Detonator

by Andy McNab

  ‘No vents, Nick …’

  The key phrases from his briefing in Courchevel finally filled my head. ‘And the lead can only mean two things. You know this. They need to store something in there that they don’t wish to be traced. Or something that requires a radiation shield …’

  But that shit was for another day. All that mattered now was that if Anna and Nicholai were being held on the boat this was where they would be.

  Rexho stepped behind the heavy steel panel so that he could pull it fully open and leave me room to enter the pitch-black compartment.

  There was no movement from inside, no voices.

  ‘Anna!’

  Nothing.

  I launched myself forward, grabbed the barrel of the SAW in my plasticuffed hands, and wrenched it to one side. I thought the guy holding it might loosen his grip to prevent himself being pulled down.

  He didn’t. Three rounds kicked off into the door, echoing down the hold, as he hung on tight and nosedived towards the deck and took me with him. My back hit the metal, and now my head did too – hard enough to stop me bouncing straight back up.

  I lay there for long enough to see a red dot on my chest.

  But he didn’t fire.

  Keeping the dot in position, he stepped back and left Rexho room to kneel by me.

  The stiletto went back up my nose.

  And took the side exit.

  Blood spurted across my cheek and into my right eye and mouth as the pain catapulted itself around my head. And Rexho’s hand closed over my throat.

  I felt his sour breath on my skin.

  I knew he was itching to squeeze the life out of me.

  I balled my fists and prepared to swivel and twist and bring them up and—

  He said one word: ‘Don’t.’

  But he didn’t tighten his grip.

  He got to his feet.

  I couldn’t see anything now. My eyes were gummed up with blood, and my face felt as big as a beach ball. The pain pulsated with my heartbeat.

  He stepped over the coaming, then gripped my arms and dragged me into the darkness. There was a metallic echo as the thing clanked shut.

  It wasn’t the only echo in my head. Hesco’s words had forced their way in there too. ‘You … cannot imagine … how much pain … you will be in …’

  20

  I turned and leant my head against the lead and closed my eyes.

  ‘Nick …’

  Voices.

  ‘Nick …’

  Women’s voices. One of them sounds … Russian …

  ‘You stupid little—’

  Not that one. That’s my mate Gaz’s mum. I’d know her anywhere. She’d caught us throwing condoms full of tomato sauce off the roof of his block of flats …

  Fuck, my head hurt. I wanted to try to stop the warm capillary bleeding that was flowing down my neck, but there wasn’t any point.

  Even when you can’t see in a confined space, you know if you’re not alone.

  I was not alone.

  ‘Anna? Nicholai?’

  I flicked on my torch and played the beam across the side wall, across the ceiling ten centimetres above me, along the floor. The space was four metres long and three wide. I took my time scanning it, because I was in no hurry to find what I was now certain I was going to find.

  She sat there looking at me. Wedged into the far corner, her back against the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She was clutching a bundle to her chest.

  She was wearing a black jumpsuit with a wide embroidered sash around her waist. It had always been one of my favourites, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever told her that. A grey fleece too, unzipped. And trainers.

  Nicholai was in a check shirt and jeans I’d bought for him at GUM when he wasn’t even crawling. Anna had taken the piss out of me relentlessly for getting an outfit that was about fifty-three sizes too large. I guess I must have been thinking about a time when we’d go hiking and do boy stuff together.

  There were smudges of blood on our little boy’s clothes. It had leaked from the places her fingernails used to be.

  There was a lot of bruising and grazing on her face. But Anna still looked like the blonde one from Abba. She still looked beautiful.

  I didn’t think she had died in that position. The fuckers had propped her up like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  I felt a flood of bile burn the back of my throat as I knelt beside her. I managed to swallow it back as I brushed her cheek with my fingertips. I leant forward to kiss her forehead. She was cold and tasted of salt and my blood.

  Dijani had said they’d threatened to damage Nicholai.

  I couldn’t bring myself to turn him over at first. Then I did. His face looked … peaceful.

  I picked him up and wrapped him in my arms; tucked his head between my shoulder and my cheek. It was a while before I realized I was rocking backwards and forwards.

  I didn’t need to do that.

  He was already asleep.

  I gave him back to his mother.

  How long had they been there?

  It would have been dark.

  So dark.

  He’d have been frightened.

  She was hurting.

  She’d have known that they’d run out of oxygen at some point.

  An adult breathes in just short of two cubic metres of pure oxygen per day.

  The air we inhale is about twenty per cent oxygen.

  The air we exhale is about fifteen per cent …

  I knew I was trying to lose myself in another sum.

  It wasn’t working.

  She’d have taken him in her arms and told him not to be afraid. That she was here for him. That she loved him. And his dad would be here soon.

  She’d have sung to him. She always did that when he woke in the dark hours of the night.

  I wondered whether she had smothered Nicholai before he started hurting too.

  I hoped so.

  21

  The bile wasn’t the only thing that burnt in me.

  Rage did too.

  The kind that starts low down in your belly and fills every fibre of your being.

  It can fuck you up badly. I’d seen that happen all too often. It can breathe all your available oxygen, and make you do stupid shit.

  But if you point it in the right direction, it can give you fuel when it’s most needed.

  I leant forward again, untied Anna’s embroidered sash, and shoved it against my face in an attempt to stop the blood flow. And, maybe, to smell her for the last time.

  I touched her cheek again. Told her and Nicholai I was going to get us all out of here, then kill the fuckers that had done this.

  I hung the sash around my neck and went back to where the rounds had hit the door. They hadn’t made much of a dent in the steel, but had buried themselves in the lead coating. I worked the top one backwards and forwards until it came loose. Then I shoved my finger into the hole and tried to peel it back. If I could get beneath the skin at the centre of the panel, maybe I could access the reverse side of the rotating lock.

  If not, they’d be back for me soon, now they’d had their laugh. I’d be waiting. Just like infantry who run out of ammo while the enemy are still attacking. They take off their helmets and get ready to batter the fuckers to death, or get killed trying.

  The lead didn’t move a millimetre.

  I undid my belt, raised the buckle and tried with the prong instead. At the fifth or sixth attempt, I started to get somewhere.

  After an hour of hard graft with the prong and the buckle frame I’d managed to make some progress. I was starting to drip with sweat, but I’d opened up about a twelve-centimetre gash in the lining and the longer it became, the easier it was to apply the leverage I needed to open it further.

  I wiped the sweat and blood off my face with the end of Anna’s sash, and carried on. At least the flow had almost stopped.

  I was doing some thinking too. Thinking about what Dijani could have brought here, and where h
e might have brought it from. Odessa was where Minerva’s voyage had begun.

  A WMD?

  I didn’t think so. Putin’s people kept a close watch on those.

  But you could still help yourself to bits that glowed from the rusting hulks in the submarine pens on the Arctic coast.

  After another hour, I’d got to the place I was aiming for. I could see four concave bolts, which must have anchored the wheel mounting. And fuck-all else.

  What had I been expecting? A rotating head like the ones that helped you gain access to a toilet cubicle?

  I wiped my hands on the front of my jeans and took a deep breath.

  Then I heard a noise directly behind my metalwork, and a series of clicks as the locks disengaged. I stood, a chunk of lead in each hand, ready to slam them into the first face I saw and then keep going until they were down or I was.

  Deep breaths, ready to go for it.

  Finally, the door swung open.

  The first figure I saw was in black kit, head to toe, with ‘CARABINIERI’ written in gold across his chest, and a badge on his left sleeve: the GIS’s version of the Regiment’s winged dagger. He didn’t enter, just stepped back into the passageway, leaving room for Luca to come into my cell, his torch burning a hole in the darkness.

  He took one look at me, then at the bodies in the corner.

  He didn’t ask the question. He already knew the answer.

  He just gritted his teeth, gripped my shoulder briefly and beckoned me outside.

  ‘Nico—’

  ‘Don’t.’ I put a finger to my lips.

  More GIS moved aside as Luca followed me back along the passageway and up through the hatch into the hold. I didn’t stop until I’d walked down the gangway and was in among the flashing lights on the quay.

  I scanned the immediate area – unsuccessfully – for the BMW and the Land Cruiser.

  Then I was ready to listen.

  The GIS had stormed in twenty minutes ago, too late to nail Dijani and Rexho, but soon enough to persuade the two guys guarding the hold to hand over their weapons.

  ‘SAWs? Laser sights?’

  Luca shrugged. ‘Maybe. These things all look the same to me.’

  The hatch had been open, so they hadn’t wasted time searching the containers.

  I gestured towards the entrance gate. ‘Did security see them lift anything off the boat?’

  ‘Yes.’ He frowned. ‘They said it looked like a coffin.’

  ‘Mate, when they get the bodies to the hospital, ask the pathologist to test for radiation poisoning. I don’t think that’s what killed them, but the lead is down there for a reason.’

  ‘You can ask.’

  He pointed to what was left of my face and I realized he could hardly speak. He was drowning in the pain I was doing my best to cut away from.

  ‘No. You got a car here?’

  He pointed at a mid-size Alfa Romeo a short distance beyond the ring of VM 90s, and handed me the fob.

  ‘A spare phone?’

  He sorted me there too.

  ‘And a weapon?’

  I knew from his expression that he would have if he could have.

  The coffin confirmed my suspicions about the activity in the barn. The graveyard must be where they’d hidden what they’d taken off the boat. And now the GIS were on his doorstep instead of messing about in Brindisi, I reckoned Dijani would be forced to change his plans and lift it out again before first light.

  ‘One more thing. Ask Pasha if they’ve got any recent thefts of uranium from the Soviet navy on record. From a decommissioned sub, maybe. Murmansk is full of that kind of shit. Over to you, mate.’

  22

  I left him to it and fired up the Alfa. I turned right off the roundabout, paralleling the beach in the opposite direction to the graveyard. I doubted that Dijani had a big enough team to have eyes on the cargo quay, but it wouldn’t do any harm to make it look like I was heading for Bari before doubling back.

  I parked in one of the residential streets between the hospital and the cypress avenue, skirted the roundabout and followed the path up the edge of the cemetery that I’d taken earlier.

  The mobile crane was in position at the rear, engine running and hoist fully extended. The three-tonner was next to it. I could see movement in each cab. And two silhouettes on the ground, waiting to be lifted over the wall.

  I went back to the most easily climbable of the trees and swung myself inside, on to the roof of the nearest building. They weren’t short of cypresses in here too. In the thin moonlight they cast long shadows across the shiny white graves and crosses, and the maze of stone and marble buildings that housed the dead. As my breathing got heavier my split nostril started to make a rasping noise. The skin flapped and kicked off the pain once more. Fuck it, I’d get it sorted later.

  It really was like a separate city, with its own paved streets, squares, monuments and glass-fronted chapels of all shapes and sizes.

  I spotted more movement fifty to my half-right. I didn’t have time to fuck about. I grabbed the edge of the parapet and lowered myself to the ground.

  Like almost everywhere else I’d seen in Italy, this place was a mixture of shiny new, classic old, under construction and falling apart. Keeping in the shadows, I made the most of the cover provided by rows of headstones. A light flickered somewhere to my left. It wasn’t a torch beam, though. It was one of those little electric candles that someone had left running on an altar.

  Something else glinted by a mound of freshly dug earth. When I got closer, I found a shovel that hadn’t been gathered at the end of the day and returned to the storeroom.

  I picked it up and looped round towards what turned out to be a not-quite-derelict family mausoleum.

  The stone facing had flaked away and the roof was crumbling. The door must have fallen off a while back. It had been replaced by a random selection of boards nailed to a rickety frame. That too had been moved aside to allow access. I couldn’t see much of the interior except for a bunch of memorial plaques and a big hole in the ground.

  I heard voices coming from inside – not very happy ones – and saw the silhouette of a body climbing out of it. When he reached the threshold, the figure turned and issued a string of instructions to whoever was still in the pit. It sounded like they were doing the heavy lifting. The boss man had swapped his sharp grey suit for jeans and a fleece, but he still didn’t want to get his hands dirty. A couple of thick undertakers’ straps lay coiled at his feet.

  I scanned the area around us. Nobody else seemed to be coming to help. Rubble was moved. A tarpaulin pulled off. Dijani was still calling the shots. He still had his back to me.

  I was no more than five paces from him now. I gripped the shaft of the shovel with both hands, raised it across my right shoulder like an axe, and swung the edge of the blade as hard as I could at the side of his neck. It wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, so I didn’t take his head clean off. It stayed attached to his body long enough to tumble forwards into the pit with him.

  I followed him in. Dijani landed on top of the one on the left. The one on the right was tangled up in the tarp they’d used to cover the coffin. I rotated the shaft so the shovel blade pointed downwards and chopped it deep into the place where his neck joined his torso. I felt his collarbone shatter and saw blood spurt from the wound. He still managed to hook my ankles with his good arm and sweep my feet from under me.

  As my arse hit the ground he raised the same hand – not to hit me, but to try and stem the flow from his shoulder.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  I kicked him backwards and focused on his mate.

  The guy was lying alongside the coffin, still trying to shift the weight of the boss man off his chest. His eyes widened as I turned and raised the shovel once more, like I was about to dig myself a hole.

  He raised both hands in surrender.

  Fuck that.

  I brought the blade down on his bulging Adam’s apple.

  I
glanced across at the other guy. He’d failed to locate and seal the soggy end of his carotid artery between his thumb and forefinger, and was bleeding out. Even if he’d succeeded, there wouldn’t have been enough oxygen feeding his brain.

  I frisked them both for weapons. No joy there. And even in the darkness, I could see that neither of them was Rexho Uran.

  I grabbed Dijani by the ear. That was all it took to remove his head from his shoulders. I held it up for a moment, thinking I might feel some satisfaction. But I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  Then I chucked it into the pit and climbed out of the ruins of the suddenly rather overcrowded mausoleum.

  23

  I heard two or three sets of footsteps approaching and saw some more of those red dots dancing among the headstones. I hung a rapid left and legged it back to what I could now see was a small family memorial chapel. I heaved myself on to the roof and out.

  As I swung down from the tree branch, I heard more footsteps at the back, and another engine sparking up.

  I hit the keypad of Luca’s spare mobile as soon as I’d crossed the main and was fifty from the Alfa. ‘Mate, get the GIS to the cemetery now. Dijani is dead. There are still at least four of the fuckers, in a blue Fiat three-tonner, and a hoist. They’re trying to move the shit they brought in.’

  ‘You still think uranium?’

  ‘Tell GIS to get a fucking move on and we’ll find out.’

  I’d just pressed the fob and seen the Alfa’s lights flash when I heard the shriek of tyres behind me. I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the ignition button as the rear-view filled with light.

  I swung the wheel hard left, flicked the Alfa’s headlamps on to main beam and did a screaming U-turn. Tyres smoking, I throttled up, straight into the path of the oncoming wagon.

  He lost his nerve first. He hadn’t taken his helmet off and got ready to fight.

  He swerved right and bounced off a line of parked cars. I glanced left as I sped past. A BMW SUV. Rexho wrestling with the wheel.

  The darkness ahead of me was filled with blues and twos. I glanced behind to see the SUV doing half a doughnut, steadying itself then coming after me.