Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 Read Online Free PDF

supposed to be doing in the first place. And with luck, I can then get back to Hereford and a few pints of decent beer.’
    Ibro led them back through the ruined city and they said their farewells at the entrance to the tunnel. He hugged them one by one. ‘Thank you my friends,’ he said. ‘We shall not forget how you helped us.’
    ‘Let’s hope so,’ Harry said, ‘because we’d hate to be back here fighting against you next time.’
    ‘There is no chance of that,’ Ibro said. ‘We kill Serbs but we do not kill our friends.’
    ‘Then we’ll hope it stays that way, for all our sakes.’
    ‘You weren’t very gracious,’ Diesel said to Harry, as they moved away along the tunnel, with Shepherd and Gus behind them again struggling under the weight of the LTD.
    ‘I don’t do gracious,’ Harry said. ‘I just do cautious.’
    Back at their base, Harry called them together. ‘That job was just us easing the pain for the Muslims in Sarajevo. But the next op is designed to help them do a bit more themselves to even the score.’
    ‘Meaning what?’ Shepherd said.
    Harry just smiled. ‘You’ll see. Now we’re going to be taking just a few days rations and I expect us to be back at base in five days maximum. Our primary task is to bring in airdrops at night with supplies for the Muslims, so I need to give you new boys a bit of instruction on the technique for bringing in a resupply drop. As it’s a NATO operation in Bosnia, we will be using NATO Standard Operating Procedures. They were developed during World War Two and never updated, which either means that they were so good they never needed improvement…’
    ‘Or?’ Shepherd said, as Harry allowed the silence to grow.
    ‘Or they’re hopelessly outdated but nobody’s got round to doing anything about it.’
    ‘Let’s hope it’s the former then, shall we?’ Shepherd said with a laugh.
    They took off after dark, flying in on a Blackhawk helicopter, escorted by two F-16s. Harry explained it was easier getting a US helicopter than a Crab Air - an RAF - helicopter. ‘We give them expertise, they give us kit. End result: everybody happy.’
    The skies were clear and with no moon, they flew under a star-speckled sky, with the pilot wearing PNGs. The patrol wore theirs too. It was Shepherd’s first experience of wearing them in the air and he was fascinated by the eerie view they gave of the earth below them, with even the weak glow of starlight making patches of open ground flare a bright yellow in his vision.
    The helicopter skimmed a last ridge-line and then dropped in the stomach-lurching plunge to the valley floor. It hovered for no more than a few seconds as the patrol tumbled out and went into all-round defence, then the Blackhawk rose into the sky and wheeled away back the way it had come.
    The Muslim militiamen that the Paras had been working with had secured the landing site and Shepherd now introduced the patrol to their leader, Zlatan, whose narrow eyes and hooked nose gave him a predatory air. Shepherd spent the next hour familiarising his comrades with the ground and the other leading personalities among the Muslims. They greeted the patrol members with grins and bear-hugs, but Harry, although polite, was cool with them. ‘They’re our friends now,’ he murmured to Shepherd, ‘and the Serbs are the enemy. But a few years ago it was exactly the bleeding opposite and who knows, in another couple of years it might be the other way round again. Don’t forget this is a political war, the Germans and Russians back the Serbs, the Yanks back the Muslims and we just follow the Yanks. Keep detached and stay safe.’
    Shepherd nodded and didn’t say anything. He didn’t care much for politics, or for looking for explanations. So far as he was concerned he was a soldier and his job was to follow orders.
    That night found the patrol lying in a field in the bottom of the valley. They had laid out recognition markings to identify their positions.