Free Dead Drop (A Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather Page A

evasive
action. If they then tried to shoot it out, they would be cut down in the cross
fire from the SAS and Para Support Group troops on either side, or the close
air support that they could call on.
    So far only a few
men on foot and a handful of vehicles - and most of those were farm carts - had
passed along the road. Mitchell yawned. ‘Quiet out there, Tonto.’
    ‘Too quiet, Kemo
Sabi,’ McIntyre said.
    As they watched
and waited in the OP, an old man passed through the checkpoint, herding a small
flock of scrawny goats, followed a few minutes later by a peddler with a donkey
cart piled with cooking pots, bowls and water vessels, cut and hammered out of
scrap metal. Shepherd noticed the faint markings on one large bowl and nudged
Mitchell. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘We’re fighting a war that even
environmentalists would approve of - the muj are recycling the bombs the Yanks
drop on them.’
    ‘The VC used to
do something similar in Vietnam,’ said Mitchell. ‘They turned shell casings
into lamps for their underground bases. Waste not, want not.’
    Two Afghan men
carrying AK47s provoked a brief heightening of tension as they approached the
checkpoint, but it was far from an unusual sight - every Afghan male carried a
weapon of some sort - and after being searched they were allowed through the
cordon and walked on towards the village.
    The road was now
empty save for a heavily pregnant woman in a faded blue burqa, carrying a
bundle wrapped in a shawl in her arms, and making her slow way on foot along
the road towards the checkpoint. Shepherd’s gaze had moved on, scanning the
area relentlessly, eyes never still, always searching for potential
threats.   Then the hairs on the
back of his neck stood up. ‘Hold it. An Afghan woman traveling alone?’ he said.
‘Something’s not right.’
    Mitchell followed
his gaze. ‘Doesn’t walk like a woman either.’
    The woman –
if it was a woman - was now close to the checkpoint.
    Harper tapped
Shepherd’s shoulder and gestured back along the track. Shepherd shot a glance
that way and saw that a Toyota pick-up had appeared on the brow of the hill a
mile and a half away. The pick-up stopped but the engine was still running
because they could see the blue-grey haze from its exhaust. The driver was
making no move to continue along the road. Shepherd swung his scope onto it.
Four figures were visible in the back of the pick-up, the barrels of their
weapons outlined against the lapis blue of the sky. As he peered into the
shadowed cab of the pick-up, Shepherd saw twin discs of reflected light as the
man in the passenger seat trained binoculars towards the checkpoint ahead.   Shepherd barked into his throat mic.
‘Abort! Abort! Abort! Suicide bomber!’
    The guards at the
checkpoint started to shout as they swung up their weapons, but the figure had
now almost reached them. Shepherd was already on auto-pilot, running through a
sequence of actions so often practised that they were almost instinctive. The
head of the burqa-clad figure now filled Shepherd’s sniperscope - only a head-shot
would stop a bomber triggering a device. He took up the first pressure on the
trigger, but even as he exhaled, squeezed the trigger home and felt the recoil,
he saw that he was too late.   A
micro-second before the shot, the burqa-clad figure’s had slapped against its
chest and in that instant, there was a blinding flash. A moment later Shepherd
heard the thunder-clap of an explosion and the shock wave swept over them in a
whirlwind of dust and dirt. There was the whine and whirr of shrapnel fragments
overhead and then the spattering sound of softer, human debris falling to earth
around him.
    Shepherd lifted
his head. The site of the checkpoint was now as blood-soaked as a halal
butcher’s yard. A pall of oily smoke was rising from a crater in the centre of
the dirt road where the burqa-clad figure had been standing when the device
detonated. The man – for Shepherd had no doubt