‘If they stop us we’re dead.’ Chaudhry licked his lips nervously. He took out a packet of gum and his hands shook as he unwrapped a stick and slipped it between his lips.
‘Keep your hands on the wheel,’ said Bradshaw, calmly. Chaudhry did as he was told.
One of the Customs officers, a woman in her forties with dyed blonde hair, was holding a chocolate and white spaniel on a long leash.
‘See the dog?’ said Bradshaw. ‘It’s a drugs dog. That’s all they’re interested in. But if they do stop us, they’ll ask us questions first. And, providing we answer their questions, they won’t search us.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘Chit-chat,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Where have we been, what do we have in the van, where are we going – the questions don’t matter. What they’re looking for are signs of nervousness, signs that something isn’t right. Only then will they search. And even if they do open the back, all they will see is cases of wine and beer. And we fit the profile of booze runners. There’s no way they’re going to start pulling all those boxes out.’ He patted Chaudhry’s knee. ‘Relax and think happy thoughts.’
Chaudhry forced a smile. They drew level with the Customs officers. A grey-haired man with bored eyes waved them on. Bradshaw nodded at the man but was ignored. ‘See? Allah is smiling on us.’
‘
Allahu akbar
,’ said Chaudhry.
‘
Allahu akbar
,’ agreed Bradshaw.
Mickey had booked them into suites at the Radon Plaza Hotel, just five minutes from Sarajevo’s international airport. There was no one to meet them, but the immigration queues were short, and less than half an hour after the wheels of the plane had touched the runway they were checking in at Reception.
Mickey told Mark and Shepherd that they had an hour before they were due to meet the man who would supply them with RPGs. ‘Now we’re here, do you think you could tell me who the hell we’re going to be dealing with?’ said Shepherd. Mickey opened his mouth to reply but Shepherd held up a hand to silence him. ‘I’m not doing business with the IRA or the Libyans or any other terrorists. The way the Yanks rule the world, we could all end up in Guantánamo Bay if things go wrong.’
‘You worry too much,’ said Mickey. ‘The guy’s Dutch, and he’s as legit as an arms dealer can ever be. He deals with a lot of governments and most of the major arms manufacturers. He’s a middleman, sells to countries that are a bit on the less-than-democratic side.’
‘You mean dictators,’ said Shepherd.
‘Dictators, not terrorists,’ stressed Mickey. ‘But the politics mean sod all to me. All I care about is that the Professor says he can supply us with RPGs.’
Shepherd wasn’t interested in picking a fight with Mickey, but he wanted to get as much information about the arms dealer as he could. ‘And how do we get the RPGs into the UK?’
Mickey grinned and tapped the side of his nose.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Shepherd. ‘Need to know.’
‘And you don’t,’ said Mark.
Mickey punched Shepherd’s shoulder. ‘Shower and shave and we’ll meet down here in an hour.’
The three men went up to their rooms. Shepherd showered and changed into a clean polo shirt, then watched BBC 24 news. Nurses in England were threatening to strike, two Members of Parliament had resigned after being caught fiddling their expenses, and a youth had been stabbed in a London street. There was a report on the plane that had crashed into the sea after leaving JFK airport. A journalist standing on a boat said that the Coast Guard were pulling bodies from the sea, that there were no survivors, and that the authorities were suggesting catastrophic engine failure was to blame.
His bedside phone rang. ‘We’re heading down now,’ said Mickey. ‘Don’t bring your mobile with you. He’s paranoid about bugs and tracking devices.’
‘Understood,’ said Shepherd. He left his phone in the room safe, picked up his jacket and went down to Reception. Mickey and Mark were already there, sitting on a sofa by the entrance. Shepherd joined them. ‘What does he look like?’
‘He’s Dutch, probably wearing clogs and carrying tulips,’ said Mark. ‘With his finger in a dike.’
Shepherd shook his head sadly. ‘What are you? Twelve?’
Mark lit a cigarette as a big man walked in through the revolving doors, looked around the reception area and came towards them. The three men stood up. ‘You are the Englishmen?’ he asked. His accent was Slavic and he had the build of a man who worked out but used steroids to add bulk to his muscles. He wore a long black coat over a charcoal grey suit, and a grey shirt buttoned to the neck.
‘As English as chicken tikka massala,’ said Mickey.
The heavy didn’t understand and frowned. ‘You have ID?’ he asked.
Mickey handed him his passport and the man squinted at it. ‘You can read, yeah?’ asked Mickey.
The man gave it back to him and stared at him with cold grey eyes. ‘Yes, I can read,’ he said. ‘I need to pat you down.’
‘What?’ said Mark.
‘I need to check that you are not carrying weapons.’
‘And do we get to pat you down?’ asked Mark.
The man pulled open his coat and jacket just enough for them to glimpse a semi-automatic in a nylon holster.
‘So, let’s get this straight,’ said Mark. ‘You’ve got a gun but you want to make sure we don’t have weapons? How fair is that?’
‘I need to check,’ said the man, flatly. ‘Mr Kleintank insists.’
Mark seemed bewildered, but raised his arms and allowed the man to pat him down. ‘Satisfied?’ he said.
Mickey held up his hands. ‘Go on, knock yourself out. But be careful around the groin area. I wouldn’t want you giving me a hard-on.’
The man remained stony-faced as he patted Mickey down, then did the same with Shepherd. ‘All three of you are coming?’ he asked.
‘That’s the plan,’ said Mickey.
The heavy nodded, took them outside and opened the rear door of a stretch Mercedes. Mickey looked inside. There was a driver in the front seat but the rear of the car was empty. ‘Where is he?’
‘Mr Kleintank is at the warehouse.’ He waited until Mickey, Mark and Shepherd were seated before closing the door and getting into the front passenger seat.
Shepherd looked out of the window as the limousine drove through the city. He had been in Sarajevo once before, spending two months in the city soon after he’d joined the SAS. That had been in 1995, during the last few months of the siege, when Serbian forces had been launching sniper and mortar attacks daily from the surrounding mountains. More than twelve thousand men, women and children had been killed during the four-year siege, and fifty thousand were injured, the vast majority of casualties being civilians. Shepherd had been one of an eight-man SAS team tasked with taking out a particularly vicious sniper, who had made a point of shooting his victims in the legs to disable them, then killing anyone who went to their aid. The Serb and his Dragunov sniper rifle had been responsible for a dozen such killings. The SAS had spent a month watching him work, and a further three weeks in hides up in the hills, waiting. Shepherd hadn’t been the one to kill him, but he had been close enough to see a colleague’s bullet take a big chunk out of the man’s skull. Shepherd had felt no remorse for the way in which they had tracked and killed him. He had no respect for snipers because they killed at a distance. It wasn’t how real men fought. Real men fought face to face, man to man, and put their own lives on the line. Snipers hid in the shadows, and the Serbian snipers who had set siege to Sarajevo were the worst of the worst because they had targeted civilians.
The city had changed a lot since Shepherd had left. The streets were full of shoppers, students sat at outdoor cafés and there were a lot of new buildings. There were still reminders of the siege, though: the crosses on the graves in the city-centre park, masonry chipped by gunfire, and indentations in the roads showing where mortars had once wreaked death and destruction.
The limousine drove to an area of the city he wasn’t familiar with, but his near-photographic memory kicked in and he was constantly aware of where he was in relation to his hotel. They drove down a narrow road lined with apartment blocks, and then through an industrial area. Shepherd realised that the driver wasn’t taking a direct route to the warehouse, probably hoping to keep them in the dark as to its location.
Eventually they pulled up in front of a metal-sided warehouse. Across the street Shepherd saw a man with a broken nose sitting in a nondescript Toyota who, he thought, was a lookout. The man put his mobile to his ear and began to talk.
The heavy took them in through a side door to where Kleintank was pacing up and down and barking in Dutch into a phone. He was in his early thirties with a crewcut and sharp features, about five feet eight inches tall. He was wearing a black cashmere overcoat and gleaming patent leather shoes.
He snapped his mobile shut and put it away. ‘I’m sorry about the formalities,’ he said, ‘but Sarajevo is a dangerous city.’
‘Yeah, well, south London’s no bed of roses, mate,’ said Mickey.
Kleintank smiled. ‘I’m sure that’s so,’ he said. ‘So, to business. I’m afraid I’ve got good news and bad news.’
‘I don’t want bad news,’ said Mickey. ‘I just want to buy a couple of RPGs.’
Kleintank grimaced. ‘That’s the bad news,’ he said. ‘I sold the last ones two days ago. A cash buyer turned up and I never turn down cash.’
Mickey scowled at the Dutchman. ‘You told my man you had RPGs for sale.’
‘And when I talked to him that was the case. But things change. Some guys from the Tamils needed them at short notice and they paid over the odds.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘What can I say?’
Mark pointed a finger at him. ‘We’ve flown all the way over to this shit-hole and now you’re telling us you don’t even have an RPG?’
Kleintank was unabashed. ‘It’s a fluid business. Stock comes and stock goes. I’ve got more coming from China. As soon as they arrive I’ll let you know.’
‘Screw that,’ said Mark. ‘You said you had RPGs and now you haven’t.’ He turned to his brother. ‘Can you believe this shit? Townsend’s fucked us over.’
‘What’s the good news?’ Mickey asked the Dutchman.
‘I’ve got a Grail missile and launcher. Better than an RPG.’ He folded his arms ‘Much better,’ he said.
Mickey turned to Shepherd. ‘What do you think?’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘The Grail’s a ground-to-air missile. More for shooting planes than anything else.’
‘A missile is a missile,’ said Kleintank.
Shepherd didn’t reply. He doubted that Kleintank was too stupid to know the difference between an RPG and a Grail. He was just a salesman who wanted to offload the product he had.
‘Okay, let’s see it,’ Mickey snapped.
Kleintank went to a wooden crate and pulled open the lid. ‘It is in perfect condition,’ he said.
Shepherd looked at it. ‘It’s a practice model,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Kleintank. ‘That’s why it’s blue.’
‘What does that mean, practice model?’ asked Mickey.
‘There’s no infrared guidance,’ said Shepherd. ‘You just point and fire, and hopefully the missile goes in a straight line.’
‘That’s fine, then,’ said Mickey. ‘We don’t need it to jump through hoops, do we?’
‘How many do you have?’ Shepherd asked Kleintank.
‘Just the one,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I did have two but I sold the other to some English guys last month. I can let you have that one for forty thousand euros.’
Mickey put a hand on Shepherd’s shoulder and whispered, ‘This one’ll do, Ricky. Let’s not look a gift horse.’
‘The practice models aren’t built to the same standard as the ones meant for the field,’ said Shepherd. ‘If a practice launcher fails, you just get another. If it fails to launch in the field your operation’s blown.’
‘This will fire,’ said Kleintank.
‘You can’t know that for sure,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’d be a lot happier with a back-up, or a field model.’ He turned to Kleintank. ‘This English guy, what was he planning to shoot at? The practice models are no good against moving targets.’
‘They didn’t say. They just said they wanted one with an IR guidance system,’ said Kleintank, ‘but they took one of mine anyway.’
‘They? There was more than one?’
‘Ricky, this is what we need,’ said Mickey. ‘We need to take out a wall, that’s all.’
‘I get that, but what’s going to happen if on the day I pull the trigger and nothing happens?’
‘It will fire,’ said Kleintank, but Shepherd ignored him.
‘We need more than one,’ he told Mickey. ‘Three or four to be on the safe side.’ He turned to the Dutchman. ‘The guys you sold the other to, have they taken delivery already? Maybe we could buy theirs.’
‘I flew it to Nice for them.’
‘But they’re English, you said.’
‘One was as English as you, but his friends were Asians. Pakistanis, I think.’
‘What did they say they wanted it for?’
‘I didn’t ask, same as I’m not asking you what you’re planning to do with RPGs.’
‘But they’re still looking to buy one with a guidance system?’
‘I managed to get them a Stinger,’ said Kleintank, ‘but it was a lot more expensive than this.’
‘The guy that sold them the Stinger, does he have RPGs?’
Kleintank shook his head. ‘The Tamils have been buying everything,’ he said, ‘and there’s a lot going into Iraq at the moment. Iranian money, but the weapons get shipped direct to Iraq.’
‘Who is this guy, the other dealer?’
Kleintank’s eyes hardened. ‘You’re asking a lot of questions.’
‘Just pursuing all our options.’
‘Well, the only option you have is in this crate, and it’s going to cost you forty thousand euros.’
‘Thirty.’
‘Mickey . . .’ said Shepherd.
Mickey held up a hand to silence him. ‘I’m making an executive decision, Ricky.’
‘Then we need to talk now,’ said Shepherd. ‘You want me on the team for my expertise, and right now you’re not listening to a bloody thing I’m saying. We either have a quiet word now or I’m out of here.’
‘Ricky—’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Relax, mate,’ Mickey said. ‘If you want a chinwag, you’ve got it.’ He led him to the far corner of the warehouse, away from Kleintank and Mark. When they were out of earshot, his face darkened. ‘Don’t you fucking make me lose face like that again, Ricky, you hear? This is my crew, right, and you’re just a hired hand.’ His fingers dug deep into the muscles of Shepherd’s shoulder. ‘Do you get my drift?’