by PAUL BENNETT
‘Where are the rest of the bearer bonds and the money?’ I asked Carlo.
‘Packed securely in my case,’ he answered.
‘Give them to me,’ I said.
‘I told you they’re safe,’ he said.
‘Just look at it as insurance. Our insurance that you’ll be here when we get back. Hand them over.’
He went into his room and came back with a bundle of paper. I checked the bearer bonds and counted the money. He didn’t seem to be holding back on me. I put it all in my rucksack and locked it in the boot of one of the hire cars. I checked my watch.
‘Hell,’ I said. ‘We might as well go as sit here twiddling our thumbs.’
‘What do I do when you’re gone?’ Carlo asked.
‘Pray that we come back alive,’ I said.
‘And that they don’t follow us,’ Bull added. ‘Especially that they don’t follow us.’
‘I think I need the toilet,’ Carlo said. ‘Frequently, I suspect.’
23
We buddied up and smeared each other’s faces with mud from the forest. Picked up our rifles and left the cabin. Red was to take point with the pump-action shotgun, Stan was to watch the back door, not that we expected any danger from there, but, as Stan says, you can’t be too careful. It felt good to be on the move at last.
‘We could well have some language problems,’ I said to Stan. ‘Do you speak Russian?’
‘What accent do you want?’ he said nonchalantly.
Ever reliable.
We tooled up.
Each of us carried an assault rifle, the 9mm Browning in a shoulder holster and a knife in a sheath on our belt, although none of us would want to use the knife – it was too messy and unreliable. Contrary to what you see in the movies, the victim doesn’t necessarily die instantly and without sound when his throat’s cut. We also carried a length of rope and some gaffer tape to make up for not using the knife. In addition, Pieter carried the bolt cutters, long handled and sharp, well fit for purpose.
The going was slow, the carpet of needles on the forest floor absorbing our tread and making it seem like we were walking on wet sand. On top of that there was cloud cover over the moon and there were times when we had to feel our way through the trees.
We had debated long and hard about the best approach – cutting the wire at four places and coming in from different directions or just one cut and spreading out from there. In the end, judging that one entry was less likely to attract attention than four, we carved a six-foot high length of wire from the south-east quadrant, bent it back, let ourselves through and spread out from there.
Red was to remain at the entry point with the pump-action shotgun and I was to take the diagonal tower at the north-west sector: Bull and Pieter fanned out, the former to the north-east and the latter to the south-west, Stan stayed with the south-east. A pause to check each others’ positions and then the moment came – the game was on.
I climbed the steps slowly, concentrating on silence rather than speed. Halfway up I was able to peer over the top step. The guard was standing at the wooden rail that enclosed the tower, staring into the middle of the compound. His rifle was propped against a high stool that the guard could use to rest his weary legs during the course of his stint on duty.
I crept up the remaining steps and behind the guard. I lifted the Uzi and hit him on the back of the neck with the butt. He was propelled forward such that I had to grab hold of his collar and pull him back before he could go over the edge. I heaved a sigh of relief and lowered him to the ground. I put a length of gaffer tape across his mouth and, now that the danger of him crying out was past, took my time so that his hands and feet were tied securely. Lastly I picked up his rifle – the omnipresent Kalashnikov – and ejected the bullets from the magazine. Time to meet the others.
We left the administration building till later and converged on the largest of the huts – this was where the rest of the guards would be, sleeping peacefully, hopefully. I gestured to Bull to kick down the door and to Red to stand by to go in first. Bull duly obliged and Red was inside in an instant. As the rest of us went through he aimed the shotgun in the air and fired. The noise was like thunder. The guards had a rude awakening. When they opened their eyes all they could see was dust falling from the ceiling and five guys covering them.
‘No one moves,’ Stan said in Russian. ‘Put your hands on your heads and face the wall.’
There was an air of reluctance from some of the guards, after all they had the numerical advantage. But we had the fire power.
There’s always one. One man who thinks he’s invincible or is just plain stupid. A guy at the back made a dive for what must have been a pistol under his pillow. I pulled the Browning from its holster and fired off a shot. The bullet went straight through his hand. He stood motionless, looking down at the hole in his hand in disbelief.
‘You’re getting soft,’ said Stan. ‘You should have used the Uzi.’
‘At this range if I’d used the Uzi I would have blown his hand off.’
‘Like I said, you’re getting soft.’
Bull sprayed an arc from his rifle in front of the feet of the guards. Hands now went on heads without delay.
We patted them down, not expecting anyone to be carrying a gun in his pyjamas, but it pays to be thorough, to leave nothing to chance – that’s what makes us professionals. We trussed them up and made a pile of their rifles, emptying the magazines as we did so.
Bull and I went to the admin block, leaving Red, Stan and Pieter to explore the other huts. The door to the admin block was unlocked – why bother when there’s plenty of guards around? Inside was a long corridor with doors off to the right and left. Bull and I followed standard procedure – one flinging a door wide, the other leaping through ready to fire if there was any danger. The first door on the left was set up as an office for two people – two desks, two chairs, two computers and so on, just like the ark. There were even two mugs waiting to be washed up. We searched the desk drawers and found what we were looking for – passports, all Russian, about twenty of them. We put them in our jacket pockets and moved on.
The first door on the right opened into a large room with a desk and two chairs, a computer terminal and a long leather couch of the type you see in a doctor’s surgery. If that wasn’t enough of a giveaway, there was a machine to test blood pressure, another to run an ECG to check out someone’s heart, and a lot more that I had no idea of their function. One thing was for sure – a lot of money had been spent on kitting out this place. In one corner was a locked cabinet. Naturally, we broke the lock. Inside was a variety of drugs: we examined the labels and apart from some tranquillizers the rest didn’t make much sense to us.
Bull went to keep watch in the corridor, I moved the mouse on the computer. I was hoping that it might provide some clue as to why Almas had invested so heavily in an enterprise involving a group of people who would simply be sold into some form of slavery.
A program was minimized and I called it up to full-screen. It was some kind of medical database. Against the name were the sex and age of each person and what looked like full details of their health: medical history, blood group, HIV test results and a lot more that didn’t enlighten me much. I flicked through some more names and there was nothing unusual. Except perhaps….
Bull called my name and pointed down the corridor. I went to join him and saw what he was pointing at – the door handle of the next room was turning. I signalled him to go down the corridor past the door. We raised our rifles and waited, breath held, fingers on triggers.
The door opened and out stepped two women in night clothes. They saw us, rifles pointed at them, and screamed.
‘Raise your hands,’ I shouted above the noise of the screaming. ‘Face the wall.’
Bull patted them down, which only caused them to scream louder. Satisfied they weren’t armed, he nodded at me.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Hands down and tell me who you are. And for God’s sake, st
op screaming. We’re not going to hurt you.’
They were a doctor and a nurse. The doctor had a hard face, greying hair and legs that would have benefitted from a longer nightdress. The nurse had brown hair, eyes to match, full lips and a figure that didn’t deserve to be hidden by the folds of some long nightshirt in an artificial fabric that probably caused sparks to come off Bull’s hands as he patted her down. I motioned them into the office and asked them to sit down.
‘What do you do here?’ I said.
They relaxed a little in the familiar surroundings of the room.
The doctor spoke. If Stan had been here, he probably could have told me exactly where she came from by just listening to the accent. I guessed at Russian by the slow, low tones.
‘We work for Almas,’ she said. ‘You know what we do here, I assume by your presence and the guns you carry.’
‘Your business is selling people into slavery of some kind – prostitution, menial jobs that others aren’t willing to do, housework for rich people….’
‘We are here to look after the people – check that they are in good health and then keep them that way before they move on.’
‘Why so much interest in their health?’
‘It’s simple,’ she said, regaining her composure. ‘Almas gets more money for those in good health and won’t let their employers down. And no one wants a prostitute who is infected by HIV AIDS. It makes commercial sense, that’s all.’
I could tell she was hiding something and I was beginning to get an idea of what it was.
‘Put some clothes on,’ I said. ‘We’re going for a walk.’
We joined Red, Pieter and Stan outside one of the huts. People were formed around them in a circle. Some looked nervous, some relieved. All looked stunned. Not surprising, I suppose. It’s not every day that a bunch of guys carrying assault rifles wakes you up in the middle of the night.
‘Have you found Irina?’ I asked Stan.
He called over to a young girl on the edge of the group, gestured that she should come to him.
‘How much English do they speak?’ I said.
‘Enough to get by in their intended position, I imagine. The girls can groan OK. Some of the boys too, by the look of them.’
I shook my head. What a life had been planned for them. Down to the last detail.
I took the passports from my pocket. Bull followed suit. We handed them to Stan who could read the Cyrillic script.
‘Dish these out,’ I said. ‘Then translate for me.’
I waited while the passports were returned to their owners. There was one left over. The man from last night, I guessed, who had finished his life dangling from the barbed wire of the fence.
I spoke slowly and with plenty of pauses so that Stan could translate.
‘You have a choice,’ I said. ‘You can stay here until someone from Almas shows up or the guards manage to untie themselves. If you choose that option, Almas will own you for life. You will have to do what they say until your dying day – which may be soon. Or you can take a walk through the woods and hand yourself over to the police. Throw yourselves on their mercy. The worst that can happen is that you will be sent back to your own lands. Make your choice, now that you are free to choose.’
The circle around us split into groups as they debated what we had said. They all looked so young and vulnerable. Irina, taken with Stan, stuck close to him like a besotted little sister.
‘Tie up these two,’ I said to Pieter and Red, indicating the doctor and the nurse. ‘Anything else you would like to tell me?’ I asked them.
‘I was only doing my job,’ the doctor said.
‘Isn’t that depressing?’ I said.
I turned to Bull. ‘Tie them up and put them with the rest,’ I said. ‘Then let’s get out of here. We need to put some distance between ourselves and this place before morning comes.’
‘We did it,’ said Bull.
‘Maybe,’ I replied.
We were close to the lodge when we saw the lights. They were coming for us. Someone must have untied the guards. Someone who we were trying to help had betrayed us. There was no point in dwelling on it now, there was another battle to fight.
The five of us ran fast and were in the clearing around the lodge when I heard a cry from Red.
‘Shit,’ he shouted, ‘my glasses have come off.’
I grabbed hold of him and led him to the left-hand firing position that Stan had marked out. We hit the ground. I motioned Bull to the right-hand firing position and Pieter and Stan to go inside the lodge. We were ready for them.
I lined Red up so that his shotgun was pointing straight to the entrance to the clearing.
‘Hell,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about this. Damn stupid thing to do. Now I’m no use to you.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘I’m going to call out instructions, right? Just aim where I tell you and fire.’
‘Shoot low at first,’ I shouted to everyone. ‘Try to cripple them. Only kill if you have to.’
It was an unwelcome restriction to place on the others, but something told me not to get blood on our hands. There had been too much killing in the past. I did not want to go back to those ways.
The trees were obstacles to them and they came at us in a column rather than a line. That was their first mistake. The second was to carry on using their torches – they stood out against the darkness of the forest like they were actors under a spotlight. They might as well have had florescent targets tattooed on their foreheads.
We let them enter the clearing around the hunting lodge and, before they could spread out, opened fire.
‘Two o’clock,’ I said to Red and he fired off a volley. Straight and true.
Arcs of bullets came from our assault rifles as we swept right to left. The shotgun boomed again and again as I called out directions. The first rank of the column was down and out.
‘Just keep firing,’ I said to Red. ‘The noise is turning them into jelly.’
I signalled to Bull that we should leave our positions and circle round them. We ran, keeping low and came up behind the guards. Then we opened fire. Now from front and back they were being attacked. They had nowhere to run. Caught in the crossfire their will was being sapped, their resistance wavering. Bull and I kept changing our positions so that it appeared that there was a lot more of us. Stan and Pieter came out of the lodge, spraying bullets as they ran to take up the positions that Bull and I had vacated. The constant movement was disorientating them. They whirled around trying to find a target only to find themselves shooting at nothing.
The guards dropped like flies, their legs riddled with bullets or pellets from the shotgun. They threw their rifles aside and put their hands in the air. They had been sensible – they had surrendered.
We took it in turns to guard our prisoners while the rest of us searched for Red’s glasses – luckily they reflected in the torchlight – and then went inside the lodge to wash the mud from our faces and change into some less conspicuous clothes. Then we packed the guns into the people carrier, split up into our individual cars and headed towards the border. Stan was taking the biggest risk, but I had a feeling that we might need the guns again.
By the time we were across the border all hell was breaking loose in the area around Freiberg. Almas was going to have a lot of explaining to do. I wondered how they would try to wriggle out of this. I smiled and carried on driving.
24
We arrived back in Amsterdam around lunchtime, tired and hungry. Red, naturally, was the first to get back. Lucky not to be picked up by the police, I reckoned. Lucky to get back alive even.
I phoned Gus and arranged for him to come over for a meeting. Scout and Natasha were off seeing Scout’s father so I thought the best plan was to grab a couple of hours’ sleep and a snack and then all meet up. I hoped that the sleep would help clear my mind. There were some big decisions to make.
Stan had arranged for the matron who ran the hotel to provide us with a snack –
various smoked fish, bread of all sizes, shapes and colours, and a plateful of Polish pickled cucumbers. ‘You can’t eat smoked fish without a pickled cucumber,’ he said. ‘And no one makes a better pickled cucumber than a Pole.’ In addition to the food there were beers, a bottle of vodka, a bucket of ice and some soft drinks. Everything we needed.
When the matron brought the first tray of food she came up to me.
‘Advance,’ she said.
I noticed that she had had her hair done. No longer lank and shapeless, it was shorter and styled into short curls. I could guess who’d paid for that.
The dining-room was getting cramped. There were the five of us mercenaries, Carlo and Irina, and still Scout, Natasha and Gus were to arrive. We spread ourselves around the two tables and dug into the food. I poured myself a vodka and waited.
Gus was the next to arrive. He was brimming with happiness when he saw Carlo, then walked across to me and gave me a big hug.
‘You did it,’ he said.
‘Sort of,’ I replied. ‘I’ll explain later.’
When Scout and Natasha came into the room, Carlo rushed to Natasha and kissed her with embarrassing fervour. I made introductions, took a slug of my vodka and prepared to put the cat among the pigeons.
‘We have fulfilled our contract,’ I said. ‘Do you agree, Gus?’
‘You have found Carlo. That was your mission. You’ve carried out your side of the bargain. I’ll arrange with Roberto to settle the account.’
‘We found Carlo and now we’re going to let him go. He and Natasha – and Irina too – are going to ride off into the sunset and start a new life.’
Carlo smiled.
‘You can keep what’s left of the million-euro bearer bond. The other eight million stays with me for the moment.’
‘But how am I going to live?’ he protested.
‘I imagine Natasha can show you a few tricks on how to save money. You’re going to have to draw your horns in and budget for the future. Time to ride on, Carlo, and consider yourself lucky. I could hand you over to Roberto and he’d probably arrange for someone to break every bone in your body, if that’s what you prefer.’