by Lee McGeorge
What else?
A detonator of some kind. ANFO has a high shock tolerance and the web pages said regular blasting caps wouldn’t work. Blasting caps? Paul searched in more detail. The high explosive needed a small explosive to trigger. He found instructions on how to make blasting caps from a substance called HMTD, short for hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Paul chuckled as he read the recipe. “Hexamine,” he whispered with a smile. “I’ve already got it.” The prime ingredient was the same solid fuel used in his camping stove. He spoke the recipe quietly, “Dissolve hexamine in hydrogen peroxide and neutralise with bicarbonate of soda,” he traced the words with his finger as he read. “Jesus. Who would have guessed it was that easy? High explosives from fire-lighters and hair bleach.”
He found a simple trigger using an array of batteries and a filament fuse wire. Connect the filament to the battery array, the heat triggers the HMTD, triggers the ANFO and blows the fuck out of everything.
The research took less than an hour but he spent another hour watching tutorial videos online. People loved filming themselves making explosives on the kitchen table. Americans in particular loved blowing up refrigerators in the desert.
----- X -----
Cornel was nursing his morning coffee when the phone rang. The name on the screen was Lupescu. “Buna, Ion,” he said.
“Cornel. I’ve just had a call from Lucian Noica. McGovern is in play.” Lupescu recounted the story third hand from Noica whilst simultaneously reading an Interpol email being shared between police forces of Britain, Albania and Romania. Gjokeja was taken.
“I told them,” Cornel said of the Albanians. “I told them not to underestimate McGovern and that’s precisely what they did.”
“Do you know about the email?”
“Email? No, what email?”
“The Popescu girl. You were right, those pictures they took of her bloodied and tits out, they emailed to McGovern. The British say he accessed his mail and a day later he turned up in Albania and massacred them.”
“But he took Gjokeja, right? He didn’t kill him that we know?”
“He was taken alive.” Lupescu confirmed.
The wheels were turning in Cornel’s head. Why would McGovern kidnap Gjokeja? What could he want? Why was he supposedly heading to Romania?
“Okay, Ion, I’m going to put the Albanians here in Brasov under surveillance. I’ll stake them out and if anything happens I’ll call you.”
----- X -----
Fertiliser was easy to buy. Ammonium Nitrate. As much as you need, in ten kilogram sacks from the combined home and garden superstore. He bought one bag. He bought a pack of one thousand, three centimetre nails. He bought wire, batteries, fuse wire and hi-fi speaker cable. He moved on to another hypermarket to pick up hair bleach, bicarbonate of soda and marker pens and all the other accoutrements of his shopping list. By a little after noon he was back at the hovel and tinkering.
The HMTD was the only process that required time to settle so he did that first. He crushed the hexamine tablets and mixed them with hair bleach until it turned into a milky white solution; then strained that solution through a coffee filter and rinsed the resultant powder in bicarbonate of soda and water. That was it. Creating a high explosive was that simple.
Whilst the HMTD was left to dry, he pulled apart marker pens for the thin steel body and tried the filament trick. He tied a tiny thread of filament between two pieces of wire and connected a battery. The filament popped with a blue flash and a wisp of smoke. His blasting caps would be made by putting the filament inside the pen barrel and filling it with HMTD.
The caps were ready to assemble after an hour. He folded a sheet of paper to funnel the white powder into the pen barrels and made three identical blasting caps. He took one outside to test, pushing it deep into snow and earth so that if there was any real force it would direct the blast upwards. He unspooled his drum of speaker wire and connected one end to the buried cap and moved back ten yards.
He touched the contacts.
It went off like dynamite sending him into a stoop and turning his back. Chunks of earth and snow blasted skywards, a small but perfectly formed mushroom cloud billowed. Debris and earth flew past with the bang.
“Fuck me…” was all he could say as he stumbled back. Frozen earth was blown so high it continued falling for a few seconds. HMTD was badass and that was just the blasting cap. It was the size of a marker pen and it went off like a grenade.
Paul got to work on the next part, the ANFO. He would mix it and pack it into the pressure cooker along with the nails and would then pack two blasting caps into the mixture just to make sure.
----- X -----
Miklos was about to settle down for the afternoon when his phone beeped. He had a bottle of beer in one hand and the opener in the other. There was little else to do. They were locked in a waiting game.
The phone beeped again. He looked at the screen.
Message from Aldo Gjokeja.
A video message… Aldo had never sent a video message before.
Miklos opened the file. The video started to play.
He reached out to rest the beer on the table without taking his eyes from the screen, the bottle toppled over the side andthe sound of it smashing caught the attention of Agron and Ludovik. They saw Miklos staring slack jawed at the screen. They saw him pull his face away in revulsion. They saw the colour drain from him.
“Jesus, Fucking, Christ!” he said.
The message ended.
“What is it?” Ludovik asked.
“Get the van started,” he replied whilst searching for a contact in the phone. “Full weapons.”
Ludovik and Agron looked to one another then jumped to action, rushing outside to the van.
Miklos made a call. “Hi, it’s me, are you OK?”
A tiny woman’s voice from a distant country replied, “Yes, why?”
“I haven’t time to explain, but you might be in danger. I need you and Melina to get out of the house and go to your Mother’s. I need you to do that right now… Got that?”
“Yes, I’ve got that, but why, what’s wrong?”
Miklos took a breath. “I can’t explain now. Just do this right now… I’ve got to go… I love you… I love you both.” He hung up. He was never one for telling his wife he loved her. She said it to him all the time but he never said it back. Today was different. Today someone had threatened to kill his wife and daughter. For some men, it takes a threat that extreme to make them appreciate their wives.
Miklos followed Ludovik and Agron to the van. Ludovik was pressing bullets into the magazine for an AK47 rifle. Agron loaded clips to an automatic pistol. “What is it boss?” he asked.
“McGovern has Aldo.” Agron and Ludovik stopped working simultaneously. “He took him from Albania and brought him here. Do you know Aldo’s nurse?”
“Yes,” Agron said. “Floriana.”
“McGovern just cut her throat and killed her on camera. He sent me the video. He wants to hand Aldo back to us in exchange for leaving him alone.” Miklos held up the mobile phone to show a text message. “He sent us a GPS coordinate of where we can pick up Aldo.”
“This has to be a trap,” Agron said.
“Of course it’s a fucking trap,” Miklos said. “But he knows who we are. Aldo told him everything. He knows our names, how to find us... So we’ve got a choice, we can go home and wait for him to turn up on our doorstep, or we can go and finish this fucker… He’s one man, we’re three. We’re armed and experienced. We’ll go there, find Aldo, hopefully alive, kill McGovern… then spend the rest of our lives enjoying Aldo’s goodwill.”
----- X -----
Cornel had checked the GPS location of the Albanians before leaving his home. He’d downloaded an application for his phone that positioned their Transporter at the farmhouse in Sacella. The software worked flawlessly, but when he arrived he saw no van.
“Oh fuck… did they find it, did they find the tracker?”
>
He checked his phone again and resent the locator signal… he waited... a reply from the tracker and the map position changed. They were heading East out of the jurisdiction of Brasov. Something was happening. McGovern was fading into view and the Albanians were on the move.
----- X -----
“I don’t like the look of this place.” Agron said as he drove closer to the airfield.
They were approaching many miles of flat and snow covered land punctuated with abandoned aircraft hangers. Huge, half circle structures that were missing their doors and a lot of the roofing. Miklos sat up front beside Agron whilst Ludovic checked a map on his laptop in the rear jump seat. “This is the place,” he said.
It was a secluded location. A weird place of little purpose, far from the city and mostly inaccessible due to the snow covered roads. The buildings were a latticework of light metal coated in corrugated steel plates. Much of the roofing had blown away, rusted to dust, or collapsed. If there was a runway here under the snow it was doubtful it could be used to land anything. Perhaps it was abandoned military, perhaps nothing more than a field for private fliers in the summer, but in winter it was a vast expanse of snow and rust.
“There’s Aldo’s car… Look!” Agron pointed.
By one of the longest hangers the black Mercedes stood out as the only beacon of human presence.
“Stop here,” Miklos said.
The three men looked out through the front window. “He can see us,” Miklos said. “He’s left the van there to guide us into a place with no cover. Somewhere, right now, McGovern is watching us.” Miklos thought for a moment, breathing through his nose, his brow furrowed. How to do this? How, how, how? “OK. This is what I’m thinking. We get a bit closer, I get out and walk us in. Agron, you follow me slowly with the van. Ludo, you walk in behind with the AK. I don’t want us all in the same place. If anything happens, Ludo, use the van for cover and pin him down whilst I get clear.”
Ludovik handed a pistol and two magazines to Miklos.
“Get us a little closer. Agron, you watch forward. Ludovik, keep watching right, I’ll watch left. Get us another two hundred meters then I’ll get out.”
The van crawled forward at walking pace. The men scoured the landscape. There was nothing to see. If McGovern was out there he’d picked a sensational landscape to hide in. He could be dug into a snowdrift and invisible, he could be peeking through a crack in one of the buildings. There was no way to see him.
“Wait,” Ludovik said softly. He was looking at his computer screen. “The GPS coordinate he gave is precisely in the middle of that building.”
“The one with the van?” Miklos asked.
Ludovik nodded.
“Let me out now.”
Miklos double checked the weapon. A bullet was chambered, the hammer was cocked. He got out of the van and felt a sudden piercing cold cut through his clothing. He looked across the airfield as freezing air flowed around his collar. He listened as the rear doors opened then closed. Ludovik was ready.
Miklos walked forward. The van crept along in tow.
Normally, holding a gun made him feel physically larger. It made him feel superior and in command. Even when a potential opponent was also tooled, he still felt the bigger man because he knew he had the aggression to shoot first; but this was different. McGovern was different. Floriana the nurse was sliced open and her blood drank on camera. There was no ambiguity to what McGovern had done. It was a display of just how far he was prepared to go. Miklos knew he would never kill a woman to drink her blood. It was the preserve of the psychopath. Miklos was a villain, not a psycho. You can’t trust psychopaths. You can’t anticipate how they react.
They came to the Mercedes. Miklos held a hand to halt the van and stepped forward. He looked inside. Empty. He crouched down to look underneath. He didn’t expect to see McGovern, it was a subconscious delaying tactic, stalling before he entered the hangar.
----- X -----
Cornel lost the GPS signal on the van. He’d pinged it a few times and it had responded within seconds, but now it had vanished and stopped replying. He pulled over on the side of the motorway to check the map.
“No, no, no, don’t do this to me now.”
How could they vanish? He looked carefully, moving the map back and forward on the screen with his finger.
A weak signal, perhaps? The tracker needed to be in range of a cell tower to work and the tracker was shielded by the bodywork of the vehicle. It needed a clear signal. A weak signal just wouldn’t work.
Cornel moved the map with his finger, looking along the last known trajectory of the Albanians. They had definitely gotten on to this motorway and there should be cell phone coverage. There were no exits except… there was something. A road branching North that culminated in nothing.
There were no other exits, no towns to pass through.
If they were still on the motorway they would have cell phone coverage, but if they had gotten off back there and headed North into the wilderness...
Cornel turned the car and backtracked.
----- X -----
Miklos edged around the corner to peek from cover. Aldo Gjokeja was in his wheelchair in the middle of the open space.
The building was immense, perhaps a hundred meters long. It was barely even a building as both ends of the structure were open, meaning snow had drifted through to glaze the floor with a frozen carpet. Miklos looked around. The ceiling was almost ten meters high, held up with a latticework of steel. Along the left side were concrete structures that may have been offices or storerooms. There was nothing to them now. No glass in the windows, no doors hanging on the frames.
“Aldo. ALDO!” Miklos called, scanning the scene, gripping the gun with both hands.
Gjokeja didn’t respond or move.
“Oh, fuck,” Miklos mouthed. There was no choice. He had to walk the fifty meters to him. He called out, “Ludovik?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep an eye open behind. And keep a look on these corners on the left.”
Miklos took a tentative step forward and waved a hand forward to summon Agron to keep driving.
The crusted floor felt scarily unfamiliar underfoot. The man sitting in the wheelchair ahead looked out of place, the doorways darkened to blackness on the left could hide a nasty surprise.
“Aldo?” Miklos called again as he got closer. “Aldo, can you hear me? Where is he?”
There was no response.
“Aldo… Aldo, can you hear…” Then Miklos saw. Gjokeja had tape around his head, his mouth covered, but his eyes rolled in his head, he was alive. Miklos snapped his attention away to recheck the doorways on his left. The van rolled behind. They got to within twenty meters of Aldo Gjokeja. Miklos raised his hand to halt the van. “Agron, Ludovik… stay here. Ludo, stay sharp, I’m going to get him.”
----- X -----
Paul watched the van creep into the hanger. He’d spent two nights sleeping in this place when looking for a squat. It was desolate and hidden but too exposed for comfort. He never felt he could make a home here despite the protection from the elements, it was too industrial, not homely; but once he had in mind the idea for an ambush he knew it was the perfect place.
Gjokeja was parked in the middle. Whichever end they approached from, they had to get in close and tight.
He watched them from his hiding place, a random hole in the ground that was probably an inspection trench at some point, but of strange and obscure shape. Only the original designers could explain its true function. In the modern day, the hole in the ground served no purpose other than to conceal him.
The van inched closer. Paul peeked out from under a piece of sheet metal he’d dusted with snow. One man was at the front, then the van, then a second man at the back with a machine gun.
Gjokeja sat motionless knowing there was a pressure cooker bomb laced with a thousand nails beneath his chair.
The man at the front edged closer. He halted the van, he stepped f
orward gingerly as Paul held the command wires for the detonator close to the battery array.
The man stepped closer to Gjokeja, moving his right foot forward as though testing uneven ground before sliding his left foot to catch up. It made Paul grin. Any moment now they were all getting blown to kingdom come. The man swept his gun along the doorways to his left. Then looked at Gjokeja who seemed to be screaming from behind the duct tape gag. He must have signalled with his eyes to the opposite side as the gunman suddenly swept his weapon in Paul’s direction despite there being nothing to see. Gjokeja knew McGovern was hidden in a hole in the floor, the gunman didn’t… but he was looking... there was no reason for…
Fuck it!
Paul lowered himself to shield from the blast. He held his breath and touched the command wires to the battery array.
Nothing happened.
The man stepped forward to Gjokeja and pulled the tape from his mouth.
“BOMB!” He heard the old man screech and then something animated in Albanian.
Paul touched the command wire again.
“Ludovik…” the man at the front called.
“Yeah,” shouted the man with the machine gun.
The gunman was looking under the wheelchair, he saw the pressure cooker, he saw the speaker wire, he followed it with his eyes along the floor towards the hole in the ground. He raised his weapon to aim straight at the metal sheet covering the hole in the floor. He screamed an instruction at the machine gun man who came out from behind the van, gun raised.
