Street Soldier by Andy McNab

to make sure he did it properly.
    It had helped that PJ had been one of his mum’s longer-term boyfriends. It had sounded like he was looking after her, so Sean hadn’t needed to head back and check up. The occasional phone call was all he needed. Only PJ had finally gone the way they all did.So he thought it was about time he paid a visit. Make sure the silly cow was doing all right.
    ‘Good man. But it’s always handy to keep the old contacts alive, right? Never know when they could come in useful.’
    Sean laughed. ‘Yeah, because they’d be well useful in a firefight!’
    Heaton shrugged, then grinned. ‘So what’d you think of the pad?’
    ‘Fucking A,’ Sean said sincerely. ‘Still can’t believe it.’ He wondered if Heaton was on the lookout for a lodger in the spare room . . . No. That really would be weird. And unless Debs brought a friend along every time she stayed over, Sean would be the odd one out on other occasions. He had his pride.
    Heaton laughed. ‘Thing is,’ he continued as he shifted gear, ‘maybe I wasn’t one hundred per cent truthful about my, uh, inheritance. It’s the easy answer I give when I don’t know someone that well. It’s what I tell the neighbours.’
    ‘So – how . . . ?’
    ‘I worked for that place, Stenders. I earned every penny.’
    Sean was all ears. Heaton earned that , on a corporal’s pay? No.
    Heaton went on. ‘You have to make the army workfor you too, right? So that’s what I’ve done. Army pay only goes so far, so you have to use your head a little, know what I mean? And that’s how I have this.’ Heaton tapped the dashboard like he was giving an affectionate pat to a pet.
    ‘Then whatever it is you’re doing, I want in!’ Sean joked. ‘I haven’t even got a car!’
    He knew a few other lads who had sidelines to their regular jobs. The army gave you skills that civvies were always on the lookout for. Some worked occasional nights as doormen in Andover or Salisbury. Nightclubs were always happy to bump up security with a soldier or two. Others bought and sold cars, upgrading each time so that they eventually ended up with a decent motor – though nothing like what Heaton was riding around in.
    ‘I might take you up on that,’ said Heaton. He looked at Sean in the mirror; he was smiling, but his eyes were serious. ‘Could always use a little help. Assuming you’re the right person for the job, of course. All kinds of perks. Cash, mostly, but also payment in kind.’
    Sean grinned. ‘It’s the cash I’m after.’
    ‘Whatever.’ Heaton leaned forward, keeping one hand on the wheel and fumbling beneath the driver’s seat with the other. He pulled out a flat box and passed it back. ‘What do you think of this?’
    Sean took the box in both hands. It was heavy. Thephoto on the lid showed the smoothly curving, dark lines of a Glock 17 Gen 4 pistol. It was the one pistol Sean could have identified immediately, since it was issued as standard to the British Army and he had just finished a training course on it. It could hold seventeen rounds compared with the thirteen of the Browning that it had replaced. It was also considerably lighter than the old Browning, because its frame, magazine body and components were built from a nylon-based polymer that was pretty much bombproof. It was a state-of-the-art, space-age weapon.
    ‘You’re kidding!’
    But it wasn’t the picture of the Glock that surprised him – it was the logo next to it. A silhouetted figure of a huntsman with a rifle, and the word AIRSOFT . Sean had heard of Airsoft, never seen it. Grown men running around in woods in camo, playing soldiers with replica weapons – identical to the real thing on the outside but modified inside to fire off plastic pellets with compressed gas or springs. To Sean, who handled a real-life SA80 every day, it was laughable.
    ‘You mean, you run around with real weapons during the week, and then you dick around with wannabe Rambos at the weekend