Crossfire (23 page)

'You on Osama watch?'

'Nah, just fishing about for work.'

The look on his face said he'd heard that one
too many times before. 'You're going the wrong
way, man. He's up north.'

I smiled and waited for a yes or no. If he didn't
have a weapon, I'd try my luck in the car park.
But it would be risky with the guards out there,
and I had no time to fuck about.

He pointed through an open doorway that led
to the back of the house. The door had been
removed – or pulled off its hinges. 'Up the stairs,
look for Stu.'

Justin finally shut up and some Indian music
came on. A couple of girls in saris got up and
began gyrating. The wizard gripped my arm. 'I'm
telling you, he's with those Pakistani bitches way
up north, getting high and laughing at us all, man.'

The flat-out monkey awoke with a jolt, maybe
startled by the change of music. He rolled right
off the shelf and landed in a puddle of beer on
the floor. He got to his feet and staggered away to
war, leaving his hat behind. But, like a good
soldier, he kept his weapon with him.

The corridor took me to a set of stairs. A naked
bulb burnt on the landing. The noise filtering
down was a mix of drunken shouts and girly
squeals.

Somebody had propped a mannequin against
the wall at the top of the stairs. They'd given him
a rubber bin Laden mask. An unlit cigarette
dangled from the mouth, and he was plastered
with lipstick and eye-shadow. The finishing
touch was a pair of fake women's breasts, the
sort the local dickhead would wear while cooking
a barbecue.

A rough Jock voice came from a room at the far
end. I followed it. That door was missing too. The
ones either side of it were intact and closed. From
behind them came the rhythmic pounding of
mattress springs and a chorus of moans and
groans.

The open room was piled high with six packs
of plastic two-litre water-bottles. The bare floorboards
were riddled with holes. The wood was
splintered inwards. No wonder weapons weren't
allowed downstairs. Punters who'd come up
for a shag would have ended up with their
bollocks shot off. Not much repeat business in
that.

The walls were plastered with more pictures
and magazine cuttings. The connecting door to
my right seemed to be a shrine to Jonathan 'Jack'
Idema. I remembered him. He'd become world
news when he'd got caught running his own
private interrogation centre a few years ago.
During his trial, he said he'd been given a passport
and visa by an unnamed American agency.
He claimed he'd been fitted up – the FBI was out
to get him because he refused to name the
sources who had tipped him off about a nuclear
smuggling operation in Lithuania.

Idema might have been away with the fairies,
but his victims weren't. The pictures on the door
showed what the police had found inside his
homemade torture chamber. Three Afghans
hung upside down from the ceiling, naked and
totally covered with blisters and burns from boiling
water. Another eighteen or nineteen were
found dead in a trunk. They'd crammed the poor
fuckers in there and locked the lid. Three more
were in a cupboard, their flesh whipped raw.

The pictures could have come straight from the
Yes Man's folder.

The shrine shifted suddenly as the connecting
door opened. One of the girls came out carrying
a red plastic bowl, some liquid soap and an old
grey towel that had probably once been white.

The picture on the door was now at an angle
but I could still see our mate Jack in court, pointing
and ranting from the dock. He had a beard,
and wore sunglasses and combat fatigues with
US flags stitched all over them. I remembered
him claiming he'd been working for the US
government and had received orders from
Donald Rumsfeld. Nothing to do with multimillion-
dollar bounties, of course. Fuck it, I
might still have a go myself when this was over.

I passed the door to see a stained stripy mattress.
Sprawled across it, an overweight and
hairy white man scratched his bollocks with one
hand and smoked with the other. Next to his pile
of clothes on the floor, a used condom leaked its
contents.

'Stu?'

His well-fed head lifted from the mattress long
enough for him to suck in another lungful of
nicotine. 'Fuck off.' His French accent certainly
didn't belong to a Stu.

I carried on to the end of the corridor.

'Stu?'

The guy in the open room was playing chess
with a young local lad, maybe fifteen at a push.
Their board lay across a couple of cases of Miller
Lite.

His head jerked up. 'Aye?'

It was a challenge, not an answer, and it came
straight from the Gorbals. He had a wiry grey
barnet and a beard that needed a good trim. So
did his nostril hair, which grew straight into his
moustache. He was early sixties, with pale skin
and a nose that had been broken so many times it
was almost flat. I nodded appreciatively at his
blue Hawaiian shirt. 'Nice. The guy from downstairs
sent me. I'm looking for a short. I was in the
Gandamack and—'

'I know.' His eyes were back on the chessboard
but he put up a hand. 'They called. The two of
them want to shoot up for free if I sell you something.
What am I? A fucking charity?' His head
came up slowly. 'You people, you never give up,
do you? Why have you come all this fucking
way? English, I suppose?'

His attention went back to the chessboard. The
white pieces were carved soldiers, Western-style,
with helmets and body armour.

He stood up and waffled in local to the boy.
Whatever he was saying, it sounded along the
lines of 'Move any of these and you're history.'

I looked at the black pieces. They had turbans,
beards and Gunga Din kit.

He looked me up and down as he came
towards me. 'You've come to play big boys'
games and you don't even have the brains to sort
yourself out with a fucking weapon. What are
you, son? A fucking bank clerk, thinking all this
shite is some sort of great adventure?'

He needed a dental plan even more than
Magreb. The few teeth that weren't black had an
inch of nicotine on them. And he stank.

I nodded and smiled. He had what I wanted. 'I
just need a weapon.'

'You got money?'

I stepped back from his BO. 'Enough.'

'What are we waiting for, then?' He turned
back to the light-skinned boy and gave him
another warning. He left the room and I
followed. I grabbed a bottle of water from a pack
that was already ripped open.

We passed the sound of more humping and
grunting and headed downstairs. We went
through the bar just as the dancing girls, now
semi-naked, were having some fun with empty
beer bottles. I followed the Jock through a door,
into what would once have been the kitchen.

Two girls stood next to the sink, chatting away
together and soaping themselves with flannels as
if we weren't there.

The Jock led me across to two rusty and disconnected
chest freezers with hasps and
padlocks drilled into them. He unlocked one
and lifted the lid to expose longs and shorts of all
makes and sizes.

This place didn't do pub grub.

I dug around in what amounted to a big
collection of rust.

'The semi-auto pistols are two hundred.
Revolvers one fifty. AKs two fifty. Anything else,
I'll tell you.'

'You heard of a Polish guy, Dominik
Condratowicz?'

He leant against the other freezer, eyeing the
two girls. They were now up on chairs and
squatting over the sink to give themselves a final
rinse with running water.

'No. That who you gonna kill with one of these
fucking things?'

I picked out an old MP5 and fished about for
some mags. There were two. 'You got any nine-millimetre
for this?'

He slapped the freezer beneath him but kept
his eyes on the girls. One was towelling herself
and the one I'd seen upstairs was giving her
makeup a bit of a retouch, ready for the next
round. 'I've got to keep the fucking lot locked up.
Fucking thieving bastards.'

The MP5 was knackered and rusty. I needed to
look inside to check it had the basics – like a
firing pin. These Heckler & Kochs were very
quick to disassemble. I pushed back on the two
pins at the rear, which opened up the backplate
and one end of the pistol grip.

He was taking an interest in me now that he
saw I knew what I was doing.

I pulled out the working parts. There was
nothing but rust around the chamber, and so
much corrosion in the barrel I could only just
about see light through it.

'What about Noah James?'

The Jock's eyes jerked away from the girls. He
went ballistic. 'Fucking animal! You anything to
do with him?'

'No, just heard he was about. You know
where?'

I started to reassemble the weapon.

His finger came up to my face. As long as his
breath stayed away that was fine. 'I don't fucking
know and don't care. If they come here again I'll
do Kabul a favour and kill the shites myself.'

'He come in with the Brit?'

'Joey fucking Wallings. Arsehole used to work
here. He was a good lad until the gear got him.'
The Jock mimed injecting his arm. 'Fucked him
up and he started running with James. They tried
to sell me Afghan whores. So smacked up, some
of them, they could hardly stand.' He pointed at
the legs and heads of the girls at the sink.
'Fucking burns all over them, whip-marks, cuts
. . . They stole them from villages, sick fucks.'

He sat on the freezer and lit a Chesterfield with
a Zippo. He sucked deeply to calm himself. His
eyes flicked down towards the MP5. 'You not
interested?'

I shook my head and put the weapon back in
the freezer.

'Well, maybe you're not some bank clerk.' He
nodded at the weapons. 'They're all shite.'

I spotted a mini Uzi, like the regular Uzi only a
lot shorter. It was stuck under a pile of rusty old
.303 Lee Enfields, probably left over from the
Second World War.

I pulled it out to discover it was a Mini-Ero, a
shameless copy. This one was the older version,
with pistol grip safety and mag housing, and big
chunky working parts that operated on the blowback
system. The only difference I could see was
that the safety-catch markings were in Serbo-Croat.

The girls left and Stu helped himself to a handful
of arse from both on their way out.

The Mini-Ero wasn't in bad nick. A bit rusty,
but at least it had a firing pin.

I'd always thought the Uzi overrated. After the
Six Day War it got rave reviews it didn't deserve.
Both the Uzi and the mini Uzi were heavy for
their size. Almost every comparable weapon did
the same job more efficiently. It was just marketing
that made the weapon so popular in the eyes
of people who didn't use them. Bank clerks and
south London drug-dealers would be the only
people ignorant enough to part with good
money for one.

There were three mags taped round the
barrel. 'I'll take this and two hundred nine-millimetre.
How much is that going to set me
back?'

Whatever the figure should have been, he
probably doubled it. 'Three hundred.'

No point haggling. 'Done.'

He unlocked the freezer as I put the weapon
back together. I took off my Bergen, bunged in
the bottle of water, and waited to add the
weapon, mags and rounds.

'You going south for long?' He handed me four
cardboard boxes of fifty 9mm and I ripped one
open. I'd always found it easy to speed-load,
even as a boy soldier. Many guys try to position
the rounds in their hands so that the percussion
cap is going to be fed in first, but the easiest thing
is to pick the things up and turn them between
your thumb and forefinger as you press them
into the magazine.

'Don't know.'

'Well, son' – he locked up the ammo freezer–
'you come back with that thing and I'll buy it
back. But I don't give money, we just trade with
honey.'

He locked up the first freezer and came over to
do the same to the second. I moved the magazines
and kit. 'That's how half of these shites pay.
Some, they come in, they've got fuck-all left but
their weapons.'

I shrugged. 'Maybe I'll bring it back.'

'I'm not sticking my nose in your business,
son, but that James shite and his like – stay away
from them. They're fucking acid.'

I finished the first mag.

'You liked my chessboard, didn't you?'

'Yeah, nice.'

'My boy.' He was grinning. 'He carved them.
He's good at that sort of thing. It's a special
edition, black Taliban, white ISAF. I'm going to
try and get it marketed.'

He took a last drag and flicked the butt on to
the floor. 'You see, son, you got the Taliban
pawns in turbans, but the ISAF pawns, none of
them match. That's because we spend so
much time out here wondering if they're on the
same fucking side.'

I was treated to another flash of his black
stumps. 'If it was going to be true to life,
obviously the Taliban king would be missing –
there'd just be a video of him in a cave. And no
Taliban knights, no Taliban castles. They'd all be
bishops, see – mad mullahs.

'And once the ISAF pieces were set up, most of
them would refuse to move from their own
squares. The bishops, well, they'd have to be
paid regularly or they'd move over to the Taliban
side. Are you getting this, son?'

I sort of was and sort of wasn't, but I nodded
anyway to make him feel a bit better. I finished
loading the last mag and counted out three
hundred-dollar bills.

'Sorry for being a bit of a shite with you in the
beginning, son. But when they called they said
you were one of those cowboys. People like that,
they come here and fuck it up for everybody else
who's trying to make a living.'

'No worries, mate.'

The money went into his jeans pocket.

I shoved the mags and spare ammunition into
my Bergen and he fired up another Chesterfield.

The other side of the door, somebody loosed
off a double-tap in the bar. The music kept playing,
but the background noise changed. Girls
screamed. Men shouted, more pissed off than
afraid.

I threw everything except the weapon and a
mag on top of the Gunga Din outfit and hoisted
the Bergen on to my back.

Somebody out there yelled for calm, but the
monkeys weren't having any of it. They
screeched their heads off.

There was another shot, then a burst of .53 on
automatic drowned them out.