For Valour

by Andy McNab

  The footsteps slowed behind me, then stopped. I gave the boys my most cheerful grin. ‘Lads, how would you like to earn yourselves fifty quid?’

  There was a glimmer of interest, but their expressions told me that these were hard men here, and I shouldn’t forget it. The one with the most zits slid off the Subaru’s bonnet and came over to invade my personal space.

  ‘How would you like to eat shit?’

  He was close enough for whatever he’d eaten for dinner to make my eyes water.

  I kept the grin in place. ‘I drank shit once. But that was for a bet.’

  Even the meanest and ugliest of them was immediately onside.

  ‘Fuck off! You’re kidding, right?’

  I shook my head and dug five ten-quid notes out of my jeans. ‘I don’t do kidding.’

  ‘What’s the catch, wanker?’

  ‘No catch. See that guy in the leather jacket behind me?’ I flicked a thumb back over my shoulder. ‘He’s really getting on my tits. All I need is for you lot to go and fuck him up a bit.’

  ‘Easy.’ Zitface took the money, counted it, and put it in his parka. ‘But it’ll cost you a ton.’

  I sucked my upper lip to demonstrate that I was no pushover, then fished out another thirty. ‘Here. That makes a tenner each.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Why don’t we beat the shit out of you instead, and help ourselves to the rest of your money?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why.’ I took his hand, pressed the other three notes into the palm and closed it for him, firmly and not very gently. Then I took half a pace towards him, so our noses were almost touching, and patted the chunk of metal in the side of my bomber. I wasn’t enjoying the smell of his breath, but I wanted him and his mates to get the message. ‘Because that’s a gun in my pocket. I’m not just pleased to see you.’

  To give the kid credit, he stood his ground. ‘Did you really drink shit?’

  ‘Sure. A turd in a pint glass. And for a whole lot less than you’re getting on this job.’

  He gave this some thought. I could almost hear the cogs engage.

  He took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke leak from his mouth and nose. ‘What’s the secret?’

  ‘The secret?’

  He nodded, keen to know.

  ‘You’ve got to chug, not chew.’

  He winced, and screwed up his face almost as much as I must have done when I was in the process of winning the bet. Then he took a couple of steps back, gathered his crew around him, and gave them a note each as he mumbled his battle plan.

  They straightened up and brushed me aside as they swaggered past, on their way to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. It was great to watch. When they were five paces away from Leatherman Two, they stopped, flicked back their parkas and loosened their imaginary Colt .45s in their imaginary holsters.

  The astonished look on his face was worth every penny. Which was just as well, because fifteen seconds later they pissed off in all directions without laying a finger on him.

  Fair one.

  At their age, I’d have done exactly the same.

  11

  At least I’d bought myself a little bit of distance and some time to catch my breath. As my new best mates scattered across the estate, I turned and bolted for the more upmarket labyrinth of designer workspaces and apartment buildings around St Saviour’s Wharf.

  When I’d got halfway down Mill Street the footsteps echoed behind me once more. This time I did look round. I couldn’t see him, which made me reasonably sure he couldn’t see me. I clambered over a gate to my left and darted down a passage between two converted warehouses that led to the Devil’s Neckinger.

  The Neckinger was one of London’s many underground rivers, and marked the border between Bermondsey and Southwark. It flowed from somewhere near the Imperial War Museum, beneath Elephant and Castle, and joined the Thames at St Saviour’s Dock.

  From the moment Fagin had told me about it, I’d always loved the name. It came from the Devil’s Neckerchief, which is what they called the executioner’s noose back in the days when they hanged convicted pirates from the gibbet at the inlet’s mouth and left their corpses on display downstream.

  The gibbet no longer took pride of place there, but the yuppies still had the use of a Victorian derrick every fifty metres or so along the shored-up bank of the tributary, in case they needed to hoist their very expensive furniture through the gable windows. The hooks and chains were silhouetted against the night sky to my right, above a walkway I now realized I couldn’t reach via dry land.

  When the gate at the entrance to my passageway started to rattle, I knew there was no going back. It was low tide right now. I’d have to take my chances in the mud.

  I grabbed a mooring rope and abseiled down the very slimy stonework between two of the oak pillars that lined the bank. As I went, I remembered Fagin saying that this place used to be Cholera Central, and not just because of the pirates’ bloated corpses. Untreated sewage, festering sheep, rotting fish, the eye-watering fluid from the tanning factories – it all used to flow down here. But fuck it: this wasn’t the first time I’d been up Shit Creek without a paddle.

  My plan had been to move as soundlessly as possible down the riverbed, keeping as close to the shadow of the oak pillars as possible, until I reached the first of the ladders that would take me up onto the walkway. As the silt gripped my Timberlands and crept up beyond my knees, I knew I had no choice but to stay exactly where I was. The distance between high and low tide was about five metres at this time of year. Maybe I’d be able to wait an hour or three and swim for it.

  I raised my hood for a bit of extra warmth and cover, and slowed my breathing.

  I heard the scrape of a boot somewhere above me, then a throat being cleared. A gob of phlegm the size of a jellyfish landed in the mud a metre away from me and glistened in the ambient light. I didn’t look up; just leaned in closer to the woodwork and hoped the next wouldn’t land on my head.

  12

  I watched the river creep up the inlet towards me. I didn’t have much choice. For the last hour Leatherman Two had been sitting on the edge of the dock, swinging his feet above me and smoking an endless chain of foul-smelling cigarettes. I was coated with mud and slime from mid-thigh down, and it was doing its best to infiltrate beneath my jeans and squeeze itself into my boots.

  The only good news was that the position of Leatherman Two’s knees seemed to be stopping him pinging me. Or maybe he knew exactly where I was and had decided to prolong the agony. Either way, I’d have to move as soon as the water reached me. I couldn’t stay there and let it freeze my bollocks off. I couldn’t reach his boots and pull him in without climbing the rope, and that was looped around the top of the pillar right next to him. But if I left my current hiding place I’d present him with a clear and very slow-moving target – and that always gave me a really bad feeling between the shoulder-blades.

  The water had reached bollock height when I heard an indignant shout followed by a muffled grunt. Seconds later a body flew over the parapet and disappeared head first into the creek about three metres away from me.

  The mooring line twitched alongside me, like a dancing snake. ‘Wake up, wanker. You can’t stay there all night.’

  I looked up. I couldn’t see the zits under the shadow of the hoodie, but I recognized the voice. Two or three more figures appeared alongside him as I gripped my end of the rope. They all seized their end, like they were finalists in a tug of war, until Zitface raised his hand and the thing went slack again.

  ‘Just one more thing, before we pull you out of that shit. It’s gonna cost you another fifty.’

  I nodded like a mad person. As Leatherman Two fought his way upright and finally broke the surface with a look of undiluted hatred on his face, fifty quid sounded like the deal of the century.

  13

  The Arnold Estate dudes heaved me out of St Saviour’s Dock, then cut the rope so Leatherman Two couldn’t join us in too much of a hurry. Th
e last I saw of him he was still flailing about in the water and yelling very unfriendly things in my direction. I hadn’t picked up much of the ragtag collection of Balkan languages during my trips to Bosnia, but I knew what kurvin sine meant. It was Serbian for ‘son of a whore’.

  Another fifty quid changed hands and I was enjoying a shower in Zitface’s mum’s flat. I managed to hose off the Timberlands, but even in a world heaving with dry cleaners, I decided it was easier to bin the jeans. As luck would have it, his stepdad had a spare pair pretty much my size. Zitface held them up for me to admire like I’d just dropped into a Giorgio Armani store for a browse. ‘Yours for a bargain price …’

  Maybe that was because the not completely genuine eagle logo had been riveted onto the arse pocket upside down.

  ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. Fifty quid?’

  ‘Sixty.’

  ‘Won’t your stepdad miss them?’

  His normally impassive face broke into a smile. ‘Who gives a shit? He fucked off six months ago.’

  I guessed he hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  I handed over another bunch of notes and we shook. At that point it struck me that I didn’t even know his name.

  ‘Before I give you every penny I’ve got, maybe we should introduce ourselves? I’m Nick.’

  ‘Dave.’ He hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t always Dave.’

  ‘Don’t tell me … When you arrived from the Planet Krypton, it used to be Clark Kent.’

  He frowned and shook his head. He didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

  ‘Nah. I never met my dad, but they say he came from the Yemen. He called me Osama. But my mum changed it about ten years ago. Fuck knows why. I was just a kid.’

  My dad hadn’t come from the Yemen, but we clearly had a lot in common. I told him a few stupid stories about me and Gaz and growing up on the Tabard while he rooted around in the fridge and conjured up a five-star full English, eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, the lot.

  I watched in admiration. ‘Mate, you should be on Master Chef …’

  He started to waffle a bit more freely as we ate. He told me a bit about his crew, and the day to day shit they got up to. As I wiped the fried bread around my nearly empty plate I felt a big stupid grin take over my face. Some things never changed.

  As I turned to go he asked me if I needed him to look after the weapon. I told him I was happy doing that myself, but he should keep an eye out for angry Serbs in leather jackets.

  He nodded. ‘Specially if they’ve been down the ink slinger.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘What’s that fucking thing all about?’

  ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’

  He whistled up the lads who’d hauled me out of the creek for one final mission – escorting me to the Butler’s Wharf car park. As they drifted away I realized I’d had more fun with Dave and his mates in the last few hours than I’d had pretty much since I’d binned the military. I was going to miss them.

  I should have chucked the Nokia I’d used to call Blackwood’s chambers and the Astra HQ in the river before taking off on my Bermondsey sightseeing trip. Instead I put it in a Jiffy-bag in a Hounslow all-night store, covered it with stamps and mailed it to an estate agent’s address in Newcastle that I’d plucked off a random website. Better late than never – and if it was being tracked, maybe it would be a waste of someone else’s time, not just mine.

  I stuffed my bomber jacket into the daysack with my Russian tank commander’s hat and pulled on the Gore-Tex. I left the Skoda in the long-term car park at Heathrow with Sam’s Browning and second mag tucked into the spare tyre, then tubed it to West Brompton and caught the train to East Croydon. After doing some of the kind of anti-surveillance shit that I’d done on Bankside the previous evening, I headed for Gatwick and took the first flight I could get to Vienna.

  If the Leathermen were going to make a habit of chasing me around, I needed to find out who the fuck they were, and who was pulling their strings.

  PART SEVEN

  1

  Rasskazovska, Moscow

  Wednesday, 1 February

  10.05 hrs

  I’d lost count of the number of movies I’d seen that featured a lone figure standing on the wrong side of a railing, gazing at the life he could no longer share, but I’d never thought I’d be in that man’s shoes.

  Now here I was in Anna’s gated enclave, watching her hold our son in the saddle of a little wooden dinosaur on a spring while the older kids ran around, leaping on and off the roundabouts and swings. It was six degrees below outside, but some genius had erected one of those inflatable plastic domes over the playground for the winter months and pumped it full of warm air.

  She seemed happier than I’d seen her in a while, and even more beautiful. And our boy was loving every minute of it. His chuckle was completely infectious, and bounced across the play area. I couldn’t wait to show him what fun you could have with a condom full of ketchup.

  The midnight Aeroflot connection to Domodedovo had been full of men in leather jackets, but none of them seemed particularly interested in me, or not enough to join me for my second breakfast of the day. I’d called in at Shokoladnitsa after we landed and got a ham and cheese pancake and a mug of their world-famous hot chocolate down my neck while I checked out the surrounding area. Then I’d mooched out to the yellow cab rank and, after a short negotiation involving both dollars and roubles, took one to Moscow’s eastern margins.

  2

  The truth is I wasn’t sure what kind of welcome I was going to get from Anna. I hadn’t called ahead, in case she was having a bad-hair day and wanted me to keep my distance.

  When she finally caught sight of me, she screwed up her face like I was someone she’d bumped into in another life, and she could no longer remember my name. But then she swept our little soldier off the dinosaur, both of them giggling like lunatics, and brought him over to the gate.

  She held him up to me. ‘Darling Nicholayevich, this is your papa. You have his eyes. Hopefully you won’t decide to follow his choice of career …’

  Her expression was still guarded. No surprises there: she’d thought she’d cleared me out of her life a week ago. But he wriggled with delight.

  I reached out and took him, as carefully as I possibly could.

  She finally gave me a smile. ‘He’s a little boy, Nicholas. He’s not made of glass!’

  As I drew him to me, he clutched my nose between his thumb and forefinger, gave it an experimental twist, then settled his head on my chest, under my chin. He smelt of warm milk and fruit purée and everything good. For about the first time in my life, I wished I’d bothered to shave.

  I held him close and shut my eyes. Which was a mistake. A big mistake. I suddenly pictured myself at the edge of the Grwyne Fawr Dam, my little boy in my arms. Heard the crack of a high-powered rifle. Watched helplessly as the 7.62mm round lifted off the top of his head, just above the eyeballs, like a soft-boiled egg …

  ‘Nicholas … What’s the matter?’ I felt Anna’s hand on my arm.

  I blinked, momentarily disoriented. ‘Nothing.’ I held our son more tightly. ‘All good.’

  Our place – Anna’s place – was a two-storey, three-bedroom villa with all the trimmings in a brand new community not far from the Borovskoe Highway. It had cost two million plus of the dollars I’d lifted from a Narcopulco-based drug baron, who’d threatened my family last year, and it had been money well spent.

  The developers had taken some stick from the tree-huggers for bulldozing this stretch of woodland, but they’d left enough silver birches to shelter each property from the next when the leaves were out, while not giving the inhabitants a sense of total isolation. Knight Frankski had really come up with the goods. It was just what she’d wanted: an even better place to bring up your kid than the Tabard Gardens Estate.

  I carried Nicholai inside and strapped him into his very shiny baby bouncer. I put it on the table where he could have a good look around while I reached for my day
sack.

  I peeled back my cuffs to show I had nothing hidden up my sleeves, then, as if by magic, I whipped out a couple of parcels I’d had gift-wrapped at Gatwick: a teddy bear in a Tower of London Beefeater uniform for him, and perfume for her.

  The girl at the duty free didn’t need me to tell her I was out of my depth. She’d guided me gently to the Chanel counter when I’d explained what I was looking for and plucked a bottle of Coco Mademoiselle from the display. Apparently it had top notes of Tunisian Curaçao and was just the thing for pretty girls on motorbikes.

  Anna gave me that look again – like I was someone she didn’t completely recognize – but this time it was immediately filled with warmth. ‘Nicholas … You’ve never done that before …’

  I shrugged. I might even have blushed. I didn’t think I’d ever done that before either.

  Whatever, they both seemed to work OK. Nicholai started chewing the teddy bear’s ear, and Anna gave me the biggest smile I’d seen from her for as long as I could remember.

  When she’d fixed us a couple of George Clooney specials from the coffee machine, she finally asked the question that had been on her mind since the moment I appeared. ‘So, Nicholas … Are you planning weekly visits?’

  I told her not to panic. ‘Only when I really need your help.’

  I gave her the watered-down version of my recent Serbian experience, and made a rather bad attempt at drawing Sniper One’s tattoo on her notepad. ‘I thought it was a birthmark at first, but close up, it’s quite intricate. It reminded me of those mortar scars in the pavement that the Sarajevo locals used to fill with resin during the siege.’

  ‘The Roses?’

  I nodded. ‘But maybe it’s just a coincidence.’