Spider Shepherd: SAS: #2 (13 page)

‘Thank you Captain,’ Shepherd said. ‘There are just a couple of things you can help us with. We need a Sea Dragon heavy lift chopper here as soon as possible. If you don’t have one on board, can you summon one for us?’

If the ship’s commander was surprised by the request, he didn’t show it and didn’t even blink before replying, ‘You’ve got it. Anything else?’

‘We’ll also need five of the dry suits that your ship’s divers use.’

‘Not a problem. Nothing else?’ He smiled as Shepherd shook his head. ‘If only all the requests we receive for assistance were as easily satisfied. I’ll get those sorted for you right away.’ He turned away and began barking orders as the SAS men returned to the deck and started cleaning their weapons and preparing their equipment.

SAS Standard Ops Procedures dictated a lower limit to the amount of ammo that each member of the patrol had to carry, but there was no upper limit. The use of .223 rounds meant the patrol could carry more ammo to support themselves than would normally be the case. Spider and the others knew that if push came to shove they could not expect the cavalry in the shape of Close Air Support or friendly artillery fire to come to their rescue. They would be on their own.

‘Dry suits?’ Jock said. ‘Aren’t those a little old school even for an old-fashioned guy like me? What’s wrong with wet suits?’

‘As a general rule, nothing,’ Shepherd said. ‘But once we’ve vented all the trapped air through the waterproof cuffs on them, using dry suits will give us a negative buoyancy and that will allow us to float just below the surface, making us virtually invisible.’ He paused. ‘Except to the Nile crocodiles of course.’

As the others burst out laughing, Jimbo tried and failed to smile at the thought. ‘Bloody hell, don’t even joke about stuff like that?’ Sensing that he had just laid himself open to a lifetime of piss-taking, he hastily tried to back-track. ‘I mean, hell, I’m not scared of them but I’d rather go into a contact with the enemy armed with nothing more than a pea-shooter than have to swim down a murky river that could be crawling with crocodiles.’

‘It’s the not knowing, isn’t it?’ Jock said, apparently sympathetic. ‘Not knowing if you’re going to scream like a girl and then burst into tears, I mean.’

‘And look on the bright side,’ Geordie said joining in with relish. ‘If a croc gets you, we’ll make sure we get the croc in revenge, so even if she’s lost a husband, at least your widow will get a nice handbag and a pair of shoes out of it.’

Mercifully for Jimbo, his tormentors were distracted as the Sea Dragon was brought up from below decks and crewmen began swarming all over it, preparing it for its mission. The Sea Dragon was the largest and heaviest helicopter the US military had - bigger even than the US Army’s Chinook. Its triple engines gave it huge lifting power and the massive sponsons on either side of the fuselage carried enough additional fuel to give it a range of well over 1000 miles. And if that was not enough, it was fitted with a probe to enable in-flight refuelling.

‘Right, Joe,’ Shepherd said. ‘Let’s take a look at these buggies you’ve brought and give them a test drive. I’d hate the first time I rode one of them to be during a contact with a bunch of terrorists with heavy weapons.’

Joe unpacked one and began tinkering with it while Shepherd and the others unpacked the rest. They were strange, skeletal-looking vehicles with a thin, tubular aluminium frame, a relatively narrow front wheel and two fat rear tyres.

‘Start one up then,’ Jimbo said, and let’s see how quiet it really is.’

‘I already have,’ Joe said with a grin. ‘It’s running now.’ The bike’s engine was running but it barely made any sound. As Joe had said, the exhaust gases were vented into the frame’s aluminium tubing before eventually being released through a series of small holes at the rear of the frame. The effect was remarkable. The engine was virtually inaudible.

Shepherd gave a nod of approval. ‘Good kit, providing they work.’

‘Let’s see what they can do,’ said Joe. They started up the engines of all of them and began testing them, riding in circles round and round the flight deck at the rear of the ship, and then gunning the engines to test their speed, zooming half the length of the ship, inches from the guard rail, then manhandling them around and speeding back to the prow. Joe glanced at Shepherd. ‘Happy?’

‘I’ll be happy if they run as well on desert sand as they do on a steel deck, yes.’

‘They should run better on it, that’s what they’re designed for.’

Once they had finished their preparations, the SAS men stacked their flimsy-looking desert buggies in the loading bay of the Sea Dragon, and then went off to the mess decks to fuel up with some food. They would be travelling as light as possible, with maximum ammunition and minimum rations. Even if the op went to plan and was trouble-free, it would be at least forty-eight to seventy-two hours before they were back within range of anything other than their belt rations to eat.

Shepherd and the patrol embarked on the Sea Dragon at last light, having spent the previous couple of hours doing work-up training with the chopper crew. The Navy pilots were very gung-ho and did not appear to be at all fazed by their mission, even though it involved a covert insertion into a country that, although technically a US ally, could not be expected to take kindly to the violation of its airspace.

‘I’m getting the strong impression that the US Navy don’t view international boundaries as things to be respected,’ Shepherd said with a smile.

‘Except where the boundaries in question belong to the United States,’ Jock said, ‘when they tend to take them very seriously indeed.’

‘One of the benefits of being a superpower, I guess,” said Shepherd.

They took off immediately after nightfall, heading south over the Eastern Mediterranean. As they flew towards the Egyptian coast the bright lights of the coastal resorts pierced the darkness ahead of them.

Guided by an AWACS aircraft flying thousands of feet above them, the Sea Dragon flew at wave-top height. They reached land and skimmed over the low coastal cliffs, the massive rotors churning up a sand and dust storm as they flew on at low level, disappearing into the black void of the Western Desert, where the original SAS had made such a mark during World War Two. They were heading in a southerly direction, and there was nothing to see in the unrelieved darkness below them but the occasional flare of light from an oil installation, and the flicker of cooking fires in isolated Bedouin encampments.

Eventually, about an hour after crossing the coast, the helicopter swung on to an easterly course and before long, peering down at the ground through their Passive Night Goggles, the SAS men could see the desert giving way to the fertile strip flanking the river Nile. The transition was abrupt; one minute they were still passing over featureless desert, the next, as if someone had thrown a switch, they saw a lush patchwork of crop fields: cotton, wheat, maize, clover, sugar cane, groves of olive and citrus trees, date palms, and, nearer to the river itself, extensive rice paddies. Reflecting the moonlight, each crop seen through their goggles glowed a different vivid and eerie shade of yellowish-green.

In the distance ahead they could now see the gleam of the river Nile. Mud-brown in daylight, it glowed silver by the light of the moon. Immediately they began their preparations to disembark, as the pilot began counting them down towards their landing site.

The Sea Dragon went into a hover above a dusty, arable field, and as soon the helicopter’s wheels touched the ground, the loadmaster lowered the rear loading ramp. The SAS men disembarked at once, driving their dune buggies off the ramp through the blizzard of sand and dust raised by the whirling rotors of the helicopter. They went into all-round defence while the loadmaster dumped out the rest of their equipment. A few minutes later the Sea Dragon was rising back into the air, whipping up a fresh sand- and dust-storm as it did so. It swung away to the west, streaking low over the crop fields and the desert sands beyond, and again keeping well clear of the settlements of the Nile Valley before turning north to make for the rendezvous with the US warship waiting offshore.

After the thunder of the helicopter’s rotors had faded, Shepherd and the patrol waited a further twenty minutes before moving, both making sure that their arrival had not been detected and allowing their eyes time to become accustomed to the darkness, and their ears to the faint, subtle sounds of the desert at night. They then spent the next hour cacheing their spare fuel and explosives, before beginning to make for their objective.

Shepherd felt strange not sending out radio messages with his situation reports, but the device on his shoulder was constantly relaying their position to the satellite tracking them. This in turn was relaying the information directly back to a bunker in the SAS base in Hereford, where the guys from the Operations Oversight Team were evaluating the information coming in, not just from Shepherd and his patrol mates, but from every available intelligence source, before deciding what further course of action they should take. Their orders were then relayed back to Shepherd’s patrol through their ear-pieces, with each stage of the operation potentially subject to a “NO GO” veto. Shepherd wasn’t too happy being under the thumb of the OOT, but he realised that it was the future, the way that all SAS operations would one day be carried out. He was sure that eventually every facet of every SAS operation would be subject to planning, control and veto in real time by the Head Shed back in Hereford. It wasn’t a future he was looking forward to – he much preferred to be in charge of his own destiny.

They left the buggies hidden in a wadi while they approached the Nile a mile upstream from the site of the kidnapper’s camp. They quickly donned their dry suits and secured their weapons and ammunition in waterproof rubber bags that they then strapped across their chests so that the outline of the bags would not break the surface of the water once the SAS men had submerged.

They waited on the bank of the river, screened by the crops growing around them, until Shepherd’s earpiece crackled a single word: ‘Go!’ Then, one by one, they slipped silently into the water up to their necks. They paused, waiting while each man in turn vented the trapped air from the cuffs of his suit, before they pushed off from the bank. Shepherd was pleased to see that, just as predicted, their negative buoyancy allowed them to float just below the surface of the river, invisible to any watchers on the bank as they drifted downstream with the current. Only their heads briefly showed above the surface from time to time as they checked their bearings.

After drifting downstream for twenty minutes, Shepherd checked his GPS, then led the way into the shallows at the edge of the river where pools of deep shadow cast by a plantation of date palms growing next to the bank screened them from view. ‘If the intelligence we had was right,’ he whispered. ‘And if they haven’t moved in the meantime, the terrorists’ camp should be about 300 yards west of us now.’

They emerged from the water without a sound and then stole towards the terrorists’ camp. Peering from the shadows beneath the date palms, they could see the dark forms of an array of heavily armed pick-ups, their gun barrels and rocket-launchers visible as blacker outlines against the darkness of the night sky. They were drawn up in a semi-circle and watched over by a couple of sentries whose hunched shoulders and lowered, nodding heads suggested that they were at least half-asleep. A few indeterminate shapes were also lying around a pile of embers glowing in the dark, but even using their Passive Night Vision Goggles it was impossible for the SAS men to identify the hostages among them.

‘We must get the kids out first,’ Shepherd whispered, ‘but which ones are they? I can’t make them out from here.’

Joe was already stripping off his dry suit. ‘I look and speak like an Arab, I’ll go and find them,’ he said, as nonchalantly as if he was discussing a trip to the off-licence to buy a few bottles of beer.

He moved off before Shepherd could argue. He watched Joe slip away through the darkness, moving silent as a ghost from shadow to shadow, evading the sentries and passing the vehicles without a sound. However, when he reached the fringes of the group of sleeping men, he began to noisily and clumsily blunder around, trying to look for all the world like a half-awake Arab going for a piss in the middle of the night. As he did so, he kept tripping over sleeping bodies and muttering unintelligible Arabic replies when the aroused sleepers cursed at him. Eventually he found what he was looking for. Shepherd heard an aggrieved and boyish-sounding American voice muttering ‘Fuck off will you? Leave us alone’. Straight away Joe lay down where he was, next to one of the boys and Shepherd then belly-crawled over to join him.

‘Who the hell…’ the boy said, but got no further before Shepherd clamped a hand over his mouth, put his own lips very close to his ear and hissed ‘We’re the only friends you’ve got in the world right now. If you keep your mouths shut and do exactly as we tell you, there’s a very good chance that we’ll be able to get you out of here and have you safely on your way back to the good old US of A before the sun comes up. But if you make any noise, or argue, or refuse to do what we tell you, or piss us off in any other way, you’re on your own and we’ll leave you here to the tender mercies of the terrorists. Understood? Don’t speak, just nod.’ He waited until he got an answering nod, then repeated the message to the other boy.

He and Joe then protected the boys by covering them with their bodies, and Shepherd raised his hand a few inches as a signal to the other members of the patrol, watching from the shadows. A moment later there was the staccato chatter of semi-automatic fire as Jock, Jimbo and Geordie opened up, picking off the two available targets, the half-awake sentries, and firing bursts of rounds at the pick-ups.