Live Fire

by Stephen Leather

  ‘We’ll be long gone by the time anyone gets near the place.’ He blew another tight plume of smoke at the fan. ‘We’ll be driving over farmland in four-by-fours. The armed cops will be in ARVs, which look great and go fast but they’re bugger-all use over ditches.’

  ‘And what about helicopters? What about the eye in the sky?’

  Mickey grinned. ‘The nearest police helicopter is a ten-minute flight away and that’s assuming it’s in the air, which it almost certainly won’t be. There’ve been cutbacks and they’re refusing to pay the pilots overtime so by the end of the month they’re pretty much grounded unless it’s a missing kid or something.’

  ‘The Professor told you that?’

  ‘He’s thorough,’ said Mickey. ‘He covers all the bases.’

  ‘And what about inside the building? What sort of manpower will we be facing?’

  ‘We’ll go in at dawn and there’ll be no one in the money-handling area,’ said Mickey. ‘Any personnel on site will be in the admin block. It’ll take them two minutes at least to get through to where we are, and once they see our firepower they’ll sit tight and wait for the cavalry.’ He winked at Shepherd. ‘You worry too much, mate,’ he said. ‘All this has been planned down to the last detail. All you’ve got to do is handle the firepower. It’ll be like taking candy from a baby.’

  ‘Not sure you’d want to point an RPG at a baby, but I get your drift,’ said Shepherd. ‘So is that the plan? Get an RPG from your army mates here and blow our way into the depot?’

  ‘Not Cambodia,’ said Mickey. ‘We could get one here, no trouble, but then we’d have to get it from Cambodia to the UK and that would be a problem and a half. No, we’re going to pick one up in Europe.’

  ‘Pop into Arms R Us you mean? Mickey, you can’t just drop into a store and buy an RPG.’

  ‘If you know the right people you can. And our Professor knows the right people.’ Mark and Yates walked in, followed by Black and Wilson, and came over to them. ‘Fancy the Red Rose?’

  Yates grinned. ‘Didn’t Mark hit someone there last time?’

  ‘He hits someone wherever we go,’ said Wilson.

  ‘I’m sorted,’ said Black. ‘I might catch up with you guys later.’ He headed out of the hotel. ‘Where’s he going?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘He’s got a boyfriend who works for one of the NGOs here,’ said Mickey. He stood up. ‘Come on, we’ll show you the delights of the Red Rose.’

  They went out to Reception. The two Landcruisers were parked in front of the hotel. Wilbur was sitting in the front passenger seat of one vehicle and climbed out to shake hands with Mickey. ‘Wilbur takes care of us on our evenings out,’ Mickey explained to Shepherd. ‘Phnom Penh’s not the same as Bangkok – it can get a bit dicey after dark. It helps to have a few guys with guns around.’ There was a large revolver in a leather holster high on Wilbur’s hip.

  Mickey and Shepherd got into the Landcruiser with Wilbur and the rest of the men climbed into the second vehicle. They drove along the Mekong river, past dozens of outdoor cafés and bars, then turned away from it, the four-wheel drives lurching over potholes and cracks in the road. There were few street-lights and most weren’t working.

  The Red Rose bar was down a small road filled with parked motorcycles. A group of men sharing bottles of brandy watched them walk in. One muttered something and Wilbur turned to give them a hard look before he followed Mickey inside.

  Sergei was sitting at the bar, a bottle of Black Label whisky in front of him. When he saw Shepherd, he held up his bottle and beckoned him over. A dozen Cambodian girls, all wearing pink evening gowns with sequins at the neck, rushed over and swarmed around the new arrivals, grabbing for their hands and trying to pull them to the booths that ran around the bar. Shepherd held his up, dropped the right to make sure his wallet stayed in his pocket.

  ‘You’ll love it here, Ricky,’ said Yates. ‘Costs you a lot less than it does in Pattaya, and the girls are up for anything. And there’s none of that “My mother’s in hospital” or “The water buffalo’s sick, please help me” crap.’ He pointed at a stairway at the far end of the bar. ‘And you can take the birds upstairs to give them a seeing-to.’ He picked up a girl, who laughed and wrapped her legs around his waist, then walked over to one of the booths with her to order a drink from a waitress. Wilson followed him with two girls in tow.

  Two more clutched Mark and led him to the bar. ‘Sisters!’ he shouted to Shepherd. ‘I’ve got sisters here!’

  Shepherd sat on the stool next to the Russian and nodded when Sergei offered him a shot of his whisky. ‘Soda water and ice,’ he told one of the two barmen.

  ‘You ruin a good whisky with water?’ said the Russian.

  ‘I won’t tell you how to drink vodka if you don’t lecture me about whisky,’ said Shepherd. ‘Where are your friends?’

  ‘Upstairs with hookers.’

  ‘Oi, Ricky!’ Wilson was going up with three girls. ‘See you up there, yeah?’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Shepherd, though he had no such intention.

  Sergei shook his head sadly. ‘The women here, they are so small,’ he said, ‘and ugly.’

  The Russian had a point: most of them were barely five feet tall and had bad skin and lank hair. ‘Why do you Englishmen like such ugly women?’ asked Sergei.

  ‘Don’t go tarring us all with the same brush,’ said Shepherd.

  Sergei frowned. ‘What do you mean – what brush?’

  ‘I mean we’re not all the same.’

  ‘What does that have to do with brushes?’

  ‘It’s a nautical expression, from the days when English ships ruled the oceans. They were made waterproof with tar but I’m not sure why it wasn’t a good idea to use the same brush. The point I was making is that not everyone is here for the girls. I came over with Mickey to shoot a few guns. And your mates are upstairs, too, remember? So they’re not fussy either.’

  Mickey had joined Mark in his booth and they were sitting with their arms around giggling bargirls.

  ‘Now, Russian girls, they are the best in the world,’ said Sergei. ‘They are fit and they are fiery. They have spirit. These Asian girls are like dolls. They tell you what you want to hear, they do what you want to do. A Russian girl is like a wild horse. You can ride them but you can never tame them.’

  ‘Nice analogy,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Analogy?’

  ‘You describe them perfectly,’ said Shepherd. He wasn’t exactly sure of the dictionary definition of analogy. ‘But I have to say, most of the Russian women I’ve seen aren’t especially pretty. And no offence, but a lot seem overweight.’

  Sergei bellowed with laughter and slapped Shepherd on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth. ‘No offence, my friend.’ He gripped Shepherd’s neck with his huge hand and squeezed. ‘I like that. You say, “no offence,” but then you say something very offensive. But I am not offended. I am talking about Russian girls, not Russian women. That is one of the sad facts of life, that many of the fit wild horses grow up to be fat pigs. That is why I shall never marry, just trade horses.’ Sergei picked up his glass and clinked it against Shepherd’s. ‘To fit women,’ he said.

  ‘To fit women,’ said Shepherd.

  They both drank, then Sergei banged his glass down on the bar and refilled it with neat whisky. ‘What about you, Ricky? Did you ever marry?’

  ‘I’m like you, a horse-trader,’ he said. Sergei slapped him on the back again. Shepherd hated having to deny that he had once been married. Every time he did so, it was as if he was betraying Sue and Liam. But his family had no place in his undercover work. He was Ricky Knight, and Ricky Knight wasn’t a family man.

  ‘You should come visit my bar in Pattaya,’ said Sergei. ‘We have Russian girls dancing. Fit Russian girls. And you can screw them for the same price as the Thai hookers. Think you can handle a Russian ride, my friend?’

  ‘I’ll give it a go,’ said Shepherd. He sipped his beer. ‘So, you said you
’d tell me what you do in Pattaya. Other than running a go-go bar.’

  ‘Because you want to move in on my businesses? You want to steal the bread from my mouth?’

  ‘As I told you before, I’m just interested,’ Shepherd assured him. ‘It doesn’t look like an easy place to make money – the Thais seem to have it all sewn up in their favour. Foreigners can’t own land, they have to have Thai partners in any company they set up, and everyone I’ve spoken to says that if a foreigner takes a Thai to court the court will always rule in favour of the Thai.’

  ‘The businesses I’m in, we don’t go to court.’ He made a gun with his hand and pointed it at Shepherd’s temple. ‘We have other ways of resolving disputes.’ He drank another shot of neat whisky. It was his fifth since Shepherd had entered the bar, and he’d already worked his way through half the bottle. Sergei was a big man, though, and clearly used to drinking, and Shepherd could see that he was a long way from being intoxicated. Shepherd could handle his drink but he knew he’d be no match for the Russian and was trying to pace himself. ‘So what do you do?’ asked Sergei. ‘Where does your money come from?’

  ‘This and that,’ said Shepherd.

  The Russian chuckled. ‘This and that? I like that. This and that. That means you do not want to tell me.’

  Shepherd put his head close to the Russian’s. ‘Can you keep a secret, Sergei?’

  The Russian nodded seriously. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Shepherd. He slapped the Russian on the back.

  For a few seconds the Russian didn’t get the joke and stared at Shepherd with deep furrows in his brow. Then realisation dawned and he spluttered whisky across the bar and burst into laughter. ‘You are a very funny man, Ricky,’ he said.

  ‘A lot of people say that,’ said Shepherd. ‘Seriously, you want to know what I do?’

  The Russian nodded.

  ‘I sell cars,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘You don’t look like a car salesman,’ said Sergei.

  ‘That’s what I do,’ said Shepherd. ‘I was a soldier and I got fed up with the crap money and the crap officers so I started selling cars and I’m good at it.’

  Sergei gestured at the Moore brothers, who were now deep-kissing the girls they were with. ‘Your friends, too?’

  ‘They’re property developers.’

  ‘They don’t look like property developers and you don’t look like a car salesman.’

  ‘What do we look like?’

  The Russian chuckled. ‘You look like trouble.’

  ‘That’s my middle name,’ said Shepherd.

  Mickey and Mark stood up and swayed unsteadily. Mickey waved at Shepherd, bleary-eyed, and pointed upstairs. ‘Going for a shag!’ he shouted.

  ‘Have one for me,’ Shepherd called back. The brothers walked unsteadily towards the stairs, a bar girl on either arm. A waitress hurried to their table and cleared away the empty glasses.

  ‘What is shag?’ asked Sergei.

  ‘Sex,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘You do not want a girl, Ricky?’ asked Sergei.

  ‘I’ll wait for the Russian ride you promised me,’ said Shepherd. ‘Is that your business, bringing in Russian girls?’

  Sergei’s eyes narrowed, but then he smiled. ‘It’s part of what we do.’

  ‘You bring girls into Thailand?’

  ‘We do everything,’ he said. ‘We recruit them in Russia and the Ukraine, we get them passports and pay for their tickets. Then we put them to work.’

  ‘And the police don’t stop you?’

  The Russian rubbed his thumb and fingers together. ‘We take care of the police and they take care of us.’

  ‘And you can make decent money? I’d have thought there’d be too much competition from the Thais.’

  Sergei grinned. ‘Men don’t want to eat burgers every day, sometimes they want a steak. The Thai women, they’re all the same. Black hair, brown eyes, brown skin. Our women offer variety. And the Thai men can’t get enough of them. Our girls work three, four times a day at two thousand baht a time. That means a girl can earn around a hundred and fifty thousand baht a month, which she splits with me fifty-fifty. That’s more than two thousand dollars a month from each girl, and I’ve got more than twenty here. Another ten in Phuket.’ The grin widened. ‘Yes, it’s good money, my friend.’

  Shepherd raised his eyebrows. If the Russian was telling the truth, he was bringing in three-quarters of a million dollars a year from prostitution alone.

  ‘But we make more money from them than just by selling their bodies,’ Sergei continued. ‘We use them to carry drugs too. We load their suitcases with heroin when they fly home and we pay off Customs in Russia.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Sergei. ‘The money we make from the girls and the drugs we put into property. Condominiums, villas, shopping malls. Then we rent them out. Thailand is a gold mine, Ricky, if you know what to do. We sell arms. Plenty of countries out here want to buy weapons, and the Soviet bloc is full of them. Drugs, arms, girls, we have our fingers in many cakes.’

  ‘Pies,’ said Shepherd. ‘You have fingers in pies, not cakes.’

  ‘Pies, cakes, it’s all the same,’ said Sergei. ‘Better than being a grunt,’ he said. ‘And better than selling cars, too.’

  Marcel Calvert pointed at the metal case with the claw he used instead of a right hand. ‘It is what you want, no?’ he said.

  Kundi looked up from the missile assembly. ‘It’s fine,’ he said to Bradshaw.

  ‘Alex said sixty thousand euros,’ said Bradshaw.

  ‘It’s a fair price,’ said Calvert. He tapped the case with his claw. He was a good-looking man with a shock of black hair that he kept flicking away from his eyes. He was wearing a long-sleeved white cotton shirt with brown cargo trousers, and had a Bluetooth unit in his left ear.

  ‘You only have the one?’ asked Bradshaw.

  ‘You need more?’

  ‘I would prefer two. Or three.’

  Calvert rubbed his chin with his claw. ‘I sold two last month,’ he said. ‘They’re hard to get. The Americans are taking as many as they can off the market and there are always buyers.’ He gestured at the metal case. ‘You’re lucky I have that one.’

  The wooden crate from Sarajevo, containing the Grail missile Bradshaw had brought from the Dutchman, was next to the Stinger. Kleintank had arranged it to be flown to Nice on a private plane while Bradshaw, Talwar and Kundi had travelled by train.

  ‘Did you need anything else?’ asked Calvert, turning towards the stacks of crates and boxes in the metal shelving that ran the full length of the warehouse. ‘I have assault rifles, small arms, grenades …’

  Bradshaw patted the Stinger. ‘This is all I need,’ he said.

  He went outside to the Citroën van with Kundi and took a bulky envelope from Talwar. He left Kundi outside and went back to Calvert with the money. Calvert held the envelope in his claw and used his hand to take out the notes. He fed them into an electric banknote counter and pressed a button. It whirred and he looked at the display. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  Bradshaw’s eyes were on Calvert’s claw. ‘That happened in the Legion?’ he asked.

  ‘Algeria,’ said Calvert. ‘Booby-trapped door.’ He shrugged. ‘Shit happens. Alex said you were a soldier, too.’

  ‘Iraq,’ said Bradshaw.

  ‘Another messy war,’ said Calvert. ‘It’s the Muslims, they don’t fight like men. If an enemy stands up and shoots at you, you can shoot back. But the Muslims fight like cowards. They plant bombs and use children and women as shields.’

  Bradshaw said nothing.

  ‘What can you do against an enemy who thinks killing yourself in the name of Allah means an eternity in Heaven being attended to by seventy-two black-eyed virgins?’ Calvert continued. ‘How stupid is that? But the pigs are too stupid to see how ridiculous their religion is so they continue to queue up to die. And when they do fight, they fight like cowards. You know
what they did? They attached a hand grenade to the front door of a house, and they had two snipers upstairs. They fired at our convoy, killing two of our men, then escaped down a drainpipe. I was first through the door. That’s how they fight, with snipers and booby traps. The West can never win against an enemy that fights like that.’

  ‘You sell grenades,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Isn’t there something ironic in that?’

  ‘It’s business.’

  ‘Would you sell to the Algerians?’

  Calvert laughed drily. ‘A good question,’ he said. ‘It’s never arisen, but I think not.’ He turned back to the Stinger. ‘What about delivery? For another five thousand euros I can deliver them anywhere in Europe. Ten thousand if you want them in Britain.’

  ‘No need,’ said Bradshaw. ‘We have our own transport.’

  Mickey Moore slammed on the brakes of the Range Rover and skidded to a halt just inches from the gates to Shepherd’s villa.

  ‘You break them, you pay for them,’ warned Shepherd.

  ‘What do you care? It’s a rental.’ Mickey laughed. ‘So, when are you going to get a place of your own?’

  ‘I figured the job we’ve got coming up will pay for it, so I’m going to leave my money offshore. I assume you’ve no problem getting it here, right?’

  ‘A guy in London does it for us. He’s an Indian, but he’s okay. No matter what the currency, he can wash it and get it into the banking system.’

  ‘That’s what I’ll do, then,’ said Shepherd. ‘Any idea what my share’s going to be?’

  ‘It’ll be big,’ said Moore.

  ‘Ballpark?’

  ‘More than enough to buy yourself any place in Pattaya. And have change. But we won’t know for sure until the day.’

  ‘But it’s money we’re after, right? It’s not another Brink’s-Mat?’ Robbers who had targeted Heathrow airport in 1983 had got away with ten tons of gold worth more than twenty-six million pounds but most of them had been caught and sent down. ‘Gold leaves a trail, Mickey. Diamonds too. I’m happier if it’s cash in hand.’