Zero Hour (2010) ns-13

by Andy McNab

  I’d nodded enthusiastically and his face lit up. ‘So, to recap … I press the app icon if I want secure speech. When a call comes in I wait for the app to give me the go-ahead, and both sides can talk in real time?’ I can’t have been the brightest pupil he’d ever had.

  I took another sip and looked around. Moldova might be in shit state but at least they were trying to get out of their hole. Most of the arrivals coming in from other flights were suited. Most of the guys with wheelies and mobiles stuck to their faces gobbed off in Russian, but I picked out a few European and American voices. A couple of the local papers sitting in the newsstands were English editions. They’d binned visas for people like me and I didn’t even have to show a return ticket. Anything to get new money into the country. But for all that, the staff still mooched about like throwbacks to the old order. They’d brightened up the buildings and forgotten to refurbish the employees.

  At long last the Moscow flight flagged up as landed. It was show time. I suddenly worried that I should have cleaned myself up a bit in the last five and a half hours.

  I got up and walked over to the sliding doors that stood between Customs and the arrivals hall. I knew she’d be one of the first out. Like me, she travelled light. The rest she’d buy when she needed it.

  I felt my stomach flutter. At first I tried to blame it on the drugs. But I couldn’t escape the fact that I was excited - for the first time in as long as I could remember.

  Then the real world kicked in. She’d agreed to come when I’d finally got round to phoning her, but only after I’d waffled and begged and lied about needing her help with a K and R. Perhaps she was only here to find yet another poor girl ripped out of her world, drugged up, beaten and fucked on the other side of the planet. That was the sort of thing that made Anna get up in the morning. I just happened to be along for the ride.

  As the first wave of wheelie bags swept past, I almost had to stand on tiptoe to look beyond them. The doors half closed, then pulled back again to reveal a blonde in a black woollen coat, with a haircut that looked like a German helmet.

  I locked on to her eyes but she seemed to look right through me.

  2

  I tried to read her expression as she came through into the hall. She scanned the faces beyond the barrier, trailing a wheelie behind her. When she finally spotted me, there was no instant smile or greeting.

  I blurted out the first thing that came into what was left of my head. ‘You’ve had your hair cut.’

  ‘I thought I’d ring the changes. More practical for my next job. Well, the one I was going to take.’

  She’d been approached by CNN to cover women’s issues following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in some of the former Soviet republics. She knew the subject matter and this part of the world like the back of her hand. CNN must have liked the hairdo: they’d granted her a two-month deferment.

  She let go of her wheelie and it toppled over. She left it where it was, finally treated me to the smile I was hoping for, and ran the last four or five paces towards me. She threw out her arms, wrapped them around me and held me tight. I did the same. I really couldn’t get enough of this girl.

  Her hair brushed the side of my face. ‘Mmm … Nice smell.’ I took in another lungful of Bulgari. I’d bought her some in London during her last visit.

  She moved her head a little so she could get her mouth closer to my ear. ‘I love it.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘You know what, you idiot? I missed you …’

  The pain in my head leaked away, along with the tension in my shoulder muscles. Anna’s perfume was more effective than any number of Kleinmann’s Smarties. I hadn’t been able to gauge her mood on the phone. She’d immediately offered to help, but didn’t overcook things on the emotional front. I understood that. I was the same. Unlike me, she wanted to save the world. Maybe you could only do that if you kept yourself just detached enough from it to stop all the shit stuff swallowing you up.

  On past performance, I knew that anyone I got involved with wouldn’t stick around too long. Now I also realized that a tiny part of me hoped she might be able to save me too - or at least give me the chance to avoid flushing the last couple of months of my life down the toilet as well as the rest.

  She took half a step back and gave me a long, hard look. ‘You have the picture for me?’

  I righted her wheelie and she took my arm as we walked towards the coffee shop. I opened up my secure BlackBerry and clicked on the blow-up of Lilian. I left her studying the image at the square plastic table as I went and bought more Nescafe instants with hot, sweet milk. They cost twenty lei each, but the woman was more than happy with a couple of dollar bills. Hard currency still said more about you than the local stuff ever could.

  Anna’s eyes were still fixed on the screen when I came back to the table. ‘Does Julian know I’m here?’

  ‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And it won’t hurt us.’

  She turned the BlackBerry screen towards me. ‘She’s very pretty, beneath all that anger. Trafficking has to be the strongest possibility.’

  ‘But she binned her Facebook account before she went AWOL. And she’s a uni girl, switched on, not some pointy-head from the sticks who’ll fall for the nearest scam.’

  Anna smiled like a mother whose kid has just said something naive. ‘You know nothing about this country and its people until you understand about trafficking. I’ll take you to see someone who will help you understand.’

  ‘Have you ever come across the name Hector Tarasov? He’s her father. He has a factory in Transnistria. A factory with a tank outside.’

  She shook her head and reached into her coat pocket for her iPhone. ‘I can Google—’

  ‘No need, mate. I’ve already had a look. Nothing. It doesn’t matter, just background.’

  She sat back, not touching her brew, and tilted her head to one side, studying me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m still trying to work out why you’re here, Nicholas.’ She’d started calling me that recently - told me I deserved all three syllables, especially now I’d got a penthouse and a Porsche. I knew she was taking the piss, but I rather liked it. ‘You should be enjoying your life. You have no more reason to do this sort of work.’

  I thought we were made of the same stuff: she wasn’t going to hang up her Crusader’s shield any time soon. I was surprised she felt the money might have changed things for me. ‘I am enjoying my life. But I don’t want to just fade away.’ I laughed slightly uneasily. ‘I want to die with my boots on.’

  She gave me a puzzled look. ‘I know you’ve taken some punishment over the years, but you should be able to survive a straightforward K and R job …’

  I took another sip of coffee and decided that eight cups was already more than enough. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look her in the eye.

  ‘Except that this isn’t a K and R job, is it, Nicholas? When have you ever been involved in the commercial world?’

  I’d known it wouldn’t be long before she rumbled that one. Recovering kidnap victims is quite a business. If the victim is recovered alive, you can cop a percentage of the premium that would have been paid out by the underwriters in the event of a death, or on any ransom demand. It wasn’t entirely risk free, but Anna was right - it was a long way from being on the receiving end of an RPG.

  ‘I’m doing it for Jules.’ I shifted my chair closer to hers. ‘I couldn’t tell you over the phone.’

  She lifted a hand and stroked my face. ‘You look really pale, Nicholas. You sure you’re feeling OK?’

  ‘Sure. Too many planes, that’s all.’

  She got to her feet. ‘Why don’t you fix the car? I’ll phone and check the hotel reservation, then call Lena. I’ll wait for you outside.’

  ‘Lena?’

  ‘There’s nothing Lena doesn’t know about trafficking.’

  I walked away with a bit of a spring in my step. The only negative so far was that there weren’t any hotels at the airpor
t. If we did find Lilian, we might have to hole up somewhere with her until Tresillian sorted out the safe-house. The beauty of an airport hotel is that all you have to do is scan the departures board, see which plane’s leaving next, and leg it to the sales desk.

  3

  It was only fifteen Ks into Chisinau. There were a surprising number of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes weaving their way between the clapped-out trucks and tractors, but the road still wasn’t exactly choked with traffic.

  The fields on each side of us looked absolutely knackered. As with most of the old Eastern bloc the heavy use of agricultural chemicals, including banned pesticides like DDT, had ripped the heart out of the land. And severe soil erosion from diabolical farming methods had fucked whatever chance these places had of being self-sufficient.

  Anna grimaced as we passed a police car. ‘I’ve been to more than fifty different countries and I’ve never seen cops as corrupt as the ones here.’

  ‘They certainly don’t hang around. I had to cough up a fistful of dollars to get through Customs.’

  ‘I was stopped here twice in two hours once, both for completely invented offences. They target locals the same. They don’t even wait for people to do something wrong. The moment they’ve finished fleecing one victim, they flag down the next.’

  Anna was on a roll.

  ‘And it’s not just about driving. Their favourite trick on a slow night is to stop foreigners at random for “looking suspicious”. Two hundred lei is the standard fine. If we get stopped on the street you’ll be asked for your passport. The law says that foreigners have to carry them at all times. Photocopies aren’t good enough. If you’re alone, keep saying you don’t speak Romanian or Russian. There are no guarantees, but if you’re lucky they’ll be too lazy to pursue it.’

  We hit the city proper. Many of the people on the streets looked pretty well turned-out, particularly the young guys.

  I nodded at a fancy-looking restaurant. ‘I thought we were supposed to be in Europe’s poorest country. Who can afford to eat in a place like that?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Moldova’s the same as everywhere in the old Soviet Union. There’s a handful of haves and a whole nation of have-nots.’ She stared out of the window at the wide concrete esplanades. ‘Most people in Moldova don’t live like this. They scrape by on less than three dollars a day. Away from the towns, work is scarce. I wrote a piece about a small village a few kilometres from Chisinau where every male had sold a kidney to the West. In lots of villages, only children and grand-parents remain. Over a million have left the country to find work. That doesn’t include the numbers who’ve been trafficked.’

  ‘I take it Tarasov is one of the haves?’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘And how do we explain all the Mercs and Hummers?’

  ‘The Moldovans like to claim Transnistria can’t function independently. They say it doesn’t have the industry or infrastructure - but they do, and not just through weapons manufacture. There’s a 480-kilometre border with Ukraine and it’s not controlled. As well as the sale of old Soviet military machinery, extortion of businessmen and money laundering, there is huge trafficking in arms, drugs and, of course, human beings. About two billion dollars are being laundered every year in Transnistria and no one wants to give that up without a fight.

  ‘But what should really have the rest of the world sitting up and paying attention are the dozen or so companies that produce arms around the clock. They’ve turned up in Chechnya, Africa, all over - even in Iraq in Saddam’s day and now Afghanistan. International organizations don’t accept that Transnistria even exists, so they can’t visit and investigate. There, Nicholas - next right.’

  Anna directed me off the main. A couple of turns later, we pulled up outside another drab Soviet-era monolith a dozen storeys high. ‘Forget the arms business. Everyone should just have shares in ready-mixed concrete.’

  The Cosmos was pretty much in the centre of town. I could see a bank with an ATM, a shopping centre, restaurants, and a Western-style supermarket with a multi-storey attached.

  I parked in a guest space and walked towards the entrance, my day sack over my shoulder. She trundled her wheelie a step or two ahead of me.

  ‘To be fair to Stalin, the city had to be totally rebuilt after the Second World War. The little the Germans left standing was flattened by an earthquake.’

  As we approached the reception desk she stopped for a moment. ‘I stay here a lot. They know me. That’s why we’re in separate rooms.’ Her eyes suddenly sparkled. ‘Besides, we’re working. See you back in the lobby in fifteen minutes. Lena isn’t that far away.’

  4

  Lena Kamenka’s office was in the basement of a run-down apartment building south-east of the city centre. An old woman scrubbing her doorstep with a brush and bucket pointed us to a staircase. There was a look of disapproval on her wizened face. Some things, it said, are best swept under the carpet and left there.

  I followed Anna down the metal steps and stood behind her as she pressed the buzzer.

  The girl who answered the door was in her early twenties. She had the kind of jet-black hair you can only get from a bottle.

  ‘Welcome. Please come in.’

  She led us along a corridor, past a battered sofa and coffee-table. The walls of Lena’s office were lined with archive boxes. She sat behind a small desk strewn with files, waffling away at warp speed on the phone. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod.

  ‘You would like coffee?’ The girl smiled shyly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She left the room and Lena gestured to us to sit down. She carried on her conversation for another ten minutes in about three different languages. When she finally hung up, she threw her arms round Anna and greeted her like a long-lost sister.

  I guessed Lena was about thirty. In a stylish blouse, grey cardigan and sharply tailored trousers, she looked more like a lawyer or businesswoman than a social worker - or she would have done if it hadn’t been for her short, spiky blue hair and long, silver-painted fingernails.

  She joined us at a small table covered with yet more files and loose-leaf binders. Photocopied head shots of young women stared up at us from their covers. Most were teenagers. One looked no older than twelve. None of them looked like Lilian.

  Lena was a repatriation specialist. Her main task was bringing trafficked Moldovan girls home. Nearly all of them had been sold into prostitution abroad.

  ‘You are lucky to catch me in.’ Lena sighed. She spoke English like it was her first language. ‘I have to go to Odessa today to collect a girl off the ferry from Istanbul. There’s usually somebody on it for us. As for the airport, sometimes I think I should just take my bed up there and move in.’

  Brothel raids in countries like the UK, Germany and Holland produced many of her clients. Her number was on the walls of police stations all over the world.

  Lena tapped her cell phone. She’d positioned it carefully in front of her and kept checking the signal every minute or so. ‘I never switch it off. Sometimes they’re just metres from the pimps. I might have only seconds to get their details. Often they don’t even know what country they’re in.’

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I’ll get caller ID, but I can’t call back unless they tell me to. It’s too dangerous.’

  We needed to cut to the chase here. ‘Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?’ I leaned in. ‘What’s the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don’t need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it “happy trafficking”. These ones are even given fake passports if
they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty - or whatever else it is they’re trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they’re not bruised and battered they’ll earn more as prostitutes.’ She sighed. ‘It’s only when the person who meets them has taken away their passport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it’s too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.’

  She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena’s desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.

  ‘There isn’t anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?’

  The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn’t quite know where to begin.

  ‘I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.’ Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.

  ‘Another “friend” met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. “Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?” We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.’

  She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. ‘In Italy, the “friend” took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.