Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 (12 page)

However, he also knew that there were massive swathes of bracken all over the hills, dying back to its autumnal brown, which would provide cover and some protection from the elements. There were also a few patches of conifer woodland that had been planted in the 1970s for tax reasons. Those trees were now mature but the timber that would once have gone to make pit props for the Welsh collieries, was no longer needed. After the pit closures of the Thatcher era, only one deep mine now remained in South Wales. As a result, many of the woods were now unkempt, littered with fallen trees and dead-fall branches that made progress through them difficult but provided good cover.

Despite the darkness, he made fast progress all that night and by first light the next morning he was in position, observing the site of the Dead Letter Box.  His instructions were that it was in the north-west corner of an old stone bridge across the fast-rushing stream in the bottom of the valley he had now reached, but there were two stone bridges close together and he was not entirely sure which was the right one. As the sky began to lighten towards dawn, he worked his way down the side of the valley. It was cloaked with a dense covering of bracken and he stuffed fronds of dead bracken into his clothes and hair and then burrowed his way down into a fold in the ground a quarter of a mile above the valley floor.

From his vantage point, as the light strengthened, he could see the movement of hunter force troops scouring the area and he could hear the sound of helicopters overhead. There was no possibility of reaching the DLB while they were in the area and he resigned himself to lying up in cover throughout the day and then making his way down to the stream after dark.

It was a grey, overcast day and rain hammered down during the afternoon, soaking steadily into his clothes, but the weather was not severe enough to cause the hunters to abandon their search and it wasn’t until towards sunset that the sound of helicopters ceased and the hunter force troops withdrew. He tried not to resent the thought that they were returning to a hot meal and a warm bed whereas he would be spending another cold and hungry night in the open on the Welsh mountains.

With the last of the light, he emerged slowly from his hiding place and, constantly scanning the hillsides and the valley floor around him for any hint of movement, he made his way down to the stream. The water-level was high, swollen by the day’s heavy rain, and to reach the Dead Letter Box, he had no option but to lower himself into the rushing waters, gasping at the shock of the cold. He searched the first bridge without finding anything and had to climb out of the water and move downstream to the other one. He lowered himself back into the stream and this time, at the north-west corner of the bridge, he found a waterproof Golden Virginia tobacco tin, wedged into a crack between the stones on the underside of the arch.

He left the stream in the valley floor at once and took his prize back to the OP he’d made earlier that day. Soaked to the skin, he stripped off his shirt and trousers, wringing as much water as he could from them before putting them back on; his body heat would have to complete the drying process. To his intense frustration, however, the sky was overcast and without any form of light of his own and with no moon- or even star-light to aid him, he was unable to read the message that the tin contained. His only option was to remain where he was until dawn for there was no point in travelling on through the darkness in case he went in the wrong direction.

He spent the rest of the night resting and sleeping fitfully, suppressing the dull ache of hunger with a few sips of water. He has no rations at all and it could easily be several more days before he ate again, but he could live with hunger easily enough. Water was the only essential and in those rain-soaked mountains, finding that was never going to be a problem.

He was awake and alert well before first light, waiting impatiently for the light to strengthen enough for him to be able to read the message. As dawn approached, he was at last able to decipher it. It contained only the coordinates and a pass code for the next RV, a Live Letter Box with an agent. The safest option was to lie up for rest of the day in his OP and only move on again after dark, but having already lost the whole of the previous night, Shepherd was growing anxious about reaching the next RV in time and he took a chance on climbing back on to the ridge and crossing the valley beyond in daylight. It was a steep-sided valley with the last 150 feet on either flank covered in loose scree.

As he started to move through the valley, he caught sight of a movement, a solitary figure in army camouflage - another runner like him - crossing the valley ahead of him. Almost immediately he heard dogs barking and saw a patrol of the hunter force - Paras with dogs and a dog handler - emerging from cover and chasing after the man.  One of the Paras spotted Shepherd and pointed at him, shouting enthusiastically. Shepherd assessed his options and decided that his only hope of evading capture was to back his fitness against that of the other runner and try to overtake him. With luck the hunters would overhaul and capture the other runner while Shepherd made good his escape.

With all need for concealment gone for the moment, he broke into a flat-out run, crashing through the bracken and coming down the hillside in what was more a controlled fall than a calculated descent. He sprinted across the valley floor, crossed a dirt road that ran through it and then hurdled a dry-stone wall. He cleared a stream with a leap, and ran on, his pace barely slackening as he met the rising ground. All the time he was running, he could hear the barking dogs and the shouts of the hunter force in hot pursuit behind him. The other runner was much closer now; either he lacked Shepherd’s fitness or panic and fear of capture was affecting him, but Shepherd was relieved to see that, whoever it was, it was not McKay that he was overhauling.

As the other runner reached the bottom of the scree slope below the summit and began to scramble up it, Shepherd raced past him, not even turning his head to see who it was, but just as he overtook him, his foot caught on a piece of loose rock and he slipped, lurching into the other man. Shepherd regained his footing and was running on up the slope in an instant but as he turned to shout an apology over his shoulder, he saw that the other runner had lost his balance and slid a few yards back down the scree-slope towards the fast-closing pursuers.

Shepherd knew it was survival of the fittest, every man for himself now. Above the shouts and baying dogs he could hear the thunder of helicopter rotors behind him, closing fast. If the heli came overhead while he was still in the open, the game was up. Whether he went to ground or kept running, it would simply track his movements and direct the hunter force onto him.

Lungs bursting, he reached the ridgeline and began plunging down the other side, frantically scanning the ground ahead of him for some cover. A hundred yards to his right and a little lower on the slope, he saw a dark circle half-hidden by bilberry and bracken. He sprinted to it, the sound of heli-rotors ever louder in his ears, and found himself on the edge of a water-filled sump hole. There were hundreds of such holes across the Welsh Mountains. Some were dry ‘shake-holes’ formed naturally in the limestone areas as rainwater dissolved the surface rock over millennia and caused it to collapse, but many more were where water-filled bell-pits and sumps, excavated by men digging for coal or other minerals and then abandoned.

Shepherd did not hesitate. He launched himself into the sump, praying the water was deep enough to cover him. As the ripples subsided, the water was whipped back into spray by the downwash lashing it as the heli overflew him. Heart pounding, he waited for it to go into a hover above him, signalling his location to the hunter force, but instead it flew on and then began flying a search pattern, moving backwards and forwards, quartering the ground to try to locate him, while the hunters continued their search on foot.

The hunters were advancing from the ridgeline, moving in line a few yards apart. Shepherd heard the sound of boots crunching through the bracken and the snap of dry bilberry stems. He took a deep breath and as he saw the peat at the edge of the sump begin to tremble faintly at the approaching footfalls, he submerged himself face down, gripping onto a rock to keep himself under the surface and began to count the seconds. He held his breath for a slow count of sixty and then, still submerged, began to release the air slowly as he counted down another thirty seconds.

Unable to remain submerged any longer, he slowly eased himself upwards, breaking the surface with barely a ripple and forcing himself to take only slow, shallow breaths, rather than the huge gulps of air his tortured lungs were clamouring for. He raised his head a fraction and peered through the curtain of bilberry, bracken and grasses. The heli was still flying a pattern further down the hillside, keeping ahead of the advancing hunters, who were now almost 100 yards away and still moving further down the slope.

Shepherd heard the hunters again perhaps twenty minutes later, heading away from his position, though the heli continued its search of the area. At one side of the sump there was a small overhang of peat with a screen of bilberry fronds and trailing mosses partly shielding it from view. Shepherd was able to haul his upper body out of the freezing water and huddle there, but he remained immersed to his waist all day, not daring to emerge from his hiding place or even glance upwards, for he knew that the white of an upturned face would be an immediate giveaway to a watcher in the heli high overhead.

Even when the sound of the rotors at last faded and finally ceased, he remained motionless, knowing that the hunters would almost certainly have set up an OP, and would be lying up in cover not far away, watching for the movement that would betray him. There was no option but to remain where he was until dark. As he had learned to do in his early training, he retreated into himself, forcing his mind to ignore the signals from his body telling him how cold he was. Whenever his falling core temperature brought him close to shivering, he began flexing every muscle in his body in turn. He made small, imperceptible movements beginning with his fingers and toes and moving up his body until he had raised his temperature a little and then he went back into his state of semi-suspension, mind alert, but body motionless.

Hard though he tried to still the anxiety gnawing at him, as he waited out the daylight hours, he knew that he was falling ever further behind his self-imposed schedule. He had hoped to reach the Live Letter Box that night but the brush with the hunter force and the hours lost lying up in the sump-hole made that problematic at best. He knew now that he was going to have to be less cautious if he was to have any chance of completing his task in the allotted time span.

As soon as night fell, he emerged from his hiding place and set off. He kept moving fast over the ground but in the pitch blackness he was constantly stumbling, tripping and falling. He plunged into another sump hole, unseen in the darkness, and then found himself sliding out of control down a scree slope, with a small avalanche of dislodged rock crashing down around him.  He knew the noise of the rock-fall could have been heard a mile away and he increased his speed still more.

He was exhausted by the time he reached the Live Letter Box, a derelict barn in a field that had once been a small meadow but had now reverted to moorland. It was just before first light and he set up an OP in a copse of brambles, worming his way in underneath them, breaking the stems off at ground level where necessary and obscuring the break marks by smearing mud over the stems. By the time the cut foliage wilted and died, he would be long gone. He spent the day observing the barn, willing away the hours until nightfall, when he could go down there and obtain the details of the next RV. All the time, the clock was ticking and he did not yet know how many more stages there would be before he reached the final RV.

He observed the barn throughout the day. No one entered or left it and he saw no trace of movement, but half an hour after nightfall that evening he saw a gleam of light from inside. He emerged from cover and moved in complete silence over the ground, every sense straining for sound or movement as he approached the barn and crept in through the doorway, fists clenched, poised either for fight or flight.

The light source was a hurricane lamp torch in a corner, with another held by the agent, who was sitting on a pile of fallen rubble watching the doorway. The man stood up, yawned and stretched as he caught sight of Shepherd. He gave his pass code number and Shepherd responded with his. ‘That’s the formalities out of the way,’ the agent said. ‘Here, take this.’

He gave him a piece of stale bread and then produced a hip flask, poured a shot of rum into the cap and passed it to him. Shepherd ate the bread in half a dozen bites, ignoring the blue mould speckling its crust, and then gulped down the rum. He was desperate to get the coordinates of the next RV and get moving straightaway, but the agent showed no sign of urgency and began asking him all sorts of questions about the exercise. He was particularly interested in Shepherd’s account of evading the hunter force and asked him a string of questions about it. Grinding his teeth, but realising that this was just another way of ratcheting up the tension in the runner, Shepherd masked his impatience and gave answers, albeit rather terse ones, to each question.

At length, the agent stopped toying with him and gave him the coordinates of his next RV. ‘It’s a linear RV in a wood,’ he said. ‘The next agent will be somewhere along the track and you will recognise him because he will be whistling. You will say “The pigeons are back in the loft”, and he will reply “But my cat will chase them”. Got that?’