Exit Wound by Andy McNab

like a black glass pyramid, would have looked at home in Las Vegas.
    ‘Got that.’
    ‘OK, that’s your axis. Go half right. Five hundred.’ He was using a fire-control order format to get me onto the target. I looked half right, scanning the five-hundred area.
    ‘You’ve got a ten-storey building with an all-black ground floor. Seen?’
    ‘Seen.’ The boring ten-storey cube’s shop fronts were all black marble.
    ‘OK, go left of the building, into the wasteground, at about a K. You’ve got a one-storey flat-concrete-roofed building – rectangular, with a wall surrounding it. Seen?’
    ‘Seen.’
    ‘That’s the target. The surrounding wall is five metres away from the building. The wall is three metres high and the wall gate and building shutters are facing us. All the damage we do must be within the wall, inside the compound. That way it’ll be months, maybe years, before anyone gets to see our handiwork. And when they do, they won’t even know what was in the building. The outside wall will not be touched.’
    I couldn’t see much detail from this distance but I had a visual on what Red Ken and Dex had described to me. We couldn’t do a walk-past to soak up more detail. No one walked in this city.

20
    The perimeter gate, the only way in and out of the compound, directly faced a doorway set into rolled-steel shutters wide enough to admit a vehicle into the building. Either side of the shutters was a window, the one on the right larger than the one on the left. I couldn’t see from this distance, but Red Ken said they were iron-barred. He and Dex had been on-target during their last recce. There were no other entrances or exits.
    There was no electricity or water running into the building. It had been left to decay for the past nine years, waiting for Saddam to defeat the Americans and then get down to a bit of DIY on his palace.
    ‘Nick, make a note of the main drag between us and the target. That’s our route out. Going left, as we look at it now, it takes us south-west out of the city, following the coast towards Abu Dhabi and the RV. Going right, we take the tunnel under the Creek into the old quarter, the gold souk and markets. You got it?’
    ‘Yep.’
    The job was kicking off at last light tomorrow. For Red Ken and me, it would start in a block of public toilets in the old quarter. Dex was going to go local and steal a Tata truck in the same area they’d pinged with a crane attached, much like the ones Jewson’s used to deliver bricks and stuff in the UK.
    Red Ken and I would keep out of sight as we moved to the target. We’d lift the crates, load them onto the truck, then take a swift detour to Dex’s GMC Suburban, parked about six K west of the target. After transferring our little insurance policy, we’d take the Tata and the Suburban back to the airport before catching up with Spag at the strip.
    Bingo.
    It was perfectly simple. Too fucking simple by half.
    I reckoned it was time for one or two awkward questions. ‘So, these Gucci gold doors have just been sitting there since the second Gulf War – and nobody knows?’
    ‘They will when the developers move in. Five years ago this was the Empty Quarter. Now look at it.’
    A flood of tourists spilt out of the mall, designer bags bulging with stuff they could have bought back home, and probably for less.
    ‘Spag said he found out about the doors just after the war.’
    ‘Yeah, he told me.’
    ‘Did he also tell you he found the lads who made them?’
    ‘No, he fucked me off on questions. Told me to ask you.’
    Red Ken nearly choked on his next mouthful of nicotine. ‘The guy in charge locked the crates in that building for Saddam to collect as soon as he’d sorted out the Americans.’
    ‘And the others?’
    ‘Two of them, apparently. Spag reckons he binned them – permanently – in case they confused the gold with their pension scheme.’
    ‘Then Spag binned him, and it’s been sitting there ever since?’
    Red Ken nodded.