Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

every scrap of natural cover. Even so, his flesh was creeping, every sense tuned for the crack of a rifle. He reached the body, stooped for an instant, grabbed the beret and then sprinted back. As he ducked into the shadow of a boulder, he felt as much as heard a burst of Serb rounds chewing the earth around him and the whine of a bullet that almost parted his hair. A heartbeat later there was the thunder of answering gunfire as Harry and Diesel, spotting the muzzle flashes, sent a torrent of rounds towards them. Shepherd was already up and running again, diving for the cover of the tree line as the SAS men again loosed off suppressing fire.
    As he got to his feet, chest heaving, with his Para beret clenched in his hand, Harry gave him a pitying look. ‘Like I said, it’s just a hat.’
    Shepherd grinned. ‘It’s a lucky hat now.’ He pointed to the neat hole the Serb sniper round had drilled an inch or so to the left of the cap badge.
    ‘I don’t see how you work that out,’ Diesel said. ‘It wasn’t too lucky for that bloody Ivan, was it? He got bleeding drilled while he was wearing it.’
    ‘That’s what makes it lucky for me,’ Shepherd said. ‘Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, right?’
    ‘Yeah, you keep believing that,’ Harry said, ‘and Diesel and me will be acting as pall bearers at your funeral. Superstitions like that will get you killed. There’s only one thing will keep you alive and that’s your skill at soldiering, and you don’t get that from the colour of the hat you wear.’
    Shepherd grimaced but didn’t say anything.
    ‘You’re good already, but if you want to be the best, there’s only one place to learn that: apply for SAS Selection,’ said Harry. ‘If you’re good enough, you’ll get in. And from what I’ve seen, you’re good enough. You’ll enjoy it. We don’t do marching, saluting, yes sir, no sir, or any of that Green Army bullshit. We just do what we do and we do it better than anyone. You should give it a try.’
    ‘You know what? Maybe I will,’ Shepherd said. And as soon as he said it, he knew that one day he surely would. He’d finally found a branch of the military that he figured he could thrive in.
     

NATURAL SELECTION
     
     
    BELIZE.
    April 1996.
     
    Dan Shepherd sat on the edge of a clearing, staring at a column of leaf-cutter ants carrying shards of tamarind leaves on an endless trek through the deep litter of the forest floor. He and his comrades were deep in the Belizean jungle, several days walk from the nearest road. ‘Don’t blame the ants, it’s not their fault.’
    He glanced up. His mate Liam McKay was watching him with a quizzical expression in his dark eyes. ‘Last time I saw a man look that pissed off, he’d just been told his leave had been cancelled.’ Liam’s mother was from Belfast and even though they’d moved to England when he was only five, there were still faint echoes of a Northern Irish brogue when he spoke. They’d met on their first day on Selection and immediately hit it off.  Liam was now a good mate, and he was also the hardest man Shepherd had ever met - and he’d known a few.
    The Jungle Training part of Selection came after almost twenty weeks of the most intensive special forces course in the world. SAS Selection began in Hereford with a one-week briefing course with swimming, navigation, first aid and combat fitness tests and a lot of runs up and down the local hills. That was followed by a month on the SAS’s fitness and navigation course based at the Sennybridge Training Camp in Wales including the army’s Combat Fitness Test – 45 press-ups and 55 sit-ups in two minutes each followed by a mile and half run in under nine and a half minutes. Neither had been a problem for Shepherd, he had spent the year prior to Selection getting himself into peak physical condition. While at Sennybridge, Shepherd had been introduced to the Fan Dance – a gruelling fifteen-mile run over two sides of Pen Y