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

that it had been man
passing himself off as a woman - had disappeared completely, with only a few
shreds of blood-stained and smoke-blackened blue fabric to show he had ever
existed. The troops who had been manning the checkpoint were sprawled around
the crater, their bodies contorted into unnatural positions by the force of the
blast. The two men who had been closest to the bomber were so mangled as to be
almost unrecognisable as human. Partially shielded by their dead comrades, the
four others were still alive - so far at least - but all were wounded. Shepherd
knew that suicide bombers routinely packed shards of steel, sharp stones and
fragments of broken glass around their devices to increase the carnage from the
blast. All the men were bleeding badly, one with blood pumping in spurts from
the stump that was all that was now left of his right arm. Nearby, the severed
limb was dangling obscenely from the branch of a stunted acacia tree.
    In his earpiece,
Shepherd heard Mitchell, the patrol medic, calling in a casevac as he broke
cover and sprinted down the hillside towards the bomb-site, where the Paras’
own medic was already working frantically to tie a tourniquet around what was
left of the soldier’s arm.
    Shepherd swung
his rifle back towards the brow of the ridge, and caught a glimpse of the
pick-up as it reversed back out of sight. He squeezed off a quick shot but he
was at maximum range and with no time to aim it would have been a miracle if he
had hit the target. A moment later he saw a cloud of dust billowing above the
ridgeline as the driver span the pick-up around and raced away.
    Shepherd could
already hear McIntyre in his earpiece, calling in an air-strike on the pick-up,
but he knew that the response, whether a Warthog - an A10 Thunderbolt with a
rotary cannon that could spit out almost 4,000 rounds a minute   - or a stub-winged Blackhawk firing
chain guns and Hellfire missiles ,would take four or five minutes to reach the
area. By then the Taliban killers who had sent the suicide bomber to his death
would already have hidden their vehicle from sight in some cover or abandoned
it and gone to ground.
    They saw the
distinctive shape of a Warthog in the sky to the west a few minutes later but
there were no rumbles of explosions nor bursts of distant cannon-fire; the
Taliban had obviously made good their escape.
    The helis arrived
soon afterwards to casevac the dead and wounded. Shepherd and his team helped
to load them onto the casevac helis and then clambered into the Chinook that
would fly them back to the base at Bagram. Bagram was home to more than seven
thousand troops, most of them American, housed in huge tented compounds.   And while the area surrounding the base
was nominally controlled by the coalition forces, it still came under daily
rocket attack.
    As soon as they
landed back at Bagram they went into an immediate debrief with Major Allan
Gannon who had been in overall charge of the operation.   Gannon was a big man with a strong
chin, his hair bleached from the unrelenting Afghan sun.   He was in his shirtsleeves and had a
black and white checked keffiyeh scarf tied loosely around his neck as he led
the debrief in the windowless, underground briefing room, its air-conditioning
a welcome respite from the furnace heat of the Afghan summer.
    As the others
focussed on the implications of the Taliban’s new tactic of disguising suicide
bombers in burqas, Shepherd found himself thinking through the sequence of
events he had witnessed. As he did so, he felt a growing sense of unease. ‘How
did they know?’ he said eventually.
    Major Gannon
frowned. ‘How did they know what?’ he asked.
    ‘It wasn’t a
regular checkpoint,’ said Shepherd.   ‘We’d never had troops there before and we hadn’t been in position for
more than an hour. So how did the Taliban know we were there?   They don’t have suicide bombers
wandering around the countryside on the off chance they’ll bump into a