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

there were two blood-soaked men draped across the donkey. ‘Jesus,’ Liam said. ‘It looks like a fucking spaghetti western.’
    Geordie had already sprung into action, grabbing his medical kit and using a spray to sterilise his hands. He’d been a patrol medic with the Paras and had joined the SAS partly because he wanted to improve his skills in dealing with battlefield trauma. The two wounded men were lifted from the donkey and laid on split-log benches on the open ground in front of the huts. Geordie spared the man with the bloody face no more than a cursory glance and then began examining the other two, swiftly assessing their wounds.
    Liam and Shepherd ran to help him. Both bodies were riddled with deep cuts and puncture wounds. Geordie began tying off the bleeders, then sutured the muscles and packed the wounds. Shepherd watched him in awe, marvelling at the speed and precision of his work. ‘If I had saline and blood, I could save them,’ Geordie said, still working frantically, ‘but without it, they’ll be lucky to survive; they’ve both lost a lot of blood.’
    ‘Can we not casevac them?’ Shepherd asked Pilgrim.
    Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. For political reasons, civilians can’t be flown in military helicopters, because if they die, there might be accusations and compensation claims. If we had a Landrover we could send him back in that, because there’s no rule against taking them in military vehicles. Apparently it’s all right for them to die in a Landrover but not in a chopper.’
    ‘So we just let them die?’
    ‘No, we do our best to save them, within the constraints under which we operate. It’s just a pity that those constraints are decided by pen-pushers, arse-coverers and staff officers rather than the men on the ground.’
    Geordie had moved on to the second man, whose wounds included an ugly gash on his head, exposing part of the skull. Blood was still pouring from the wound. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ Geordie said. ‘There’s a rich blood supply to the scalp so there’s always plenty of claret from a head wound.’ He mopped up the blood and then tapped the exposed skull gently with a pair of forceps, like a piano tuner using a tuning fork on a piano. ‘Middle C,’ he said. ‘Shows the skull’s intact. If you get a dull thud that means trouble. As it is, if he survives the blood loss, he should have nothing worse than a headache to show for it.’
    He sutured the scalp wound, then began treating the man who had brought the others in. The reason for his blood-stained face became obvious, because his lips had been cut off, though he looked even more frightened of the needle Geordie was using to stitch his wounds.
    Pilgrim had been questioning him, speaking in Mayan with only an occasional prompt from the alcalde. The man struggled to form his replies, his words slurred by his injuries. ‘He says they were hunting monkeys in the forest,’ Pilgrim said, ‘when Guatemalan soldiers surrounded them. They used these two for bayonet practice and told the other one to take them back as a warning to the others about what’ll happen to them if they don’t get out of this region.’
    ‘They cut off his lips by the look of it,’ Shepherd said.
    ‘A traditional Guatemalan remedy for those they think are spies and informers,’ said Pilgrim. ‘They know we’ve been working with the Maya, so the military junta is obviously stepping up their terror campaign; they even treat their own Mayan population abominably. Among the villagers here are the only two survivors of a massacre that wiped out an entire village on the other side of the border. The Maya here will now have even stronger reasons to fear that they’re next in line for that treatment. It’s a mess. A bloody mess.’
    Pilgrim radioed a report back to base and then moved the patrol out, following the trail of dripped blood on the ground but working their way through the jungle flanking the track, rather