“Why do they call him Hammer?” The reporter sounded exasperated. She was yet to get a straight answer.
Warrant Officer Class Two Gary “Boot” Fulham smiled inwardly. Laughing would have been too painful. The gunshot wound to his upper chest hurt like crap, and the rest of his body felt as though it had been through a rock crusher.
He was recovering from an intense, days-long shitfight in the White Mountains, chasing a much-wanted Taliban commander code-named Rasputin. Fulham was laid up in the Role Three Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Airfield. He was lucky to be alive—and only because of the man who went by the nickname Hammer.
“You don’t know, right?” The reporter, Madison Braithwaite, sounded resigned to the answer. Everyone was talking about Hammer, never to her, just among themselves.
She had met him only briefly while embedded in his special-forces troop during the final days of their patrol, a rare privilege. Hammer—Shepard—and Fulham had disappeared on foot into the Safed Koh. What happened up there? Three days on the base and it was “Hammer this” and “Hammer that”. Then the exfiltration. She knew it had been a big deal. It ended with the tilt-rotor crash.
Fulham grinned. If he earned a dollar every time someone asked, he would be a millionaire.
“It’s funny, right?” Braithwaite asked. She had tried teasing the story from other troopers, but they offered a cheeky grin and the old cliché: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” She suspected many did not know the story either. That only sharpened her curiosity.
“No, no,” Fulham finally said. “It’s not funny.” Bitterly funny, perhaps.
“And?”
“And—you have to ask him.” Shepard never talked about it.
“They won’t let me. Still recovering, they say.”
Fulham shrugged, immediately regretting it. The man, the legend and the name. No doubt they had just written another chapter. They were calling it the Sikiram Nightmare. They were not wrong.
He looked at the reporter standing at the foot of his bed. Maybe there was something he could do. This woman was interesting, aside from being a looker. Women did not normally fluster his boss. This one was different. Unless Fulham had misread the signals, Hammer had a thing for her.
And the name—Maddy. Holy shit. That took him back.
Fifteen years earlier
Fulham knew how Shepard earned the nickname because he had been there, along with three other troopers and the directing staff. It was not the birth of Jake Shepard’s legend, but it put a name to it.
Fulham and Shepard had been on the same SAS selection course. It started with 135 candidates. Fifteen made it through, although more would be cut later. Selection was followed by the twelve-month reinforcement cycle—the “reo”. The two men were completing a six-week patrol course, one of the proficiencies required before they could wear the sandy-coloured beret.
Patrolling had long been the beating heart of SAS operations: moving behind enemy lines, gathering intelligence and leaving unseen. The core was a five-man team. They learned to walk through bush quietly, using cover and shadow, sometimes covering only five hundred metres in a day and spending long periods completely still.
They were practising in the Lancelin Training Area, north of Perth, at the end of a day that would likely extend deep into the night. Shepard was on point when he raised his fist.
A dog squealed in pain somewhere ahead.
A local man had turned off the beaten track to kill his dog with a hammer. The five-man team happened upon him as he was laying into the animal. He had already broken one of its back legs. The dog screamed and struggled to escape. Its attacker had neither heard nor seen the team—which was exactly how the exercise was meant to work.
Then Jake Shepard did the unthinkable. He broke cover, stepped from the bush and yelled:
“Stop.”
Breaking cover violated strict procedure. It could end his SAS career. There were no do-overs in this business. But this was Jake. Hammer time was about to begin.
Shepard threw his weapon to Fulham and said, “Wait here.” Then he moved towards the man with the dog.
The scene grew worse as the patrol watched. Bloody dog carcasses lay along the tree line. The man had done this before.
He was big, and he still held the hammer. He and Shepard argued. Nobody could hear the words, but the exchange was heated. Then the man launched himself at Shepard with every intention of burying the hammer in his head.
Shepard sidestepped and drove him into the ground. In seconds the hammer was in Shepard’s hand. Fast and methodical, he pinned each arm and smashed both hands. On the hard gravel it was difficult to distinguish bone cracking from stone. The man screamed. Shepard rolled him over and struck both kneecaps.
Kneeling on his chest, Jake spoke to him again, took a telephone from his pocket and made a call. As far as the injured man knew, Jake was alone. Shepard leaned close and said something that, even through the agony, commanded his full attention. His body went rigid. He stopped screaming.
Before the Chief Instructor
Within twenty-four hours, Fulham was standing to attention before the Chief Instructor, certain it was over for all of them.
The CI had already spoken with the directing staff. He understood that the dog killer—Brendan Shapiro—had suffered broken bones in both hands and kneecaps during what was being described unofficially as a struggle.
“Was anything else said?” the CI asked.
“Not much, sir. Hammer—I mean, Jake—came back, collected his rifle and said he had called someone to pick this bloke up. Then he picked up the dog and walked off.”
Jake walked sixteen kilometres back to base camp, arranged for the dog to be taken immediately to a vet, then walked back to the patrol.
“When did he return?”
“That evening, sir. Around twenty-one hundred. Suddenly appeared in the middle of us. Nobody knew he was there—or how he tracked us in the dark.”
Not even the directing staff, the CI thought. Trooper Shepard would receive an earful, but this was clearly a man to watch.
“For whatever reason, Brendan Shapiro isn’t laying charges, and the local coppers seem quite pleased. Apparently, Brendan had it coming. But let’s not poke the bear. The hammer episode goes no further than this room. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, the CI asked, “Did Hammer keep the dog?”
“Yes, sir. A cross between a bluey and something hairy. Maddy. Hammer called her Maddy.”
Brendan, the man who got hammered, was driven back to the town hospital. He said nothing and was never seen again. Hammer never spoke of the episode. Nobody knew what he had whispered, or why it frightened Brendan enough to keep his mouth shut.
“Don’t mess with Hammer” carried weight for good reason. Had it been anyone else, they would have been expelled. But nobody else would have dared do what Hammer did.
If Fulham could put his finger on what made the moment stand out, it was conviction. No hesitation about the action required. No fear of personal consequence. Only what needed to be done.
The military preached that leadership was learned: taught, practised and reinforced. Yet a rare few were natural leaders. Their authority seemed effortless. They made the right instinctive decision without hesitation. Gravitational leadership. Shepard possessed it, and people reacted accordingly.
Back at Kandahar
Fulham’s attention returned to the journalist. He entertained the possibility of becoming a matchmaker. Perhaps it was time his boss showed interest in something beyond work.
A twinge of pain reminded him how close the grim reaper had come. But for Shepard, Fulham would be dead on the slopes of Sikiram. What he could not know was that the Sikiram ordeal was merely the beginning. High on that mountain, Shepard had triggered a chain of events that would consume nations and plunge them into another fight for survival.
Significant events in history often emerge from incidents that seem unrelated. The First World War was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In this instance, Shepard had brought something down from the mountain.
It sat in his kit bag. It resembled a piece of aircraft wreckage—perhaps an oleo strut. It had helped them escape, but it was not an oleo strut.
The Sikiram Nightmare was the Ferdinand moment for what was coming.