by Andy McNab
I heard some chat, then the strike of a match, and nicotine-laden smoke began to do battle with the smell of dog.
I wasn’t scared about what might lie ahead. I just felt depressed.
And hungry.
And, much to my surprise, pretty fucking lonely.
5
We came to a halt and the driver wound down his window. He rattled off a series of short, sharp instructions to someone in Paperclip, then I heard the creak of a barrier being raised and the car rolled forward once more.
We rumbled over the kilometre or so of hardcore towards the main and took the left. No surprises there. The Georgians weren’t any fonder of their old mates from the Russian Federation than the Americans were.
We moved smoothly along the metalled road, with only the occasional shake and rattle as we encountered a good old-fashioned pothole.
I tried to time this stretch by counting off the seconds, and got to twenty minutes without a pause.
The two in the front were still enjoying themselves. They switched the radio on and listened to some Georgian songs that seemed to involve a lot of wailing. Maybe it was the same station that played in embassy security huts?
At no stage did they acknowledge I was there. Maybe they’d forgotten me. That would have been nice.
There’d been no steep climbs up or down, so we were still following the valley. Why weren’t we going over the high ground, stopping at the VCP then heading back to the city? And if we weren’t, was that a good or a bad thing? I had a nasty feeling I knew the answer.
Ten minutes more and this definitely wasn’t normal police stuff. We still hadn’t got anywhere near the high ground; if we’d been going back to the city we would have done so by now.
I shuffled around, trying to get more blanket over me. My goosebumps were on the retreat and I wanted to make the most of it while I could.
Something about being warm and cocooned set me thinking about Silky again. I was confused. I knew I’d done the right thing coming here with Charlie, but at the same time, all I wanted now was to be back with her in Australia. Not just as an alternative to lying in the back of a car on my way to what was probably going to be the beasting of a lifetime, but simply because I wanted to be with her. She smelled a whole lot better than these blankets, for starters.
I thought about her lying next to me on the beach, and sitting beside me in the passenger seat of the VW. My mind rambled. I couldn’t think of a single moment with her that hadn’t been good. I thought about the time she said, ‘We’re a good fit, no?’ She was right, we were. I missed her.
So what were we going to do when I got back? There was still the trip to the red centre; to what I called Ayers Rock and Silky and everybody else seemed to think was now Uluru.
Before meeting Silky, I’d have cut away from any fearful thoughts in a situation like this — even cut away from good stuff at the same time. I probably would just have lain here. But fuck it, I liked it this way. There was still sailing in the Whitsundays, and Kakadu National Park, and New Zealand. All the places we’d spoken about when we were travelling together. I wanted to go to them all, and I wanted to go to them with her.
The gearbox made a muffled complaint and the car slowed. We turned onto much rougher ground. I curled up tight.
The engine cut out.
Both front doors opened and there was the crunch of shoes on stones.
The tailgate was lifted and the blanket pulled away. The cold air hit me like a slap in the bollocks.
6
I was dragged past another vehicle, across a stretch of wet grass strewn with rocks and scree.
The night wind chilled me to the bone; my skin was like a freshly plucked chicken’s.
We stopped and I heard the sound of a heavy kick on wood. A door swung open and I was pulled through it into what felt like a sauna. The air was heavy with the odour of damp and bottled gas.
I stumbled forward a few paces then felt pressure on my shoulders. My arse connected with a plastic chair. Above me, I could hear the gentle hiss of burning gas. I leaned forward, clenching my teeth, waiting for them to give me the good news. I expected to get yanked upright any second, but they let me stay as I was.
Then, even more surprisingly, they pulled off the sack.
I kept my head down but my eyes went into overdrive. I was in a small room with rough stone walls and a compacted earth floor. In front of me was a blue plastic collapsible picnic table with metal legs, which looked as though it had come straight out of an Argos catalogue. Two hurricane lamps sat at either end of it, their shadows dancing across the walls. My passport and Charlie’s lay in between them.
The driver and his mate were behind me, breathing heavily after the exertion of frog-marching me from the car.
A pair of US desert boots appeared on the other side of the table. The chinos above them looked as though they’d been inflated by a high-pressure hose. A thin-barrelled.22 semi-automatic was pointing straight at my forehead, held rock-steady in a latex-gloved hand.
When I saw who it belonged to, the Georgian secret police suddenly seemed like the soft option.
My luck had finally run out.
Towering over me was at least 250 pounds of fat, topped off by an all-too-familiar whitewall haircut.
I didn’t like the way he was holding the weapon, but it didn’t look nearly as scary as he did.
Jim D. ‘Call Me Buster’ Bastendorf, the man we’d rechristened Bastard at Waco, had hardly changed a bit in the twelve years since I’d last seen him.
7
I looked down again, but kept my eyes on the weapon.
All of a sudden, my hands felt strangely comfortable round my head. All the same, I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes. I had fucked up and had to accept whatever followed.
If he wanted me to beg, though, he had another thought coming. Fuck him. He was going to do what he was going to do, whatever I did, so what was the point?
I heard him move around the table. His nostrils whistled as he bent closer. Then I felt him jam the muzzle hard into my right hand.
I flinched as the working parts clicked. I couldn’t help it.
I opened my eyes. Bastard was still above me. He liked how I’d reacted; it made him smile.
‘Now, son, who the fuck are you?’
‘You’ve got my passport. Give it a read.’
He looked down at me. I knew from his expression that he still hadn’t made the connection between me, Anthony the Brit fag scientist, and a compound full of dead Davidians, and I wasn’t going to help him out. I was in enough trouble already.
‘You’re no American. Where you from?’ His brow furrowed as he studied my face and let his brain flick back a few pages. ‘I know you from somewhere, don’t I?’
‘Listen, we have you on film, handing over equipment at the Marriott in Istanbul and—’
The first punch was to my right temple and caught me square on. I managed to stay on the chair, but it was a while before my head stopped ringing and splinters of light stopped dancing in front of my eyes.
‘Shut the fuck up! You’re in deep shit, boy! The police want your ass, big-time. You’re responsible for the murder of their answer to that Bob fucking Geldof guy, and they don’t see the funny side of that. And you know what? I’ll give those fucks just exactly what they want if you don’t offer me a little co-operation.’
He hit me twice more. My hands took some of the pain but the second blow took me down onto the hard earth floor and came fucking close to dislocating my shoulder.
‘That’s what I want, co-operation!’
I tensed, eyes closed, knees up to my chest, ready for more.
I didn’t look up.
Bastard was a difficult man to ignore, but in my opinion it was well worth the effort. The heat on my back was good and I made the most of it while I waited for the starbursts in my head to burn out.
The two boys leaned down either side of me and heaved me back up onto the chair. I felt the cold s
teel of a blade against the right side of my chin. I flinched again, but was patted gently on top of my head.
‘Relax, Nick. The guys are just having a little fun.’ He’d put his Mr Nice Guy hat on, and although it was never going to fit, at least it made a change. ‘They’re just gonna cut the tape off you. Relax, son. We don’t wanna risk slicing out those baby blues now, do we?’
They dug a pair of scissors into the gaffer tape and started to cut and pull. As the tape was yanked away, it took clumps of my hair and eyebrows with it. There was a positive side to it, though; I felt the blood rushing back into my arms.
‘Sit up, Nick. Enjoy the party.’
I tipped my head a little and looked behind me. A patio heater fuelled by a king-size propane gas bottle was doing its bit for global warming, and the two boys were the shiny-headed bouncers I’d seen in the Pajero outside the Marriott. Both were still in black, and the one on the right was giving his gigs a polish.
‘How you doing, Nick, you OK?’ Bastard drew up another plastic chair on his side of the table, all sweetness and light. The weapon had gone but the gloves remained.
An aluminium thermos now sat between the lamps. The passports had gone.
‘Go on, son. Smell the coffee. It’s good and strong.’
I flexed my fingers, leaned forward, took the flask, and started to unscrew the lid. At times like this you’ve got to take whatever’s on offer. You’ve no idea when it’s going to come your way again. Besides, I’d been gagging for a brew for hours.
The two boys behind me shuffled from one foot to the other. I couldn’t decide whether they were just enjoying the heat, or readying themselves for the next bout in the programme. Whatever, it was clear they were still in the red corner, and I was still in the blue.
The venue for tonight’s entertainment was, as far as I could tell, an old farmhouse with exposed roof beams and tiles. The holes in the wall, where I guessed there had once been windows, were blocked with grey nylon turnip sacks like the one I’d been wearing.
I poured hot black coffee into two plastic cups and pushed one across the table with a smile. It smelled really good. ‘Where’s Charlie?’
He took a sip. He knew what I was doing. If I got drugged, he did too.
The coffee stung the cuts on my tongue, but so what? It tasted as good as it smelled, and warmed me all the way down to my stomach.
‘Any chance of my clothes?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure.’ He leaned back in his chair, lifted another grey sack from the floor and tipped my kit out in front of me.
I dressed quickly, checking my pockets as I went. No cash; definitely no passport. Nothing, apart from Baby-G. But then what was I expecting?
‘Has Charlie got his?’ Part of your job under interrogation is to look after your mates. Charlie was in bad enough shape already, without going hypothermic.
Bastard gave me a nod, and sampled a little more of his coffee. ‘You guys look out for each other, don’t you? I like that.’ He put his cup back down on the table. ‘Hey, I’m sorry about what happened just now. But you know’ — he made a pistol with his fingers and pulled the trigger at me — ‘finding out that Chuck had brought someone on the job with him, well, it made me a little crazy.’
He still had a supersize smile glued to his face, but I wasn’t too happy about that. He’d been a little crazy the last time we’d met, and that hadn’t taken us anywhere good.
8
His smile broadened. ‘I like to know what’s going on; I like to get things done my way. I just needed to let off some steam. Guys like us, we need to do that from time to time, don’t we, Nick? You understand.’
I understood all too well. It wasn’t about letting off steam; it was about showing everyone within a 500K radius who was boss.
I took my time tucking in my sweatshirt. This wasn’t about the 110, Baz and the police. This was about something much more important to him, the job.
I sat back down. ‘So help me out here… Having Charlie dropped, once he’d done the safe. That’s getting things done your way, is it?’ I risked a smile too. ‘Looks like it was just as well I came along.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. Whichever fucks on the top floor’ — he pointed skywards — ‘made that decision, they didn’t ask me along. All I know is that Chuck was going to do the job, and I supplied the support, the kit, the information, that kinda thing. What do you think I am? A fucking animal? Hell, Chuck’s one of us, one of the good guys.’
‘Who’s on the top floor? Military? The oil guys?’
He shook his head slowly and gave me a pitying look. ‘You know what, Nick? I like you, but do you think I’m fucking stupid? Come on, man. All you need to know is: I saved your asses today. You’re a wanted man. Any longer in that camp and you’d have been picked up and shovelled like shit into custody.’ His eyes sparkled unpleasantly. ‘Hey, I know what they do to guys like you in those cesspits. Not good, Nick, not good at all. They’re fucking psychos in there.’
I was sure he was right, but my mind was elsewhere, trying to work out what to say next, how to keep well away from those particular cesspits. The one I was in was bad enough.
‘Hey, enough of that shit. I’m sorry, really sorry, for monstering on you just now. But when I got the news about you two at the camp…’ He laughed a little too loudly and took another mouthful of brew. ‘I guess it’s kinda worrying having a pistol to your head. But you should be thanking me for not letting you get handed over. Those guys in the camp? They got really pissed when they found out you weren’t no fucking terrorist.’ His jowls quivered. He was enjoying every minute of this. ‘Hey, can you believe that?’
I could, actually. If they had been able to stick me with the terrorist label, I’d have been halfway to Guantanamo Bay by now.
I wondered why he hadn’t said anything about the laptop bag. Or the papers and tape. He must be saving it up for later.
‘But, you know what, Nick? You did a helluva job saving your asses out there, considering the problems you had.’
This wasn’t the Bastard I knew. But then, this wasn’t Bastard — this was just a good old boy fronting a set of interrogation techniques, and me shutting up until I needed to speak.
He was deploying what the manual called ‘Pride and Ego Up’. He thought I’d be feeling devastated by the capture, and would respond to praise for a job well done. Any minute now he’d be telling me he understood my feelings, and we’d bond big-time over a few more cups of coffee.
But what he didn’t know was that my pride and ego had been well and truly hung out to dry more years ago than I cared to remember. He’d have to dig a whole lot deeper, if he wanted to find any traces of either.
I nodded to show how glad I was that he understood me. ‘We did all right.’ I got more brew down my neck. ‘Who was that at the house and cemetery?’
‘No idea.’ Bastard shook his head slowly, as if Red Eyes, Stubbly and the man mountain with the machete had all dropped out of a clear blue sky. ‘Whatever, those fucks sure messed up a good operation.’
He leaned across the table, nodding in agreement with himself as he pulled two cigars from his Gore-Tex jacket. ‘People think it’s a science, but they forget about the bit you can’t control, and that’s the target, right?’ He offered me one and I gave a polite shake of my head. But I poured myself some more coffee and got it down my neck, just in case he decided he’d gone far enough with this and it was time to wheel in Bad Cop again.
He lit up and inhaled appreciatively. He seemed to have kicked his old tobacco-chewing habit. Maybe this was his idea of a healthier option.
Was he waiting for me to start gobbing off, trying to fill the dead space? If so, I was going to disappoint him.
No way would I respond to any of this by opening up and saying stuff that could dig me and Charlie a deeper hole. In a strange way, knowing there was somebody else in the shit with me for a change made me feel more confident, and I knew Charlie would be thinking the
same. He wasn’t going to let me down; I wasn’t going to let him down either.
‘You know what?’ Smoke poured from his mouth. ‘You turning up with Chuck like that? That was one big surprise. Yessir, he kept that set of cards pretty close to his chest. How’s it working with you guys — you planning on splitting the money?’
I nodded. ‘Down the middle.’
‘That’s one heap of change…’ He sucked on the end of his cigar, as if he suddenly couldn’t make up his mind whether to chew it or smoke it. ‘But I think you should’ve got more, Nick. Seems to me you did the lion’s share, getting you both out of the shit. Only fair, don’t you Brits say?’ He flicked away half an inch of ash. ‘I suppose it was Chuck’s idea to make this a two-hander?’
‘Had to be, didn’t it? Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.’
It didn’t sound like he knew anything about Charlie’s disco hands. This time a thread of spit hung between cigar and lip as he drew the Havana away from his mouth.
If you’re anywhere long enough, you tune into the environment. Every house feels strange the first time you go into it, but give it half an hour and you begin to feel at home.
That still wasn’t happening to me here, though; the only familiar elements in this room were the hiss of the gas heater and the smell of cigar smoke.
9
He studied my face, waiting for me to say more.
But I wasn’t going to fill any gaps, not while he was still trying to be my new best friend. Later, perhaps, when we got to the page in the manual that had pictures of crowbars and broken bones; that would be the time to gob off enough bullshit to try and keep him and his two Georgian mates off my back.
‘Did Chuck tell you what the job was about?’