Authors: Andy McNab
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #General & Literary Fiction, #Fiction - Espionage, #Thriller, #Thrillers, #Mystery & Detective, #Suspense, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Crime & mystery, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Suspense Fiction, #Stone, #Nick (Fictitious character), #Thriller & Adventure
117
Spag’s eyes were fixed wide open, like he was watching with amazement as the blood dribbled from his nose and mouth and his intestines spewed out over a rack of his own ribs. The motor idled, making it pulse from side to side.
I dragged Anna to her feet and out of the cabin. Out on the tarmac, I kept her upright. Once people are on the ground they flap even more. It’s all to do with the body language of surrender.
‘Anna – switch on!’
I shook her. I squeezed her face with my hand, trying to force her to focus. ‘Look at me! It isn’t over yet!’
It took her a while. ‘Yes, yes.’ She swallowed hard and I smelt strawberries again. ‘Yes, Nick, you’re right.’
She wiped hair from her face and I let her go. ‘Now listen to me. I want you to take the wagon . . .’ I kept my voice slow and low. ‘Take the wagon, and go and untie Zar. Don’t bring him here. He can do that himself. Tell him it’s steak time for him and the lads.’
‘What?’
‘Tell him to take as much money as he can carry and bury the rest. He can come back for it later. Do you understand?’
She nodded.
‘Deep breaths, Anna, it’s all right.’ I kept an eye out for the crew, but if they had any sense they were going to stay where they were until the dust had settled.
‘Then get the bags and all our kit from the bike. We don’t want to leave anything here that can be connected to us. Do you understand?’
‘Grisha’s bike . . . we can’t . . .’
‘Just leave it, Anna. We’re taking the wagon. You got what you wanted. It’s time to let go.’
She looked dazed. She needed gripping.
‘Anna! Switch on!’
‘Yes, yes – Zar, I’ll go to Zar.’
She turned away and I went back into the aircraft. I tipped half a dozen immaculately pressed shirts from a Louis Vuitton bag and started stuffing it with muddy hundred-dollar bills. When it was full I found another, and then another. I’d filled four by the time the wagon came back down the runway. The tailgate was still open.
I threw the bags into the back and climbed into the passenger seat.
Anna was recovering. ‘I heard him shouting at you. What did he tell you, Nick?’
‘Nothing we didn’t already know. Everybody’s got their face in the trough and the ones who pay the price are lads like Grisha . . . my mates . . . and the rest of us at the shit end of the stick. So fuck it, let’s go.’
We passed the missile-launcher. He hadn’t moved anywhere fast, and was going to need a lot of work on that jaw of his. She was more concerned about me. ‘Nick – your head . . .’
‘Don’t worry about me.’ The pain was excruciating, but I managed a smile. ‘I’m still breathing. So I’m still winning.’
A fourth drone cut across the sky, not realizing this particular show was over.
She drove fast. We were just about to enter the trees when Zar burst out onto the tarmac, staring wild-eyed at the wreckage at the end of the runway. Anna smiled as she watched him run towards the Ural. ‘I told him to take Cuckoo. It’s his now.’
118
Saturday, 18 July
1456 hrs
London City airport
Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the big plate-glass windows as I strolled through the automatic doors.
Through half-closed eyes, London City airport on a Saturday afternoon was how air travel must have been forty years ago. The building was almost deserted. A couple with small kids were making their way up an escalator towards the departure lounge. Some punters ambled from the shop, magazines in hand, to one of the two short check-in queues. An announcement encouraged last passengers for a flight to Geneva to make their way to the departure gate.
The person I’d come here to meet wasn’t where he’d said he would be, but I’d half expected that. We were at an airport, after all. I turned around and headed back towards the car park. It should have been the first place I’d looked.
A couple of vehicles came and went in the unloading bay. An overweight woman with a bad case of sunburn lugged a heavy suitcase on wheels across a pedestrian crossing, shouting at her overweight kids to keep up.
I heard the roar of engines behind me as a commuter jet pulled into the sky.
I stepped out of the bright sunlight, and scanned the cars. I picked him out of the background clutter, his face angled skywards, one hand shielding his eyes from the glare. I hadn’t a clue what the plane was – I didn’t care – but I knew this was where his attention would be. Once a geek, always a geek . . . ‘Oi, Ali.’
He lowered his arm and dropped his gaze. ‘Jim!’
That was a bridge we had yet to cross. He rushed up and I held out my hand. ‘Good to see you, mate.’
‘You, too.’ His eyes flicked from my face to my head. The scabs had gone and the skin was starting to lose its redness, but there was still a rather obvious lack of hair on one side.
I bent down so he could have a good look. ‘Came off a motorbike.’ I showed off the little stubby hairs trying to push through. ‘But I can see the green shoots of recovery.’ I stood up again, feeling quite pleased with my joke.
He didn’t get it.
We were supposed to meet in the café – the airport being a handy halfway house between my place and his. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry. Have you been here long?’
I shook my head. ‘No drama, mate. Settling in OK?’
‘Yes, thank you. The weather is not like they told me it would be.’
‘Better or worse?’
‘Better!’ He raised his eyes. It was another of those cloudless days that convinced us for a moment that we might have a really good summer this year. The papers had been full of phew-what-a-scorcher headlines.
Ali had been at summer school at the University of East London for the past month – on a lead-in English course before he kicked off his degree in journalism in September.
‘How’s Aisha?’
‘She’s well. I owe her so much. If it hadn’t been for her . . .’ He didn’t need to say any more.
As far as Ali was concerned, it was Aisha, researching online, who’d found the course as well as the bursary that had paid his tuition fees and living expenses. It was how she and I had agreed it.
Coming up with the cash had been the easy bit. Julian had played his part by pulling strings at the UK Border Agency to ensure that the fast-track student visa went through, no questions asked – not easy, when the subject in question was an Iranian with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s aerospace and defence industry.
‘And the old man, how is he?’
‘Better. He has – how do you say? – turned the bend.’
I already knew because Aisha had told me but, Oscars all round, I had to look surprised.
‘It was like you said. My father has been living with a pain in his heart for many years. But he is leaving the past behind . . .’
‘And Aisha? Things calming down after the election?’
He shrugged. ‘It happened just like I said, Jim, yes?’
Ahmadinejad had won. But he was never going to be allowed to lose.
‘Aisha still believes in the green revolution. She still struggles.’
People like Aisha were the cinders under the ashes. This time it looked like it was going to turn into a baby Tiananmen Square. But next time maybe it would be an action replay of the Berlin Wall.
Ali stood there beaming at me like an idiot, but I could see he was itching to get back to some more plane-spotting. He had my email address.
We shook hands.
‘I just wanted to make sure you’re all right, mate.’
We both smiled and I made to leave.
‘Jim?’
I turned back.
‘What I helped you with . . . It was a good thing we did, yes?’
‘Not just a good thing, Ali. The best thing.’
This time I kept walking.
SA-16s would still reach Afghanistan, of course. They’d just take a while longer. Heroin would continue to flood the Iranian market. Another Ollie North lookalike was probably already making cash that Obama didn’t know about to spend on a war he wouldn’t want to know about.
I pulled my keys from my pocket and pressed the fob. Twenty metres away, the rear hazards of a gun-metal Porsche 911 flashed into life.
I clambered in and shut the door. I hadn’t had it long enough yet to stop appreciating the sound of that reassuringly expensive clunk or the smell of new seat-leather.
As I eased the car out of the airport onto the North Woolwich Road, sunlight glinted off the gold ring on my left pinky.
I’d found the sixth crate exactly where Red Ken had left it. The tricky bit had been finding a patch of desert where I wouldn’t be overlooked melting down Saddam’s face, but it’s amazing what you can do with a few uninterrupted hours and a propane burner if you put your mind to it.
If the guy in the souk had had any inkling of where the gold had come from, he didn’t show it. He’d got a good deal, so why rock the boat?
As for the CIA’s muddy dollars, Anna had most of them. Getting them ready for circulation must have given a whole new meaning to money laundering. I’d only kept enough to buy me a beanie to cover my head, to clean and feed myself up, and to get on the train with her to St Petersburg, then on to Narva, on the border with Estonia. The river that separated the former Soviet satellite from Russia was a piece of piss to deal with. Then it was on to Dubai.
Five days later, I was home again – just in time for the christening of Red Ken’s granddaughter. At a break in the proceedings, I gave his widow her gold ring and told her I’d opened an account for her with five hundred grand in it. She knew better than to ask where the money had come from. The code was the code, and she knew that he was gone for ever even before I told her. His seat was occupied by a large, framed picture of him in uniform. I liked to think Red Ken would have done the same for me, but maybe I was getting soft in my old age. I must have been, because Tenny’s widow had got the same amount.
Cinza? I have a feeling she’s already made other arrangements, but she got the biggest bottle of Amouage Homage I could find to help her on her way.
After that I’d decided I’d had enough of
The Secret Millionaire
routine and headed for the Porsche showroom. Well, it was about time I had the odd mouthful of steak as well.
I’d never been much good at keeping score. Did it go some way towards compensating for Dex and Red Ken getting zapped? Julian reckoned it did – but then he always was a big softy.
Not only did he pull strings for Ali. During the Iranian election riots, there’d been a low-key news story that a certain Bradley Capland, banged up in the UAE as a bad debtor, had been allowed to go back to spend his final days in Canada with his beloved wife Sherry by his side. Several commentators expressed their surprise at the UAE authorities – not known for their touchy-feely side – letting him go. The story was a welcome antidote to the bad news that had been flooding out of the Gulf state as the Dubai dream continued to turn sour.
Julian wanted me to work for him and I told him I might. But not just yet – I had some things to do.
It took me ten minutes to reach the basement car park of my docklands apartment block – a glass-and-steel monolith that had had its final lick of paint, the estate agent told me, the day Lehman Brothers went to rat shit. Their crunch had been my gain. If you’ve got cash in your back pocket, recessions are a great time to clean up, the experts say. Since in every other recession I’d ever lived through I’d been penniless, I was only just beginning to find out.
My biggest problem was not really knowing what furniture I needed for the penthouse two hundred feet above my head. But help was at hand. Anna was arriving tomorrow and staying over – as long as she only ever smoked on the balcony.
I had two outings planned: a trip to IKEA, followed by a night out at
Mamma Mia
. She was a smart girl, but I doubted that even she would get the connection.
Also by Andy McNab
Non-fiction
BRAVO TWO ZERO
IMMEDIATE ACTION
SEVEN TROOP
SPOKEN FROM THE FRONT
Fiction
REMOTE CONTROL
CRISIS FOUR
FIREWALL
LAST LIGHT
LIBERATION DAY
DARK WINTER
DEEP BLACK
AGGRESSOR
RECOIL
CROSSFIRE
BRUTE FORCE
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