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

can’t jeopardise that by initiating contact now, with only a couple of hours to sundown, but they look like they’re settling themselves into the night. Let’s do the job, then come back here and give them payback for what they did to the village.’ There were no dissenting voices. They returned to the beach and finished their preparations for the beach landing. As the appointed time approached, Shepherd placed two infrared torches at either side of the beach, one red, one green, to denote port and starboard, and in the centre he placed a line of torches showing white, denoting the centre of the landing area. It was low tide, the perfect time for a beach landing.
    At 00.53, two minutes before the H-hour, Shepherd began flashing the Morse signal for the letter S, three short dots, using a torch masked off to show only a narrow strip of light.  Two minutes later, to their amazement a Landing Ship Tank of Second World War vintage, belching smoke from its stack, came clanking and rattling out of the darkness. Its ramp crashed down and a series of Russian-made armoured vehicles began emerging from the interior of the ship. They were led by a BTR-60, a Russian troop carrier. Like most Russian military vehicles it was amphibious, able to negotiate shallow seas or rivers.  Several more BTR-60s and then a couple of armoured BRDM combat reconnaissance vehicles followed. What caused Shepherd’s jaw to drop even further was the fact that at the back of the column were a couple of tracked ZSU-23-4s, armoured, self-propelled and radar-guided anti-aircraft guns.
    Shepherd shook his head, wondering if he was having hallucinations. It made no sense that Russian equipment was coming ashore in support of a British operation, but it was even stranger that ZSU-23-4s were arriving. They were purely of use as anti-aircraft weapons and, according to the briefing before the op, the only aircraft in Sierra Leone were British.  He exchanged a questioning glance with Jock, then shrugged his shoulders; his job was to do what he was told to do and not ask too many questions. 
    The vehicles rumbled past them, churning up the sand and knocking aside small trees and bushes as they roared up the beach.  Shepherd could see that the guys riding in the turrets of the armoured vehicles were white but the rest of the crews were black. None of the vehicle crews even acknowledged the SAS men, but Shepherd heard a couple of shouted orders and immediately recognised South African accents.  Suddenly the Russian vehicles made sense – they had probably been captured in Angola during one of the many regional conflicts in which South Africa has been involved in the apartheid era.
    The convoy disappeared into the scrub of Sierra Leone and that was the end of the mission for Shepherd and his team.  As they reassembled, Jock was still shaking his head. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’
    Geordie nodded. ‘What the hell are South African mercs doing in Sierra Leone on a British Government sponsored mission?’
    ‘Keeping it at arm’s length, I guess,’ Shepherd said. ‘HMG doesn’t want to be seen to be involved in the fighting here - maybe too many echoes of colonial times - so they hire some mercs to do the job instead.’
    Jimbo scratched his head. ‘Which is?’
    ‘Who knows?’ said Shepherd. ‘Keep the government in power, overthrow the government - one of those, probably.’
    ‘If you ask me,’ Jock said. ‘This isn’t really about governments at all, it’s about minerals.’
    ‘Well we’ll have time to ponder that later,’ said Shepherd. ‘For the moment we’ve  got some unfinished business.’
    Wearing their NVGs, they made their way back past the still smouldering ruins of the village and along the route they had scouted that afternoon. Even though it was the early hours, the rebels were still awake, high on a cocktail of drugs, alcohol and adrenaline.  The captured boys from the village were still herded together in a circle, with