six parks. Gorky Park had been the first. It was the only one I’d heard of. Then I discovered there was more green stuff here than in New York, and New York had more of it than London. It almost made me glad I’d left.
As the days got longer and warmer, Anna and I had headed for Serebryany Bor, an island just a trolleybus ride away. It could be walked at any time of day, but it was especially great in the evening when the late-setting sun bathed the
I checked out the spring buds and flowers, kids on bikes with stabilizers, all the normal shit that now made sense to me. These were people who were getting on with their lives. I was getting on with mine too. It was all right. It wasn’t as if I jumped up every morning and ran outside to kiss the flowers and hug the trees, but I’d been taking the time to stand and stare. For a while, anyway. Then I’d started to get itchy feet.
The more I got to know Anna, the more I realized how alike we were. We gave each other loads of space and got on with our own lives, knowing that made us both happy.
She was certainly giving me enough space at the moment. She’d just arrived in Libya, after a four-week stint covering the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt for RT news. Since January, the only time I’d seen her was on the screen.
2
According to her reports, beamed out every day on Russia Today, Gaddafi wasn’t giving up without a fight. He had just begun bombing rebel-held Benghazi. And, of course, the Brits were still having the piss taken out of them by the Russian and the German media for the fucked-up evacuation of British nationals. The Russians — and everyone else for that matter — had sent in their ships and planes and got their people out, well before the British FCO had decided to have a think about it over a nice cup of tea one morning.
I liked it when she went away. Reporting, for her, was a matter of doing the right thing. I knew it made her happy. Maybe it was the only way that a relationship would work for me, by having gaps and then coming back together. We’d probably get on each other’s tits if we lived a conventional lifestyle.
I was looking forward to her coming home. Not only because I’d get to see her, but also because it’d mean she was out of harm’s way. Far too many reporters were getting dropped. Russia, together with many other countries, showed the horror of war much more than we tended to in the UK and US.
Instead of a doll being placed on the rubble of a bombed-out building and some bland report voiced over, Russians got to see the mangled body of the child.
Al-Jazeera and RT reporters stood in the line of fire rather than watching from the rooftop of a distant hotel. Russians got to see dogs eating the dead. They got to see it as it was. Which was why Anna and her team were in more danger.
I didn’t mind being on my own. I felt comfortable with my own company, just as Anna did. I’d been alone most of my life. I’d had lots of mates and always been around people, but I’d felt like an outsider. That was OK: I knew that was the way it was for me. I just got on with what I was doing.
I spent a lot of time in the basement gym of our condominium. For me, the gym had always been famine or feast. I did nothing for months on end because I was busy, working or injured, but when I had the time, I was in there every day.
My brain was getting a bit of a workout, too. I was reading the books I’d promised myself I was going to get through last year when I’d thought I was dying from a falsely diagnosed tumour. I did Tolstoy’s
I’d just finished Fadeyev’s
I’d given the art galleries a pounding as well, and she’d taken me to
I didn’t feel I’d entered a world that I’d been missing. When I’d thought I was dying, I’d felt like I had some kind of hole that needed filling. Now it was just great to know something new. But it wasn’t going to take over my life. That was why I still needed to keep my eye in on the range.
3
It’s easy to shoot well, in theory. If the weapon is correctly aimed, the trigger is squeezed and the shot released without moving it, then the round will hit the target. However, the perfect or ‘lucky’ shot that is going to save your life is the result of years of practice. It’s like building muscle at the gym: use it or lose it.
I started loading the seventeen-round magazine. A couple of punters to my left pressed their return buttons and man-shaped targets of Russian hoods with knives slid towards them. Lots of Russian piss-taking came from their cubicles as they checked each other’s hits.
Gaston Glock was a genius. He’d had no experience with firearms when he entered a design competition for a new pistol for the Austrian Army in the 1980s, but he’d come up with the idea and built a prototype within a couple of months. He might have known jack about weapons, but he knew a lot about synthetic polymers, and that was one of the things that made this gun so different. The Glock’s plastic frame made it much lighter and easier to handle, but it was also what made it so hard for people — myself included — to accept initially. But in the last thirty years it had proved reliable and durable, and old Gaston had done all right for himself.
I liked it here at Gunslingers. There was always a great mixture of police and Mafia, as well as gun nuts and European tourists doing the ‘Russian military experience’. They paid the equivalent of five euros a round to fire weapons, and up to 16,000 to fly in a MiG 23. Some of these guys, mostly the Germans, blew off about thirty grand in euros over a long weekend.
It wasn’t as if I talked to any of them or had mates there. Apart from anything else, I’d only learnt a phrase or two of Russian in the time I’d been in the country. There wasn’t much point. Moscow was one of the big tourist destinations these days and most people knew enough English for me not to have to learn Russian. If they didn’t understand me I’d do the British thing of pointing and shouting. It seemed to do the trick. I’d nod at the regulars, but only if they nodded at me first. Police and Mafia tend not to be the most sociable of people, and that was the way I liked it. I also liked coming in early, before the first tourists Rambo’d in and the place got packed.
Standing in my cubicle, I put the target out at about ten metres. I loaded a mag, pulled back on the top slide, and let go so it rammed a 9mm round into the chamber.
In the movies, when actors load semi- or automatic weapons they always pull back the top slide and keep hold of it as it goes forward. It looks good, but it’s bollocks. You’ve got to let the top slide go. The spring then forces the next round out of the magazine and into the chamber. Hamper this action and you’re going to have stoppages. Law-enforcement agencies all over the world have trouble training recruits because of how they’ve seen the likes of Russell Crowe fuck it up on screen. When a Hollywood hard guy takes cover against a wall, the camera shows him with his weapon up, barrel near his face and pointing at the sky. It’s yet more bollocks. The weapon’s got to be pointing out towards the threat. The reason directors show it the way they do is so you can see the sexy weapon very close up, so it’s next to the actor’s head and you can register his emotion before they cut to the next scene.
I still used the Weaver stance when I shot. Your body became a firing platform by adopting the stance of a fighter. My legs were shoulder-width apart, left leg forward so my body turned forty-five degrees to the target. Now I was balanced forward and back, left and right.
