Rough Diamonds (A Spider Shepherd short story)

ROUGH DIAMONDS

By Stephen Leather

***

SIERRA LEONE. October1997.

‘Penny for them?’ growled Jock McIntyre. Jock was a hard-bitten Glaswegian whose rough, no-nonsense ways concealed a keen intelligence. Had ‘intellectual’ not been something of an insult where Jock came from, he might even have admitted to the title, for the SAS rumour mill claimed that he could read the Iliad in the original Greek.

Shepherd realised that the question was directed at him. ‘Penny for what?’ he said. He took a long pull on his glass of Jamesons whiskey. It was Jock who had introduced him to the brand and he had developed a taste for it, albeit mixed with soda water and a few ice cubes thrown in for good measure. They were billeted at the Tradewinds Hotel, overlooking Lumley Beach, west of the Sierra Leonean capital. In different circumstances it would have been an idyllic location with palm-fringed, white sand beaches fringing the turquoise sea, but decades of rampant corruption, military coups, insurrection and civil war had left the country destitute, and as violent and lawless as anywhere on earth.

‘You know what,’ said James “Jimbo” Shortt. ‘You keep drifting off in your own little world.’

‘Probably because you keep boring the pants off him,’ said Jock. ‘He’s missing his wife and kid, that’s what it is.’

Jimbo  raised his beer to Shepherd. ‘I know the feeling. I miss my missus and would much rather be back at home than stuck in this mosquito-ridden hell-hole.’

‘At least Sierra Leone is sunny,’ said Geordie Mitchell, the fourth man at the table.

‘Sunny? You call this sunny?’ said Jimbo. ‘It’s hell on earth, that’s what it is.’

‘I’m just saying, give me a hot country over a cold one, every time,’ said Geordie. ‘At least when it’s hot you can drink a cold beverage.’ He nodded at the ice cubes in Shepherd’s glass. ‘Not that I’d be tempted to touch the ice here.’

‘He deserves whatever he gets for adulterating a perfectly good whiskey,’ said Jock.

Shepherd grinned. ‘There’s a machine in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I checked. There’s a filter on it so it’s all good.’

‘You hope,’ said Geordie. ‘I’ll stick with the beer. No one ever got the runs from beer.’

‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ said Jock. ‘What’s on your mind?’

Shepherd grinned. ‘I was just thinking of all the shit I’ve been through over the last few days,’ he said. He took another long pull on his whiskey. ‘I’ve helped to usher a rapacious bunch of South African mercenaries into Sierra Leone, been forced to trek seventy miles through the bush with no food and no water, witnessed some of the worst atrocities I’ve ever seen, been pursued through the jungle by a group of drug-crazed boy soldiers who were not even in their teens. And I’ve had to put up with Jimbo’s boring stories. I’m not sure how much I can take.’

‘At least we’re never short of excitement in the SAS,’ said Geordie. ‘Unless Jimbo’s telling us a tale, of course.’

‘Fuck you very much,’ said Jimbo.

‘Seriously though, this God-forsaken country is getting me down,’ said Shepherd. ‘I mean, how the hell are we supposed to deal with what goes on here?’ He took a long pull on his drink. ‘I’ve seen Sierra Leonean girls as young as eight who’ve been raped, and boys not even in their teens who’ve been forced to murder their own parents. Kids kept high on a lethal cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine and gunpowder, so that they can be used as killing machines and cannon fodder.’

‘That’s Africa for you,’ said Jock.

‘It doesn’t matter where it’s happening,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s wrong. It’s just plain wrong. I keep wondering how I’d feel if it was my boy being treated like that.’

‘Liam’s still in nappies,’ said Jimbo. ‘And England’ll never go that way.’

‘You say that, but look at Yugoslavia,’ said Shepherd. ‘That was only a few years ago and they were carrying out ethnic cleansing like there was no tomorrow. Snipers were shooting pregnant women and kids in Sarajevo. And Sarajevo is just a hop, skip and a jump from London.’

‘Yugoslavia’s different,’ said Jock. ‘It was never a real country anyway. Like Jimbo said, it’ll never happen in England.’ He grinned. ‘And once we’ve rebuilt Hadrian’s Wall and thrown out the English, we’ll be as happy as Larry north of the border.’

‘You know that the English built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Scots out?’ said Jimbo.

Jock shook his head. ‘Nah, you Sassenachs rewrote the history on that. We built it because we couldn’t stand the sight of you.’

Geordie raised his glass. ‘At least we’re here,’ he said.

‘The cavalry has arrived?’ said Shepherd sourly. ‘I don’t think so, Geordie. Looks to me like we’re doing more harm than good. What’s the first thing we did on arriving here? They get us to organise a beach landing for an unnamed invasion force that turned out to be a bunch of South African mercenaries that the spooks had armed and recruited. What was the first thing the Mercs do when they landed? They ignored the job they’d been hired for – ie to engage the rebels – and instead the went rogue  and made straight for the diamond fields. There they drove the rebels out of the diamond fields and grabbed the stocks of diamonds for themselves.’

‘Aye, you can’t get decent help these days,’ growled Jock.

‘It’s not funny,’ said Shepherd.

‘It’s the way of the world, Spider,’ said Jock. ‘Mercenaries fight for money, that’s the nature of the beast. If they can see a way of getting more cash from a situation, they’ll take it.’

‘So that’s why you were so deep in thought?’ said Geordie.

‘I want to do something to help, I just don’t know what,’ said Shepherd.

‘That’s because we’re soldiers, we follow orders,’ said Jock. ‘Someone else does the thinking, we do the fighting.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Jimbo, and he banged his glass against Geordie’s.

‘There must be something we can do to help the poor sods who live in this godforsaken country,’ said Shepherd.

 ‘Better men than us haven’t managed to find a way to sort out the problems of this shithole,’ said Jimbo.

‘We’re the Pilgrims,’ said Geordie. ‘There are no better men than us.’ He was only a couple of years older than Shepherd and Jimbo, but the stress lines around his eyes and across his forehead made him seem much more than that. He paused, giving Shepherd a calculating look. ‘So spit it out then, Spider. Where has all your deep thought got you to so far?’

‘The reasons for some of the things that have happened here are now pretty obvious,’ he said.  ‘Fact One: We’ve come across a lot of obnoxious shits in our line of work - it goes with the turf - but the rebels here are the worst I’ve ever encountered: torturers, child rapists, child murderers and thieves, stripping Sierra Leone of the resources needed to rebuild the country and give children like the ones we met some sort of hope for the future. Fact Two: The people we helped to bring ashore are now making the country’s problems even worse.  They’ve gone straight from the landing beach to the diamond fields and are plundering the diamonds which could and should be used for the good of the Sierra Leonean people. This is one of the poorest nations on earth but once more the people are being robbed of their rightful inheritance and pushed ever deeper into poverty.’

‘So cut to the chase,’ Jimbo said. ‘We agree: it’s shit and shouldn’t be happening, but we could read that in a Guardian editorial. The question is: what do you want to do about it?’

‘Hang fire a minute,’ Geordie said as Shepherd was about to speak. ‘Incoming slime.’

‘I thought I could smell something,’ Jock said, following his gaze.

As Shepherd looked round, he saw a man approaching. He was wearing a linen suit, an MCC tie and a Panama hat, and couldn’t have looked more typically “an Englishman abroad” if he’d been wearing a bowler hat and carrying a furled umbrella. Jonathan Parker had claimed to be a businessman when they’d first met him in the hotel bar two weeks before, but everything about him had told them from the start that he was a spook. He had later admitted that he was with MI6 and, using intelligence his agency had gathered, he supplied them with the location of the rebel arms dump that they had then destroyed.

He swept off his hat and gave an exaggerated bow to them. ‘Gentlemen, I believe congratulations are in order. Surveillance imagery is showing a large, blackened crater where the rebel arms dump used to be. And as a nice bonus there were quite a few corpses around it too. Two the price of one - that’s what I like to see.’ Without invitation, he sat down, then leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and putting the tips of his fingers together. ‘Seriously lads, job well done. You gave the rebels a well-deserved bloody nose.’

‘And Spider here nearly died,’ said Geordie.

Parker managed to fake a look of concern. ‘Really?’

‘It was a bit rough, yeah,’ said Shepherd. ‘But all’s well that ends well.’

‘He’s going to do a McNab and write a bestseller,’ said Jimbo. ‘Short And Curlies – how I was chased through the jungle by a group of twelve-year-olds with Kalashnikovs,’

Shepherd pulled an ice cube from his glass and tossed it at Jimbo.

‘You’re okay though?’ asked Parker, and his concern seemed more genuine.

Shepherd shrugged. ‘I had a rough few days in the jungle, but I’m back on form.’

‘Good to hear, because there another problem you might be able to help me with.’ He waved over a waiter and asked for a coffee.

‘Let me guess,’ Shepherd said once the waiter had gone. ‘It’s your pet mercenaries.’

‘Indeed. As you know, they have ignored their orders and instead of fighting the rebels, they’re plundering diamonds from the Kono fields. We have intelligence that they’ve secured a large cache of uncut diamonds - several million pounds worth - and are planning to make a run for the Liberian border. If they succeed, they’ll not only be able to sell the diamonds there but the Liberians will also buy or otherwise obtain their armoured vehicles and heavy weapons, and we cannot afford that to happen.’

‘Pity you didn’t think of that before you supplied the mercenaries, isn’t it?’ Jock said.

 Parker gave Jock a wintry smile. ‘To be fair now, that particular decision was taken way above my pay grade,’ he said. ‘And as my old grandmother used to say, there’s no use crying over spilled milk.’ His coffee arrived and he helped himself to three spoons of sugar before continuing. ‘At the moment the Liberians are already using their ex-Soviet helicopter-gunships in cross-border raids in support of the rebels here. Not much we can do about that. But the Liberians can’t give the rebels armoured vehicles and heavy weapons without endangering their own security because the Liberian regime’s grip on power in its own country is by no means secure. They just don’t have the resources.  But if the rebels can get their hands on the mercenaries’ vehicles and heavy weapons that could well tip the balance here. And that one thing that HMG most definitely doesn’t want is for the present government to be overthrown.’

‘Because it’s doing such a great job of running the country?’ said Shepherd, his voice loaded with sarcasm.

Parker flashed him a tight smile as he stirred his coffee. ‘Believe me, it could get a lot worse.’

‘So what is it you want?’

‘I was hoping that perhaps you might be able to make sure that the vehicles and weapons don’t fall into rebel hands.’

Shepherd’s jaw dropped. ‘You want us to intercept the mercs before they can reach the border?’ he said. ‘Four lightly armed men against an armoured column - what could possibly go wrong? And where does your intelligence about their movements come from anyway? I hope it’s more reliable than the mercenaries you recruit.’

Parker’s fixed smile wavered. ‘We’re not as naive as you sometimes like to think, you know. We’ve had a trusted source inside the mercenaries from the very start.’

‘Well maybe he should stop the column for you then,’ Jock said.

‘And if he’s such a good source, why he didn’t he tell you what they had planned?’ asked Shepherd.

‘I think that it’s a pay grade thing again,’ said Parker. ‘Only the guys running the show knew that the diamonds fields were going to be seized.’

Shepherd fell silent, deep in thought. ‘There may be a way to take out the mercs and at the same time, discourage the Liberians from supporting the rebels.’

Parker shot him a guarded look. ‘HMG cannot be seen to be carrying out or openly supporting attacks on Liberian territory.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Shepherd said. ‘It won’t be traceable and we may even be able to put your mercs to good use after all.’

‘In what way?’ He smiled as he answered his own question. ‘Make them the scapegoats, you mean?’ Parker’s smile was now back in place. ‘I like the way you think, Shepherd. You think like a spook.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a compliment, actually,’  Shepherd said.

Jock burst out laughing at the expression on Parker’s face as he stood up. ‘I’ll give you a dossier of the intelligence we have, and I’ll make sure you have the full cooperation of the Boss of the Operational Squadron, within the constraints of the available resources obviously.’

‘Which means there won’t be any,’ Geordie said.