Andy McNab - Crossfire

I watched as I got hit and dropped like a bag of shit. The Poles were loving it. Real live bang-bang, filmed by a real live Polish hero.

I'd booked myself on to the next day's two p.m. Royal Jordanian to Amman. The flight had had the world's most obvious sky marshal sitting in the galley by the cockpit door. Kitted out in a very sharp suit and some of Russia's finest steel sticking out of his holster, he was even scaring the flight attendants.

We landed at three thirty, but there were no useful connecting flights till the morning. I'd spent last night on an airport bench because I wanted to be sure of a ticket for the nine a.m. BA to Heathrow the moment the desk opened – only to discover when it did that the airline will put you up in a hotel if you're waiting overnight for a connecting flight.

It had been last night that I fucked up my arm again. I sort of let them think I was a wounded soldier and they upgraded me to business all the way through to London.

I'd taken the fast train to Paddington, jumped into a cab and got the driver to take me to Guy's. I could have walked round the corner to St Mary's, but south London was more my stamping ground. Going to Guy's was a trip down Memory Lane.

Besides, it was closer to Brockwell Park.

I tried Dom's mobile for the fifth time since landing. Still only voicemail.

I rang Moira again. 'Has he called in yet?'

'No. Have you heard anything?'

'Nothing. I'm in London.'

There was a long pause. Something not very good was about to happen.

'Listen, Nick, with Pete gone and Dom missing, there isn't any reason to keep you on. That's it, I'm afraid. Send me an invoice for the days worked and I'll get our accounts department to sort it out.'

She wasn't one to mess about, was she?

'Nick, I have to go.'

So, that was it, then. No more pay cheques from TVZ 24.

A very pissed-off voice paged a doctor on the Tannoy. They might have installed CCTV since the 1970s, but some things about the place hadn't changed. The woman's voice sounded exactly the same as the reception staff had when I'd been there as a nine-year-old leaking red stuff.

I lived on the Tabard Estate, a few streets away, in a block of council flats thrown up after the war. They'd been built on a newly vacant site. Demolition had been cheap, courtesy of the Luftwaffe.

All the houses were given names associated with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Apparently the pilgrimage had started from the Tabard Inn or somewhere. We ended up in Eastwell House: Eastwell was one of the stops along the pilgrims' route, they'd said. I'd never read the Canterbury Tales. I'd thumbed through the Canterbury Messenger once while waiting for a train back to Shorncliff barracks when I was a boy soldier, but that probably didn't count.

I went to a primary school near the chocolate factory, which for some reason us kids thought was owned by Bob Monkhouse. Another rumour flying round was that the sweet shop in Kirby Grove had a shed behind it stacked with Coca- Cola and R. White's lemonade. One dinner-time, a gang of us set off to scale the wall. Like a dickhead, I volunteered to be first up. I hadn't taken account of the broken glass set into the concrete along the top. I fucked myself up big-time. Blood poured from my lacerated hand, but I knew Guy's was just a couple of minutes away. I ran all the way there. They did their stuff, and told me to go home. I didn't argue. After that I was forever grazing my knees and elbows and taking myself off to Guy's, then home for the rest of the day.

All I needed now were a few new sutures and some more antibiotics to counter any infection in the wound and the shit I must have swallowed. They'd do it, no trouble. This was south London. It wasn't like they didn't know how to treat gunshot wounds. Once they'd sewn me up and handed out some more antibiotics and painkillers, I'd be looking for Dom, and my first stop would be Tallulah and Ruby's. They were the real casualties. My arm would heal.

I stuck it out for another twenty minutes as old people vomited into plastic containers and called for their forty-something children, who were wandering round, trying to find out why their parents had been abandoned in the corridors.

It depressed the shit out of me, and reinforced my own plans for old age. I wasn't going to hang about. Once I started pissing in my pants, it was time to drop myself.

I got to my feet, picked up all my worldly goods in my Bergen, and asked the Polish builders to keep my seat for me.

At the coffee machine, I scrabbled in my pocket for change with my free hand, when a gravel-voiced Ulsterman piped up behind me: 'It's all right, boy, I'll get that.'

I didn't turn. I knew who it was. I could feel his roll-up tobacco breath against my ear. My heart sank.

'Shirley Temple, if I remember right?' A worn brown leather-covered arm brushed past my face and a big freckled hand threw a quid into the slot and punched 'white no sugar' with a nicotine-stained forefinger.

Sundance saw the expression on my face. 'Don't worry, boy, we're not carrying. We're not going to hurt you.'

We? Where there was Sundance, you also got Trainers. I looked round and, sure enough, he was sitting a little further down the corridor. He was there to block a getaway, but he seemed more intent on checking out the nurses, cleaners, female patients, anyone with a pair of tits. His forearms rippled below his short-sleeved shirt as he worked a roll-up. His Red Hand of Ulster tattoo had just been lasered off last time I saw him, and all traces of it had now disappeared.

I didn't care what Sundance said. I was fucking concerned. They had kicked the shit out of me once before just because the Yes Man, the arse-hole they worked for, felt in that kind of mood. He'd given me a brief to kill a kid, which would send a warning to his father. I hadn't complied, so Sundance and Trainers had introduced me to the Yes Man's alternative brief: go to Panama and kill the father. If not, Kelly, a child who was my last remaining link with the human race, would die.

I'd nicknamed him Sundance because of his thick, blond, side-parted hair and Robert Redford looks, back in the days when Bob was young enough to play Paul Newman's mate. The years hadn't been kind. His face had dropped an inch or two, and the parting had widened to take in much of the top of his nut.

And Trainers? He'd got his name because he wore them all the time and they were the first thing I'd seen of him when they were kicking me to shit.

They'd obviously kept hitting the weights since their days in the H Blocks, but still looked bulked-up rather than honed. With their broken noses and big barrel chests they wouldn't have been out of place outside a nightclub in ill-fitting dinner jackets and Dr Martens. But they were in the Good Lads' Club now, and worked for the Firm.

Sundance nodded down at my arm as the cup dropped on to the tray. 'Had a bit of a rough time there, eh? I saw it on the news. Hit a bone?'

I shook my head. He glanced up again as the cup filled. 'Fucking chaos out there, eh?'

As if he'd know. Guys like him were just muscle, not two brain cells to rub together. They stayed local, within the M25. These days, they were probably used to fight the new enemy – anyone with a towel on their heads. They probably went round intimidating young Muslim men, trying to turn them into sources in the mosques.

'It has its moments,' I said. 'So, what the fuck are you after?'

Sundance lifted the steaming coffee from the machine and presented it to me. 'The boss wants to see you at the office.'

I took the plastic rim with my thumb and forefinger, but I'd gone off the idea. In fact, I suddenly felt sicker than I had when I came into this fucking place. 'When?'