Moving Targets_An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel

by Stephen Leather

  Handy spread his hands. ‘Mate, I’d love for us to be double-teaming this, but our hands are tied. It’s been made very clear by the politicos that we’re here in support of the NSW Police and not the other way round. They’re running the show and are responsible for the whole shebang: crowd control, searching, cordons, vetting and entry to the various events. It’s going to be a right head banger of a situation, demos for and against, blood on the streets, the city in lockdown. The Chinese have even shipped in their own security teams, listed as embassy officials. They know something is going to happen and don’t trust us to keep their man safe, and they may be right about that. But we will only get involved if it’s something the cops can’t handle, and they are very unlikely to admit to that … until it’s too late. So there you are.’

  Something about Handy’s expression told Shepherd that it wasn’t his last word on the subject. ‘So if I’m reading you right,’ he said, ‘although your hands are tied, you wouldn’t be totally upset if we were to see what we could do, providing we don’t tread on any police toes in the process?’

  Handy smiled. ‘I couldn’t possibly say that - or not on the record anyway. Off the record, someone needs to be on top of this and I’m not sure the boys in blue are up to it. Sydney’s finest are complacent - some would say arrogant. The only protests they’ve had to deal with in years have been union marches and campaigns for aboriginal rights.’

  ‘Is there any point in us talking to the police?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘You can, but I guarantee that the only answer you’ll get is “Thanks Pommie, now fuck off”.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Shepherd said, ‘but I’m sure that there’s going to be a major incident. And I want to be there when it kicks off because I’ve got a score or two to settle.’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t say this,’ Handy said, ‘but something we Aussies admire about the Pommie SAS is that you’re more prepared to take risks than we are. We’re much more tightly controlled by our political masters.’

  Shepherd inclined his head. ‘We take risks, yes, but we train and plan to the max beforehand, so that we understand the risks and have taken every possible step to minimise them.’

  ‘All right mate, go for it, and if you need any help in what you’re planning, just ask. We owe you for PNG.’

  ‘But I suppose a copy of these files is out of the question?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘I’d like to help you, mate, but if I did that and it ever got out, it wouldn’t just be my career and my pension, I’d be jailed for betraying state secrets. Anything else, you’ve got it.’

  ‘I understand,’ Shepherd said. ‘Just give me a few more minutes to study them.’ In the event he spent a further two hours there, making a forensic examination of the plans of the Opera House, including all possible access points, not just doors and windows, but manholes, drains, conduits and vents. He made frequent notes and a few sketch plans and drawings and when he’d finished he had a glimmer of an idea about how he could access Sydney’s most iconic structure unseen.

  While Shepherd had been talking to Handy and studying the files, Jimbo and Geordie were staring dubiously at the contents of the package that the Wingco had just delivered to them. It had arrived in a FedEx cardboard box and they had unpacked it and assembled it following the clear and concise instructions that came with it. They now had a squat oval cylinder about eighteen inches long with a gas cylinder at the rear and an arrowhead-shaped harpoon protruding from the front. The whole thing was made from titanium alloy and mounted on a small tripod.

  Having charged the cylinder from an industrial-sized bottle of compressed air, they first dry-fired it without the harpoon attachment. When they were satisfied that it actually worked, they took it to an abandoned building dating back to World War II on the edge of the airfield where they could carry out a full-scale test fire. Now was the moment of truth, they aimed the device at one of the building’s single-skin brick walls, and Jimbo held the firing lanyard while Geordie did the countdown. As he reached ‘Zero!’, Jimbo gave a tentative pull on the lanyard and then, not knowing what to expect, both of them pressed their fingers into their ears. In fact, there was no loud bang, just a fierce hiss of escaping air, but the harpoon was blasted forward at incredible speed, trailing a thin cable in its wake. It disappeared through the wall, dislodging enough bricks to leave a hole that a man could just about have squeezed through.

  They walked over to inspect the damage. On the other side of the wall, the device had opened into a metal framework, like the frame of an umbrella, on the far side of the entry hole, about two and a half metres in diameter.

  ‘Now I get it,’ Jimbo said. ‘If we pull on the trailing rope, it will make a hole big enough to run through. If we attached the rope to a vehicle or a winch it would make a hole in almost anything: windows, doors, walls, you name it. What a bit of kit! Even the rope is carbon fibre, so it’s almost unbreakable. This is going to come in handy!’

  Although Shepherd had assessed the Opera House as the most likely target, in the course of the next day and night, the three SAS men carried out ground recces of all the other potential sites. They eliminated them one by one: too secure, too complex, no access, no escape route. The more they studied the alternatives, the more convinced they all became that the terrorists had chosen the Opera House as the stage for their spectacular. To get the full picture they took a tourist tour of the building, their keen eyes missing nothing as the cameras of the holidaymakers clicked incessantly around them. At the end of the tour, they strolled around the perimeter of the building, pausing frequently, ostensibly to admire the views across the harbour or gaze up in wonder at the soaring “sails” that formed the roof.

  Although the itinerary had been set in stone, there had been one change: the original plan had been to hold the gala performance in the main Concert Hall of the Opera House, which had the greatest seating capacity. However a boycott organised in protest at China’s repressive policies and contempt for human rights had been so effective that tickets were being returned and apologies for absence received, almost faster than the organisers could cope with them. All attempts having failed to solve the problem, to avoid exposing the Chinese, not to mention their Australian hosts, to the embarrassment of having a gala performance in front of an auditorium that was only one-third full, at the last minute it had been switched to the Number Two space: the Opera Theatre. It was also a very impressive space, but with only about half the seats to fill.

  ‘So if that’s the target, Spider,’ Geordie said. ‘What are our options for gaining access?’

  ‘It’ll have to be covert,’ Shepherd said. ‘Because the state police are running the show and don’t want any input from the Aussie SAS, let alone a bunch of Pommies like us. It also needs to be well in advance, before the security around the place is tightened, so it seems like tonight should be the night.’

  ‘Right, that’s the when and where,’ Jimbo said, ‘What about the how?’

  Shepherd flipped through the pages of his notebook. ‘There are a couple of small grilles set in the roof. We can’t see them from down here but they’re marked on the plans. They give access to the roof void and from there I should be able to abseil down onto the lighting gantry above the stage.’

  ‘Should?’ Geordie said.

  Shepherd smiled. ‘Did I say should? I meant will.’

  Jimbo frowned. ‘I dunno Spider, those roof tiles are ceramic, aren’t they? They look bloody slippery.’

  ‘And how will you access the roof anyway?’ Geordie said. ‘The gig’s not for another forty-eight hours but they’re already putting the barriers in place.’ He gestured towards a group of police who were cordoning off the whole of the steps and terraces leading to the Opera House with steel barriers, while others had begun steering the tourists out of the building and the surrounding area.

  ‘I thought a late night dip might be the way to go.’ Shepherd pointed towards the Botanical Gardens stretching eastwards along the shore.
‘I can slip into the water round there, and the ferries coming in and out of Circular Quay will churn up the water enough to hide me from the sight of anyone watching from the Opera House terrace.’ He smiled. ‘And if I can’t slip across the terrace and climb the roof without being spotted by a couple of half-asleep local cops or bored security guards, I shouldn’t be doing this job at all.’

  ‘So where are we in all this?’ Geordie said.

  ‘I need you to liaise with the Aussie SAS, who’ll be on standby in case they’re needed. Get yourselves inside the outer security cordon on the big night, and then await developments, but be ready to force immediate entry if and when I give you the word over the radio.’

  ‘Weapons?’ Jimbo said.

  ‘I think MP5s for all of us.’

  Geordie nodded. ‘And we’ll bring that new piece of kit. It did a bloody good job on a brick wall so it might be a useful method of entry if the bad guys grab some hostages and barricade themselves in anywhere.’

  CHAPTER 27

  That afternoon, Shepherd assembled all his kit and weaponry. He dressed in a dry suit with a tight-fitting tracksuit underneath, in the NSW police force colours. He checked his equipment container for negative buoyancy and leaks in the base swimming pool and then checked his own negative buoyancy, adding weights to the belt around his dry suit until he had achieved a level that would allow him to swim just below the water, with only twenty-five percent of his body above the surface. In that position he would be virtually undetectable to above surface radar on the police boats patrolling the approaches from the harbour and would be mistaken for flotsam by any subsurface detection devices.

  He slipped into the water from a cove in the Botanical Gardens just before midnight. He was wearing a pair of super-sized fins on his feet to propel him through the water, and was also helped by the current flowing around the bay towards the Opera House. By swimming on his side he minimised his silhouette to just a few inches above the waterline, and the choppy water caused by the ferries, pleasure boats and police launches around Circular Quay and Bennelong Point made him virtually invisible in the darkness.

  He had packed his waterproof equipment container meticulously. Inside were an MP 5K with four thirty-round magazines, a workman’s belt with a steel wrecking bar and a range of other tools that might be needed, a pair of trainers and a towel because he had to be absolutely dry for where he was going after the swim. He had a fixed channel HF radio with a set of spare batteries and also, crucially there was an abseiling system, with the rope wound inside a canvas bag. The rope would only deploy as he descended, making it more covert than the normal abseiling system.

  In a holster under his arm he carried a Glock 9mm pistol, the rounds in the magazine lightly covered in grease to protect them from the small amount of sea-water they would be exposed to, and a razor-sharp fighting knife was strapped to his leg.

  The swim was physically arduous, with the small swells from the boat traffic in the harbour occasionally washing over him, trying to push him off course. However, after twenty minutes of hard swimming, he reached the concrete retaining wall beneath the harbour-side terrace of the Opera House.

  He worked his way round to the bottom of the steps leading up from the water and then quickly unpacked his kit. He cut off the dry suit with his fighting knife, weighed it down with his diving belt and silently lowered it back into the water, watching it sink out of sight. He carefully dried himself then dropped the towel into the water as well and, alert for any noise or movement, he climbed the steps. The promenade would normally have been bustling with people but the police cordons had left it deserted. The police and security teams had obviously decided that the harbour was all the security that they needed at the rear of the Opera House and were keeping watch at the front with only an intermittent foot patrol passing right around the building. Clad in black from head to foot and with the night sky masked by cloud cover, Shepherd was able to remain invisible in the darkness near the top of the steps for the next hour, timing the patrols as they passed by. Professionals would have varied the gaps between patrols but he was pleased to note that the NSW police were creatures of habit, passing by at precisely fifteen minute intervals.

  He waited until the patrol had again just passed him and then, every sense attuned for any signs of them returning, Shepherd moved swiftly across the terrace and into the shadows of the recessed area between the two wings of the building housing the Concert Hall and the Theatre. He used a small grapnel to help him climb the sheer, roughcast concrete wall and spent a couple more minutes making sure he was in the exact spot he needed, directly below the intersection of the two banks of soaring sails that formed the roof, before starting to climb.

  The roof panels were four feet square and so smooth and shiny that he could get no purchase on them, and there were no fixing bolts or other projections he could grasp. However, there were narrow fissures above the interlocking flanges of each panel, and by jamming his fingers into the gaps and then locking them in place with his thumb - a technique he had learned from free rock climbers - and bracing the soles of his trainers against the tiles, he was able to haul himself up far enough to jam the fingers of his other hand into the next gap.

  It was painfully slow progress and the drizzle that had begun to fall made the climb up the steeply sloping, curved roof even more lethally slippery. Twice his foot slipped and he dropped down until his wedged fingers jerked him to an agonising halt. Ignoring the pain from his fingers, he dragged himself back up and climbed on. He kept inching his way up the steeply sloping roof. At last his groping fingers found their first secure handhold - the ridge line of the roof. He heaved himself up and paused there a moment, straddling the ridge.

  The lights of the harbour-side tower blocks cast a faint glow over the roof but even if anyone had been watching at that moment, they would have seen nothing but a momentary dark shape, almost invisible against the black of the night sky. A moment later it was gone, as Shepherd lowered himself over the other side of the ridge. The grille he was seeking was only a few feet below him, but descending the roof felt even more precarious than climbing it, and his heart was in his mouth as he inched his way down, groping with his feet for the reassuring feel of the steel frame. It had been painted to match the tile work and was invisible from the ground, but he knew from the plans he had studied that it was there. At last, when his forearms were trembling from the strain of bearing his weight, his foot touched something that was not yet another smooth roof tile. Two minutes later, he was holding on to the steel bars of the grille.

  Using his left hand to cling to the roof tile alongside it, he groped in his pack for the wrecking bar and used it to prise open the grille. With a faint squeal of protesting metal, it swung open on its hinges and Shepherd pulled himself up and swung feet first through the gap. The structural panels supporting the roof were concrete frames with diagonal cross beams connecting to a central boss, but the gaps between them were just wide enough for him to squeeze through into the vast, timbered roof space of the Opera Theatre. Searching around him, he eventually located a trapdoor, and glancing through, he found himself high above the auditorium, directly above the main stage.

  Looking down, he could see the steel gantry, the grid deck holding the lighting rigs, and the suspended stage sets that hung ready for a future performance. To either side, steel “cages”, hidden behind the sides of the proscenium arch, encased thickets of cables, ropes and wires, and more cables were wound around huge steel drums and mechanical pulleys at either end of the gantry. There were so many dangling ropes, wires and cables that looking through them was like peering into a jungle. He climbed down to the gantry, found a strong belay point and tied off his abseil rope, then settled down and made himself comfortable; he had a long wait ahead of him. From his perch high up in the theatre, he would have a bird’s-eye view of events as they unfolded.

  For the remainder of the night he observed the watchmen going about their duties, checking the auditorium, p
unching their time-clocks and occasionally taking a seat to ease the strain on their feet. Each time they checked all the exit doors, but none ever raised their eyes to the roof high above them. Even if they had done so, Shepherd was invisible, hidden by the lights and equipment.

  Eventually an army of cleaners appeared, vacuuming the carpets and dusting down the seats. A procession of officials, some in uniform, then came into the auditorium to check that everything was to their satisfaction, taking notes, ticking checklists and talking loudly among themselves. They also staged a run-through of the ceremonies that would be held in honour of the distinguished visitors, with an assortment of minions filling in for the principals, rehearsing the ushering, bowing and scraping that would accompany the arrival of the dignitaries.

  At the end of the morning and for most of the afternoon there followed the final rehearsals for the big night. The show was to be a staging of an opera eulogising Chairman Mao’s revolutionary Long March, performed by the Chinese National Opera in the original Chinese, something Shepherd was sure that the Australian great and good would be keenly looking forward to. As stagehands began scaling the steel staircase leading to the gantry, Shepherd retreated to the shadows behind one of the giant steel cages encasing wires and cables, and remained unseen as they rehearsed the set changes and lighting cues.

  From his vantage point, Shepherd was still able to see and hear the chorus, dressed in khaki uniforms and carrying replica firearms, as they marched around the stage, singing revolutionary songs in Chinese. When rehearsals were finally over, the stagehands descended from the gantry and the opera house quickly emptied, with everything now set for the next day.

  Standard Operating Procedures when on surveillance required SAS men to carry in everything they would need with them and remove it again afterwards, leaving no trace that they had ever been there. So Shepherd had brought two containers of drinking water in his pack. When he had emptied the first one, he began to refill it with his urine because, as their instructor had remarked during his first days of training with the Regiment, ‘Not even SAS men can go forty-eight hours without taking a leak.’