by Andy McNab
‘Look, I will be coming back. All my gear’s here. I’m coming back. It’s OK.’
In an ideal world it would be better if she came with me so I had control of her all the time, but I didn’t have enough clothes for her. And I had a phone call to make.
I dumped the Bergen in the loading bay and locked the door. I headed down past FilmNoord XXX towards the market. I felt a lot better with my boots back on. The market itself wouldn’t be open just yet, but some of the shops would be.
The all-night store I landed up in could have been anywhere in the Middle East. Big sacks of spices sat alongside crates of weird fruit and veg. The Arab version of Starsky and Hutch blared out from a TV mounted over the counter. Behind the checkout a young guy, with shaved sides to his gelled jet-black hair, munched pistachio nuts and watched the car chase. Half a souk’s worth of bling hung down the front of his T-shirt, and the Iranian flag hung proudly behind him.
I walked up and down the aisles and filled a basket with pitta bread, cans of salmon with ring-pulls and cartons of UHT milk that sat alongside 25-kilo bags of rice and huge aluminium cooking pots. There were cheap plastic buckets, dustpan and brush sets, ironing boards and, more importantly, kids’ clothing – cheap cotton shirts and jumpers, most of them with old Disney themes like Lion King or anything else that had passed its sell-by date. There were a few things that I thought would fit her and I threw them in the basket as well. I couldn’t see any decent bath towels, just small ones the size of dishcloths, but they’d have to do.
I got back to the counter as the cars drew level and bad guys with seventies haircuts and spear-pointed collars drew their weapons and fired at each other. The soundtrack sounded like belly-dancing music on steroids. A dozen or so phone cards were displayed in clear plastic wallets behind the boy with the bling. The point-of-sale poster showed little arrows aiming at all the different world flags, and a sentence or two in Dutch that I guessed told me it only cost two euros to call Iran or the USA. I grunted and pointed, as most people do if they can’t speak the language, and managed to end up with a fifty-euro one.
I headed out with my shopping in thin carrier bags that dug into my fingers. The good thing about poor areas of any city, especially those with a migrant population, is that most of the phone boxes are still working. The mobile-phone network hasn’t taken over completely because the locals don’t have the cash.
I went into a call box and scratched the strip off the back of my brand new if slightly grubby card. I dialled the company number, and then the code. Finally, I dialled her mobile number.
I got a ringing tone, and then her recorded voice in Russian. I waited for the bleep.
‘Anna – it’s Nick. I’m going to keep trying to get hold of you.’ I hit the receiver and rang straight back. If I’d woken her, she might have been too slow to pick up. After three rings I got the Russian version of hello.
‘It’s Nick.’ I only told her as much about the girl as she needed to know for now. This wasn’t the time for a full rundown and you never know who or what is listening. ‘Her name is Angeles. She won’t leave me. You have to come and pick her up.’
‘She is scared, Nick. She’s scared of everything and everyone – except for you right now. You’re probably the only friendly face she’s seen for months. I can get a cab and pick her up, but she could still run. Why should she trust me? She’s probably been handed from person to person, and each one has made her situation worse. Can’t you hand her over to the contact with Lilian?’
‘No. I’ll explain later. Could you lock her in the room?’
She thought for a few seconds. ‘She is young, yes?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Jesus. There’s no saying what she will do. You are her only friend. Just think, Nick – chances are, the reason she is here is because of strangers. I have already called Lena. She will be able to help. She has contacts in the city. But you’ll have to take her, Nick – you’re the one she trusts.’
I stood with the phone to my ear while I tried to forget the pain in my arse and do some thinking.
‘Nick? What do you want me to do?’
‘OK, I’ll keep her with me. Can you set up the meeting with Lena’s people at your hotel, say three hours before the flight?’
‘What flight?’
‘Our flight to Moscow. We need to be away from here as soon as we can on Saturday. You should book the flights. Still
got my card details?’
‘Yes. But—’
‘But what?’
‘The other girls. What about them?’
‘Don’t worry. I have that sorted.’
4
My fingers were numb and throbbing from the carrier-bag handles by the time I got back.
She jumped off the airbed to grab them, the sleeping bag still gathered tightly around her. ‘I help you.’
I let her. Why not give her the chance to feel she was earning her keep?
‘Here are some clothes for you. Take a look.’
I went over to the kettle. I could hear the rustle of plastic behind me.
‘My friend, the blonde woman, is going to help you – in a couple of days. But I’ll be with you to make sure everything is OK, yeah?’
There was more rustling as she ignored what I’d said, pulled the gear out and tried it on.
‘You must never tell anyone you were here, or tell anyone anything about me. You understand?’
I turned to see Angeles splitting open one of the carrier bags to make a kind of tablecloth. She spread it on the floor by the airbed and started tearing into the bread and opening the ring-pull cans.
‘Angeles, do you understand what I said?’
All I wanted was for her to say jack-shit until I got tucked in with Anna in Moscow. After that, so what?
She looked up, her big eyes focused on mine, and nodded.
‘OK, good. Start eating. Don’t wait.’
She shook her head. She sat on the carpet with her legs tucked under her and waited while I poured water over another couple of Yorkshire Tea bags and added too many spoonfuls of sugar. I took the brews over and motioned her to take the mattress. No way was I going to sit down.
‘Will you put some fish in the bread for me?’
She looked disappointed I wasn’t joining her, but made me a salmon wrap and handed it to me. She didn’t mess about after that. She gulped hers down, sucking her oil-stained fingers after each mouthful.
‘Angeles, why have you got no eyebrows?’ I wasn’t going to tell her I’d seen what she had to do with an eyebrow pencil.
She stopped eating, mid-mouthful. Her hands, still holding the food, fell onto her lap. Her eyes followed. ‘They raped us and then they held us down and shaved our eyebrows. They told us that the customers like their girls to look like that.’
‘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.’
&n
bsp; 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.
