by Iain Cameron
‘The guards, the kidnappers, they live in the bunkhouse?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me about it?’
Henderson assumed, and this was confirmed by Veronika, the bunkhouse was a temporary home for the men any time a group of women were occupying the kennels. After the women were dispersed to places where they would live and work, Vasile Lazar would go back to his house in Sandown Road and the others back to their own houses.
‘I don’t know much about the bunkhouse,’ Veronika said, ‘I have never been in there, but the girl in the next cell told me it is on three floors. There is living space at the bottom, beds in the middle floor where they sleep and at the top of the house, a games area with a big table. Like a pool table, but bigger.’
‘Snooker?’ Henderson said.
‘Yes, snooker.’
‘What do you remember about the men?’
‘There are four of them.’
‘Only four?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did anyone come to visit? Did you see anyone else?’
‘No, I only see, saw the four men and they all live in the bunkhouse.’
‘Tell me about them.’
She looked beyond Henderson, out of the window, trying to recall difficult memories. ‘There’s Vasile, he’s a large man, twice as big as me but he doesn’t say much.’
‘We know about him,’ Henderson said. ‘We followed him and he led us to you.’
‘I’m so glad you did,’ she said smiling. ‘Then, there’s Nicholae. He small and thin with narrow, staring eyes that I call him Weasel-Face. He seems to be the boss and orders the other men around.’
‘Ok.’
‘The other two are called Dmitri and Stefan. Both are of average height and size. Neither of them made such an impression on me.’
‘All the men are armed?’
‘Yes, they all carry guns.’
‘Is there anything else you can think of that might prove helpful?’
‘I am not sure. Like what?’
‘I don’t know, if they go out often, if they receive deliveries, those sorts of things.’
She thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘I don’t think I was there long enough to see everything.’
‘Not a problem,’ Henderson said, as he gathered his papers and photographs together. ‘I’d like to thank you, Hilary, for bringing Veronika here today, especially after her experiencing such a terrible ordeal. Veronika, I’d like to thank you for being so brave in coming here and telling me everything you remembered. Now, with my officers, I’ll work out the best way of closing this place for good.’
FORTY-ONE
Henderson pulled in behind the unmarked Ford van carrying six armed officers. They were close to the village of Shermanbury, more a hamlet than a village, and dwarfed by its near-neighbour Partridge Green. He’d instructed the other members of the team due here tonight to come from the north, as too many cars arriving from the south on such a quiet, rural road might raise suspicions with anyone watching.
A few minutes later, the release team arrived, and not long afterwards an empty minibus. The big lads in the Armed Response Team only made an appearance when everyone else was assembled. Despite being parked some distance from the bunkhouse, Henderson wanted all chatter, the slamming of car doors and the stamping of feet, kept to a minimum. Noises travelled far at night and the last thing he wanted was to lose the element of surprise.
They walked along the road sounding to Henderson like a small army but little could be done to mute the clanking of weapons against jacket buckles, boots striking tarmac and the sniffing from those with a runny nose. The surveillance team confirmed the gang had not evacuated the bunkhouse and kennels following Veronika’s escape. It would be a large undertaking, with so much invested in the place and a having a large number of kidnapped women to house. On the plus side for the traffickers, the escapee wouldn’t have a clue as to her whereabouts, she couldn’t speak English and with winter outside, a few months later someone would find her face-down in a ditch.
When they reached the track leading to the kennels, the group split in two and walked up both sides of the track, everyone ready to leap into the trees at the first sign of a vehicle or guard. It didn’t take long before they heard the sound of dogs barking and, by the deep, throaty sounds they made, it didn’t sound like a pack of West Highland Terriers.
At the top of the track they came to a yard, the kennels on the left, the bunkhouse over to the right. They stopped. The release team moved forward and, without speaking, Henderson pointed to the kennels, a long, low concrete building. The three officers nodded. Their role was to release and attend to the kidnapped women. Veronika had described how she had opened the lock of her cell door, and even though the release team expected to open them with the same level of ease, they would be using something more substantial than one of her hairgrips.
Two of the team set off while the third member waited. Five minutes later one of the officers appeared at the door at the end of the kennels with two women. As instructed, the women ran across the yard, triggering the security light, and into the arms of the third release team officer. The officer led the women down the track to the minibus.
He could hear the odd huff and puff from a couple of guys in the Armed Response Team, keen as they were to get on to the main event of the night, but at the briefing they had been warned they needed to be patient. By the time women five and six had crossed the yard, Henderson’s adrenaline was starting to rise, anticipating that they would soon see some action.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the bunkhouse door opening. Henderson instructed a member of the ART to move to a position opposite the kennel door and hide in the bushes. He then backed into the cover of trees and pulled out his radio. ‘Dave, guard coming, repeat, guard coming.’
The man approaching from the bunkhouse was neither big like Vasile Lazar, nor short and skinny like Nicholae. This had to be either Stefan or Dmitri.
He was muttering something in his own language, no doubt about the stupid security light going off and on all the time. When the guard reached for the door handle and turned his back, Officer Wardle stepped forward and smacked him in the head with the butt of his Heckler & Koch MP5 carbine. The guard fell to the floor in an untidy heap. Wardle removed the gun from the guard’s waistband and tied the hands of the unconscious man behind his back with plastic bindings, impossible to break and bloody uncomfortable to wear.
Following a signal from Henderson, Wardle dragged the dazed man across the yard and handed him over to a uniformed officer who led him down the track to a patrol car.
Henderson lifted his radio. ‘Dave, threat neutralised. Cease evacuation, repeat, cease evacuation.’
If the guard didn’t return to the bunkhouse in a timely manner, chances were another more alert guard would come out and, this time Wardle’s surprise attack wouldn’t be enough. He waved the ART forward, he and DS Walters, both armed with handguns, following at the rear.
No need for the ‘Big Red’ door opener this time as the guard had left the door of the bunkhouse unlocked when he came out. In a building like this, spread over three floors with several dangerous staircases, Henderson decided on stealth not shock, depriving Sergeant Bob Roberts at the front of using his deafening bellow, a familiar sound to anyone in the south stand at the Amex.
The bunkhouse, like many similar developments, was open-plan with a large lounge occupying most of the floor space. All the ground floor rooms were clear except for the lounge where they found a short, skinny guy, Nicholae, playing a PlayStation game on the giant television. He had big headphones clamped on his head, leaving him oblivious to their presence. A large gloved hand over his face soon caught his attention.
The team made their way upstairs, slow and steady, as it was potentially the most dangerous of all manoeuvres inside a house. If a gunman knew they were there, he could hold them at bay with a single weapon, and there would be little they
could do about it. The group was now seven, one down as DS Walters had the job of escorting the handcuffed and gagged Nicholae, over to the officers in the yard.
They made the first-floor landing without incident and discovered what gave the bunkhouse its name, as the whole floor consisted of a large room with eight beds, and off to one side, a large communal toilet and several private stalls. On one of the beds, the skinny, naked arse of someone he believed to be Dmitri or Stefan was bobbing up and down between the open legs of a naked woman. It had to be one of the women from the cells as it was obvious she wasn’t there willingly, her face contorted in anguish and sobbing non-stop. Seconds later, her tormentor said something harshly in a language Henderson didn’t understand before slapping the girl in the face.
Someone in the police group let out a gasp and the man turned.
‘Put your hands where I can see ’em!’ roared Sergeant Roberts.
The naked man moved as if to climb off the distraught woman, but instead, he reached under a pillow and pulled out a gun. He twisted round towards the group who were standing stock-still as if mesmerised by the spectacle and all bunched together at the door, making for an easy target. Before the gun reached its target, there was a short burst from Sergeant Roberts’s carbine and the man’s head exploded, showering the poor woman with blood and brain matter.
They left her screaming and made their way to the stairs. He saw Walters coming up and without speaking, pointed into the room with the dead man and the screaming girl. She gave him a thumbs-up in response.
They climbed the stairs with the same caution as before, one step at a time. If Lazar, the last remaining member of the kidnapping group, heard the shots and the screaming, and they had no reason to think otherwise, he could lie behind the door of the games room and pick them off on the stairs. Instead, they heard a heavy thump and when they reached the top and looked inside the games room, he’d upended the snooker table and was taking refuge behind it.
The officers were standing partly on the stairs and partly on a small landing, the door to the left leading into the games room which, like the lounge, occupied most of the floor area at the top of the bunkhouse. In front of them and to the right, various toilets and store rooms.
Whenever anyone from ART tried to take a look inside the room, Lazar peppered the doorway with bullets. It was in their favour that the table wasn’t in the centre of the room or they’d never be able to look inside, but instead it covered a corner at the far end. It looked as though he’d upended it and then dragged it into position. Henderson knew that Lazar was big, but if he could upend such a heavy item and drag it any distance, he had to be extremely strong as well.
‘If what he’s hiding behind is a proper snooker table, and sounded like it when it upended,’ Sergeant Roberts said to Henderson, ‘it’s made out of thick slate to give it an even, flat surface.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning from this distance, these,’ he said tapping his H&K, ‘won’t put a dent in it.’
‘So, in theory, he could hold out all night?’
‘Yep, depending on how much ammo he’s got.’
‘Hang on. Let me try talking to him.’
‘Don’t get too close.’
Henderson moved to door. ‘Vasile! Can you hear me?’
‘I can hear.’
‘We have many armed officers here. Put the gun down and walk out.’
‘Get lost! Come and get me.’
Henderson spotted the movement of a gun at the top of the snooker table and ducked away before bullets splintered the door frame.
He turned to Roberts. ‘That went well. What else can we do?’ He looked at the ceiling for inspiration. ‘We could crash through the windows, bring up a cherry picker with a sniper on board, throw in smoke, percussion, gas?’
‘I’d favour CS myself,’ Roberts said.
Henderson ran through the options in his mind. The first two would suit the military better than a group of big lads who could shoot straight but were better suited to standing on terra firma than abseiling down ropes.
‘I do too. Do you guys carry anything in the van?’
‘Nope.’
Henderson pulled out his phone and put an urgent call through to Lewes Control.
‘They say they can get it here in about thirty minutes,’ Henderson said after terminating the call.
Roberts nodded. He turned to his team. ‘Lads, listen up. We’re gonna smoke him out with CS gas but it won’t be here for another thirty minutes. Okay?’
They nodded.
‘Andy, you, Wardle and Butch keep your eye on him in there, the rest of us are taking a break, see if we can start a brew. If him inside does anything different, call me immediately. Understand?’
They nodded.
‘After about fifteen minutes we’ll come up and swap. Everybody all right with that?’
‘Fine boss. Just don’t eat all the bloody biscuits.’
‘Andy, the boys in this place are Romanian. Any biscuits they have in here will likely be made from figs or lentils or some other shite.’
‘In which case you’re welcome to scoff the lot.’
Henderson walked downstairs with Roberts and two members of the ART. When they reached the next floor, the officers carried on to the ground floor while Henderson headed into the bunk room. There, Walters was comforting the woman they’d seen earlier. She was now wrapped in what looked like a former professional wrestler’s dressing gown, a garish combination of black shiny material and gold braid dwarfing the woman’s slight frame.
‘How is she?’ he said to Walters, nodding towards the head lying in Walters’s lap.
‘She’s calmed but I can’t tell her anything about what we’re doing here as she doesn’t speak any English. I think she’s guessed we’re cops from the body armour and the guns and the fact that the brains of the man tormenting her are splattered all over the bed. What’s happening upstairs?’
‘Lazar took refuge behind an upended snooker table. We can’t go in as he’s got the door covered. We’ll try and flush him out with CS.’
‘What was he doing up there on his own? You can’t play snooker with only one person, can you?’
‘No, but maybe it’s like a young lad with a ball. If he can’t find anyone to play with, he can practise various shots on his own and try to improve his technique. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but maybe he’s the solitary type.’
‘Three down and one to go, Walters said ‘These things never go the way we plan them, do they?’
‘It’s not a bad result so far. Two kidnappers captured.’
‘Plus, all the women are out of the kennels.’
‘You restarted the evac?’
‘Yeah, I figured with three down and seven against the last one, it would be safe to continue.’
‘Good move. It was shaping up to be successful night if only the guy in here didn’t take a gun to bed with him.’
‘It’s to be expected when everyone is armed.’
‘True,’ Henderson said levering himself up, ‘but it still doesn’t make me feel any better about someone being killed. I suggest you take this young woman over to the minibus and come back here for a brew. Sergeant Roberts is on kettle duty.’
‘I will. See you in a minute.’
Henderson headed downstairs to the kitchen, thankful to be away from the bunks where the smell of death permeated the air. The body would need to lie there for some time longer as he couldn’t allow a SOCO team or the pathologist to enter the building with a siege taking place upstairs. The walls and floor of the bunkhouse were made of wood and there was no telling how far a stray bullet would travel without the impediment of a brick wall to stop it.
The tea breaks over and the CS gas delivered, the armed officers gathered around the games room door and fitted their gas masks. The operator fired one canister further away from the snooker table than he would have liked and fired the other blind from behind the door frame, trying not to elicit a bla
st of gunfire from the holed-up man inside.
It was a big room and Henderson wondered if two canisters would be enough, but given that the gas was designed to be used with the obvious difficulties of the great outdoors, in the confined space of the room it filled every corner with astonishing alacrity.
Now came the tricky bit. There wasn’t much cover inside the games room and if Lazar had mitigated some of the effects of the gas by deploying an effective face mask, as they couldn’t hear him coughing or wheezing, the ART would be sitting ducks once visibility improved.
Roberts, as ever an officer who led from the front, went first. He instructed the team to fan out on as they entered the room. Henderson and Walters waited by the door. With all the officers now in the games room Henderson had a better view of the snooker table. Seconds later, movement caught his eye and he saw a handgun appear above the edge of the table. The team saw it too.
‘Gun! Everyone down!’ Roberts shouted, his voice muffled by the mask.
Lazar’s handgun fired in random fashion, suggesting he had been blinded by the gas and had taken to shooting wildly, but it found its mark when two ART officers screeched in pain. Wardle, on the left side of the ART fan was making his way towards the snooker table, unseen by Lazar. When he reached it, he stepped behind to get a better view, his mask partially impeding his vision. He opened fire with a short burst and the clatter of the handgun ceased.
FORTY-TWO
Walters completed the preliminaries for the recording devices while Henderson took a good look at the man in front of him. At last, he’d got one of the human traffickers in an interview room, albeit with a duty solicitor sitting beside him. He would have liked to see all four in custody, but it wasn’t to be.
