Andy McNab - Agressor

A loud, male Paperclip monologue fired up close by in the street. I couldn't hear a reply; he was probably mad, drunk, or on the phone.

I looked to our right. We were about three or four metres from the outbuildings that were going to cover us while we tuned in to the target and carried out final checks before making entry.

Hugging the wall, I started moving. Slowly, really slowly.

The band in the Primorski struck up with Boney M's 'Brown Girl In The Ring'. The audience's polite applause was followed a few seconds later by a volley of raucous cheers. The Vegas girls must have made it onstage.

Aminute or two later we were safely behind the outbuildings and Charlie's mouth was against my ear. 'I like this one. It's Hazel's and my song.' His shoulders did a little jig. 'Brings back a few memories.'

I stifled a laugh. 'I'm very happy for you both. But let's not have those hands of yours doing all the moves.'

He was probably grinning like an idiot under his ski mask, but I knew he must be as worried as I was about his condition.

He turned his head and spoke gently through the fabric. 'We'll give it just a bit longer, then go and have a decent look at that door lock, eh?' Charlie had always tried to make ops like this sound like nothing more than a bit of DIY, but he was overdoing the nonchalance now.

He retrieved the binos from the satchel and peered round the corner of the brick sheds. He passed them to me. They weren't NVGs [night-viewing goggles], but they certainly helped my night vision. I checked out the CCTV first, then the door. Nothing had changed.

The band segued from Boney M to Sinatra. A group of three or four highly excited male voices moved past the gates. Maybe they were looking forward to dislodging a feather or two, or maybe they just thought New York was their kind of town.

We checked yet again that our phones were off and nothing was going to fall out of the satchel, and Charlie put his mouth back up to my ear. ''Eh oop, lad, we might as well get on with it, mightn't we?'

So far, we seemed to have been right about the light-and-camera motion detectors, if that was what they were; they covered the front of the house and the courtyard area between it and the gate. The two on each corner of the building swept the narrow alleyways between the house and the perimeter wall. We hoped we wouldn't need to check out the set-up at the rear.

Only one aspect of the security arrangements didn't make sense. The wall the far side of the courtyard, facing us as we came through the gate, didn't seem to be covered at all. It didn't take us long to decide it was our best route to the front door.

We edged along, Charlie ahead of me, our backs against the decaying brick wall. It was still very muggy, and the inside of my ski mask was soon clammy with sweat and condensed breath.

The only sounds up until now had come from the club and the occasional passing nutcase, but there was a sudden flurry of footsteps on the pavement by the front wall. There were at least two people out there; one of them was coughing and sniffing his way towards us.

He stopped just the other side of the gates for a good old spit; I could see the silhouette of his shoes at the centre of the two-inch gap beneath them. I hoped he didn't decide to pop inside for a piss. I edged further back into the shadows. There was a burst of raucous French mockery from his companion. I didn't speak much French, but enough to know that our throat-clearing friend had left a trail of snot down the front of his shirt.

They moved on, and so did we, working our way round to the corner of the house. The camera focused on the gate was mounted on the wall above us, with the motion detector immediately beneath it. We had to assume that it was angled towards the porch, so the light would go on when Baz went into or came out of the house. We'd have to make it think we were part of the floor this time, rather than the wall.

As we eased ourselves downwards, the Primorski band switched into Johnny Cash tribute mode, which must have put a big smile on the faces of the men in black. While they walked the line, we started to kitten-crawl the last four or five metres. Hugging the ground, we pushed ourselves up, as slowly as possible, on our elbows and toes, just enough to move forward, an inch or two at a time, along the cracked wet concrete path. We moved our eyes, not our heads, to see what lay in front of us; mine were already aching from the strain of keeping them right at the top of their sockets.

Charlie had to nudge the satchel ahead of him before he got to move himself. He finally got his head level with the three tiled steps leading up to the front door, and stopped dead, checking for any sign of a motion detector inside the porch. We hadn't seen one through the binos, but we'd had to plan on the assumption that there was one.

He lay there for another fifteen seconds or so, then started to slide the bag forwards again. Slowly, and with infinite care, he and the satchel moved up the steps and out of my line of sight. All I could hear was his laboured breathing, punctuated from time to time by the click of high heels and the occasional peal of laughter heading in the direction of the club. Didn't anyone sleep in this place?

I sucked in a lungful of air, lifted myself on my toes and elbows, and moved forward another four inches. I breathed out as my wet jeans and thighs made contact with the concrete once more.

There was a burst of applause at the Primorski as the band performed the closing bars of the Georgian version of 'Jumping Jack Flash', and in the momentary silence that followed I sensed rather than heard another sound, like something being dragged, from much closer by.

It felt as if it had come from the window above me, but I didn't dare move my head to check. I held my breath, mouth open to cut down any internal body noise, and listened.

I raised my eyes as far as I could towards the porch. There was no sign of Charlie. He would have been doing the same: stopping, listening, tuning in.

Whatever it had been, it didn't happen again. The only sounds now were distant laughter and the music of the night.

I breathed out, breathed in, kept my mouth open, and strained to pick up even the slightest vibration. Still nothing. Had it come from the window? Impossible to tell.

I waited another thirty seconds or so. If someone upstairs had spotted us, surely they would have done something by now.

I started to edge forward. We had no option but to treat this like an advance to contact. If you stopped every time you heard a gunshot, you'd never close in on the enemy. If there was someone in the house, or we'd been seen, we'd know about it soon enough.

My head eventually drew level with the bottom step. I resisted the temptation to take a shortcut and rush the last few feet. That's always the time you get caught.

Charlie was on my right, the side the door opened. He'd pulled up enough of his mask to be able to press his ear against the wood.

I finally made it inside the porch, and sat against the rotting brickwork. I didn't know which felt worse: the sweat on my back or the residue of rain-soaked concrete on my front. Charlie's left knee was on the doormat. He would have checked underneath it for a key – well, you never knew your luck – and that it didn't conceal a pressure pad. He moved his knee off the mat, pointed down at it as he kept listening.

I pulled the rubber up and saw that one of the four-inch-square tiles had no cement around it. I lifted it, and it appeared Baz had scraped out enough concrete to hide a set of keys very nicely. But of course they weren't there. Maybe Baz had switched on a bit since coming up with that one. Why do people think no-one else would ever think of looking just by the door?