by Andy McNab
So the routine was: stop; take a breath; freeze for a couple of minutes; reverse a foot or two. I stayed on elbows and toes. I didn’t turn, just inched backwards.
Once I’d gone six metres, I waited, got up on my hands and knees, turned and crept, Komodo dragon-style, another ten or twelve. Only then did I rise to my feet and walk back to where I’d first encountered the steel mesh.
Once there, I moved back and paralleled it, keeping to the scrub. Whenever I lost sight of it, I angled back in. I had to keep checking. For all I knew, the fence might veer off to the left; I didn’t want suddenly to discover I was a kilometre out.
I did that two or three times before spotting the first of the CCTV cameras. This was no Mickey Mouse gizmo gaffer-taped to a tree. It was mounted on the kind of fifteen-metre-high steel post that you’d see beside any European motorway.
I carried on uphill, following the liquorice strip as it carved its way through the bush. Only nine kilometres to go. I grabbed the CamelBak tube and gave the mouthpiece a quick suck. The water was warm and tasted of plastic after its hours in the bladder, but you know what? It was more than OK. I really loved doing this shit.
7
7 September 2011
02.07 hrs
The night sky was crystal clear and peppered with stars.
The range to target from where I was concealed inside the scrub-line was about eight hundred metres. Gentle slopes surrounded the plateau, so although there was a ridge behind me, I wasn’t actually on what Dino had described as high ground. He’d made it sound like I’d be looking down on the casa at forty-five degrees, but a head full of crystal meth doesn’t do much for your powers of recall. He had got two things right, though: the Pilgrim’s country seat was set in acres of immaculately cut grass, and it was floodlit.
The irrigation system was kicking off big-time. Jets of spray from a network of pipes buried under the green stuff glittered in the lights that swept across the front of the casa. I couldn’t see from this angle, but Dino had said it was the same set-up at the rear.
The lighting was clearly designed to show off the place rather than catch intruders. Its ambient glow had guided me in from more than three Ks away, and made everything in the immediate vicinity of the sprawling hacienda – the terracotta-roofed outbuildings and garages, the fleet of chunky 4x4s – shimmer like a Sunday-supplement spread for an exclusive country hotel. I’d been expecting major-league bling, but what I saw was fit for a discerning movie star – or a president in the making.
There were horses somewhere; I couldn’t see or hear them, but a white-fenced dressage arena stood this side of the tree-lined drive, and sections of the surrounding field had been corralled.
The She Wolf’s answer to the Lincoln Memorial lay in the dead ground at the rear of the casa. The hangar and helipad stood about two hundred metres away to my half-right. A wind-sock hung lifeless nearby, beside a path that curved through the grass towards the light show.
I retreated behind the ridge, shrugged off the CamelBak and grabbed the last can of Monster. I wasn’t too sure what flavour it was – but I was after a caffeine high, not a taste sensation. I knew that the military in Afghanistan had restricted young squaddies to no more than three cans of the stuff a day because armoured-vehicle drivers were getting hyper at the wheel. But after so much travelling and so little sleep, that was the effect I was aiming for. I eased back the ring-pull and it gave a gentle hiss.
Between swigs I fished out the telescopic lens and mini-tripod and used them to transform my iPhone into a night viewing aid. Then I unrolled the freezer bag and bit a hole through its base, big enough to accommodate the lens but small enough to conceal the light from the screen, and poked the tripod legs through its side.
I finished the last of the Monster, carefully squashed the can and tucked it into the CamelBak. I didn’t really have to take it with me – this wasn’t a long-term hide I might need to return to – but old habits die hard.
I scrunched together the open end of the freezer bag and scrambled back to the edge of the scrub. I pressed the tripod into the ground until it was stable, then powered up the phone and got a full signal immediately – of course.
I inserted the ear-plugs, stuck my head and left hand into the bag and tapped the screen to wake it up again. Making sure the lens was still poking through its hole, I adjusted the focus with my right.
I closed my right eye before sparking up the camera app; I wanted to keep some night vision for when I moved in on the target.
8
Eyes take a long time to adjust to the darkness. The cones inside them – which enable you to see in the daytime, giving colour and perception – are no good at night. The rods at the edge of your irises take over. Because of the convex shape of the eyeball, they’re angled at forty-five degrees, so if you look straight at something at night you don’t really see it: it’s a blur. You have to look above it or around it; that lines up the rods and gives you a clearer picture.
It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. What you see when you have a light-affected eye, and what you see those five minutes later, are two very different things. Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process has to start all over again. That’s why I closed the eye that I aimed with – my ‘master eye’ – and monitored the iPhone screen with the other.
I twisted the lens and the hangar came into sharper focus through the crystalline haze thrown up by the sprinklers. A dark vertical shadow told me that the doors were a metre or so ajar. Dino had said there was always a helicopter docked inside; he just didn’t know what kind it was.
I took a series of pictures and pressed send.
I kept checking the target, gently moving the camera left and right. At this distance it didn’t take long to scan the place for signs of life – a light that had just been switched on, maybe, or a shadow across a window. The more I knew about what lay ahead of me, the better.
My plan was to leg it to the chopper and access the house via the escape tunnel – then get out the same way, with Katya in tow. If I couldn’t get into the tunnel, I’d activate Plan B: another six hundred metres across the open ground to the house, and get on with it. Plan C? I didn’t have a Plan C.
I watched the last of the images being uploaded and waited for the ring tone in my ear. When it came I hit the screen and let Dino do the talking.
‘It’s looking good, Nick. Nothing has changed. There’s a signal in the basement, so I’ll be with you all of the way. If she’s there, we’re going to find her. Eight one eight two eight three – you got that?’
‘Got it.’
As I prepared to close down, Dino’s tone changed. ‘Hey … Nick?’
‘What?’
‘It’s kinda like what we did all those years ago, know what I’m saying? Wish I was there with you, man.’
‘You’d be just as fucking useless.’
Each time he laughed, he sounded ever so slightly more like the Dino I used to know.
9
I stayed where I was for another ten minutes, right eye still firmly shut, squinting at the image of the hangar, then the house with my left. Tuning in for the insertion, I went through the what-ifs. What if I was spotted halfway across the open ground? What if the hangar doors weren’t really ajar – that what I thought was a gap was just a shadow? Once I had given myself a few answers, I picked up the freezer bag and scrambled three or four metres below the ridge to sort myself out.
My first task was to delete the call log and replace the SIM card. The old one went down my throat and joined the others in the litre or so of Monster seething in my gut. I shovelled the phone rechargers into one of my jeans pockets and slid the cash – both pesos and USD – into the other. I transferred my cards and passport from my neck pouch to the CamelBak, along with the tripod and the folded bag, then looked around for a place to cache them.
Two large boulders close together would be ha
rd to miss, even if I was running fast. I scraped a hole in the dirt and buried the CamelBak between them. All I needed to do now was work out which direction to leg it if the shit hit the fan.
I returned to the ridge to take a fix on the hangar. It was roughly to my half-left; on the way out, I’d reverse the angle and head for the scrub-line. If I was in a flap with an HK spitting 5.56 and a pack of dogs behind me, I wanted to hit the CamelBak first time.
I double-checked the cache site to fix the boulder combo in my head, then went right, towards the rear of the casa, for sixty metres behind the ridgeline and left again until I got to the edge of the scrub. I wanted to break cover some distance from where I’d hidden the CamelBak: if I was seen or caught, I didn’t want them rerunning the CCTV footage and zeroing in on my real start point.
I lay there another couple of minutes, made sure that everything in my pockets was secure, and tucked the iPhone, with earphones attached, into the neck pouch.
Then, fuck it.
I launched myself to my feet and started running.
10
There’s no clever way of crossing open ground apart from putting one foot in front of the other as fast as you possibly can. And that was all I could do now, apart from keeping the hangar as much as I could between me and the target.
It wasn’t long before the sprinklers were giving me the good news. My shirt and jeans got wetter and wetter as I legged it past the dressage arena. When I hit the grey concrete helipad I slowed to a walk, eyes on the hangar entrance, hands checking my pocket and pouch. If anything had fallen out I’d have to go back.
I reached the steel sliding doors and swivelled so that my back was against the right side of the gap between them. I held my breath. All I could hear was the hiss of the water being forced out of the irrigation pipes. As I listened, I scanned my escape route back to the CamelBak. Once I’d made sure I had it fixed, I dropped to the ground and poked my head into the darkness of the hangar.
Small pools of light spilled from various bits of machinery but there was no sound; no TV, no snoring or talking. If I’d missed anything I was about to find out.
I slipped through the gap and jinked immediately to the right. It was second nature, making entry into a building. I couldn’t see why people got nervous or anticipated a drama the other side – or were sometimes just plain scared. It seemed very simple to me: the less you flapped about what might be on the other side, the quicker you were going to get in there and find out. If there was a drama to deal with, the sooner you gripped it, the better.
The building was empty, apart from the chopper and its support kit. I scanned the silhouette of rotor blades, nose and tail-plane and breathed in the distinctive aroma – not the oily-rag-in-a-workshop smell, more hint-of-avgas-spilled-in-a-clinic. These places are always immaculate, every tool and component precisely where it should be.
I pulled the iPhone from the pouch, powered up the torch beam app and swept it around the large open space in search of the tunnel door. It wasn’t hard to find, between two chest-high multi-drawer toolboxes.
The keys bleeped as I punched in the digits. The 818283 code was designed to be used in a panic, in darkness or in smoke: start at the centre of the bottom row of keys then hit the top three in sequence, alternating with the 8.
The steel-plated door opened with the gentle electronic whine of a hotel safe. The other side of it was solid wood, with a metal bar like you’d find on a fire exit. I wheeled one of the toolboxes across to keep it ajar and ran through its drawers for some heavy-duty pliers. Then I headed to the chopper.
As I got closer I could see it was a Bell 430; it said so on the fuselage. Any president worth his salt would want to be seen climbing aboard one of these four-rotor monsters and settling into one of its six leather seats.
I slid my hand behind the instrument console, grabbed a fistful of wires and chopped at them in a frenzy. If I was running around in the scrub at first light because it had been a total fuck-up, I didn’t want this thing hovering overhead, loaded with lads gripping HK machine-guns.
I severed seven or eight cables. That had to be enough to keep the fucker grounded; I didn’t want to be here playing aircraft vandal all night. I still had to get in, find Katya, and maybe do a favour or two for Dino.
He’d told me the location of Peregrino’s and Liseth’s apartments within the casa, and where they put their guests. But what if Katya wasn’t in any of those places? I needed to crack on before everybody started tucking into their cornflakes and Peregrino wanted to kill someone because he hadn’t got a free toy.
11
The tunnel had been constructed from sewage pipes, with a steel walkway running along the floor. I closed the door behind me and heard the lock whine back into position. I didn’t want anyone popping into the hangar and thinking they might help themselves to a Christmas bonus.
I pushed the bar to check the exit mechanism and the door whined open again. I closed it once more and set off along the walkway. I took my time to keep the noise down, but the sound of my footsteps still echoed in the space ahead of me.
I caught sight of a chamber, three or four metres up to my right, as I moved through the gloom. I sparked up the iPhone beam and pinged a row of large black nylon sail-bags. Liseth didn’t sound like running away was her thing, but planning ahead obviously was.
I unzipped the nearest. It was filled with banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills. I grabbed it by the handles and lifted. Whatever the denomination, a US dollar bill weighs a fraction under a gram, so ten thousand hundred-dollar bills hits the scales at about ten kilos. This thing felt like it weighed thirty. I’d learned shit like that over the years.
So – three million dollars a bag, give or take, multiplied by twelve. She had it all worked out: three bags per spare seat on the aircraft, at ninety kilos a throw and in manageable weights, quick to load. All very nice, but not much use to me right now. I’d been hoping to find a weapon, not win the lottery. I moved back into the tunnel proper.
It took me ten minutes to reach the far end. I took a breath and repeated my listening drills. This time I put my ear to the door. I couldn’t hear anything, so gently pushed the bar. The lock mechanism whirred. I was immediately engulfed by cooking smells.
I craned my neck and found myself looking through a concrete archway into a kitchen that Claridge’s would have envied. Dino had told me there were two – a party kitchen, and an everyday set-up on the other side of the house. Everything I could see, from the worktops and cookers to the rows of utensils and hanging pots and pans, was shiny stainless steel.
In one of the rooms beyond it, Dino had lived with the dogs. But I was heading elsewhere.
The door clicked shut behind me and I went left, up the bare concrete service stairs that led to the banqueting suite and main reception room. The floors were marble, and the centrepiece of the casa was a Scarface staircase that curved left to Liseth’s chambers and right to Peregrino’s apartments, two floors above me.
A corridor the width of a four-lane highway led from the top landing to the guest suites at the back of the house. That was where I was hoping to find Katya.
I reached a door one flight up and went into stopping and listening mode. Silence. I turned the handle as slowly as I possibly could and pushed.
It didn’t give an inch.
I tried again.
Shit, I was going to have to take another route. I didn’t want to go through the admin rooms and risk sparking up the dogs, so I decided to retrace my steps into the belly of the casa and call Dino.
Before I had a chance to return to stainless-steel heaven, the lights came on.
I was fucked – I knew it instantly. I had nowhere to go, other than into the fists of four heavies who’d appeared through the kitchen archway.
The guy in front brought up a bright yellow Taser handgun. I saw the electronic initiation and heard the sigh of compressed nitrogen as the two barbs shot towards me, their wires trailing like kite tails.
<
br /> One hit my shoulder and one hit my arm and I couldn’t do anything except take the pain. I was slammed against the wall with the G force of a Tornado and dropped like a sack of shit.
Apart from 50,000 volts, the only thing that went through my mind was the idea that I should try to curl up and protect my head as I tumbled down the stairs like a second-rate stuntman.
12
The current bounced around my body for far too long as the guy kept his finger on the trigger. I couldn’t do anything but try my best to ride out the muscle convulsions and get ready for what came next. Toecaps piled into my body, punctuated by angry shouts. I curled up and waited for them to drag me to wherever. They’d used the Taser instead of lethal rounds, so they didn’t want me dead straight away.
My heart thumped like a bass drum. It felt like every single one of my organs had been given a massive kicking. The pain sparked up again when they grabbed me by my arms and dragged my arse across the floor, my Timberlands scraping along behind me, my head back, the world upside-down.
They pulled me under the archway and into the kitchen, then ripped the Taser barbs from my body. One of them had buried itself in my skin; the other was firmly implanted in my shirt.
I needed to feel I still had a little control, even if I didn’t: I tried to make sure I knew where I was the whole time, where I was about to end up and who I was against. The two older guys sported thick moustaches and, as always seemed to be the case with Arab and Latin American lip hair, every word they spoke sounded like a command.
The five of us barrelled through a pair of large double doors to a chorus of dog barks bouncing off the bare concrete walls and ceiling. As we pushed through another set, the growls and snarls got a whole lot louder. Then I could smell them, their animal scent blended, bizarrely, with the salon aroma of hairspray and shampoo. I was dragged past three long-haired German Shepherds in floor-to-ceiling cages, their slavering jaws pressed against the steel mesh. I wondered which had replaced the dog that had tried to hang onto Dino.
