Exit Wound by Andy McNab Page A

dejected.
    I laughed. ‘Didn’t they teach you cab skills in the RAF?’
    Red Ken looked up and down the road. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done in Para Reg.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and stepped off the kerb. Of course a cab was approaching – that was why he’d done it. He waved it down.
    We loaded the clubs into the boot and Dex jumped in next to the driver. He was an Indian in a white shirt and tie. Dex was going to blend in perfectly. ‘Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club.’
    There wasn’t much else to say. We weren’t going to talk in front of our new mate, even though the big thing for me was that we were on our way to meet the middleman for this ‘little wheeze’, as Dex kept calling it. He had his head buried in Golf Clubs of the World and was getting very hyper.
    He turned and nodded with excitement. ‘Par seventy-one, 6,857 yards.’
    I nodded back as if I gave a shit. Red Ken smiled, but it faded as he looked out of the window at the throngs of Filipinos and Indian cleaners washing store-fronts. Cranes cut into the sky in all directions above half-finished buildings. The ones that had been completed towered above us. I’d never seen so much marble, glass and steel. Dubai looked like Hong Kong on steroids, designed by architects on LSD.
    We peeled off the highway and hit the approach road to the clubhouse. It had been designed to look like an enormous white Bedouin tent, pitched in a sprawling oasis of green.
    The cab drew up outside the main door and Dex jumped out. He busied himself with loading the bags onto a trolley while Red Ken left to look for the elusive fourth man of this crew. I was left to pay the taxi. That was one bit of cab skills they both knew.
    A Land Cruiser drew up behind Dex while he was still unloading. The driver and passenger were two sun-dried women in their sixties. They looked like they’d been getting drunk in the city since Margaret Thatcher’s era. They had all the golf gear on, down to the peaked plastic hats without the crown. Their jewellery jangled, but not as much as their accents. The driver left the engine running. One clambered down in a pink polo shirt, checked shorts and golfing shoes and shouted back into the wagon, at her blue-shirted friend, ‘I’ll get a boy.’ She was Romford, born and bred.
    She walked between the bonnet of her 4x4 and the rear of our taxi as Dex straightened up from the boot. She pointed at her wagon. ‘When you’ve finished with those, our bags are in the back.’
    I opened my mouth to object but Dex was too quick. He put on the worst Indian-waiter voice ever. ‘Yes, memsahib.’ He gave an exaggerated bow that was totally wasted on them as they disappeared into the clubhouse.
    ‘What the fuck you doing, Dex? We got a job to do here, mate.’
    He smiled and did the Indian shaking of the head to indicate yes. ‘Getting in character.’
    Red Ken came back in time to see Dex at the back of the Land Cruiser and me with the trolley holding our bags. Another Indian guy was waiting to drive it away. ‘What’s he doing now?’
    I explained as we picked up the bags and headed inside. Red Ken steered me to a leather sofa while we waited for Dex. We watched as he deposited the bags with the women in the foyer. ‘You know, this place is filled with so many obnoxious, incompetent fuckers, especially in senior positions. Back in the UK they wouldn’t last ten minutes behind the counter at McDonald’s, let alone in management.’
    Dex waited for a tip. The sun-drieds ignored him.
    Red Ken was living up to his name – come the revolution and all that. ‘I bet those two have maids like everyone else here, running round doing everything but wipe their arses. They used to be Filipinos, but now it’s Somalian girls. These people get a maid and they have total power over her. They keep her passport, even though it’s illegal. They decide what to pay her, and even when she can have a break or a day off.
    ‘Chrissie hated the way they were