Andy McNab - Recoil

'Thanks, mate, but I'll have to take a raincheck on that. I'm on my way to a mug of tea.'

It took far longer than it should have to get to Hereford. It was bucketing with rain all the way, and everyone drove like it was the first time they'd seen the stuff.

I came down Aylestone Hill into the city centre, and passed the railway station. Four and a half hours was still quicker than a train would have been, by the time I'd trekked from Docklands to Paddington. In any event, I needed wheels. He didn't know it yet, but Crazy Dave was going to find me a contact in-country and buy me a ticket – fast. As soon as I'd read him his horoscope, I wanted to be heading for an airport.

I passed the cattle market and headed for the other side of town. Huge estates had sprung up like mushrooms in the eighties. Bobblestock had been among the first of the new breed. The houses were all made from machined bricks and were uniformly ugly. Then they had given the roads names like Chancel View and Rectory Close, even though there wasn't a single old church in sight. With two point four children inside, a Mondeo on the drive and front lawns small enough to cut with scissors, these places had about as much individual character as a room in a Holiday Inn. No wonder it was Crazy Dave's manor.

The only crazy thing about Dave was that he'd earned his name because he wasn't: he was about as zany as a teacup. He was the kind of guy who analysed a joke before saying, 'Oh, yeah, I get it. That's funny.'

There had always been a broker knocking around Hereford. He had to be ex-Regiment because he had to know the people – who was in, who was getting out – and if he didn't, he had to know a man who did. Crazy Dave had set up in business when he was invalided out of the Regiment after a truck driver from Estonia bounced him off his Suzuki on the M4 and forced him to take the scenic route. He'd done a tour of the central reservation, then checked out a fair amount of the opposite carriageway. His legs were still useless and he was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo. I'd felt sorry for him when I met up with him last year. Now I thought two fucked-up legs weren't enough.

Only a few months ago, a friend of mine from Regiment days had gone to Crazy Dave for work. He was in the early stages of motor neurone disease, and wanted one last big pay-off so his wife would have a pension. So far so good, but Crazy Dave had found out and taken advantage. Charlie was so desperate, he accepted only a fraction of what the job was worth, and Dave had pocketed the rest.

I pulled up outside a brick rectangle with a garage extension that might have been assembled from a flat-pack. There was a brand new green Peugeot van on the drive. No lights on in the house, no sign of life.

I locked my hire car, and as I walked past his Popemobile I could see through the side windows that the whole thing was rigged and ramped for his disability, even down to levers and stuff instead of pedals. It must have cost a fortune. Where there's war there's brass.

As I walked up the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps, I rehearsed what to say. I hadn't called to let him know I was coming. I was probably the last man on earth Crazy Dave wanted to see and I didn't want the fucker wheeling it for the hills.

At the same time, I knew from my last visit that his office was a fortress. He could drop the firearms-standard shutters and that would be that. I could pretend to be a delivery man, but he might tell me to leave it on the doorstep. Or I could say I was one of the guys from the camp, but nobody would come here without an appointment.

The decision was made for me. There was a camera in the porch, new since my last visit. No point bluffing. I pressed the buzzer. 'Dave, mate. It's Nick Stone. Just passing, thought I'd say hi.'

There was no reply but the door buzzed open. I walked inside. Nothing had changed. There was still a stairlift parked at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top, enough climbing frames for Dave to move about on to keep a whole troop of baboons happy. The only thing different was a few framed pictures on the wall, of a girl in her twenties with Dave's big bulbous nose. She was holding a baby, who luckily took after its dad.

I walked into a no-frills living room. Laminate flooring, three-piece suite, a large TV and that was about it. The rest was open space so he could rattle about in his wheelchair.

French windows opened on to the garden, accessed via another ramp. I followed a narrow path of B amp;Q fake Cotswold stone that led up to a pair of doors set into a wall. The garage had been converted into an office. There was a stud wall where the up-and-over door had once been, and no windows.

Crazy Dave was waiting for me behind his desk. Balding, with a moustache like a seventies porn star, the only thing about him that had changed was the expression on his face. Last time I was there he was all smiles. Now he looked tense. Just here to say hi, my arse. He knew there'd be more to it than that, but couldn't fight his basic greed. I might be here with a million-dollar contract, or a caseful of Iraqi oil bonds with no idea how to sell them on.

On the desk in front of him, next to a telephone and an open laptop, sat the two most important assets his business possessed: a pair of small plastic boxes stuffed with index cards containing the names and details of more than a hundred former members of special forces. No wonder the garage had drop-down steel shutters and weapons-grade security: to people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, those cards would have been worth more than a containership full of RPGs.

I closed the door behind me. 'All right, mate? Want a brew?' I kept my tone light and happy, but he knew as well as I did that I wasn't here for tea and a KitKat.

The little table with the brew kit was still against the opposite wall. I even recognized the Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs that would have come with an Easter egg.

He shook his head while I went to test the weight of the kettle.

'OK, Dave, let's crack on.' I flicked the switch and stopped playing Mr Nice. 'By the time I get to Heathrow this evening I want a ticket to DRC and a contact in-country who'll get me to Ituri province and a fucked-up village called Nuka.'

Crazy Dave's face didn't even twitch. He just stared. If he'd been able to move his legs I was sure he'd have put them up on his desk, sat back and chuckled.

'Write the name down, Dave. N-U-K-A. I need to be there as of yesterday.'

He still didn't move.

'There are two reasons why you need to pull your finger out and get on with it. One, it'll stop me putting the word around about how you tear the arse out of the commission so much you make more money on every job than the fuckers in the field. They wouldn't be impressed with you, would they? They'd probably take you out of here and give that chair of yours a bit of a roll down the hill, know what I mean?

'Two. What are the companies going to say when they discover you don't even check that guys like Charlie have all their pistons working? Sending out cripples isn't the finest quality control, is it? I mean, if word got out, you wouldn't be left with much to broker, would you? And these are good times, aren't they?'

I leaned against the wall. 'By the way, is that your grandkid on the wall in the hallway there?'

'A boy.'

'Congratulations.'

The kettle clicked and I threw a teabag into the Smarties mug. 'But that's not to say I ain't going to bubble you anyway, one day. Charlie shouldn't have been on that job in the first place. He wasn't physically capable, and you ripped him off. How much was it?' I put the kettle down and picked up a Tetrapak of UHT milk. 'Oh, yeah, I remember. You gave Charlie two hundred grand and kept three hundred yourself. Wasn't that how it went?'