Spider Shepherd: SAS: #2 (8 page)

‘Yeah?’ Jock said. ‘Well, he’s a mate and we’re having dinner with him tonight. Get used to it.’

‘It’s nice to see that you haven’t lost any of your diplomatic charm,’ Geordie said to Jock as they walked away from the embassy.

‘Diplomacy my arse,’ Jock said. ‘A mate’s a mate, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Guy’s got a point, though,’ said Shepherd. ‘By hanging out with him, it might look as if the British Government is giving him their support.’

‘So what?” said Jock. ‘He’d make a better politician than the shower we’ve got back in the UK.’

‘No argument here,’ said Shepherd.

They spent the rest of the day exploring Kathmandu and that evening they met up with Gul in a Chinese restaurant. ‘Bloody hell, Gul,’ Jock said, as soon as they were seated. ‘I’ve really been looking forward to my first proper Gurkha curry in years and here we are eating bloody Chinese.’

Gul laughed. ‘Most of the upmarket restaurants in Kathmandu are foreign, my friend, and the best of them are Chinese, so here we are. But next time we meet, we’ll eat Gurkha food. You must come to the recruiting day at the Gurkha base in Pokhara tomorrow. It’s really something to see and there we will eat the real Gurkha food, I promise.’

They left the restaurant much later, after a big meal and quite a few beers and black rums, and strolled back through the still-crowded streets. ‘Bloody hell, will you look at that?’ Jimbo was pointing up the street. Shepherd followed his gaze and saw an aged Nepali carrying a six foot by four foot steel security cabinet on his back up a steep hill. ‘I know from bitter experience that one of those is a four-man lift,’ Jimbo said, ‘but there’s an elderly gent managing it all on his own.’

Gul gave a proud smile. ‘Never underestimate the strength and determination of the Gurkha, my friend. Many of our enemies have made that mistake down the years, and always to their cost.’

Even as they were sauntering along, deep in conversation, Shepherd was still keeping a wary eye on their surroundings. It was so deeply ingrained a part of SAS training that it had become second nature. Now his antennae had detected something in the ebb and flow of the people around them: a group of young men, moving through the crowds behind them with a common purpose.

He double-checked, using the reflection in the windscreen of one of the few cars parked in the street and then alerted the others. ‘We’ve got company,’ he said.

Suddenly sober, everyone’s survival instincts kicked in. From the surrounding alleys a gang of teenage thugs had appeared, armed with a variety of weapons, including Gurkha khukris - vicious knives with a curved blade. The next moment, Shepherd, Gul and the others were locked in a vicious, bloody street brawl with no quarter given, as they fought for their lives. As a thug ran at him, slashing at his face with his khukri, Shepherd swayed back to let the wickedly curved blade whistle past his chest, then doubled his attacker up with a kick to the groin and sent him down and out with a chop to the neck and a stamp with his booted heel to the Nepali’s face as he slumped to the ground.

The next one was already on him, but Shepherd dispatched him with a series of rapid-fire blows: the heel of his hand to the thug’s nose, a raking stamp down the shins and onto the instep - agonising for the victim - and then an elbow to the head put him down.

His last assailant turned and ran for it, even dropping his knife as he did so in his panic to get away, but Shepherd at once turned to target one of the three thugs still surrounding Gul. The Gurkha had already flattened one attacker but was being hard-pressed by the others until Shepherd poleaxed one of them with a blow to the back of his head and spread another’s nose all over his face with a vicious straight-arm punch. Gul meanwhile dealt with the other one, letting out a blood-curdling war cry as he rained down a fusillade of blows on him. Jock, Geordie and Jimbo were finishing off the remnants of the attackers. Battered and bleeding, they scrambled to their feet and stumbled away into the maze of surrounding streets, the last one sped on his way by Jimbo’s Size 12 boot up his backside.

‘That was fun,’ Jock said as they got their breath back. ‘Kathmandu's a lot less boring than Akrotiri any day of the week.’

‘Anyone hurt?’ Shepherd said.

‘Just me,’ Geordie said, examining a deep cut in the side of his hand. ‘Bloody hell, it’s through to the bone. Some of those little bastards had khukris!’

‘Well you’re the patrol medic, aren’t you,’ Jock said, showing not a trace of sympathy. ‘Physician heal thy bloody self, as Shakespeare once said.’

‘In fact that quote comes from the Bible, you ignorant Scots git,’ Geordie said. ‘ And anyway, I’ve got a better idea. It’s a two-handed job, so I’ll tell you what to do while you bloody suture it up for me.’

While Jock patched Geordie up, Shepherd turned to Gul. ‘What was that about?’

‘I don’t know. Street violence like that is almost unknown here. Perhaps they just saw a group of Westerners and thought they’d rob you.’

‘They didn’t seem like they had robbery on their minds,’ said Shepherd. ‘And they can’t have been targeting us deliberately because nobody knew we were in town. Besides, they seemed to be focusing on you, which suggests that you were their target.’

‘He’s right, Gul,’ Jimbo said. ‘They’d followed us from the market area and tried to set up an ambush. It was planned.’

Gul brushed their concerns away. ‘Well, if they were targeting me, it was probably just a case of mistaken identity. Don’t worry about it.’

The following day, Shepherd was coming back from his morning run, chest heaving with the effort required in the thin air, when he saw the Military Attaché striding towards their quarters with a face like thunder. ‘Get your men together,’ he said, ignoring Shepherd’s greeting. When they were all assembled, he let rip. ‘I told you to keep your distance from Gul, but I now discover that not only did you ignore my request but you were also involved in an ugly street brawl with him last night.’

‘News travels fast,’ Shepherd said. ‘ But we were attacked without provocation. What do you expect us to do, let them cut us to pieces?’

‘You should not have been with Gul. As I expressly warned you, it’s an implicit message of British support for his political candidacy, which is not at all the message we wish to send. The Nepalese government is furious and the ambassador has already been summoned to receive a bollocking in person.’

‘So what about our attackers?’ asked Shepherd. ‘What’s being done to trace them? They shouldn’t be too hard to find because they’ll be nursing a few broken noses and black eyes.’

Jenner gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘The Nepalese authorities are keeping a tight lid on the whole affair, because they’re terrified about the detrimental effect that reports of street violence might have on the tourist trade.’ He paused. ‘So, the sooner you four are on the Herc back to Cyprus, the happier I’ll be, and meanwhile I would be grateful if you could avoid making any further waves around here.’

‘So the next time we’re attacked, you’d just like us to lie back and take it, would you?’

Jenner’s eyes hardened. ‘No, I’d like you to make sure there isn’t a next time. And do not see Gul again, that’s an order.’

‘Tough,’ Jock said. ‘You’re not part of our chain of command, so we don’t take orders from you, and we’re seeing Gul this afternoon in Pokhara.’

After their frosty confrontation with Jenner, Shepherd used the Diplomatic Service telegram secure signals system to speak to Jamie, the Ops Officer, back in Hereford and obtain permission to go west.

They then borrowed the MA’s Landrover - without his knowledge, for he’d now left Kathmandu with the Gurkha recruiters. They loaded their operational kit into the Landrover, stocked up with food from the market and then set off for Pokhara. That chilly December afternoon found them on a sports field alongside a spectacular river gorge on the outskirts of Pokhara.

A group of five hundred young Nepalis, all dressed alike in British Army issue physical training kit - blue shorts with a red top and brown canvas shoes - were sitting cross-legged in an atmosphere dripping with tension. They were patiently waiting to be processed, issued with an identifying number and then put through a gruelling series of physical and mental tests. Those that passed would be eligible to join the Brigade of Gurkhas. They were being watched by an audience of several thousand spectators

‘This is just the final stage,’ Gul said. ‘They started with several thousand volunteers and the competition is so fierce that there are always about 25,000 applicants a year, competing for just 200 places. That’s more than 100 for every single place. Recruiting is like the bloody Pied Piper. We send “Galla Wallahs” - former Gurkhas - up into the hills and each of them comes back with a few hundred would-be Gurkha recruits trailing behind him. Most still come from the martial castes: Gurungs and Magars from central Nepal, and Rais and Limbus from the east. They’ve bred soldiers for centuries, but we make sure that Gurkha Selection is free and fair - no one is chosen or excluded because of their caste or their family’s influence. In fact it’s almost the only thing in Nepal that isn’t governed by an accident of birth, geography or caste. Becoming a Gurkha remains a great source of pride and families sacrifice a lot to help their sons prepare for Gurkha Selection. The earnings of those who succeed are enormous by Nepalese standards, enabling their parents to retire and securing the future of their families, but it’s a brutal process; those who fail, return to their villages with only their bus fares.’

‘What’s with the red dot?’ Geordie asked with his usual irreverence, pointing to the mark that many of the young candidates had painted on their foreheads. ‘Is that to help the snipers sight on them?’

‘It’s what we call a tilaka,’ Gul said. ‘It’s a religious thing, before they travel here for Selection - and some have travelled day and night for three days from their villages to get here - they are blessed by a Brahmin who paints a red tilaka on their foreheads. Most of them get a haircut as well.’

Gul explained that the applicants were sorted into groups of fifty and each group rotated through the assessment, ranging from a timed run over an army obstacle course, press-ups, pull-ups, carrying a man over a hundred yard dash using the fireman’s lift, and finally a lung-bursting “doko run”.

‘What’s a doko run?’ Shepherd said.

‘It’s a three mile run carrying a seventy pound doko or rucksack, over dusty, rough and rocky tracks, up a gradient that climbs 1500 feet. The doko is the traditional wicker basket carried on our backs, with most of the weight borne by a broad strap across our foreheads. It’s the toughest physical challenge any British Army recruit has to face, but most applicants succeed.’

‘In the SAS we have the Fan Dance, where we run up and down a mountain,’ said Geordie. ‘It separates the men from the boys, all right.’

‘All the Gurkha applicants are fit to start with,’ said Gul. ‘Fitness is never an issue. The hardest tests to pass are the mental and written ones. The candidates may never have heard English spoken by a native speaker, but if they join the Gurkhas they have to respond instantly to orders in English. So even before they start training we need to be sure that they have the ability to understand and respond instantly to orders. It’s a ruthless process - a bit like SAS Selection.’

‘Not really,’ Jock said. ‘Because if there’d been an intelligence test in SAS Selection let alone a written one, Geordie would never have got through it. He can’t add two and two without a calculator and his handwriting looks like a spider has had diarrhoea and then crawled across a piece of paper.’

‘At least I can write and talk,’ Geordie said. ‘All you and your fellow Picts do is grunt at each other.’

‘What happens if they fail?’ Shepherd said. ‘Is that it?’

‘Not immediately, they can reapply up to three more times until they’re twenty-one, but after that, it’s over for them. It’s heart-breaking to see the faces of those who’ve failed for the final time, because they know that for their families, so much depends on them.’

They fell silent as the tests began. Many in the crowd were former Gurkhas themselves and they watched every move with critical eyes. The group being selected carried out the tests impassively, their faces revealing none of the physical strain and psychological pressure they must have been feeling. ‘Hell fire, Gul,’ Shepherd said, ‘none of them have even broken sweat.’

Gul shrugged. ‘We’re used to living and working at altitude, and everything here is man-carried because our mountain tracks aren’t well-suited to vehicles or horses and carts. But there are a lot of other things for us to get used to. When I joined the Gurkhas, I’d never seen Western food - I brought a piece of yak’s milk cheese with me, wrapped in a leaf, in case I couldn’t eat the Army food.’

‘You weren’t wrong there,' Shepherd said. ‘You don’t have to come from Nepal to find Army food inedible.’

‘I and many of those selected with me also had to be taught to use a knife and fork,’ Gul continued. ‘And after a lifetime of wearing sandals or flip-flops, or going barefoot, we had to adjust to wearing army boots and learn to tie shoelaces. We’d never seen flush toilets or showers either; we used to wash every morning in the icy meltwater of the river. And of course Nepal is a land-locked country, so none of us had ever seen the sea. But do you want to know the strangest thing of all? We live our lives within sight of snow - Annapurna, Everest and the Himalayan peaks fill our northern horizon - but it never snows here in the valleys and the first time most Gurkhas ever experience snow is when they arrive at Catterick for their basic training. Selection is always in December so they do their training in January and February every year.’