Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page B

Guatemalan soldiers were firing blind, with no real idea of where their enemies were.
    Shepherd expected Pilgrim to lead them back towards Belize immediately, but to his surprise he realised that the SAS veteran was taking them even deeper into Guatemala. He moved at an apparently unhurried pace, more concerned not to leave sign than to speed away from the contact. At their first stop to watch and listen, Pilgrim called them around him and gave a whispered briefing. ‘The Guatemalans will expect us to be heading back to Belize,’ he said. ‘They won’t expect us to be going deeper into Guatemala, so with luck their follow-up searches will be in the wrong area. However, we need to minimise consumption of our rations because if we miss the RV with the infantry on the Belize border, the next stop might have to be the coast.’ 
    They moved on, working their way back to the ridgelines and following animal tracks, well away from any path that the Maya or the Guatemalan army would normally use. An hour before dusk, they looped their track and lay up in ambush in case any troops were following them, then after nightfall they ate a very small meal from their rations and bedded down. Shepherd quickly realised that going without food for a while was not going to be a problem and in fact it seemed to heighten his senses. Even Liam, whose search for food was normally a constant in their daily lives, endured the hardship without complaint.
    For several days they moved on, making no more than a few miles a day, before starting a long slow turn back to the east, towards the Belize border. The following day, as Pilgrim called the usual hourly halt to watch and listen, all of them heard a faint noise in the distance, the sound of men moving as fast as the jungle vegetation would allow.
    ‘We’re being followed,’ Pilgrim said at once. ‘And the only people who can track us through the jungle are the local Maya tribes. The Guatemalans don’t like the jungle but the Maya live in it, it’s their home and they can travel through it faster than anyone, including us, so we need to send them a message not to come too close. Come on, don’t worry about leaving tracks for now, the more the better.’
    For a few hundred yards they hurried on, leaving clear evidence of their passage in the bootprints and bruised and broken plant stems in their wake.  Pilgrim then chopped down a small sapling, pointed the end and set up a pig trap for the people following them, lashing the pointed stake to a whippy sapling and then tying it down to a “trip wire” - a piece of plant stem that would trigger it when a stray boot knocked against it.  ‘I’ve set it at an angle to one side, so it won’t hit the front man who triggers it - he’ll be a Mayan - but it will hit one of the Army guys further back in the patrol and that will slow them down,’ Pilgrim explained.
    They moved on again at once, still taking less trouble to conceal their tracks. Pilgrim explained that however carefully they concealed their tracks, the Mayan would read it as if he was reading a book. So speed was more important. They looped their track and lay up in ambush towards nightfall but the Guatemalans did not enter the trap. None of the SAS men slept that night and they moved on again at first light. As soon as they paused, they again heard the Guatemalans pursuing them.
    By mid-afternoon, they were close to the Belizean border but were still being followed.  ‘We can’t afford to lead the enemy too close to the RV with the infantry and certainly not to the LZ,’ Pilgrim said. ‘We need to buy ourselves some more time. We’ve got to frighten them but not kill them. One or two senior officers dying fifty miles from the border can be explained away as the fall-out from a dispute with the drugs traffickers about bribes, but like our brave colonel almost said, too many dead soldiers on the border could start an international incident.’
    They again doubled back on their