NS13 Zero Hour (2010)

by Andy McNab

  He slurred a few words. Saliva dribbled from his mouth. His head went limp and his eyes stayed open.

  ‘Did you get it?’

  She nodded.

  I let him go.

  I stepped over the bodies and checked down the corridor. There was nothing that would slow us down.

  I came back and looked her in the eye. ‘Take a breath. Are you ready?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good.’ I gestured towards the first one I’d dropped. ‘Check him for car keys.’ I frisked the other guy’s long leather coat and came up with the Beamer’s.

  We headed out into the corridor, the weapon still in my hand in case we had a drama. We ran down the stairs and out into the street. I pointed Anna to the right and I headed left, eyes peeled for a glint of blue.

  She called out to me.

  I turned to see her pointing at a vehicle that I couldn’t see. Too many others were in the way.

  I ran towards her, hitting the key fob until lights began to flash. ‘You drive.’ I threw her the keys. ‘Lena’s. Go, let’s go!’

  20

  Anna turned about four corners before we hit Constitution Street again. I kept a look-out for any major drama on the street.

  ‘I hope Irina’s OK.’

  Anna swerved to avoid an old guy on an unlit bike. ‘You think they might have got to her first?’

  The Skoda was where we’d left it.

  She slowed down. Through the rain-slicked windows I could see the silhouette of a body in the driving seat. It wasn’t moving.

  I powered down my window. Irina raised her head and wound down hers.

  Anna leant across me. ‘Irina, he was a trafficker.’

  She got it straight away. ‘Was?’

  ‘We need to split up now. I’ll keep Lena’s weapon. I’m going to dump it. Will you be OK making your own way back?’

  She gave me a dazzling smile and fired up the Skoda’s engine.

  ‘Nobody saw us or knows about us, OK?’

  Irina nodded. She came out of her space and stayed behind us until the next junction. Then she peeled off to the right.

  I quizzed the Beamer’s dash. ‘Half a tank. Will that get us to the ferry?’ We had to get out of this place, but I wanted to avoid the airport. Ships are less secure and easier to get onto than planes.

  ‘It’s two hours maybe, not far.’

  ‘We’ll give the hotel a miss.’

  ‘I’ll call them later and they’ll bill me. What about the Polo?’

  ‘We just leave it.’ An oncoming vehicle’s headlights splashed across her face as she concentrated on the road. The rain was heavier now. The wipers sounded like a drumbeat.

  ‘And the pistol?’

  ‘I’m going to keep it as long as I can - at least until Odessa.’

  We hit a pothole and the Beamer’s skirting scraped the tarmac.

  ‘What did Mr Lover Man say about Lilian?’

  ‘She’s gone to Copenhagen. A place called Christiania. Have

  you heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a commune inside the city. Slobo said she needed to get

  away for a while. She was pissed off with her father.’

  ‘Does that mean he knew who Tarasov is?’

  Anna kept one hand on the wheel while she fished in her pockets for cigarettes. ‘I don’t think so. He just said “her father”. But he cut off her Facebook, and he moved her along with a new ID. She may think she’s taking a break in Hippie Land, but I think Slobo had other ideas.’

  I powered down my window a quarter of the way as she lit

  up. Spots of rain peppered my face. ‘Do we have an address?’ ‘He didn’t know it. Or if he did, he wasn’t telling me.’ I sparked up my BlackBerry. ‘What’s her new name?’

  ‘Nemova.’

  ‘How did she travel?’

  She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘He didn’t say, but I didn’t ask. It wasn’t exactly coffee and chat.’

  My screen lit up and showed four bars. I hit the time and date app. It took a second or two to load. I tapped in Julian’s number. There was a long tone and a short break as he began to receive the call. The green padlock icon would signal secure mode. It rang three times.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘She’s been trafficked. She’s in Denmark. Some kind of commune, maybe. She’s got a new name. Lilian Nemova. I’ll spell: November - Echo - Mike - Oscar - Victor - Alpha. Worth checking the visa applications again?’

  Julian didn’t answer immediately. He was probably still writing it all down. ‘I’ll get somebody on it. Then I need to inform Mr Tresillian.’

  A deep growl cut in. ‘Already here, Julian. Now listen to me, Mr Stone. Excellent work. Go to Denmark. Find her. A contact and a safe-house will be arranged once you’ve discovered where she is.’ There was a pause. ‘A commune? A fucking commune? I didn’t even know they still existed. Do these people think the world owes them a fucking living?’

  Jules and I weren’t sure who was meant to answer.

  Tresillian filled in the gap. ‘Anyone got anything useful to say?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind dropping out myself one day.’

  The jokes still weren’t welcome. ‘Not on my watch, Mr Stone. Next time we hear from you I trust it will be good news.’

  The phone went dead. Obviously Julian didn’t have anything to say. Or if he did, tough shit.

  Before closing the BlackBerry down I shifted the cursor to the camera icon and clicked on ‘View Pictures’. I spent a few moments willing the minute Cyrillic script to magically translate itself into plain English and leap out at me. ‘I took these of the shipment stacked inside Tarasov’s factory. You see the stencilling on the nearest case? Can you read what it says?’

  She zoomed in on each photograph in turn. ‘Just a series of numbers and letters - the product serial ID, maybe.’ She looked up. ‘Why not run them by Julian? He’ll be able to blow them up on a big screen.’

  She wasn’t wrong. I thought of the one on the wall behind Tresillian’s head. And I thought of the look on Tresillian’s face when I’d asked about Lilian’s dad. ‘My orders were to steer well clear of Tarasov. And if the boss of bosses is listening in to Jules’s incoming calls …’

  She squinted harder at the BlackBerry’s tiny display. ‘I can’t - no, hang on … here, in the corner …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some kind of shipping label.’

  ‘Russia?’

  She zoomed in further. ‘Yes and no. It’s shipping to Moscow but it’s marked “for onward transit”. There’s an end-user company mentioned. I don’t recognize the name - but I know somebody who might.’ She pulled out her iPhone. ‘Is there anything else about Tarasov I should know?’

  I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t know myself.

  She pressed the speed dial. It didn’t sound like there were any pleasantries. The exchange was short. ‘He’ll call back when he’s done some digging.’

  21

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘About an hour and a half, I think.’

  ‘No, not that. I was thinking about you, back in the flat. Those tears, the way you brought them on like that. What was that all about?’

  ‘It’s what I do, Nick. I get people to talk. I told him I was her sister. I told him I didn’t care what he was doing, why he was doing it, who he was doing it with. I just wanted her back.’ She flicked the stub of her latest cigarette out of the window. ‘Not that it got me far this time.’

  The city was way behind us now. The arc of the BMW’s fullbeams cut into the darkness ahead.

  ‘How do you manage cry-on-demand? Do baby journalists have to go to acting school or something?’

  ‘Sort of. I learnt the trick from an American reporter in Bosnia. It came in handy sometimes at road-blocks. She used to think of something really sad. Her mother’s death, maybe.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m sure you can guess.’

  A grim silence filled
the car. The pulse in my neck quickened. I pictured a twenty-one-year-old kid on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. I was just going on what she’d told me, but the image was astonishingly vivid - maybe because I was no stranger to scenes like that.

  It was 1987. They were young. They were in love. They’d started dating when she was just sixteen - a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen and in the Soviet Army. And then he’d gone to Afghanistan. She waved goodbye to him at the station, and the next time she saw him he was in a coffin. Even now, she still went to the station sometimes when she wanted to remember him.

  ‘Grisha was an idealist.’ I remembered the sadness in her voice as we’d walked along a windy Moscow prospekt and she’d told me the story. ‘He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening when I came back from school I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I love Pushkin …’

  They’d got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him - in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. He would have been conscripted anyway, to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well? It meant signing up for five years, but then he’d be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher.

  Anna’s father didn’t approve of the relationship. But, then, he didn’t approve of anything much. He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system had killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. Anna’s mother was scared of him.

  Anna was his only child. He wanted her to make something of her life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. She had to see Grisha in secret. He had a motorbike, so they could escape every so often for a few hours on their own.

  When he’d joined the army, Grisha had gone away for almost a year. In that time Anna saw him only once. He didn’t talk about his training, but she could see that it had affected him deeply. It was only after the Chechen war, years later, when she’d helped families who’d tried to discover what had happened to their dead or missing sons, that she’d found out what they did to recruits. There was systematic abuse. Punishments had nothing to do with performance. If the officers and the NCOs in charge were having a bad day, they beat you. If they were bored, they beat you. When Grisha had come home that summer he was a changed man. He didn’t want to talk about the army, just kept telling her that it wouldn’t be long - another four years - and then he’d be free of it.

  It was Grisha’s father who had bought the motorbike, a beaten-up old thing from the Great Patriotic War, and restored it for him. The only times she had seen Grisha happy that summer were when he and his father had worked on the bike and when he had taken Anna out on it.

  It was her eighteenth birthday while he was still on leave so they had decided to hand in their application to get married. Russians didn’t have engagements and rings. They applied to ZAGS, the department of registration. But the wedding had never happened. He was sent to Afghanistan before ZAGS had given them a date.

  Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. In February 1989, the month the war ended, so had the letters. The army told her he was missing, presumed dead. She wrote requesting further information, but the authorities had never replied. It was like he’d never existed.

  Almost a year after they’d lost the war, Grisha’s father had got a call from a man who claimed to be from the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on his son’s body. He wanted to meet; there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was too scared. This was Soviet Russia.

  Anna had said she would go. ‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man - this colonel - at a cafe. He told me about himself - told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. Then he showed me some pictures.

  ‘The autopsy had been carried out at a medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.

  ‘The colonel told me the carrier had been hit by an anti-tank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head - just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’

  It was a Soviet missile. The army had found a whole cache of them soon afterwards. The boxes had identified the manufacturer. Someone had sold them to the mujahideen.

  Grisha’s father worked for the Soviet Union’s biggest arms manufacturers. Weapons that he had helped to build had killed his son. Grisha’s death drove them both - him, until his death, to unearth arms trafficking; her, to champion the underdog at every turn.

  I turned my head. Anna was weeping, and this time the tears weren’t on demand.

  ‘Walking through that graveyard made it easy. Those places always make me cry.’

  ‘Pull over, Anna, I’ll drive. You navigate.’

  She bumped to a halt. Three trucks thundered past us, just metres apart. She hardly noticed. She had both hands on the wheel, head down.

  ‘I try to move on, Nick, I really do. But it’s … hard …’ She turned to face me. ‘Do you understand?’

  I put a hand gently on her shoulder.

  22

  About half an hour out of Odessa, Anna glanced towards me again. ‘When you asked about the tears, Nicholas, what were you trying to tell me?’

  Jesus, this girl didn’t miss a thing. ‘Nothing really. I was just—’

  She pulled into the side of the road again and swivelled in her seat. ‘OK, we can play this one of two ways.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Either you carry on treating me like one of your army friends - and we pretend there’s nothing wrong - or you tell me why you look like shit and what those little red pills are for.’

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Anna, I thought … I thought … if you still can’t hold back the tears every time you think about Grisha, then what right have I to—’

  ‘You don’t really understand this at all, do you? Grisha’s story is about the importance of telling the truth, however painful it might be.’

  Her beautiful, sad eyes bored into me, and stripped me back layer by layer. And for the first time since I could remember, I didn’t cut away. I told her about the headaches and the visit to Kleinmann. I told her about his prognosis and the Smarties and the fact I had binned all the other treatment on offer. Finally, I told her about sitting in the flat, desperate to make a call to her, but being unable to do it. I told her I was too scared of her reaction, that I didn’t want her to bin me.

  Then I sat, arms folded, not daring to look at her, and stared out into the darkness.

  I felt her fingers gently brush my cheek.

  ‘You idiot …’ She was shaking her head. ‘I would never walk away. Surely you know me well enough to know that?’

  I nodded, letting my hands drop, and tried to smile.

  A tear had formed in her eye, and I watched it roll down her cheek. I’d done that. Her first chance of moving on and I’d fucked it up for her.

  ‘You can understand, can’t you? I wanted this one last kick at it before I go. Wouldn’t you do the same?’

  ‘The treatment - we can fight this …’

  ‘It’ll just delay the inevitable.’ I pulled the Smarties out of my jeans. ‘At least I can take these in front of you now.’ I flicked it open and stared at the shiny red pebbles inside. I let the silence lengthen. ‘I don’t want to be a lump of dribbling jelly, depending on you, making your life as miserable as mine would be. You don’t deserve it. Fuck it, better to burn out than fade away, eh?’

  She moved her mouth closer to my ear. ‘You
stupid, stupid idiot.’ She kissed me on the temple, then took two Smarties from the case and gently popped them into my mouth. ‘We’ll do this whichever way you want. But promise me one thing: be open to the idea of getting involved. It feels just as scary to me.’

  We held each other close. A wave of happiness washed over me. She murmured in my ear, ‘I’m glad you told me. I want to be with you.’ She kissed me on the cheek again. ‘And it doesn’t matter for how long.’

  Bulgari was still there, on her neck, though much weaker than this morning. Or maybe it wasn’t there at all, and I just wanted it to be. Fuck it: it still felt comforting, reassuring and safe.

  She was the one who pulled away. ‘We have to get back on the road, Nicholas. Let’s move, or we’ll never get to see those White Nights.’

  She spun the wheel and we carried on heading south.

  PART FOUR

  1

  Copenhagen Tuesday, 16 March

  11.15 hrs

  The Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 was on its final approach. The three-hour flight from Istanbul wasn’t full. Anna found herself a spare row of seats and slept all the way, cuddling her pack of 200 duty-free Camel. We were dressed in the same clothes we’d been wearing when we’d left the Cosmos yesterday morning and the Bulgari was a distant memory.

  Less than two hours after I’d called him, Julian had come back to confirm that Lilian had obtained a visa under the name of Nemova and flown to Copenhagen ten days ago. She had booked the ticket in person at a travel agency on Nicolae Lorga Street in Chisinau. The Malev Hungarian flight was the cheapest available, departing Moldova at 05.45. It arrived in Copenhagen at 09.15 after a one-hour stopover at Ferihegy in Budapest.

  Lilian had asked for a window seat. She hadn’t booked in conjunction with anyone else. Nor had she checked in with, or asked to sit next to, anyone else. She’d paid cash for the US$693 return fare.