Dead Centre ns-14 Read online

  Dead Centre

  ( Nick Stone - 14 )

  Andy Mcnab

  Somalia — a lawless, violent land, ignored by the West, ripped apart by civil war and famine, fought over by drug-fuelled, gun-crazy clan fighters. They want the world to sit up and take notice. They have a new and terrifying weapon — pirates.

  And now, the pirates have in their possession the young son of a Russian oligarch, snatched from a luxury yacht in the Seychelles. His father wants him back, will pay anything, stop at nothing to retrieve his boy. Up to now everything he has tried has failed. He needs the one man with the know-how, the means and the guts to complete the mission: ex-SAS trouble-shooter Nick Stone…

  Dead Centre takes you to the reality behind the headlines, into the poorest and most violent country on the planet, a place that no sane person would choose to be.

  Andy McNab has been there, seen it, done it. No other thriller writer can take you so close to the action.

  Andy McNab

  Dead Centre

  PART ONE

  1

  Camp Hope Aceh Province, Sumatra

  Sunday, 2 January 2005

  15.39 hrs

  Shit …

  This was not going to end well.

  The two of them were at it again, and this time one of them was going to get hurt.

  Mong towered over BB, his forehead pressed hard against the top of the other man’s skull to prevent him pulling back and trying a Glasgow kiss. Mong’s sweat dripped onto BB’s face, then down into the sand. He was breathing heavily, through clenched teeth. I could hear him even from where I was sitting.

  I knew Mong. What he started, he finished.

  I jumped up and skirted around a pile of pulverized, multicoloured hardwood that had once been a fishing boat. It was a week since the tsunami, and Aceh was still a disaster zone. There was debris everywhere. The coastal region looked like Hiroshima after Enola Gay. The tide brought in more wreckage and bodies with every wave.

  ‘Mong — enough, mate! We’ve got work to do!’

  He wasn’t listening. He snorted like a bull.

  ‘Bin it, mate. Back away. We’ve got no hospitals, fuck-all medical kit …’

  But Mong was in his own little world. These boys were like two wind-up robots, grinding against each other until their clockwork motors ran out.

  BB was going to get it big-time, and he knew it. But he stood his ground.

  ‘Lads, kick the shit out of each other when we get home.’

  It still wasn’t happening.

  Mong flicked his forehead back and then down and cracked BB right on the top of his normally perfectly sculpted hairdo. BB slumped, but before his knees hit the sand Mong swung a punch that connected with his right temple like a pile driver.

  BB couldn’t do much except take the pain. He flung his arms round Mong’s waist, trying to drag him down as well while he regained his senses. Mong stayed right where he was, but his cargoes went south, exposing the tattooed outline of two hands, one on each cheek, which looked like someone else had already grabbed his arse.

  Mong fought to free himself, but BB clung on, closed his arms round Mong’s knees and threw his weight forward. Mong toppled into the sand. They both scrabbled to land a punch.

  I peeled a spar off the fishing boat.

  Mong wasn’t shouting any more. He was saving his breath for the fight. He pulled himself up onto his knees and threw another two punches that BB managed to duck. Either would have laid him out.

  He missed with the third, but the next got BB on the side of the neck and took him down. Mong dropped onto BB’s chest, legs astride, and pumped his fists into the boy’s body.

  BB tried to curl up to protect his film-star looks.

  I was nearly on top of them. ‘Mong! You gotta stop, mate! Not today!’

  White faces gathered by the line of NGO tents about fifty metres behind us — some of the aid workers who’d poured in from all over the world to help. Thousands of locals had fled into the hills for safety and were streaming back every day. They’d heard there was a relief camp, but few came near the ocean. They were terrified of another killer wave.

  ‘Mong, you listening?’ I stood over them. ‘Bin it — now.’

  It was too late. BB was fighting back. It was all his fault; it always was. He’d been having a go at Mong all day. But I had to admire the arsehole. Not many would last this long against the man mountain.

  ‘Mong, last chance, mate. I’m going to have to hurt you if you don’t back off.’

  BB was about to get seriously fucked up. He deserved what was coming, but this wasn’t the day.

  I swung the spar down on Mong’s back and kept it in place as he collapsed across BB, so he knew I was still there. BB heaved him aside, got the hint and rolled away. He crawled a metre or so, his face a mask of blood-coloured sand.

  ‘Fuck off, BB, and get cleaned up.’

  I pushed hard between Mong’s shoulder-blades as he tried to get up. ‘Mate, stay down or I gotta hurt you again. He’s a fucking arsehole, but this isn’t the time or the place. Sort all that shit out after the job, OK?’

  BB got to his feet and shuffled back to our tent. The throng of aid workers parted like the Red Sea to let him through.

  I sat on an oil drum bedded into the sand, still pressing on Mong’s back. The beach was littered with all sorts of shit. The straits were the world’s favourite dumping ground for hazardous waste, and why not? The only people who’d ever know were a bunch of Indonesian fishermen. The dumpers just hadn’t reckoned on a tsunami propelling their dirty laundry into full view of a hundred tent loads of international observers.

  ‘And pull your cargoes up, for fuck’s sake. Those jazz hands are giving me the hump.’

  2

  They’d been in different squadrons, but I’d known Mong and BB since Regiment days. Now the three of us were out, and making a few bob on the circuit whenever and wherever we could.

  ‘BB’ was short for ‘Body Beautiful, Mind Full of Shit’. He hadn’t come into the Regiment the normal way, from one of the three services or the Oz or Kiwi military. He’d joined the TA off the street after watching too much SAS shit on telly. The problem was, he didn’t get the culture. He didn’t even speak squaddie. He was a mobile-phone salesman who played soldiers every other weekend about fifteen miles from where he lived. He was living the dream a bit too much instead of getting on with the job. He hadn’t realized you had to serve your apprenticeship before going into the trade.

  BB hated his nickname. He wanted all his mates to call him Justin. The trouble was he didn’t have any mates.

  He was OK, I supposed, and a pretty good operator. He just didn’t get it, whatever ‘it’ was. He was a smooth-talking Geordie fucker who fancied himself. He did all the weight training, took all the supplements. His T-shirts were two sizes too small. He plastered his face with moisturizer, and spent every spare minute building a tan for when he was back in the UK, cruising round town in his red Mazda 5.

  Worst of all, he fancied Mong’s wife, and didn’t mind letting him know. BB had few scruples when it came to horizontal tabbing. He was plenty stupid enough to try it on with her. He’d tried it in the past, before Mong was on the scene, but Tracy soon cottoned on that he wouldn’t be giving her what she needed.

  Of course, BB wasn’t the only one who fancied her. We all did. She was a good-looking girl. She had the kind of smile that belonged on an infant-school teacher. Everything about her was close to perfect — the way her dark hair brushed her shoulders, the way she dressed. We called her Racy Tracy, but it wasn’t really true.

  For everyone apart from BB she was off-limits. She was somebody else’s wife. And that somebody was a mate.

  This new fight had
been brewing since the moment we’d met up a week ago in the UK. BB hadn’t seen Mong for a couple of years, but got stuck straight in with the same old banter: ‘Any time she needs a real man, just give her my number.’ And he hadn’t stopped there.

  I gave Mong a prod. ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He lifted his head, held a finger to each nostril and blew out a stream of sand and snot. He nodded at the waves pounding in ten metres away. ‘I suppose I’d better get cleaned up.’

  His accent was West Country, borderline pointy-head. It didn’t fit with how he looked. Mong was a big unit; he could have been a poster boy for the World Wrestling Federation. He was tall and thickset, with crinkly dark blond hair. He never went to the gym or lifted weights, but still shat muscle. It was how he was made.

  He really did have a huge arse. Each cheek was plenty big enough for those hands. From behind, with his kit off, he looked like a crime scene. After a few beers at a party, he’d drop his trousers and work his muscles so it looked like they were shuffling cards. His biggest pick-up line was ‘Stick or twist?’ There was still a bit of the Royal Marine in him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Any excuse, any piss-up, those lads couldn’t wait to get their kit off.

  With BB it was a totally different story. To keep his bulk he had to hit the weights non-stop and take supplements by the fistful. His day sack was filled with protein powder.

  3

  Mong began to ease himself up. There wasn’t a mark on him.

  ‘He’s full of shit, Mong. You know that, don’t you?’

  He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. ‘He still gets to me. After all these fucking years.’

  ‘What did he say this time?’

  Mong looked away. He blinked hard, like he had sand in his eyes. ‘He came out with the wedding-photo thing. The cunt. He said I’d better keep checking.’

  When BB targeted a married woman, it wasn’t about shagging her, or even liking her. It was about conquering her, and having one up on her husband. When he was pissed once he told me that every time he was in the new conquest’s home he always asked to see the wedding photograph. As soon as he was alone, he’d ease it out of the frame, grab a pen and write ‘J was here’ halfway down the front of the bride’s dress. If he was in a bit of a rush, he’d just scrawl it on the back, like a dog cocking his leg to mark his territory. If it was all going tits up, he’d say to her, ‘Go and look at your wedding pic.’

  That hadn’t happened to Tracy. She was a Hereford girl who’d hung around with Regiment guys from the time she was seventeen. She and her sister had been trying to snag one for years. Why not? They got a house out of it, and a well-paid husband who was away for most of the year. For girls like Tracy, it was life as per normal, but with cash and security. She wasn’t mercenary, just realistic. And it meant that once she’d got Mong, she wouldn’t rock the boat. Apart from anything else, she really did love him.

  ‘Fuck him. You know Tracy wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. How long have you two been together?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘So look on the bright side, you twat. You could have ended up with Jan. Fucking nightmare. You’d be changing the wedding photo every month — it’d look like an autograph book.’

  He wiped sand out of his eyes and started to laugh.

  Jan was the nightmare version of her sister. Tracy’s only failing was naïvety. While Jan’s head was full of shit, Tracy’s had room for nothing but fairies and happy endings. Before she met Mong she’d thought that meant she had to get her kit off every time she thought she’d found true love. It took her a while to realize she was just getting fucked and left to fend for herself.

  Jan was a bit more cold and calculating. She knew she’d get turned over at frequent intervals until she stumbled across somebody stupid enough to take her on. Tracy had always been faithful to Mong. She didn’t belong in the Hereford meat market. But Jan had thought she could handle it; she thought she could keep moving from one man to the next unscathed.

  I looked over at the NGO tents, a sea of smart blue and orange canvas hooked up to brand new generators.

  BB had disappeared into ours, and the white Land Cruiser crowd had gone back to doing whatever they did. Not that they’d been much help. The NGO thing had always seemed to me to be about looking good rather than doing good. BB had missed his vocation.

  4

  Mong clambered to his feet and wandered to the water’s edge. I dropped my pacifier and joined him. ‘You’re a lucky bastard. You know that?’

  He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick nod. He didn’t take his eyes off the scum that swirled across the sand in front of us.

  ‘I remember half of B Squadron telling you to steer clear of Tracy — but only because they wanted to have a crack at her themselves. They didn’t see what you saw in her. She’s in love, mate. And that’s with you, not with any other fucker. Just you.’ I pointed a finger at him like it was a bollocking.

  ‘You’ve got each other, that’s all that matters. Fuck BB, fuck ’em all. Just think how many of us’ve messed that up — BB included. They’re jealous of you two. We all are.’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Why don’t you just pack up and fuck off out of Hereford? Why stay?’ In the film version of Mong and Tracy’s life that played in my mind, they would have packed up and gone to live where nobody knew them as soon as he’d left the Regiment. Like Shrek, but without the swamp.

  Mong put up with a load of shit from BB, but a whole lot more of it was dealt behind his back. He was too big and fearsome for anyone else to say it to his face.

  He shrugged. ‘Tracy wants to be near her mum and sister. She’s a family girl.’

  I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. ‘No wonder they all think you’re soft in the head.’

  He wasn’t. They were forgetting what he did for a living. And they mistook kindness for weakness. The stupid fucker was still sending cash to a woman he bumped into when he was in the Marines. He was at the checkout in Tesco one Saturday with three of his mates, each hefting a box of Stella, ready to watch the rugby. She was ahead of them, moaning that she couldn’t afford to buy nappies — one of the oldest cons in the book, but Mong was suckered. He paid for all the beer, paid for the Pampers too, and hadn’t stopped since. The baby had to be about twelve years old by now, and he was still sending her money.

  Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.

  Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.

  ‘I’m not washing your back.’

  ‘If anything happens to me — if I get dropped — you’ll look after her, won’t you?’

  He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’

  He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’

  He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’

  ‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’

  He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.


  I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’

  5

  Our tent was a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.

  BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.

  BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.

  I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.

  I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps. Star Trek had finally met Carry on Camping. Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.

  I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice — with UN stamped all over them — to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.