Deep Black - Andy McNab [53]
A huge contact sparked up nearby. This time everybody did look up. An amazing amount of heavy .50 cal tracer stitched hot dotted lines across the sky. Every pair of eyes followed its trajectory, but once they realized it wasn’t going to fall on our heads, their owners got back to their chats and beers.
I was just treating myself to a swig of Coke when I got a huge slap on the back that made my teeth bang against the bottle.
‘Wanker!’
I recognized the broad Geordie accent even before I turned round. I’d known Pete Holland for years, but thankfully not that well. He was one of those guys who had an opinion on everything, and a lot of them disappeared when you held them up to the light. Built like a prop forward, he was known in the Regiment as a good Bergen carrier, a strong back you could depend on to get kit from A to B. So strong, in fact, he could make the muscles in his back bulge like bat wings. His nickname was, of course, Lats-Like-A-Bat.
We shook hands. ‘All right, mate? How’s it going? This is Jerry.’
It wasn’t long before Jerry made his excuses and left, probably so I could start quizzing Lats about Nuhanovic. But I’d need to be pretty fucking desperate before I went that route. He’d want to know why, where, when – and how much I was willing to pay him for answering.
Pete had a beer in one hand and a spare in the other, what he called ‘having one on the loading tray’. He’d been in the Artillery before the Regiment. That was his problem: once he’d started on the beers, the loading tray was as busy as a factory conveyor belt. He could have given Ezra a lifetime’s work.
He nodded at the two Balkan boys I’d seen in the coffee-bar area, who had just joined a group at the end of the pool. The one with the goatee had a huge smile on his face as he offered round his pack of cigarettes. ‘Not working for them cunts, are you?’
I shook my head. ‘A journalist. That guy Jerry. You?’
He stuck out his jaw and pranced around on the spot as if he was sizing up to throw a punch. ‘Doing me own thing. A wee bit of freelance. I’m on a good number, BGing some Japanese. Five hundred a day. Champion.’ He took a hefty swig of free beer.
How did you answer that? ‘Five hundred. Good for you, mate. Listen, those flat-tops. They Bosnian, Serb, what?’
‘Fuck knows. I fucking know what they’re up to, though.’ He pointed at the others in the group with his bottle. ‘Don’t these cunts know what they’re doing? Some of them are younger than my two girls.’
It clicked. These two were part of the Balkans’ globalization campaign. It didn’t sound like they’d be spending much time with the ayatollah.
He took another swig, not that he needed it, and I realized what the posturing was all about. He was trying to keep his balance. No wonder he was on his own. Anybody working for a decent firm and found drinking on a job would be thrown out, no exceptions, no second chances. And word flew round the circuit quicker than tracer. He wasn’t an independent by choice. No one would vouch for him. It was a big deal to do that. If the guy you vouched for turned out to be crap, that meant so were you. It was just the way it was.
I hoped he hadn’t come over and slapped me on the back because he thought I was a kindred spirit. ‘You and the Japanese in the hotel?’
‘Aye, I’m here and there. You know how it is.’
I didn’t. I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.
37
The Canadian woman floated into the pool area with Mr Gap in tow. He looked as if he’d stepped straight out of the shop window, only tonight his polo shirt was green. She was in a black cheesecloth dress that she knew made the best of the buttons she had left unfastened between her breasts.
Lats couldn’t keep his eyes off them as she joined the bunch by the barbecue. He put down his empty bottle and kicked into the next as he fished in the bin for another. ‘I’m gonna fuck her. She