Zero Hour (2010) ns-13

by Andy McNab

  ‘Just painted on?’

  She nodded slowly, her head still down, as her mind took her back to wherever that place was.

  I grabbed one of the cartons of UHT and sat down carefully beside her. She liked that.

  I passed the milk over. ‘What happened? How did you get here with the other girls?’

  ‘I was walking home from school. Men came in a car when I was outside my village. Ukrainian men. They hit me, and put me into the trunk.’ She looked up. Her face was a mask. ‘They drove me to Odessa and locked me in a garage. In the trunk.’

  She tried ripping at the carton’s edge to release the milk but she couldn’t do it, and it wasn’t because she hadn’t the strength. A tear welled in the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. She put the carton onto the carpet as she tried to fight back. I picked it up.

  ‘I was a virgin. I wanted to wait until I married, like my mother. But the men …’

  I handed her the open carton and gave her a moment or two to gather herself. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I escaped from the garage. I went to the police. But they arrested me and sent for the Ukrainian men. They handed me back to them.’

  I waited while she wiped her eyes. She took a swig of milk, her hands rigid with anger and distress. I was beginning to understand why Anna had felt so strongly about me not just handing her on.

  ‘The men took me on a boat. I was on it for a long time. I had to …’ She turned away, overcome by shame once more. ‘I had to pay my fare …’

  ‘You came here, to Amsterdam?’

  ‘No, Copenhagen. Your picture, the girl - she is here now. She came here also. She told me Copenhagen. The men there …’ She rubbed an index finger over where her eyebrows should have been. ‘The men there did this.’

  ‘You both stayed at a house there, an old, cold house?’

  She nodded. ‘A week, maybe ten days, I do not know.’

  ‘And Lilian, the girl in the picture - she stayed there with you?’

  She nodded. ‘For maybe three or four days, with three other girls.’

  My mind went back to the meeting with Robot, and what had been happening above us.

  ‘Then they put us into a truck with lots of furniture and brought us here. But I escaped. I climbed up the tower.’

  She wasn’t celebrating.

  ‘Angeles, how many men are there in the building? Where do they stay, what do they do? Do you think you could do me a drawing of the layout?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It was dark when we arrived and then we were kept in the room.’

  ‘Did you go out of the room to eat, use the toilet?’

  She shook her head. ‘There is bucket in the room and they bring food from a takeaway. I don’t know what else, I—’

  ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ I didn’t want to put her through any more of that shit than I had to. ‘What about your parents? Brothers? Sisters? Family? Did they try to find you?’

  She shook her head. ‘My father? The Ukrainian men said they have given my father money. If he says anything or I go home they will burn our farm down. No one will help. My mother? What can she do?’

  ‘The men, maybe they lied … Maybe they just said that so you wouldn’t run home. You know what? My friend has people in Moldova who will help you. One of them was like you, taken away and all alone. But she is safe now, like you will be. They can find out if it’s true what the Ukrainian men told you. Whatever happens, they can help you go home. Would you like that?’

  She nodded. The tension was starting to ebb out of her face and neck. She gave me a small, shy smile. ‘My brother … he looks like you.’

  ‘Poor guy!’ I gave Angeles as much of a grin as I could manage and left her to finish her picnic. The Bergen was in the loading bay, where I’d left it. I dragged out the twenty-litre plastic container and went back upstairs. I was going to need a lot of water for what I had in mind.

  She watched me as she tidied empty cans into a bag.

  ‘Stay here. Get some sleep. I’ve got to fill this, then do some work downstairs.’

  She looked scared again.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, but do not come down, OK? Just stay here. Do you understand?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s not long now. Then you’ll be safe.’

  She took a breath. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Nick.’ I turned away quickly and disappeared to fill the container. My head had filled with images of what had happened to her and Lilian in the green house. I had to cut away.

  I took the showerhead off and used it like a hosepipe. It was easier than fiddling around in the sink.

  I hobbled down the stairs again with the full container and the bundle of vomit-soaked clothing. I laid out the kit at the back of the loading bay, behind the two vehicles. The fluorescents flickered uneasily. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need much light.

  I took out the camping stove and screwed in the fuel, then opened the Russian-doll nest of pans.

  The bulkiest item of all was the aspirin. I’d picked up 320 tablets of the stuff, and was going to use them all - minus the two I’d already taken, the two I swallowed now, and a couple more for luck.

  The red-hot poker perked up again, but I found myself grinning like an idiot. I was going to sort out the bastards who’d done those things to Lilian, Angeles and the kids I’d spotted in the green house, and I was going to use 314 aspirin to give those fuckers the world’s biggest headache. The kind of headache you got from an Improvised Explosive Device.

  5

  I didn’t need much high explosive to totally fuck up the silo and anyone in it. CNN and the BBC were going to end up with some great footage. Two lumps would do it: one of about a kilogram, to produce a kicking charge; and one half that size to produce a firebomb.

  Picric acid is magic stuff, but a fucker to make. To get there, I was going to have to separate the acetyl-salicylic acid in the aspirin from its bulking agent, add a couple more ingredients, and do a bit of mixing and distilling. The trouble was I only had the kit to make it in small batches. The whole process was probably going to take me all night.

  I knew it better as Explosive Mix No. 7. As part of my anti-terrorism experience, I’d had to learn to be a terrorist. A lot of the time I was doing pretty much the same as they were, infiltrating a country, buying everything I needed in corner shops and pharmacies, and mixing those items with others in my basket so I wouldn’t get noticed by the guy on the checkout. Then, like a terrorist, I’d go back to my hide, make and plant my device, and get out of the area before it went off.

  The big difference nowadays is that we’re in the age of the suicide bomber. They go in and stay with the device to make sure it goes off. Sometimes they’re even wearing it. Neither of those things featured in my plans.

  The first demolitions course I did when I joined the Regiment had lasted twelve weeks. I loved every minute of it. Even as a kid, I’d been fascinated by the TV footage of Fred Dibnah dropping power-station chimneys, and tower blocks imploding within their own perimeter. The principal task I trained for back then was to fuck up an enemy’s industrial base.

  Their troops might be giving us the good news at the front line, but no army can function if it can’t get supplies. We might want to drop a bridge, railway line, hydroelectric power station or crude-oil refinery - or render docks useless, open floodgates, destroy military or civilian aircraft. So much damage can be done with just two pounds of plastic explosive. Why send in an air force to destroy a big industrial complex when the same result can be achieved by taking out its power source? It might be easier for a four-man team to infiltrate as civilians, do the reconnaissance, then buy ingredients over the counter to make the devices.

  Destroying something doesn’t necessarily involve removing it from the face of the earth. A large factory or even a small town can be neutralized by taking out an electricity substation. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an inch with
explosives into a particular piece of machinery. That might be all that’s needed to disturb the momentum of the moving parts inside it. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying where the weak point is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.

  The problem is, you’re not going to have a notebook in your pocket with all your formulas and bomb-assembly instructions. We’d spent the first few weeks of the demolitions course having to learn them by heart. There were nine basic mixes: nine different types of explosive for nine different types of job, from low explosive - a lifting charge if you want to make a big crater in a runway or blow up a road or vehicle going along it - to high explosives, which can be used with enough precision to cut steel if you want to destroy a power station or drop a bridge or a couple of pylons. It’s horses for courses, different explosives for different attacks. High explosives were going to be perfect for me on this job.

  I pressed forty aspirin tablets out of their foil and crushed them in the first of the three 5mm-thick juice glasses I’d bought in the market. I used the hard plastic spoon from the knife-fork-spoon camping set. It couldn’t be metal. I was making picric acid because it’s easy to detonate. The downside is that the slightest friction or percussion can set the stuff off. What’s more, it attacks metal, creating salts that are just as explosive. It can only be safely in contact with wood, glass or plastic.

  I opened the little tap at the bottom of the container, poured some water into the largest of the cheap aluminium pans and put it on the gas. While I waited for it to come up to the same temperature as a hot bath, I added a little water to the powder in glass number one to make a paste, then added a splash of alcohol. I stirred until it liquefied.

  Only now was there time for my stab wounds to get a little TLC. I pulled my jeans down and poured some of the alcohol between the wound and towel padding. It was like my skin was on fire.

  I left the mix on the concrete floor and hobbled over to the Passat. Brogues wasn’t in complete rigor mortis yet. Everything but his eyelids was still soft and pliable. The process normally starts two to three hours after death and it can take maybe another four for all the muscles and organs to stiffen. It was cold in the loading bay, which would speed things up. The eyelids are among the first bits to go rigid, along with the jaw and neck. His eyes were no longer closed; he stared dully out of the boot. That was why the poor used to place coins over them to keep them closed.

  His skin was already pale. The blood had settled in the parts of the body closest to the ground and had drained into the larger veins. The back of his head didn’t look as beaten about as I’d thought it would. I pulled off his handmade brown suede shoes. I needed the matching socks.

  I tried to sit down while I shoved a sock over glass number two, but my buttock wasn’t at all keen. I had to stand and lean down instead. I poured the aspirin mix into the sock sieve. Cloudy liquid trickled through. After a while I removed the sock and wrung out the dregs. I didn’t want the rubbish that was left - that was just the bulking agent. What I needed was in the glass - or, rather, what was going to be left after I’d evaporated the water and alcohol out of the liquid. But that was still a few steps away.

  Glass number two went into the simmering water. It was going to take about twenty minutes for the alcohol and moisture to evaporate and leave a residue of white powder.

  The next stage was to add the acid. Concentrated sulphuric was a lot harder to come by, these days, because of anti-terrorist legislation. Unless you’re an industrial chemist, buying it arouses suspicion. My original plan had been to drain some of the Panda’s battery acid, but the Passat was a bonus. Or so I thought. There was more of it, but it was a fucker to get out. Everything under the bonnet was covered and sealed to make it look all nice and Gucci. Nobody serviced these things any more: they just plugged them into diagnostic machines.

  I poured out a third of the contents of each cell into one of the smaller cooking pots. Even depleted, the battery would still work. The battery acid had to be boiled until all the white fumes had disappeared. It had to be seriously concentrated.

  The method for making picric acid hadn’t changed for years. It was discovered in the late 1700s, and initially used as a yellow dye for silk and wool. Its explosive potential was discovered a hundred years later. The problem was, this stuff was so strong it attacked common metals like lead and copper to create even more dangerous salts, which were sensitive to shock. During the Boer War, the artillery boys threw shells into their guns and blew themselves up. There were some massive explosions in factories and ammunition ships. Tin and aluminium were the only metals picric acid didn’t corrode. Millions of tons of the stuff were used in bombs and grenades in the First World War. They were all coated with tin to prevent the acid contaminating the metallic shell. Even so, munitions factory workers were nicknamed canaries because of the way it stained their skin.

  Then they discovered that picric acid was only a nightmare in powder form. Even these days, if the powder is stored in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to take enormous care not to trap grains of it in the threads of the bottle and cap. It’s so volatile that just unscrewing the top will make it detonate.

  I was going to miss the kick of being able to get shit like this together and see the results. The payoff would be sitting on the flight to Russia with Anna on one side and somebody tapping away on his laptop on the other and me thinking, When you watch the news today you’ll see what I’ve been up to.

  I could see the white powder starting to settle in glass number two as the water simmered gently around it. I took the pan off the cooker and replaced it with the one holding the battery acid. It wasn’t long before white haze was rising and wafting round the lock-up. Once it had stopped, I poured some of the concentrated acid into glass number three. Then, using the plastic knife, I slowly shifted the white powder out of glass number two and added it to the other so it became a white liquid.

  All I had to do now was add a bit of potassium, before placing glass number three in the water and letting that boil down until the mixture turned a yellow-orange colour.

  The final stage would be to filter it through a second sock placed over glass number four. But this time it wouldn’t be the liquid I was after. I wanted what stayed behind in the sock. The yellow and - thankfully - wet lumps that remained were what this process was all about. Once dried, they would turn into one big fuck-off unstable explosive that could be detonated very easily by heat or an electric charge. For now, however, it would be stored wet in a double layer of freezer bags, twisted, folded over and fastened with the wire retainer to keep the air out and the acid wet. I would keep filling the bags until I had enough.

  6

  Friday, 19 March

  07.20 hrs

  I’d fallen asleep in Brogues’s camel-hair coat, lying on the footwell carpets from the Passat. I’d spread them out on the floor alongside my four bags of explosive.

  I forced myself up off the concrete. There was plenty more to do.

  The first thing was to empty the water container to prepare it for its next payload. I opened the tap and let it run out on the floor. Next I got hold of the set of blister-packed halogen bulbs. The plastic packaging was so rigid I had to use the Chinese Leatherman to make any headway.

  These bulbs were just what I needed. They were small, they banged out a huge amount of instant heat, and for their size they were more robust than normal bulbs, which were increasingly hard to find anyway because of EU green legislation. These ones would probably be banned as well when the law makers found out they could be used as detonators.

  I pulled one out. It was about the size of the tip of my little finger. It had two loops of metal at the bottom for terminals.

  The mosque digital alarm clock was next out of Santa’s Bergen. I shoved in four AA batteries, then yanked out the leads that connected the power source to the speaker at the back. I twisted the bare wires around each of the bulb loops and set the clock to 08.00. Then I set the ala
rm for 08.01. Bang on time, instead of me getting the muezzin’s wail, the bulb lit up. After three seconds it was hot to the touch - not enough to detonate anything, but that didn’t matter for now. I was going to do something else to the bulb to bring it up to speed. I turned off the alarm clock to save the batteries and put it down.

  The twenty-litre container had emptied. I picked it up, together with the length of clear plastic tubing I’d bought from a shop that sold tropical fish, and headed for the Passat.

  I opened the fuel cap and shoved the tube down into the tank. With the empty container by my feet, I put the other end of the tube to my lips and sucked. My lungs filled with petrol fumes but I kept going. A few seconds later, the tube darkened. As soon as the fuel had risen to within an inch or two of the tip I slid my thumb over it and took it out of my mouth. I pointed it down into the container, pulled my thumb away and the fuel flowed.

  I remembered all the times my stepdad had sent me out nicking petrol from other people’s cars during the fuel shortage in the seventies. I was only about twelve. After that, he said there was a sugar shortage, so I used to get sent out to pocket the sugar shakers from cafes. There wasn’t a sugar shortage, of course: it was my stepdad’s way of saving a few pennies, and fuck the fact that I might get caught.

  I left the tube where it was and let the siphon do its stuff. It was time for a brew. The flow would stop as soon as the fuel in the container reached the level of the tube, which was about twenty centimetres below the neck. That would be plenty.

  I had a quick look at my G-Shock. Bradley was going to be here soon. I needed to have Angeles tucked away by then.

  I had a quick check of the telltales on the way up to see if she’d been having a nose around. They were all in place, and so was the one behind the pigeonholes. I realized I felt nowhere near as bad as I thought I would without the Smarties. I made a mental note to stab myself in the buttock next time I felt a headache coming on.