Read Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) for Free Online Page A

confirmation from each of them before continuing. ‘Belt kit: ammunition, survival kit, survival rations and water bottles. Third, your personal grab bag. Between them they contain the patrol operational equipment, medical pack, radio, demolitions kit and more rations. If the patrol is hit, you just take your grab bag and run.
    ‘Your bergen should contain your cooking kit, spare clothes and sleeping bag - all of which should be made from lightweight nylon parachute material - candles, a hammock and any other thing you feel you might take to make life in the jungle a little bit more comfortable. Each individual SAS guy makes most of the equipment he uses in jungle warfare conditions himself. There’s no shortage of parachutes, so tailor your own kit so you’re comfortable with it.  The rationale is simple: if you make it yourself, it’ll be fit for purpose. Lastly we will all wear jungle hats with a piece of yellow ribbon around the rim for identification. If we get into a contact in jungle conditions with minimal visibility, we don’t want any uncertainty about who’s friend and who’s foe.’
    The four men nodded earnestly.
    ‘Okay, it’s your first operational patrol - though as it turned out, your practice patrol wasn’t exactly incident-free - so I’ll be the skills man in the patrol, because I’m the only one with the training and experience. I’ll be signaller and demolitionist, and you’ll be my kit carriers. We’re going to use old fashioned morse code radio comms with a one-time code pad. The reason is that those old morse sets give out a very low wattage when transmitting and are very difficult for enemy direction finding systems to locate.  The set has a wire dipole aerial which we have to string through the jungle canopy high above the ground.  To deploy it, you tie a fishing weight to it, throw it high into the trees and let it fall back to the ground.  To then get it into a straight line through the branches is a painstaking task, also known as a pain in the arse.  It’s laborious but effective, so you need to practise that. And whatever else we might communicate to HQ, we never send the correct grid reference of our location. The reason is that it’s not unknown in Special Forces for the grid reference to be passed on to other agencies for other reasons, usually to the detriment of the patrol, but if they don’t know it, they can’t blow it. Now, weapons: we’re going to carry Self-Loading Rifles.’
    ‘Aren’t the SLRs a bit heavy and out-dated?’ Shepherd said.
    Pilgrim nodded. ‘In other circumstances, yes, but they’re very well suited to jungle combat. Although the rifle’s heavy, it fires the standard Nato 7.62 round and that’s the round which packs a real punch.  All the new lightweight rounds bounce off trees in the jungle undergrowth, but the Nato round goes straight through them.’
    Pilgrim opened a map and spread it out over the floor. ‘Now RVs,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the first ones now, then we’ll set them every morning before moving off. First RV here.’ His finger tapped a point on the map. ‘Emergency RV here,’ he pointed to another, ‘open until dusk. The war RV here.’ He moved his finger to a third point. ‘That’ll be good until the following dusk. After that, anyone separated from the patrol will make their own way to the emergency RV.  The RV we’ll use will always be in front of any contact we have with the enemy, deeper into their territory, so that we can get on and complete the mission without having to return to base.
    ‘If we’re in a contact and are pursued, a small group like ours always has the advantage in the jungle over a large group. We know that we’ll be outnumbered but large groups are very unwieldy and difficult to control. We all have a  map and compass and we can all navigate. Large green army groups only have one compass and map for every ten men. So we can split up and rendezvous later miles away, whereas the