The eyes are the aiming mechanism and the brain is the decision maker of when to fire, but everything else is used to create stability for the weapon. The web of my right hand was pushed hard and high into the grip. The higher the grip, the better the bore axis, the better the control of the weapon as the muzzle jumped when I fired. That was important. If I had to draw down outside this club it wouldn’t be just one round at a time and at a paper target. Semi-automatic pistols are designed for a high grip. When the top slide comes back to reload after a round is fired, it needs to move against the abutment of a firmly held weapon frame. If not, the top slide may not go all the way back and may not be able to reload. Then I’d be fucked.
My bottom three fingers were like a vice. My thumb was wrapped round the other side of the pistol grip. Only my trigger finger was free. It was the only thing that was allowed to move. Fuck the gentle tremor that I knew would be there as I aimed. This was a lump of metal that had to be controlled if it was to do its job. If I gripped the weapon and aimed correctly, the tremor would be where I wanted to hit.
I brought the weapon up towards the target, my support hand wrapped around the dominant hand. My shoulder was forward so my nose was closer to the target than my toes. My right arm pushed the weapon towards the target as my left exerted rearward pressure so the platform was rigid.
I lifted the weapon to the centre mass of the raging Russian. Both eyes fixed on the target; dead centre of mass. The weapon’s metal foresight came into my vision and became my primary focus. The target and the rear sight were now just blurs. I made sure the split at the back of the rear sight was level with the foresight. Then everything blurred as I focused on the foresight with both eyes.
As I squeezed, I felt the trigger safety with the first crease in my finger, the small lever that released the trigger action.
The foresight rested on the centre of mass and I finished my squeeze. The trigger went back. The round kicked off.
I didn’t check to see where my round had hit. I’d find out soon enough when I retrieved the target. I just carried on firing, bringing the weapon down, then slowly up again into the same point of aim.
The only negative about coming down to Gunslingers was that it gave me itchy feet. Not to get out of Moscow, or away from Anna — far from it. But there was only so much reading, art and opera you could take in one burst. If I wanted to get out there again, it wasn’t because I needed the money. There was still plenty of that left. If Anna had taught me one thing, it was that money isn’t everything. It certainly wasn’t her motivation. It was easy for me to say that money wasn’t mine now that I had plenty of it, but I was starting to understand why Anna did what she did. Besides, going away for a bit of work the next time Anna was on a trip would make me want to come back to her and Moscow even more.
I squeezed off round after round, no double taps, just slow-time singles, making sure my skills and my eye were still in. I was in no rush. I’d bang out a couple of mags, clean my weapon, and take a walk home to get stuck into a bit of
4
The coffee shop was further down the corridor, in an area that looked as if it had once been a Cold War nuclear bunker. The new owners had given it a complete makeover. It was warm and welcoming, and did a good trade in coffee and a roaring one in vodka and Baltika beer. Nobody saw a problem with customers having a few looseners before they picked up a weapon.
There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk — and on from dusk till dawn.
I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.
There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.
At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well- connected, and those who wanted to be — mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.
I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.
The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.
I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to avert a full meltdown. The number of confirmed dead and missing after the tsunami now stood at nearly thirteen thousand. Some 450,000 people had been staying in temporary shelters amid sub-zero night-time temperatures.
The German comedy show next door was much better viewing. The two lads were about to enjoy some AK action down one of the longer ranges. It wasn’t heated, and their breath condensed around them in clouds. So did the cordite fumes kicking from their muzzles.
The AKs jerked into their shoulders and pushed them backwards. Mong was behind one of them as he fired, pushing the guy forward to try and keep the barrel pointing down the range. Rounds cracked and ricocheted off the concrete. These lads were giving it twenty-round bursts, when they’d have been told to limit them to five. At five euros a round, I doubted Mong cared that much.
He wasn’t really Mong, of course. He just looked like him. Or maybe he didn’t, and it was the endless news footage that made me think back to our time in Aceh. Whatever it was, every time I saw him, I wondered if he had tattoos on his arse.
5
Mong was getting a bit more pissed off. These two were tearing the arse out of it. They started to Rambo it up, firing from the hip, which made the AKs swing to the right with each burst. It was a total gang-fuck. The real Mong would have banged their heads together.
It always made me sad to think of him. Or maybe I just felt guilty. I’d kept my word after the job. I’d looked after Tracy. Jan had sucked cash out of her like a vacuum cleaner, and Tracy had paid for her mother to have private medical treatment for her cancer and home care afterwards, so I gave her money when I could.
If I was in Hereford I always went to check that things were all right. They weren’t, of course. She was devastated: she’d gone into a deep depression and it was taking her a long time to climb out. The cash I gave helped her pay the bills, but it wasn’t really what she needed. I never stopped telling her to get out of Hereford, to make a new start, but she didn’t want to leave her mum and Jan to fend for themselves.
I got the Glock out and started cleaning the barrel with a small brush. I smiled as I thought about all the times I used to take the piss out of Mong for being soft in the head and sending money to his supermarket woman.
When I’d got out of Russia with a few million dollars of a corrupt company’s money in 2009 and bought the London flat, Tracy was the first person I wrote to. I told her I’d settle the mortgage so at least she had security. If
