Hostile Territory (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Free Page A

shower in more than a fortnight. He trampled his filthy clothes underfoot as he showered, killing two birds with one stone. He dried himself on a threadbare towel, hung his wet clothes over the balcony railing and put on some clean ones. Feeling human again, he went downstairs.
    The other three had got there well ahead of him, and were sitting at a table in the baffa - the outdoor, tin-roofed drinking area overlooking the beach. Geordie and Jimbo were drinking bottles of beer while Jock had sequestered the bottle of whiskey. It was Jamesons.
    ‘Thought you only liked Scotch?’ said Shepherd, sitting down at the table.
    ‘Whiskey’s whiskey,’ said Jock. ‘And the Paddys make a decent enough drop of the hard stuff.’ He poured a large measure into a glass and pushed it across the table towards Shepherd.
    ‘Got any ice?’ asked Shepherd.
    ‘The ice out here’ll give you the runs for a week,’ said Jock. ‘But neat whiskey will do wonders for your digestion.’
    Shepherd picked up the glass. He sniffed the whiskey and then took a cautious sip. He felt a warm glow spread out from his stomach and he grinned. ‘Nice,’ he said, then emptied the glass with one swallow.
    Jock laughed. ‘A convert,’ he said, and refilled Shepherd’s glass.
    Shepherd looked around the room. Despite the mosquitoes fogging the air, the relative coolness of the evening breeze was welcome. There were another dozen or so people in the outdoor bar, the usual Third World mixture of local fixers in shiny suits, Western carpetbaggers, wheeler dealers, arms traders and other dubious types who were always drawn to troubled countries like flies to shit. As the four SAS men drank and joked, Shepherd saw two men paying them particular attention. One was Arab-looking, balding and overweight with a gold Rolex on his wrist, and the other a younger man in a linen tropical suit wearing what appeared to be an orange and yellow striped MCC tie.
    When Shepherd had walked in they had been sitting on stools at the end of the bar but after a while they moved to the next table and struck up a conversation with the troopers. The Arab-looking man introduced himself as Farid and described himself as a Lebanese trader.
    ‘And I’m Jonathan Parker,’ the other said, ‘I’m a Brit, out here looking at a couple of business opportunities.’
    ‘And what line of business would that be?’ Shepherd said.
    ‘Oh, import-export, that sort of thing,’ said Parker. ‘It’s not every day I get a chance to buy fellow-Brits a drink in this tropical hellhole, so what’ll it be? Same again?’  Shepherd couldn’t help but notice that Parker had cleverly managed to stop any further questioning of what he was doing in the country.
    As he went to the bar, Jock and Shepherd exchanged a look. ‘We should have asked for Six drinks,’ Shepherd said.
    Farid looked blank, but none of the SAS men needed the cryptic comment explained. They’d all reached the same conclusion: Parker was a member of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
    The sky was darkening into dusk and Shepherd could see lightning already flashing over the mountains to the east. A few moments later, the bats flitting among the palms disappeared and a curtain of rain began to fall. Within seconds it was drumming on the corrugated iron roof and sending torrents of water sweeping through the street in a foaming brown tide.
    Thirty minutes later the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, the floodwaters ebbed away and the evening chorus of frogs resumed. Clouds of mosquitoes again filled the air and the bats resumed hunting for moths drawn by the flickering glow of the lights. Street traders emerged from the doorways and shacks where they’d been sheltering and set up again around the hotel, lighting candles to illuminate their threadbare selection of goods.
     The lights in the hotel and in the buildings across the city flickered and died in one of the frequent power cuts, but after a few seconds of