Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd Short Story)

NATURAL SELECTION

  By Stephen Leather

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  Published by:

  Copyright (c) 2013 by Stephen Leather

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  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  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