Hostile Territory (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free Page A

overthrow the government, they’re just fighting for control of the diamond-producing areas. It’s all about money. Correction. It’s ONLY about money. The RUF have been in control of large parts of those areas for over a year and have used the revenues to buy more and more weapons, fuelling the civil war here and Charles Taylor’s brutal rule in Liberia. And in Sierra Leone, if you control the diamonds, you control the country.’
    Shepherd sipped his whiskey and wondered where the conversation was heading.
    ‘The SLA - the Sierra Leonean Army – are just as bad as the rebels,’ continued Parker. ‘They’re of almost no value to us in counter-insurgency. They’re not trained, they’re rarely, if ever, paid and even their rations are inadequate. They live with their families in what are called barracks, but most are just a collection of mud-walled, one-roomed houses, built by the soldiers themselves. They have to use money from their wages - if they’ve been given any - to pay for the corrugated iron sheets for the roof.  In some barracks, they’re so short of space that two soldiers and their families share each tiny house. They’re supposed to get a uniform, a gun and one bag of rice a month. The senior officers have just cut that allowance in half, so that they can sell the surplus on the black market. It’s not only corrupt but very dangerous, because the last such cut in rations led to an uprising in which 6,000 people were killed in Freetown alone.’
    ‘And we bitch about our wages,’ said Geordie.
    Parker ignored the comment.  ‘The civilian population is preyed on both by the rebels and by government troops, and for every soldier killed there are ten civilian deaths. Many local people call the SLA “sobels” - soldiers by day, rebels by night. The fighting often forces villagers to abandon their crops before they even have time to harvest them and some think that it’s a deliberate policy by the SLA; they collude with the rebels to terrify the villagers until they flee, then harvest the crops for themselves, either to eat or to sell on the black market. Many SLA soldiers have even been known to sell their arms and munitions to the rebels and some find they can do better by defecting to the rebels. Whether they do or not, they are often as brutal as the rebels and as prone to theft, rape, murder and looting. For protection, the civilians have increasingly turned to a grass roots militia called the Kamajors, though they can often be just as corrupt.’
    ‘Sounds like a bloody nightmare,’ said Shepherd.
    Parker nodded. ‘So to sum up: the entire country is up shit creek, in a barbed wire canoe, and without a semblance of a paddle. The rebels are probably only waiting for the end of the rainy season - any day now - before launching another offensive. The Nigerians and their allies have shown no interest in advancing beyond the airport perimeter and the South African mercenaries that you gentlemen ushered into the country a couple of weeks ago have, it seems, ignored their orders to engage the rebels and drive them back from the outskirts of Freetown, and abandoned any pretense of intervening on behalf of the government. Instead they have simply driven the RUF out of some of the most productive diamond mining areas and seized them for themselves.’
    ‘That’s what you get for using mercs,’ Jock said. ‘There is no task in this shithole of a country that the SAS couldn’t have done for you and it would have been equally untraceable back to HMG, but instead you chose to bring in South African mercenaries. Any one of us could have told you that they’re about as unsavoury and unreliable a bunch as you can imagine, a ragbag of thugs, renegades, soldiers of fortune, deserters from other armies and “kaffir-killers” from South Africa’s apartheid era bush wars.’
    Parker shrugged. ‘Our masters had their reasons,’ he said. ‘You know as well as I do that decisions are always made way