NS13 Zero Hour

by Andy McNab

  There was an old wooden staircase dead ahead, uncarpeted, dimly lit by a bulb with no shade. A dank smell filled the air, strong and sickly, as if the house hadn’t been aired for years.

  The biggest of the North Face boys got his dibs on Anna. He leered at his mates as he ran his hands over her body. She glared back at him. The stream of Russian that poured out of her told him that she was ready to bite. He seemed to like whatever she was saying, though, and gave her breasts an extra frisk so he could hear more.

  The runt was obviously in charge of storage. He stood there enjoying the show, with both of Lilian’s pictures, our maps and mobiles clutched in his hands.

  I heard movement at the top of the stairs and looked up to see two wide-eyed teenage faces. The girls were on their hands and knees, trying to hide from view, but captivated by the aggression on the floor below. Apart from oversized T-shirts - one from a Guns N’ Roses concert, the other a plain grey that had once been white - they were naked. Their hair was a mess, but pushed back far enough for me to see that both had thin, painted eyebrows that made them look like dolls.

  They almost jumped out of their skins as Mr Big caught sight of them. They shot from sight as he dragged himself away from Anna’s breasts and double-stepped it up there, shrieking like the world’s angriest parent.

  Anna and I were hauled to our feet and pushed against the wall. These guys were big and aggressive, but what was more worrying was their air of who-gives-a-fuck. They looked like they’d just as easily kill us as offer us coffee.

  Anna took the lead. She began to talk to the runt. It sounded like she still wanted to meet the boss. Her tone was measured, persuasive and even - despite being punctuated by screams and shouts from upstairs as the girls got a good slapping. She had to speak up to be heard, and managed to show no interest whatsoever in the drama unfolding above us.

  The runt pointed towards the back of the house, but it was clear I wasn’t invited.

  She didn’t budge. She turned and pointed at me. This time it sounded like she was telling them to fuck off. Her words were quick and aggressive. The slaps and screams stopped and the girls began to beg.

  The runt asked her something.

  Whatever she answered, it seemed to work. He strode off down the corridor. Anna hadn’t looked at her hired help once since we walked up to the building. She was playing it well. She gave me an order in Russian and signalled what I was to do. I stayed behind her along the short stretch of corridor and as we went through a doorway at the rear. Our footsteps sounded unnaturally loud on the bare boards.

  The kitchen was large and filled with smoke. A man smaller than even the runt - but clearly infinitely more powerful - was sitting with a brew, drawing hard on an untipped cigarette. The girls and Mr Big were now directly above us. I knew I couldn’t show the slightest interest in the sounds. We were buyers: we knew these girls needed to be kept in hand.

  The odd glimmer of makeshift street-lighting managed to fight its way through what was left of the blind. It was obvious now why they kept their coats on. It was colder and more miserable in here than it was outside. There was no heating. This was a meeting place. People weren’t here all the time.

  The only thing that looked like it might work was a Nespresso machine like the one in my flat. It sat among the general shit by the sink, next to its discarded packaging.

  Anna didn’t wait to be asked. She went over to the table and sat opposite him. Bed springs started to squeak above us. I heard a muffled sob.

  Anna ignored it all and kept talking, cool and calm. In case he wasn’t getting the message, she leant over and helped herself to a cigarette from the pack that sat next to an old dinner plate piled high with butts. She lit it with a plastic throwaway that lay next to his mobile.

  He gave me a cursory glance, out of boredom more than anything. I looked away. He would have expected nothing less. I was Anna’s BG. My total focus was on my principal, not on trying to establish eye contact with anyone else.

  Mr Big was really getting into it. His breathless shouts were followed by a couple more slaps and an anguished scream.

  Anna was playing a blinder. She exuded confidence. She sounded like she really was here to buy herself some girls.

  I looked around. A small bread knife lay beside half a loaf near the coffee machine. That was the only weapon I could see. The corridor was blocked by the North Face crew, who were leaning against the wall, maybe waiting their turn upstairs. The door behind Anna was bolted. If the shit hit the fan, all I could do was to hold them off long enough for her to unbolt it and run.

  The springs stopped squeaking and grunts were replaced by sobs. I still didn’t move a muscle, but I made myself a promise then: for as long as I lived, I’d track these fuckers down - and their mates - and kill them.

  Anna sparked up another of the boss’s cigarettes and put the lighter back on the table. The smoke curled from her mouth and nose before she spoke. The only words I recognized now sounded like names of countries. He was still calm. He lit himself another cigarette too and took such a mega-drag I could see the paper burn down like a fuse.

  Anna sat and waited while he thought about what she’d said. But she didn’t wait for long. She stood up before he’d delivered his answer: she’d had enough of this bullshit.

  I turned towards the North Face guys. I wanted them to know that we intended to leave in one piece. Fuck the mobiles and the other stuff. I moved into the corridor just in time to see Mr Big give his mates a very satisfied grin and put his coat back on.

  The small guy started talking. Anna stopped, turned back, went to the table and sat down. She helped herself to another cigarette from his pack.

  He gave an order to one of the North Faces. I heard the front door open and close.

  We waited in silence. The two of them smoked. The boss checked his mobile now and again for messages as Anna sat back, picking tobacco from her lips. The sobbing above us gradually subsided.

  After three or four minutes the sound of clubland laughter echoed down the hallway and a new body appeared. Dressed in a brown overcoat over a black polo neck, he was so slim his head looked as if it really belonged on someone else’s shoulders. Everything about him was immaculate. His nails were manicured, possibly even polished. Not one dark brown hair from what was left on his head was out of place. He didn’t give Anna or me as much as a glance as he headed for the small guy’s side of the table.

  He jerked his head. ‘She speak English?’

  He was no Russian: his accent was Scouse, deep, strong and quick.

  The small guy shrugged.

  The Scouser took a seat next to his mate.

  Anna stubbed out what was left of her cigarette on the plate and frowned impatiently, wanting to get on with business. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Santa fucking Claus. What the fuck’s it to you? Why have you come to us?’

  He wasn’t exactly cross-eyed, but they looked ever so slightly inwards. He reminded me of someone I’d known back in my battalion days. Robot was permanently AWOL. He’d always either gone to a Millwall match, or got arrested after one. His big pleasure in life was smashing up shop fronts or battering other teams’ fans with a hammer. Being in the army had messed up his social life.

  I always kept clear of Robot. He was as crazy and unpredictable as he looked. One day he walked into someone in the cookhouse by mistake. Instead of ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ the guy said, ‘Why don’t you go where you’re looking?’ It cracked us up, but Robot didn’t see the funny side. The squaddie he’d collided with was in hospital for weeks with a fractured jaw.

  Anna relaxed back into her chair. ‘I want girls. I’m expanding into Italy, France, Germany. I want to pick them up from here, and do my own distribution.’

  The Scouser leant over and examined the last cigarette in the pack. With a curl of the lip he extracted a silver case from an inside pocket. He flipped it open, selected an untipped cancer stick of his own and bounced it up
and down in his lips as he spoke. ‘What’s your name?’ He reached for the lighter.

  ‘Anna.’ Her tone was assured. She was going for it.

  The Scouser dipped into his coat and pulled out Lilian’s pictures, along with our mobiles. ‘What the fuck’s this shite about?’

  Anna didn’t miss a beat. ‘She is one of mine, from Moldova.’

  He smiled. ‘Not any more.’

  Anna sat back and accepted the news with a slow nod. ‘Is she upstairs?’

  ‘Not now. Those two are just perks for the lads.’ He waved an arm towards the doorway. ‘Can’t be all work, no play. Know what I mean?’

  She didn’t bother answering. ‘The hard part is getting the girls into Europe. If you can do that, why don’t I just come to you? It will make my life easier.’ She retrieved the pictures from the table and screwed them up. ‘Do you have girls for sale, or am I wasting my time?’

  ‘That depends.’

  She pointed a finger at him. ‘I want young ones. No crack whores or ugly pigs the Turks have already finished with. I want the ones you get fresh from here. No scars, no skin ink.’ She draped an arm coolly over the back of her chair.

  He put cigarette and lighter to one side. ‘Who wants them? Who sent you?’

  She laughed. ‘Why? Are you with Animal Welfare? You want to make sure they go to good homes? Now, do you have some for me to see, or what? I want a good price. If I get that, we can do business. A lot more business. But young. No more than twenty-one, twenty-two.’

  The Scouser flicked a speck of ash off his coat, then studied her through the cloud of smoke that still hung over the table. He finally shrugged and put his hands in the air. ‘Tell you what, give me a number. Maybe I’ll call you.’

  ‘No. Fuck you.’ She stood up, grabbed our mobiles and turned, ready to leave.

  He waved an arm. ‘For fuck’s sake, calm down. Sit down a minute.’ He pulled out a pen and wrote on the cigarette packet.

  She came and stood beside me. She wasn’t going to do fuck-all of what he said.

  He threw the empty packet at her. ‘Be at that address tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do. Wear one layer of clothes. That coat. And have a fucking bath, will you? You smell and look like shite.’ He pointed at me. ‘And no fucking ape.’

  She had what she wanted. She turned towards the door, confidently expecting the North Faces to part like the Red Sea.

  PART FIVE

  1

  Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam Wednesday, 17 March

  09.25 hrs

  The flight from Copenhagen only took ninety minutes and landed on time. We’d followed our new mate Robot’s advice and bought new gear and day sacks to carry it in, then gone back to the hotel for a shower. Of course Anna had kept her coat.

  I reached into my brown-leather charity-shop bomber jacket and pulled out my passport. I’d put it into the right-hand inside pocket so I had to use my left to take it out. The action was awkward enough to remind me I was doing something unusual: that I was Nicholas Smith, not Nick Stone. Julian’s guys hadn’t exactly pushed the creative envelope there, but it fitted my alias business cover. Nick Smith was an unemployed satellite-dish engineer. He’d only ever worked for small outfits. You never used a well-known company like Sky or BT as cover. If you did and got caught, they’d go ballistic. Apart from anything else, you’d be putting their genuine personnel at risk. They could become a target for reprisals.

  In my well-worn jeans, bomber and Timberlands I was just one of the thousands of Brit workers moving in and out of Schiphol and other EU airports every day. They spilt out of the no-frills flights from Gatwick and East Midlands, day sacks and wheelies in hand so they could bypass the luggage carousels and get to work. With a couple of days’ growth, I really looked the part. Nick Smith was in good company as he approached the Immigration desks.

  Being unemployed is always good cover. You don’t have to go into detail about who you work for and risk having it checked. Chances are, you won’t be questioned going from one EU country to another, but you never know. All I needed was enough to get me through the first layer of security.

  Anna was four or five places behind me in the queue. My cover didn’t sit well with her in tow, and that was one of the reasons why we weren’t together. The other was that the meeting Robot had lined up for this morning was our best and maybe only chance of getting hold of Lilian. If for any reason we got lifted together, that chance would evaporate.

  My passport was now in my right hand. I flicked the picture page open with my thumb, ready for the scanner. The flat screens beyond the desk by the luggage carousel showed newsreels of yesterday’s suicide bombings and Taliban attacks in Kabul. The caption said the death toll had reached double figures.

  I recognized the square near the war victims’ hospital, just down the road from the Iranian embassy. It now had a massive hole in the ground where one of the car bombs had kicked off, and the buildings around it were in ruins. It was the way of things now. Back in the studio, they rounded off the piece with some new accusations that Islamabad trained and funded the Taliban, and Pakistan had refused to use US technology in their nuclear-energy systems.

  I’d been there before too - and I didn’t blame them. Word had got around after the al-Kibar adventure. President Zardari and his mates didn’t fancy the Americans tripping the kill switches at Zero Hour and making free with their airspace.

  The kill switches in the al-Kibar ground-to-air defences really did work. There was no illumination of Ra’am’s F-15s as they went into their attack profile. But the real reason the Americans approved the mission was to send the Iranians a clear message. Which had to be why they were getting their kit direct from Tarasov, these days.

  It was my turn to approach the desk. One glance at Nick Smith’s photograph and the Dutch immigration officer waved me through.

  2

  I picked up the keys for a Fiat Panda while Anna headed for the Radisson, opposite the terminal. It would be easy to park in highly congested streets, and it wouldn’t draw too much attention to itself. It would blend in even more once I’d installed the baby seat that the very tall blonde woman at the Budget desk passed over with a smile. I liked the Dutch. They spoke perfect English and even looked like us. Maybe that’s why the Costa del Clog had taken over from Spain as every self-respecting Brit villain’s hideout of choice.

  I handed her Nick Smith’s MasterCard. It had about PS2,000 left out of its PS5,000 limit. You can’t do without credit cards. They’re uncomfortably easy to track, but you need them for things like car hire and flights. Try to pay cash and you’ll be flagged up as a possible terrorist or, in this neck of the woods, drug-dealer or criminal.

  Half an hour later, we were following the A10 north, day sacks tucked alongside the baby seat. There hadn’t been time to go to the room. All the earlier flights had been fully booked, and the clock was ticking.

  Anna was navigating with the map Budget had given us. The place was heaving with blue motorway signs and glass-fronted office blocks - we could have been driving along the M4 into London. I even passed a service station with signs for BP and a Wild Bean coffee shop.

  Anna told me we had a while before we hit the city exit. ‘Do you know Amsterdam? Do you know where this—’

  ‘Used to. When I was a young soldier in Germany, I used to go to the Dutch camp to buy stuff because everything was cheaper. A tank unit was billeted there - good lads. We played football with them and went downtown as a gang, that sort of thing. We even went on a couple of trips to Amsterdam with them, doing what young soldiers do. We out-drank them, of course.’ I gave her a grin. ‘But only just.’

  ‘What is it with soldiers?’ She wasn’t impressed. But she probably knew I was trying to keep her mind off the meeting and what went along with it.

  I suddenly realized I had a bit of a lump in my throat. That sort of carry-on had stopped years ago, but until the day I’d walked into Kleinmann’s consulting rooms the memories of those times had
always brought a smile to my face. Thinking about them now just made me miserable. Not the events themselves, but the thinking about them. Was this what happened when you knew the clock was ticking?

  The sun was bright, even though it was starting to spit a little with rain. I pulled the visor down to protect my eyes and Anna handed over a couple of Smarties.

  As I swallowed them, something weird happened. I started to think about the people I’d fucked over. Not work people, but the real ones - women mostly, who I’d messed around through naivety, stupidity, or just not giving a shit. What had happened to them all? Did they think of me? What did they think of me? I didn’t even know where my ex-wives lived, let alone anyone else, but should I go and say sorry, like an alcoholic starting out on the Twelve Steps?

  Was I good or bad, all things considered? Was there a heaven and a hell? If there was, I knew which of the two I’d be heading for.

  For the first time ever, I found myself thinking about what happens when you die. Maybe you discover all the secrets of the universe in a nano-second. Or maybe an old man with a long white beard presses your off button and then there’s oblivion. Part of me wanted there to be something that went on afterwards - even if it was in a place where you had to meet all the people you’d fucked over and try to be best mates with them. I rather liked that idea. There were a few times I should have been a better person and done the right thing, rather than what I was getting paid to do. Actually, more than a few.

  I was starting to scare myself here. Fuck this. I made myself cut away. I’d always preferred action to thought. Maybe that was why I’d wanted this job: it was the one thing that could stop me thinking about that kind of shit. The fact was: I was going to die. Getting shot at, you know you stand a chance of getting killed - but you don’t know it for sure. And every second you were still alive was a bonus. I was on Death Row now, with the date of my execution pretty much in the firing squad’s diary.