Recoil by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page B

wrecks sent plumes of black smoke into the sky. Bodies lay scattered below the Cobra two-ship that hovered to cover our withdrawal. Grey smoke puffed from their 20mms and the rounds bounced off the ground like hard rain hitting a pond.
    I turned towards Standish.
    He wasn’t interested in anything on the ground. He was already giving the general a slap on the shoulder and a big victory grin.

PART TWO
    Café Raffaelli
    Lugano, Switzerland
    Thursday, 8 June 2006

1
    There’s an entire street of jewellers and designer clothes shops in Lugano that probably shift half of Prada’s and Rolex’s annual output between them. You can positively smell the money walking along Riva Albertolli, or resting its rather large arse at one of the outdoor cafés beside the lake.
    The small but perfectly formed city is in the south-east, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, just ten minutes’ drive from the border. It’s unlike anywhere else in the land of Toblerone and tax-dodging; for starters, the mountains protect it from the north wind, so the place enjoys its own temperate microclimate. In fact, the whole place is Little Italy, from the frescos in the cathedral-sized churches to the brands of ice-cream sold on the palm-tree-lined boulevards. The only thing non-Italian is the driving. This is still Switzerland, after all.
    Silky had been working at the Mercy Flight office ever since we’d got there. ‘It’s the only way I don’t feel guilty about my life,’ she said. ‘A year or two on the road, six months putting something back.’
    Her office was as close to the Gucci quarter as the charity could afford so it could tap into some of that passing wealth. She and I had got into the habit of meeting for lunch at one of the pavement restaurants; she took an hour off from saving the world, and I took an hour off from reading the English papers and wishing we were back on the road.
    We’d been in Lugano a month, and as far as I was concerned that was three and a half weeks too long. I wanted us to be in the Far East, India, any of the places we’d talked about. Maybe even back to Australia. I didn’t really care where, quite frankly, so long as she came with me.
    She’d fucked me off on that idea for a month or two, but to make sure she didn’t fuck me off altogether, my Visa card had just taken a two-thousand-Swiss-franc dent – and all I had to show for it was a little box containing a billion-billionth of the world’s gold reserves and a diamond you needed an electron microscope to see. She often said that less was more, and I hoped she’d stick to her guns on that, but in any case, it was all I could afford. I needed to keep something back for my airfare to Sydney, and a few weeks’ pocket money in case there were no freefall meets and therefore no rigs to pack to make enough to live on. She had money, of course, but that wasn’t the point.
    I’d been tempted to head straight from the jeweller’s to her office and get it over and done with, but quickly thought better of it. When it came to a sense of humour, there were some areas where she remained decidedly German. If I was going to sweep her off her feet, I had to do it correctly.
    So I wandered down the road instead, bought a copy of The Times for the price of a paperback, and pulled up a chair at Raffaelli’s, her favourite outdoor place.
    I ordered a cappuccino, put on my shades and got to grips with the day’s front page as the sun beat down on my neck. Same old, same old. Car bomb in Baghdad. Political scandal in Washington. And the big news from London? John Prescott playing croquet when he should have been running the country.
    I couldn’t be arsed to read on. I put the paper on the table and stretched my legs and arms as I looked out over the lake.
    There wasn’t a breath of wind: Lake Lugano was a mirror, reflecting the sun back at a cloudless sky. There had to be worse places on earth to sit and pass the time of day.
    A gaggle of women walked past,