Andy McNab: Crossfire

'No? Good. OK, the house we're going to hit…' He glanced at the huge wall map of the city behind him. Satellite photos and int briefs lined its sides. 'The spooks over in the west wing have strong reason to believe it's part of the supply chain between Iran and local insurgents. Weapons, ordnance, explosives – they think we'll find the lot. No need to remind you, this affects us all. We've lost enough good people.'

He tapped the satellite photography with his steel pointer. 'Take a lot of care. Look again at the junctions either side, look at the buildings all around. Before we move out, make sure your people are aware of where they need to be, what they need to do, where everyone else is and what they're doing. There will be no fuck-ups.'

B Company's target, in the Gazaya district of the city, the main stronghold of Muqtada Al- Sadr's Mahdi Army, was a small two-storey building surrounded by a concrete-block wall with a steel door on to the street.

The strike was phase two of the operation to kill and disperse the insurgents in the Brits' area of operations. They had also been gathering in Gazaya over the past two weeks, and their numbers would have kicked up a notch if any had managed to escape the Kingsmen's attacks out in the sandpit.

It was obvious from the photos there hadn't been any town planners around when Gazaya went up. Houses and apartment blocks up to four storeys high seemed to have been piled on top of each other with a warren of alleyways and wasteground between them.

Dave gobbed away about the outlying areas, the other houses that were going to be hit by the other rifle companies, where they'd had contacts in the past, where their guys had been shot. The team commanders nodded; so did the two female RMPs (Royal Miltary Police) and a medic. None of them could have been over twenty-five. Some things don't change. I'd been a corporal in this very battalion when I was nineteen.

By comparison Dave was an old man. He must have been about forty; either he was using hair dye, or he was so laid-back he was almost horizontal. There wasn't a grey hair in sight, and his face was almost completely unlined, except for a thin scar that ran from the edge of his top lip up the side of his cheek.

'Number one on the door is Rifleman Duggan.' He turned to his lads and stabbed a finger at them, more out of pride than aggression. He was the CSM, this was his rifle company, and the respect between them was so solid you could reach out and touch it. 'You lot make sure you big him up before tonight. It's a big deal for him. It's a big deal for anyone.' He paused to make sure it sank in. 'He leads us in and we take on whoever's there. We lift the targets, then the film crew come in to do their thing and make you all famous.'

A ripple of laughter spread round the room. They knew a couple of the young lads would be taking up fire positions a little more dramatically than usual if Pete and his camera were nearby.

'And then we stay and fight. But remember, this is a hard-arsed area. They like to keep all their mortars and explosives to themselves. We've never left there without a contact.'

There was a loud thud out in the compound. We jerked down to tighten our body armour and get our helmets from under our seats. Nobody went anywhere without them.

Then, maybe fifty metres away, a second rocket exploded. We were being IDFd by 107mm Katyushas.

'Remember.' Dave scanned the room as the third and fourth rockets slammed into the compound. 'The house is probably holding the guys who killed the Marines last Remembrance Day. That's why the media are coming with B Company. We're going to show some payback.'

He jerked a thumb at the vehicle-group commander, a Fijian corporal with a head the size of a watermelon and hands that made his notebook look like a postage stamp. 'If they start firing, you hit them with everything you've got, you understand me? I want all our lads out of there alive – and that's an order.'

This was a really tight company. You could feel it. Even if I'd told them I was from the Green Jackets and later the Regiment it wouldn't have counted for anything. They were fighting a war together and didn't give a shit about anyone else.

Dave was still going nineteen to the dozen; maybe he had his eye on another brew. 'Once we're in there, we're staying. We'll wait for the fuckers to try it on and see what happens. Corporal Barney,' he pointed to the sniper commander, who looked up from his notes, 'you tell your lot to get a few drops of that Optrex stuff down their eyes. I don't want them missing anyone coming our way.

'If it kicks off, don't worry, I've got more brass in my wagon to resupply your lot than they had at the Alamo. We might need it. C Company were in there last week. Five fucking hours that contact lasted.'

His jaw tightened as there was another explosion in the compound. 'Remember the two lads killed last week, and the poor fucker sent back to the UK with half his guts hanging out after one of those fucking things landed on him. Just make sure you look after your people and keep them alive, OK?'

There was a murmur as everyone stood. We headed for the brew area. Nobody was going anywhere until the attack had stopped and the munitions guys had got out there to clear the compound.

Pete stood up with his empty cup still in his hand and his helmet at a jaunty angle. He didn't wear one of the black Wehrmacht-style helmets like the rest of the media. He said the lip at the front got in the way when he filmed. Instead, he'd got hold of an old British steel helmet on eBay, and ground down the front of the rim.

He wore it tipped back and to the left, with a square of shammy leather underneath so it stayed at the same angle and didn't slide about on his bald head. With the corners of the shammy hanging down over his ears, all he needed was a Capstan Full Strength glued to his bottom lip and he'd have been a ringer for old Tommy Atkins in the trenches.

I tapped his arm. 'Finish your emails, Bermondsey Boy, I'll see to these.'

'Thanks.' He passed his cup. 'That's if the sat phone ain't shot to bits.'

Pete went to the other side of the room, where his iBook was rigged up to a BGAN wire running out through the window. The BGAN itself was sitting on top of one of the HESCOs outside.

Yet another rocket landed with a dull crump. It was the fourth attack we'd had that day. The last one had been mortars and had taken out two of the quartermaster's steel freight containers. No one was killed or injured, so I could just imagine the QM rubbing his hands as he prepared to compile a list of bomb-damaged goods long enough to fill two ships, let alone two containers.

When I got back to Pete with his Shirley Temple, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, his iBook on his lap. The memory stick he normally wore round his neck was jutting out of the USB port.

He wore a big smile under the helmet.

'Family stuff?' I laughed. 'So that's what you keep on those things. I thought you boys had 'em as some sort of good-luck charm. Fucking Dom walks round like he's immune to everything except green kryptonite.'

'Don't I know it, mate. It's a worry. Here you are…' He shifted the screen so I could share. 'Last year's birthday party. Six years old and bright as a button.'

A tall woman in a bikini with long wavy blonde hair was doing her best to keep control of half a dozen kids in armbands and goggles. The camera panned to take in more of the background.

I did a double-take. 'Fuck me, Brockwell Park lido! That takes me back a bit.'

'Done a few laps in your time, have you?'

'We used to go and mess about there as kids.' I watched his grin widen. 'We'd get out at Brixton and go to the market first, see what we could nick. We usually landed up with a couple of tomatoes or some green thing we didn't even know the name of, but it still made a nice picnic. Then we'd doss by the pool until we got thrown out for divebombing the grown-ups.'