Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story)

NATURAL SELECTION

By Stephen Leather

***

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 grueling fifteen-mile run over two sides of Pen Y Fan, the highest mountain in the Brecon Beacons, with a fully-loaded bergen. The fourth week of the hills phase had been a killer. The instructors - the Directing Staff – called it test week and it consisted of six marches on consecutive days with increasing distances and weights carried. The final day was a forty mile march across the Brecon Beacons with a fifty-five pound bergen which had to be completed in less than twenty hours. It had been pouring down with rain the entire march but Shepherd and Liam had completed it in a little over eighteen hours. Those that hadn’t failed or quit went on to do fourteen weeks of weapons, vehicle, demolitions and patrol tactics before they were flown to Belize for the six-week jungle training course.

‘I’m not pissed off,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just a bit disillusioned I guess. I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere, you know?’

‘We’ve flown half way around the world,’ laughed Liam. ‘That not good enough for you?’

Shepherd grinned. ‘You know what I mean, you daft sod.  I thought we’d be part of the elite, the absolute ultimate in soldiering, but-’ he dropped his voice and gestured around them. ‘I mean, this is supposed to be the best Regiment in the world but there’s a real lack of intensity in a lot of the training we’ve been doing. I was more tested on some of the stuff I did with the Paras, and I don’t rate some of the guys we’re training with. A few are keen enough but the others…’  He shrugged. ‘Some of the guys here just aren’t putting in the effort. Seems to me they’re doing the minimum, just enough to get by.’

‘Fair comment,’ said Liam. ‘But not everyone wants to be an action hero like us. Some of them will be happy enough with a base or admin post, or signals.’

‘Action hero?’

Liam laughed. ‘You know what I mean. You love it, Dan. The guns, the flash bangs, the jumping out of planes. You’re an adrenaline junkie.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘You just don’t see it, but it’s true.’ He held up his hands. ‘Hey, I love it as much as you do. That’s why I wanted to join the SAS. Best unit in the army, no question.’

‘I’m not doing it for the buzz,’ said Shepherd.

Liam raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

‘Seriously, I’m doing it because the SAS are the best, like you said. The Paras are great, but even they don’t come close.’ He looked around to check that none of the Directing Staff were within earshot. ‘To be honest, I don’t rate some of the trainers and their “big time” attitudes either.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Liam said. ‘They’re supposed to lead by example, aren’t they? But a couple of them got the local tribesmen to build their bashas for them - and they’re a lot more luxurious than the others have got, let alone ours. And then they spend a lot of time lying around in them, lording it over the rest of us.’ 

Only the oldest SAS men had ever served in Malaysia but the use of “bazaar Malay” words was still common in the Regiment.  Barrack rooms, jungle shelters and accommodation areas anywhere in the world were always referred to as the “basha” - the Malay word for hut or shelter.

‘That three weeks of “Hard Routine” we did,’ Shepherd said, ‘two-man patrols, carrying minimum kit, sleeping on the ground and eating minimum cold rations, with no cooking allowed - that was the real deal and the way it should be every day, trying to replicate what it’ll be like when we’re actually on active service out in the real world. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘You’re a masochist, mate,’ said Liam.

By now, Geordie Mitchell and Jim “Jimbo” Shortt had also wandered over to join them. Jimbo was a couple of years older than the rest of the team. His pale blue eyes seemed faded by the sun and even in his mid-twenties, there were stress lines etched into his forehead.  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘Dan’s having a moan about the Directing Staff,’ said Liam.

‘When’s he never not moaning?’ said Geordie. ‘A couple of the trainers are pretty canny, mind,’ he said. ‘Lofty’s good and so’s Taff.’

‘Yeah, they’re good, though no one could ever accuse them of being imaginative in their choice of nicknames, eh Geordie?’ Shepherd.

‘You don’t get to choose your nickname, you know that,’ said Geordie. ‘We’re still working on yours.  ‘How about Sheepish?’ He was the same age as Shepherd - twenty-two - but a good bit taller than the typical SAS man. Shorter, stockier men tended to have greater powers of endurance and, since the ability to carry a monstrously heavy bergen over long distances at a ridiculously fast pace was one of the many things that set SAS men apart from the rest, most of them were no more than five foot nine.

‘God, I’m starving,’ Liam said. He claimed to have a metabolism that made it necessary for him to eat every two hours or keel over, and his principal hobby seemed to be searching for food. ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s got some spare scran squirreled away?’ he said, more in hope than expectation. ‘I’m that hungry I could even eat my mother’s cooking.’

‘Her cooking’s not that bad, is it?’ Jimbo said.

‘Come to lunch when we’re home then, if you’re brave enough,’ said Liam. ‘We try to have takeaways whenever we can.’ He broke off as he caught sight of an older-looking soldier standing in the shadows at the edge of the clearing. ‘Where the hell did that guy come from?’

There had been no sound or visible movement, but the man now stood there, watching and listening, his posture upright and alert, the barrel of his weapon tracking the path of his gaze. Satisfied, he lowered his weapon and stepped into the open. He was hard-muscled, but lean and whippet-thin, and his skin was pale enough to suggest that he had seen little sunlight in quite some time. His green uniform was almost black with the sweat and humidity caused by the long hard march he had made through the jungle.

He walked across the clearing, pausing to shake hands and exchange a couple of words with two of the trainers, Lofty and Taff, but pointedly ignoring the others. He walked on, found a space away from everyone else and, without cutting any foliage, put up a very spartan basha: a waterproof sheet and a hammock. Ignoring everyone, he then spent the remaining hours of daylight studying his maps. He was alone, self contained and apparently completely at home in the jungle environment.

As night was falling, Shepherd went across to Lofty’s basha. ‘Who is that guy?’ he said., gesturing towards the new arrival.

Lofty smiled. ‘His nickname’s Pilgrim.’

‘Pilgrim? That doesn’t sound like a typical regimental nickname.’

‘It isn’t. It’s more of a mark of respect. The very last thing you’ll have to do before you complete the final stage of Selection is to memorise part of a James Elroy Flecker poem called “The Golden Journey to Samarkand”. It’s our creed, if you like:

“But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,

You dirty bearded, blocking up the way?”

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.”

‘There’s more of it, but you get the drift: we are the Pilgrims. There are only two ways to get the experience you need in the Regiment: one is to serve long enough to do everything, and the other is to learn at the feet of a master. Most of the highly skilled guys in the Regiment learned their tradecraft from a senior mentor.’

‘Got you,’ Shepherd said. ‘So Pilgrim’s a mentor - one of the “old and bold” - but what’s he doing here?’

‘You’ll find out tomorrow,’ Lofty said. ‘Meanwhile get some shut-eye, you’ll need it.’

The following morning, as Shepherd, Liam, Geordie and Jimbo were sorting their kit, ready to join the others on the march back to the road-head for the transport back to base, Pilgrim walked over to them. He didn’t introduce himself, just said, ‘You four are not going back with the others. You’ve been picked out for further testing, so I’m going to take you on a patrol to evaluate you and see how good you actually are.’

Shepherd looked across at Liam and couldn’t help but smile. This was the sort of training that he wanted.

‘The criteria I will be applying is whether you’re good enough to be accepted into a Sabre Squadron Troop or a patrol led by me on active service,’ Pilgrim continued. ‘You won’t find it a picnic; one of the things that makes the SAS unique is that the physical and mental effort required of you is greater in an operational squadron than in any and all of the various tests you have undergone during Selection.’

He paused, holding the gaze of each of them in turn. ‘You’ve been issued with maps of this area. I suggest you devote some time to studying them. When we first came here, the only maps of Belize dated from before the Second World War and we had to update them as we went along. The bedrock’s limestone, so the topography is always changing. There was one big river marked on the old map that had gone underground years before. The jungle had reclaimed the riverbed and we spent days searching for a river that no longer existed. You won’t have that problem to deal with but, as you’ll already have noticed, you can’t use the sun, the stars or the topography to navigate in the jungle, because you can’t see any of them, so you have to be able to navigate with map and compass alone.’

A mosquito landed on his neck and he smacked his hand against it as he continued.

‘In the jungle noise and smell are always more of a giveaway than movement. Even the absence of noise can be significant; if the constant background noise of bird and animal calls is interrupted, it can only indicate that something’s alarmed the wildlife. You can hear much further than you can see, so to survive, you spend much of your time just listening.  Animals do not break twigs; if you hear a twig breaking it has been done by a human. You also use your sense of smell because anything from the smell of food to a whiff of sweat or aftershave can be enough either to give you away, or enable you to detect an enemy. You’ve probably already been told that we never drink coffee in the jungle because the smell of coffee travels a long way.  Your eyes are pretty much your least valuable sense in the jungle because most of the time you can’t see more than a few yards in front of you.’

As Pilgrim paused, Shepherd glanced at his companions. They were all hanging on the veteran SAS man’s every word.  ‘And no matter how good your eyesight,‘ Pilgrim said, ‘you can’t travel after dark in the jungle, so there’s a lot of downtime which you can use in one of two ways. You can either piss the time away reading James Bond or Harold Robbins, or you can take a course of study.  In my experience, the easiest and best time to learn a language is when you’ve got nothing else to do in the jungle at night. Most languages have a core vocabulary of about six hundred words.  If you learn twenty a night, then in a month you’ll know enough words to speak a pidgin version of the language, and if you can conjugate a few verbs you’ll be able to have an educated conversation.’ He shrugged. ‘Just a suggestion. What you do with your down time is your own business.’

‘I was thinking of learning the piano,’ joked Jimbo, but Pilgrim silenced him with a dark look.

‘Right,’ he continued, ‘let’s talk about uniform. The Army-issue camouflage uniform you’re wearing is useless in the jungle because of the high humidity. It’s much better to use an older jungle green uniform which dries out much quicker.’ He tugged at his sleeve and rubbed the material with his fingers. ‘Get one. You’ll really notice the difference. Now rations: to survive when patrolling in the jungle you must eat at least seven thousand calories a day but it’s almost impossible to carry that amount of rations on a long patrol, so we rely mainly on lots of sugar, sweets, dark chocolate, biscuits, nuts and raisins. The good news for those of you carrying an extra pound or two,’ he gave Jimbo a meaningful look, ‘is that you’ll be coming back from patrol a lot lighter than when you set out.