Andy McNab - Crossfire

He stood up and waffled in local to the boy. Whatever he was saying, it sounded along the lines of 'Move any of these and you're history.'

I looked at the black pieces. They had turbans, beards and Gunga Din kit.

He looked me up and down as he came towards me. 'You've come to play big boys' games and you don't even have the brains to sort yourself out with a fucking weapon. What are you, son? A fucking bank clerk, thinking all this shite is some sort of great adventure?'

He needed a dental plan even more than Magreb. The few teeth that weren't black had an inch of nicotine on them. And he stank.

I nodded and smiled. He had what I wanted. 'I just need a weapon.'

'You got money?'

I stepped back from his BO. 'Enough.'

'What are we waiting for, then?' He turned back to the light-skinned boy and gave him another warning. He left the room and I followed. I grabbed a bottle of water from a pack that was already ripped open.

We passed the sound of more humping and grunting and headed downstairs. We went through the bar just as the dancing girls, now semi-naked, were having some fun with empty beer bottles. I followed the Jock through a door, into what would once have been the kitchen.

Two girls stood next to the sink, chatting away together and soaping themselves with flannels as if we weren't there.

The Jock led me across to two rusty and disconnected chest freezers with hasps and padlocks drilled into them. He unlocked one and lifted the lid to expose longs and shorts of all makes and sizes.

This place didn't do pub grub.

I dug around in what amounted to a big collection of rust.

'The semi-auto pistols are two hundred. Revolvers one fifty. AKs two fifty. Anything else, I'll tell you.'

'You heard of a Polish guy, Dominik Condratowicz?'

He leant against the other freezer, eyeing the two girls. They were now up on chairs and squatting over the sink to give themselves a final rinse with running water.

'No. That who you gonna kill with one of these fucking things?'

I picked out an old MP5 and fished about for some mags. There were two. 'You got any nine-millimetre for this?'

He slapped the freezer beneath him but kept his eyes on the girls. One was towelling herself and the one I'd seen upstairs was giving her makeup a bit of a retouch, ready for the next round. 'I've got to keep the fucking lot locked up. Fucking thieving bastards.'

The MP5 was knackered and rusty. I needed to look inside to check it had the basics – like a firing pin. These Heckler amp; Kochs were very quick to disassemble. I pushed back on the two pins at the rear, which opened up the backplate and one end of the pistol grip.

He was taking an interest in me now that he saw I knew what I was doing.

I pulled out the working parts. There was nothing but rust around the chamber, and so much corrosion in the barrel I could only just about see light through it.

'What about Noah James?'

The Jock's eyes jerked away from the girls. He went ballistic. 'Fucking animal! You anything to do with him?'

'No, just heard he was about. You know where?'

I started to reassemble the weapon.

His finger came up to my face. As long as his breath stayed away that was fine. 'I don't fucking know and don't care. If they come here again I'll do Kabul a favour and kill the shites myself.'

'He come in with the Brit?'

'Joey fucking Wallings. Arsehole used to work here. He was a good lad until the gear got him.' The Jock mimed injecting his arm. 'Fucked him up and he started running with James. They tried to sell me Afghan whores. So smacked up, some of them, they could hardly stand.' He pointed at the legs and heads of the girls at the sink. 'Fucking burns all over them, whip-marks, cuts… They stole them from villages, sick fucks.'

He sat on the freezer and lit a Chesterfield with a Zippo. He sucked deeply to calm himself. His eyes flicked down towards the MP5. 'You not interested?'

I shook my head and put the weapon back in the freezer.

'Well, maybe you're not some bank clerk.' He nodded at the weapons. 'They're all shite.'

I spotted a mini Uzi, like the regular Uzi only a lot shorter. It was stuck under a pile of rusty old.303 Lee Enfields, probably left over from the Second World War.

I pulled it out to discover it was a Mini-Ero, a shameless copy. This one was the older version, with pistol grip safety and mag housing, and big chunky working parts that operated on the blowback system. The only difference I could see was that the safety-catch markings were in Serbo-Croat.

The girls left and Stu helped himself to a handful of arse from both on their way out.

The Mini-Ero wasn't in bad nick. A bit rusty, but at least it had a firing pin.

I'd always thought the Uzi overrated. After the Six Day War it got rave reviews it didn't deserve. Both the Uzi and the mini Uzi were heavy for their size. Almost every comparable weapon did the same job more efficiently. It was just marketing that made the weapon so popular in the eyes of people who didn't use them. Bank clerks and south London drug-dealers would be the only people ignorant enough to part with good money for one.

There were three mags taped round the barrel. 'I'll take this and two hundred nine-millimetre. How much is that going to set me back?'

Whatever the figure should have been, he probably doubled it. 'Three hundred.'

No point haggling. 'Done.'

He unlocked the freezer as I put the weapon back together. I took off my Bergen, bunged in the bottle of water, and waited to add the weapon, mags and rounds.

'You going south for long?' He handed me four cardboard boxes of fifty 9mm and I ripped one open. I'd always found it easy to speed-load, even as a boy soldier. Many guys try to position the rounds in their hands so that the percussion cap is going to be fed in first, but the easiest thing is to pick the things up and turn them between your thumb and forefinger as you press them into the magazine.

'Don't know.'

'Well, son' – he locked up the ammo freezer- 'you come back with that thing and I'll buy it back. But I don't give money, we just trade with honey.'

He locked up the first freezer and came over to do the same to the second. I moved the magazines and kit. 'That's how half of these shites pay. Some, they come in, they've got fuck-all left but their weapons.'

I shrugged. 'Maybe I'll bring it back.'

'I'm not sticking my nose in your business, son, but that James shite and his like – stay away from them. They're fucking acid.'

I finished the first mag.

'You liked my chessboard, didn't you?'

'Yeah, nice.'

'My boy.' He was grinning. 'He carved them. He's good at that sort of thing. It's a special edition, black Taliban, white ISAF. I'm going to try and get it marketed.'

He took a last drag and flicked the butt on to the floor. 'You see, son, you got the Taliban pawns in turbans, but the ISAF pawns, none of them match. That's because we spend so much time out here wondering if they're on the same fucking side.'

I was treated to another flash of his black stumps. 'If it was going to be true to life, obviously the Taliban king would be missing – there'd just be a video of him in a cave. And no Taliban knights, no Taliban castles. They'd all be bishops, see – mad mullahs.

'And once the ISAF pieces were set up, most of them would refuse to move from their own squares. The bishops, well, they'd have to be paid regularly or they'd move over to the Taliban side. Are you getting this, son?'

I sort of was and sort of wasn't, but I nodded anyway to make him feel a bit better. I finished loading the last mag and counted out three hundred-dollar bills.

'Sorry for being a bit of a shite with you in the beginning, son. But when they called they said you were one of those cowboys. People like that, they come here and fuck it up for everybody else who's trying to make a living.'