Aggressor

by Andy McNab

  I double-checked the safety catch before shoving the pistol down the front of my jeans and the plastic bag into my bomber pocket. As I got out of the Audi I gave myself the once-over. We still had to make it back to the hotel tonight, and pass muster with the night staff. Even in Tbilisi, they didn’t like their guests covered in other people’s blood.

  I pulled out my phone and switched it on. ‘I’ll call when I’m done. If you see any dramas coming in, just give us a call, OK?’

  Charlie nodded as he slid into the driver’s seat. His job was to keep the trigger on the entrance.

  ‘I’ll need your torch as well.’

  He handed it over.

  ‘See you in a bit.’ I headed straight for the open gate. There was no time to lurk about in the shadows. It was just a case of straight in, get it done, and back to the hotel before first light.

  I checked the phone for a signal as I hit the main path between the burial plots. The glow from the petrol station was doing its best to bathe everything – headstones, benches, tree trunks – in BP green. I had no complaints; it meant I could see where I was going.

  Acar drove past the entrance, sounding like its exhaust was bouncing along the road behind it. Apart from that it was quiet. Even the knitting circle had called it a day.

  My marker bin loomed out of the shadows. The four guys on Tengiz’s headstone were still gazing at the heavens. I couldn’t make up my mind whether they were doing it out of sheer admiration, or just waiting for an answer that never came. I shone the beam along the wrought-iron fence to get my bearings, and then picked out the bench. I moved across the plot and tried to slide the top slab away from the base. I only needed a one-inch gap, but this was one chunk of marble that looked as though it wasn’t going anywhere tonight.

  I bent down and gave it a second shove, this time with my shoulder. There was a low, grinding noise as it moved, and a quick flash of the torch confirmed I had the gap I needed. In went the bag of papers, the torch went back in my pocket, and I started to pull back the slab.

  There was a crunch of feet on gravel behind me.

  I spun round. A figure closed in on me, arms raised, blocking out every shred of ambient light. This boy was huge.

  I stepped to my left as the arm came down, trying to check it in mid-stride. I was lucky. Steel clattered against stone as something very unfriendly fell from his hands.

  I grabbed the bottom of my bomber jacket with my left hand and pulled it up, trying to grab the pistol grip with my right. But he was ahead of me. He yelled and lunged, hands the size of grappling irons gripping my arms and trying to wrench them from their sockets. I stumbled backwards over the low fence and we crashed onto the pathway.

  My shoulder hit the kerb and my attacker fell on top of me, crushing the air from my lungs. I arched my back, kicking, bucking, struggling to get my hands down, trying to get him away from me so I could draw down.

  The top of his head pushed hard against my chin. My teeth weren’t clenched and I bit my tongue.

  Eighteen, maybe nineteen stone of him pressed down on me, keeping my arms pinioned above my head.

  ‘Charlie!’

  I could feel the blood spurting from my mouth as I shouted. I bucked and kicked, but his body was still moulded to mine, pressing against the weapon.

  ‘CHARLIE!’

  He let go of my arms and decided to throttle me instead. Massive fingers closed around my throat and I felt his saliva spray across my face as he strained to push my Adam’s apple out through the back of my neck. My head felt like it was going to explode.

  There was nothing I could do but kick and writhe like a madman. I managed to get my hands round his neck as well, but his muscles simply tensed like steel hawsers under my fingers. I shifted them down to grip the lapels of his jacket, using them as leverage to dig my thumbs into the soft, fleshy area between the collar bones, at the base of his throat.

  He was going to have to use his hands to deal with mine. If he didn’t, he’d choke to death. Unless I did first.

  My face swelled to bursting point under the pressure of his grip.

  He pushed down his chin, tensing his neck even more. Fuck, he was big. His stubble took two layers of skin off my hands.

  My head pumped, my eyes blurred.

  I dug harder and he lifted his head.

  His hair flicked against my face. I felt his bristles rasp across my cheek and smelt his sourly alcoholic breath. I knew he was going to try and finish this with his teeth.

  9

  I shook my head, trying to keep it moving, hoping I’d have a chance to get in there first.

  When his nose was only inches away from mine, I got my chance. I lunged, and my teeth caught him just on the bridge. I bit down on the hard bone above the cartilage and kept on going. He flung his head from side to side in an attempt to shake me off, but I was like a terrier hanging on to a stick.

  At last his grip slackened on my neck and his hands moved up my face. I managed to screw up my eyes before he got there with his thumbs. He pressed them into my sockets, but I just bit harder. Blood spurted over my face.

  He went berserk with pain, thrashing about like a game fish under a harpoon.

  I let go of his throat and threw my hands round the back of his head, pulling it towards me so I could get a better purchase with my teeth. Then I bit as hard as I could, working my head from side to side as I did so.

  My jaws closed and the bone collapsed like a peanut shell. His sinuses exploded.

  Blood and snot spurted from the hole in his face and he let out a scream of rage and pain.

  I pulled away from him, kicking and punching, trying to get him off me. But he still held on.

  I managed to turn us onto our sides, and force my hand down between us until it could close around the cold metal of the pistol grip. I brought the muzzle up beneath his armpit, released the safety, and squeezed.

  He took the round full in the chest.

  I squeezed again.

  Nothing.

  There hadn’t been room between us to allow the top slide to move backwards and forwards fully enough to reload.

  I pushed myself away from him, scrabbling at the top slide with my fingers until I got enough grip to rack it and release it.

  I lay on my back for a moment as he writhed beside me. Then I rammed the muzzle into his chest and squeezed the trigger twice.

  I crawled away and sat against Tengiz’s stone. The only sound louder than my choking attempts to regain my breath was another car passing along the road. This one seemed to have parted company with its exhaust entirely.

  My tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. My Adam’s apple felt like it had been kicked right against the back of my throat. I sat there, gobbing out blood between my jumper and my sweatshirt, trying to leave as little DNA as possible on the ground.

  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 gr
oped 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.’

  PART SEVEN

  1

  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.

  We’d made it to the hotel just before four. The kit had stayed with the body in the boot. We had to walk back into the city clean, just in case a curious blue-and-white wanted to know what we were lugging about this time of the morning. Charlie’s jumper and the weapon went down an open manhole that no man or beast in their right mind would consider even going near, then we’d played a couple of drunken arseholes back from a night on the piss, jackets inside out and tied round our waists to cover the worst of the blood and mud. As it turned out, nobody raised an eyebrow. It was just another Saturday night in downtown Tbilisi.

  I’d retrieved my card from behind the cistern, had a shit, shave and shower, then headed for Charlie’s room with my old clothes under my arm to spend a little quality time covering our tracks. I pulled the CTR tape from its casing and burned it, with the help of the hotel’s complimentary matches, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Even our cell phones got the good news from my boot heel after a wipe-down to dispose of prints. We’d come into this country sterile, and we had to leave the
same way.

  The Marriott tape stayed with us; it was just too valuable to lose control of. There was a world of potential shit between us and Brisbane, and we needed to keep as much bargaining power to hand as we could.

  After enough room-service breakfast to feed a couple of Charlie’s horses, we binned our clothes in the kitchen skips behind the hotel, along with the remains of the camcorder. The tape was in my new, oil-worker chic, dark blue Rohan trousers, and I had slipped the first ten pages of the document in Baz’s safe inside a magazine, in the pocket of my new khaki jacket. Charlie, waiting in the terminal, had the other half. He was going to come out and buy something from the shop when it was time to leave. That would be my signal to follow him back in.

  I felt sorry for the old fucker. Once such a strong, solid, dependable performer, and now so screwed around by disease that he was finding it hard to grip anything firmly for more than five minutes. I could only begin to imagine his frustration. Just like Ali – king of the world one minute, a wreck the next. But unlike Ali, Charlie had a half-empty wallet into the bargain.

  I had been thinking about that wallet a lot since this morning. Instead of keeping the papers as insurance, maybe we should cut a deal.

  I felt a call to Crazy Dave from Vienna coming on. I’d persuade him to put us in touch with whoever the fuck had dreamed up this job, and give them the chance to buy the papers for the rest of Charlie’s two hundred grand.

  As a bonus, I’d try and resist the temptation to rip their heads off for forgetting to mention that we’d be sharing house-room with a couple of maniac jewel thieves, and a graveyard with a machete-wielding cousin of the Incredible Hulk. We’d keep the two tapes of Whitewall and a copy of the papers as a little memento of our Georgian adventure, in case they changed their minds later, or suddenly found themselves in the mood to give us 200K’s worth of pain.

  I didn’t have too many illusions about Whitewall. He was probably just as expendable as we were, and they’d bin him as easily as they’d planned to bin Charlie. But at least we had something up our sleeves that he wouldn’t want to become regular Sunday afternoon family viewing.