Firewall

by Andy McNab

  As Eight went to the door and I passed the table, they got a respectful bow from me before I followed him downstairs at the speed of sound.

  * * *

  35

  Eight was a happy camper the moment he caught sight of his beloved Lada in the noisy parking lot.

  "Where do we go now, Vorsim?"

  "An apartment." He already had the Lada's hood open.

  I heard two metallic bangs as the starter motor got a reminder as to what it did for a living.

  The Lada eventually fired up and he drove us both out of the parking lot and turned right, toward the traffic circle. The "komfort baars" all had enormous doormen standing under their flashing neon to control the evening's trade. Turning left this time at the traffic circle, away from the river, we drove past even more establishments and parked trucks.

  The baars' lights slowly disappeared and the darkness took over again.

  Now apartment and industrial buildings lined the road, in between electrical towers and shells of crumbling masonry.

  Fighting with two trucks that were trying to overtake each other, both throwing up waves of ice and snow, we turned left without indicating, then left again down a narrow street, with apartments to the left and a tall wall to the right.

  Eight threw the Lada into the side of the road and jumped out. "Wait here, my man."

  Skirting the inevitable tower leg, he headed for the main door of one of the buildings. He stopped and checked the stenciling, gave me the thumbs up, then turned back toward the Lada to lock up. I got out and waited.

  The loud, constant noise of machinery came from behind the wall as I entered a very cold, dimly lit hallway, so narrow I could easily have put my arms out and touched both walls. It stank of boiled cabbage.

  Tiles were missing from the floor and the walls were painted blue, apart from the places where big chunks of plaster had fallen to the ground. Nobody had bothered to sweep them up. The apartment doors, which were one-piece sheet metal with three locks and a spy hole, looked so low that you'd have to stoop when entering.

  We waited for the elevator by rows of wooden mailboxes. Most of the doors had been ripped from their hinges and the others were just left open. I'd have felt more comfortable walking into a South American jail.

  The wall by the elevator was covered with a mass of hand painted instructions, all in Russian. It gave me something to look at while we listened to the motor groaning inside the shaft.

  The machinery stopped with a loud shudder and the doors opened. We entered an aluminum box, its paneling dented everywhere it was possible for boots to have connected. It reeked of urine. Eight hit the button for the fourth floor and we lurched upward, the elevator stopping suddenly every few feet, then starting again, as if it had forgotten where to go. Eventually we reached the fourth floor and the doors opened into semidarkness. I let him step out ahead of me. Turning left, Eight stumbled, and as I followed I found out why: a young kid was curled up on the floor.

  As the doors slammed shut again, cutting out even more of the dim light, I bent down to examine his small body, bulked out by two or three badly knitted sweaters. By his head lay two empty chip bags, and thick, dried snot hung from his nostrils to his mouth. He was breathing and he wasn't bleeding, but even in the feeble light from the ceiling bulb it was obvious that he was in shit state. Zits covered the area around his mouth and saliva dribbled from his lips. He was about the same age as Kelly; I suddenly thought of her and felt a surge of emotion. As long as I was around she would never be exposed to this kind of shit. As long as I was around I could see the expression on Dr. Hughes' face.

  Eight looked down at the boy with total disinterest. He kicked the bags, turned away, and carried on walking. I dragged the local glue head out of the way of the elevator and followed.

  We turned left along a hall, Eight singing some Russian rap song and pulling a string of keys from his jacket. Reaching the door right at the end, he messed about, trying to work out which key went where until finally it opened, then groping for the light switch.

  The room we entered definitely wasn't the source of the boiled cabbage stench. I could smell the heavy odor of wooden crates and gun oil; I would have known that smell anywhere. Proust's friend's childhood might have rushed back to him when he caught a whiff of madeleine cakes; this one took me straight back to the age of sixteen and the very first day I joined the army as a boy soldier in '76. Cakes would have been better.

  The inevitable single bulb lit up a very small hall, no more than a couple of feet square. There were two doors leading off; Eight went through the one on the left and I followed, closing the front door behind me and throwing all the locks. Only one of the four bulbs worked in the ceiling cluster that any 1960s family would have been proud of. The small room was stacked with wooden crates, waxed cardboard boxes, and loose explosive ordnance, all stenciled with Cyrillic script. The whole lot looked very Chad-Chad that was dangerously past its use-by date.

  Nearest to me was a stack of brown wooden crates with rope handles.

  Lifting the lid off the top one, I recognized the dull green bedpan shapes at once. Eight, grinning from ear to ear, made the noise of an explosion, his hands flying everywhere. He seemed to know they were land mines too. "See, my man, I get what you want. Guarantee of satisfaction, yes?"

  I just nodded as I looked around some more. Piles of other kit lay wrapped in brown military wax paper. Elsewhere, damp cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other had collapsed, spilling their contents onto the floorboards. Lying in a corner were half a dozen electric detonators, aluminum tubes about the size of a quarter-smoked cigarette with two eighteen-inch silver wire leads coming out of one end. The silver leads were loose, not twisted together, which was frightening stuff: it meant they were ready to act as antennae for any stray extraneous electricity-a radio wave, say, or energy from a mobile phone-to set them off and probably all the rest of the shit in there, too. This place was a nightmare. It seemed the Russians hadn't been too fussed about where this kind of stuff ended up in the early nineties.

  Picking up the detonators one by one, I twisted the leads together to close the circuit, then checked out the rest of the kit, ripping open cardboard boxes. Eight did the same, either to make me think he knew what he was doing or just out of curiosity. I gripped his arm and shook my head, not wanting him to play with anything. It would be nice to get out of here with all my bits and without him losing any more fingers.

  He looked hurt, so once I'd finished sorting the dets out and had stored them in an empty ammo box, I pulled out the policy to give him something to do. "What does this say, Vorsim?" I presumed he could read his own language.

  As he moved under the light, I spotted some dark-green det cord. It wasn't in its handy 200-yard reel as I would have liked; there seemed to be two yards here, another ten yards there, but then I saw a partly used reel with maybe eighty or ninety yards left, which would certainly do the trick.

  I put the reel of det cord to one side and went to check the other rooms. That was easy enough because each was about the size of a broom closet; there was a tiny kitchen-cum-bathroom cum-toilet arrangement and a bedroom that was even smaller. What I was looking for was plastic explosive, but there wasn't any. The only PE around here was in the antitank mines, and there were certainly enough of those to give me P for Plenty.

  I returned to the main room and lifted one of them from the open box.

  These were either TM 40s or 46s, I could never remember which was which; all I knew was that one was made of metal and the other of plastic. These ones were metal, about a foot in diameter and weighed around twenty pounds, of which over twelve pounds was PE. They were shaped like old-fashioned brass bed warmers, the sort that hang on stone fireplaces, alongside the horse brasses, in country inns. Instead of the long broomstick, these things had a swiveling carry handle, like on the side of a mess tin.

  It was going to be a pain in the ass to get the PE out of these things, but what was I expecting
?

  Placing the mine on the bare floorboards, I tried to unscrew the cap, which was in the center of the top. Before laying it, all you had to do was replace the cap with a detonation device-normally a fuse and detonator combination-then stand well back and wait for a tank.

  When it eventually started to move, shifting the years of grime that had formed a seal, I knew at once that it was really old ordnance. The smell of marzipan hit my nostrils. The greenish explosive had become obsolete in recent years. It still worked, it did the job, but the nitroglycerine fucked up not only armor, but also the head and skin of anyone preparing it. You were guaranteed a fearsome headache if you worked with it in a confined space and extreme pain if you got it on a cut. I was taking enough aspirin already without having to deal with that.

  Eight sparked up. "Hey, Nikolai, this paper is really cool."

  "What does it say?"

  "First of all, his name is Ignaty. Then it says, you are his man.

  Whatever you need must be yours. He protects you, my man." He looked at me. "It gets heavy. It says, "If you do not help my friend, I will kill your wife; and then, after you have been crying for two weeks, I will kill your children. Two weeks after that, I will kill you."

  That's heavy shit, my man."

  "Who is Ignaty?"

  He gave a shrug. "He's your guy, am I right?"

  No he wasn't, he was Val's. The card players had certainly recognized the name, that was for sure. I took the policy from Eight's hands and put it back in my jacket pocket. Now I knew what Liv meant about Tom receiving the kind of threat that made the Brits look a bit weak by comparison. No wonder he'd kept his mouth shut and just done his time.

  Between us we carried several boxes down to the car, passing the kid still lying where I'd left him. On the last trip down, Eight locked up the apartment and we stood by the Lada with the hum and groan of the factory in the background. He was going to walk from there as he wanted to go and see a friend.

  I said goodbye, feeling more than a bit sorry for him. Like everything else in this place, he, too, was just fucked over.

  "Thanks a lot, mate, and I'll bring the car back in about two days."

  I shook his cold hand and then grabbed the door handle as he walked away.

  He called after me. "Yo, Nikolai. Hey " There was suddenly a less-confident tone in his voice. "Can I can I come to England with you?"

  I didn't look back, just wanting to get on my way. "Why?"

  "I can work for you. My English is cool."

  I could hear him getting closer. "Let me go with you, man. Everything will be cool. I want to go to England and then I will go to America."

  "Tell you what, I'll be back soon and we'll talk about it, okay?"

  "When?"

  "Like I said, two days."

  He shook my hand again with all the fingers he had left. "Cool. I'll see you soon, Nikolai. It'll be cool. I will sell my car, and and get new clothes."

  He virtually skipped back up the road, waving at me, thinking about his new life as I gave the starter motor some encouragement, fired it up, and did a three-point turn to back out onto the street, passing Eight on the way.

  I'd only driven a hundred yards when I stopped and put the car in reverse. Fuck it, I couldn't do this.

  As I drew alongside and wound down the window he greeted me with a big smile. "What's up, my man?"

  "I'm sorry, Vorsim, I can't take you" I corrected myself "will not take you to England."

  His shoulders and face slumped. "Why not, man. Why not? You just said, man "

  I felt an asshole. "They won't let you in. You're Russian. You need visas and all that stuff. And even if they do, you won't be able to stay with me. I don't have a house and I haven't got any work I can give you. I'm really sorry, but I can't and I won't do it. That's it, mate. I'll drop the car off in two days."

  And that was it. I wound the window up and headed back into the center of town, so I knew where I was and could pick up the main Narva-Tallinn drag again.

  I could have lied to him, but I remembered as a kid all the trips that my parents were going to take me on, all the presents I was going to be given, all the promises of nice vacations and all the rest of the shit that had never happened. It was just said to keep me quiet. I couldn't have let Eight get all psyched up, burning bridges, and all for nothing. Liv was right: Sometimes it's better to fuck people off with the truth.

  I found my bearings in town and headed west. My destination was a hotel room where I could prepare all the shit I had in the trunk.

  I was still feeling quite sorry for Eight; not for dumping him, because I knew it was the right thing to do, but because of what the future held for him. Absolute jack shit.

  A gas station appeared, exactly the same as the one in Tallinn, very blue, and as clean, bright, and out of place as an alien spacecraft. I pulled in and filled up. Parking off to one side of the building, I went to pay just as the two staff had started to think they had their first runner of the night.

  I was the only customer they had. There was a small section in their shop that actually sold car parts; the rest of the space was given over to beer, chocolate, and sausages. I picked up five blue nylon tow ropes-their entire stock-and all eight rolls of black insulation tape on display, together with a cheap multi tool set that would probably break the second time it was used. Finally, I picked up a flashlight and two sets of batteries, and two of the small rectangular ones with terminals on top. I couldn't think of anything else I needed just now, apart from some chocolate and meat and a couple of cans of orange soda.

  The guy who took my money had more zits on his head than brain cells in it. He was trying to work out the change, even though the register had told him. Eventually he handed me my shopping bags; I wanted some more and pointed. "More? More?" It took a few seconds of miming and a couple of small coins, but I came out with half a dozen spares.

  It was sausage and chocolate time. I sat in the car with the engine running, stuffing my face as I looked out at the main drag. Beyond it was a massive poster site showing me the wonders of Fuji film, covering the whole side of a building as the trucks screamed past. I didn't blame them; I was in a hurry to get out of town, too.

  Feeling sick after eating everything I'd bought, I rejoined the mayhem on the road. My destination was Voka, a coastal town to the north, between Narva and Kohtla-Jarve, where I was going to prepare for the attack tomorrow afternoon. I had chosen Voka for no other reason than that I liked the name, and that, since it was on the coast, there was probably a better chance of finding a room.

  Voka turned out to be just what I was expecting, a small beach town with one main drag. Maybe it had been a bit of a hot spot during the Soviet era, but from what I could see of it in my headlights and the occasional functioning streetlight, it was now very tired and flaky, the Estonian equivalent of those Victorian places in Britain that reached their expiration date in the seventies when everyone started getting on planes to Spain. When the Russians had packed their bags a few years earlier, this place, too, must have rolled over and died.

  There was no one about; everyone was probably at home watching the end of another Kirk Douglas movie.

  I drove slowly along the coast road with the Baltic on my left and the car rocking with the wind off the sea.

  There weren't many lights on in the apartments to my right, just the glow now and then of a TV.

  Eventually I found a hotel with a sea view. At first glance it had looked more like a four-story apartment building, until I saw the small, flickering neon sign to the left of its double glass doors. As I locked the Lada, waves crashed onto whatever sort of beach was behind me, and the wind buffeted my jacket and hair.

  The fluorescent lights in the hallway nearly blinded me. It was like walking into a television studio, and almost as hot. A TV blared away somewhere in Russian. I was starting to catch the intonation quite well.

  The sound came from in front of me. I walked along the hall until I found its source.
At the bottom of a flight of stairs, a sliding window was set chest high into the wall. Behind it sat an old woman, glued to the screen of an old black-and-white TV.

  There was plenty of time to study her while trying to attract her attention. She wore thick woolen tights and slippers, a chunky black cardigan, a gaudy flowery dress, and crocheted woolen hat. While she watched the TV, she spooned lumpy soup out of what looked like a large salad bowl. The TV had a coat hanger for an antenna that seemed to be the law around here. It reminded me of the times I had to dance around the room with an indoor antenna in my hand so my stepdad could follow the horse racing.

  She finally noticed me, but didn't bother with a greeting or asking what I wanted. Nodding politely and smiling, I pointed at a sheet of paper taped to the window, which I presumed was the rate.

  "Can I have a room, please?" I asked in my favorite Australian accent.

  I was getting rather fond of my Crocodile Dundee impression. It was wasted on her.

  There was a clatter of footsteps from the wooden staircase and a couple appeared, both dressed in long overcoats. He was a small, skinny guy in his late forties, slightly balding on top, but with the rest of his hair greased back in the style that Eastern Europeans, for some reason, think looks marvelous, and a big droopy mustache. They walked past without giving me or the old woman a second glance. The woman, I noticed, was at least twenty years younger than Baldy, and considerably less smelly. He had a body odor that no deodorant could tame.

  The old woman handed me a towel the size of a tea cloth and a set of what had once been white sheets. Muttering something, she held one finger in the air, then two. I guessed she meant number of nights. I showed her one.

  She nodded, writing down some numbers which I took to be the price.

  EEK150 for the night about $10. A bargain. I couldn't wait to see the room. I gave her the money and she put the key, attached to a six-inch length of 2x4, on top of the sheets and got back to her soup and TV. I didn't get to learn the Estonian for "have a nice day."