Andy McNab - Zero hour

'You may not be surprised to hear he's not the only game in town. Some new boys want in. Moldovans. If they succeed, things could get very messy for us. And for you.'

'Why? I'm not here to fuck about with some tin-pot gang war.'

He pursed his lips. 'I'm way down the food chain – but I think Mission Control is worried that they might hit the silo before you do.'

'What can you give me on these fucking Moldovans?'

'I have an address.' He turned back to the kettle. 'You'll need to write it down. The names here are as long as the roads.'

I pulled a Bart Simpson notebook out of Bradley's goodie bag.

I wasn't surprised he hadn't written it down for me. He wouldn't be leaving anything to link him to the job. If I was in his shoes I'd be making me do the writing as well.

'It's on W-e-s-t-e-r-s-t-r-a-a-t, number 118. It's just short of the junction with Noordermarkt, in the western part of the city. It's quite a smart area. There's a cafe with striped canopies on the junction.'

'You know anything about the house? Is it alarmed? How many occupants?'

He handed me a brew. 'We know the main man drives a smart green-'

'Passat?'

'How do you know?'

'Because my nan's Gipsy Rose Lee. What does he want doing to, this Moldovan?'

'Killed, Nick. That was all he would say.'

'I'd rather be doing the Flynns.'

'Mr Tresillian didn't say anything about the Flynns.'

'Yeah, anyway. Any idea where he parks the Passat?'

'That's all I was told. I thought you knew how to find out stuff like that.'

Fair one. He was sounding more like Tresillian by the minute.

'So I take care of things in Westerstraat before they make a play for Lilian and her mates, then turn the silo into a hole in the ground?'

He nodded. 'Life never ends well, does it?'

'What?'

'No matter who we are or what we do, we all die.'

'Tell you what, I need you to get me some gear.' I walked towards the door. 'I've got to get a move on.'

He fell in behind me as I headed for the stairs.

'Can you get me shotgun cartridges?'

'Yes.'

'Birdshot, solid shot, whatever. I need at least two hundred rounds.'

We reached the bottom of the stairs.

'No need for receipts.' I grinned and held out my hand. 'Lock up, so real people still think the place is empty.'

We agreed that he'd come back at the same time tomorrow, and I headed back up the stairs. I waited by the first exit onto the fire escape until I heard his key in the top lock, then legged it three at a time to the top floor. I grabbed the mallet, ran to the mailroom and scrambled up the ladder. I twatted the bolts and lifted the roof hatch.

I'd wanted my new best friend on foot today not just because of security but also because I wanted to start finding out what the fuck this guy was all about. Making him walk was a way of slowing him down. It might give me the chance to see what he did next.

I kept low to minimize exposure as I headed towards the top of the vacant office block.

Yesterday Bradley had claimed he didn't know what was going on – and didn't want to know. Yet this morning it seemed like he knew everything. He claimed he didn't have comms, yet he'd been talking with Tresillian. It was all a bit too foggy for me. And having comms didn't mean they 'had you'. That was bollocks. If it were true, I'd have dumped my comms on day one. No one will ever call when you're not expecting them to: it could compromise the job. The only danger lies in passing on mixed messages – like this fucker had been doing. Maybe he'd made the mistake of thinking I was a knuckle-dragging gorilla from London who should be kept in the dark. And maybe Tresillian had too.

I reached the next-door building and moved to the edge. I poked my head slowly over the parapet and looked down onto Papaverhoek. Bradley was almost level with me, hands in his pockets, heading for the main.

I slid back, took a bit of a run-up and jumped towards the higher roof. I managed to hook my hands over the raised brickwork at its edge and scrabbled with the tips of my fifteen-euro trainers to continue my upward momentum. One elbow followed, then the other, then my right knee as I swung my legs to the side like a pendulum. Ten seconds later I was lying on my stomach on the tar-and-gravel surface. I got to my feet and ran past the entrance to the central stairwell to the far side of the block.

Bradley had a BlackBerry in his hand. He was taking too much time just to dial. The fucker was waiting for secure comms. He finally raised it to his ear. I watched his back as he walked down towards the junction. His free hand was cupped around the phone. Whatever Tresillian was saying, he had Bradley's full attention. His head was down, and he kept close to the wall, as if it was giving him a bit of protection, and preventing him from being overheard.

So he had comms after all, and he was bullshitting. I'd been correct not to trust him, and not to say a word about the girl.

I watched him veer right at the junction and disappear. There was a gap through which I could see the main drag between the big and small roundabouts. I waited for a while, in case he came back into view.

If I'd had more time I might have followed Bradley to see what the little shit got up to, but I had more important things to do. I gave it another ten minutes.

I sheltered under the little ferry's glass canopy and watched the city grow slowly bigger as we crossed the bay. It looked more like a Second World War landing craft than anything a tourist would leap onto. But, then, who in their right mind would want to visit the decaying docks and warehouses of Noord 5?

The other seven passengers all had bicycles. A couple in workmen's overalls munched their lunchtime sandwiches. The rest were in jeans and trainers, like me. They all had day sacks.

On the other side of the scratched glass, boats of all sizes zigzagged between the big cargo vessels nudging their way east along the waterway into Europe or west out towards the North Sea. High in the air, and so far away it was scarcely visible, I could just about make out the pinprick of a helicopter. Not many people would have noticed it. Even fewer would have known the reason it was static. There was probably a surveillance operation on. More than likely, it would be something to do with drugs.

I could picture what was going on up there. Somebody would be sitting in the co-pilot's seat with the world's most sophisticated optics at their disposal. The heli was an eye in the sky. These things could hover kilometres from the target area and still get a grandstand view.

Even back in the nineties, when I was doing surveillance in places like Belfast and Derry, the gear was phenomenal. I once lost the target in a crowd in the Segments, a shopping area protected by turnstiles and security fences. I didn't have to panic. The boy was obsessive about his trainers and bunged them in the washing machine most nights with a scoop or two of Daz. The optics were so good I could just rattle around looking at feet rather than bodies, waiting for a pair of spotless white trainers to appear – which they did.

Nowadays helicopters were used to track vehicles that have had small GPS devices hidden on them, or to support covert police surveillance teams on the ground. The eye in the sky means the surveillance team don't have to be right up the target's arse all the time; they can go where the heli operator tells them to, only closing in when they're about to be unsighted. If he goes into a building, they can stay back: they don't have to have the trigger on the house because the helicopter can do that.

My walk from the safe-house to the ferry had taken me past the tile warehouse. I had the mallet with me. It always felt better having a weapon. The parking spaces were filled with shiny but battered Transits – Distelweg's factory units were doing a roaring trade. Almost every one of the bays was full. I'd kept my hands in my pockets as I mooched past the flour silo, head tucked down inside my new nylon padded jacket but eyes up. The gates were still chained and padlocked.