Heavy Duty People

11 THE HIT

Under cover of darkness and using their anonymous white Transit van, I took the guys to the mine on Tuesday evening. I thought it best to wait until the last minute. Again there was a risk in leaving it so late as the stuff could have been moved but I still didn't think it was a big one, and if any of Dazza's crew did go down there, the last thing I wanted was for them to find they had no stash. Even if they didn't cancel the drop, they would be armed to the teeth from elsewhere.

As before we dumped the van a way down the road, close to the nearest farm so that it wouldn't raise any suspicion. I had brought a couple of shovels and I handed one each to Gut and Popeye as we left the van while I shouldered a roll of rope.

'What are these for?' Gut asked.

'You'll see,' I said, leaving him none the wiser, but I guess thinking that Dazza's stuff was buried and we were going to need to dig it up.

The reality was that they were to dig us out if the mine roof came down. I'd had a good look when I'd been in the other night and I hadn't liked what I had seen. Things hadn't improved any since Billy and I played down there twenty odd years ago as kids, and they were dodgy enough then. These old drifts were safe enough alright once you got properly underground. From about twenty to thirty feet in they were carved out of the solid rock, hard limestone, and so that wasn't a problem, other than where the old guys had chipped away upwards, following a vein of ore. They would stack the spoil on wooden shelving above the tunnel as they went ever higher because it wasn't worth the effort to cart out worthless rock when they didn't need to, and then sometimes the shelves would collapse as the supports rotted away, sending the deads cascading down into the tunnel below. But that was only a problem much further into the hillside than we were going.

No, it was the entrance I was worried about. Before it got to the solid rock, the entrance tunnel was just driven through the earth and scree of the hillside, with the roof supported on timber pit props, but timbers that had now been stood with their bases in the cold running water draining out of the mine for over a hundred years, or maybe even two. Going in you were betting your life on what could be some pretty rotten timbers.

If you knew what to look for you could see them elsewhere around the area, scars in the hillsides where the entrances to old tunnels had collapsed in over the years since they had been abandoned.

I led them to the entrance, and they followed me underground.

'Wow, SVD Dragunovs!' Popeye sounded impressed as he yanked the lid off one of the longer boxes and peered inside.

'What are they?' I asked. I didn't really know much about guns.

'Sniper rifles, semi-automatic, integrated telescopic sight,' he said, putting one to his shoulder and sighting out down the mouth of the tunnel, 'supposed to be good.'

'Yeah, but this is what we need for what we're gonna do,' said Gut, turning an AK47 over in his thick hands, 'Kalashnikovs!'

I had pulled a pistol from yet another box and was screwing in a silencer that had been stowed beside it.

Popeye looked over. 'Makarov,' he said, 'nine millimetre, standard Warsaw Pact side arm. He's really got himself all the shit, hasn't he?'

'He has now,' growled Gut. 'How much do we take?'

'All of it.'

'Aren't they going to spot it's missing?'

'They won't. And even if they did, if it's all gone it's a bit late then, isn't it?'

'We'd risk losing the element of surprise,' Popeye pointed out practically, 'and they might tool up from somewhere else.'

'True, but trust me. They won't know a thing about it until it's too late. That's what that's for,' I said swinging the torch round to shine on where I'd left the rope I'd brought.