Moving Targets_An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-19T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The tourist coach pulled up at the bottom of the short incline leading to the entrance of the Parthenon. It was early and the coach was one of the first of the day’s arrivals, but the heat was already rising in shimmering waves from the ancient stones. Tourists poured off the coach, the Koreans, Chinese and Japanese photographing everything that moved, the clicking of their camera shutters a mechanical echo of the dry choruses of the cicadas in the dusty trees at the foot of the slope.

An elderly American couple, Hank and Leanne, were the last to climb down from the coach. Hank was fussing over Leanne, who was visibly exhausted and limping slightly from an attack of sciatica. By contrast, even though there were also lines of fatigue around his eyes, her husband kept his back rigidly upright – the posture of a veteran military man. An ammunition technical expert, he had served more years than he cared to remember, first in uniform and then, after retiring from the military, with the Department of Defense until it became obvious to everyone, even Hank, that he finally had to go.

During his long and distinguished career, he had watched many thousands of pieces of ordnance being fired, detonated or sent into orbit, and in fact had probably witnessed more gunfire and explosions than the most hard-bitten combat veteran. And yet, too young for Vietnam, too old for the Gulf War, he had never once heard a shot fired in anger. Indeed, it was his proud boast that he had never – till now – even left the continental United States. It was his job to monitor and assess the effectiveness of weapons and ammunition and, where necessary, to order the destruction or recycling of items that had reached the end of their shelf life. Consequently, he was able to identify every piece of ordnance equipment and ammunition used by the US military since the end of the Second World War.

A lifelong bachelor, on retirement he had moved to Florida and bought a condo close to Tarpon Springs – ‘Sponge Capital of the World’. To his and everyone else’s amazement he then met, fell in love with and married a local widow – Leanne – to whom he became devoted. With extra time on his hands after his retirement, he was able to indulge his hobby of attending military parades. It was a hobby that had started in November 1963, when he had been taken by his father to the funeral parade of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Too young to have been more than dimly aware of JFK as president, the raw atmosphere of grief and shock, just three days after Kennedy’s assassination, made less impact on Hank than the pageantry of the funeral procession. The horse-drawn gun carriage carrying the coffin, the riding boots placed backwards in the stirrups of the President’s riderless charger, the troops and sailors with their rifles reversed, the muffled rumble

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