Dead Drop (A Spider Shepherd short story)

  DEAD DROP

  By Stephen Leather

  ****

  July 2002.

  Afghanistan.

  Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd shifted position slightly, trying to ease the pressure from the rocks beneath him and the ammo belt pressing into his chest. He lay prone, scanning the terrain through his sniperscope. A rough dirt road ran along the foot of the hillside below their observation post, leading to the village away to the east, a cluster of mud-brick buildings, surrounded by terraced fields, thick with the vivid pink blooms of opium poppies. The heat was ferocious, rising in waves from the stony hillside around them, while high above vultures were circling on the thermals, the feathers at their wingtips extended like claws as they flexed in the updraft. Shepherd could feel beads of sweat trickling down his brow, the salt and the moisture attracting still more of the flies that had been buzzing around them since they set up the OP.

  ‘Instead of lying there scratching your arse, Geordie,’ Shepherd said. ‘Can you not use your ninja skills to catch a few of these bloody flies?’

  Geordie Mitchell, lying next to him on the rock ledge, gave him a sideways look. ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘Your flies, your problem.’ He was in his early thirties but looked older. His pale blue eyes seemed as sun-faded as his fatigues and the stress of continual active service had etched deep lines into his face.

  ‘They’re attracted to rancid smells,’ Jock McIntyre said in the gruff Scottish growl that made every sentence sound like a declaration of war. ‘So it’s not surprising they’ve gone for you.’ His round face and open features gave him a guileless look that had led many to underestimate him. It was a dangerous mistake to make for he was as hard as Aberdonian granite. ‘Anyway, pal,’ he said. ‘Look on the bright side: if they’re buzzing round you, at least they’re leaving us alone.’

  The fourth member of the group, Lex Harper, a Para who acted as Shepherd’s spotter - part target-spotter, part-bodyguard - whenever he was on sniper ops, smiled to himself but didn’t join the banter, keeping his gaze ranging over the terrain, alert for any movement or anything out of place.

  Shepherd settled himself again, gently placing his sniper rifle on the rock. He’d already zeroed the rifle and scope but the least knock could throw it off a fraction of an inch which would be more than enough to turn a kill into a miss.

  Mitchell gave a theatrical sigh. ‘You’re so precious with that bloody rifle it’s a wonder you don’t raise your pinkie when you fire it.’

  Shepherd grinned. ‘You’d be precious with it, if I was ever dumb enough to trust it to you,’ he said. ‘It’s state of the art kit and it cost the Regiment well over £20,000 but it’s worth every penny. I could drill you a new arsehole from a mile and a half away with it.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake don’t do that,’ McIntyre said. ‘He does enough farts with the one he’s already got. I don’t think I could stand them in stereo.’

  Harper and Mitchell chuckled. Banter and swearing was the norm in the Regiment – it was the glue that bound them together.

  Shepherd put the spotter scope back to his eye. A temporary checkpoint had been set up on the road directly below them, manned by two Afghan troops and four of Harper’s mates from the Para Support Group, who always supported the Regiment on ops. The site for the checkpoint had been well chosen. It was set in dead ground, where the road dipped down to ford a river that had been a torrent of snow melt in the spring, but was now as dry and lifeless as the landscape around it. Hidden in the dip, the checkpoint was invisible to people approaching from either direction until they were almost upon it. If, as the Intelligence suggested, Taliban insurgents were planning a raid on the village to kill or kidnap the local headman, they would have no more than a few seconds warning of the checkpoint and no time to take evasive action. If they then tried to shoot it out, they would be cut down in the cross fire from the SAS and Para Support Group troops on either side, or the close air support that they could call on.

  So far only a few men on foot and a handful of vehicles - and most of those were farm carts - had passed along the road. Mitchell yawned. ‘Quiet out there, Tonto.’

  ‘Too quiet, Kemo Sabi,’ McIntyre said.

  As they watched and waited in the OP, an old man passed through the checkpoint, herding a small flock of scrawny goats, followed a few minutes later by a peddler with a donkey cart piled with cooking pots, bowls and water vessels, cut and hammered out of scrap metal. Shepherd noticed the faint markings on one large bowl and nudged Mitchell. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘We’re fighting a war that even environmentalists would approve of - the muj are recycling the bombs the Yanks drop on them.’

  ‘The VC used to do something similar in Vietnam,’ said Mitchell. ‘They turned shell casings into lamps for their underground bases. Waste not, want not.’

  Two Afghan men carrying AK47s provoked a brief heightening of tension as they approached the checkpoint, but it was far from an unusual sight - every Afghan male carried a weapon of some sort - and after being searched they were allowed through the cordon and walked on towards the village.

  The road was now empty save for a heavily pregnant woman in a faded blue burqa, carrying a bundle wrapped in a shawl in her arms, and making her slow way on foot along the road towards the checkpoint. Shepherd’s gaze had moved on, scanning the area relentlessly, eyes never still, always searching for potential threats. Then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. ‘Hold it. An Afghan woman traveling alone?’ he said. ‘Something’s not right.’

  Mitchell followed his gaze. ‘Doesn’t walk like a woman either.’

  The woman – if it was a woman - was now close to the checkpoint.

  Harper tapped Shepherd’s shoulder and gestured back along the track. Shepherd shot a glance that way and saw that a Toyota pick-up had appeared on the brow of the hill a mile and a half away. The pick-up stopped but the engine was still running because they could see the blue-grey haze from its exhaust. The driver was making no move to continue along the road. Shepherd swung his scope onto it. Four figures were visible in the back of the pick-up, the barrels of their weapons outlined against the lapis blue of the sky. As he peered into the shadowed cab of the pick-up, Shepherd saw twin discs of reflected light as the man in the passenger seat trained binoculars towards the checkpoint ahead. Shepherd barked into his throat mic. ‘Abort! Abort! Abort! Suicide bomber!’

  The guards at the checkpoint started to shout as they swung up their weapons, but the figure had now almost reached them. Shepherd was already on auto-pilot, running through a sequence of actions so often practised that they were almost instinctive. The head of the burqa-clad figure now filled Shepherd’s sniperscope - only a head-shot would stop a bomber triggering a device. He took up the first pressure on the trigger, but even as he exhaled, squeezed the trigger home and felt the recoil, he saw that he was too late. A micro-second before the shot, the burqa-clad figure’s had slapped against its chest and in that instant, there was a blinding flash. A moment later Shepherd heard the thunder-clap of an explosion and the shock wave swept over them in a whirlwind of dust and dirt. There was the whine and whirr of shrapnel fragments overhead and then the spattering sound of softer, human debris falling to earth around him.

  Shepherd lifted his head. The site of the checkpoint was now as blood-soaked as a halal butcher’s yard. A pall of oily smoke was rising from a crater in the centre of the dirt road where the burqa-clad figure had been standing when the device detonated. The man – for Shepherd had no doubt that it had been man passing himself off as a woman - had disappeared completely, with only a few shreds of bloodstained and smoke-blackened blue fabric to show he had ever
existed. The troops who had been manning the checkpoint were sprawled around the crater, their bodies contorted into unnatural positions by the force of the blast. The two men who had been closest to the bomber were so mangled as to be almost unrecognisable as human. Partially shielded by their dead comrades, the four others were still alive - so far at least - but all were wounded. Shepherd knew that suicide bombers routinely packed shards of steel, sharp stones and fragments of broken glass around their devices to increase the carnage from the blast. All the men were bleeding badly, one with blood pumping in spurts from the stump that was all that was now left of his right arm. Nearby, the severed limb was dangling obscenely from the branch of a stunted acacia tree.

  In his earpiece, Shepherd heard Mitchell, the patrol medic, calling in a casevac as he broke cover and sprinted down the hillside towards the bomb-site, where the Paras’ own medic was already working frantically to tie a tourniquet around what was left of the soldier’s arm.

  Shepherd swung his rifle back towards the brow of the ridge, and caught a glimpse of the pick-up as it reversed back out of sight. He squeezed off a quick shot but he was at maximum range and with no time to aim it would have been a miracle if he had hit the target. A moment later he saw a cloud of dust billowing above the ridgeline as the driver span the pick-up around and raced away.

  Shepherd could already hear McIntyre in his earpiece, calling in an air-strike on the pick-up, but he knew that the response, whether a Warthog - an A10 Thunderbolt with a rotary cannon that could spit out almost 4,000 rounds a minute - or a stub-winged Blackhawk firing chain guns and Hellfire missiles ,would take four or five minutes to reach the area. By then the Taliban killers who had sent the suicide bomber to his death would already have hidden their vehicle from sight in some cover or abandoned it and gone to ground.

  They saw the distinctive shape of a Warthog in the sky to the west a few minutes later but there were no rumbles of explosions nor bursts of distant cannon-fire; the Taliban had obviously made good their escape.

  The helis arrived soon afterwards to casevac the dead and wounded. Shepherd and his team helped to load them onto the casevac helis and then clambered into the Chinook that would fly them back to the base at Bagram. Bagram was home to more than seven thousand troops, most of them American, housed in huge tented compounds. And while the area surrounding the base was nominally controlled by the coalition forces, it still came under daily rocket attack.

  As soon as they landed back at Bagram they went into an immediate debrief with Major Allan Gannon who had been in overall charge of the operation. Gannon was a big man with a strong chin, his hair bleached from the unrelenting Afghan sun. He was in his shirtsleeves and had a black and white checked keffiyeh scarf tied loosely around his neck as he led the debrief in the windowless, underground briefing room, its air-conditioning a welcome respite from the furnace heat of the Afghan summer.

  As the others focussed on the implications of the Taliban’s new tactic of disguising suicide bombers in burqas, Shepherd found himself thinking through the sequence of events he had witnessed. As he did so, he felt a growing sense of unease. ‘How did they know?’ he said eventually.

  Major Gannon frowned. ‘How did they know what?’ he asked.

  ‘It wasn’t a regular checkpoint,’ said Shepherd. ‘We’d never had troops there before and we hadn’t been in position for more than an hour. So how did the Taliban know we were there? They don’t have suicide bombers wandering around the countryside on the off chance they’ll bump into a patrol or a checkpoint. They target them at places where they know troops will be.’

  Mitchell nodded in agreement, his face still blood-spattered from working on the casualties.

  ‘So the intel was planted?’ said the Major. ‘They lured our boys out there to blow them up?’

  ‘Or the op was bubbled,’ Shepherd said. ‘Compromised before it had even started. Either way, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.’

  ‘It’s not the first time either,’ said Mitchell.

  ‘Seems like everything’s being bubbled at the moment,’ said The Major. ‘It looks as if all our air and ground movements are being monitored.’

  ‘It’s not surprising,’ McIntyre growled, ‘given the small army of domestics, barbers, cleaners, washers up, dhobi wallahs, chai wallahs, et bloody cetera, that we have hanging around the base.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Mitchell. ‘There are fucking hundreds of them kicking around Bagram. No one notices them, they’re just part of the furniture, which makes it all the easier for them to pick up information and pass it on to the Taliban. It’ll only take someone to leave a memory stick lying around and they’ll have the crown jewels.’

  ‘But our ops are getting compromised too’ Shepherd said. ‘And our compound is a self-contained, sterile zone. We don’t have any domestics because we do our own chores, so whatever the source of today’s compromise, it didn’t come from us.’ He looked over the Major. ‘I think you’re right, Boss. I think they’re clocking our flights in and out.’

  Gannon shrugged. ‘It’s a big base, and they’re not going to kick out all the Afghans. The place wouldn’t function without them. All we can do is keep our own security water-tight and have everything on a need to know basis.’

  ‘Which we already do anyway,’ McIntyre said.

  Shepherd nodded. ‘Agreed. But if we need Green Army support on an op, let’s give them the absolute minimum of notice.’

  ‘Aye, right enough,’ McIntyre said. ‘The less time they know something, the less chance of it being compromised.’

  *

  Shepherd was up at dawn the next morning and before the heat of the day became too oppressive he went out for a run around the sprawling, six thousand acre base. As usual he did his running in his boots with a rucksack containing a concrete-block wrapped in old newspapers on his back. As he came out of the gates of the Special Forces’ compound in the dim pre-dawn light, his eye was caught by a movement on the main runway. Lit by the harsh glare of floodlights and watched over by heavily armed American soldiers, a line of a dozen men, all hooded and dressed in identical orange jump suits, were shuffling towards an unmarked transport plane. They were shackled hand and foot, their chains clanking and rattling as they were hustled across the concrete hard-standing and up the loading ramp into the aircraft. By the faint light of the emergency lighting inside the loadspace, Shepherd could see each man being chained to a ring-bolt fixed to the steel floor. Then the ramp was closed and as Shepherd began running around the perimeter, he could hear the engines wind up and saw the plane taxi out and take off into the breaking dawn.

  Shepherd had run ten miles and the sun was well above the horizon by the time he came back towards the gates of the Special Forces compound, sprinting the last four hundred yards flat out. He came to a halt, chest heaving, alongside a familiar figure, an Afghan boy squatting in the dust, with a kettle boiling on a small spirit stove. The boy beamed when he caught sight of Shepherd. ‘Salaam alaikum, Spider. Mint tea?’

  ‘Alaikum salaam, Karim,’ Shepherd said between gasps. ‘Hell yes, but give me a moment to get my breath back and drink some water first.’ He drained the plastic bottle he’d been carrying, wiped the sweat from his brow and then took the cup of hot, sweet green tea from Karim, paying him with a dollar bill from the pocket of his shorts.

  Only twelve years old, with dark, fathomless eyes, and a foot-dragging limp, the result of a broken ankle that had never been properly set, Karim was one of dozens of Afghan Artful Dodgers wheeling, dealing and hustling on the margins of the base. As well as mint tea, he changed money, sold cigarettes singly or in packs, and claimed to be able to lay his hands on almost anything else as well. The first time they’d met, he’d offered to sell Shepherd a Kalashnikov, and just the previous week he’d had a sackful of antiquities, small stone carvings that had been stolen by grave robbers from some ancient site or perhaps even looted from the wrecked Kabul museum. Shepherd liked the boy�
�s spirit and cheeky sense of humour and had got into the habit of stopping to chat to him every morning. Karim was teaching him Pushtu and in return, although the boy already spoke excellent English, Shepherd was teaching him some English slang that wasn’t in any textbook.

  ‘So how’s business, Karim?’ he said.

  ‘Slow, Spider, I need more customers like you.’

  ‘So what’s this week’s special offer – gold bars? Stinger missiles?’

  The boy pretended to be hurt. ‘Don’t mock me, Spider. I can be very useful to you. I don’t just sell things,’ He smiled slyly. ‘I can sell you information too.’

  ‘About what?’ said Shepherd.

  ‘About the Taliban. No one pays any attention to boys like me. I can go anywhere and everywhere, and I keep my eyes and ears open.’

  ‘Oh come, on, Karim. You’re telling me stories here. The Taliban don’t go around talking in front of strangers.’

  Karim broke into a big smile and spread his arms wide. ‘Me? I’m just a simple cripple boy trying to make a living selling tea and cigarettes. No one pays me any attention, Spider. I’m invisible.’

  Shepherd smiled despite himself. ‘Simple is one thing you’re not, Karim, but you need to be careful saying things like that. You’re just a kid, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

  ‘I might be young in your country, Spider, but not here. We Afghans grow up fast - we have to. You pay others for information. Pay me and you will not regret it, I promise.’

  ‘No, forget it, Karim. If the Taliban even suspect you of spying on them, it’ll be your death sentence.’ He pointed a finger at him. ‘I’m serious now. The Taliban are dangerous people, you don’t want to give them an excuse to hurt you.’

  The boy grinned. ‘They won’t suspect - like you said, I’m just a kid.’ He gave Shepherd a calculating look. ‘I’ll tell you something anyway - how do you say it? - a free sample. Don’t pay me anything now, but if you find I spoke the truth, I’ll trust you to pay me afterwards.’