Spider Shepherd: SAS: #2 (14 page)

The noise of the gunfire, the metallic thwock of rounds piercing the pick-ups’ metal skins and the whine and howl of ricochets was terrifying to men who were still barely awake. The result was instant panic, with the terrified terrorists scattering in all directions. Some of them jumped into their pick-ups, started them up and disappeared at high speed into the desert, trailing clouds of dust. But others, having also scrambled to their vehicles, brought their heavy weapons to bear and began opening up with them at the fleeing terrorists, apparently oblivious to the fact that they were shooting at their own comrades. In the continuing panic and confusion, Joe and Shepherd were able to stealthily guide the two boys away, belly crawling across the ground while the rest of the patrol kept the terrorists’ heads down with further barrages of fire.

While Jock, Geordie and Jimbo continued to cover their retreat, Shepherd and Joe reached the riverbank with the two boys and slid quietly into the water. They began making their way slowly downstream, soon followed by the other three, with Jock announcing their arrival by quietly moaning, to himself as much as to the others, ‘I hate fucking water ops’.

‘Of course you hate water ops,’ Geordie said. ‘You’re from Glasgow, you’re allergic to water, full stop. That’s why there’s probably no bathroom in that hovel you call home.’

They emerged from the river a couple of miles downstream, crossed the fields to a farm-track heading north, parallel to the river, and began cautiously moving along it in classic patrolling style, with Shepherd as lead scout, the boys shielded in the middle of the line of SAS men, and Joe as “tail end Charlie” bringing up the rear, checking constantly behind him for signs of pursuit.

Moving by the little-used paths and tracks crossing the crop fields to avoid passing through settlements, by later that morning, the patrol had moved well downstream and brought the boys close to a ferry crossing, where a party of American and Japanese tourists were waiting, their eyes fixed on the ferry that was just setting out from the far bank. Just beyond the jetty on that side, Shepherd could see the flags fluttering above the luxury hotel where the boys had been staying.

They waited with them until the ferry had docked on the near bank and the tourists began to board. ‘Right,’ Shepherd said. ‘You need to get out of Egypt as quick as you can. Do not speak a word to anyone about anything, particularly about the people who helped you escape. If anyone asks - and they will - you tell them that you did it on your own. You managed to undo the ropes they’d tied you up with and slipped away from the terrorists’ camp while they were sleeping. Now get your arses on that ferry. Once you’re on, sit down and stare straight ahead. Stay on the fringes of the tourist party until you reach the hotel, then go inside, pack your bags, grab your passports and check out. Take a taxi straight to the airport, get on the first flight back to the USA and, if you’ve got any sense, this will be your first and last visit to the Middle East.’

Numb with fatigue, the younger boy merely nodded, muttered ‘Thank you,’ and began to head off towards the ferry, but his older brother stood his ground. ‘You can’t just dump us here,’ he said in a nasal East Coast whine. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘It’s perfectly safe,’ Shepherd said, ‘as long as you do what I’ve just told you to do.’

‘And I’m telling you that we’re not doing that,’ the boy said, folding his arms defiantly. ‘Do you have any idea who my father is? You’ll take us to the US Embassy now or my father will get to hear of it.’

Shepherd exchanged a world-weary glance with his comrades. ‘Let me handle this,’ Jock said. He picked the boy up by his lapels, so his feet were dangling above the ground. ‘Now you listen to me, you ungrateful little shit,’ he said, his mouth just inches from the terrified boy’s face. ‘We just saved your miserable lives back there. Do you think those terrorists were taking you out into the desert for popcorn and movies? And you know what? We’re not even looking for any gratitude from you for risking our lives to save yours. All we want you to do is to do as you’re told: get on that ferry, get your passports and get out of here. And don’t bother threatening us with what your big bad daddy might do. We know exactly who he is and the person we answer to is a lot higher up the food chain; he’d eat your father for breakfast and shit him out afterwards.’

He paused, holding the boy’s gaze and keeping him lifted off the ground, feet dangling. ‘So,’ Jock said at last. ‘If you’re still standing here, arguing the toss, by the time I’ve counted to three, I’ll either shoot you where you stand or, even better, we’ll take you back up the river and hand you back to your new best friends. And, having had their nights sleep disturbed and at least a couple of their friends shot dead, I don’t imagine that they are in the best of tempers. Ready? One… Two…’ He didn’t get to “Three” because the boy and his brother were already sprinting for the ferry as if their lives depended on it.

‘Ever the diplomat,’ Geordie said.

‘No more and no less than the little prick deserved.’

They watched to make sure the boys actually boarded the ferry and waited until it begin to pull away from the jetty, then turned to retrace their steps towards the south. ‘Now the real fun starts,’ Shepherd said.

They trekked back along the river, avoiding well-used roads and tracks and skirting the settlements they encountered, until they reached the place where they had cached the buggies the previous night. They collected the spare fuel, explosives and ammunition, and then set out to track the terrorists, wherever their trail might lead.

They first rode south for a couple of miles, aiming to pick up the trail from the terrorist encampment where they had rescued the boys. All of them found riding the desert buggies a strange experience at first. Apart from a few circuits of the US Navy warship’s foredeck, none of them had ridden the buggies before, and it took a while to get used to their handling characteristics. Even more disconcerting, though, was the lack of engine noise and Shepherd found himself checking the speedometer, just to be sure the buggy really was responding to the throttle.

When they reached the site of the previous contact with the terrorists, they found that Egyptian vultures were already feasting on the spoils, tearing at the sun-blackened flesh of the bodies of three dead terrorists, while jackals prowled the fringes, wary of the vultures’ cruel, hooked beaks, but seeking the chance to steal some of the carrion for themselves.

Jimbo shuddered and looked away. ‘Jesus, I’m not sure even a terrorist deserves to end up like that.’

Jock shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘You’re not going soft on us, are you? Just be glad that it’s not you on the menu.’

After circling the campsite, they picked up the terrorists’ trail from the pattern of tyre treads their pick-ups had cut into the earth. They were pointing west, towards the desert, just visible beyond the fertile lands of the Nile valley floor. They went slowly at first, picking their way along the dusty tracks flanking the crop fields and palm plantations, and pausing frequently where two tracks intersected to make sure that they were not losing the terrorists’ trail.

The crops thinned and grew more stunted as they travelled further from the river behind them, with the irrigation channels increasingly silted with sand blown in from the desert.

Finally they reached the edge of the fertile zone: a line straight as a ruler drawn across the terrain. Behind them were green fields, tall palms and trickling water. Ahead of them there was only sand and rock with the burning heat of the sun rising from it in shimmering waves. Shepherd paused long enough to wind a scarf around his mouth and nose, in an attempt to keep the dust and fine sand out of them, then led the way as they gunned their engines and headed out across the desert wastes.

They followed the tyre tracks, still running arrow-straight towards the west. They were travelling at speed, reaching up to fifty miles an hour over the hard, rocky surfaces, though moving slower over the patches of soft sand and dunes. But even when travelling flat out, they were doing so in almost complete silence with even the faint whisper from the buggies’ exhausts carried away on the breeze. Disconcerting to him at first, Shepherd had now adjusted to it and was enjoying riding the buggy, which seemed to take all the different desert terrains in its stride. Its lightweight and broad, soft tyres made light work of the low sand dunes they crossed, and it was also stable and powerful enough to speed across the stony plateaus, swerving around the boulders that dotted the surface.

They climbed steadily away from the Nile Valley, crossing some dunes, but mainly traversing rocky, exposed terrain known as hamada - wind-stripped plains of loose rock and gravel, that would have made the trail harder to follow had it not been for the tyre treads imprinted in the frequent patches of dust and soft sand.

They were able to travel much quicker on their tricycle buggies than the terrorist pick-ups, heavily laden as they were with the weight of men, supplies, heavy weapons and ammunition that they were carrying.

The SAS men were rapidly beginning to overhaul the terrorists, and eventually they began glimpsing the dust-trail the column of vehicles left as they headed west across the desert in front of them. All the time Shepherd’s earpiece stayed suspiciously quiet. The Head Shed would know exactly where they were from the AWACS monitoring their movements and though there had been no ‘Go’ for a pursuit of the terrorists, nor had there been a ‘No Go’ either. Shepherd and his patrol mates took that silence as acquiescence.

They had been travelling across a high, stony plateau for some time when Shepherd saw the land ahead of them dip steeply away. They found themselves on the edge of a steep escarpment, dropping almost sheer for a thousand feet. Through his binoculars, Shepherd could see the terrorists pulling to a halt a couple of miles away from the foot of the escarpment, and beginning to “laager up” their vehicles, like Boer trekkers in South Africa, parking them in a classic, circular formation deep inside a wadi running due west. They were clearly preparing to camp there for the night.

Around them, stretching away to the west and south as far as the eye could see, was a strange, almost lunar landscape in a patchwork of colours and textures: areas of yellow and white sand, and the pink-tinged exposed rock, giving way to the dark, crescent-shaped shadows cast by steep sand-dunes, and then mud-brown areas, gleaming white salt pans and in the distance, the glint of what might have been a lake, or a mirage. In places Shepherd could also see strange, rounded rock columns, rising like giant mushrooms from the desert floor. ‘What the hell is this place?’ Jock said. ‘It’s like no desert I’ve ever seen.’

‘It’s called the Qattara Depression,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a massive area, something like 7,500 square miles stretching across the Libyan border to the west and to the edge of the Great Sand Sea to the south. It’s about 450 feet below sea level and most of it is a wilderness of salt pans, salt marshes and treacherous stretches of dunes and soft sand. Nothing grows in the Depression except acacia groves in the drier areas and reed beds in the swamps.’

‘Swamps? In the desert?’

‘Don’t forget that it’s well below sea level, so what water there is all drains into the Depression and it retains all the water that flows into it; there’s no outflow at all, though obviously there’s a fearsome loss to evaporation. No doubt one day there’ll be nothing here but a vast salt-pan, but for the moment there’s enough water to form a brackish lake covering about four square miles in the north-eastern corner of the Depression and, as well as the swamps, there’s also an oasis on the south-western side that’s so big that if you stand at one end, the far end is invisible beyond the horizon.’

‘Even so, how do the trees survive?’ Jimbo said.

‘They put down very deep tap roots and use the run-off from the rains, when they come, and the groundwater deep below the surface to survive.’

‘So does anybody live here?’

‘There are a few hundred people, some nomadic Bedouins and their flocks, but mostly Berbers, living in small, isolated oases, and maybe a few thousand people in the Siwa oasis. Oh and there are a few oil prospectors as well and a handful of oilfields. The Berbers grow huge quantities of dates and olives, and there are goats and Barbary sheep and quite a bit of game around the swamps and acacia groves - hares if you can get to them before the desert foxes and jackals, and gazelles if you can beat the cheetahs to them.’

‘How come you know all this, Joe?’

‘I’m an Arabist, I spent almost all of my time on active service in the Middle East, a lot of it in the Libyan Desert.’ He showed them the gold signet ring he wore, with a translucent yellow-green stone set in it. ‘One other strange thing about this desert. The stone is Libyan desert glass; Tutankhamen had a piece of this in some of his jewellery, so I’m in good company. You can find pieces of it scattered over an area of hundreds of square kilometres of the desert. It’s tens of millions of years old and some people say it was formed when meteorites crashed into the earth or exploded in mid-air, though no one really knows where it comes from.’

He paused. ‘Anyway, we need to overhaul the terrorists before they get much further into the Depression, because the terrain from here on in is very difficult. In the Second World War, the first and second Battles of El Alamein were fought between here and the coast. Both commanders constructed their defensive lines there because they could not be outflanked - the Depression and its surrounding cliffs were thought to be impassable, not just to tanks but to any military vehicles. That wasn’t quite true - there are ways through and the Long Range Desert Group, who often guided the original SAS across the Western Desert to their targets, sometimes used them - but the terrain is treacherous. Do you know what fech fech is?’