Read Warning Order (A Spider Shepherd short story) for Free Online

at the Army Legal Services Major with undisguised contempt. ‘Look at him,’ he said. ‘He’s even got creases in his fatigues.’  Shepherd couldn’t help but smile because Jock was right. Only a real idiot would iron his fatigues.
    Behind the officers was a large screen and an array of no-expense-spared, state-of-the-art electronic gadgetry. A Signals Squadron technician operated it from an adjoining room, responsible not only for the high tech equipment required for the briefing, but also the video and sound equipment used to monitor and record every word and gesture from the participants. At the end of the briefing the video and sound recordings would be sealed by the lawyer and kept in the Regimental Registry along with the rest of the SAS’s classified material. As a result, officers fell over themselves not to issue orders that might come back to bite them on the arse and anything potentially damaging was left unsaid, with briefings almost invariably concluding with the standard cop-out instruction to the patrol: ‘You must decide how the objective is to be achieved, within the Rules of Engagement’. Or as Jock preferred to say – ‘if you fuck up, you’re on your own.’
    Shepherd and his three comrades sat at a table in the centre of the room with tiered rows of empty seats behind them. On the table in front of each member of the patrol was a planning pack.  Everything they were to hear in the briefing was in the pack and the real work would begin once the briefing was over.  They looked pale and tense in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. 
    The Ops Officer, Jamie, tall and languid with a mop of fair hair, was an ‘Honourable’ from an old aristocratic family whose father had restored the family fortunes by marrying the only daughter of an uncouth but very wealthy biscuit manufacturer. Jamie had cut his teeth with the Scots Guards in the Falklands campaign and shortly afterwards had transferred to the SAS.  He had a relative who sat on the Defence Select Committee, which had proved extremely useful when the SAS required a bit of publicity in the right quarters.  Shortly after joining the Regiment he had spent time in the jungles of South America chasing down drug runners and during that time he had formed an unlikely friendship with Jock, doubling up with him in the jungle camps and sharing their meagre rations.
    Their backgrounds could not have been more different - Jock came from a crumbling tenement on the fringes of Maryhill in Glasgow.  On leaving school, he’d worked in a shipyard on the Clyde for a few weeks but then joined the Army Boy Service as soon as he was old enough.  Despite his lack of formal education, Jock’s highly profane vocabulary concealed a keen intelligence which he usually kept hidden from even his closest mates, but when his guard was down he could quote from Classical philosophers and poets, and it was even rumoured that he could read the Iliad in the original Greek.
    The briefing finally got under way, with a succession of formal briefings covering every phase of the op: Prelims, Ground, Situation, Mission, Execution, Service Support, Command and Signals. For the first time they discovered where the op was to take place as a large a map of Sierra Leone was projected onto the screen.
    ‘Sierra Leone?’ Geordie said. ‘Where the hell is that? Mexico?’
    ‘Remind me to make sure you never book a holiday for me,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s in West Africa. There are sixteen ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs, the two largest and most powerful being the Temne in the north of the country and the Mende in the south-east. The good news for the non-linguists is that the official language of Sierra Leone is English, the bad news is that ninety per cent of the population don’t speak it. Instead they communicate in a pidgin language called Krio.’
    A series of photographs of features along the coastline followed. There were a succession of