Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 Read Online Free Page A

to reinforce the first section, their surfaces streaked with orange rust, but the Bosnians must have run out of iron and steel beams, for the remainder of it was shored up with a motley assortment of wooden props. ‘My dad was a miner,’ Diesel said, his voice muffled by his face-mask. ‘He would not have been impressed with those pit props.’
    Thin metal rails had been laid in the floor of the tunnel, suggesting that a primitive railway was used to transport goods but there was no sign of any carts or trucks and Shepherd resigned himself to having to carry the LTD marker all the way into the city. The tunnel was only five foot three inches high and Shepherd, who was more than six inches taller than that, had to duck down to avoid cracking his head on the roof.
    The strain of carrying a heavy weight while bending over meant he was mightily relieved to see the glow of light that at last signalled the end of the tunnel ahead. They emerged in the underground garage of one of the city’s shell-battered apartment buildings. Shepherd and Gus set the LTD marker down with sighs of relief. Ibro beckoned them towards a grating set high in the wall, which offered them their first view of Sarajevo. ‘Welcome to our beautiful city,’ he said with a bitter laugh.
    Just outside the building, Shepherd could see more trenches manned by Bosnian troops. Beyond them, as far as the eye could see, there was not a single undamaged building. The years of shelling had reduced almost all of the houses to rubble, and though some of the Soviet era apartment blocks still stood, they had been reduced to skeletons, with their reinforced concrete pillars supporting only empty space. One gable end still stood but it was so pitted by small arms fire, and so pierced and shattered by shelling that it looked more like filigree than concrete. They could hear the constant rumble of mortars and artillery in the distance and every now and again the crash and thud of a round impacting in the surrounding streets.
    ‘What now?’ Harry said.
    ‘Now we wait for nightfall, my friend. Nothing moves here by day, but at night the city comes alive.’
    They made themselves as comfortable as they could. Diesel and Spud, like soldiers of the world over, snatched the chance to close their eyes and catnap, but Harry remained alert, conferring with Ibro in whispers. Shepherd kept staring out into the darkening streets. A few men came and went through the tunnel, each one, like Ibro, as pale as a ghost. The traffic increased as night fell.
    At last, at a word from Ibro, Harry roused his men and Ibro led them out into the street. They moved slowly, picking their way through a morass of rubble and shell craters. Even though the front and back walls of almost every apartment building they passed had been blown out and shell holes in the roof and upper floors had left them half open to the elements, Shepherd could glimpse people still living in them, like troglodytes in their caves. Using whatever wood they had managed to scavenge despite the risks from snipers, several had lit small fires set in the middle of what might once have been their living room floors. The glow of those small fires and the flickering light of an occasional candle was the only illumination in the whole of the city, for every street light had been shattered and the night sky was moonless and overcast.
    Shepherd and the others used their PNGs - Passive Night Goggles - but though Ibro had none, he seemed as keen-eyed and sure-footed as a cat in the darkness as he led them on through the streets, making for the outskirts.
    The shelled and burnt out wrecks of four cars littered one street, one of them blown onto its side by the blast that had destroyed it and, from the reddish-brown stains of dried blood that were still visible on the dashboard and the inside of the door, had also killed its occupants. The seats had been taken, probably for use as makeshift furniture by some of those living in the