by steve higgs
‘Indeed, I do.’ I was keeping my volume low, but I wasn’t whispering. In many ways, I was here to call the Ukrainians out. They had played their hand, clearly believing they were unbeatable or invulnerable and could get away with making people vanish if they chose to. ‘You asked for evidence.’ I said, fishing out my phone.
‘Shhh!’ He insisted, panic in his eyes as he looked around the room. Rather than argue or tell him it was time to man-up, I opened the message with the clip and played it.
His eyes widened as he understood what he was seeing, perhaps recognising some of the people in the short film.
‘There is a complex of rooms beneath the Dockyard, dug several centuries ago and accessed via hidden tunnels. Your Ukrainian friends are using them as a secret base for illegal activities. In the room seen in the clip they are manufacturing counterfeit cigarettes which they will sell without paying tax and make a fortune from. Doubtless there are other nefarious enterprises we cannot see.’
He put his hand to his chest as if to steady his heart. ‘Goodness. What do I do?’
‘You call the police.’ I replied, the answer obvious to me. ‘I don’t know where the entrances to the tunnel system are but with a squad of armed officers here, I doubt it will take long to find them.’ He stared at me, caught between a nervous desire to do exactly what I had just suggested and a terrified fear he might get killed by the Ukrainians before he could rid himself of them.
He had gone to sit at his desk, indecision like a mask on his face. I put my hands on the desk and leaned across to get in his face. ‘You do this now or you will never be rid of them. Grow a set, will you? It has to be you that places the call. The police will listen to the man that runs the place calling a raid on his own facility.’
He nodded. ‘Yes. It is time to act.’ He locked eyes with me, opened his mouth and yelled, ‘We’re busted. Come on in.’
Dirty Truth. November 24th 1142hrs
The office door opened to allow Andriy Janiv and Danylo Vakhno to enter. Their faces were impassive, no emotion showing of any kind. They were followed by a pair of the oversized uniformed guards so that I had Alex Jordan in front of me and four men blocking my escape, each of them roughly fifty percent heavier than me. Any thoughts of barrelling through them to escape were benched.
I turned back to face Alex.
He was smiling an exaggerated smile. Putting his arms out on each side in a gesture that said, “Oops”. What he said was, ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Michaels. I’m the bad guy.’
I opened my mouth to speak, the words never aired though as a wicked blow struck my left kidney, shocking me like a bolt of electricity. My legs buckled, and I suffered a brief bout of fuzziness that passed quickly only because my head was now close to the floor.
Strong arms hauled me back up, the two security guards now flanking me and holding me in place.
‘Well done, Mr. Michaels.’ Alex Jordan had taken up a relaxed position sitting on the front edge of his desk, one foot on the carpet, his hands resting lightly in his lap. ‘I underestimated you. At first that is. When you first visited, I saw an amateur with good intentions but too little brain to achieve what no law enforcement agency has been able to. I kept an eye on you though, it was the cautious thing to do and I am a cautious man, Mr Michaels. I will admit I was impressed when you found your way onto the night cleaning crew, but I did expect that Pasha’s tactics would convince you to withdraw.’
My mind was whirling. I needed to fight my way through five men. If I could get out into the open, with the public around me they wouldn’t dare touch me. I was still being held by the two security guys, but their grip had loosened. Waiting wasn’t a clever option.
So, I didn’t.
I jinked forward, a simple tactic designed to make them move their centre of gravity forward. As they dived after me, I countered my direction and as I went backward, I made sure the back of my head connected with the face of the man to my left. His grip on my arm came loose exactly as I had known it would. In anticipation, I had already started to twist so that I could use the whipping effect of my arm coming free to strike upwards at the guard to my right.
They were big, and they were strong, but they were not fighters. Big Ben would have taken them apart. As I broke free of both guards, the second losing his grip as my open palm contacted his jaw to snap his head back, I turned my back on Alex Jordan. Gritting my teeth, I went for Andriy and Danylo.
A nanosecond. That was all the time I had to plan. Grab the arm of whichever one of them moved first, use their weight against them. They would both want to use their greater mass to force me backwards, which I could use to my advantage. If I could pull them off balance all I needed was one accurate strike to land a crippling blow. No matter how big you are, the throat, the testicles, the way the joints of the body work were always just as vulnerable, but bigger men didn’t see the danger coming.
As I lined up on Danylo, the first to move between he and Andriy, the blow from behind caught me by surprise. It was hard and decisive, and wisely it landed in exactly the same spot as the first blow to my left kidney.
This time I threw up.
I had dismissed the smallest man in the room. Why was it that I couldn’t listen to my own advice? While the big men weren’t fighters and relied upon their size and strength to see them through, Alex Jordan needed the skills because he was that much smaller.
Looking up from the floor, I saw in him the lightness and balance of a martial arts master.
‘That was fun.’ He said as he settled back onto the front of his desk again. ‘Get up.’
For a second, I considered replying with a tirade of swearwords. Then I realised he wasn’t talking to me. The two guards I had felled were getting back up and looking not only ashamed but afraid. Alex Jordan really was the big cheese of the operation.
‘Mr. Michaels you interrupted me. Please refrain from doing that again.’
With a grimace devoted to the pain in my lower back, I pushed myself upright. I didn’t respond though.
‘When I played the role of the victim yesterday morning, it was nothing more than a safety net to drive you to me if you did find something.’ He laughed. ‘It was quite brilliant actually. You were so ready to defend me. A real man of the people, always looking for someone to protect or save. You were surprisingly easy to read. I must say though that I had no notion that you might discover the operation beneath our feet. I would like to shake your hand for that.’ He said as he extended his hand toward me.
I looked down at it. ‘You have got to be kidding.’
‘Not at all, Mr. Michaels. You have played a good game. It is not my fault that you lost. I am just better than you, but I acknowledge your skills. We should part as gentlemen.’ He offered his hand again, insistent almost.
‘I’m going to have to pass.’
He blew out a breath of disappointment. ‘Very well. He can go out tonight with the others.’
Danylo Vanhkno spoke for the first time. ‘Do I put him with the others?
Alex Jordan was getting up to return to his seat behind his desk. ‘No. He is a bit too capable. Give him a beating and make sure he is well restrained.’ He didn’t even face his number two when he spoke. Everyone was dismissed.
My arms were grabbed again. This time the two nameless guards made sure they had me. I wouldn’t shake them free again. Automatically, I turned my feet toward the door. However, we were not going that way. Andriy walked to what I had assumed was Alex Jordan’s private bathroom and opened the door.
As the guards shoved me toward it, I saw Andriy begin to descend.
It was an entrance point into the underground tunnel system.
Captive. Thursday, November 24th 1201hrs
The stairs led down and down and down, the bare stone walls giving off a familiar damp smell I associated with churches and cellars. The stairs were also stone, made to last forever in an age when other materials might be less easy to obtain. The stairwell itself was rectangular, the flig
hts leading down around a central stone column, ten steps, then a corner, six steps then another corner, another ten steps on the longer side.
I counted in my head. Allowing a six-inch drop per step every circuit took me down sixteen feet. The Admiral’s office was on the second floor, so deduct ten feet for that. By the time we reached the bottom of the dimly lit stairs I had descended roughly one-hundred feet, which by my reckoning put us below the level of the river at high tide.
Cross matching that information with what I remembered about the height of the river on Tuesday when I went to Upnor… gave me nothing useful. The tide on the day had been most of the way in I thought. There was six feet of beach between the waves and the obvious high tide mark, but not only did I not know whether the tide had been coming in or out, I also didn’t know how fast it moved on that piece of beach. It was a very gentle slope, so it would move slowly. Slowly wasn’t a useable measure though.
I decided to ask. ‘Hey, guys, what time is high tide today?’
In answer Danylo thumped the back of my head. ‘Shuddup.’
We had reached the bottom of the stairs and a large wooden door. There were faint sounds coming from the other side of it like ghostly echoes. It wasn’t locked though, Andriy in the lead opened it by grasping an ancient iron handle and putting his shoulder against it. It opened inward.
As I went through it, the two guards still gripping me tightly, I spared a glance at the door to see if it had a lock. At this moment all information was vital. I was doing my best to keep my head clear but there was no denying that I was in peril. I was alone, I still had my phone, but I doubted that would last long and it wouldn’t work this far underground anyway, plus I was surrounded by enemies that would probably kill me if I gave them any trouble. Alex hadn’t made my fate clear, he said I would be taken out with the others tonight, but if they planned to kill me later somewhere else, they could just as easily kill me now and take me out dead.
I had wagered my life that this was not to be the case. If I was to be taken somewhere else to be executed, it meant I had several hours in which to escape. The clock on the wall behind Alex’s head had given the time as 1201hrs when I was led from the room. It would be dark in less than five hours.
Behind the door was a tunnel, dark and poorly lit, but with overhead fluorescent lighting strung lazily from hooks in the ancient ceiling just as I had seen in the clip Joseph sent. It curved gently to the right eight feet ahead of me so that I could not see where it went. The tunnel was rounded at the top and only just a little more than six feet in height. Ahead of me Andriy had to tilt his head to one side to avoid scraping it.
I didn’t bother to resist as they led me along it. Doing so would just waste energy. All my focus was on memorising everything I saw and plotting a map in my head. We had wound around the stairs four times so had ended up pointing in the same direction we had started. The river therefore was behind me and we were now turning east toward it with the curve of the tunnel.
Glancing back, I could no longer see the door. Danylo was so wide that I could see little other than his chest and blockish head. He was kind enough to give me another shove, no doubt to discourage me from looking at him and face forward.
Then we reached a room. It was small, about ten feet in each direction with a table and lockers taking up one wall. That was all I was allowed to see as a bag was roughly shoved over my head from behind to an accompanying gut punch from the front.
What was with the constant gut punches?
As I doubled over, still held by the guards each side, my jacket was ripped off and my hands were drawn back, and I felt a plastic restraint on the skin of my wrists. It was ratchetted tight. Though I couldn’t see it, the zip sound it made as it closed convinced me it was the same type of plastic cuff I had used on prisoners of war in Iraq. They were designed to stay on. Then hands were in my pockets and my phone was gone.
Alex had told them to give me a beating and secure me. I was secure now, so I was really trying to take my mind to a place where I could endure what I was sure was to come next. They were speaking in Ukrainian as I made sure my mouth was closed but my jaw was loose. My head was down but no blow came.
Instead, I was grabbed by the arms again and led away again. I tried counting steps, tried keeping myself orientated by noting any turns in my head so I might be able to find my way out again if I could escape once they left me alone. It didn’t work though. For all I knew they were walking around in circles to ensure I was disorientated. We passed through what sounded like a large room, the noise of our feet was different as if the walls were further away for the noise to bounce off. Then another room which I heard coming for some time because there were machine noises coming from it. In my head, I imagined the room Joseph had shown me with the cigarettes being made.
It seemed like we covered a lot of distance, but it was less than two minutes of walking so less than half a mile in total when we stopped, and my arms were released. More Ukrainian speech, which could have been instructions to kill me or a discussion about Manchester United’s hopes in the league this season. A door opened in front of me, I heard the handle turn and felt the air move as the door swung inward. Then I was shoved hard from behind and tripped to land on the cold stone. With my hands fastened behind me, I did my best to keep my face up. I avoided a blow to my jaw or skull and took most of the impact on my right arm and shoulder. I had protected myself, but it proved to be a senseless act though as the beating was now overdue it seemed.
In retrospect, I have to be glad that they didn’t use weapons on me. Being whacked with a steel pipe would have ended my plans instantly. Thirty or more blows landed on my back and ribs, my arms, buttocks and my head, which without my hands I could not protect.
Then laughter and they were gone.
I was alone in a poorly lit room, deep inside the underground lair of an organised criminal gang. I was bound and blinded and beaten.
I rolled onto my back and laughed.
I had them.
Not Trapped. Thursday, November 24th Roughly 1220hrs
Plastic cuffs are considered by many to be an acceptable alternative to steel handcuffs. They are not. Once on my back, I rolled onto my shoulder blades, pulled my hands under my bum to get them to my front and then stood up.
The next bit was going to hurt, and I had to do it on top of all the bruising I already had. With my hands behind my back, the natural position was for my palms to be facing outwards. I had ensured they were not in anticipation they would use the plastic cuffs favoured by everyone other than the police. Doing so allowed me to create a small gap between my wrists so the cuffs were tight, but not as tight as they should have been. I lifted my hands away from my body then drew them back in sharply. As my wrists hit my stomach wall, my elbows flared either side and the cuffs shifted slightly. They also dug into the skin on the back of my hands quite cruelly, but they didn’t break. I was trying to shock the little ratchet inside over the lip of the lug keeping it in place. I tried again, this time harder. The same effect. It took four attempts which I considered to be a poor show on my part, but they were loose enough for me to slip out of. The hood came off and I could take in my surroundings.
I guess this is where the story started, with me escaping from the room with a pipe wrench in my hand. Had the Ukrainians received any training on prisoner handling at any point they would have removed my footwear. I might be wearing leather office shoes, but they were a lot better than nothing. I wanted my combat boots on, and my Kevlar and my black ripstop clothing. However, if I had arrived dressed in my fighting gear it would have given the game away. I needed Alex to have no idea that I was onto him.
I had found the pipe wrench, slipped out of the room and almost immediately been spotted by three Ukrainians. As I ran along the tunnel with the mob chasing me and gaining, I had been looking for the river entrance. I had found it and the plan was almost complete. But now, in the moment of truth, I felt more worried than I had at any point thus
far. Now that I had my back to the door to the river entrance, my surge of confidence at finding it left me.
What if I was wrong?
‘It was a good try, Mr. Michaels.' A familiar voice echoed in the confined space. ‘Unfortunately, that door only opens from the other side.' It was Andriy Janiv, still in his immaculate suit and very clearly the boss of the twenty thugs around him.
I glanced at the door. He was right. There was no handle this side.
Andriy beckoned for me to come back to them. ‘Come along, Mr. Michaels. Enough silliness now.’
The moment of truth was here. How clever was I? How reliable were the people I had placed my trust in?
I reached out behind me to knock loudly on the solid wood door three times. Even in the dim light of the tunnels, I could see the curious expression on Andriy’s face and I got to watch the expression change to one of disbelief and then horror as everyone in the corridor heard the mechanism turn and the door behind me open.
‘How’s it going, Army?’ Asked Alan.
Without turning, I answered, ‘Honestly? I’ve been beaten, blindfolded and locked up and the worst part of this is still that I had to get the Navy to rescue me.’
Behind me, he chuckled. ‘Don’t sweat it, Army.’ Then he growled. ‘Let’s get ‘em, boys.’
Tunnel Fire Fight. Thursday, November 24th No Idea What Time it is. Don’t Really Care.
Alan, Richard, Boy George and almost two dozen other pensionable aged men stormed into the tunnel. It had been a risky play. I hadn’t counted on the beating, a few punches maybe, but I had run close to being incapacitated. It wouldn’t have taken much more for them to have broken one of my bones.
The gamble had been that Alex Jordan was not the innocent that he claimed to be. There were two clues that had smuggled into my head and stayed hidden, waiting for the rest of my brain to catch up before revealing themselves at a time when I would understand what they meant.