Dead Centre

by Andy McNab

  I didn’t mind being on my own. I felt comfortable with my own company, just as Anna did. I’d been alone most of my life. I’d had lots of mates and always been around people, but I’d felt like an outsider. That was OK: I knew that was the way it was for me. I just got on with what I was doing.

  I spent a lot of time in the basement gym of our condominium. For me, the gym had always been famine or feast. I did nothing for months on end because I was busy, working or injured, but when I had the time, I was in there every day.

  My brain was getting a bit of a workout, too. I was reading the books I’d promised myself I was going to get through last year when I’d thought I was dying from a falsely diagnosed tumour. I did Tolstoy’s War and Peace first, seeing as I was in Russia and Anna had suggested I started on the local lads’ classics. She tested me on them, just to make sure I had done exactly what I’d promised myself. She didn’t warn me the first fucking thing was over twelve hundred pages long. It had taken me longer to read than it took Napoleon to reach Moscow.

  I’d just finished Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, about the Russians’ fight against the Nazis in the Second World War. Stalin had loved that guy. Now I was into Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A poverty-stricken young man, who views himself as intellectually superior, comes up with the idea of murdering a rich money-lender he hates. I’d read as far as the crime, so I supposed the punishment bit was coming up. I couldn’t wait to bore Anna to death about it when she got back.

  I’d given the art galleries a pounding as well, and she’d taken me to Swan Lake at the Bolshoi ballet, and Così Fan Tutte at the opera house. I’d always thought it was a kind of ice cream.

  I didn’t feel I’d entered a world that I’d been missing. When I’d thought I was dying, I’d felt like I had some kind of hole that needed filling. Now it was just great to know something new. But it wasn’t going to take over my life. That was why I still needed to keep my eye in on the range.

  3

  IT’S EASY TO shoot well, in theory. If the weapon is correctly aimed, the trigger is squeezed and the shot released without moving it, then the round will hit the target. However, the perfect or ‘lucky’ shot that is going to save your life is the result of years of practice. It’s like building muscle at the gym: use it or lose it.

  I started loading the seventeen-round magazine. A couple of punters to my left pressed their return buttons and man-shaped targets of Russian hoods with knives slid towards them. Lots of Russian piss-taking came from their cubicles as they checked each other’s hits.

  Gaston Glock was a genius. He’d had no experience with firearms when he entered a design competition for a new pistol for the Austrian Army in the 1980s, but he’d come up with the idea and built a prototype within a couple of months. He might have known jack about weapons, but he knew a lot about synthetic polymers, and that was one of the things that made this gun so different. The Glock’s plastic frame made it much lighter and easier to handle, but it was also what made it so hard for people – myself included – to accept initially. But in the last thirty years it had proved reliable and durable, and old Gaston had done all right for himself.

  I liked it here at Gunslingers. There was always a great mixture of police and Mafia, as well as gun nuts and European tourists doing the ‘Russian military experience’. They paid the equivalent of five euros a round to fire weapons, and up to 16,000 to fly in a MiG 23. Some of these guys, mostly the Germans, blew off about thirty grand in euros over a long weekend.

  It wasn’t as if I talked to any of them or had mates there. Apart from anything else, I’d only learnt a phrase or two of Russian in the time I’d been in the country. There wasn’t much point. Moscow was one of the big tourist destinations these days and most people knew enough English for me not to have to learn Russian. If they didn’t understand me I’d do the British thing of pointing and shouting. It seemed to do the trick. I’d nod at the regulars, but only if they nodded at me first. Police and Mafia tend not to be the most sociable of people, and that was the way I liked it. I also liked coming in early, before the first tourists Rambo’d in and the place got packed.

  Standing in my cubicle, I put the target out at about ten metres. I loaded a mag, pulled back on the top slide, and let go so it rammed a 9mm round into the chamber.

  In the movies, when actors load semi- or automatic weapons they always pull back the top slide and keep hold of it as it goes forward. It looks good, but it’s bollocks. You’ve got to let the top slide go. The spring then forces the next round out of the magazine and into the chamber. Hamper this action and you’re going to have stoppages. Law-enforcement agencies all over the world have trouble training recruits because of how they’ve seen the likes of Russell Crowe fuck it up on screen. When a Hollywood hard guy takes cover against a wall, the camera shows him with his weapon up, barrel near his face and pointing at the sky. It’s yet more bollocks. The weapon’s got to be pointing out towards the threat. The reason directors show it the way they do is so you can see the sexy weapon very close up, so it’s next to the actor’s head and you can register his emotion before they cut to the next scene.

  I still used the Weaver stance when I shot. Your body became a firing platform by adopting the stance of a fighter. My legs were shoulder-width apart, left leg forward so my body turned forty-five degrees to the target. Now I was balanced forward and back, left and right.

  The eyes are the aiming mechanism and the brain is the decision maker of when to fire, but everything else is used to create stability for the weapon. The web of my right hand was pushed hard and high into the grip. The higher the grip, the better the bore axis, the better the control of the weapon as the muzzle jumped when I fired. That was important. If I had to draw down outside this club it wouldn’t be just one round at a time and at a paper target. Semi-automatic pistols are designed for a high grip. When the top slide comes back to reload after a round is fired, it needs to move against the abutment of a firmly held weapon frame. If not, the top slide may not go all the way back and may not be able to reload. Then I’d be fucked.

  My bottom three fingers were like a vice. My thumb was wrapped round the other side of the pistol grip. Only my trigger finger was free. It was the only thing that was allowed to move. Fuck the gentle tremor that I knew would be there as I aimed. This was a lump of metal that had to be controlled if it was to do its job. If I gripped the weapon and aimed correctly, the tremor would be where I wanted to hit.

  I brought the weapon up towards the target, my support hand wrapped around the dominant hand. My shoulder was forward so my nose was closer to the target than my toes. My right arm pushed the weapon towards the target as my left exerted rearward pressure so the platform was rigid.

  I lifted the weapon to the centre mass of the raging Russian. Both eyes fixed on the target; dead centre of mass. The weapon’s metal foresight came into my vision and became my primary focus. The target and the rear sight were now just blurs. I made sure the split at the back of the rear sight was level with the foresight. Then everything blurred as I focused on the foresight with both eyes.

  As I squeezed, I felt the trigger safety with the first crease in my finger, the small lever that released the trigger action.

  The foresight rested on the centre of mass and I finished my squeeze. The trigger went back. The round kicked off.

  I didn’t check to see where my round had hit. I’d find out soon enough when I retrieved the target. I just carried on firing, bringing the weapon down, then slowly up again into the same point of aim.

  The only negative about coming down to Gunslingers was that it gave me itchy feet. Not to get out of Moscow, or away from Anna – far from it. But there was only so much reading, art and opera you could take in one burst. If I wanted to get out there again, it wasn’t because I needed the money. There was still plenty of that left. If Anna had taught me one thing, it was that money isn’t everything. It certainly wasn’t her motivation. It was easy for me to say that money wasn
’t mine now that I had plenty of it, but I was starting to understand why Anna did what she did. Besides, going away for a bit of work the next time Anna was on a trip would make me want to come back to her and Moscow even more.

  I squeezed off round after round, no double taps, just slow-time singles, making sure my skills and my eye were still in. I was in no rush. I’d bang out a couple of mags, clean my weapon, and take a walk home to get stuck into a bit of Punishment.

  4

  09.45 hrs

  THE COFFEE SHOP was further down the corridor, in an area that looked as if it had once been a Cold War nuclear bunker. The new owners had given it a complete makeover. It was warm and welcoming, and did a good trade in coffee and a roaring one in vodka and Baltika beer. Nobody saw a problem with customers having a few looseners before they picked up a weapon.

  There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk – and on from dusk till dawn.

  I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.

  There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.

  At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well-connected, and those who wanted to be – mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.

  I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.

  The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.

  I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to avert a full meltdown. The number of confirmed dead and missing after the tsunami now stood at nearly thirteen thousand. Some 450,000 people had been staying in temporary shelters amid sub-zero night-time temperatures.

  The German comedy show next door was much better viewing. The two lads were about to enjoy some AK action down one of the longer ranges. It wasn’t heated, and their breath condensed around them in clouds. So did the cordite fumes kicking from their muzzles.

  The AKs jerked into their shoulders and pushed them backwards. Mong was behind one of them as he fired, pushing the guy forward to try and keep the barrel pointing down the range. Rounds cracked and ricocheted off the concrete. These lads were giving it twenty-round bursts, when they’d have been told to limit them to five. At five euros a round, I doubted Mong cared that much.

  He wasn’t really Mong, of course. He just looked like him. Or maybe he didn’t, and it was the endless news footage that made me think back to our time in Aceh. Whatever it was, every time I saw him, I wondered if he had tattoos on his arse.

  5

  MONG WAS GETTING a bit more pissed off. These two were tearing the arse out of it. They started to Rambo it up, firing from the hip, which made the AKs swing to the right with each burst. It was a total gang-fuck. The real Mong would have banged their heads together.

  It always made me sad to think of him. Or maybe I just felt guilty. I’d kept my word after the job. I’d looked after Tracy. Jan had sucked cash out of her like a vacuum cleaner, and Tracy had paid for her mother to have private medical treatment for her cancer and home care afterwards, so I gave her money when I could.

  If I was in Hereford I always went to check that things were all right. They weren’t, of course. She was devastated: she’d gone into a deep depression and it was taking her a long time to climb out. The cash I gave helped her pay the bills, but it wasn’t really what she needed. I never stopped telling her to get out of Hereford, to make a new start, but she didn’t want to leave her mum and Jan to fend for themselves.

  I got the Glock out and started cleaning the barrel with a small brush. I smiled as I thought about all the times I used to take the piss out of Mong for being soft in the head and sending money to his supermarket woman.

  When I’d got out of Russia with a few million dollars of a corrupt company’s money in 2009 and bought the London flat, Tracy was the first person I wrote to. I told her I’d settle the mortgage so at least she had security. If she wanted to sell the house, she could do what the fuck she wanted with the proceeds.

  She wrote back. She was really happy to have an address for me at last, and told me thanks, but no thanks. Her mum had died six months earlier and she’d finally taken my advice and got a job as a nanny in the South of France. She’d met a man. A Ukrainian guy called Frank. It didn’t strike me as the commonest name for a Ukrainian, but that was beside the point. Tracy was in love. She’d sold the house and moved to be with him.

  There was no return address, just thanks for all I had done. She told me life was wonderful, and how much she wished she’d taken my advice earlier.

  I felt happy for her, but the last paragraph choked me up. She thanked me for all I’d done for Mong. I’d been a true friend to him, she said. I’d always watched his back. And she would always be my friend, too. Mong would have wanted it that way.

  I was cleaning the barrel a bit too vigorously. I felt the same way I had the first time I’d read the letter. That she wouldn’t have had to go through all this shit if Mong was still alive. And he would have been, if I’d stood firm about him not going to help BB.

  6

  TWO BRITS I’D seen there a couple of times before came into the coffee shop and ordered espressos. They reminded me of the comedians Mitchell and Webb. Their accents were almost posh, the sort estate agents might develop after a few years’ running around in designer Minis selling overpriced properties to Sloanes or the Notting Hill mob.

  Their hair was well cut but over-gelled, and they were cleanshaven. They wore Armani jeans and shirts, with rugby-ball cufflinks. You saw a lot of guys like them around town, with money to burn and plenty of drop-dead beautiful Svetlanas and Nadias happy to help them – for a suitable fee. These were sex-pats. They’d be down here later tonight, no doubt, watching the women who danced in cages, and buying shots from the ones wearing bikinis and vodka bottles slung in hip-holsters.

  The ex-pat women didn’t get left out. There were plenty of Russian men looking to provide the same service. This was an equal-opportunities town.

  Companies that sent staff to dangerous places showered them with incentives. Forget bankers’ bonuses. On top of their monster salaries, these guys got free rent, foreign service premiums, and cost-of-living allowances. No wonder money lost its meaning for them. After a thousand-dollar dinner at the Café Pushkin, they went to clubs like Gunslingers and ordered vodka tonics at thirty dollars a time. Then they’d select their sofas and wait for the girls to come say hi. Behind each was a private room. The menu
on the table – in Russian, Japanese and English – helped you budget for what happened in there: Intercourse 30 minutes: $500.

  Then they all turned up at their banks and law firms the next morning after about half an hour’s sleep. By lunchtime they’d be having the first one of the day in the company bar or snorting a line of coke on their desk to steady their nerves.

  Anna had a word for their disease: anomie. ‘It means a breakdown of social norms or values, Nicholas. Distance from home puts personal values out of mind.’

  It was just the kind of thing her favourite Russian authors banged on about. My new best mate Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly went for it in Crime and Punishment. The main character was trying to justify murder by saying it was not people he was killing but a principle.

  Good luck to them. Why not? It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life and let those jokers get on with theirs.

  Mitchell, the well-fed one with the side parting, turned to me. ‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’

  I looked up from reassembling the weapon. ‘Yep.’

  ‘We are too.’

  He pointed at the Glock. ‘We like them. That your own?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ve seen you shoot a couple of times. We’re thinking of joining, buying some Glocks, having some fun.’

  Webb, taller, with dirty-blond hair, was concentrating on the TV. RT ran the intro to the ten o’clock news.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

  ‘What do you do with the gun? Do you have it locked up at home, or is it better to leave them here? Is it a drama carrying a pistol across town?’

  The RT announcer was a very bland-looking guy with thinning hair and rimless glasses. The headlines kicked off with Libya. Anna would be on soon. Gaddafi had launched his first bombing raids on Benghazi. The West had called for a no-fly zone and Russia was sitting back and laughing at it all.