Free Spider Shepherd: SAS: #2 by Stephen Leather Page A

hanging out with him, it might look as if the British Government is giving him their support.’
    ‘So what?” said Jock. ‘He’d make a better politician than the shower we’ve got back in the UK.’
    ‘No argument here,’ said Shepherd.
    They spent the rest of the day exploring Kathmandu and that evening they met up with Gul in a Chinese restaurant. ‘Bloody hell, Gul,’ Jock said, as soon as they were seated. ‘I’ve really been looking forward to my first proper Gurkha curry in years and here we are eating bloody Chinese.’
    Gul laughed. ‘Most of the upmarket restaurants in Kathmandu are foreign, my friend, and the best of them are Chinese, so here we are. But next time we meet, we’ll eat Gurkha food. You must come to the recruiting day at the Gurkha base in Pokhara tomorrow. It’s really something to see and there we will eat the real Gurkha food, I promise.’
    They left the restaurant much later, after a big meal and quite a few beers and black rums, and strolled back through the still-crowded streets. ‘Bloody hell, will you look at that?’ Jimbo was pointing up the street. Shepherd followed his gaze and saw an aged Nepali carrying a six foot by four foot steel security cabinet on his back up a steep hill. ‘I know from bitter experience that one of those is a four-man lift,’ Jimbo said, ‘but there’s an elderly gent managing it all on his own.’
    Gul gave a proud smile. ‘Never underestimate the strength and determination of the Gurkha, my friend. Many of our enemies have made that mistake down the years, and always to their cost.’
    Even as they were sauntering along, deep in conversation, Shepherd was still keeping a wary eye on their surroundings. It was so deeply ingrained a part of SAS training that it had become second nature. Now his antennae had detected something in the ebb and flow of the people around them: a group of young men, moving through the crowds behind them with a common purpose.
    He double-checked, using the reflection in the windscreen of one of the few cars parked in the street and then alerted the others. ‘We’ve got company,’ he said.
    Suddenly sober, everyone’s survival instincts kicked in. From the surrounding alleys a gang of teenage thugs had appeared, armed with a variety of weapons, including Gurkha khukris - vicious knives with a curved blade. The next moment, Shepherd, Gul and the others were locked in a vicious, bloody street brawl with no quarter given, as they fought for their lives. As a thug ran at him, slashing at his face with his khukri, Shepherd swayed back to let the wickedly curved blade whistle past his chest, then doubled his attacker up with a kick to the groin and sent him down and out with a chop to the neck and a stamp with his booted heel to the Nepali’s face as he slumped to the ground.
    The next one was already on him, but Shepherd dispatched him with a series of rapid-fire blows: the heel of his hand to the thug’s nose, a raking stamp down the shins and onto the instep - agonising for the victim - and then an elbow to the head put him down.
    His last assailant turned and ran for it, even dropping his knife as he did so in his panic to get away, but Shepherd at once turned to target one of the three thugs still surrounding Gul. The Gurkha had already flattened one attacker but was being hard-pressed by the others until Shepherd poleaxed one of them with a blow to the back of his head and spread another’s nose all over his face with a vicious straight-arm punch. Gul meanwhile dealt with the other one, letting out a blood-curdling war cry as he rained down a fusillade of blows on him. Jock, Geordie and Jimbo were finishing off the remnants of the attackers. Battered and bleeding, they scrambled to their feet and stumbled away into the maze of surrounding streets, the last one sped on his way by Jimbo’s Size 12 boot up his backside.
    ‘That was fun,’ Jock said as they got their breath back. ‘Kathmandu's a lot less boring