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the tractor swerved across the field and crashed into a boulder in its path. One wheel rose into the air, paused for a moment and then the tractor toppled over on its side, span on its axis for a moment, the tyres still chewing a blizzard of mud from the Earth and then the engine coughed and died. The young driver was still lying in a bloody heap on the floor. As they ran forward to try to help him they thought at first he had been hit by an incoming shell. It was only when they turned him over to treat him that they found he had been killed by a single bullet.
    ‘Bloody sniper using the artillery as cover’, snarled Harry. ‘I hate fucking snipers. Present company excepted,’ he added hastily, eyeing Shepherd. ‘But this is now personal. Let’s do what we have to do to take him out.’
    The patrol spent most of the morning working on a plan to deal with the sniper, while not compromising their main mission and eventually, after much “Chinese Parliamentary” discussion, they thought they had something workable.
    Diesel was not only the transport guy, he was also an expert mortar man, and he now spent several hours with a Muslim mortar battery “registering targets” on the hillocks and dips at the bottom of the main enemy ridge. He had the mortar fire a series of rounds until one hit the precise spot he wanted. He and the mortar crew both then made a written note of the bearing, range and mortar charge, and it was given a registration, like “Green 10”. Any time after the target had been registered, if he ordered them to fire at Green 10, the mortar crew had all the information required to get a first round hit.
    The plan they had formed was to fire a pre-planned, co-ordinated fire plan aiming to force anyone in the area to retreat along a predictable route. They had concluded that the sniper was unlikely to be a lone wolf, more probably part of a pair, or even a larger group, and would not be a long distance away. ‘The Soviet forces had no strategy on the use of snipers,’ Harry said. ‘They changed their tactics after 1945, and from then on every soldier was issued with a short range Kalashnikov, and they drove on to an objective in an armoured vehicle, and took on defenders at very short range.’
    ‘They still use a sniper rifle,’ Shepherd said, ‘The Dragunov.’ Part of his training as a sniper was to familiarise himself with the weapons an enemy counterpart might use.
    ‘They do,’ Harry conceded, ‘but it’s not technically advanced, uses standard ammunition and has a telescopic sight which, compared with Western optics, is of pretty limited use.’
    After much discussion, Shepherd and Harry decided that the enemy snipers would be working at a maximum range of up to 700 yards. When they laid out the inverted “L” for that night’s supply drop, they deliberately calculated for a third of the containers to land in the open.
    During the night everything appeared to be going to plan. The Hercules arrived dead on time and the team saw some of the load landing where they had calculated. Harry allowed another hour to elapse, giving the Serbs and their Russian “volunteers” time to lose their vigilance in the immediate aftermath of the air-drop, then Shepherd watched through his scope and PNGs as Harry broke cover. He used all his SAS tradecraft to move undetected through the trees and scrub and down the valley side across the patches of open ground. Twice he paused to change camouflage, lying up in dead ground, hidden from the Serb spotters on the ridge line above him while he removed the gorse sprigs and bracken fronds that he’d inserted into the hessian sniper suit he wore, and replaced them with clumps of the pale, bleached stalks of the late summer grasses, flowers and thistles that grew in the open areas. At times he seemed to move with painful slowness, sometimes belly-crawling or lying motionless for minutes at a time when his instincts told him he was exposed and at risk. At others,