Moving Targets_An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel

by Stephen Leather

  Jimbo nodded. ‘I’m good too.’

  They remained in cover for another twenty minutes, moving constantly and keeping up a targeted fire whenever any of the enemy so much as raised his head to peer between the rocks. For at least one of them it was the last thing he ever did – Shepherd put a round through the man’s forehead in the split-second he was visible. He was thrown backwards, arms splayed, his weapon spiralling from his grasp and although the second shot of the double-tap did no more than part the man’s hair, a fine mist of blood droplets hanging in the air for a moment showed that the first one had already done its work. The enemy firing now ceased altogether and there was clearly little appetite for any further pursuit of the SAS men. Peering through his binoculars, Shepherd caught fleeting glimpses of some of the Afghan fighters crouching as they began to move off in the opposite direction, away from the patrol. As they began preparing to move out themselves, Shepherd suddenly said: ‘Cover me, I’m going back. I forgot something.’

  The other two exchanged puzzled glances but without attempting to question him or talk him out of it, they took up firing positions facing the enemy. Using the rough ground to give him body cover, Shepherd slipped away among the rocks and made his way back to the site of the firefight. He disappeared from Jock and Jimbo’s sight for a few seconds, but then reappeared and began making his way back. This time, he was not only carrying another enemy weapon and an ammunition waistcoat, but also a pair of the locally made flip-flops, the soles cut from a worn-out Dunlop tyre tread, which he had stripped from one of the Afghan dead.

  ‘What the fuck was that about?’ Jock said.

  ‘We need a spare rifle and an ammunition waistcoat for Geordie, if he makes it.’

  ‘And the flip-flops?’

  ‘Will come in very handy over the coming days. Trust me. Now let’s go,’ he said. Before Jock could say anything else, Shepherd led them down the far side of the ridge, away from both the enemy and the main force of infantry in the adjoining valley. They found good cover in a place where they could ambush their track if any Taliban attempted to follow them, and then lay up for the rest of the daylight hours. After dark they moved again, close to the RV site that Geordie had identified.

  Even though the RV system was as close to foolproof as it was possible to make it, none of them were ever comfortable using RVs. It was a regrettable fact of military life in Afghanistan that interpreters and the West’s allies in the Afghan Army would often betray Allied plans almost as soon as they had been formed, or a captured soldier might be tortured to yield information. As a result, any prearranged RV was only approached after careful surveillance and using enormous caution.

  Under their SOPs, as the time of the rendezvous had been set at midnight by Geordie, he had to be at the RV one minute before that time and the others had to make contact with him within five minutes. If that did not happen, the RV was abandoned and they had to move to the next one, the War RV, exactly twenty-four hours later. However, having made a thorough scan of the surrounding area to make sure no enemies were lying in wait, the three of them were delighted to see a pale-skinned, slightly balding figure emerge out of the darkness bang on time. Geordie broke into a huge grin as he saw all three of his patrol mates waiting for him.

  ‘Bloody hell, I’m glad to see you all, even you, Jock,’ he said, since even in a moment of huge relief, he was unable to resist the urge to wind him up. ‘I was sure at least one of you was going to have copped it.’

  ‘No such luck for you, you Geordie prick,’ Jock said. ‘And you seem to have come through all right as well.’

  ‘I got down off the ridge with the gun crew OK, but then we had an anxious couple of hours looking for a friendly subunit, all the time praying we weren’t going to be misidentified as enemy by some idiot who would then call in an airstrike to wipe us out. Anyway, in the end we found a subunit and I managed to get rid of the wounded on to them, and then came back up the hillside and across the ridge. I didn’t see any live enemy up on the ridge - I think they might have had enough action for one day and pulled out – but I did see a lot of dead ones. Anyhoo, here I am, ready to roll.’

  They moved out at once, still anxious to put distance between themselves and the enemy. Travelling quickly but tactically, they disappeared in a direction that the enemy would never have expected, going away from the valley where the main force was still fighting and deeper and deeper into Afghanistan, heading towards Mazar-e Sharif.

  Although moving at speed, they were constantly alert. Shepherd, at the head of the patrol, scanned the terrain ahead, while Geordie and Jimbo watched the ground to either side and Jock kept an eye on the area behind them. They kept going until the pre-dawn light began to grey the night sky, then circled back on their tracks and found a Lying-Up Position surrounded by bushes and a group of boulders. Here they would be sheltered from watchers and the wind and could lie up during the daylight hours.

  The patrol had approached their chosen spot by a circuitous route, always careful to place their feet on rocks only, so as to leave no sign of their passing in the dust and soil, then backtracking before entering the LUP. By doing this they were able to ambush their own tracks to check if they were being followed. The trick had been developed by the insurgents in the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, but had since been adapted and refined by the SAS and the patrol had used it on numerous operations in jungles and other dense cover around the world.

  They watched the track into the LUP until the sun was high enough in the morning sky to bring some warmth into their weary bones. They took it in turns to clean and lightly oil their weapons, then settled in, trying to make themselves comfortable on the rocky earth. Even at rest they never dropped their guard, with at least one and often two men on watch so that the others were able to relax slightly. They were dog-tired after a night of physical and mental activity, but they were surrounded by potential enemies, both military and civilian, and there would be no relief or complete relaxation of their guard until they were able to link up with friendly troops. They had successfully disengaged from the enemy. All they had to do now was to re-engage with their own forces.

  ‘Right,’ Shepherd said. ‘We had better get our heads together and come up with some sort of plan of action.’

  After a “Chinese Parliament” in which each man added his own ideas to the mix, Shepherd summarised what they would try to achieve. ‘Okay, we’ll move only at night, taking on targets of opportunity if they present themselves and try to find a place where we can link up with a heli lift back to Bagram. That’ll be easier said than done because for obvious security reasons, we don’t have maps showing the locations of any British or American bases. So we’ll need to use our wits to find one, and ideally it should be a Fire Support Base rather than an Infantry Patrol Base, because it’ll be easier to make contact with rear echelon troops rather than guys who are out patrolling from their base and being fired on every day and night, who tend to be very trigger-happy, obviously. The last thing we want is a spot of friendly fire.’

  ‘Yeah, makes sense,’ Geordie said. ‘The brass only visit the Patrol Bases for a couple of days every few months. They gee up the troops, stir things up with the locals and try to get among the medals, but once the pot is fermenting nicely they piss off back to Bagram for a few G & T’s and fresh rations in the mess, and leave the poor saps in the Patrol Base to cop the retaliation from the locals and the Taliban. So the Patrol Bases stir up trouble whereas the Fire Support Bases are usually in relatively safe areas, so their troops are used to a quieter life and are less jumpy as a result.’

  ‘Some of the locals quite like having the bases there,’ Jock said. ‘They can pick up shell cases and other scrap metal which they can sell on, and there are a few casual jobs from time to time as well, filling sandbags or washing clothes, or whatever.’

  ‘But there’s an obvious downside to that,’ Jimbo said. ‘The enemy can get access to as much intelligence as they want, including the ranges to targets, the
number of troops on the base, the routines and the response plans if attacked, so we may be stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.’

  Jock shrugged. ‘Nothing’s risk-free, but it’s the best available plan.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’ll move out as soon as it’s dark.’

  Their LUP was halfway down the side of a ridge leading down from the high mountains of the Hindu Kush towards the fertile Afghan plains. Perched on a tiny ledge surrounded by bushes and rocks, they were totally invisible even from a few feet away. The place was carefully chosen; only animals move along the sides of ridges, men walk either along the ridge tops or through the valley bottoms.

  It was an almost perfect place to rest, giving them the options of fight or flight. If discovered, they had the choices of either running uphill to the top of the ridge from where they would have a range of escape routes, or going steeply downhill into the valley bottom where the going would be easier and again would offer them a choice of routes to follow. If they were left with absolutely no other choice, they could stand and fight with their backs to the wall.

  Close by they could hear the sound of a torrent of pure, ice-cold water, thundering down towards the bottom of the valley, cutting its way through rocks and boulders millions of years old. It was one of thousands of similar streams, fed by meltwater from the glaciers and winter snows in the high mountains. As they reached the valley floor, the streams merged into one of the fast-flowing rivers that made the plains of Afghanistan the bread basket of the country. The fertile soil fed the inhabitants with the staples of life - bread, vegetables and fruit - that were sold in the many markets and sooqs dotted around the towns on the plains, but it also nurtured the thousands of acres of poppies that fed the addicts of the great cities of the West with their drug of choice: heroin.

  When the SAS men were on the run, they were only really conscious of the pangs of hunger when they were resting. They never felt hungry when they were on the march, because there were so many things to do. Each of them was carrying a couple of days patrol rations as part of their escape kit on their belts but it never entered any of their heads to start breaking into them. Instead, before settling into the LUP, they spent some time by the swiftly flowing stream, drinking copious amounts of the icy mountain water, refilling their water bottles and washing away the accumulated sweat and grime from the previous night’s exertions.

  They drank so much water that their bellies became distended and slowly over the course of the day they urinated away the toxins that would otherwise have accumulated in their bodies. Survival was all about “The Rule of Three” – a man could survive three minutes without air, three days without water but three weeks without food, so they were hanging on to their rations until they were really needed.

  They were following the standard SAS escape and evasion routine of walking at night and resting during daylight hours. The long late summer days and short nights were frustrating, but any movement in daylight would lead to almost certain discovery. The routine in the LUP was relaxed but alert and they followed the cardinal rules at all times: no smoke, no fire, no noise and minimum movement. Shepherd had not laid down a fixed time for each man’s sentry duty and downtime, as would have been normal in the rest of the army. Instead he allowed the patrol to set its own parameters, as long as they ensured that there was always at least one man awake and alert. This allowed the ones who needed more sleep to get it and the others who could get by on less sleep to take up the slack for the rest. It inevitably led to banter among them because, for whatever reason, Jock always got by on very little sleep. Geordie, who could never resist another dig at his Scots mate, said it was because ‘You’re a good few years older than us and old men are so decrepit they don’t really need any sleep’.

  It was just after midday and they were all rested and impatient to be on the move, but Shepherd knew that to set out before darkness would be suicidal. The afternoon lay ahead of them, with the long hours having to be filled somehow, so they whiled away the rest of the daylight hours dozing or talking in whispers, their heads close together like conspirators. Shepherd leopard-crawled back to the others from where he had just been taking a piss. Using his combat knife, he had dug a small deep hole into the rocky earth before emptying his bladder while still lying prone on his side. He waited until the liquid had seeped away into the ground before carefully refilling the hole. Without that precaution, the flies would have been all over them in seconds, making rest impossible with the added threat that they might be carrying disease.

  Shepherd crawled back past Jimbo, who was taking his turn on stag, peering out through the scrub with a pair of binoculars to hand, his head covered with a piece of the camouflaged, fine mesh scrim netting that they preferred to the cam cream most soldiers used. Shepherd lay down next to Jock and Geordie, who were in classic LUP pose, flat on their backs on the ground, using their belt kits as pillows and with their weapons snug along the right side of their bodies, the butt under the armpit with the muzzle pointing down away from their feet. The backs of their heads were almost touching, allowing them to communicate in the tiniest whispers.

  Shepherd was just settling his head on his belt, the third man in the triangle, when Jock’s belly rumbled and he let out a fart. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jock,’ Geordie whispered, ‘you almost blew us off the mountain. If there were any enemy within half a mile, they’d not only have heard you, they’d have smelled you as well.’

  Jock patted his stomach and then pinched some skin between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Would you look at that,’ he said. ‘I’m fading away. I could do with a decent meal in there.’

  Geordie smiled. ‘Number One: the rest of us will have starved to death weeks before you’ve wasting away, you fat Scots gannet. And Number Two: you wouldn’t know a decent meal from a pile of roadkill. You’re always first in the scoff queue and you’ll eat anything put in front of you - dead or alive.’

  ‘And you’re Marco Pierre Fucking White are you? Let me tell you something. I have eaten the finest, with the finest, and in the most surprising places.’

  ‘Such as where, you Caledonian cretin?’

  ‘A few years ago I was involved in a task on the other side of the Gulf. We were training on the edge of the Empty Quarter, living in tents and feeding on patrol rations for no better reason than that the Quartermaster’s Department was too idle to organise fresh ones for us. The boss was a pedant and a keep-clean nut, the other guys not much better. The training was boring and something I had done a hundred times before. So one day I took the Land Rover and drove to the nearest sooq down on the coast where I bought a load of fruit, vegetables and fish, which I then drove back to the boys on the hill. This became a habit and every few days I would repeat the exercise until on the third or fourth trip, as I was dropping down the escarpment, I saw in the distance what looked like a mirage shimmering in the heat. I was so intrigued I drove the few miles from the graded track I was on, to what turned out to be a temporary village, with each building made from an enormous wooden box of about thirty cubic feet, probably used as transit cases for JCBs.’

  Jock paused and rolled onto his stomach and Shepherd and Geordie did the same, glad of the distraction of Jock’s tale, even if it turned out to be bullshit, as many of them did. Even Jimbo was not totally focused on his sentry duties, keeping half an ear on Jock. ‘As I pulled up in a cloud of dust, an Asian guy came out of the nearest box and offered me tea in a mug filled from an aluminium kettle; there was nothing inside the box but an ancient Primus stove. He then asked if I was hungry and brought me a goat meat curry with some rice and roti in a chipped enamel washing-up bowl. The food was so delicious I devoured it at once, sitting in the sand, and when I asked how much I owed him, he just said “As you wish, Sahib”.

  ‘I gave him what I thought was far too much and said “Thanks, I’ll be calling in again soon”. By the time I did so, a few days later, he had acquired a couple of small wooden crates from somewhere and was usi
ng them as tables inside the big box. The curry he gave me was even better than the first one and he told me that he’d used some of the money I’d given him to invest in a greater variety of herbs and spices. When I said “How much?” the reply was the same: “As you wish, Sahib”.

  ‘This developed into something of a routine. I called in every few days and each time he had made some other improvement to make his box worthy of “a British sahib”. So the next time I called there was a sheet of clear plastic tacked around the front of the box to keep out the dust and flies, and over the next few weeks scraps of oilcloth appeared as covers for the tables, a couple of chairs were rescued from the local dump, then there were tin plates and a couple of spoons and forks, and then the finishing touch: a waiter’s napkin draped over the owner’s forearm. The final upgrade was a Heath Robinson contraption of valves, taps and hosepipe to provide a trickle of running water for the restaurant box so that honoured patrons, which at the time, as far as I could ascertain was only me, could wash off the dust from the journey before sitting down to eat. All the time the curries, usually goat but occasionally chicken, were getting more and more delicious.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t get away with it much longer. The guys at the training camp were getting pissed off because I was spending more and more time away, and while they were losing weight because of the crappy rations, I was putting on weight, so they knew something was up. Eventually the Boss took me to one side and demanded to know what was going on. He was convinced that I had found myself a lady friend down in the town who was feeding me up, and when I explained about the wooden box restaurant, he didn’t believe me and insisted that he would come with me on the next trip. The more I tried to talk him out of it, the more he insisted on coming with me. Like I said, he was a pedant and a keep clean fetishist who hated the dust and dirt of the desert, and I was sure he’d rather die than eat anything in the wooden box restaurant.