Moving Targets: An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel (Spider Shepherd: SAS Book 2)

by Stephen Leather

‘You must understand, Spider, I am Cretan first and Greek second. My cousin’s uncle was the legendary Mitsotakis from the Cretan resistance in the Second World War. He worked with the British, fighting the Germans in Crete. He told me that it was easy, because every Cretan knows how to shoot a weapon from the cradle, and they also do not like interference from the authorities because that way they have to pay taxes. Many years afterwards he was in charge of the New Democracy party, which won an election and threw out the Socialists. Because I am related and he trusts me, and also because he knows I am clever, he put me in charge of the counter-terrorist team in Athens. They were good times and with your help, and the help of many others, we built a very good team. Then the Socialists won the next election and I was out on my ear, along with every policeman and government worker who supported New Democracy. I was sent to Crete to keep an eye on the immigrants coming from the Middle East. There are many terrorists coming to our country that way and no one helps us.’

  ‘A waste of your talents though,’ Shepherd said.

  He shrugged. ‘No worries. When the Socialists get kicked out, I will go back. It is the same for all government workers, when the bosses change, we all change.’

  ‘How good are the people in charge now? Are they competent?’

  Simos smiled. ‘The short answer to that my friend is no, but they are in power now. All the equipment we were given is back in boxes and in storage, and the people in charge are too proud and too stubborn to ask for help from anyone. No other country thinks that Greece needs help now, because it has all been done. Besides, we are Europeans now.’

  ‘But why was the whole team fired?’ Jock said

  ‘I know, it’s madness, but that is how my country does things. We are now in Europe, so we are Europeans with supposedly European standards and prosperity, but we have no standards and we certainly have no prosperity.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, now we go, guys.’

  ‘We can’t, we’re under arrest and in jail.’

  ‘Who’s keeping you in jail?’

  Shepherd pointed to the Snowdrops. ‘These two gentlemen are Royal Air Force policemen and they are responsible for keeping us safe and secure.’

  Simos gave them an old-fashioned look. ‘OK. They come too.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Jock said.

  ‘To my house. I have a housekeeper because my wife is still in Athens with our kids, who are at school, waiting for me to come back. My housekeeper is an excellent cook and I have lots of food and drink, so let’s go!’ He gave the Snowdrops a menacing stare. ‘And if the RAF police are not happy, I will put them into their own jail.’

  ‘Right guys,’ Shepherd said. ‘You had better come with us. Simos is serious and if you find yourself under arrest you might miss tomorrow’s flight.’

  They all piled into the bus and spent the rest of the evening at Simos’s small house. Even though Shepherd and his team had already eaten the contents of several of the food boxes, they ate the dinner his housekeeper prepared for them and drank more wine than they usually would. The head Snowdrop was impressed. ‘Where the hell do you put it all?’

  ‘The golden rule is to eat and drink when you can,’ Jock said. ‘Because you never know where your next meal is coming from.’

  Just as they started the post-meal craic, normal for military types the world over, they were interrupted by the shrill ringing of the telephone. When Simos returned from answering it, his face was thunderous. ‘I’m sorry but I will have to leave you. My cousin Angeli is in a standoff with the police in his village up in the mountains. They say he has a gun for shooting at aircraft.’

  ‘What? He wouldn’t really have an anti-aircraft gun, would he?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘Of course, why not? Every family in the mountains has a machinegun, so why not an anti-aircraft gun? We Cretans are like the English, we have a horror of being invaded. The last time was in the war with the Germans, when we were defenceless. We swore then that it would not happen again, but it has. The Germans then were Nazis; now they’re called Europeans, but to Cretans they’re still Nazis. This is why my cousin is in trouble, because the Germans are trying to force us to pay higher taxes before we can be good Europeans and Angeli is refusing. I repeat, we Cretans are not Greeks, or Europeans. We are Cretans first, second and last—.’ He broke off as they heard a police car with siren wailing, screech to a halt outside the house. ‘Now I must go and get my cousin out of trouble.’

  ‘Whoa, not so fast, Simos,’ Shepherd said. ‘If you don’t mind, we’ll come with you. If we leave our air force friends here, we can squeeze in with you and see if we can help. Any problem with that?’ he said, turning to the Snowdrops. They exchanged glances and then shook their heads.

  Simos got into the front with the driver while Spider and his team piled into the back, squashed in like sardines. They roared off up the road, Simos and the driver shouting a conversation between them, the driver smoking and gesticulating wildly, occasionally flicking ash out of his open window and all the while looking sideways at Simos and only occasionally at the road. Soon they left the tarmac and started to climb steeply up into the mountains on a graded track.

  As they climbed higher, the track became narrower and bumpier until it was barely wide enough for the police car, with a steep cliff on one side and a precipice on the other. By now it was dark down in the valley, but the sky grew lighter the higher they climbed. Still chatting away to Simos, the driver was throwing the car around the bends, the wheels spinning in the gravel at the roadside millimetres from the cliff’s edge.

  Eventually, Shepherd could take no more. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ he said. ‘Stop the car now, and turn off that bloody siren.’

  Puzzled, the driver brought the vehicle to a halt, switched off the siren and gave Simos a questioning glance before turning around to look at Shepherd.

  ‘Look guys,’ Shepherd said. ‘I can accept losing my life in combat – that’s just a risk that goes with the job. I can’t accept being killed in some stupid accident because the guy driving the vehicle misjudged a corner and sent us over the edge of a bloody mountain. We want to get where we’re going in one piece with our nerves relatively intact. So, we will drive calmly the rest of the way, we will arrive calmly, and we will deal with the situation, whatever it is, calmly. Understood?’

  The Cretans exchanged another glance but then nodded in unison, and the driver set off again at a funereal speed. ‘It’s not too far now, Spider,’ Simos said, ‘only a couple more kilometres and we’ll be there.’

  Just as he finished speaking they heard a loud burst of automatic fire from further up the mountain. ‘Bloody hell, that wasn’t just any machine gun, was it?’ Jock said. ‘That was something much heavier.’

  ‘Well, we don’t need to go quite this slow,’ Shepherd said to the driver. ‘You can speed up a bit, just don’t drive us off the bloody mountain.’

  A few minutes later, they reached a point high on the mountain where the track did a loop before descending back the way they had just come. Inside the loop, a straggle of dirty, once whitewashed, single-storey buildings were surrounded by heaps of goat droppings and the rusted and neglected wrecks of worn-out tractors and pickup trucks.

  ‘Natural causes?’ Jimbo said, gesturing to the wrecks.

  ‘More like kamikaze drivers, if this one’s anything to go by,’ Jock said.

  A group of villagers were standing in the open in the middle of the village, smoking, chatting and taking occasional gulps from bottles of beer and a bottle of retsina they were passing around. Peering around the sides of the buildings were a posse of policemen in ill-fitting uniforms. Their pistols were drawn and their eyes were focused on a squat, ramshackle building with ancient wooden double doors. Hiding behind the policemen were two well-shaven, well-dressed individuals, presumably the hated taxmen, who were gesticulating wildly, exhorting the police to solve the problem by attacking the building, though they seemed to have little appetite for it.

  Just when it appeare
d that they might actually be about to muster enough courage to carry out an assault, the wooden doors suddenly opened, revealing what Jock at once identified as a Soviet-era SU-23 anti-aircraft cannon. It was widely used by the Russian military and its many allies, and just as widely available on the black market in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when soldiers in the former Soviet satellite or client states often took the opportunity to augment their miserable or non-existent wages by flogging off their equipment.

  There was an ear-shattering burst as the gun opened up, sending five rounds flashing overhead and tearing away across the darkening sky, their course easily tracked by the burning tracer at the base of each round. Any notion that the police might have had about carrying out an assault on the building immediately evaporated. The doors slammed shut again with a resounding thud.

  ‘Where the hell did he get that thing?’ Shepherd said.

  Simos shrugged. ‘I think it came from Libya.’

  ‘But what the bloody hell does he want it for, apart from shooting taxmen, that is? The thing’s a beast. It’s belt-fed and can fire about four hundred rounds a minute. Never mind the taxmen – with enough ammo he could demolish the whole island.’ He paused. ‘So, how much ammo do you think he has in there?’

  ‘Oh he has lots, Spider. He bought a lot with the gun because it was cheap. The Libyans will sell anything to anybody.’

  Shepherd thought for a moment. ‘So what happens if he comes out?’

  ‘Well if the police get to him, he’ll get twenty years in jail on the mainland, with no remission. But if he gets a few metres head start on them, then he can vanish into the high mountains and return here in a few weeks’ time as a hero. The police will not dare to come back again after this.’

  ‘Right then, we’d better get him out of there. The question is how?’

  ‘We could do it with a flashbang if we had one,’ Jock said.

  ‘Which we don’t,’ Shepherd said. ‘But we might be able to improvise one if we can lay our hands on some PE and det cord, and a few other bits and pieces.’ He turned to Simos. ‘Is there a quarry or a big construction site somewhere near here where they use explosives?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I will ask the villagers. They may have something lying around. I told you every family has a machine gun, but every village also has a cache of other stuff hidden away, just in case.’

  Simos walked over to the group of villagers, who had been staring at the SAS men with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. A loud argument ensued with much shouting, arm-waving, shoulder-shrugging and pointing. This went on for several minutes and it was only because Shepherd was watching the group intently that he spotted a couple of the villagers using the cover of the commotion to quietly slip away from the back of the group and disappear down the mountain.

  The argument then petered out and Simos came back to join the SAS men, but within ten minutes the two men who had slipped away were back, struggling under the weight of a wooden crate with rope handles. They dropped it unceremoniously in front of them and went to rejoin their friends. The crate was painted a fading, dull brown colour with stencilled writing across the top and sides.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jock said. ‘Do you see those markings? This is a World War Two Wehrmacht ammunition box. Look, it’s even got the Nazi eagle on it. These things are rarer than hens’ teeth because once the squaddies emptied them, they used the crates as fuel to cook their rations. Open it quick – it might be full of Nazi gold!’

  Shepherd lifted the lid to find not gold, but a staggering range of weaponry and hardware from various countries and eras. Lying on the top was a Second World War Schmeisser machine pistol, and alongside it a Luger 9mm pistol from the same era, both lightly oiled and looking in pristine condition. They removed the contents, item by item, and lower down the crate found a British Mk I Sten gun that had been disassembled, probably to ease the pressure on the main spring. There were magazines for each of the weapons, kept empty so as not to damage the mechanism, with ammunition rolling loose around the bottom of the box.

  Shepherd also uncovered a couple of No 36 grenades – the grooved and pineapple-shaped hand grenades that were the British Army’s standard issue from the 1930s right through to the 1970s. To check whether they were primed or not, he unscrewed the base plates and was relieved to find that the timing fuses were not in place. He had almost reached the bottom of the crate and was beginning to wonder whether there was any explosive material there at all, when he found a silver tin with a screw top at either end. He recognised it immediately as a detonator-carrying tin, designed to safely house electric detonators at one end and non-electric ones at the other. There were no markings on the tin, so he unscrewed one end to discover that it was empty, but when he unscrewed the other end, he was delighted to find six of the No 27 detonators that had been issued to the British Army for decades. Right at the bottom of the crate he also found a loose coil of what looked like grey rope – safety fuse for use with the detonators – and then the holy grail: a long coil that looked just like a plastic clothes line, but was in fact detonating cord.

  He grinned at the others. ‘Right guys, we’ve got all the makings of an initiation set. Let’s see if we can improvise a flash-bang with it. We need fuel, oxygen and ignition, so something that will burn slowly and give off a lot of smoke, an accelerant that we can prime with the initiation set, and a container to put everything in, because we’ll have to restrict the amount of oxygen to give us smoke and not flame. Any ideas?’

  Geordie glanced around them. ‘We can use rags soaked in the sump oil from those wrecks dotted around the village and there must be a tin or a plastic bottle lying around to put it all in.’

  ‘What about the brake fluid from the same wrecks as the accelerant?’ Jock said.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Shepherd said. ‘You two sort out the sump oil and the brake fluid, and Jimbo, you scout around and see what you can find in the way of rags and a container while I test the fuse to make sure it’s not been affected by damp.’

  Just as they were about to separate to carry out their tasks, they heard the faint sound of singing from Angeli’s house. ‘Dear God, it sounds like he’s started drinking ouzo,’ Simos said. ‘Can it get any worse?’

  ‘Oh things can always get worse, Simos,’ Shepherd said.

  While the other men were foraging around the village outbuildings, Shepherd discarded the first twelve inches of the safety fuse, in case it had been penetrated by damp. He then cut off the next twelve, chamfered one end and lit it with a match, timing its burning rate. Satisfied that it burned within the safety limits of twenty-seven to thirty-three seconds, he then began to prepare the initiation set. He cut off the next twelve inches of fuse and placed the non-chamfered end into the opening at the top of one of the detonators. Using surgical plaster from his personal medical kit, he taped the detonator on to a short length of det cord, tied a couple of knots in the end of the cord furthest from the detonator, and the initiation set was ready.

  The others arrived back shortly afterwards, carrying two rusting paint tins they’d found in one of the outbuildings. One was nearly full with sump oil and the other contained brake fluid that they had drained from one of the wrecked vehicles. Jimbo was also carrying a discarded T-shirt, which he proceeded to rip into strips. ‘There’s a thick layer of dried paint at the bottom of the tin with the brake fluid in,’ Jock said, ‘so that would be the best one to use.’

  Shepherd nodded and poured some of the sump oil into it, stirring it with a stick to form a solution with the brake fluid, and then added the rags, pushing them down into the mixture with the stick. He made a hole in the lid of the tin with the point of his combat knife and threaded the det cord through it, then jammed the lid back on. The improvised flash bang was now ready to go.

  ‘Will it work?’ Simos said.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Shepherd said, ‘but it had better do, because we don’t have a Plan B if it doesn’t.’


  By now it was almost completely dark. Fuelled by the prodigious amounts of booze they were drinking, the villagers were getting increasingly noisy and restless, making the police and taxmen even jumpier. However, when Shepherd, Simos and the others approached Angeli’s house, the police made no attempt to stop them.

  The singing inside the house had grown louder and Simos began hammering on the door, shouting, ‘Angeli, it’s me, Simos, open the door!’ Shepherd stood to one side, ready to ignite the safety fuse on the flash bang. There was more shouting between Simos and Angeli before the doors were finally opened a few inches. Shepherd immediately lit the safety fuse and slid the flash bang along the floor through the narrow gap.

  Angeli yelled in anger, throwing the doors wide open and firing another burst from his anti-aircraft cannon. Everyone hit the deck and the rounds flashed over their heads, etching hot white streaks across the night sky. The doors were suddenly slammed shut again, the noise almost masking the sound of a small bang from inside. There was a pause of a few seconds when nothing appeared to be happening inside, then wisps of oily black smoke began escaping around the door and they heard a loud bout of coughing from within. Shortly afterwards the doors were thrown back and Angeli staggered out, still coughing and gasping for breath, his face blackened and his clothing singed.

  Shepherd, Simos and the others at once formed a line, keeping themselves between Angeli and the police while he recovered his breath. Simos yelled at him in the local dialect and began trying to hurry him away as the police, now recovered from their surprise and emboldened by the sight of their target in the open, began advancing to make the arrest. Seeing this, the villagers ran to block them.

  After a few seconds Angeli had recovered sufficiently to realise what was going on. He quickly shook Simos by the hand and kissed him on both cheeks, then did the same with Shepherd and the others, treating each of them to a blast of second-hand garlic, ouzo and Metaxa fumes before disappearing into the dusk and heading up the mountainside like an inebriated mountain goat. Any remaining enthusiasm the police had for pursuing him was ended by the hostile stares that the villagers and the SAS men were directing at them. The police jumped into their cars and, with sirens wailing, disappeared back down the track towards civilisation, taking the taxmen with them.