Zero Hour

by Andy McNab

  I got on with checking out my escape route.

  There was open ground to the rear. If anything kicked off, I’d be in plain sight there. The houses on the other side of the vacant office block next door would give me some cover, but there was an eight-foot height difference between the two rooflines.

  Apart from the front entrance and fire escape to the rear, it was my only way out of this building. If I couldn’t go over the top, I’d have to get myself across the road and into the sprawling estate alongside the market. I’d get lost in there, no drama. Then I’d try and hook up with Anna.

  I stared into the darkness. It had been a night like this when she’d first told me about Grisha.

  Now I was going to die on her too.

  This was alien territory for me. I guess I’d always assumed I’d be killed in action, hopefully without much fuss, and with nobody close enough to give a shit. Now I was starting to think that I’d do anything for a couple of months with her. At least we’d have time to say goodbye.

  The skies opened once more. Rain fell on me like 7.62 rounds and brought me back to Planet Earth. Kleinmann’s diagnosis had pulled the ring back on one big can of fuck-with-your-head, and I had to cut away from it.

  I headed back to the hatch.

  I had to put all that shit to one side, and focus on the job in hand.

  I had to get myself on-target.

  9

  I pulled the wooden pigeonhole unit far enough from the wall to slip the blue folder behind it, then wedged a small piece of paper between unit and wall, about six inches up from the carpet, as I eased it back. If anything was disturbed, I’d be able to tell at a glance.

  As always when going on-target, I had to be sterile. All I carried with me was cash: my run money. Everything else was in the folder. I didn’t rush the drill even though I’d done it a thousand times. I found myself wanting to enjoy the ritual. If this really was going to be my last job, I wanted to savour every moment.

  I folded another couple of pieces of paper and wedged them between the frame and the door of the fire escapes and the roof hatch. I trousered Brad’s mallet and went downstairs. He might be the most obliging lad on the planet when it came to dodgy tea bags and shower gel, but I didn’t trust him an inch. I eased a little sliver of paper into each of the three locks on the front door.

  I did my best to bang out the dent I’d left in the Panda’s roof. Rubber hammers are better than steel ones for panel beating, thumping in wooden tent pegs and dropping humans. Steel imparts a blunt trauma on soft material like bone, but rubber or wood conveys all its kinetic energy without penetration. It can take someone down much more effectively. And if you hit a skull too hard with a steel hammer it can become embedded and really mess things up.

  I backed the car out into the rain. As the shutters came down I pretended to check that I’d locked the front door properly. I wanted to make sure I could see my telltales if I looked directly into the keyholes. No drama: it all worked.

  I got into the Panda and headed down the road. The rain had calmed down but there was more to come. I put the wipers on intermittent. FilmNoord XXX was still open, but the girls had decided to call it a day.

  Despite being closed, the market was still brightly lit. The kebab shops and one or two nearby stores were still open. Mopeds buzzed around the place like wasps and one or two lads were busy spraying a beard and glasses on a Geert Wilders poster. For a moment it felt just like home.

  I paralleled the main until I got to the small roundabout and turned onto Distelweg. Before I went on-target, however, I had one final bit of business to take care of.

  10

  I crossed the canal and looked for somewhere to park. The windscreen wipers kicked off again as another squall blew in. I spotted two truck cabs outside a tile warehouse with a massive glass front. I pulled up between them.

  The entrance was decorated with a row of oversized concrete plant pots. As anti-ram-raiding precautions went, these ones looked good, but the plants themselves had died long ago. Making it look like I was busy taking a piss, I tucked the safe-house keys in the one nearest the door and scooped some wet mud over them. Two minutes later I was on my way to the target.

  I checked the gates as I drove past the stretch of wasteground. Still chained and locked. And still no light from the building.

  I parked up between a couple of petrol tankers just short of the bend and got out to check the ferry point. The timetable by the little glass shelter told me it only ran during business hours.

  I went back to the car and sat in darkness, engine off, as the rain hammered on the roof.

  11

  I took a couple of minutes to get my head in gear. Then I got out, locked up and hid the keys in a patch of scrub by the fence. Zipping up my bomber, I headed along the fence line, looking for a way in that didn’t involve climbing. If the possible was Lilian, and I had the chance to lift her, I’d need to get out quickly. The rain had calmed down a bit, but my jeans got soaked in the high grass and clung to my calves.

  Eventually I found a gap where a couple of railings had been uprooted and the muddy track between them had been pounded by plenty of feet. It looked like a rat run.

  I followed the trail for about twenty metres, then turned to face the way I’d come. I needed to have a clear picture of my route back. Three pinpricks of particularly bright light – cranes standing guard in a construction site, perhaps – hung like a small constellation over the edge of the city across the bay. The gap I’d be aiming for was almost directly in line with them. That was my marker.

  The flour silo was about two hundred metres away, exactly as Anna had described it. I picked my way round waist-high chunks of broken concrete and dodged a couple of twisted steel reinforcing rods that arched up at me like bull’s horns. More and more mud stuck to my Timberlands. They were beginning to feel like divers’ boots.

  The ground dipped into a hollow the size of a bomb crater. I slid down into it and skirted more lumps of rubble. A circle of rocks surrounded a pile of ash that had once been a campfire. So many discarded syringes were scattered beside it that it looked like the entire junkie community had been playing their own version of pick-up-sticks. I was glad it was raining. They weren’t going to be coming back for a rematch tonight: they’d all be competing with the working girls for space under the shop canopies instead.

  Anybody out here would have to be totally off their heads. If I got challenged I’d pretend to be a drugged-up dickhead. It was pretty much how I felt right now.

  That thought triggered a memory of my old mate Charlie. He’d been on his last legs about five years ago, and he’d done one final job to earn his family a wad before he keeled over. But I already had the money. I had what Charlie had been after. Why the fuck was I still doing it?

  Fuck it – it must be the rain making me miserable. I knew why I was here, and it wasn’t just to have one last crack. It was also about Lilian and those poor fuckers in the green house in Copenhagen, and the rest of them who’d been fucked up and fucked over by those shaven-headed bastards. I couldn’t clear my mind of the sounds and images of what had happened above our heads while Anna was posing as the world’s most uncompromising trafficker. The guys in that house were animals, and someone had to stop that shit happening. I wasn’t going to be saving the world single-handed: I was small fry and hadn’t got much time left to go on a crusade. But I could get one girl out, and maybe free the others, even if it was just a pinprick in the shit-pile.

  There was less than a hundred metres to go now. I still couldn’t see any cameras or motion sensors. That didn’t mean there weren’t any. If the intention was to detect people rather than deter them, they might have gone for concealment.

  I pulled up about twenty metres short, looked and listened. The silhouette of the silo tower rose into the night sky; it dwarfed the remaining two-thirds of the building. I could make out two windows on the ground floor to the right of it, and two more one storey up. The arrangement made s
ense of Anna’s description of the interior: two doors each side of the front entrance and a staircase on the left. There were no lights that I could see, and no movement.

  A concrete strip ran from the front of the silo to the chained gates on Distelweg. The dock was less than thirty metres away from other side of the tower.

  The silo was the only old building in the area. Maybe it was some kind of historical monument. Or maybe it just hadn’t figured in anyone’s regeneration plans yet. Everything else I’d seen had been thrown up with new brick or metal sheeting.

  I found a slab of old concrete to sit down on and cocked an ear towards the target. I stayed like that for five minutes. Only then did I look around me, giving my unconscious the chance to take in as much as it could.

  My jeans clung to my legs. My boots weighed a tonne. I didn’t have to fake it too much when I swayed towards the silo, hands in pockets. If someone was watching me, I’d look as though I was doped up to the eyeballs.

  I mooched along to the left, to the silo tower. The closer I got, the more obvious it was that there were no cameras. It looked as though they’d decided not to draw attention to themselves by throwing up surveillance equipment.

  I liked doing this part of the job, just as I enjoyed going through Passport Control on fake documents and all that shit. Beating the system always had given me a buzz, ever since I was being a total arsehole on the Bermondsey estates.

  The silo was square and about sixty metres tall. The bricks were rotting and most of the pointing had fallen out. The only things that seemed to hold it together were the old steel reinforcing plates that ran up the sides, and a thick layer of graffiti.

  There was no entry point on the gable end. I moved to the corner on the side nearest the water, and sank slowly to my knees. I craned my neck gently round at muddy ground level.

  There was no light whatsoever here. The concrete stretched all the way down to the dock, interrupted only by weeds pushing up stubbornly through the cracks. A big section of hard standing lined the water’s edge, where a crane had probably once stood. A conveyor-belt ran down to it from the top of the silo at a forty-five-degree angle, supported by a steel framework made from the world’s biggest and rustiest set of Meccano.

  Noord 5 was five hundred metres away on the other side of the water. Its street-lighting and the intermittent sweep of car headlamps did nothing to help me. I put my ear to the brickwork to listen for a generator, but heard nothing.

  I moved along the front of the building, covertly now, until I reached two large steel doors big enough to drive a truck through. Yet more weeds grew right up against them, looking like they were intent on forcing entry. None of them had been trodden on or driven over. Two padlocks were covered by security cups so you couldn’t cut through them, and the huge rusty crossbars looked like they hadn’t been shifted any time this century.

  I carried on towards the far gable end. More windows: two up, two down, all boarded up with metal anti-vandal sheeting. I put an ear to the one I hoped the girls were still behind. There wasn’t a sound.

  I found the door Anna had gone in through. It had two locks. Going by the shine on the brass inserts, they were almost brand new. I sat against it, switching back into dosser mode, and had a look around. The next nearest building was a two-level warehouse or factory about three hundred metres away on the perimeter of the wasteground. Again: no light, no noise, no movement. This silo was a good place to hide people.

  I put my ear to the lower keyhole. Nothing. I stuck my nose against it and inhaled deeply. I might be able to smell cooking or a cigarette, anything at all that would give me an indication of life. But all I got, as Anna had said I would, was the aroma of cake shop.

  I got to my feet and gave the top and bottom of the double doors a push. They didn’t give an inch. They were bolted from the inside. Somebody had to be in there.

  There was no other entrance apart from this one and the large steel doors, as far as I could tell. But that didn’t mean it was the only means of access.

  I walked back to the conveyor-belt and started to climb. I only had to scale four or five metres of Meccano, but the junctions I used as hand- and footholds were awkwardly spaced and the steel was rusty and wet. By the time I heaved myself over the top, I felt like I’d completed an assault course.

  The conveyor-belt itself was just over a metre wide. Its rubberized fabric was rotten and frayed and a lot of the steel banding was exposed. I raised myself slowly onto my hands and knees and started to crawl. Almost immediately, the rubber between the rollers gave way with a loud, tearing sound. I dropped flat, listened and watched. Then I decided not to fuck around. If they’d seen me, they’d seen me. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about it. I might as well carry on until I heard the shouts.

  The belt led up to a pair of rusty metal doors each about a metre square. A gentle push and they opened.

  The brickwork was four courses thick. If there was still any flour in there, it would be bone dry. I edged forward on my elbows until my chest was on the lip of the hatchway and peered down. Right at the bottom, the faintest flicker of light showed through what looked like a tunnel connecting the silo with the rest of the building.

  A vertical access ladder was fixed to the wall. I curled my body until I was able to reach my boots, unlace them and tug them off. I scraped off the worst of the mud on the top edge of the Meccano, tied the laces together and slung them round my neck. I eased myself back through the hatch, feet first, until I made contact with the top rung. I took a breath and started down.

  After about twenty metres I stopped to look and listen. My feet hurt without the boots to protect them, but that was better than leaving mud on the ladder or having clumps of it fall off and land below.

  The further down I went, the stronger the smell of flour and the brighter the light. I paused again just before reaching the ground. The edges of the silo were lined with flour two or three feet high.

  I stepped down onto a concrete base. I didn’t need to worry where I trod. There were plenty of disturbances in the flour, including footprints.

  The opening into the rest of the building was about the size of a garage door. Steel shutters above it were locked in the up position.

  Very slowly, I moved my head around the corner. A brick wall stood immediately opposite me, in the middle of which was a door. Two windows either side of it were in darkness. There were also three windows on the second floor of what had probably once been offices. Light spilt from the one on the right – enough for me to see its haze reflecting off the remains of what had once been hundreds of tonnes of flour dust piled up against the walls.

  A body moved across the window.

  I froze.

  Male, early twenties. Both forearms dark with tattoos; cigarette in mouth; bare-chested and overweight. His bitch tits wobbled as he moved.

  He shouted something to someone and gestured at his crotch. A young girl shuffled into view. Her hair was dark and frizzy. She sank slowly to her knees in front of him. Her head disappeared below the sill. Bitch Tits soon had a slack smile on his face. He looked down at her, took a deep drag and flicked some ash onto her head.

  I stayed where I was. If there was just one of them, maybe I could take him now, then get Lilian and the rest of them out.

  I heard screams from the ground floor, along with some very pissed-off male shouting.

  The door to Bitch Tits’s office burst open. The new arrival wore a lot of black leather. His head was shaved, neo-Nazi style. His face had multiple piercings.

  Bitch Tits wasn’t impressed by what he was hearing. ‘Well, fucking find her! Don’t you dare fucking lose her!’

  He was a Brit – a Scouser. It was beginning to sound like a family business.

  The ground-floor office door was also thrown wide. This time the yells were Dutch.

  I didn’t see any of the bodies. I was too busy climbing back up the ladder as fast as my legs would carry me.

  12

 
I lay on my side at the top of the conveyor-belt and pulled my boots back on. I gulped in mouthfuls of air. The smell of decayed rubber made me gag.

  The shouts below me – now in heavily accented English – echoed round the tower.

  ‘There is nothing.’

  ‘She is not here.’

  More shouts from the Dutch guys outside. Bodies bomb-burst from the door. Bitch Tits screamed with anger – or it could have been fear. His voice was high-pitched, out of control. ‘Fucking get out there! Fucking find the bitch!’

  I finished tying my laces and started reversing carefully down the conveyor-belt, keeping as low as I could. A few metres below me, fucked-off men tried to organize themselves for the hunt. It wasn’t working. Bitch Tits was going completely ballistic in Scouse. ‘Yous cunts! We’ll all be in the shite! Get out there!’

  By the time I was about two-thirds of the way down, the shouts had begun to fade. I stared into the darkness. The search party had spread into the wasteground. I jumped the last couple of metres and ran for cover.

  I legged it in the direction of Distelweg, making each big chunk of concrete a single bound. I checked the ground ahead as best I could, straining my ears for the shout that would signal they’d found her. She’d be terrified. Maybe she’d got stuck trying to get over the fence – desperately wanting to, but having lost all control because she was so scared.

  I heard nothing. Total silence. The Dutch must have gone out via the gate or jumped the fence. Keeping in the shadows, I used my three-light marker to navigate back to the gap. Someone else had been through here since I last had. Someone in bare feet. I could see the mark of my boots in the mud, and also the imprint of small, frantic toes.

  I slipped through and kept to the edge of the road, almost hugging the fence. The search party would be moving up and down Distelweg by now, checking every bit of cover, flapping more and more as the minutes ticked by.