Zero Hour

by Andy McNab

  He got his mouth to my ear. ‘Give up. You’re just going to die fucked.’ The Scouse was as precise and unhurried as it had been at the negotiating table.

  I writhed again to try to get on top of him, but we rolled together and hit the wall.

  My hands were pinned behind his back. All I had left was my head. I butted him in the temple.

  His arms flailed. My hands broke free. I was going to have to be quicker than him. Or just better.

  I kicked and he let me go. It was pointless running. I had to stay here. He was the target. I had to carry on.

  Somehow I got to my feet, my body side-on to him, crouching, legs nice and stable, arms up.

  He stood up too. Dusted off his coat. I half expected him to shoot his cuffs. We were about three metres apart. Our eyes locked.

  I mirrored his pose, knees bent to protect my bollocks, arms up, head pushed down so my chin hit my chest. I stared at him, ready to grab or punch or otherwise react to whatever he did. I hated this. I’d rather a short, sharp frenzy without any controls.

  Robot bounced on his boots a little, as if he was looking for an angle of attack. He was almost enjoying it. Maybe he was rehearsing his attack in his head. A lot of martial-arts lads visualize what they’re going to do before they actually do it. That’s why they stand there squaring up to each other for two minutes before there’s three seconds of action and it’s all over and done with. It’s all about pre-work. I knew that and appreciated it. I just didn’t want him to do it on me.

  I kept my feet planted firmly on the ground, muscles gripped, everything tightened, ready to take the hits. I wanted him nearer. He was still out of range. But I knew he’d close in when he was ready.

  In he came. A high kick flew towards my ribcage. I kept my arms up and tried to block it. It hit my left bicep. The force of it made me punch myself in the forehead.

  I rocked back. Another kick to my other side. I took it on the wrist and opened up my arms. I knew another kick was coming. He launched it and I grabbed his leg with both hands. His calf was almost on my shoulder. I had hold of his thigh and could feel the kneecap through the fabric of his jeans. I pushed down, trying to control it, gripping hard with both hands. I moved into him, my hips between his legs like the foreplay was over and we were going to have sex.

  With my right hand on his kneecap, I grabbed him round the top of his leg with my left, pulling him closer, trying to lift him. I kept the forward movement and almost bounced him towards the wall. He crashed against it and arched his back as he felt the fire extinguisher spike. His eyes opened wide. His muscles tensed, desperate to resist the impact of the steel rod. He tried to push me back. Flecks of spit landed on the side of my neck.

  I leant into him, my legs almost at forty-five degrees as I pushed and pushed, my body weight hammering him into the spike.

  His coat gave way first, then all seven layers of skin. He didn’t scream. He took it, breathing heavily but not panicking, trying to work out what the fuck he was going to do. A rib cracked under the pressure and the spike gave him its full six inches. His hands flew back against the wall like he was breaking a fall. He pushed himself off it, grunting with pain, and sank down onto his knees. He kept his eyes on me. He was going to get up. He was going to fight on.

  I pivoted on the ball of my left foot and swung round, volleying a kick into his face that pushed his head back into the wall. There wasn’t much noise, just a sound like splitting wood as his skull made contact. He jerked, and then he was very still.

  I felt his carotid. There was nothing. He’d gone. I collapsed beside him, my back against the wall. Next door, Horatio and his CSI mates cracked yet another case and the music blared.

  A mobile rang in the TV room. I jumped up and headed towards it. A fist pounding on the main entrance stopped me in my tracks.

  18

  Chest still heaving, I staggered down the stairs. I bounced from wall to wall, almost falling, then somehow staying on my feet.

  ‘Open the door! For fuck’s sake!’

  The mobile rang again upstairs. I stumbled to the door and pressed my ear to it. A vehicle was ticking over. Then I heard the clank of keys in locks.

  There were more bangs, exactly where my head was.

  ‘Fucking – open – up!’

  The accent was the same as Robot’s.

  The door shifted under his weight until the bolts took hold. He knew someone had to be inside. He yelled behind him. ‘Call him again! What a bunch of cunts!’

  I could make out another voice, cooler, more measured.

  I got my eye to the centre keyhole. Bright headlights, then a body blocked the view. The lights had been above knee height. An MPV maybe, or truck to take the girls away.

  The guy was apoplectic. ‘Call him again, Dad. Where the fuck is he?’

  I finally recognized the first voice. It was Bitch Tits. Whoever he was with, I couldn’t let them leave. I’d lose control of what they did next. I turned and focused on the fire extinguishers. I picked up two and positioned them on the second stair. I plunged the hall into darkness and used the chinks of light spilling from the keyholes to find my way to the doors. I put on my best Van der Valk accent. ‘Ja, ja, komm.’

  Bitch Tits threw a terminal wobbler as I pulled the first bolt. ‘What the fuck are yous up to in there?’

  I freed the last bolt and ran towards the stairs. I picked up the first fire extinguisher as the door burst open and light flooded the hallway. Shadows danced across the concrete as Bitch Tits stormed in. The man behind him was big enough to block out the headlamp beams.

  ‘Get the fucking lights on, then!’

  I heaved the fire extinguisher above my head and hurled it at Bitch Tits. I didn’t see where it made contact, just that it hit him with a thud and he went down in the direction of the girls’ cell. I was already heading to the main door with the second extinguisher.

  Flynn was three steps into the hallway. I’d burnt his image into my memory: a well-fed body with a shaven head. I knew from my BlackBerry video that the crow’s feet around his eyes gave away his age, but he was in good nick.

  I slipped behind him. He was still taking a second to react to what had happened to his son. I pushed against the door with my shoulder and it was dark once more.

  The second extinguisher came down hard on the back of Flynn’s head. He grunted and buckled. This time I kept my grip on the top of the cylinder but let go of the bottom and brought it down on the blurred shape below me like a pile-driver, again and again. I didn’t care where it made contact, as long as it did. One time it hit bone. There was a crunch but no screams, just subdued groans, then heavy slobbering as he tried to breathe through the mess I’d made of his head.

  I moved up the hallway and repeated the process a couple of times on Bitch Tits. I was tempted to finish him then and there, but I had something else in mind.

  My face was covered with sweat by the time I dropped the extinguisher and headed outside. The Lexus was ticking over smoothly. I turned off the ignition and lights and pocketed the keys. Back in the hallway, I slammed the door behind me and bolted up before hitting the light switch.

  Flynn and Bitch Tits lay prone on the concrete. They’d taken a battering but their chests still pulsated.

  I gave them both another slam into the back to keep them immobilized before checking for weapons. They were clean.

  Legging it as best I could, I went through the door into the silo to retrieve the Bergen. I lifted it on one shoulder. My feet were heavy. I was fucked. I gulped huge mouthfuls of air. Adrenalin was going to keep me going here. Adrenalin and blind fucking rage. I had to get back to them before they had time to recover. I needed to control them.

  Dutch voices had taken over the TV above me now. I dropped to my knees beside the bodies and took off the Bergen. I unpacked the gaffer tape. The one eye that Flynn could still open was fixed on me.

  They gave no resistance as I grabbed their hands. I taped them behind their backs, and then I di
d their ankles. I wrapped a strip over their mouths. I kept it as tight as possible. I wanted them to have to fight for every molecule of oxygen.

  I taped open two out of the four eyes that weren’t broken or swollen. I didn’t want them to miss a thing.

  19

  I slid down the wall and sat there, totally fucked, fighting for breath. The two of them were starting to recover a little. They tried to beg and reason with me via muffled, gaffer-taped moans.

  I didn’t want to get up. But I had to.

  I staggered to my feet and opened the windows and doors of the two ground-floor offices that faced the silo, then did the same in the three upstairs. The news was still on. A female anchor with sculpted blonde hair was getting highly excited about the football results. Robot hadn’t moved an inch.

  I stumbled downstairs. Grabbing Flynn’s bound feet under my arm, I dragged him into the silo. He kicked out as best he could, but his weight was more of a problem. I dropped his feet just past the door and kicked into both of them. It wasn’t about control: every time I looked at these guys I kept thinking about the green house.

  Picking up his feet once more, I finished dragging him into the centre of the main building. I left him with his back against a heavy desk, then went back and fetched Bitch Tits.

  I put my ear to the girls’ door. They’d heard the fight. Their voices were high and agitated. Some of them cried. I heard one of them speaking only centimetres from my head. She was probably doing the same as me, ear to the door, trying to work things out.

  I hit the light switch by the main entrance and checked the Facebook picture, then unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  ‘Lilian Edinet?’

  The girls were all wearing jeans and sweatshirts. They had nothing on their feet or above their eyes. They cowered by their mattresses, some holding hands, expecting the worst.

  ‘Lilian?’

  I looked at each face, the blonde ones first.

  ‘Yes, I am Lilian.’

  The girl who stepped forward had been standing in the far left-hand corner, by the slop bucket and piles of grease-stained pizza boxes and plastic sandwich wrappers. Her hair was longer than in the picture, and matted. Her expression was defiant.

  I moved towards her, my hand outstretched.

  ‘Come on. Move!’ I knew I should be treating her to the full Mother Teresa number, but I didn’t have the time. None of us did.

  I had to grab her arm and pull her all the way out of the room. I slammed the door shut and threw the bolt.

  Under the lights in the hallway, her resolve crumbled. Tears cascaded down her cheeks. She was trembling. She tried to hide it, but wasn’t having much success.

  ‘Please, please . . .’

  I took her face in my hands and moved it up towards the light.

  It was her all right. The Goth vampire look had faded, but you couldn’t mistake the fire in her eyes. Whatever they’d done to her, they hadn’t yet broken her spirit.

  I let go of her and pressed the picture into her hand. ‘Who is that? What is his name?’

  The paper shook in her hands. Teardrops hit the page. ‘Viku.’

  I grabbed her by the arm once more. ‘I’m taking you home.’

  I dragged her to the office opposite and pushed her inside.

  ‘Turn the light on. Stay here. I’ll come back soon. Do not leave this room, OK?’

  She nodded.

  I closed the door. This one also had a key in it. They probably all did if this place was being rented out. I gave it a turn. It would put the frighteners on her again, but I didn’t want her to see what I was getting up to next.

  Everything I needed was squared away. All the girls, and the two fucks next door, were contained, and I had Lilian. Now I could sort out the device.

  I hoisted the Bergen onto one shoulder and headed back into the silo. Flynn and Bitch Tits thrashed their legs about, their heads jerking in unison as they tried to shout out at me through the gaffer tape. The pleading had stopped. They were just pissed off big-time.

  Three thick, cast-iron heating pipes ran from beneath the concrete, through evenly spaced brackets up the wall, all the way to the floor above us. I gave them an exploratory tug. They didn’t give an inch.

  My body ached, my feet were getting heavier and I was gagging for water, but nothing could detract from the glow of knowing these two were going to watch my every move and then work out exactly what was going to happen to them. And to make sure that happened unimpeded, I dragged each of them across the floor and ran the gaffer tape around their heads and the pipes, and then did the same with their chests and waists. Their legs stretched out in front of them. They were going nowhere. The show was about to begin, and I wanted them to have ringside seats.

  The offices above me spilt enough light for me to see what I needed to see and do what I needed to do. Whatever was on the TV, it was now in Dutch.

  I removed the freezer bags: two with the yellow picric acid crystals, and two with the shotgun propellant. The fuel container came out next. I laid them all in a line. I had to do this methodically or I might fuck up and forget something.

  The pair of them had stopped moving about. They had one good eye each and they were fixed on me like laser beams. They were trying to work out what the fuck was happening. They’d know soon enough.

  First I had to assemble the two explosive charges. I unsealed a bag of picric, inserted an open pack of dark grey propellant into the middle of the yellow crystals, and put them to one side. I exposed one end of my home-made fuse with my teeth and shoved it into the second pack of propellant, then gaffer-taped the two securely together before repeating the process. I taped the second picric bag too.

  I moved across to where the remnants of the flour had drifted like snow against the wall that joined the silo to the admin building. Dropping onto my hands and knees, I scooped as much as I could of it to one side so the twenty-litre fuel container could sit directly on the concrete. My nose and mouth were soon full of fine white powder, and so were my eyes.

  I placed the container in the space I’d cleared, and taped the second IED on top of it. The fuse snaked off to my right.

  The flour began to mix with the sweat running down my cheeks and gathering at the back of my neck. I must have looked like a cross between the world’s most enthusiastic coke head and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  I grabbed the components of the first IED, which was to be the kicker charge. I dug deep into the flour that I’d just helped bank against the wall. I had to make sure of two things: first, that I placed the kicker charge higher than the firebomb; and second, that it went as deep into the flour as I could manage. These bags still weren’t sealed. It wasn’t their time yet.

  I checked the fuse leading from the petrol bomb to make sure it was within easy reach of the kicker charge, and that it didn’t touch the fuel at any point. That was why the kicker had to be higher – so the fuse flowed easily into the picric.

  I picked up the Bergen and moved away from the two devices. The TV news was still blaring away. They’d have something right on their doorstep to talk about in a couple of hours.

  I took out the mosque alarm and the bulb, lifted the batteries out of the back of the clock and reinserted them the right way round.

  20

  I unwrapped the gaffer tape protecting the bulb and gave it a quick test. Perfect. I closed it down before the filament got hot. I set the alarm for two hours. That would be enough for me to get back and shower all this shit off me before I went anywhere near the airport.

  I moved back to the device and gently pushed the bulb into the open propellant bag of the kicker charge. I bit away the free end of the fuse and shoved that alongside. I made sure both were sunk deep into the propellant before sealing them in place. I wrapped some more tape around both the wire and the fuse and made sure it was all nice and tight.

  The timer gave a gentle green glow as I started scooping flour on top of the kicker charge. The clock would spark up the
bulb. That, in turn, would set off the propellant in the bag, and at the same time ignite the fuse. The fuse would start burning towards the firebomb. The propellant inside the kicker charge would generate a fuck of a lot of heat. The picric acid would explode. And since it was against the wall, the force of it would push up, down and forwards into the building.

  The pressure wave would force out the flour in a fine mist at supersonic speed. There’d be a massive amount of pressure, because this place was so enclosed. There were no windows, and the building itself was sealed. The pressure wave would have nowhere to exit. So as it bounced and rattled around the building, it would take the cloud of flour and dust with it. The cloud would fill the building.

  All the while, the fuse to the kicker charge would be burning down to the propellant inside the main charge. It would also explode, and detonate that lot of picric, creating another massive pressure wave. That was why there had to be an air gap between the fuel and the explosive. You need to give the wave a little time before it hits the fuel. If it’s physically touching, it can sometimes just explode and kick out fluid at supersonic speed instead of flame.

  What I wanted was flame. It would ignite all the particles of flour, and that would create even more pressure. The wave would burst its way round the entire building in a couple of seconds.

  Flynn and Bitch Tits looked like they were going to explode all by themselves.

  I finished burying the kicker charge and laid the Bergen next to the fuel but kept the remaining gaffer tape in my hand. I’d almost done it. The last bit was the hardest of all, and that was the wait. But it had benefits, I supposed. Flynn and Bitch Tits also had to wait.

  They’d gone noisy again. I wasn’t sure if they were begging, trying to cut a deal, or just giving me their final thoughts on my mother’s sexual history.