WARNING ORDER

By Stephen Leather

***

September 1997

Dan “Spider” Shepherd yawned as he sprawled across a hammock in the cramped interior of a submarine’s forward torpedo bay. It was the last place he’d expected to find himself – SAS troopers jumped out of planes, abseiled down cliffs and blew their way through locked doors, they didn’t generally find themselves in sardine cans breathing recycled air. He wasn’t finding it a pleasant experience.  One of the other members of his patrol, Jim ‘Jimbo’ Shortt, was lying on the deck below him in an attempt to stretch out his six foot two inch frame. They were squeezed into the cramped space between the torpedoes - the only free space available. The other two patrol members, Geordie Mitchell and Liam McKay, were sitting on the floor with their backs against a bulkhead. Subs aren’t designed to carry passengers and there were no bunks to spare – even the crew had to work a “hot bunk” system: two men sharing each bunk, one using it while his shipmate was taking his turn on watch.

The four SAS men had been together as a patrol since they’d passed Selection and had soon settled into the relentless rhythm of the Sabre Squadrons:  Operations - Rest - Retraining - Standby - Operations. Whenever they were on Standby, they were the next cab on the rank for any incident or active service mission that was not already covered by the duty Operations Squadron.

During their army careers, they’d already trained or seen action in everything from jungle and desert to high mountains and arctic tundra, and could cope with almost anything that was thrown at them, but it was clear they were all out of their comfort zone in the claustrophobic environment of the submarine. The harsh neon lighting gave their faces a grey pallor, the hard surfaces made sounds rattle from one end of the sub to the other and the air they breathed had a metallic tang and a musty whiff of stale sweat and unwashed bodies that the recycling systems were unable to eradicate.

There was a clunk from beneath him as Jimbo sat up and banged his head on Shepherd’s boot which was dangling over the side of the hammock. He stood up rubbing his head. ‘Why can’t they build these things for normal human beings instead of pygmies?’ he said. ‘That’s the fourth time I’ve cracked my head in this floating tomb. If I’d wanted a life on the ocean wave I’d have joined the bleeding Navy.’

‘At least there’s only four of us,’ said Geordie. ‘If you count the hooks for attaching hammocks, you’ll see that there could have been eighteen of us snoring and farting away in here. Just the four if us is bearable, just about.’

‘Your farts stink like there’s eighteen of us anyway,’ said Jimbo.

Liam winked at Shepherd. ‘Those two bicker like an old married couple,’ he said in his Northern Irish brogue. They’d been firm friends since they’d met on the first day of Selection. Even soldiers used to excelling in their field found Selection daunting, and of the one hundred and twenty who started, just ten had passed. Liam had been one of them - the only non-airborne soldier to succeed.  ‘Speaking of which,’ Liam said. ‘How’s the lovely Sue?’

‘As big as a house, but at least she’s stopped blaming me for the morning sickness.’

‘How far along is she?’ asked Jimbo.

‘More than seven months now,’ said Shepherd. ‘I went to see the Boss and he promised not to send me to far afield on training or ops until after the baby’s been born.’ He gestured at their surroundings. ‘I guess I should have been more specific and mentioned submarines. How deep do you think we are?’

‘I try not to think about it,’ said Geordie. ‘At least if you’re in a plane and something goes wrong, you’ve got the option of jumping. In a submarine…’  He shuddered at the thought of what would happen if the hull were breached.

‘They’re as safe as houses,’ said Jimbo.

‘Yeah, well they said that about the Titanic,’ said Liam. ‘And my great-grandfather helped build it but that didn’t stop it sinking.’

‘What about icebergs?’ asked Shepherd. ‘We’re headed to the Lofoten Islands and that’s inside the Arctic Circle.’

‘We’re well below any ice,’ said Jimbo. ‘And these hulls are designed to be uncrushable.’

‘I’m pretty sure they said that about the Titanic’s hull, too,’ said Liam.

‘Can we talk about something else,’ said Shepherd.

‘Is the missus trying to talk you into becoming an officer?’ asked Jimbo. ‘Mine is. Says I should push for a commission.’ He mimicked her plaintive voice. ‘If you were an officer, you wouldn’t have to keep going to all these horrible places for weeks and months on end.’

‘Which is exactly why you don’t want to be an officer, right?’ said Geordie.

‘Right, but it doesn’t stop her trying,’ said Jimbo. ‘Her parents are well connected in the County’s hunting and shooting set and I’ve already been shanghaied into a few dinner parties.’ He gave a mock shudder at the thought. ‘She dragged me to one last week and there were a couple of retired senior officers from the Regiment there. They talked a complete load of babbling nonsense, but the other guests were so in awe of them that they hung on their every word. Total bollocks, but I didn’t say anything. But there was a certain amount of frost in the taxi going home at the end of the evening.’

‘Sue’s not like that,’ said Shepherd. ‘And her parents know the score. Her dad’s a bank manager and my mother-in-law’s a sweetie. They’re both Hereford born and bred so they know how important the Regiment is.  They know I’ve never wanted to be an officer. I didn’t join the SAS to shuffle paper and send other people out to do my fighting for me. But there’s no doubt she’d be happier if I was doing something else.’

‘Like what?’ asked Liam. ‘You love it, you know you do.’

‘My missus reckons I’m more married to the squadron than I am to her,’ Jimbo said. ‘I told her: “You’re right and you know what? The sex is better too”.’

Geordie laughed. ‘You’re so naive, couldn’t you tell I was faking it?’

‘Bloody hell,’ Liam said in mock disgust. ‘The SAS camping it up. Is nothing bloody sacred any more?’

‘Clearly not,’ laughed Shepherd.

‘But seriously, what does she want you to do instead?’ asked Liam.  ‘Find a desk job?’

‘She suggested the police,’ said Shepherd.

‘What, have you walking the streets in a pointy hat?’ laughed Geordie. ‘Has she seen Hereford town centre on a Saturday night? You’d be safer with the Regiment in Belfast. At least we’ve got guns. What do cops have? A stick and a whistle.’

Shepherd smiled. ‘I pretty much said that to her. I guess the way she looks at it, if I was a cop at least I’d be home every night.’ The hull creaked and he grimaced. ‘She’s got a point.’

‘I don’t know why anyone would want to be a cop,’ said Geordie. ‘They have to work with one hand tied behind their backs most of the time. The villains have more rights than the victims.’

‘They should let the Regiment loose on the bad guys,’ said Jimbo. ‘We’d cut re-offending rates at a stroke. So what did you say to her?’

‘Said I’d think about it. But I can’t see I’d ever leave the Regiment. Kid or no kid.’

‘That’s the spirit.’

‘But I do understand how she feels. I mean, she’s pregnant and I’m stuck in a sardine can in icy water. She’s having to do the doctor’s appointments on her own and I can’t guarantee that I’ll be there when it’s born.’

‘It?’ said Liam. ‘You don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl?’

‘The doctor said she was seventy-five per cent sure it was a boy after the last scan but she couldn’t say for sure. Sue’s got a scan coming up and I wanted to be there for that but the way this is panning out…’  He shrugged.

‘It’s going to be worse when the kid arrives, of course,’ said Jimbo. ‘Then she’ll say you’re using operations to get out of nappy-changing.’ He grinned. ‘And she’ll probably be right, too.’

Shepherd grinned. ‘Nappies are one thing I’m not looking forward to,’ he admitted. ‘Anyway, I hate to spoil the party but this is supposed to be squadron training, so how about we focus on the task for a few minutes?’ He unrolled a map and spread it out over the floor. ‘We’ve come on this little pleasure cruise to test-launch a self-inflating reconnaissance boat.  There’s a question mark over it because in previous tests it has not always inflated correctly. Assuming it does this time, we’ll be using it to make a covert landing on the Lofoten Islands - here.’ He tapped the map. ‘And if you want to keep an eye on the movements of the Russian Northern Fleet, the Lofotens are as good a place as any, because it’s based just around the corner in Murmansk.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and we’d better hope the outboard works too, because the Lofotens are also home to the Moskstraumen - it means maelstrom in Norwegian apparently - a whirlpool powerful enough to drag in a much bigger boat than ours.’

‘You’re all good news today, aren’t you?’ Liam said. ‘So where is this inflatable wonder boat?’

‘Already loaded in one of the torpedo tubes.’

Liam did a double-take. ‘You’re shitting me, right? We’re going to trust our lives to a rubber boat that’s been fired out of a torpedo tube? What if it gets shredded?’

‘It won’t, but if it doesn’t inflate correctly or it sinks, we’ll be swimming to the coast because once we’ve exited the sub, the crew have no means of knowing if we’re fine or fucked and won’t even be able to see us, let alone pick us up again. They stay submerged and access comms by trailing a tiny aerial on a wire several miles long, timing the deployment precisely to coincide with the transit of a military comms satellite overhead.  That allows the sub to remain undetected by enemy forces, but unfortunately, for operational and practical reasons, it also means that it cannot surface to rescue us if we get into difficulties as there’s no way of getting the boat or us back on board.’ He paused again to let that sink in.

‘Remind me again why the SBS boys aren’t doing this?’ asked Jimbo.

‘Because the Special Boat Service are experts at ducking out of dangerous jobs,’ said Liam. ‘Their motto is “By Strength And Guile” and they’re always heavy on the guile.’

‘It’s our mission and we’re stuck with it,’ said Shepherd. ‘OK, Survival brief: Geordie?’

Geordie, the patrol medic, cleared his throat. ‘We’re well inside the Arctic Circle, so even wearing dry suits, if we’re in the water, our survival time is going to be limited. For an unprotected body, at a water temperature close to freezing point, exhaustion and unconsciousness will set in within fifteen minutes and death will follow within forty-five minutes. Our dry suits will prolong that survival time by up to another couple of hours, but no more than that. Should the boat capsize, we’re better adopting a defensive posture in the water to conserve heat than trying to swim or even tread water, both of which can cut survival time by as much as fifty per cent. At the risk of getting my boyfriend over-excited again-’ He gave Jimbo a sideways look, ‘-huddling together in the water will also decrease heat loss significantly. However, the good news is that we have the Norwegian coastguard chopper on standby, so there should be no problems.’

Shepherd took up the briefing again. ‘Okay, as I said, the recce boat is deployed by being fired through the submarine’s torpedo tubes.  The patrol will follow through the lock-out system in the sub’s conning tower and swim to the boat. The only other issue may be the weather, which is looking dubious.’ He paused at the sound of approaching footsteps on the steel floor. ‘This might be the update on that.’

A lieutenant, wearing the dolphin badge of an experienced submariner, stepped through the hatch. He was in his early thirties, pale skimmed with a rash of brown freckles across his nose and cheeks.  ‘Not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Pressure’s falling, visibility is poor and the wind’s backing northerly and strengthening, so we look to be in for a bit of a blow. The commander’s recommendation is that the exercise should be postponed until the weather improves.

Shepherd glanced at the others. ‘What do you reckon?’

Liam shrugged. ‘It’s the navy’s environment, not ours. If they don’t think it’s fit, we’d be mugs to overrule them.’

There was a murmur of agreement from the others.

‘Fair enough then,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’ll tell the Head Shed, assuming we have comms at the moment? Though you know what the Boss is like, so don’t stand down just yet.’

Shepherd went to the comms area and outlined the weather problems and the sub commander’s opinion, to the Squadron OC, Michael de Vale, who was supervising the operation. There was a pause on the radio while he digested the news. ‘Nonsense,’ he said eventually, his accent pure cut glass. ‘Who Dares Wins, remember? We don’t suspend operations because there’s a bit of wind and rain. Get on with it, Shepherd. That’s an order.’

‘Yes sir,’ Shepherd said, masking his irritation. De Vale came from a family with a strong military background and a lineage stretching back to the Norman Conquest and he was renowned in the Regiment for losing no opportunity to blow his own trumpet and for volunteering his men for any operation, no matter how reckless or ill-conceived.

Shepherd reported back to the others. ‘No surprises there,’ Geordie said. ‘OK, let’s get to it.’

Despite their reservations, there was no grumbling or hesitation from anyone. The decision was made and, whatever their private thoughts, they had received a direct order and would carry out the task without further pause. They began to dress themselves in their dry-suits, a difficult enough task in ample space on dry land, never mind in the cramped confines of a submarine torpedo bay. Shepherd was sweating profusely by the time he’d struggled into the suit, with its gaskets clamping tight around his wrists, neck and ankles.

When all four men were fully suited, they shuffled along to the lock-out chamber and, with the help of two of the sub crew, clambered through the circular hatch into the chamber. They synchronised watches with the lieutenant. ‘We’ll launch the raft at 0950 hours,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

Shepherd nodded, then the sub crew closed the hatch and he span the circular wheel to lock it shut. ‘Alone at last,’ he said to the others.  No one laughed. They were all in operations mode, all too well aware that any mistake could be fatal.

They took it in turns to put on their fins and their modified submarine escape hoods, designed to allow them to exhale during the short ascent to the surface.  It was essential that they did so; if they held their breath, the air in their lungs would expand as they rose from the depths, causing internal damage to their organs.

They waited as the time ticked down, every sound echoing from the steel walls of the tiny chamber. ‘Now!’ Shepherd said at last. He spun the wheel to free the hatch above their heads. There was a blast of gas, the hatch swung open and a torrent of seawater cascaded into the chamber. He stifled a gasp at the icy shock of the water, and had to fight to control the involuntary, hyperventilating response to sudden, extreme cold. The airlock filled rapidly and he was swept upwards. He cleared the hatch and exhaling as he went, finned rapidly upwards.

He broke surface and looked around. A heavy swell was running, the wind whipping drifts of spray from the crests. As he was lifted by the swell, he caught a brief glimpse of three other heads bobbing above the surface near him.  About a hundred yards away he could see the glistening outline of the black rubber raft uncurling as it began to inflate. He slipped down into the trough before the next wave and he lost sight of his colleagues. He began finning towards the raft, pausing a couple of times to check his direction, as the stiff, gusting wind and the powerful current of the ebb tide combined to hamper him. Even in the short time in the water, he could feel the effects of the cold, which seemed to double the effort needed to swim to the boat.

In the far distance, to the east, he could see the outlines of the peaks of the Lofoten Islands, as sharp and jagged as shark’s teeth against the lowering grey clouds. He reached the raft just ahead of the others and clung to the side of it for a moment as the waves pummeled him. He could hear the hiss of gas from the boat’s cylinders as they continued their slow inflation of the raft. One by one they pulled themselves out of the frigid water and swung into the raft. Even the freezing wind felt better than the numbing cold of the ocean.

His relief proved short-lived because the hissing sound from the cylinders faltered and stopped. He looked at the others and saw his concern mirrored on their faces. The boat was not even half-inflated. Burdened by their weight, it was  filling with water. As the others scrambled for anything they could use to bale out the seawater as the boat bucked and rocked in the swell, Shepherd grabbed the mini-flares from the boat and jammed them into his belt, then began trying to restart the cylinders. As he looked up, he froze, seeing a monster wave rising above them. His shouted warning was snatched away by the wind, and the wave smashed down with crushing force, capsizing the boat and hurling them all back into the ocean.

As Shepherd broke surface, he saw the raft had turned turtle and was now upside down. He swam back to it and hung on to the slippery hull as the others joined him, battling to maintain their grip as each wave threatened to tear them loose. They had only the most minimal kit on them. Everything else - comms, weapons, rations, survival gear, rations - had been in the boat and was now on its way to the bottom of the ocean.

Shepherd was all too well aware of the seriousness of their situation. Even wearing dry suits to combat the extreme cold of the Arctic water, they would not be able to survive for long before hypothermia began to kick in. He pulled the metal firing tube from the flare pack. His frozen fingers fumbled with the trigger for a moment, then it fired and the mini-flare arced up high above them and burst into vivid red star.

At intervals of ten minutes, he fired off three more flares. The Norwegian coastguard was on watch for them and the support chopper was patrolling just off the Lofotens, so help should have been with them within half an hour at worst. But as the minutes ticked by and still no help appeared, all of them began to succumb to the near-zero water temperature.

Shepherd was shivering uncontrollably and felt as weak as a newborn. It took all his strength just to cling to the hull of the raft. When he fumbled for a fresh flare, his movements were clumsy and uncoordinated. He recognised the symptoms of the onset of hypothermia and knew that his blood was retreating from the extremities towards the core of his body. It was the body’s way of trying to survive extreme cold, but if it continued unchecked would lead to unconsciousness and death.

After what felt like hours, above the howl of the wind and the sound of the waves battering the upturned boat, he heard a faint sound. It grew rapidly louder, swelling into the clatter of rotors and he saw a black speck approaching from the coast. He felt relief surge through him. Every movement slow and laboured, he managed to fire another flare and saw the helicopter change course slightly towards them. It overflew them and even went into a hover, but it then swung away and headed back towards the coast. In desperation he fired another flare but the helicopter kept on its course and soon disappeared from sight. How had they missed them? How had they not seen the flares?

He stared helplessly at his three companions.  ‘Flares!’ he shouted. ‘Keep firing the flares.’

They kept firing flares but did so now more in desperation than in genuine hope that they might result in a rescue.

The time dragged by and Shepherd no longer had any sense of how long they had been in the water. Only a deep-rooted, subconscious survival instinct kept him clinging on. He was not even aware of feeling cold any more, in fact, if anything, in his rare moments of relative lucidity, he almost felt too hot. He was now only semi-conscious. The others were in no better shape and the weather was deteriorating, with vicious gusts of wind and stinging showers of sleet and snow blowing across them. Through the fog of his thoughts, he was dimly aware of a sound that appeared to come from a long way off, but in his confused state it seemed of no more significance than a fly buzzing against a window pane. It grew louder and louder, but he still gazed vacantly in front of him, even as the downdraft from a hovering helicopter lashed the water into foam. A moment later, a dark shape splashed into the sea alongside them.

The winchman grabbed Jimbo first, manhandling him into the sling and signalling to be hauled up. He returned a couple of minutes later for Geordie, who seemed no more aware of what was happening than Shepherd.  The winchman came to get Liam next, but Liam shook his head, pointing towards Shepherd. ‘Take him,’ he said, his speech so slurred that he sounded half-asleep. ‘He’s not going to make it if you don’t. Take him.’

Shepherd was only half aware of what Liam was saying. The winchman swam towards Shepherd and wrestled him into the sling. He signalled to the winch operator to haul them up. Shepherd was swung in through the hatch and laid on a stretcher on the floor of the helicopter next to the other two men. His pupils were fully dilated and his skin had turned blue. He didn’t appear to be breathing and had no detectable pulse, but the medic refused to give up and began using CPR to try to restart his heart.

As the medic fought to revive Shepherd, the winchman swung out of the hatch ready to retrieve Liam. He could see the dark shape of the Irishman, still clinging to the hull. But as he descended a huge wave broke over the boat and ripped Liam away. The winchman stared at the waves waiting for Liam to reappear, but there was no sign of him. He spoke to the pilot on his headset and the helicopter began a series of slowly widening circles around the boat, but nothing broke the surface of the sullen ocean swell. Time was running out for the three men they had already rescued so eventually the pilot had to abandon the search and he wheeled the helicopter away to speed back towards the Norwegian coast.

* * *

Shepherd heard a voice and opened his eyes a fraction, blinking in the strong light. ‘Welcome back, Dan.’ The voice had a Scandinavian accent. As Shepherd’s eyes came into focus, he saw a white-coated figure looking down at him.

‘Where am I?’ croaked Shepherd.

‘In Narvik, at the University Hospital, and you’re a very lucky man indeed,’ the doctor said. ‘You nearly died out there.  You had no pulse or visible respiration when you were brought in, and the core temperature of your body was barely twenty degrees Celsius. A weaker man wouldn’t have recovered. ‘

‘Good to know,’ said Shepherd. He tried to lift his head but fell back.

‘Luckily for you, the medic on the rescue helicopter is no stranger to hypothermia cases. Once you reached hospital we gave you a breathing tube with warm air for your lungs, and warm saline through an IV and through a tube directly into your stomach. That helped to raise your temperature from the inside - much faster than heating you from the outside. But it was the medic on the rescue helicopter who really saved your life.’

‘What about the others?’ Shepherd struggled to sit up again and failed.

‘Please lie still,’ the doctor said. ‘You’re very weak and your body has had a very narrow escape. Give it time to recover.’

‘But my friends? What about my friends?’

The doctor’s smile faded. ‘Two of them are recovering well and you will be able to see them shortly. But I’m afraid the other man drowned before he could be rescued.’

‘Who was it?’ Shepherd dreaded the answer, whatever it was, but he had to know.

The doctor consulted his notes.  ‘McKay. Liam McKay.’

Shepherd groaned and lay back.

‘I am sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘If it’s any consolation, drowning in such a cold sea is relatively painless.’

Shepherd held up a hand to silence the doctor. He didn’t want to be consoled. He was barely aware of the doctor leaving the room.  He took slow deep breaths as he came to terms with what he’d been told. Liam was gone.  Not killed in combat - a proper soldier’s death - but lost in some stupid training accident. It was a senseless death. And it could so easily have been Shepherd who had died in the icy waters.

His dark thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door and a fair-haired man walked in. He was wearing a red anorak over pale green overalls. Shepherd scowled at him. ‘This isn’t a good time.’

‘I won’t keep you long,’ the man said. He shifted his weight from leg to leg, clearly uneasy. ‘My name is Mats. I was the winchman on the rescue helicopter. I just wanted to make sure that you were all right and tell you how sorry I was that we weren’t able to save your friend.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Shepherd. He struggled to sit up and extend his hand. ‘I owe you my life.’

Mats solemnly shook hands with him.

‘Seriously, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, you only have to ask,’ said Shepherd. Sitting up was painful so he lay back down again.

Mats smiled. ‘That really isn’t necessary, I was just doing my job, and anyway, if anyone deserves your thanks, it’s our medic, Runar. I’d given you up for dead but he worked on you all the way back to Narvik.’ His smile evaporated. ‘I’m sorry about your colleague. Liam. He was a very brave man.’

Shepherd nodded. ‘I know you did your best.’

Mats nodded.  ‘I rescued the other two men first, and then I went to your friend, but he insisted I take you first, saying that you wouldn’t make it unless I did. He was obviously hypothermic himself, but I did as he said. If I hadn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here now.’  He grimaced and shook his head at the memory. ‘ He was washed away and when I was lowered, there was no sign of him. We searched but he didn’t resurface.’ He took a deep breath to steady himself before continuing. ‘He gave his life to save yours.’ Shepherd felt a slow tear trickle down his cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mats said, ‘ but I thought you should know how he died.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘There’s one other thing you should know’ He took a step closer to Shepherd’s bed and lowered his voice. ‘My chief told your Commanding Officer that the weather was not fit for the exercise and likely to deteriorate further. He was ignored and the exercise went ahead.  My chief remained concerned and sent us out to overfly the boat. Your CO came with us in the helicopter and though he could see you in the water and saw the distress flare you fired, he insisted that you were, as he put it, “in control of the situation” and would be able to right the boat, and he ordered us back to base.  We only returned because when the weather deteriorated further, my chief overruled your CO.’ He searched Shepherd’s face for some reaction. ‘I hope I have done the right thing in telling you this. I thought you ought to know.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Shepherd.  ‘I’m grateful. And my offer to you stands, if you ever need help of any sort, just say the word and I’m there for you.’ Mats nodded, forced a smile, and left Shepherd to his thoughts.

* * *

Shepherd, Geordie and Jimbo were discharged from hospital two days later and flown back to England. The cab that dropped Shepherd off in front of his house in Hereford had only just pulled away when a heavily-pregnant Sue opened the front door. Shepherd rushed towards her and hugged her. As he held her close he felt his son kick in her womb and he gasped. Sue laughed. ‘It’s his way of saying hello,’ she said. ‘Either that or he wants to be a professional footballer.’

Shepherd laughed and then the implication of what she had said hit home. ‘It’s a boy?’

‘He’s a boy,’ said Sue. She kissed him on the lips. ‘We’re having a son.’

They went inside and Sue took him into the kitchen to make tea. As she busied herself with the teapot she asked him what had happened. Shepherd couldn’t tell her too much – even families weren’t privy to SAS operations – but even if he had been in a position to give her the details he would never tell her just how close he had come to losing his life. He told her about Liam dying in the freezing waters and her eyes misted over.  Liam had been around to their house many times and they had been planning to ask him to be Godfather to their child. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said.

‘Neither can I,’ said Shepherd. ‘And it was all down to an incompetent officer putting our lives on the line.’

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know yet, but I want some answers about what went on.’

Lying in bed that night, his hand resting on her bump, feeling their son’s kicks inside the womb, he turned to her.  ‘Can we call him Liam?’ he whispered.

She smiled. ‘Of course we can.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

* * *

Shepherd, Geordie and Jimbo had been put on sick leave while they recuperated, but word of what had happened and the circumstances of Liam’s death spread rapidly around and brought the SAS Stirling Lines base to a state of near-mutiny. To placate the troops, the Regiment convened a Court of Inquiry where the Squadron OC, de Vale, defended his actions vigourously. He appealed to the Regiment’s ‘warrior traditions’, as he called them, to justify leaving his men struggling in a near-frozen sea. ‘It was reasonable to expect that they would be able to right their boat. We preach self-reliance; this was an opportunity for them to demonstrate it.’

Shepherd’s evidence was pithy and direct. He had burned with a cold fury as he listened to the OC’s self-justification. ‘There are limits to self-reliance,’ Shepherd said when  it was his turn to address the court. ‘When you are sent into Arctic waters in weather conditions that lead the submarine commander and the Norwegian coastguard to call for the exercise to be postponed, and you are provided with a supposedly self-inflating boat that first fails to inflate and then capsizes, self-reliance is irrelevant. We are soldiers; our job is to follow orders and complete our task to the best of our ability. The job of our officers is not to needlessly put us into harm’s way as a result of excessive ambition, hubris, ignorance, or point-scoring.’

De Vale’s gaze had been fixed on a point on the far wall as he listened to Shepherd’s testimony, but he snapped around and glared at Shepherd. Despite further damning evidence from the submarine crew, the Norwegian Coastguard officers, and the other patrol members, the Inquiry found that Liam’s death had been ‘a tragic accident for which no blame could be attached to any individual’.  That in turn influenced the subsequent Inquest into Liam’s death held at the Coroner’s Court in Hereford, which also returned a verdict of ‘Accidental Death’. It was, Shepherd knew, a total whitewash.

Jock McIntyre, a ten-year veteran with the Regiment, who had been brought in to take Liam’s place in Shepherd’s patrol, shrugged his shoulders when he heard the verdict. ‘No surprises there, eh ,Spider?’ he growled in his near impenetrable Glaswegian accent. ‘The coroner here’s always vulnerable to pressure from the Regiment; it takes a strong man not to buckle under it.’ Jock’s seniority should have made him a patrol leader, but he was a man who did not suffer fools gladly and, not for the first time in his military career, he had been busted down to the ranks. On the most recent occasion he had settled an argument with an over-bearing Sergeant-Major by knocking him out with a single punch. Had he not been such a good soldier he would probably have been RTU’d as well. A few days later came the news that de Vale was being promoted and posted to Special Forces HQ in London. Jock merely gave a weary shake of his head. ‘It just goes to prove the old adage that there are three regimental mottos.  One: “Who Dares Wins”. Two: “Who Cares Who Wins?” And Three: “Shit Never Sticks To A Regimental Rupert”. But whoever said that life was fair, huh?’

* * *

Shepherd’s patrol was on the rest cycle and he was at home still recovering from his ordeal and spending some quality time with Sue getting to know their new-born son, when he was called into camp by de Vale’s replacement as Squadron OC.   Geordie, Jimbo and Jock were already there when Shepherd arrived. His name was Allan Gannon. He was a big man with a cleft chin and a nose that appeared to have been broken several times.

‘Right gents,’ said Gannon briskly. ‘Time to shake the lead out. I’ve got an active service op for you.’

Jock exchanged a look with Shepherd. ‘But Boss,’ Jock said. ‘We’re not on operational standby or even re-training. We’re on the rest cycle. D squadron are the next cab off the rank.’

Gannon gave a sympathetic smile but spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Sorry boys, my hands are tied. The order comes from Special Forces HQ and I can’t countermand it. So I’m giving you a Warning Order for an imminent active service operation.  You’ve got forty minutes to call your wives and girlfriends, and sort your kit.’

Although they’d seen action in Belize at the end of Selection, for the three newly-badged members of the Regiment, this was to be their first planned active service operation and they should have been excited and elated, but Shepherd felt only bitterness and suspicion. When they got outside, he and the others clustered around Jock. ‘I joined the SAS to go on ops,’ Geordie said. ‘But I don’t see why we’ve been pulled off the rest cycle to do it when D Squadron are sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They’re on Standby, this should be their operation.’

‘And what did he mean by a Warning Order?’ Jimbo said.

Jock flashed a cold smile. ‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper. It means we’re being placed in isolation and quarantine, effectively cutting us off from the outside world.  Any contact can only be made through the supervisory guard forces, and then only if they sanction it. We’ll prepare for the op at a purpose-built camp away from Stirling Lines.  You’ve not seen it yet, but everything we need for the operation is there: ranges, weapons and explosives. There’s also a dedicated admin support group to cater for anything else we might need, but they’re subject to the same restrictions as us.’

‘It’s payback from de Vale,’ Shepherd said. ‘This has nothing to do with the operational needs of the Regiment and everything to do with stopping us from going public about the Norwegian fuck up. The Warning Order is a gag, right?’

‘Give the man a cigar,’ Jock said. ‘Got it in one.’

‘So what do we do?’

Jock patted Shepherd on the shoulder. ‘What can we do? We get on with preparing for the op.  And then, after we’ve done the op, whatever it is, and got back to the UK, if I ever catch our old Boss out of uniform, I’ll beat the shit out of him.’

‘You can get in the queue,’ Shepherd said. ‘Liam was my mate and I’ll be first in line for payback.’

As the others hurried away to break the news to their families and throw their personal kit together, Jock called Shepherd back. ‘One other thing about a warning order. Once a soldier has received one he can’t legally resign, so whatever you decide about your future, you can’t now apply to leave the army until the order has been lifted.’

‘What do you think the op will be?’

‘Who knows?’ said Jock. ‘But I can pretty much guarantee that it’ll be outside of the UK. So far as the top brass is concerned, the further away we are, the better. My guess is that we’ll not be seeing the UK again for a wee while.’

Shepherd phoned Sue to break the bad news. ‘So you can’t tell me where you’re going or how long you’ll be away or anything at all?’ she said. ‘And meanwhile I have to stay here, the dutiful little wife, with our baby boy, not knowing what’s happening to you or even if you’ll come back at all. Is this what our life is going to be?’

‘It is for now, but not forever,’ Shepherd said. ‘That’s all I can say.’

‘And that isn’t enough, Dan. And you know it isn’t.’ Shepherd heard the click as the connection was broken and swore violently under his breath as he hung up.

They transferred to the isolation camp later that morning and at once went into an intensive phase of work-up training. As elder statesman, Jock spoke to them at their first briefing. ‘We’re all angry and frustrated,’ he said, ‘and with good reason, but we need to set that aside for now, and focus only on the task. This isn’t about de Vale, it’s about getting the job done right and getting ourselves in and out of wherever it is in one piece.’

The op was broken down into phases and each one was dealt with as a separate entity, with the operational details - the where and the when - kept from them until the last minute, ‘Need to know, and all that,’ was Jock’s only comment. Although still unaware of where the mission was to be, they soon had an idea of what it was. They were clearly preparing to secure a beach landing site for an invasion force in an as yet unspecified country. Each phase was practised until perfect and then full scale practice ops were run, combining all the phases, until the whole system was as flawless as possible.

Over the following days and weeks they briefed and practised beach marking for assault troops - equipment required and codes; actions on meeting the enemy - weapons and explosives, immediate action drills and after action drills; actions on meeting friendly forces: recognition features, radios and codes and RV procedures; after operational tasks: finding and destroying targets of opportunity; exfiltration or RV with friendly forces.

The only phase of the operation that they could not prepare for at the isolation camp was the means of entry.  This was to be a parachute insertion into the sea off the coast of the intended target country and to prepare for this they had to transfer to the top secret RAF base at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.

The briefing by one of their minders about the method of insertion almost provoked a riot. They were to parachute-jump into the sea off the enemy coast and make the sea-to-shore run in an inflatable recce boat. ‘Hold it right there,’ Shepherd said. ‘You’re asking us to insert using the same kind of inflatable recce boat that cost Liam his life and nearly killed the rest of us as well?’

‘The faults with the boat have been identified and rectified,’ the minder said. He was in his late thirties with close-cropped grey hair and a jagged scar across his left cheek. ‘You’ll be practising in the Channel not the Arctic, and rescue boats will be patrolling to ensure your safety. Any other questions?’ He closed the file with a snap and walked out.

At 0230 on a coal black starless night a Hercules lumbered into the air from Boscombe Down, climbing to 10,000 feet as it headed west towards the Isles of Scilly.  Shepherd and the rest of the patrol sat on uncomfortable canvas seats with the RAF dispatchers in the back of the aircraft.  The recce boat, rigged with a 20-foot drogue parachute, was at the back of the aircraft, lashed to the tailgate and ready to be dropped when the pilot gave the signal,.

It took several days and nights of trial and error to get to the stage where they had a workable technique. They tried dozens of different permutations of how the drop could be successfully completed, but most were either too dangerous or unworkable and were discarded.  They tried high-drop, low-opening, they had dropped the patrol first and then the boat, and they had tried dropping the boat in the middle of the patrol. Nothing seemed to work.

They used up a huge number of parachutes. Every time a parachute was immersed in sea water it had to be washed in fresh water, dried and tested for decay before it could be used on another drop.  As a result, water jumps into the sea were usually made using parachutes near the end of their useful lives, which were then discarded afterwards, but the sheer numbers the patrol required meant the RAF supply chain was hard pressed to keep up with their demands.

The crew from the Special Forces squadron at RAF Lyneham had heard about the patrol’s experiences in Norway and were sympathetic to their situation, and while everyone involved knew there was a job to be done, that did not mean that anyone should be exposed to unnecessary, life-threatening risks. Because of the lack of trust in the recce boat, the aircrew had taken to carrying a liferaft which they could drop if the recce boat malfunctioned.  During the practice runs there was also such an overkill of safety boats in the drop zone, that as Geordie looked around, he exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell, it’s like Dunkirk all over again out here.’

‘Are you surprised?’ Shepherd said. ‘A death off the Lofoten Islands is one thing, but it’d be a lot harder to hush up something that happens in sight of the British coast.’

Eventually they worked out a successful technique. The Hercules crew extinguished all lights on the aircraft over the Isles of Scilly, including the external strobe navigation lights.  Inside the aircraft every window except the windscreen had been blacked out before takeoff.  After the skipper made one last call to base to ensure that everything was in place at the drop zone, the aircraft went into a stomach-churning dive towards the sea and at the same time, turned onto an easterly heading.  The Hercules was now flying at wave-top height, bouncing on the pressure wave from the ocean as it swept past the cliffs of Cornwall and Devon, visible only as a blacker mass against the moonless, cloud-covered sky.

In the back of the plane, the deafening noise made speech impossible. The patrol and the RAF dispatchers were strapped into their seats to prevent being thrown around in the darkness. Everyone was wearing passive night goggles, ready to go into action when ordered by the skipper.

As they neared the drop zone, everyone on board went into the clear-headed, calm mode of professionals with complete confidence in their skills. Over Lyme Bay the engines were throttled back and everyone in the cargo bay immediately unhooked themselves and started to prepare for the drop. Shepherd was already wearing his neoprene wet suit, much better for use in the more temperate waters off the UK than the cumbersome dry suit and much easier to get out of when no longer required.  Around his waist he wore a web belt with a sheathed divers knife.   He pulled on his main parachute harness followed by his reserve chute.  Under it he wedged a pair of fins and then rested the heavy waterproof pack containing his weapon and equipment on his leg as he clipped it to the parachute harness ready for lowering when his chute had deployed.  Although this was only a test run, everything had to replicate the real thing.

As the time to the jump counted down, he felt the familiar tingle of anticipation, mixed with fear. He’d done hundreds of parachute jumps in his time in the Paras and the SAS, but even now, there was always a moment where he wondered if his nerve would fail him as he stood on the brink, looking down. It was part of the reason why they had dispatchers on board: to ‘assist’ hesitant jumpers out of the aircraft. If the dispatchers had to get physical they were backed by the full force of military law; an order to jump from the aircrew was a direct order and to refuse was a court martial offence.  If it occurred in a training jump, it was punishable by a couple of years in a military prison, but if it was on an operational jump, it was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Shepherd’s nerve had never failed him yet, but he never made a jump without the thought flashing through his mind.  He stood up with difficulty, trying to tense his legs against the bucking of the aircraft. He lost his balance under the weight he was carrying and he fell over. He was more embarrassed than hurt and he grinned shamefacedly as a dispatcher pulled him to his feet again and checked his equipment was safe to drop.  Together they staggered towards the tailgate.

When they were all in the area of the tailgate they hooked up their parachutes to the overhead steel wires, two on the port wire and two on the starboard wire, allowing the patrol to exit almost simultaneously. That carried a risk, but allowed them to be close together in the air. For safety reasons Paras are trained to exit an aircraft at one second intervals but at over two hundred knots aircraft flying speed that translated into a considerable distance on the ground or in the water.  That wasn’t good enough for the SAS so Shepherd and the rest of the four-man team would exit together. While that made for more potential danger in the air it made things in the water much slicker, with the jumpers landing in a tight group.

The loadmaster opened the tailgate.  The noise from the slipstream became almost overwhelming. Shepherd could make out the outline of Portland in the distance and the lights of Swanage on the port side.  The Hercules dipped its left wing and turned around the headland into Studland Bay, as the navigator gave a running commentary over the tannoy marking off time to drop in seconds.

‘Stand By’ came over the tannoy, followed quickly by ‘Go!’  A dispatcher dropped a small chute into the slipstream.  It hung there for a fraction of a second, then filled and disappeared into the darkness.  It was attached to the drogue chute on the recce boat and as the chute filled with the slipstream, the boat disappeared into the night with a massive roar.

The Hercules immediately went into a climbing turn up to 800 feet and turned onto a reciprocal heading to the one it had just been flying.  As Shepherd looked down through his PNGs, he could see the recce boat inflating on the calm sea.  Another ‘Go!’ came over the tannoy and he and the rest of the team stepped over the edge of the tailgate into the darkness below.

He rode the slipstream and felt the nylon ties in his parachute breaking in sequence.  He was yanked backwards as the chute deployed and he used the chute risers to stop the pendulum motion.  Checking that his chute was fully deployed, he took a quick look around him for the rest of the patrol.  He could see them, close but not too close.

With his parachute safely deployed, he lowered his equipment container on its suspension rope. The technique had the double benefit of preventing him from landing on top of his gear, while at the same time the weight kept him stable as he dropped.  He took out his fins and struggled to get them on his feet before concentrating on steering the chute as close to the boat as possible.

Like the rest of the patrol, he was using a modified free-fall parachute with two L-shaped vents in the rear of the chute, making it very manoeuvrable.  By using the toggles on the harness, Shepherd made the chute side-slip steeply, picking up speed and allowing him to get down to the sea quickly.  Such manoeuvres were risky as they carried the risk of collapsing the chute, but an experienced Para could cut down substantially on his time in the air by using them, and in a combat zone that might be the difference between life and death. He knew without looking that the rest of the patrol would follow his moves in formation.

As the sea rushed towards him, he moved his hands to the cutaway mechanism on his shoulders.  When he pulled them, the chute would drift away leaving him static in the water, but if he didn’t get it right he could be dragged for miles and almost certainly drowned. A few seconds later, he heard his container hit the water.  He pointed his fins and hit the cutaways. He felt the chute drift away and he dropped the last few feet into the sea. He grabbed his equipment container and began to swim towards the boat.  When he reached it, he hung from the side for a few moments, then pulled himself into the still-inflating boat, closely followed by the others.  Normally there would have been a couple of jokes like ‘I’m getting a sinking feeling about this’, but Liam’s death was still too fresh and too raw in all their minds for even the Regiment’s trademark black humour, and they went about their work in silence.

It took them several minutes before they were organised and able to start the boat’s outboard engine.  As they did so, a safety boat manned by the Royal Marines from Poole loomed out of the darkness.  ‘Everything okay, guys?’ called a voice.

‘Just hunky dory,’ Jock growled. ‘But where will you be next time, when we do it for real?’

* * *

The atmosphere in the briefing room was tense.  Although it was large enough to seat a couple of SAS squadrons, there were only ten soldiers present, including the four members of Shepherd’s patrol. A Yeoman of Signals sat at the back of the room, a senior NCO from the dreaded ‘Scaly Back’ signals squadron who monitored the signals that the patrols sent in from the field.  Scalies did not take part in operations, but if women in the bars and clubs they frequented somehow formed the impression that they were part of an operational squadron, they did little to set the record straight.

The officers all sat on a raised dais. It wasn’t quite a stage but it was raised high enough to enable them to look down on the men sitting below them. The new OC of Shepherd’s squadron sat at one end of the platform, his watching brief to ensure fair play and that the operation was viable. The man leading the briefing was the Operations Officer, second in seniority only to the CO.  He was accompanied by his Intelligence Officer, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, there to supply whatever Intel was available.  Universally known and despised by the combat troops in the field, the Intelligence Corps’ nickname of ‘The Green Slime’ spoke volumes. The captain was barely out of his twenties with a crop of old acne scars across his forehead. A major from the Army Legal Services sat uncomfortably next to him. Dressed incongruously in neatly-pressed camouflage fatigues, he was there in his official capacity to ensure that what the patrol was ordered to do was legal and in accordance with the Rules of Engagement.  His unofficial role, unstated but understood by everyone present, was to ensure that if any shit was attached to the operation, none of it went any higher than the Patrol Commander.

Jock looked at the Army Legal Services Major with undisguised contempt. ‘Look at him,’ he said. ‘He’s even got creases in his fatigues.’  Shepherd couldn’t help but smile because Jock was right. Only a real idiot would iron his fatigues.

Behind the officers was a large screen and an array of no-expense-spared, state-of-the-art electronic gadgetry. A Signals Squadron technician operated it from an adjoining room, responsible not only for the high tech equipment required for the briefing, but also the video and sound equipment used to monitor and record every word and gesture from the participants. At the end of the briefing the video and sound recordings would be sealed by the lawyer and kept in the Regimental Registry along with the rest of the SAS’s classified material. As a result, officers fell over themselves not to issue orders that might come back to bite them on the arse and anything potentially damaging was left unsaid, with briefings almost invariably concluding with the standard cop-out instruction to the patrol: ‘You must decide how the objective is to be achieved, within the Rules of Engagement’. Or as Jock preferred to say – ‘if you fuck up, you’re on your own.’

Shepherd and his three comrades sat at a table in the centre of the room with tiered rows of empty seats behind them. On the table in front of each member of the patrol was a planning pack.  Everything they were to hear in the briefing was in the pack and the real work would begin once the briefing was over.  They looked pale and tense in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights.

The Ops Officer, Jamie, tall and languid with a mop of fair hair, was an ‘Honourable’ from an old aristocratic family whose father had restored the family fortunes by marrying the only daughter of an uncouth but very wealthy biscuit manufacturer. Jamie had cut his teeth with the Scots Guards in the Falklands campaign and shortly afterwards had transferred to the SAS.  He had a relative who sat on the Defence Select Committee, which had proved extremely useful when the SAS required a bit of publicity in the right quarters.  Shortly after joining the Regiment he had spent time in the jungles of South America chasing down drug runners and during that time he had formed an unlikely friendship with Jock, doubling up with him in the jungle camps and sharing their meagre rations.

Their backgrounds could not have been more different - Jock came from a crumbling tenement on the fringes of Maryhill in Glasgow.  On leaving school, he’d worked in a shipyard on the Clyde for a few weeks but then joined the Army Boy Service as soon as he was old enough.  Despite his lack of formal education, Jock’s highly profane vocabulary concealed a keen intelligence which he usually kept hidden from even his closest mates, but when his guard was down he could quote from Classical philosophers and poets, and it was even rumoured that he could read the Iliad in the original Greek.

The briefing finally got under way, with a succession of formal briefings covering every phase of the op: Prelims, Ground, Situation, Mission, Execution, Service Support, Command and Signals. For the first time they discovered where the op was to take place as a large a map of Sierra Leone was projected onto the screen.

‘Sierra Leone?’ Geordie said. ‘Where the hell is that? Mexico?’

‘Remind me to make sure you never book a holiday for me,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s in West Africa. There are sixteen ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs, the two largest and most powerful being the Temne in the north of the country and the Mende in the south-east. The good news for the non-linguists is that the official language of Sierra Leone is English, the bad news is that ninety per cent of the population don’t speak it. Instead they communicate in a pidgin language called Krio.’

A series of photographs of features along the coastline followed. There were a succession of palm-fringed, white sand beaches. ‘Not bad,’ Jimbo whispered to Shepherd. ‘I’m packing my Ambre Solaire and my Speedos, in case we get some downtime.’

Another picture showed a huge, creeper-clad stone structure like a ruined English castle. It looked as out of place in its tropical setting as a mud hut on Salisbury Plain.

‘What’s that?’ asked Shepherd.

‘It’s one of the slave traders’ forts, where slaves were held before being sold to the British for shipment to the New World colonies,’ Jamie said.

Jock grinned. ‘Bet your ancestors bought a few poor bastards there then.’

The Situation brief was more revealing. It became clear that the new buzz phrase among the military top brass was now ‘Special Forces’.  No longer would the SAS work alone, Jamie said, ‘because the new world order demands more troops with the technical ability to survive in the changed circumstances in which we find ourselves.’

‘Or to put it another way, more men also means more rank for our beloved senior officers,’ Shepherd muttered.

‘Got it in one,’ Jock whispered.

Jamie also talked vaguely about the patrol’s need to work with ‘other, more irregular forces’, which did not make a great deal of sense to any of them, but there was a collective shrugging of shoulders and they moved on.

‘Now, Mission,’ Jamie said, and at once had everyone’s attention. ‘There is a civil war raging in the country. It’s a complicated picture and the details of it aren’t strictly relevant to your operation, so suffice it to say that there are various rebel groupings, the most powerful one supported by Liberia. The rebel groups are fighting with each other and with the government forces, not so much for control of the country as for control of the diamond-producing areas. The government forces are militarily ineffective, poorly paid, poorly armed, and poorly disciplined. They have a tendency to be passive in the face of rebel forces and in some cases they actively collude with them. ECOMOG troops - don’t worry about the acronym, it just means troops from a bunch of West African states, with Nigeria having by far the largest contingent - are supporting the government but having secured the airport perimeter they haven’t shown much interest in advancing beyond it and the government’s own writ barely extends beyond the capital. The rebels run the countryside, pretty much.’

He paused. ‘Enough background, I think. Your operation is a small support role to the Operational Squadron’s intervention in the civil war now raging in Sierra Leone. You are to make a para insertion into the sea off the coast, do a beach reconnaissance and mark the beach for a landing by friendly forces.  When the landing is over, you are to remain in the area awaiting further orders, and eventually you will link up with the Operational Squadron for repatriation to UK.’   For emphasis, he read the mission statement again, so there was no excuse for anyone not understanding it.

Jock at once asked the obvious question, ‘If we’re inserting by sea, why isn’t this op being done by the Shakies?’ he said, the Regiment’s sarcastic nickname - Shaky Boat Squadron - for the SBS.

‘The obvious reason: because we want it done right,’ said Jamie, and the troopers – but not the officers – chuckled.

Jamie went on to cover Execution: how the Regiment’s hierarchy saw the operation being carried out. As always in SAS ops, it was subject to the patrol’s agreement, and they were free to amend and adjust it as they thought fit.

The remainder of the briefing was routine, concluding with the Yeoman briefing them on technical stuff about settings on the radio, schedules and lost comms procedures.

Just as Shepherd and the rest of the patrol thought they were done, the Ops Officer dropped one final bombshell, ‘Oh, by the way’, he said. ‘You may come across some of our friends from Six when you’re on the ground there.  Treat them with the usual courtesies, won’t you?’

Everyone’s heart sank; the last thing any of them wanted was to do anything involving MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as the SIS. The history of botched operations and screw-ups involving Six was the stuff of Regimental nightmares, dating back as far as operations in Aden and other parts of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s and continuing right up to and including the Falklands Campaign in the 1980s.

The last person to speak, as ever, was the Major from the Army Legal Services, delivering the usual arse-covering warning to stick rigidly to their orders, coupled with dire warnings about the consequences if they did not. Everyone knew it was bullshit. There has never been an operation in the history of the SAS that had gone entirely as it was briefed, because the enemy was never obliging enough to stick to the script.

The patrol exchanged cynical looks. ‘Why don’t you come with us to make sure we do it right?’ Jock muttered under his breath. ‘You might finally be able to get the creases out of your cammos.  Now fuck off and leave us alone’.

Once outside the briefing room, Gannon added his own final words.  ‘Bollocks to all that in there.  Just get the job done and get back here safely’.

They knew the real work started now and made their way back to the isolation billets clutching their planning packs, already thinking about the permutations and changes they wanted to make to the Head Shed’s plan. They all realised that their op was just a sideshow to the Squadron’s main operation in Sierra Leone, but they prepared just as meticulously over the next few hectic days. Day and night they practised ambush drills, anti-ambush drills, and RV procedures, attended detailed comms briefings, and had a long discussion before settling on the weapon of choice for the op: the AR-15 Commando assault rifle with retractable butt. It was a robust, tried and tested weapon that could fire single shots, burst or semi-automatic, and had a mounting to launch rifle grenades. They decided against carrying any heavy weaponry, taking just the basic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, since they were not anticipating a lot of trouble in Sierra Leone. They also took some less typical kit, including a few tubs of plasticine, bought by one of their support team from a toy store in Hereford.

Finally ready to go, they were transported to Lyneham, loaded on to a Special Forces Hercules and flown down to Gibraltar. The air crew had filed a flight plan which would take them from Gibraltar to the Cape Verde islands and then on to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, the cover story being that they were recceing a new route to the Falklands as an alternative to the normal route through Ascension Island.

The Special Forces crew did their best to make Shepherd and his mates comfortable on the nine-hour flight from Gibraltar to Sierra Leone, They had put makeshift bunks in the back of the plane so they could at least try to sleep, and fed them as often as they wanted to be fed, fully aware that once on the ground they were likely to be short of rations.

They began their final approach to the target area in the dead of night. They dropped the inflatable boat, and after swinging onto the reciprocal heading they jumped on the signal. As Shepherd used the risers of his chute to steer himself towards the boat, he looked down and swore.  In all the practice jumps into Studland Bay in Dorset, surrounded by safety boats, everything had worked perfectly. Now on the operational jump, he could see in the phosphorescence of the night Atlantic that the boat was not inflating as it should. He could not believe his eyes; he looked incredulously at the others, then back to the water.   For a second he wondered if they had somehow been sold down the river and deliberately sabotaged, but he told himself he was just being paranoid and snapped back into focus on the task.

He hit the water close to the boat and at once saw the reason that it was not inflating: the valves on the gas cylinders were covered in frost and had frozen solid. The words of his science teacher, in a long ago lesson, came back to him: ‘gases cool as they expand’.  The compressed gas from the cylinders was being forced through the valves at such a rate that it had frozen them.

His patrol joined him. ‘Throw water over the valves, it should raise the temperature,’ shouted Shepherd. Treading water, the four of them began frantically splashing water onto the valves, even though it also filled the boat and swamped the equipment inside. It took an age, for each time one of the valves thawed and gas began to flow again, it refroze almost at once.

All of them were exhausted and Jock in particular was getting very distressed, as he was not a strong swimmer. Eventually they managed to half-inflate the boat - enough to just bear their weight, and wallowing low in the water, they made it to the beach. They were so exhausted by their efforts that after a very quick reconnaissance of the area they crashed out on the sand.

They woke to glorious sunshine and immediately went into operational mode. Jimbo and Geordie began a more thorough recce of the surrounding area while Shepherd and Jock surveyed the beach. They worked their way along either side of the surf-line, testing the exposed sand and prodding the sea bed under the water using sticks with balls of plasticine on the end. Each time the plasticine came up covered with a mixture of sand, fragments of shells and bits of gravel embedded in it, enabling them both to determine the composition of the ground below the water line, and to measure the gradient of the beach. They were looking for a combination of sand and gravel that would give the wheels of incoming vehicles some purchase as they hit bottom, and a shallow slope up the beach to allow them a fast exit from the area of maximum danger. While they were doing this, Shepherd could smell something sweet and sickly on the breeze.

‘Smell that?’ he asked Jock.

Jock nodded. ‘Rotting flesh,’ he said.

‘That’s what I thought.’

When they had finished the survey and chosen the best landing site, Shepherd got on the radio and contacted base. ‘We’re ready for the landing.’

‘Understood. Standby for further orders.’

Within half an hour, he received a further message, telling them that the landing would take place that night at 00:55.

When Jimbo and Geordie eventually returned, they were excitable and almost incoherent, insisting that Jock and Shepherd went with them immediately. ‘You’ve got to see this for yourself,’ Geordie said. ‘You won’t believe it otherwise.‘

‘What is it?’ asked Shepherd.

‘Come and look,’ said Geordie.

They moved away from the beach through low-lying scrub bush. After a couple of miles they arrived at a village. Even as they approached it, Shepherd could smell blood in the air, sickly sweet with a faint metallic tang.  The village had been torched and the round mud-brick huts with straw or palm roofs were still smouldering. Bodies already crawling with flies and ants, littered the ground around them and as he looked inside the smoking interiors, Shepherd could see still more charred corpses of adults and children. Even more horrifying, in the centre of the village was a large tree stump that had perhaps been used by the villagers as a seat or table, but had now been put to a far more terrible purpose. The horizontal surface of the trunk was stained with blood that had dried to a brownish red in the heat of the sun. In the dirt next to it was a pile of severed hands. Shepherd counted at least a dozen and from their size they were the hands of small children, not adults.

‘I’ve heard of this being done to punish adults for voting the wrong way,’ Jock said. ‘They cut off the hand that made the mark on the ballot - but here...’ He broke off, baffled. ‘Maybe it’s that without a hand, they can’t bear arms against the people who did this and seek revenge for the slaughter of their parents?’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘Maybe. Have you noticed the lack of bodies of older children, boys and girls?’

‘Yeah,’ Jock said. ‘You can guess why the girls have been taken. They use them as camp prostitutes and then abandon or kill them if they become pregnant. AIDS is rife here and there’s a widespread belief that the only cure is to have sex with a virgin. The rebels will even take babies - girls as young as two years old - and rape them in search of a cure.’ He shook his head. ‘Bastards.’

‘That means the girls get infected?’ said Shepherd.

Jock nodded. ‘The boys are recruited to fight as soldiers for the rebels. The standard practice is to make them kill their own parents. If they refuse, they’re killed themselves. Most do it. I’ve even heard of parents throwing themselves onto the knives their sons were holding, if they hesitated before killing them. Once the boys are brutalised, they’re kept high on a concoction of what they call “brown-brown” - raw, impure heroin, amphetamines and gunpowder - and given an amulet that they’re told is juju to make them invisible to their enemies and turn bullets fired at them into water, then sent into battle.’

Jimbo stared at him open-mouthed. ‘How do you know all this shit?’

‘Me?’ Jock said. ‘I read a lot and I listen more than I talk. You should try it some time.’

‘So what we can do?’ Shepherd said. ‘Are we going to just look the other way? Or shall we track them? They clearly weren’t worried about leaving sign.’ He gestured towards the route the killers had taken, marked by footprints and broken stems as they’d pushed through the scrub, and a trail of drips of blood left by some of their wounded captives.

‘We’ve a few hours to spare before the landing. Let’s see how far they’ve gone at least,’ Geordie said. ‘My guess is that, once they’re out of the immediate area, they’ll find a place to stop so they can have their fun with the girls they’ve captured.’

There were no dissenting voices and as Shepherd glanced from face to face, he saw the same cold hatred for those who had done this. They did not deserve to live, Shepherd thought, and though the task of securing the beach for the landing came first, he hoped there would be time and opportunity to avenge the murdered villagers they had found.  As they moved off, they went into the familiar patrol routine, with Shepherd as lead scout, Geordie and Jimbo in the middle of the patrol watching left and right, and Jock as ‘tail end Charlie’, watching the rear.

They made their way through scrub bush and a few overgrown plantations, and worked their way around belts of elephant grass that towered above them. As Geordie had suspected, the rebels had not gone far. They had covered no more than a mile and a half when, as Shepherd inched his way forward to breast a low rise, he heard the sound of voices and smelt woodsmoke on the wind. Shepherd gently eased apart the branches of a thorn bush and through the gap he saw the rebel encampment, no more than a hundred yards away. The rebels had set up in another abandoned village. There were dark circles of charred earth in places where huts had been burned, but three still stood, their sagging roofs of palm fronds relatively intact. Groups of boys and girls were huddled together, sitting cross-legged on the ground, watched over by a couple of the rebels with AK-47s and bandoliers of ammunition across their chests. The remainder of the rebels sat or lounged in the dust, swigging from bottles, laughing and joking. Most were armed with AK-47s but a couple had RPGs.

Shepherd motioned the other members of the patrol forward to take a look, then they retreated a few yards and held a whispered discussion. ‘The mission comes first,’ said Shepherd. ‘We can’t jeopardise that by initiating contact now, with only a couple of hours to sundown, but they look like they’re settling themselves into the night. Let’s do the job, then come back here and give them payback for what they did to the village.’ There were no dissenting voices. They returned to the beach and finished their preparations for the beach landing. As the appointed time approached, Shepherd placed two infrared torches at either side of the beach, one red, one green, to denote port and starboard, and in the centre he placed a line of torches showing white, denoting the centre of the landing area. It was low tide, the perfect time for a beach landing.

At 00.53, two minutes before the H-hour, Shepherd began flashing the Morse signal for the letter S, three short dots, using a torch masked off to show only a narrow strip of light.  Two minutes later, to their amazement a Landing Ship Tank of Second World War vintage, belching smoke from its stack, came clanking and rattling out of the darkness. Its ramp crashed down and a series of Russian-made armoured vehicles began emerging from the interior of the ship. They were led by a BTR-60, a Russian troop carrier. Like most Russian military vehicles it was amphibious, able to negotiate shallow seas or rivers.  Several more BTR-60s and then a couple of armoured BRDM combat reconnaissance vehicles followed. What caused Shepherd’s jaw to drop even further was the fact that at the back of the column were a couple of tracked ZSU-23-4s, armoured, self-propelled and radar-guided anti-aircraft guns.

Shepherd shook his head, wondering if he was having hallucinations. It made no sense that Russian equipment was coming ashore in support of a British operation, but it was even stranger that ZSU-23-4s were arriving. They were purely of use as anti-aircraft weapons and, according to the briefing before the op, the only aircraft in Sierra Leone were British.  He exchanged a questioning glance with Jock, then shrugged his shoulders; his job was to do what he was told to do and not ask too many questions.

The vehicles rumbled past them, churning up the sand and knocking aside small trees and bushes as they roared up the beach.  Shepherd could see that the guys riding in the turrets of the armoured vehicles were white but the rest of the crews were black. None of the vehicle crews even acknowledged the SAS men, but Shepherd heard a couple of shouted orders and immediately recognised South African accents.  Suddenly the Russian vehicles made sense – they had probably been captured in Angola during one of the many regional conflicts in which South Africa has been involved in the apartheid era.

The convoy disappeared into the scrub of Sierra Leone and that was the end of the mission for Shepherd and his team.  As they reassembled, Jock was still shaking his head. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

Geordie nodded. ‘What the hell are South African mercs doing in Sierra Leone on a British Government sponsored mission?’

‘Keeping it at arm’s length, I guess,’ Shepherd said. ‘HMG doesn’t want to be seen to be involved in the fighting here - maybe too many echoes of colonial times - so they hire some mercs to do the job instead.’

Jimbo scratched his head. ‘Which is?’

‘Who knows?’ said Shepherd. ‘Keep the government in power, overthrow the government - one of those, probably.’

‘If you ask me,’ Jock said. ‘This isn’t really about governments at all, it’s about minerals.’

‘Well we’ll have time to ponder that later,’ said Shepherd. ‘For the moment we’ve  got some unfinished business.’

Wearing their NVGs, they made their way back past the still smouldering ruins of the village and along the route they had scouted that afternoon. Even though it was the early hours, the rebels were still awake, high on a cocktail of drugs, alcohol and adrenaline.  The captured boys from the village were still herded together in a circle, with two rebels standing guard over them, dozing over their rifles. There was no sign of the girls, but the rebels standing around the doorways of the huts and the occasional cries and screams from inside, showed where they were and left no room for doubt about what was happening to them.

Shepherd beckoned to the other three and in whispers they identified the initial target each would take, choosing the ones who looked like leaders from the way the others deferred to them. ‘On my signal,’ Shepherd said. They spread out, took up firing positions and zeroed in on their targets. Shepherd had chosen a powerful figure standing in a hut doorway, dimly illuminated by a lamp burning inside it, though through his NVGs, Shepherd could have seen him clearly even without the light. He squinted along the sight, focusing on the bridge of the man’s nose. He took a deep breath, took up the first pressure on the trigger then gave a slow exhale and squeezed the trigger home.

The first shots from the other three came within a heartbeat and all four targets crumpled to the ground. The SAS men were already zeroing in on other targets, firing three-shot bursts, cool and unhurried, picking the rebels off one by one. The rebels panicked, firing off wild bursts in all directions, uncertain even where the SAS fire was coming from. One rebel stumbled from a hut where he’d been raping a girl  and was cut down as he tried to haul up his shorts. Another, wielding an RPG, was hit by a burst from Shepherd a fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger. Smashed backwards by the impact of the rounds, the rebel’s dying shot sent the RPG round blasting straight up into the sky, where it detonated in a ball of flame as it reached the end of its programmed four and a half second flight time.

The thunder of gunfire eased and then stopped as the remaining rebels scattered and fled, running blindly into the bush. The SAS men moved slowly and methodically forward, ensuring the rebels were dead and finishing off the wounded with a round to the head. They felt no remorse. In their eyes the rebels had already forfeited whatever rights the Geneva Convention might have given them by the slaughter of the villagers; anyone who could murder women, children and babies, and burn the bodies, deserved to die.

The village boys had remained in their huddle pressed flat to the ground their eyes wild with terror as they saw the SAS men approach. While Jock and Shepherd tried to reassure them, Jimbo and Geordie went from hut to hut, checking there were no rebel soldiers still hiding there and bringing out the girls. The clothes of all the girls were torn and their faces and bodies bloody and bruised.

Shepherd gathered the children around him. ‘Anyone here speak English?’ There was no response at first, but when he repeated the question, one of the boys raised his hand. ‘I speak a little.’ He looked no more than nine or ten years old, but the look in his eyes spoke of things that no child should ever see.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Shepherd.

The boy hesitated again. ‘I am called Baraka.’

‘I’m Dan. Can you tell the others that there’s no need to be frightened now? The rebels have gone for now, but they may come back later, so you need to leave this area. Do you have anywhere safe that you can go?’

‘Can’t we go with you?’ There was a look of such desperate longing in the boy’s eyes that Shepherd felt a lump in his throat and found himself hesitating for a moment, his mind racing as he tried to think of a way they could get the children to safety, even though he knew it was futile. They were on active service and could not encumber themselves with refugees, no matter how desperate their plight.

‘I’m sorry. We don’t know where we’ll be going next. But we’ll alert someone who may be able to help you. There are people who can help you.’

The hope in the boy’s eyes faded. ‘No one will come.’

‘You don’t know that, Baraka. I promise you that I’ll try to find help for you.’

The boy shrugged, still unconvinced.

‘Where will you go?’ asked Shepherd.

‘Back to our own village. Where else can we go?’

Shepherd fell silent, unable to answer him.

‘Come on,’ Jock said. ‘One thing’s for sure, we can’t help them by standing around here.’

They began to move off, but Shepherd couldn’t stop himself from looking back and saw the boy’s young-old face staring after them, his eyes boring into him.

Back at the beach, as the sun came up, Shepherd contacted base on the radio, and sent in a contact report - standard procedure when a patrol had been in a firefight with the enemy. ‘There is a group of kids there. Their parents have all been murdered by the rebels, the girls have been raped, the boys are just as traumatised - some of them were even forced to kill their own parents. What help can we get for them?’

‘It’s not our job to nursemaid refugees,’ was the cold-hearted response.

‘I know that,’ Shepherd said, feeling his hackles rise but trying to keep the anger out of his voice. ‘I’m just asking that you notify the authorities or a relief organisation that may be able to help them.’

‘I’ll pass that on.’

Shepherd wanted to go on with the argument but Jock, listening in, laid a warning hand on his arm. ‘Wait one, base,’ he said, then covered the mic. ‘Spider, I know where you’re coming from, but you’ve more chance of being struck by lightning than you have of persuading base to help,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Wait till we’re in Freetown and we may be able to contact one of the aid agencies ourselves.  I know someone who works for Medicaid International and they may be able to do something. Okay?’

Shepherd hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. He opened the mic again. ‘OK base, job done,’ he said. ‘Request permission to leave the area. If you can get us a heli lift to Freetown, we can link up with the Operational Squadron.’

‘Negative, no air resources available. You’ll have to stay where you are until resources can be spared.’

‘We’re short of rations. We need to be lifted out.’

‘Nothing available. You’ll have to wait out.’

Shepherd broke contact and exchanged a world-weary glance with Jock. Geordie was on sentry at the edge of the beach while Jimbo was already working on his tan, sprawled on the white sand, still marked with the tank tracks from the landing the previous night.  He lay back, clasping his hands behind his head with a blissful expression on his face. ‘This is the life,’ he said. ‘People back home would pay good money to stay here. Sun, sea, sand, what more could you ask for?’

‘They’d probably expect to eat occasionally though,’ Jock growled. ‘Anyone bring a bloody fishing rod?’

* * *

Spider’s adventures in Sierra Leone continue in Hostile Territory, available in the UK at http://tinyurl.com/neqrcfv

Hostile Territory is available in the US at http://tinyurl.com/krbzdm5

Spider Shepherd left the SAS at the end of 2002 and joined an elite police undercover unit. You can read the first of his undercover adventures in Hard Landing, where he goes undercover in a high security prison to unmask a drugs dealer who is killing off witnesses to his crimes. The Spider Shepherd series continues with Soft Target, Cold Kill, Hot Blood, Dead Men, Live Fire, Rough Justice, Fair Game, False Friends and True Colours. You can read more about Stephen Leather’s work at www.stephenleather.com

Hard Landing is available in the UK for 49p at –  http://amzn.to/xxX2YU

And in the US for less than a dollar at –  http://amzn.to/xWg1E7

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