Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather

NATURAL SELECTION
    By Stephen Leather
    ***
     
    BELIZE.
    April 1996.
     
     
    Dan Shepherd sat on the edge of a clearing, staring at a column of leaf-cutter ants carrying shards of tamarind leaves on an endless trek through the deep litter of the forest floor. He and his comrades were deep in the Belizean jungle, several days walk from the nearest road. ‘Don’t blame the ants, it’s not their fault.’
    He glanced up. His mate Liam McKay was watching him with a quizzical expression in his dark eyes. ‘Last time I saw a man look that pissed off, he’d just been told his leave had been cancelled.’ Liam’s mother was from Belfast and even though they’d moved to England when he was only five, there were still faint echoes of a Northern Irish brogue when he spoke. They’d met on their first day on Selection and immediately hit it off.  Liam was now a good mate, and he was also the hardest man Shepherd had ever met - and he’d known a few.
    The Jungle Training part of Selection came after almost twenty weeks of the most intensive special forces course in the world. SAS Selection began in Hereford with a one-week briefing course with swimming, navigation, first aid and combat fitness tests and a lot of runs up and down the local hills. That was followed by a month on the SAS’s fitness and navigation course based at the Sennybridge Training Camp in Wales including the army’s Combat Fitness Test – 45 press-ups and 55 sit-ups in two minutes each followed by a mile and half run in under nine and a half minutes. Neither had been a problem for Shepherd, he had spent the year prior to Selection getting himself into peak physical condition. While at Sennybridge, Shepherd had been introduced to the Fan Dance – a grueling fifteen-mile run over two sides of Pen Y Fan, the highest mountain in the Brecon Beacons, with a fully-loaded bergen. The fourth week of the hills phase had been a killer. The instructors - the Directing Staff – called it test week and it consisted of six marches on consecutive days with increasing distances and weights carried. The final day was a forty mile march across the Brecon Beacons with a fifty-five pound bergen which had to be completed in less than twenty hours. It had been pouring down with rain the entire march but Shepherd and Liam had completed it in a little over eighteen hours. Those that hadn’t failed or quit went on to do fourteen weeks of weapons, vehicle, demolitions and patrol tactics before they were flown to Belize for the six-week jungle training course.
    ‘I’m not pissed off,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just a bit disillusioned I guess. I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere, you know?’
    ‘We’ve flown half way around the world,’ laughed Liam. ‘That not good enough for you?’
    Shepherd grinned. ‘You know what I mean, you daft sod.  I thought we’d be part of the elite, the absolute ultimate in soldiering, but-’ he dropped his voice and gestured around them. ‘I mean, this is supposed to be the best Regiment in the world but there’s a real lack of intensity in a lot of the training we’ve been doing. I was more tested on some of the stuff I did with the Paras, and I don’t rate some of the guys we’re training with. A few are keen enough but the others…’  He shrugged. ‘Some of the guys here just aren’t putting in the effort. Seems to me they’re doing the minimum, just enough to get by.’
    ‘Fair comment,’ said Liam. ‘But not everyone wants to be an action hero like us. Some of them will be happy enough with a base or admin post, or signals.’
    ‘Action hero?’
    Liam laughed. ‘You know what I mean. You love it, Dan. The guns, the flash bangs, the jumping out of planes. You’re an adrenaline junkie.’
    ‘Bollocks.’
    ‘You just don’t see it, but it’s true.’ He held up his hands. ‘Hey, I love it as much as you do. That’s why I wanted to join the SAS. Best unit in the army, no question.’
    ‘I’m not doing it for the