Read Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 for Free Online

were loading. Boxes of ammunition. ‘I thought we were supposed to be on the side of the angels here, keeping the Bosnians alive, not tooling them up for a full scale war. This is supposed to be humanitarian aid, but it looks like heavy weapon ammo to me, and that would be against the UN Resolution that made it illegal to supply any of the combatants with armaments, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Heavens, so it would,’ Diesel said with a wink at Harry. ‘Perhaps we’d better pack it all up and get the Hercules to come back and pick it up again.’
    Harry shrugged. ‘UN Resolution, UN schmesolution. As I told you before, there are no angels here, no good guys and bad guys in this war. They are all as bad as each other and the Yanks are quite happy to give the Bosnians enough kit to blow the country back into the Dark Ages, though of course the Yanks always call it fighting for freedom and democracy.’
    ‘You’d think there’d be more of it around then, wouldn’t you?’ Gus said. ‘What with the number of wars and proxy wars they’ve fought over the years.’
    Shepherd nodded in agreement but didn’t say anything, Harry’s words about listening and not speaking still ringing in his ears.
    ‘You would, wouldn’t you? But realpolitik just keeps getting in the way of all that Yankee Doodle Dandy shit. Dictators and absolute monarchs are more predictable and usually more long-lasting Allies, so they’ve become the default American clients in most parts of the globe. Especially in the Middle East, where oil barrels always weigh an awful lot heavier than ballot boxes. Anyway the Russians are supplying the Serbians, and on its own, that’s invariably enough reason for the Yanks to give whoever is opposing them, in this case the Muslims, whatever they want. It will probably all come back and bite them on the arse in a few years time, but that’s life.’
    As they were speaking, a tractor and trailer suddenly drove out of the cover of the trees, heading for the load that had fallen in the open. There were three young men on the trailer and another one driving the tractor. Harry bellowed out ‘Get the fuck back into cover!’ and Zlatan shouted a rather more comprehensible warning in his own language, but there was no response. Either they didn’t hear the warnings, or chose to ignore them. Perhaps they were overtired from working all night or simply euphoric about receiving so much equipment from the airdrop, but whatever the reason they had now put themselves in mortal danger, exposed in the open and vulnerable to attack from the Serb positions on the surrounding ridges. As confirmation of that, the hills overlooking the DZ suddenly erupted with a hail of rocket and artillery fire.
    Harry grabbed the handset: ‘Foxtrot Eight, Top Cat’.
    As in Sarajevo, the replies came at once: ‘Roger’.
    ‘Grab the LTD and fire very short bursts at the gun positions,’ Harry said to Shepherd. ‘The F16s will be here in seconds.’
    Shepherd’s mind raced as he began spotting the gun flashes and firing short bursts from the LTD. Jets roared out of the high clouds and began taking out the targets he was indicating.
    ‘Acquired,’ a laconic American voice said in his headset. Moments later, even as a bomb from the F-16 was obliterating a Serb artillery position, Shepherd had already switched to the next target. He fired another burst and a fraction of a second later he heard a different voice saying ‘Acquired… nootralised,’ in a Texan accent as broad as the state itself. It was all over in seconds, with the Serbian positions on the top of the ridge reduced to a series of smoking fires.
    It was only then that Shepherd noticed that the tractor was running wildly around the field. ‘The throttle’s a hand operated lever on the steering column,’ Diesel said. ‘So there’s no Dead Man’s Handle. The engine will keep on running until either the tractor runs out of fuel or runs into an immovable object.’ As they watched,