Andy McNab - Agressor

I fished out the mobile, gulping oxygen to slow down for Charlie to understand me. It rang just once before he answered.

'Back the car up to the gate. Get the boot open. We've got a drama.'

He didn't answer; he just closed down. He knew what was going into the back.

I rolled over and scrabbled about, trying to locate whatever the Hulk had been aiming to cut me into little pieces with. My fingers touched the cold steel of a gollock. No half-measures for this boy; he might have called it a machete, tree-beater, it didn't matter. What did was that the thing wasn't buried in my head.

Fuck that. I'd been lucky this time.

I crawled over to the bench, still trying to gulp in air, my mouth still filling with blood. I spat it into my jumper, and managed to heave the slab far enough to get my hand through the gap. I fished about until my fingers brushed against the plastic bag. The papers went back in my jacket pocket. Until the Hulk had turned up, I'd given Whitewall and whoever pulled his strings the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't any longer. Charlie and I were being well and truly fucked over. No-one was getting this now. It was ours.

I groped around with the torch and found the pistol. I pushed it back into my jeans, and shoved the machete down the front of its previous owner's trousers.

I grabbed his hands, and started to drag him down the pathway. We couldn't just leave him here. The elderly are early risers, and for all we knew there could be a steady stream of widows from first light.

I could see Charlie bumping the Audi across the road, then turning and backing it up.

I reached the tap and started to wash myself down.

Charlie walked through the gate and saw the body on the pathway. 'Fucking hell, lad.'

'You've been stitched up, mate. Fucking Whitewall had this knucklehead waiting for you with a gollock.' I pointed down at the handle sticking out of his waistband. 'I've got to clean up, then I'll give you a hand.'

I washed as best I could and pushed back my wet hair, trying to look a bit respectable for the hotel. I filled a couple of plastic drinks bottles that someone had left by the taps, and went back to the plot to rinse away the most obvious splashes of blood. I didn't want the Sunday morning knitting circle to miss a stitch and call in the blue-and-whites.

Charlie and I somehow managed to heave the Hulk into the boot, torso first. For a moment the rest of him was hanging down across the Audi's rear bumper, as if he was bent over, being sick.

There was rustling, and the crunch of gravel behind us. Bodies on the pathway.

No time for talk: I grabbed the gollock and ran back into the gloom. My eyes out on their stalks, I checked each side of the path as I ran to where I thought the noise had come from.

I stopped just past Tengiz, took cover behind a tomb, and listened.

More rustling, left of the path.

I ran for it between two plots. They heard me and took off. I headed for the shouts of scared Paperclip.

Jumping a low wall, I crunched over the gravel of a plot. I could make out two shapes, maybe two plots ahead, stumbling over fences and walls, trying to get away. I jumped again and fell onto plastic sheeting. A body was under it, moaning, not moving.

Gollock up, I kicked myself free and pulled the plastic away.

One of the shell-suit crew stared up at me, tourniquet still in place around his arm, not moving a muscle. The plastic was pulled between two plots to make a shelter. I shone the torch beam in his eyes, and his pupils remained fully dilated. If he was looking into the future, he didn't have to look far.

The others were well gone now. There was nothing I could do but head back for Charlie and hope they'd been too fucked up to see anything. But I knew, deep down, that if they were, they wouldn't have been jumping around as they had.

We each grabbed a leg and swung him in. I closed the lid and Charlie took off his jacket and jumper and started to wipe blood off the back of the car.

'He was waiting for me,' I said. 'He knew you'd be here. Which means I wouldn't mind betting those two at the house weren't there by accident either.'

Charlie carried on with his cleaning while I checked the area for stray shell suits and any other machete-waving psychopaths.

'I hope you got the full wad up front, mate. It's a total fuck-up, but we'll protect ourselves with the document. Whatever's in it must be pretty important; every fucker seems to want to get their hands on it.'

The cleaning was taking too long. 'Let's just fuck off and sort everything out when we get back under cover.'

We got in the car, me behind the wheel.

'I've got a problem, lad.' Charlie looked like he'd just seen a ghost.

'What?'

'I've only got half.'

'You what? What the fuck were you thinking of?'

Charlie raised a hand. 'Hold on, everyone's in the driving seat except for me. I had two choices. Take the job as it was, or leave it.'

I headed for the nearest area of darkness, the high ground towards the TV tower. I couldn't believe he'd been so stupid. You always demand all the money up front. You never know who's fucking about with you. I started shouting at him as we bounced back into the shadow of the trees. 'Didn't you think you could be stitched up? What the fuck was going through that wobbly old head of yours?'

He said nothing as we twisted and turned our way towards the darkness.

As I parked up, in what I supposed was a fire break in the pine trees that blanketed the mountain, he finally turned and faced me. It was his turn to shout, and I could feel the force of his soundwaves against my face as well as in my ear. 'I'm fucking dying, remember? I need the cash. What would you have done? Assume Crazy Dave would come begging, and just walk away? Think about it.'

I'd known I was wrong as soon as I'd opened my mouth. 'I'm sorry, Charlie. Fuck it, it doesn't matter. Let's get the kit in the boot, and then get the fuck out of here. As long as we've got that document, we're going to be OK, I'm sure of it.'

'Yeah,' Charlie quipped. 'If all else fails we can put it on eBay.'

Sunday, 1 May The terminal was heaving with passengers waiting for international flights, and every single one of them had been delayed.

It was 10.09 on a Sunday; only a matter of time before the Audi would be discovered. Even in Georgia, bloodstained seats and a shot-out window must be a curiosity.

Our flight to Vienna should have taken off at 10.30, but we weren't even being allowed to check in. There was only one departure gate, and only enough room airside for one planeload of passengers.

We'd covered our tracks as effectively as we could, but that didn't stop me feeling uncomfortable. Red Eyes and his mate hadn't done us any favours when they'd ripped our masks off, and it wouldn't take Inspector Morse to link us to Baz's Audi and the bodies in his driveway. I just wanted to get the fuck out of here. Freedom felt so close I could spit at it, but we were still the wrong side of the glass partition.

I sat by the garden sheds across the road from the terminal. At least the benches were dry; the sun had done its stuff, and now peeped intermittently through the banks of slow-moving cloud.

A lot of us had moved out here to escape the crush, and the taxi drivers were really pissed off about it. They didn't want to share their world with a load of foreigners. The shed owners weren't too happy about it, either. Each of them sat behind their identical chocolate- and gum-laden counters, making it very clear that the portable black-and-white TV on the shelf behind them was a great deal more appealing than the potential customers in front.

A bored-looking anchorwoman with big black hair was presenting a news programme on all three screens. It was obviously another slow day at the network. We were treated to endless vistas of grand buildings, or lingering shots of Georgian soldiers in US BDUs, with Richard the Lionheart insignia stuck all over them, sitting purposefully in the back of trucks, or running courageously up and down hills.