Andy McNab - Exit wound

Red Ken couldn’t pull off the grit act any more. Tears welled in both eyes. ‘From now on, it’s going to be about her. I’ll go down on my hands and knees at the christening if I have to, if it means she’ll have me back.’

I watched a tear dribble down the crags in his cheek. ‘Is that why you left everything to the Fat Controller?’

He sort of nodded, and at the same time waved his finger in front of his face. He was right: no work talk. ‘Believe me, son, I’m desperate. Without Chrissie, I’ve got nothing. I want her back. I want my kids and grandkids to have a good life. Not a shite one like I’ve given to Chrissie. If this doesn’t work…’

I cut away from it a moment to scan for Checked Shirt. ‘What about Dex? Why’s he taking the risk?’

‘Because he’s soft in the head, that’s why. You know him. One minute he’s here for the fucking juice, and the next – who knows? He’s been talking about moving to Scotland and buying a castle, but that was last week.’

Red Ken looked over my shoulder and nodded. I turned to see Dex empty-handed.

‘For all that, I’m glad he’s here. You too, Nick. I just wish Tenny was too, you know?’

Dex bounced in and sat next to me. He studied Red Ken’s face. ‘You OK, chap? Nick here been stealing your chips?’

Red Ken wiped his eyes. ‘No, you soft twat – just the normal thing.’

‘Ah.’ Dex pointed at the carton full of juice. ‘That mine?’

He gulped it back with relish, then leant forward with that ever-bright smile. ‘Guess what? We’re being followed. The checked shirt stayed with me. So, what now?’

Red Ken took a swig of his drink. ‘Fuck ’em. We’re just shopping, aren’t we? So we carry on doing what we’re here to do – show Nick what he needs to see, and carry on as planned. We finish our drinks, get on with our job, and keep our eyes skinned.’

Dex had some bits of orange caught in his straw and was trying to blow them out instead of just taking the top off and drinking normally.

Red Ken thumped his watch. ‘We need to go up to the car park.’

Dex gave it some thought. ‘I’ll bring it with – and I see Checked Shirt. He’s sitting to my half-right, outside Starbucks. He’s talking with a white shirt, long-sleeved, buttoned-up, jeans. It’s a trigger.’

We got up and started walking, ignoring the two of them. We passed through the funfair, where Indian and Filipina girls stared out from behind the stalls. They looked as though they were in prison.

It’s best not to look for followers while on the move. It’s too obvious and not necessary. The best way is to check things out once you go static. Who was there the last time you stopped? Who just fucked up by jumping into a shop doorway?

We came to a massive floor-to-ceiling glass screen, the other side of which was Switzerland. Acres of blindingly white snow glittered under a brilliant blue sky. Chairlifts carried skiers over snowmen and tall fir trees. You could almost smell the gluhwein . We stopped and had a quick look at all the Arab lads wrapped up in their hired cold-weather gear. As usual, the women in burqa s had drawn the short straw. They couldn’t get the skiwear on over their other clobber. Their breath hung around them in clouds as they waited at the bottom of the toboggan run for their kids to appear at warp speed. They must have been freezing.

Dex took another suck from his juice container. ‘They’re still with us, chaps. They really need to sharpen their skills.’

We turned to walk away from the skiers. He was right. The two of them were directly in our eye-line, trying to look normal as they window-shopped for women’s clothes.

We took the escalator to the roof and walked out into forty degrees of overwhelming heat. Like any other mall on the planet, a queue of people with shopping bags stretched back from the taxi rank. There must have been space in the car park for at least a thousand cars, but only a third of it was occupied.

‘Recession.’ Dex shook his head as well as his drink. ‘It’s everywhere.’

The sun was low in the sky. Red Ken checked his watch. ‘Ten past six. Last light in about fifty.’

We moved into the shade of the ski slope. It ran up the side of the mall and above the car park to dominate the skyline. We admired all the massed ranks of sparkling 4x4s and Lamborghinis, and tried to look like we were waiting for someone to join us.

Neither of the shirts made an appearance. Red Ken pulled out his cigarettes and I admired the scenery. ‘They can’t be that shite. We’re up here for one of two reasons. To get a taxi, or meet someone with a vehicle. Bet they’ve gone back to the Toyota. They’ll be staking out the exit.’ I turned to the click of a disposable lighter and was met with a cloud of smoke.

‘Good. Fuck ’em. Let them wait. Dex, you keep an eye out for them. Nick, look out there.’

From our vantage-point, the area round the mall was littered with patches of barren ground and half-finished buildings draped in scaffolding. Over the constant background rumble of traffic came the rhythmic thud of pile drivers. Little ant-like bodies scurried about in yellow or blue hard hats. It must have been a fucker labouring in Gas Mark Ten.

The whole city was criss-crossed with highways that looked like giant concrete flumes. A monorail was also under construction. We had seen the elevated strip of concrete heading towards the city centre from the airport. The partly built stations looked like golden cocoons wrapped around the track. Red Ken, of course, thought they were shite. I quite liked them.

We could see all the way to the sea. The Burj Al-Arab hotel looked like a giant sail a couple of K away on the coast. The needle-like Burj Dubai was well on its way to being the world’s tallest building. In all directions, the rows of dominoes gleamed in the sun. But we weren’t there for the view.

He leant against one of the concrete supports for the ski slope and sucked hard on his B amp;H. ‘Dunes. You got it?’

The hotel, like a black glass pyramid, would have looked at home in Las Vegas.

‘Got that.’

‘OK, that’s your axis. Go half right. Five hundred.’ He was using a fire-control order format to get me onto the target. I looked half right, scanning the five-hundred area.

‘You’ve got a ten-storey building with an all-black ground floor. Seen?’

‘Seen.’ The boring ten-storey cube’s shop fronts were all black marble.

‘OK, go left of the building, into the wasteground, at about a K. You’ve got a one-storey flat-concrete-roofed building – rectangular, with a wall surrounding it. Seen?’

‘Seen.’

‘That’s the target. The surrounding wall is five metres away from the building. The wall is three metres high and the wall gate and building shutters are facing us. All the damage we do must be within the wall, inside the compound. That way it’ll be months, maybe years, before anyone gets to see our handiwork. And when they do, they won’t even know what was in the building. The outside wall will not be touched.’

I couldn’t see much detail from this distance but I had a visual on what Red Ken and Dex had described to me. We couldn’t do a walk-past to soak up more detail. No one walked in this city.

The perimeter gate, the only way in and out of the compound, directly faced a doorway set into rolled-steel shutters wide enough to admit a vehicle into the building. Either side of the shutters was a window, the one on the right larger than the one on the left. I couldn’t see from this distance, but Red Ken said they were iron-barred. He and Dex had been on-target during their last recce. There were no other entrances or exits.