be the skills man in the patrol, because I’m the only one with the training and experience. I’ll be signaller and demolitionist, and you’ll be my kit carriers. We’re going to use old fashioned morse code radio comms with a one-time code pad. The reason is that those old morse sets give out a very low wattage when transmitting and are very difficult for enemy direction finding systems to locate. The set has a wire dipole aerial which we have to string through the jungle canopy high above the ground. To deploy it, you tie a fishing weight to it, throw it high into the trees and let it fall back to the ground. To then get it into a straight line through the branches is a painstaking task, also known as a pain in the arse. It’s laborious but effective, so you need to practise that. And whatever else we might communicate to HQ, we never send the correct grid reference of our location. The reason is that it’s not unknown in Special Forces for the grid reference to be passed on to other agencies for other reasons, usually to the detriment of the patrol, but if they don’t know it, they can’t blow it. Now, weapons: we’re going to carry Self-Loading Rifles.’
‘Aren’t the SLRs a bit heavy and out-dated?’ Shepherd said.
Pilgrim nodded. ‘In other circumstances, yes, but they’re very well suited to jungle combat. Although the rifle’s heavy, it fires the standard Nato 7.62 round and that’s the round which packs a real punch. All the new lightweight rounds bounce off trees in the jungle undergrowth, but the Nato round goes straight through them.’
Pilgrim opened a map and spread it out over the floor. ‘Now RVs,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the first ones now, then we’ll set them every morning before moving off. First RV here.’ His finger tapped a point on the map. ‘Emergency RV here,’ he pointed to another, ‘open until dusk. The war RV here.’ He moved his finger to a third point. ‘That’ll be good until the following dusk. After that, anyone separated from the patrol will make their own way to the emergency RV. The RV we’ll use will always be in front of any contact we have with the enemy, deeper into their territory, so that we can get on and complete the mission without having to return to base.
‘If we’re in a contact and are pursued, a small group like ours always has the advantage in the jungle over a large group. We know that we’ll be outnumbered but large groups are very unwieldy and difficult to control. We all have a map and compass and we can all navigate. Large green army groups only have one compass and map for every ten men. So we can split up and rendezvous later miles away, whereas the large infantry groups can’t.’
He gave them a moment to let that sink in. ‘One other thing: Belize, and the Toledo District in particular, is now the principal route for Colombian cocaine being shipped to the US. They bring it over the border from Guatemala, while the military there pocket plenty in bribes to look the other way, and send it on into Mexico or ship it out to the cays off the coast - there’s hundreds of them and many are unpopulated - either in light aircraft, which use the dirt roads as air-strips, or fast-boats. The traffickers are more heavily armed than the Belizean armed forces and probably better in a fight, and they’re inclined to shoot first and worry afterwards. They’re ruthless killers, but the good news is that no-one gives a shit about the drug-traffickers and while there’ll be hell to pay if we shoot it out with a platoon of the Guatemalan Army, there won’t be an international outcry at the news that a few members of some Colombian coke baron’s private army have been wiped out. So if we come across them, it’s open season as far as I’m concerned. Okay, that’s it. Let’s get to work.’
The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, they were airborne again. As usual, Jimbo and Geordie had closed their eyes as soon as the rotors had begun to turn, and were cat-napping, while Liam was gazing out of the helicopter’s Plexiglas window. Shepherd joined Pilgrim near the open doorway. The SAS veteran was watchful and alert, his gaze raking the terrain as the Puma flew on to the south, as if every building or tree concealed a potential threat.
Shepherd stared out at the landscape unfolding below them as the Puma tracked the course of a broad, mud-stained river. Beyond the last of the sprawling, rust-coloured shanty-towns on the outskirts of Belize City, long stretches of mangrove swamps gave way to scrub bush and then secondary jungle. As they skimmed over the unbroken canopy of the rainforest, Shepherd saw a dark mountain range looming ahead of them. A few ancient, twisted oak trees maintained a precarious hold on the lower slopes of the summit ridge, but above them, a pine forest stood tall against the sky. It was a bizarre transition, as if they’d suddenly been transported from the rainforest to the Canadian Rockies. As they skimmed over the ridge, the downwash from the rotors stirred up a dust-storm of pine needles and thrashed the wildflowers studding the sandy soil.
‘I’ve not seen this before,’ Shepherd said. ‘It’s been dark when we’ve flown in and out. It’s strange isn’t it?’
Pilgrim nodded. ‘Mountain Pine Ridge,’ he said. ‘Weird place to find a pine forest. And see that?’ He pointed ahead to where the river they were tracking suddenly disappeared from view. As the Puma shot over the edge, Shepherd found himself looking down at a waterfall dropping sheer for five hundred meters. Indifferent to the clatter of the Puma’s rotors, king vultures and orange-breasted falcons were spiralling on the thermals rising up the granite rock-face. The waterfall seemed to bridge two different worlds. The mountains at the head were clad in the pine forest; the bottom of the falls, lost in a mist of spray, was back in dense tropical jungle.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Shepherd.
‘Dangerous places often are,’ said Pilgrim.
A few minutes later, the Puma cleared the last ridge of the mountains and Shepherd saw another, even stranger change in the landscape. ‘Goodbye Rockies,’ Pilgrim said, ‘Hello Great Plains.’
The plain stretching away from the foot of the mountains was classic farming country, flat arable land and pasture, with metalled roads bisecting the massive fields at right angles.
‘What the hell?’ Shepherd said.
Pilgrim smiled. ‘The Mennonites. They’ve been here since the late 1950’s and they’ve turned the jungle into a close replica of Kansas.’
‘What’s a Mennonite? It sounds like some sort of fossil.’
‘You’re closer than you think. They’re mostly American but they talk ancient German that even Germans can’t understand. Their clothes look like sackcloth, they don’t use modern inventions, and they work in the fields about twenty-eight hours a day. Imagine the Amish without the sense of fun and you’re not far off.’
Beyond the miniature Great Plains the jungle began again, stretching unbroken far to the south. Shepherd checked his watch. They had covered the sequence from city and shanty town, through swamp, scrub, jungle, pine forest, arable land, and back to secondary and then primary jungle in no more than an hour’s flight from north to south.
Pilgrim was again pointing ahead. ‘The end of the line,’ he said. ‘Toledo is the land that time forgot. It’s bigger than Wales but there’s only thirty thousand people here. There’s only one dirt road connecting this entire region with the rest of the country. You can get around some of the other tracks with a Landrover in the dry season, but the rest of the time you can forget it; there’s about two hundred inches of rain a year down here, so there are really only two ways to travel: by boat or on foot.’
Shepherd stared down at the jungle. At first he could see nothing but the dense, green canopy, pierced by an occasional silver glint as light reflected from the surface of a river. As the helicopter dropped lower, he caught a glimpse of a just-discernible break in the canopy, and caught sight of the Mayan village - a few huts in a small clearing on the banks of the river, like a tiny island in a huge emerald-green sea. They overflew the village and the Puma went into a hover a few miles closer to the border, above an old plantation, abandoned by the Maya but not yet reverted to jungle, that was to serve as the Landing Zone.
Geordie and Jimbo had stirred themselves at the engine note changed and as soon as the
chopper landed, the five men unloaded their gear, jumped out and ran clear. At once, the rotors thundered and the downwash whipped the jungle, sending a dust storm of leaves and broken branches spinning through the air as the Puma lifted off and swung back towards the north.
As the noise of the rotors faded, the sounds of the rainforest resumed; the insistent cries of birds answered by the buzzing of a billion insects. Shepherd crouched by the buttress root of a strangler fig for a moment, watching and listening as they’d been trained, but also savouring the beauty, the strangeness and the silence. Then at a nod from Pilgrim, they shouldered their bergens. As they entered the jungle, they could hear behind them the chop of rotors as a succession of other helicopters began landing the local infantry company who were providing cover for the op and would form a defensive perimeter around the RV point just inside the border.
The SAS patrol had already disappeared from sight, moving through the dense jungle, maintaining the silent patrolling routine they had practised. Pilgrim took the role of lead scout - or point man - at first, navigating and keeping the patrol heading broadly the right direction, but as they moved on, he brought each of