NATURAL SELECTION

By Stephen Leather

***

BELIZE.

April 1996.

Dan Shepherd sat on the edge of a clearing, staring at a column of leaf-cutter ants carrying shards of tamarind leaves on an endless trek through the deep litter of the forest floor. He and his comrades were deep in the Belizean jungle, several days walk from the nearest road. ‘Don’t blame the ants, it’s not their fault.’

He glanced up. His mate Liam McKay was watching him with a quizzical expression in his dark eyes. ‘Last time I saw a man look that pissed off, he’d just been told his leave had been cancelled.’ Liam’s mother was from Belfast and even though they’d moved to England when he was only five, there were still faint echoes of a Northern Irish brogue when he spoke. They’d met on their first day on Selection and immediately hit it off.  Liam was now a good mate, and he was also the hardest man Shepherd had ever met - and he’d known a few.

The Jungle Training part of Selection came after almost twenty weeks of the most intensive special forces course in the world. SAS Selection began in Hereford with a one-week briefing course with swimming, navigation, first aid and combat fitness tests and a lot of runs up and down the local hills. That was followed by a month on the SAS’s fitness and navigation course based at the Sennybridge Training Camp in Wales including the army’s Combat Fitness Test – 45 press-ups and 55 sit-ups in two minutes each followed by a mile and half run in under nine and a half minutes. Neither had been a problem for Shepherd, he had spent the year prior to Selection getting himself into peak physical condition. While at Sennybridge, Shepherd had been introduced to the Fan Dance – a grueling fifteen-mile run over two sides of Pen Y Fan, the highest mountain in the Brecon Beacons, with a fully-loaded bergen. The fourth week of the hills phase had been a killer. The instructors - the Directing Staff – called it test week and it consisted of six marches on consecutive days with increasing distances and weights carried. The final day was a forty mile march across the Brecon Beacons with a fifty-five pound bergen which had to be completed in less than twenty hours. It had been pouring down with rain the entire march but Shepherd and Liam had completed it in a little over eighteen hours. Those that hadn’t failed or quit went on to do fourteen weeks of weapons, vehicle, demolitions and patrol tactics before they were flown to Belize for the six-week jungle training course.

‘I’m not pissed off,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just a bit disillusioned I guess. I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere, you know?’

‘We’ve flown half way around the world,’ laughed Liam. ‘That not good enough for you?’

Shepherd grinned. ‘You know what I mean, you daft sod.  I thought we’d be part of the elite, the absolute ultimate in soldiering, but-’ he dropped his voice and gestured around them. ‘I mean, this is supposed to be the best Regiment in the world but there’s a real lack of intensity in a lot of the training we’ve been doing. I was more tested on some of the stuff I did with the Paras, and I don’t rate some of the guys we’re training with. A few are keen enough but the others…’  He shrugged. ‘Some of the guys here just aren’t putting in the effort. Seems to me they’re doing the minimum, just enough to get by.’

‘Fair comment,’ said Liam. ‘But not everyone wants to be an action hero like us. Some of them will be happy enough with a base or admin post, or signals.’

‘Action hero?’

Liam laughed. ‘You know what I mean. You love it, Dan. The guns, the flash bangs, the jumping out of planes. You’re an adrenaline junkie.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘You just don’t see it, but it’s true.’ He held up his hands. ‘Hey, I love it as much as you do. That’s why I wanted to join the SAS. Best unit in the army, no question.’

‘I’m not doing it for the buzz,’ said Shepherd.

Liam raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

‘Seriously, I’m doing it because the SAS are the best, like you said. The Paras are great, but even they don’t come close.’ He looked around to check that none of the Directing Staff were within earshot. ‘To be honest, I don’t rate some of the trainers and their “big time” attitudes either.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Liam said. ‘They’re supposed to lead by example, aren’t they? But a couple of them got the local tribesmen to build their bashas for them - and they’re a lot more luxurious than the others have got, let alone ours. And then they spend a lot of time lying around in them, lording it over the rest of us.’

Only the oldest SAS men had ever served in Malaysia but the use of “bazaar Malay” words was still common in the Regiment.  Barrack rooms, jungle shelters and accommodation areas anywhere in the world were always referred to as the “basha” - the Malay word for hut or shelter.

‘That three weeks of “Hard Routine” we did,’ Shepherd said, ‘two-man patrols, carrying minimum kit, sleeping on the ground and eating minimum cold rations, with no cooking allowed - that was the real deal and the way it should be every day, trying to replicate what it’ll be like when we’re actually on active service out in the real world. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘You’re a masochist, mate,’ said Liam.

By now, Geordie Mitchell and Jim “Jimbo” Shortt had also wandered over to join them. Jimbo was a couple of years older than the rest of the team. His pale blue eyes seemed faded by the sun and even in his mid-twenties, there were stress lines etched into his forehead.  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘Dan’s having a moan about the Directing Staff,’ said Liam.

‘When’s he never not moaning?’ said Geordie. ‘A couple of the trainers are pretty canny, mind,’ he said. ‘Lofty’s good and so’s Taff.’

‘Yeah, they’re good, though no one could ever accuse them of being imaginative in their choice of nicknames, eh Geordie?’ Shepherd.

‘You don’t get to choose your nickname, you know that,’ said Geordie. ‘We’re still working on yours.  ‘How about Sheepish?’ He was the same age as Shepherd - twenty-two - but a good bit taller than the typical SAS man. Shorter, stockier men tended to have greater powers of endurance and, since the ability to carry a monstrously heavy bergen over long distances at a ridiculously fast pace was one of the many things that set SAS men apart from the rest, most of them were no more than five foot nine.

‘God, I’m starving,’ Liam said. He claimed to have a metabolism that made it necessary for him to eat every two hours or keel over, and his principal hobby seemed to be searching for food. ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s got some spare scran squirreled away?’ he said, more in hope than expectation. ‘I’m that hungry I could even eat my mother’s cooking.’

‘Her cooking’s not that bad, is it?’ Jimbo said.

‘Come to lunch when we’re home then, if you’re brave enough,’ said Liam. ‘We try to have takeaways whenever we can.’ He broke off as he caught sight of an older-looking soldier standing in the shadows at the edge of the clearing. ‘Where the hell did that guy come from?’

There had been no sound or visible movement, but the man now stood there, watching and listening, his posture upright and alert, the barrel of his weapon tracking the path of his gaze. Satisfied, he lowered his weapon and stepped into the open. He was hard-muscled, but lean and whippet-thin, and his skin was pale enough to suggest that he had seen little sunlight in quite some time. His green uniform was almost black with the sweat and humidity caused by the long hard march he had made through the jungle.

He walked across the clearing, pausing to shake hands and exchange a couple of words with two of the trainers, Lofty and Taff, but pointedly ignoring the others. He walked on, found a space away from everyone else and, without cutting any foliage, put up a very spartan basha: a waterproof sheet and a hammock. Ignoring everyone, he then spent the remaining hours of daylight studying his maps. He was alone, self contained and apparently completely at home in the jungle environment.

As night was falling, Shepherd went across to Lofty’s basha. ‘Who is that guy?’ he said., gesturing towards the new arrival.

Lofty smiled. ‘His nickname’s Pilgrim.’

‘Pilgrim? That doesn’t sound like a typical regimental nickname.’

‘It isn’t. It’s more of a mark of respect. The very last thing you’ll have to do before you complete the final stage of Selection is to memorise part of a James Elroy Flecker poem called “The Golden Journey to Samarkand”. It’s our creed, if you like:

“But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,

You dirty bearded, blocking up the way?”

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.”

‘There’s more of it, but you get the drift: we are the Pilgrims. There are only two ways to get the experience you need in the Regiment: one is to serve long enough to do everything, and the other is to learn at the feet of a master. Most of the highly skilled guys in the Regiment learned their tradecraft from a senior mentor.’

‘Got you,’ Shepherd said. ‘So Pilgrim’s a mentor - one of the “old and bold” - but what’s he doing here?’

‘You’ll find out tomorrow,’ Lofty said. ‘Meanwhile get some shut-eye, you’ll need it.’

The following morning, as Shepherd, Liam, Geordie and Jimbo were sorting their kit, ready to join the others on the march back to the road-head for the transport back to base, Pilgrim walked over to them. He didn’t introduce himself, just said, ‘You four are not going back with the others. You’ve been picked out for further testing, so I’m going to take you on a patrol to evaluate you and see how good you actually are.’

Shepherd looked across at Liam and couldn’t help but smile. This was the sort of training that he wanted.

‘The criteria I will be applying is whether you’re good enough to be accepted into a Sabre Squadron Troop or a patrol led by me on active service,’ Pilgrim continued. ‘You won’t find it a picnic; one of the things that makes the SAS unique is that the physical and mental effort required of you is greater in an operational squadron than in any and all of the various tests you have undergone during Selection.’

He paused, holding the gaze of each of them in turn. ‘You’ve been issued with maps of this area. I suggest you devote some time to studying them. When we first came here, the only maps of Belize dated from before the Second World War and we had to update them as we went along. The bedrock’s limestone, so the topography is always changing. There was one big river marked on the old map that had gone underground years before. The jungle had reclaimed the riverbed and we spent days searching for a river that no longer existed. You won’t have that problem to deal with but, as you’ll already have noticed, you can’t use the sun, the stars or the topography to navigate in the jungle, because you can’t see any of them, so you have to be able to navigate with map and compass alone.’

A mosquito landed on his neck and he smacked his hand against it as he continued.

‘In the jungle noise and smell are always more of a giveaway than movement. Even the absence of noise can be significant; if the constant background noise of bird and animal calls is interrupted, it can only indicate that something’s alarmed the wildlife. You can hear much further than you can see, so to survive, you spend much of your time just listening.  Animals do not break twigs; if you hear a twig breaking it has been done by a human. You also use your sense of smell because anything from the smell of food to a whiff of sweat or aftershave can be enough either to give you away, or enable you to detect an enemy. You’ve probably already been told that we never drink coffee in the jungle because the smell of coffee travels a long way.  Your eyes are pretty much your least valuable sense in the jungle because most of the time you can’t see more than a few yards in front of you.’

As Pilgrim paused, Shepherd glanced at his companions. They were all hanging on the veteran SAS man’s every word.  ‘And no matter how good your eyesight,‘ Pilgrim said, ‘you can’t travel after dark in the jungle, so there’s a lot of downtime which you can use in one of two ways. You can either piss the time away reading James Bond or Harold Robbins, or you can take a course of study.  In my experience, the easiest and best time to learn a language is when you’ve got nothing else to do in the jungle at night. Most languages have a core vocabulary of about six hundred words.  If you learn twenty a night, then in a month you’ll know enough words to speak a pidgin version of the language, and if you can conjugate a few verbs you’ll be able to have an educated conversation.’ He shrugged. ‘Just a suggestion. What you do with your down time is your own business.’

‘I was thinking of learning the piano,’ joked Jimbo, but Pilgrim silenced him with a dark look.

‘Right,’ he continued, ‘let’s talk about uniform. The Army-issue camouflage uniform you’re wearing is useless in the jungle because of the high humidity. It’s much better to use an older jungle green uniform which dries out much quicker.’ He tugged at his sleeve and rubbed the material with his fingers. ‘Get one. You’ll really notice the difference. Now rations: to survive when patrolling in the jungle you must eat at least seven thousand calories a day but it’s almost impossible to carry that amount of rations on a long patrol, so we rely mainly on lots of sugar, sweets, dark chocolate, biscuits, nuts and raisins. The good news for those of you carrying an extra pound or two,’ he gave Jimbo a meaningful look, ‘is that you’ll be coming back from patrol a lot lighter than when you set out.

Shepherd grinned – Jimbo was carrying a few extra pounds around the waist.

‘You carry your weapon at all times, you don’t have it slung over your shoulder, because it’s always got to be ready for use,’ continued Pilgrim.  There are no long-range views, no early warnings in the jungle. The lead scout has a split second to respond to danger. Any slower than that and we’ll be looking for a new lead scout.’

He took out a tube of insect repellent and rubbed some on his neck. ‘Watch out for the mosquitoes,’ he said. ‘If you catch malaria it’s game over, you’re Returned To Unit, no ifs or buts. Malaria is totally preventable.’ He put away his mosquito repellant and pointed at Liam’s shirtsleeves which were rolled up to the elbow. ‘That’s an amateur mistake right there,’ he said, and Liam’s cheeks flushed red. ‘You’ll never see anyone from a Sabre squadron with his sleeves rolled up. Out in the field, it’s long sleeves, end of. It become such a habit that we tend to keep it that way back in Hereford. So, keep your cuffs buttoned, wear long trousers, never shorts, and use insect repellent on all exposed skin. Use it on your clothing and on your boots as well. Keeps the mossies away but leeches and anything else that might want to sink its teeth into you will also be put off. But that’s no reason to forget your anti-malarials – paludrine and chloroquine. Don’t get RTU’d because of forgetfulness, got that?’

The four men nodded and Liam rolled down his sleeves. ‘Any questions?’ asked Pilgrim. He was faced with a wall of shaking heads. ‘Okay, we’ll move out at first light and we’re doing this as if it’s a real operational patrol, so from now on, you’re going to be more silent than Trappist monks. If we need to communicate, it’ll be done by signs or whispers.’ He turned and walked back to his basha.

‘Impressive,’ Shepherd said to Liam as Jimbo and Geordie ambled away. ‘Walks the walk and talks the talk.’

Liam nodded. ‘Looks like you got your wish, that’s for sure.’

The next morning they woke before first light, as soon as the insect dawn chorus began. Following Pilgrim’s example, Shepherd and the others broke down their bashas, packed their bergens and then sat motionless, listening and scenting the air. As soon as it was light enough to move, Pilgrim led them out of the clearing and into the jungle. As they moved on, the undergrowth grew dense and almost impenetrable.  Thickets of understory palm formed fearsome barriers, spines bristling at all angles from the trunks. Above them, the succeeding layers of trees were bound together in the stifling embrace of lianas. However, Pilgrim led the way, following animal tracks so faint that at first Shepherd and the others could barely detect them at all. They continued their painstaking progress through the jungle for about fifty minutes, then stopped, sat and listened again. They brewed up a mug of tea, ate some hard tack biscuits and moved off again for another fifty minutes, then stopped for another ten.

As they went along, Pilgrim would occasionally stop and ask one of them where they thought they were, making them use the fine point of a leaf to indicate the exact place on the map.  Liam, Jimbo and Geordie were generally wrong but Shepherd was more often than not correct to a few dozen metres. Whenever Shepherd did correctly pinpoint their location, Pilgrim would reward him with a grunt of acknowledgement which he took to be the highest praise any of them was ever likely to receive from the man. Navigation had always been one of Shepherd’s strengths, his near-photographic memory meant that he usually knew exactly where he was, even if he didn’t have a physical map to hand.

The stop-start patrolling routine continued until midday when they stopped for an hour and ate a lunch of more tea, biscuits and cheese, then carried on patrolling until two hours before dark, when they ate their main meal of patrol rations, tea and more hard tack biscuits. After that the patrol moved on for another hour, then sat and listened again. Once they were sure everything was quiet, they doubled back on their tracks, stopped to listen again for one more hour and then after night had fallen, they put up their bashas, changed into clothes from their bergens that were only damp instead of soaking wet, and stripped down, cleaned and oiled their weapons. They did it one at a time, so that the rest of the patrol was always armed and ready to respond to any threat. Eventually they bedded down for the night on the jungle floor, using a candle to read or study for an hour or two.

Shepherd lit a candle and unpacked his kit then sat by his basha and stared into the black depths of the jungle. The iridescent shells of beetles sparkled in the flickering light of his candle and huge luminous eyes reflected it back to him. Lizards of all colours, salamanders and frogs were captured by the light for a moment before disappearing among the foliage.

He blew out the candle and lay back, feeling rather than hearing the sonar of bats swooping and twisting between the trees as they hunted down moths, while a torrent of other noises flooded through the darkness. A gibnut foraging in the litter of the forest floor gave a hoarse bark and clattered off deeper into the jungle. A howler monkey screamed its defiance into the night, frogs and toads croaked endlessly and there was the squeaking, buzzing, clicking and rattling of a million insects, but none of the jungle noise sounded threatening to him, not even the snarl of a jaguar deep in the forest. He fell asleep at once, so tired from the exertions of the day that he was oblivious to the thought of the snakes, scorpions and other venomous creatures that he knew roamed the forest floor.

For five days they followed the same hard routine, sleeping on the ground, eating cold rations and drinking water collected from small tributaries of the river system. They kept up their silent patrols from dawn to dusk, following Pilgrim through the jungle. As Shepherd watched him, learning from his actions, he became convinced that if he wanted to, Pilgrim could probably walk on water - he seemed to be able to do everything else.

A couple of hours before sunset on the fifth day, Pilgrim called a halt in a space where a fallen hardwood had created a temporary clearing. Nothing was said, but Shepherd had the feeling that all four of them had passed the test Pilgrim had set. ‘You’ve earned a hot meal so we’ll cook tonight,’ he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud after so many days of communicating in whispers. ‘Jimbo, gather some dead standing wood - dead branches still on the trees.’

Jimbo worked his way into the forest and snapped off several long, dead branches. ‘Now we have to feather it,’ Pilgrim said. He stripped off the damp bark from the smallest pieces, then feathered the wood by shaving a ring of fine flakes away from the branch. He set Geordie and Liam to do some more. ‘We need about fifteen of those; no shortcuts if you’re going to light it with one match - or one strike of the flint if your matches are wet.’

When they’d prepared enough wood feathers, Pilgrim pulled a few tufts of cotton wool from the medical kit and handed it and a flint to Shepherd. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now all you have to do is light it.’

Very aware of Pilgrim’s eyes on him, Shepherd flinted it, blew gently on the spark, and then began feeding in the wood feathers one at a time as the cotton wool burst into flame. He added sticks and larger branches as a thin column of blue smoke drifted upwards and the sticks crackled as the fire caught hold.

‘Not bad,’ Pilgrim said. ‘Boil up some water in a mess tin, Geordie, and make a brew while Shepherd and I find us something to eat.  You’ll never starve or die of thirst in the jungle; the one thing that will kill you is disease.’

‘Or drug-traffickers or Guatemalan soldiers,’ Shepherd said.

‘Or those,’ he said. ‘But food’s no problem. Not if you know what to look for.’

They walked into the jungle and Pilgrim found a standard palm tree. He pulled out his bush knife and gave it to Shepherd. ‘Shin up the trunk and cut off the top growth.’ Shepherd climbed a few feet up the trunk and hacked off the pale green top growth. He dropped it down to Pilgrim and slid back down the trunk. Pilgrim carried it back to the clearing, stripped off the outer layers and threw them on the fire and then passed the tender heart of the palm to Geordie. ‘That’s our vegetable, I’ll go and get the meat. There’s a softwood tree in Belize, softer than birch - you can cut it down with a parang - your jungle knife - strip off the bark and the heartwood looks and tastes like chicken.’

‘What if the tree doesn’t grow in this area?’ asked Liam.

Pilgrim gave an enigmatic smile. ‘Then we’ll be needing the curry powder.’ He returned a while later with his supplies wrapped in an attap leaf and announced ‘I’ll cook it. It needs a special knack to bring the best out of it.’

He chopped up the meat, roasting it until it was brown, then made a curry and served it up with the palm heart, using more attap leaves as plates. Shepherd and his mates fell on it like starving men, the first hot food they’d had in a week.

As they sat eating, Pilgrim glanced around the circle of faces. ‘Any of you done a jungle survival course yet?’

All four shook their heads.

‘I used to train pilots - they all have to do the course in case they have to eject from their aircraft and E & E through enemy territory. The biggest problem is always a psychological one, getting people to eat things that their bodies need, but their minds might reject: plants and fish, but also insects. Pound for pound insects will give you more protein than beef.

‘The first time I did the course, I made a serious mistake. I gave them some insects to eat: termites, ants eggs and rhino beetle grubs. The beetle grubs look especially revolting. They’re grey and bloated, about seven inches long, and have four sets of legs on the middle. They look even more hideous when they’ve been boiled, but they’re very nutritious. I managed to persuade one pilot to volunteer to taste one but as he tried to put it in his mouth, it flopped over onto his chin. It wasn’t alive, it had been boiled after all, but the pilots all took one look and then point blank refused to touch them.’

‘You can’t blame them,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t think I could something like that.’

‘Depends how hungry you were,’ said Jimbo.

‘If I was that hungry, I’d take a bite out of you,’ said Liam. ‘But a grub?’ He shook his head. ‘No bloody way. I’d rather go hungry.’

Pilgrim smiled.  ‘Anyway I left them to it while I went back to my base camp, roasted the insects, chopped them up and made a curry with them. I served it up that night when they were all starving hungry and they wolfed it down. They all thought it was delicious until I told them what was in it. So that was a lesson learned: the first time you feed insects to anyone, camouflage the fact.’

Shepherd’s expression had been changing throughout the latter part of Pilgrim’s story. He put down his fork, looked around and saw that the others had also stopped eating. He thought about it for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. ‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘Rhino beetle grubs?’

Pilgrim nodded. ‘And termites and ants eggs.’

Liam put his hand up to his mouth. ‘Are you serious?’

‘It’s protein,’ said Pilgrim. ‘And now you’ve eaten it, and enjoyed it, next time…’

Liam nodded. ‘Point taken,’ he said.

They made another brew and then Pilgrim began educating them on regimental policy as he saw it. Still unbadged and with nothing having been said directly, Shepherd took the way that they were now being taken into Pilgrim’s confidence as sign enough that he now no longer regarded them as candidates on Selection but as members of the Regiment. ‘A lot of the guys serving in the Regiment are happy to coast along taking promotion and career moves,’ Pilgrim said, ‘but they’re not prepared to put in the hard work and the hard yards to be a proper professional SAS soldier. With a couple of honourable exceptions, most of the trainers on the Selection course are also guys who couldn’t make it in the fighting Sabre Squadrons. They’re happy to lord it over the new recruits but will find any reason to avoid going back to a squadron.’

Shepherd nodded enthusiastically. That was exactly what he’d been thinking, even before they had arrived in Belize.

‘However, there is an inner core of like-minded guys within the Regiment who want to be the best of the best,’ Pilgrim continued. ‘You’ll never hear them bragging and big-timing about the stuff they’ve done. They don’t need to. They know and their comrades know, and that’s all that counts, but if you study them and learn from them, you might one day join their ranks.  I’ve seen enough in you four to think you all have the potential to do so, but only you can decide whether you’re willing to make the necessary commitment. Green Army training and even SAS training will just give you the basics. After that, you must then put in the follow-up time if you want to become experts in what you do. It isn’t a part-time job, it’s a full time, unrelenting commitment and to become one of the inner elite you must expect to make sacrifices at the expense of family, friends and your career. Think about it, decide what you want to do and then either commit to it wholeheartedly or get the hell out of the way of the guys who do.’

There was a long silence. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Enough said, it’s up to you. Now we’re heading out of the jungle tomorrow, but we’re calling at a Mayan village on the way. We’ve been doing hearts and minds work with them for years now - medicine and hygiene, improvements to their agriculture, and simple construction projects like latrines or a clean water supply - but we’re careful about what else we give them. We don’t give the Maya chainsaws because they can already fell enough trees with axes. They’re the only tribe I’ve ever seen that don’t use nets for fishing, but we don’t supply them either because they’re catching enough fish for their needs with longlines, and if we gave them gill nets they might overfish the river. We’re also teaching the older children basic medicine, so that there will be a legacy of continuing care when we’ve gone, just like in Malaya, Borneo, Oman and a score of other regions where we’ve operated over the years. In return for our help, they give us Intelligence. They fish the rivers and hunt in the forest. They know if there are strangers - soldiers or drug-traffickers -  coming across the border, so the Maya are our eyes and ears in this area.’

The following morning they followed Pilgrim through deep jungle and emerged on a well-worn path towards the Mayan village. Heliconias, flame trees and bougainvillea lined the track and they glimpsed brief slashes of even more electric colour - crimson, turquoise, violet and gold - as toucans, macaws and countless other birds flitted through the forest canopy a hundred feet above them.  Clouds of butterflies danced in the columns of sunlight in the clearings and open areas.

As they walked on towards the village, the jungle gave way to patches of cleared land, planted with maize and plantain bananas. The air was drenched with scents, the musty tang of the rainforest mingling with perfume from the wild flowers covering the fallow land and the blossom of the groves of orange, lime and lemon trees at the side of the track.  They came around a bend and saw huts scattered along the bank of a river. A fish eagle swooped down on the water, then struggled back into the sky with a fish impaled on its talons. There was a flash of vivid colour as a coral snake swam across the surface and disappeared back into the jungle.  Fisherman stood motionless on the riverbank, fishing with long lines, while a little way downstream a group of women were washing clothes. A few shouts were exchanged as they caught sight of the SAS men and a group of children came running to see the cause of the commotion. They greeted the squadron with shy smiles and followed them as they walked in to the village.

Most of the Mayan dwellings were dirt-floored, small and poor looking, little more than shacks with walls of loosely woven sticks and a palm-thatch, but two were larger, with sugar-cane walls and attap thatched roofs, and the largest house of all was built on stilts. Pilgrim pointed to it. ‘You can always spot the police post in these villages,’ he said. ‘The police are all Caribs - coastal-dwellers - and they don’t like the heat and humidity of the jungle, so they always build their posts on stilts in the hope of getting a little extra cooling breeze.’

Geordie glanced around him. ‘Police? I can’t imagine there’s much of a crime wave round here.’

‘There isn’t, and what crime there is, the Maya usually sort out for themselves under their own traditional laws,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Last time I was here, the village elders were holding a court in the hut of the alcalde - the mayor - about a knife fight between two women. They couldn’t establish which one of them had started the fight, so they found them both guilty. Mayan law dictated that the women should be tied to a tree on the outskirts of the village and left overnight as a punishment, but since one of them was pregnant, the elders decided that their husbands should be tied to the tree instead.’

‘Sounds quite civilised to me,’ Shepherd said.

‘Better not tell your missus, Jimbo,’ Geordie said. ‘She’ll have you tied to a lamp-post before you can say “knife fight”.’

‘It’ll make a change from tying me to the bedposts, anyway.’

‘More information than we needed,’ laughed Shepherd.

Pilgrim pointed to a coffee tree and a tall breadfruit in the heart of the village, casting a deep pool of shade. ‘I need to check in with the alcalde,’ he said. ‘So why don’t you take five?’ He walked over to the alcalde’s office - a hut knocked together from used boxes and planks, with a solitary sheet of rusting corrugated iron nestling amongst its thatch - and almost had to bend double to get through the low door.

Shepherd and the others took off their bergens and squatted in the shade. The village children surrounded them, a circle of silent faces. Their mothers also stared impassively as they sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands never still, grinding the corn for the day’s tortillas. Pigs and dogs chased each other between the houses, a few chickens pecked listlessly in the dust, and Shepherd saw one chase and eat a dark green scorpion unwise enough to have strayed from the safety of the forest.

Pilgrim emerged from the hut a few minutes later, accompanied by the alcalde. Like most Mayan men, he was little more than five feet tall and all the SAS men towered above him as Pilgrim introduced them in turn. Just then there were shouts and the children began pointing up the track on the far side of the village.  A Mayan man was approaching, leading a donkey. The lower half of his face was a mask of blood and there were two blood-soaked men draped across the donkey. ‘Jesus,’ Liam said. ‘It looks like a fucking spaghetti western.’

Geordie had already sprung into action, grabbing his medical kit and using a spray to sterilise his hands. He’d been a patrol medic with the Paras and had joined the SAS partly because he wanted to improve his skills in dealing with battlefield trauma. The two wounded men were lifted from the donkey and laid on split-log benches on the open ground in front of the huts. Geordie spared the man with the bloody face no more than a cursory glance and then began examining the other two, swiftly assessing their wounds.

Liam and Shepherd ran to help him. Both bodies were riddled with deep cuts and puncture wounds. Geordie began tying off the bleeders, then sutured the muscles and packed the wounds. Shepherd watched him in awe, marvelling at the speed and precision of his work. ‘If I had saline and blood, I could save them,’ Geordie said, still working frantically, ‘but without it, they’ll be lucky to survive; they’ve both lost a lot of blood.’

‘Can we not casevac them?’ Shepherd asked Pilgrim.

Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. For political reasons, civilians can’t be flown in military helicopters, because if they die, there might be accusations and compensation claims. If we had a Landrover we could send him back in that, because there’s no rule against taking them in military vehicles. Apparently it’s all right for them to die in a Landrover but not in a chopper.’

‘So we just let them die?’

‘No, we do our best to save them, within the constraints under which we operate. It’s just a pity that those constraints are decided by pen-pushers, arse-coverers and staff officers rather than the men on the ground.’

Geordie had moved on to the second man, whose wounds included an ugly gash on his head, exposing part of the skull. Blood was still pouring from the wound. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ Geordie said. ‘There’s a rich blood supply to the scalp so there’s always plenty of claret from a head wound.’ He mopped up the blood and then tapped the exposed skull gently with a pair of forceps, like a piano tuner using a tuning fork on a piano. ‘Middle C,’ he said. ‘Shows the skull’s intact. If you get a dull thud that means trouble. As it is, if he survives the blood loss, he should have nothing worse than a headache to show for it.’

He sutured the scalp wound, then began treating the man who had brought the others in. The reason for his bloodstained face became obvious, because his lips had been cut off, though he looked even more frightened of the needle Geordie was using to stitch his wounds.

Pilgrim had been questioning him, speaking in Mayan with only an occasional prompt from the alcalde. The man struggled to form his replies, his words slurred by his injuries. ‘He says they were hunting monkeys in the forest,’ Pilgrim said, ‘when Guatemalan soldiers surrounded them. They used these two for bayonet practice and told the other one to take them back as a warning to the others about what’ll happen to them if they don’t get out of this region.’

‘They cut off his lips by the look of it,’ Shepherd said.

‘A traditional Guatemalan remedy for those they think are spies and informers,’ said Pilgrim. ‘They know we’ve been working with the Maya, so the military junta is obviously stepping up their terror campaign; they even treat their own Mayan population abominably. Among the villagers here are the only two survivors of a massacre that wiped out an entire village on the other side of the border. The Maya here will now have even stronger reasons to fear that they’re next in line for that treatment. It’s a mess. A bloody mess.’

Pilgrim radioed a report back to base and then moved the patrol out, following the trail of dripped blood on the ground but working their way through the jungle flanking the track, rather than using the track itself. They had been following the trail for about an hour when they saw ahead of them the place where the Mayan villagers had obviously been attacked, for the vegetation to either side of the track was splashed with blood and the ground soaked with it. Two dead monkeys lay in the dirt, still bound to the wooden pole on which the Mayan villagers had been carrying them when they were attacked.

Pilgrim took in the scene, his expression unreadable, then led the patrol back about a hundred yards and signed to them to huddle around him. ‘They may be lying up in ambush,’ he said. ‘They use monkeys as a food source so I can’t see that they would have left them behind.  I’m sure Guatemalan rations aren’t so ample that they’d ignore some good protein when they had it.’ He paused. ‘Liam, Geordie, Jimbo, take the far side of the track. Dan and I will take this one. Move twenty paces, scent and listen for one minute, then another twenty paces, and so on. We need to clear the area to a hundred yards past the place where the Maya were attacked. Safety catches off - if they’re there, you’ll have no more than a fraction of a second to see them and fire. This isn’t a drill, lads, this is for real. So keep your wits about you.’

The other three crossed the track and at a signal from Pilgrim, they melted into the jungle and began to advance. ‘You’re lead scout,’ Pilgrim breathed in Shepherd’s ear. He nodded, and began to inch through the jungle, keeping the dusty track on his left just visible on the periphery of his vision. Shepherd was totally focussed, leaving no sign and making no sound, but scanning the jungle ahead and to either side at every step, tracking the path of his gaze with the barrel of his weapon, alert for any movement or sound, or the slightest thing out of place, that might give warning of an enemy. After twenty paces he paused, listening intently then, hearing nothing, he moved on. Shepherd sensed that Pilgrim was behind him, though the veteran SAS man made not a sound as he moved through the jungle.

Shepherd moved even more cautiously as they approached the scene of the ambush, raking the vegetation with his gaze, though the wall of foliage seemed as blank and impenetrable as a rock face. He paused once more, listening intently and sniffing the air and had just taken a pace forward again when there was an explosion next to his right ear. The foliage in front of him was blasted into shreds and he glimpsed a figure in camouflage fatigues toppling backwards, blood spurting from a hole punched in his chest, while his weapon stitched a line of tracer across the jungle canopy. Shepherd threw himself flat as firing erupted all round him. He targeted a muzzle flash, a speck like a firefly in the jungle gloom and saw another Guatemalan soldier crumple to the ground as the burst Shepherd had fired tore the vegetation apart. Pilgrim was firing more short staccato bursts and the others were firing too though, his ears still deafened from Pilgrim’s first shot, Shepherd registered that only by the shredding of the leaves as the rounds struck home.

The answering fire ceased almost at once with any remaining Guatemalan soldiers either dead or fleeing through the jungle. The SAS men remained in firing positions until their hearing had cleared and the jungle birds and animals that had scattered in panic began to return to the canopy. Pilgrim signed to Shepherd to follow him and began to inch his way forward again. They checked the bodies of the two Guatemalans, both stone dead, eyes rolled up into their heads, and with ants already swarming over the corpses, and then moved on, clearing the area and making sure the Guatemalans really had fled before returning to the ambush site.

‘You all right?’ Pilgrim said, his voice sounding to Shepherd’s damaged hearing like the buzzing of a wasp.

Shepherd nodded, shamefaced. ‘I never even saw the guy till you fired.’

Pilgrim nodded. ‘Another lesson learned. There’s a knack to seeing beyond the surface of the foliage. The trick is to focus on the nearest leaves and then re-focus the eye to look through them. Keep practising and it’ll suddenly click, but you need to learn it - I won’t always be next in line on patrol.’ He winked at Shepherd, taking the sting out of his comments. ‘You did all right in the contact though.’

They RVed with Jimbo, Geordie and Liam and searched the ambush site. Among the small bare footprints of the Mayan villagers were the booted tracks made by the Guatemalan soldiers who had attacked them. Shepherd stared at them for a moment. ‘The boot treads are the same pattern as the ones we’re wearing.’

Pilgrim gave a shrug of his shoulders. ‘All supplied by the good old USA, always playing both sides against each other.’

As they looked around for further signs, Liam spotted a battered torch, lying in the dirt near the edge of the track. He was already stooping to pick it up when Pilgrim grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t touch it, it’ll be booby-trapped.’

He examined it from all angles, then led them back down the track fifty yards, sighted on the torch and fired at it. The round struck home and there was the flash of an explosion, setting the birds in the canopy to panic-stricken flight once more. Pilgrim glanced at the others. ‘Learn from this,’ he said. ‘A torch is a valuable possession here. Why would one be lying in the dirt? A month ago I had to treat a Mayan kid whose hand was blown off when he picked up a torch like this and tried to switch it on. Right, we’ve bought ourselves and the villagers a bit of time, but we need to find a more permanent way to discourage the Guatemalans.’

Liam smiled thinly and Shepherd patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. ‘Not your day, mate,’ he said.

‘Hey, I could have lost an arm there,’ said Liam. ‘I’m ahead of the game.’ He gestured at Pilgrim, who was checking his weapon. ‘He knows his stuff, doesn’t he?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘It’s a pity he’s not on the DS,’ he said. ‘I’ve learnt more from a few days with him than all the time we were in Hereford.’

Pilgrim led the way back to the village, this time using the track. He exchanged a few words with the alcalde, who was hovering nervously at the edge of the village, his smiles now replaced with a worried frown. Pilgrim shook his hand, murmured some more words of reassurance, then led the patrol away, moving fast towards the RV point for a heli lift-out.  Just as dusk was falling, a Lynx helicopter clattered out of the sky. Shepherd and the others threw their bergens into the loading bay and jumped up after them and within five minutes the chopper was airborne again. It was now dark - Shepherd still hadn’t got used to the speed of nightfall in the tropics - and looking down from the chopper, he could see nothing but the dark mass of the jungle, extending to the horizon, unrelieved by any glimmer of light.

They flew in to the dusty airfield camp on the outskirts of Belize City, half-dead from fatigue, but at once went to the headquarters building for a briefing with the Chief of Staff, an Infantry Colonel with thinning, sandy-coloured hair, fleshy features and sweat patches beneath the arms of his shirt. He came straight to the point. ‘As you know, the Guatemalan Army are making cross-border incursions and appear to be waging a terror campaign. We believe it may be the prelude to a full scale invasion, since they’ve long wanted to take Toledo Province from Belize.’

‘Why would the Guatemalans want Toledo?’ Jimbo said. ‘As far as I could see, there’s nothing there but jungle.’

‘They want a port on the east side of the continent, giving them access to the Atlantic. Punta Gorda would do that, but an oil company has also been prospecting in Toledo and there are rumours that they’ve found significant deposits.’ The colonel paused, putting the tips of his fingers together and lowering his gaze as if in prayer. ‘It’s a delicate situation. We don’t want to provoke a major international incident, particularly in what the Yanks have always considered their own back yard - and the Guatemalan military junta is closely allied with the US - but we need to stop these incursions. So,’ he said turning to Pilgrim, ‘you are to take a patrol into Toledo, going in with the local Infantry Company as cover, and carry out aggressive patrols in the Mayan reservations spanning the border areas.’

Pilgrim stared at the Çolonel. ‘And what are the rules of engagement?’ he asked.

The Colonel flushed at the direct question and he dropped his gaze. ‘We are awaiting clarification from the Ministry of Defence about that. So, do what you need to do but don’t on any account get into any more fire-fights with the Guatemalan Army. The diplomatic and political consequences of that could be disastrous, particularly if they take place on Guatemalan soil.’

Shepherd looked over at Jimbo as the same thought obviouslyflashed through their minds. They were to carry out aggressive patrols but not fire their weapons? How was that supposed to work? It sounded like standard officer double-think.

Pilgrim opened his mouth as if he was about to ask another question, but then appeared to change his mind. As they left the headquarters, Pilgrim led Shepherd, Geordie, Liam and Jimbo off to the far side of the compound, away from everyone else. ‘What did I tell you?’ he said, clearly annoyed.  ‘They want us to sort it out but won’t give us a direct order to do it. Last time that guy saw action was about twenty years ago - if then - and now all he’s interested in is protecting his pension. Here’s the lesson for today - always question authority; if they want the mission to be done a certain way then let them do it. If it is not your plan it will fail. Nine times out of ten officers haven’t a clue what they’re doing.’ He took a deep breath.  ‘Right, you four are going to form the patrol with me.’ He paused, checking their expressions. ‘Assuming that you’re all up for it, because it’s a volunteer operation.’

Shepherd was already nodding and the other three quickly followed his lead.

‘You guys seem to rub along all right together,’ Pilgrim said. ‘But just between ourselves, it’s not necessary to be friends with the rest of a patrol to do the job, though you must have respect for them and no one can force you to work with somebody you don’t respect.  But if you want to pull out, now is the time to do it.  If you agree to go, then you must give it one hundred per cent, and you must input any ideas you have. One unbreakable rule in the Regiment is that if you have something to say, you say it before the mission. If it goes tits up and you haven’t said anything beforehand, you don’t get to criticise the plan afterwards. Understood?

The four men nodded enthusiastically.

‘Now, you all have experience from other units which I don’t have, so let’s hear it,’ said Pilgrim. ‘The mission plan has got to be the patrol plan or it will not succeed. And just so you know, although we operate in areas under the command of officers from the Green Army, the CO of 22 SAS always retains command.  He alone makes the strategic decisions affecting the deployment of SAS troops and he cannot be countermanded, not even by the Director of Special Forces.  So if the MOD thinks the CO is getting it wrong, the only course of action is to sack him and the implications of that are so serious that it has never happened in the entire history of the regiment.  So although the Chief of Staff can brief the patrol, the mission is always referred to Hereford for approval.  And if the patrol commander - me in this case - doesn’t agree with the mission he’ll refer it to Hereford knowing that he will be supported without question and the mission blackballed.  It happens quite a lot and as a consequence, senior officers treat SAS senior NCO’s with great deference.  The downside is that, to keep things under their control, they will often try to use ordinary infantry to do tasks that are beyond their skill set, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Okay, we have twenty-four hours to prepare for the op,  make the most of it.’

He walked away. ‘I’m hungry,’ said Liam almost immediately.

‘You’re always hungry,’ said Shepherd.

‘Hungry enough to eat one of those bugs?’ asked Jimbo.

Liam pulled a face and Shepherd laughed.  ‘If you’re that hungry, ask that trainer for one of his tarantulas,’ Shepherd said. ‘They’re delicious apparently.’

One of the “big time” trainers had a sideline mounting tarantulas, rearing up as if they were attacking, on little wooden shields like hunting trophies. He caught them with an improvised net, made from an old mosquito net, and kept them in glass jars before injecting them with formalin - which both killed and preserved them - and then sold them to squaddies as souvenirs.

‘Are you off your head?’ Liam said, suppressing a shudder. ‘Nobody in their right minds would eat one of those things. They’re worse than the bugs.’

‘I would,’ Shepherd said. ‘If the money was right.’

‘A bet?’ said Liam.

‘If you think I won’t do it, put your money where your mouth is.’

There was a moment’s stunned silence. ‘Go on then,’ Geordie said. ‘Twenty quid.’

‘I’ll match that,’ said Liam.

‘Bloody hell, yeah, I’d pay twenty quid to see that,’ said Geordie. He strode off towards the trainer’s basha and returned a few minutes later with a jar containing a live tarantula. ‘Cost me £50,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be money well spent, if you’ve got balls enough to eat it.’

‘I’ve got the balls,’ Shepherd said, ‘but I’m not doing it for £60. Make it £150. Fifty quid each.’

The three men agreed.

Shepherd gave a slow smile. ‘All right, bring it on.’

‘Would you look at those fangs,’ said Liam, peering into the jar. ‘It’ll bite you before you can bite it.’

‘I doubt it.’ Shepherd opened the jar, tipped the spider onto the ground and hit it on the head with his rifle butt as it tried to scuttle away. ‘That’s the mercy killing done.’ He took a disposable lighter out of his pocket and blowtorched the spider with the flame.

‘You won’t cook it that way,’ Jimbo said.

‘I’m not trying to, I’m just singeing off the hairs, they’re an irritant.’

‘Bit like you,’ Geordie said. ‘Get on with it, will you?’

Shepherd pretended to hesitate, then popped the spider in his mouth, letting the legs drape over his chin for a moment, before crunching it up in a couple of bites and swallowing it.

‘Bloody hell,’ Liam said, grimacing ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

Shepherd opened his mouth to show it was empty and gave a big smile. ‘Easiest hundred and fifty quid I ever made. Some of the local tribes eat them. I read about it before we came out here.’

‘You sly sod,’ Geordie said. ‘You set us up, didn’t you?’ He paused. ‘So what do they taste like?’

‘Chicken,’ Shepherd said reaching for his water bottle. He grinned. ‘To be honest, more like chicken shit.’

Jimbo gave a slow smile. ‘I think we’ve found your nickname: “Spider”. What do we think guys?’

Geordie and Liam nodded. ‘Spider it is,’ said Geordie.

Shepherd insisted that the three handed over the money as Pilgrim returned with five ration packs which he distributed before they sat down and began their first “Chinese Parliament”, throwing ideas and suggestions for the patrol into the mix, which were then argued over, disputed, and accepted or rejected. Pilgrim controlled the discussion and had the final say, but he was careful to let everyone have their input.

Shepherd, Geordie and Jimbo had been in the Paras, where a limited amount of opinion from the ranks was permitted, but it was a very new experience for Liam, who had been an infantryman – ‘a crap-hat’ to the ex-Paras, since he wore a black beret rather than their maroon one. During Liam‘s previous military career he had been expected to follow orders without question and if he had any opinions, his wisest course was to keep them to himself. All that had changed now that he was with the SAS. Now everyone’s opinion was at least listened to.

‘So,’ Pilgrim said. ‘We need to give the Guatemalan Army a couple of good reasons not to come across the border again, but as the Colonel told us, if we get into another contact with them, we don’t want to kill too many because it’ll create an international shit-storm. So we just want to do enough damage to discourage them, and that means we’re going to be selective. As we’ve just discussed, the only way we will relieve the pressure on Belize is to go deep into enemy territory, find a military base staffed by senior officers and take one or two of them out. The junta won’t care if a few other ranks get killed in cross-border ops, but if we give some senior officers the good news, they’ll soon go off the idea.’

‘How will we locate the base?’ Jimbo said.

‘We’ll track the course of this river,’ Pilgrim said, pointing at his map. ‘Jungle villages are always close to rivers - the source of food and the only communications route - and soldiers locate next to civilians if they can for administrative reasons: they can get food cooked and laundry washed... and possibly other services that soldiers often seem to want. OK. That’s the plan. All agreed? Then let’s get the preparation done.

‘Personal equipment: escape and navigation kit should either hidden or tied to the body. Each of you should be carrying an escape button compass with a wire diamond-tip file hidden in the seam of your clothing to help you escape.  You must also carry your personal medical kit and your compass on your body. Wear your ID tags, watch and morphine around your neck tied with para cord and masking tape. The relevant map must always be in your pocket.’

He waited for a nod of confirmation from each of them before continuing. ‘Belt kit: ammunition, survival kit, survival rations and water bottles. Third, your personal grab bag. Between them they contain the patrol operational equipment, medical pack, radio, demolitions kit and more rations. If the patrol is hit, you just take your grab bag and run.

‘Your bergen should contain your cooking kit, spare clothes and sleeping bag - all of which should be made from lightweight nylon parachute material - candles, a hammock and any other thing you feel you might take to make life in the jungle a little bit more comfortable. Each individual SAS guy makes most of the equipment he uses in jungle warfare conditions himself. There’s no shortage of parachutes, so tailor your own kit so you’re comfortable with it.  The rationale is simple: if you make it yourself, it’ll be fit for purpose. Lastly we will all wear jungle hats with a piece of yellow ribbon around the rim for identification. If we get into a contact in jungle conditions with minimal visibility, we don’t want any uncertainty about who’s friend and who’s foe.’

The four men nodded earnestly.

‘Okay, it’s your first operational patrol - though as it turned out, your practice patrol wasn’t exactly incident-free - so I’ll be the skills man in the patrol, because I’m the only one with the training and experience. I’ll be signaller and demolitionist, and you’ll be my kit carriers. We’re going to use old fashioned morse code radio comms with a one-time code pad. The reason is that those old morse sets give out a very low wattage when transmitting and are very difficult for enemy direction finding systems to locate.  The set has a wire dipole aerial which we have to string through the jungle canopy high above the ground.  To deploy it, you tie a fishing weight to it, throw it high into the trees and let it fall back to the ground.  To then get it into a straight line through the branches is a painstaking task, also known as a pain in the arse.  It’s laborious but effective, so you need to practise that. And whatever else we might communicate to HQ, we never send the correct grid reference of our location. The reason is that it’s not unknown in Special Forces for the grid reference to be passed on to other agencies for other reasons, usually to the detriment of the patrol, but if they don’t know it, they can’t blow it. Now, weapons: we’re going to carry Self-Loading Rifles.’

‘Aren’t the SLRs a bit heavy and out-dated?’ Shepherd said.

Pilgrim nodded. ‘In other circumstances, yes, but they’re very well suited to jungle combat. Although the rifle’s heavy, it fires the standard Nato 7.62 round and that’s the round which packs a real punch.  All the new lightweight rounds bounce off trees in the jungle undergrowth, but the Nato round goes straight through them.’

Pilgrim opened a map and spread it out over the floor. ‘Now RVs,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the first ones now, then we’ll set them every morning before moving off. First RV here.’ His finger tapped a point on the map. ‘Emergency RV here,’ he pointed to another, ‘open until dusk. The war RV here.’ He moved his finger to a third point. ‘That’ll be good until the following dusk. After that, anyone separated from the patrol will make their own way to the emergency RV.  The RV we’ll use will always be in front of any contact we have with the enemy, deeper into their territory, so that we can get on and complete the mission without having to return to base.

‘If we’re in a contact and are pursued, a small group like ours always has the advantage in the jungle over a large group. We know that we’ll be outnumbered but large groups are very unwieldy and difficult to control. We all have a  map and compass and we can all navigate. Large green army groups only have one compass and map for every ten men. So we can split up and rendezvous later miles away, whereas the large infantry groups can’t.’

He gave them a moment to let that sink in. ‘One other thing: Belize, and the Toledo District in particular, is now the principal route for Colombian cocaine being shipped to the US. They bring it over the border from Guatemala, while the military there pocket plenty in bribes to look the other way, and send it on into Mexico or ship it out to the cays off the coast - there’s hundreds of them and many are unpopulated - either in light aircraft, which use the dirt roads as air-strips, or fast-boats. The traffickers are more heavily armed than the Belizean armed forces and probably better in a fight, and they’re inclined to shoot first and worry afterwards. They’re ruthless killers, but the good news is that no-one gives a shit about the drug-traffickers and while there’ll be hell to pay if we shoot it out with a platoon of the Guatemalan Army, there won’t be an international outcry at the news that a few members of some Colombian coke baron’s private army have been wiped out.  So if we come across them, it’s open season as far as I’m concerned. Okay, that’s it. Let’s get to work.’

The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, they were airborne again. As usual, Jimbo and Geordie had closed their eyes as soon as the rotors had begun to turn, and were cat-napping, while Liam was gazing out of the helicopter’s Plexiglas window. Shepherd joined Pilgrim near the open doorway. The SAS veteran was watchful and alert, his gaze raking the terrain as the Puma flew on to the south, as if every building or tree concealed a potential threat.

Shepherd stared out at the landscape unfolding below them as the Puma tracked the course of a broad, mud-stained river. Beyond the last of the sprawling, rust-coloured shanty-towns on the outskirts of Belize City, long stretches of mangrove swamps gave way to scrub bush and then secondary jungle. As they skimmed over the unbroken canopy of the rainforest, Shepherd saw a dark mountain range looming ahead of them. A few ancient, twisted oak trees maintained a precarious hold on the lower slopes of the summit ridge, but above them, a pine forest stood tall against the sky. It was a bizarre transition, as if they’d suddenly been transported from the rainforest to the Canadian Rockies. As they skimmed over the ridge, the downwash from the rotors stirred up a dust-storm of pine needles and thrashed the wildflowers studding the sandy soil.

‘I’ve not seen this before,’ Shepherd said. ‘It’s been dark when we’ve flown in and out. It’s strange isn’t it?’

Pilgrim nodded. ‘Mountain Pine Ridge,’ he said. ‘Weird place to find a pine forest. And see that?’ He pointed ahead to where the river they were tracking suddenly disappeared from view.  As the Puma shot over the edge, Shepherd found himself looking down at a waterfall dropping sheer for five hundred meters. Indifferent to the clatter of the Puma’s rotors, king vultures and orange-breasted falcons were spiralling on the thermals rising up the granite rock-face. The waterfall seemed to bridge two different worlds. The mountains at the head were clad in the pine forest; the bottom of the falls, lost in a mist of spray, was back in dense tropical jungle.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Shepherd.

‘Dangerous places often are,’ said Pilgrim.

A few minutes later,  the Puma cleared the last ridge of the mountains and Shepherd saw another, even stranger change in the landscape. ‘Goodbye Rockies,’ Pilgrim said, ‘Hello Great Plains.’

The plain stretching away from the foot of the mountains was classic farming country, flat arable land and pasture, with metalled roads bisecting the massive fields at right angles.

‘What the hell?’ Shepherd said.

Pilgrim smiled. ‘The Mennonites. They’ve been here since the late 1950’s and they’ve turned the jungle into a close replica of Kansas.’

‘What’s a Mennonite? It sounds like some sort of fossil.’

‘You’re closer than you think. They’re mostly American but they talk ancient German that even Germans can’t understand. Their clothes look like sackcloth, they don’t use modern inventions, and they work in the fields about twenty-eight hours a day. Imagine the Amish without the sense of fun and you’re not far off.’

Beyond the miniature Great Plains the jungle began again, stretching unbroken far to the south. Shepherd checked his watch. They had covered the sequence from city and shanty town, through swamp, scrub, jungle, pine forest, arable land, and back to secondary and then primary jungle in no more than an hour’s flight from north to south.

Pilgrim was again pointing ahead. ‘The end of the line,’ he said. ‘Toledo is the land that time forgot. It’s bigger than Wales but there’s only thirty thousand people here. There’s only one dirt road connecting this entire region with the rest of the country. You can get around some of the other tracks with a Landrover in the dry season, but the rest of the time you can forget it; there’s about two hundred inches of rain a year down here, so there are really only two ways to travel: by boat or on foot.’

Shepherd stared down at the jungle. At first he could see nothing but the dense, green canopy, pierced by an occasional silver glint as light reflected from the surface of a river. As the helicopter dropped lower, he caught a glimpse of a just-discernible break in the canopy, and caught sight of the Mayan village - a few huts in a small clearing on the banks of the river, like a tiny island in a huge emerald-green sea. They overflew the village and the Puma went into a hover a few miles closer to the border, above an old plantation, abandoned by the Maya but not yet reverted to jungle, that was to serve as the Landing Zone.

Geordie and Jimbo had stirred themselves at the engine note changed and as soon as the chopper landed, the five men unloaded their gear, jumped out and ran clear. At once, the rotors thundered and the downwash whipped the jungle, sending a dust storm of leaves and broken branches spinning through the air as the Puma lifted off and swung back towards the north.

As the noise of the rotors faded, the sounds of the rainforest resumed; the insistent cries of birds answered by the buzzing of a billion insects. Shepherd crouched by the buttress root of a strangler fig for a moment, watching and listening as they’d been trained, but also savouring the beauty, the strangeness and the silence. Then at a nod from Pilgrim, they shouldered their bergens. As they entered the jungle, they could hear behind them the chop of rotors as a succession of other helicopters began landing the local infantry company who were providing cover for the op and would form a defensive perimeter around the RV point just inside the border.

The SAS patrol had already disappeared from sight, moving through the dense jungle, maintaining the silent patrolling routine they had practised. Pilgrim took the role of lead scout - or point man - at first, navigating and keeping the patrol heading broadly the right direction, but as they moved on, he brought each of them in turn up to work as lead scout, though again he remained at their shoulder, second in line.

When Shepherd’s turn came, he began picking his way through the tangled vegetation, following the faint, wavering trace of the animal track they were following, avoiding breaking twigs or rustling dry leaves. He had practised the technique of looking through the foliage that Pilgrim had described to him and to his surprise, he had found both that it was relatively easy to master and  that it really did enable him to see through what had seemed impenetrable jungle, glimpsing any suspicious shapes that might be lurking in cover. He was hyper-alert for the first sign of danger - a movement, a sound, an unfamiliar smell - that might be the only warning before another contact with the enemy. It took ice-cool nerve, constantly alert for the least sign of danger but not so on edge that he would be startled into an overreaction by the sudden movement of a bird or animal. It was exhausting, physically and mentally.

They travelled along the ridge tops where there were no tracks and only animals moved. The terrain was punishing, dense secondary jungle with no open ground. It took them three hours to cover the first mile, fighting their way through dense undergrowth, constantly splashing through swamp and stagnant water, climbing and descending steep, slippery mud slopes, clambering over rotting tree trunks and skirting around thickets of understory palms, their trunks bristling with spikes, and thickets of razor grass, sharp enough to cut them to ribbons if they tried to push through it.

The air was cloudy with mosquitoes and sand-flies, and leeches lined the animal tracks, raising themselves to search for their next meal like plant-stems waving in the breeze. Every time they stopped they had to pick the leeches from the soft tissue of their armpits, necks and groins. They covered as little as five miles in the entire day, slept on the jungle floor and the next day they moved on.

Eventually, when Pilgrim decided that they were deep enough into Guatemala, they dropped down towards the river system and then tracked the course of the river very cautiously for two more days until they reached a large village. As Pilgrim had predicted, they found that there was a military camp alongside it.

They sat watching the camp all day from across the river and eventually, as the sky began to darken, their patience was rewarded when a group of soldiers emerged from one of the huts in the centre of the village and came down to the river bank to wash and bathe. The other ranks hung back, deferring to the officers and waiting for them to bathe first.  Pilgrim held a whispered conversation with the others. Even though the Guatemalans were wearing shirts with no visible badges of rank, Pilgrim was in no doubt about which officers to target. ‘See the slightly taller guy with greying hair? And the officer next but one to him on his right? They’ve got to be the most senior. You can tell by the way the others fall silent as soon as they open their mouths to speak. I’ll take the right-hand guy, which of you will take the other one?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Shepherd whispered.

‘He won every marksmanship task we were set in the Paras,’ Geordie said, in case Pilgrim was harbouring any doubts.

‘Head shot?’ Shepherd said.

‘You’re sure you can do it?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘On my count then,’ Pilgrim whispered. Shepherd sighted on his target, the Guatemalan officer’s head filling the sights, as Shepherd zeroed in on the bridge of the man’s nose. He held an individual’s life in the palm of his hand but that knowledge did not faze him at all. This was his job, and the Guatemalan officer might have been a plywood cut-out on the firing range for all the emotion Shepherd felt. He heard Pilgrim start to count down from five. At ‘Three’, he took up the first pressure on the trigger, and at ‘Two’ he exhaled in a long sighing breath. He heard ‘One’ and gently squeezed the trigger home. He felt the recoil in his shoulder and heard the two shots merge in a single report. His target disappeared from the scope, but the spray of blood in the air showed that the heavy SLR round had struck home with devastating effect. He glimpsed Pilgrim’s target also slumping to the ground and saw a flock of startled birds rising into the air as the Guatemalan soldiers froze in panic for a moment, and then began running in all directions.

The SAS men were already worming their way back from the riverbank. Shepherd heard Geordie’s whispered, ‘Tidy shooting. That’s my boy!’

Hidden by the jungle foliage, they picked up their bergens and began to move away. Behind them they heard shouts and ragged volleys of rifle fire, though the Guatemalan soldiers were firing blind, with no real idea of where their enemies were.

Shepherd expected Pilgrim to lead them back towards Belize immediately, but to his surprise he realised that the SAS veteran was taking them even deeper into Guatemala. He moved at an apparently unhurried pace, more concerned not to leave sign than to speed away from the contact. At their first stop to watch and listen, Pilgrim called them around him and gave a whispered briefing. ‘The Guatemalans will expect us to be heading back to Belize,’ he said. ‘They won’t expect us to be going deeper into Guatemala, so with luck their follow-up searches will be in the wrong area. However, we need to minimise consumption of our rations because if we miss the RV with the infantry on the Belize border, the next stop might have to be the coast.’

They moved on, working their way back to the ridgelines and following animal tracks, well away from any path that the Maya or the Guatemalan army would normally use. An hour before dusk, they looped their track and lay up in ambush in case any troops were following them, then after nightfall they ate a very small meal from their rations and bedded down. Shepherd quickly realised that going without food for a while was not going to be a problem and in fact it seemed to heighten his senses. Even Liam, whose search for food was normally a constant in their daily lives, endured the hardship without complaint.

For several days they moved on, making no more than a few miles a day, before starting a long slow turn back to the east, towards the Belize border. The following day, as Pilgrim called the usual hourly halt to watch and listen, all of them heard a faint noise in the distance, the sound of men moving as fast as the jungle vegetation would allow.

‘We’re being followed,’ Pilgrim said at once. ‘And the only people who can track us through the jungle are the local Maya tribes. The Guatemalans don’t like the jungle but the Maya live in it, it’s their home and they can travel through it faster than anyone, including us, so we need to send them a message not to come too close. Come on, don’t worry about leaving tracks for now, the more the better.’

For a few hundred yards they hurried on, leaving clear evidence of their passage in the bootprints and bruised and broken plant stems in their wake.  Pilgrim then chopped down a small sapling, pointed the end and set up a pig trap for the people following them, lashing the pointed stake to a whippy sapling and then tying it down to a “trip wire” - a piece of plant stem that would trigger it when a stray boot knocked against it.  ‘I’ve set it at an angle to one side, so it won’t hit the front man who triggers it - he’ll be a Mayan - but it will hit one of the Army guys further back in the patrol and that will slow them down,’ Pilgrim explained.

They moved on again at once, still taking less trouble to conceal their tracks. Pilgrim explained that however carefully they concealed their tracks, the Mayan would read it as if he was reading a book. So speed was more important. They looped their track and lay up in ambush towards nightfall but the Guatemalans did not enter the trap. None of the SAS men slept that night and they moved on again at first light. As soon as they paused, they again heard the Guatemalans pursuing them.

By mid-afternoon, they were close to the Belizean border but were still being followed.  ‘We can’t afford to lead the enemy too close to the RV with the infantry and certainly not to the LZ,’ Pilgrim said. ‘We need to buy ourselves some more time. We’ve got to frighten them but not kill them. One or two senior officers dying fifty miles from the border can be explained away as the fall-out from a dispute with the drugs traffickers about bribes, but like our brave colonel almost said, too many dead soldiers on the border could start an international incident.’

They again doubled back on their own tracks and sited themselves on a low ridge overlooking the way they had come just a few minutes earlier.  They did not have to wait long before they heard movement below them.  As the Guatemalans moved into the ambush area, advancing in single file behind their Mayan scout. At Pilgrim’s signal, Shepherd and the others opened up with their SLRs, laying down a barrage of fire that flashed inches above the heads of the troops and ripped the vegetation around and in front of them to shreds. The Guatemalans fled in all directions, two of them dropping their rifles as they ran.

The SAS patrol then split up and moved away quickly in different directions. Shepherd moved through the jungle alone for an hour, paused to listen, and then began to make his way towards the RV point. Pilgrim was already there when he reached it, appearing out of the shadows like a ghost. The others arrived within a few minutes. They compared notes and since Jimbo told them he’d heard sounds of pursuit, they again split up, and came back together again, using the rendezvous system until they were certain they had broken contact with their pursuers. ‘It’ll take the Guatemalans several hours to get themselves reorganised,’ Pilgrim said at last, ‘and even if they do manage to pick up our trail again, they’re very unlikely to attempt to follow us into Belize.’

They re-crossed the border soon afterwards and in another hour were close to the RV with the local infantry. Pilgrim peered through the jungle towards the RV point about three hundred yards away. ‘You get down in cover,’ he said, ‘while I go forward and make contact with them.’ He disappeared noiselessly through the jungle and a few minutes had ticked by when there was a sudden ragged burst of firing. Shepherd and the others sprinted forward, weapons at the ready. They found Pilgrim on the ground with a gunshot wound in his leg. As they came into the view of the infantry there was another burst of fire and the SAS men flattened themselves in the dirt.

‘Stop firing you fucking idiots!’ Liam bellowed at the top of his voice, his face purple with fury.  ‘Can’t you see the fucking yellow bands on our hats?’ He waited a moment then cautiously showed himself and this time there was no more firing.

Geordie ran to Pilgrim and began treating him, while the others started bollocking the infantry officer who ran up to them, his face ashen with shock or fright.

‘Go easy on him,’ Pilgrim said, propping himself on one elbow and ignoring Geordie’s demand to ‘Lie down again you idiot, how do you expect me to treat you if you’re jumping around like a frog on a hotplate?’

‘Don’t blame the infantry guy,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It’s my own stupid fault. I should have realised that they’d be spooked and jittery after the small arms fire at yesterday’s ambush and would be likely to shoot first and check who it was afterwards. I should have made more noise as I went towards them.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘It just shows, you never stop learning.’ He bit his lip and fell silent as pain lanced through his leg.

‘Will you lie down?’ Geordie said, putting one of his huge hands on Pilgrim’s chest and forcing him flat. The infantry company signaller radioed for a casevac and when Geordie had finished working on Pilgrim, the four of them carried him to the LZ a few thousand yards away. Within half an hour they were airborne and on their way to the main hospital in Belize City.

Once Pilgrim had been safely delivered, Shepherd and the others returned to base and had their first shower and shave in a fortnight but found they could eat almost nothing. Their stomachs had contracted to the size of a fist and Shepherd felt full after just a couple of mouthfuls.

That evening they went to see Pilgrim in hospital. He was sitting up in bed, flirting with one of the nurses, but Shepherd was surprised, almost shocked, to see how frail he looked in the relatively normal surroundings of a hospital.

‘Bit of hospital food and a few days’ rest and you’ll be back out bollocking us again,’ Liam said, dropping down onto a wooden chair at the side of Pilgrim’s bed.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Pilgrim said. ‘That was my last op with the Regiment. I’m handing in my papers. I’ve got a job working for the “funny guys” instead.’

‘Funny guys?’ said Shepherd.

Pilgrim tapped the side of his nose. ‘Secret squirrel,’ he said.

‘Mi5?’

Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Six,’ he said. ‘Plenty of work for someone like me and the pay’s better. No mossies or leeches either, so far as I know.’

‘I’d never work for the intelligence agencies, either of them,’ said Shepherd. ‘From what I’ve heard you can trust them about as far as you can throw them.’

Pilgrim took a sip from a glass of water. ‘You all did okay out here,‘ he said, and they all knew that it was high praise from him. ‘Get some experience in the Regiment, remember what I’ve taught you, and who knows, in a few years time, we might be working together again. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got something for you.’ He reached into his bedside locker and produced four beige berets, with the winged dagger badge and the famous motto. ‘A lot of good men have worn that beret,’ he said. ‘Make sure you live up to it.’

He handed the berets to the four of them.

‘That’s it?’ said Shepherd. ‘We’re badged?’

Pilgrim smiled. ‘You are indeed,’ he said. ‘For better or worse.’

* * *

There are eight more Spider Shepherd: SAS short stories, including Narrow Escape, Warning Order, Hostile Territory, Rough Diamonds, Personal Protection, Friendly Fire, Dead Drop and Kill Zone.

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.

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

You can read more about Stephen Leather’s work at www.stephenleather.com