Authors: Andy McNab
It really was like a separate city, with its own paved streets, squares, monuments and glass-fronted chapels of all shapes and sizes.
I spotted more movement fifty to my half-right. I didn’t have time to fuck about. I grabbed the edge of the parapet and lowered myself to the ground.
Like almost everywhere else I’d seen in Italy, this place was a mixture of shiny new, classic old, under construction and falling apart. Keeping in the shadows, I made the most of the cover provided by rows of headstones. A light flickered somewhere to my left. It wasn’t a torch beam, though. It was one of those little electric candles that someone had left running on an altar.
Something else glinted by a mound of freshly dug earth. When I got closer, I found a shovel that hadn’t been gathered at the end of the day and returned to the storeroom.
I picked it up and looped round towards what turned out to be a not-quite-derelict family mausoleum.
The stone facing had flaked away and the roof was crumbling. The door must have fallen off a while back. It had been replaced by a random selection of boards nailed to a rickety frame. That too had been moved aside to allow access. I couldn’t see much of the interior except for a bunch of memorial plaques and a big hole in the ground.
I heard voices coming from inside – not very happy ones – and saw the silhouette of a body climbing out of it. When he reached the threshold, the figure turned and issued a string of instructions to whoever was still in the pit. It sounded like they were doing the heavy lifting. The boss man had swapped his sharp grey suit for jeans and a fleece, but he still didn’t want to get his hands dirty. A couple of thick undertakers’ straps lay coiled at his feet.
I scanned the area around us. Nobody else seemed to be coming to help. Rubble was moved. A tarpaulin pulled off. Dijani was still calling the shots. He still had his back to me.
I was no more than five paces from him now. I gripped the shaft of the shovel with both hands, raised it across my right shoulder like an axe, and swung the edge of the blade as hard as I could at the side of his neck. It wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, so I didn’t take his head clean off. It stayed attached to his body long enough to tumble forwards into the pit with him.
I followed him in. Dijani landed on top of the one on the left. The one on the right was tangled up in the tarp they’d used to cover the coffin. I rotated the shaft so the shovel blade pointed downwards and chopped it deep into the place where his neck joined his torso. I felt his collarbone shatter and saw blood spurt from the wound. He still managed to hook my ankles with his good arm and sweep my feet from under me.
As my arse hit the ground he raised the same hand – not to hit me, but to try and stem the flow from his shoulder.
It wasn’t going to happen.
I kicked him backwards and focused on his mate.
The guy was lying alongside the coffin, still trying to shift the weight of the boss man off his chest. His eyes widened as I turned and raised the shovel once more, like I was about to dig myself a hole.
He raised both hands in surrender.
Fuck that.
I brought the blade down on his bulging Adam’s apple.
I glanced across at the other guy. He’d failed to locate and seal the soggy end of his carotid artery between his thumb and forefinger, and was bleeding out. Even if he’d succeeded, there wouldn’t have been enough oxygen feeding his brain.
I frisked them both for weapons. No joy there. And even in the darkness, I could see that neither of them was Rexho Uran.
I grabbed Dijani by the ear. That was all it took to remove his head from his shoulders. I held it up for a moment, thinking I might feel some satisfaction. But I felt nothing. Nothing at all.
Then I chucked it into the pit and climbed out of the ruins of the suddenly rather overcrowded mausoleum.
I heard two or three sets of footsteps approaching and saw some more of those red dots dancing among the headstones. I hung a rapid left and legged it back to what I could now see was a small family memorial chapel. I heaved myself on to the roof and out.
As I swung down from the tree branch, I heard more footsteps at the back, and another engine sparking up.
I hit the keypad of Luca’s spare mobile as soon as I’d crossed the main and was fifty from the Alfa. ‘Mate, get the GIS to the cemetery
now
. Dijani is dead. There are still at least four of the fuckers, in a blue Fiat three-tonner, and a hoist. They’re trying to move the shit they brought in.’
‘You still think uranium?’
‘Tell GIS to get a fucking move on and we’ll find out.’
I’d just pressed the fob and seen the Alfa’s lights flash when I heard the shriek of tyres behind me. I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the ignition button as the rear-view filled with light.
I swung the wheel hard left, flicked the Alfa’s headlamps on to main beam and did a screaming U-turn. Tyres smoking, I throttled up, straight into the path of the oncoming wagon.
He lost his nerve first. He hadn’t taken his helmet off and got ready to fight.
He swerved right and bounced off a line of parked cars. I glanced left as I sped past. A BMW SUV. Rexho wrestling with the wheel.
The darkness ahead of me was filled with blues and twos. I glanced behind to see the SUV doing half a doughnut, steadying itself then coming after me.
A spider’s web of cracks appeared in the top corner of the Alfa’s rear screen as I went left, and the round exited through the window just behind the passenger headrest.
Another shrieked through, punching a hole the size of a fist in the centre of the glass and burying itself in the dash.
I floored the accelerator pedal on the approach to the level crossing. The lights flashed and the barrier started to lower when I was ten away. I kept going.
The paintwork on Luca’s roof took some punishment, and his suspension didn’t take bumping over the railway track at speed too well, but the SUV came off worse. It managed to get under the first barrier without losing everything above the bonnet, but hit the second head-on.
I put some distance between us as Rexho smashed the entire structure off its mounting and went into a ninety-degree skid. He added another two parked cars to his scorecard, sorted himself, and was thirty behind me when I took the next left, along the remains of the old city wall.
This was the highest-risk stretch for me.
I couldn’t step on the gas.
It was too narrow to dodge and weave.
And if my plan was going to work, I needed him to be close enough not to be able to take evasive action.
His headlamps started to fill my rear-view again as I passed the shop where I’d bought the maps and then the boutique hotel. I careered through the small square overlooking the water.
Every parking space was taken.
I reckoned the SUV’s fucked-up radiator grille was ten behind me as the scaffolding-covered apartment block loomed ahead.
I took a round in the right shoulder as I hit the throttle again but I still had enough control to swing the wheel left and take out the last two upright poles.
For a heartbeat, fuck-all happened.
Then the timber planks began to cascade off their supports and a few hundred tubes of heavy metal and sheets of tarp crashed down to fill the space between the front of the building and the harbour wall.
I hit the brakes as soon as I was a safe distance away. I got out, but didn’t walk back. I just needed to make sure all that shit had landed on Rexho’s head.
It had.
The front of the SUV had been flattened. The roof was half the height it had been two minutes ago.
But when the last pole and plank had fallen and the dust had started to clear, I saw movement behind what was left of the windscreen.
I scrambled over the debris and peered through the driver’s window.
Rexho turned his very bloody head towards me. His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, but no sound came out.
It would take a squad of firemen and cutting equipment to extract him. And the chances were that he’d be dead before they arrived.
But I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
I took off Anna’s sash, reached inside, looped it twice around his throat, and pulled it tight.
He probably thought he was being fast-tracked to Paradise. I hoped he’d end up somewhere he could carry on feeling the pain.
As shutters started to open further down the street and across the square, I slid back behind the wheel of Luca’s slightly bruised Alfa, draped the sash back around my shoulders, and drove away. Keeping a memento wouldn’t bring them back. But I knew that any time I looked at it I was now going to feel a little bit better.
They stitched my nostril and sorted the rest of the damage at the hospital a little later that morning, a couple of floors above the pathology lab where Anna and Nicholai had been taken.
Luca was very understanding about the damage to his wagon, and keen to bring me up to speed on the GIS. They’d picked up the coffin. The rods of depleted uranium 235 inside it
had
come from a decommissioned Oscar-11 Class sub. Its ID code had been stamped into the casing.
Three rods was enough to make a very big dirty bomb, irrespective of whether they detonated it in Otranto or in St Peter’s Square. No wonder the GIGN, TIGRIS and the GIS had been going ballistic for Dijani and his crew.
Anna and Nicholai did show signs of radiation poisoning, but not at a critical level. He hadn’t been able to meet my eye when he told me that.
The last three members of Dijani’s cell were in custody. One of them seemed to be keen to trade in his passport to Paradise for a place in their witness-protection scheme. He wasn’t telling them everything, but had fed them one or two details.
He’d confirmed that Rome was in their sights.
They’d been tempted by the idea of reminding the world about Gedik Ahmed’s great victory in Otranto in 1480, but St Peter’s was a more iconic target. The cradle of Christianity. And since the Pope continued to ignore his security advisers and walk among the infidel, they had been confident of success.
I liked Luca a lot, and not just because he’d saved my life. But I found him tough to be around. The sharply chiselled crusading journo I’d met in the mattress shop had been replaced by a whipped dog. He still couldn’t hide the things I was trying to bury. So I wasn’t sorry to see him go.
I retrieved my day sack from where I’d hidden it, sparked up the Seat and drove towards the cemetery. Luca had told me that a couple of graves had already been selected for Anna and Nicholai, complete with all the nice shiny marble one could wish for. It was the city’s gift to them, and to me.
I stopped halfway down the cypress avenue, and looked at the slightly weird motif on the stark white panels each side of the entrance: a couple of crossed bones and the Grim Reaper’s scythe.
I hadn’t gone down to see their bodies in the hospital. I wasn’t going to visit their grave sites now. I had the sash, and that would do me.
My mantra had always been: Why worry about what you can’t change? If I said it often enough, I might start to believe it.
From the day he was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy’s Hospital in London,
Andy McNab
has led an extraordinary life.
As a teenage delinquent, Andy McNab kicked against society. As a young soldier, he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh. As a member of 22 SAS, he was at the centre of covert operations for nine years, on five continents. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, ‘will remain in regimental history for ever’. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS.
Since then Andy McNab has become one of the world’s bestselling writers, drawing on his insider knowledge and experience. As well as three non-fiction bestsellers – including
Bravo Two Zero
, the bestselling British work of military history – he is the author of the bestselling Nick Stone thrillers. He has also written a number of books for children.
Besides his writing work, he lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the USA and the UK, works in the film industry advising Hollywood on everything from covert procedure to training civilian actors to act like soldiers, and he continues to be a spokesperson and fundraiser for both military and literacy charities.
Novels featuring Nick Stone
REMOTE CONTROL
CRISIS FOUR
FIREWALL
LAST LIGHT
LIBERATION DAY
DARK WINTER
DEEP BLACK
AGGRESSOR
RECOIL
CROSSFIRE
BRUTE FORCE
EXIT WOUND
ZERO HOUR
DEAD CENTRE
SILENCER
FOR VALOUR
Featuring Tom Buckingham
RED NOTICE
FORTRESS
STATE OF EMERGENCY
Andy McNab with Kym Jordan
WAR TORN
BATTLE LINES
Quick Reads
THE GREY MAN
LAST NIGHT ANOTHER SOLDIER
TODAY EVERYTHING CHANGES
Non-fiction
BRAVO TWO ZERO
IMMEDIATE ACTION
SEVEN TROOP
SPOKEN FROM THE FRONT
THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S GUIDE TO SUCCESS
(with Kevin Dutton)
SORTED! THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S GUIDE TO BOSSING YOUR LIFE
(with Kevin Dutton)
For more information on Andy McNab and his books, see his website at
www.andymcnab.co.uk
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