Free Narrow Escape (A Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather

NARROW ESCAPE
    By Stephen Leather
    ***
     
    BRECON BEACONS, WALES.
    December, 1996
     
     
    Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd woke in the dead of night, instantly alert at the sound of a low voice off in the distance. He raised his head. In the faint starlight filtering through the open door of the wooden hut that served as their quarters, he could see an SAS sergeant moving along the row of sleeping men on the other side of the room. The sergeant stooped to shake a soldier by the shoulder and murmured something to him, and the man dressed hastily and gathered his kit, then made for the door. The sergeant moved on, waking three others, but passing Shepherd’s bed without a glance in his direction. He ushered the last of the men outside and closed the door quietly behind him. A few moments later, Shepherd heard a truck start-up and rumble out of the camp.
    He lay back, his mind racing. There had been 120 candidates for SAS Selection when they started almost five weeks earlier. By the previous night only fifteen remained and now another four had gone, unless - and the thought gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach - the four who had just left the room were the chosen ones who’d passed Selection, and Shepherd and the others were about to be woken and sent back to their former units.
    He couldn’t think of any reason why he would be being rejected; his fitness was damn near perfect and his near-photographic memory meant he rarely slipped up when it came to navigation. He was relieved to hear his friend Liam McKay still quietly snoring in the next bed. Pass or fail, at least they would do so together. They’d met on the first day of Selection and bonded instantly, both with the same will to succeed and the same refusal to accept second best. Shepherd closed his eyes and sighed. Every muscle in his body was aching from the relentless pounding he had gone through over the previous fortnight. It was a brutal, unending succession of day and night route marches and speed marches over ever-increasing distances, carrying ever greater loads in his bergen.
    At the halfway point of Selection they had performed the ‘Fan Dance’, ascending and descending the three thousand feet high Pen y Fan three times in four hours,. That had been tough, but the previous day had been the hardest test of all, an endurance march crossing seventy miles of the Welsh mountains, with a bergen weighing well over twenty-five kilos, plus a rifle, belt kit and water. They had to navigate using only map and compass - no GPS - and were forbidden to use any tracks or roads. The off-road terrain was unforgiving: bogs, peat hags, tussocks of mat grass, screes, steep ridges and wind-blasted summits to climb, and icy mountain streams and rivers to ford. It had tested Shepherd to his limit.
    ‘Green army”’- regular army - exercises always started with a roll-call, but there was none at the start of any of the tests in SAS Selection. If you weren’t where you were supposed to be at the appointed time, you had ruled yourself out of Selection. There was no right of appeal, no excuses accepted; the only thing to do then was pack your kit and get out.
    Before they began the endurance march, they were given two six-digit grid references. They weren’t allowed to write them down and had to memorise them, an easy enough task for Shepherd. He had only to glance at a sheet of paper for the contents to be committed to his memory, be it a list, a photograph or a map. The first grid reference was the final RV point he had to make for, a summit cairn in the west of the Brecon Beacons. The second was unexplained, just a reference number.
    For a night and much of the next day, Shepherd had marched on through wind, rain and a sudden hailstorm that had coated the ground and chilled him to the bone. Now, as he began to make the ascent to the summit, sweat dripping from him, the straps of his bergen sawing at his shoulders, he saw one of the other candidates climbing the hill