Zero Hour Read online

  Irina smiled for the camera. ‘That’s easy. I’ll meet him for you.’

  Anna hesitated before pressing the button. She looked at me.

  ‘Too dangerous. He’s got a weapon.’

  Irina walked back to the desk. ‘Where do you think you are, Nick?’ She dug around in her small black leather handbag and pulled out a .38 revolver. ‘Meet this country’s only reliable policeman.’

  Then Lena pulled aside her grey cardigan to reveal a shoulder holster. I didn’t recognize the weapon from the grip but I knew it would still go bang and kill people. ‘In our business you need these things. If Irina wants to go, let her. She knows what to do.’

  Irina was back in pose mode, still waiting for Anna to do her David Bailey number.

  I pointed at her bag. ‘Have you used that thing?’

  ‘Three times. And if I ever see the friend who sold me, it will be four.’

  13

  19.55 hrs

  The border crossing into Transnistria was at a place called Bender. It would get us into Tiraspol, the capital of this breakaway state, just thirty minutes later. As Viku said when he replied to Anna, he was chilling out at home for a while. Why didn’t Anna come and spend some time with him, see some sights?

  That was exactly what a much younger Anna was going to do tonight. Irina had taken over the communication on Anna’s iPhone. She said she was new at the university. She was coming in from Moscow and was suddenly getting cold feet because she had no friends in Chisinau. She’d come across him on Facebook and wondered if he’d help her out. He looked a fun kind of guy.

  Anna had been at the wheel of Lena’s Skoda estate for the best part of an hour.

  Irina bounced around on the back seat. The roads were unsigned, potholed and totally unlit. We’d had close shaves with tractors, pedestrians and livestock. Anna’s eyes were glued to the small pool of light in front of us as yet another minibus taxi overtook us on a blind corner, packed to capacity with people and suitcases.

  ‘You have the presents?’

  I patted the four hundred US dollars’ worth of lei in my jeans, two hundred in each pocket. Irina had changed some for us both. She’d lost ten per cent on the deal because her USD bills weren’t in absolutely pristine condition.

  The headlights picked out a sign that said we were coming to the border. Anna slowed. A pool of light bathed the rutted tarmac about two hundred metres ahead.

  ‘Look bored, Nick. Who knows? They might just let us through. Irina, be asleep.’

  Six or seven guys were sitting in the middle of the road on fold-up chairs. One got slowly to his feet as we came into view. He indicated for us to park up behind them.

  ‘Shit.’ Anna wasn’t impressed. ‘We’re visiting a friend in a bar, remember. Use his real name, Irina.’

  I nodded. I’d leave it to her to explain why her boyfriend was British and didn’t speak a word of her language.

  Two older guys stepped forward. They had parkas with the hoods up, and orange armbands to show they were official. One of them came round to her side of the vehicle. Anna powered down the window and tried being short, sharp and aggressive.

  They didn’t buy it.

  Irina produced an ID card. Anna pulled her passport out and I followed suit. My guy had a grey beard but I couldn’t see much else of his face. With his hood up, he looked like something out of South Park. I smiled as he took it away. I couldn’t tell if he’d smiled back. I doubted it.

  He walked round to the front of the wagon. I hated this. I hated losing control of a passport, even for a few minutes.

  We were held as a couple of people-carrier buses screamed straight through. The bearded one was joined by his mate. They had a chat about the passports. He came back and gobbed off in Russian at Anna. He handed Irina back her ID card, but he pointed at me. Then he pointed at the bonnet.

  ‘Give me two hundred, Nick.’

  I passed over the two notes from my right pocket and the passports were slipped back through the window. Transaction complete. Simple as that.

  Up went the windows and we moved off.

  ‘All that nonsense just for a bung?’

  Anna manoeuvred between two trucks. ‘They said it was a car tax to cross the border. That’s a new one on me. Normally it’s a fine for some kind of driving offence.’

  ‘Why do they sit in the middle of the road? They got a death wish or something?’

  Irina’s head appeared between us. ‘Moldova refuses to build an official checkpoint because it considers Transnistria a break-away province. But at the same time they’re not too thrilled about having their eastern border wide open. So . . .’

  No sooner had Anna accelerated than she had to slow down again. We entered a massive concrete anti-tank chicane.

  Irina stayed in tour-guide mode. ‘These were put here by Transnistria in case the Moldovans came across again. It gives the one thousand Russian “peacekeepers” time to get to the border to help.’

  Anna prepared her passport for another outing. We emerged from the chicane to see two uniformed Russians in camouflage parkas and furry hats, AK47s slung across their chests. They looked severely pissed off at being on stag at this time of night.

  ‘They’re part of the Fourteenth Army, the so-called “secret Russians”. You can’t move for them over here.’

  Ahead of us, on a straight bit of tarmac, there was another pool of light. More lads sat outside on chairs, but this time there was a Portakabin close by.

  ‘This one’s trickier. Same story. Visiting a bar.’

  More Russian soldiers milled about. They’d pulled in a few of the newer-looking wagons but the rest screamed through. The Transnistria flag, ripped and tattered, flew above the door. It was just the old Soviet red duster with the hammer and sickle in the top left-hand corner and a green stripe across its centre.

  We joined a queue. Three Russian soldiers took our passports and Irina’s ID. Their condensed breath hung in the air. They ordered us out and pointed to the Portakabin. Vehicles honked their horns and the smell of diesel fumes filled the cold air.

  A trestle table groaned under a pile of brown-paper forms. Anna picked up a pencil. ‘I’ll do it.’

  My passport was causing quite a stir. Maybe they’d never seen a British one. They were probably working out how much they could get for it on eBayski. Word had got around. The commander made a special guest appearance, a high-peaked hat cocked on the back of his head and a cigarette clamped between his lips.

  He beckoned Anna over. The two of them exchanged pleasantries, and then they got down to business. Whatever it was he’d asked for, she wasn’t going to give up without a fight. Finally they seemed to agree.

  I dipped into my left pocket. She held up her hand. ‘He wants four hundred. He’s going to let us stay until two a.m.’

  ‘It’s by the hour?’

  ‘Welcome to Dodge.’

  I handed over the money, and fished another two notes from my wallet. He accepted the cash before getting one of his underlings to stamp the form about six times.

  Anna took it and we got back into the car. None of us said a word as we left the checkpoint and almost immediately crossed the three-hundred-metre-wide Dniester River into Transnistria. I expected to see Checkpoint Charlie at any minute.

  The roads here were even worse than Moldova’s – stretches of concrete and tarmac that looked like they’d been carpet-bombed. Maybe they had. We passed the burnt-out shell of a building, crumbling walls stained brown where its rusting iron skeleton poked through.

  Anna shook her head. ‘This place depresses me so much. It’s like the Wild West. There are no international aid agencies here. Why would they risk their people? It’s bandit country.’

  With one hand on the wheel she flipped open a cigarette pack, lit two and passed one back to Irina. ‘Have you heard of Viktor Bout?’

  ‘The world’s biggest arms trafficker? He still in jail in Thailand?’ I powered down my window to lose the smoke. She smiled an
d did the same.

  ‘He operated out of Tiraspol. Same as the Russian and Ukrainian Mafia. They come here to hide. The police are a joke. Even when families are afraid their daughters may have been trafficked they don’t report it. They just don’t trust them.’

  For the next two kilometres, we passed factory after factory. Even at night, some were still online and belching fumes. Minging cars filled the parking lots, along with the occasional Merc. There was plenty of foot traffic. The young lads sported cheap tracksuit tops, jeans and trainers and wore their hair white-walled around the sides. The occasional whore patrolled a street corner. Ancient Trabants kerb-crawled alongside them. I could almost see the hot breath on their windows.

  ‘Whatever they manufacture here, they do it away from the prying eyes of the international community.’ Anna flicked her butt out into the darkness. An old guy at the roadside looked tempted to go and pick it up. ‘The border with Ukraine is only a kilometre or two away. It’s unmarked and unguarded. All sorts of goods are smuggled across, from cigarettes and alcohol to serious weapons.’

  Irina nodded. ‘Smugglers load up and head for Odessa. From there they can ship whatever they have to the rest of the world. This place is—’

  ‘Anna! Stop!’

  She braked hard and pulled over to the side of the road.

  ‘Over there . . .’

  I stuck my hand through the open window and pointed. The tank was mounted on a ramp in front of the factory.

  ‘That’s the building.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’ve seen a picture of it.’

  She tilted her head to get a better look at the sign on the wall. ‘Well, he isn’t making tanks.’

  14

  I reached for the door handle. Anna grabbed my arm. She knew exactly what was on my mind. ‘We only have twenty minutes.’

  Irina’s head reappeared between our seats. She looked confused.

  I smiled. ‘This is where one of the girls used to work. Maybe they can help. I’ll pop in and find out.’

  ‘At this time of night? There won’t be—’

  ‘Do a circuit and I’ll meet you here in fifteen, OK?’ I fastened my jacket and stepped out into the drizzle. I didn’t want Irina to get rattled, or Anna asking what she should do if I wasn’t here when they got back.

  Light leaked through the narrow slit windows that ran the length of the building. Trucks were parked up in what looked like a large loading bay to my right. Apart from one slowmoving vehicle in the distance, there was very little sign of life. The main entrance, to the right of the tank, was a gate in the chain-link fence. I approached the security area. A body, fat and bored, sat reading a paper. I veered away to the left.

  Fuck knew what I was going to achieve in the time. I wanted to find out what Tarasov was making in there. Tresillian might have sounded like a straight talker, but that didn’t mean what he was saying was straight.

  I climbed the three-metre fence. It was simple enough. I was soon kneeling on the wet verge the other side. The factory didn’t have high security or cameras. Crimes against property would be almost non-existent in a place like this. Thousands of Russian troops were based in this narrow strip. If they couldn’t catch a thief and deal with him, the local Mafia would. Anybody intent on doing some nicking probably drove across the border for the night.

  The building had large steel air ducts. Steam escaped from a jumble of smaller pipes that looked like a gang of eels clinging to the blockwork. Two cars were nosy-parked against the wall. I rattled in between them for cover.

  One of the windows above me was open. I gripped the brackets holding the air ducts. The steel was cold and slippery. An uncomfortable film of sweat gathered on my back as I climbed. I checked my G-Shock. I had less than ten minutes left. I had to get a move on.

  A vehicle turned the corner below me. In a couple more seconds its headlights would catch me in their glare. I hauled myself up level with the window and scrambled through.

  The corridor had a glass wall that ran the length of the building and overlooked the works area. There was movement down there: three or four people in blue nylon boiler-suits, with hoods and gloves and white wellies. They all had full-face masks attached to a filter hanging from their belts. The place was quiet, apart from the hum of the heaters. There was no clunking of machinery, and not a spot of oil in sight. You don’t need oil when you’re soldering microprocessors onto motherboards.

  Further along, the rectangles of silicon and pressed steel were being packed into green, foam-lined aluminium boxes. White stencilling on the sides probably indicated wherever they were bound. I couldn’t be sure – it was all Greek to me.

  I pulled the BlackBerry from my jacket, checked the flash was off and activated the zoom. Then I inched forward until I could hold it against the glass. I angled it downwards, and took five shots in a panoramic sequence.

  A third vehicle had pulled up beneath the window. Its lights were off. I pulled myself over the sill and onto an air duct, then scrambled back down the pipes to the ground. It was a 3 Series Beamer. That wasn’t a big deal. We’d seen plenty of them. But this one had the low-rider trim. And its registration was C VS 911.

  15

  Tiraspol

  20.15 hrs

  The Cold War had never stopped in this city. I’d seen more government propaganda billboards than in Cuba and North Korea combined. There were still more statues of Lenin than you could shake a Red Flag at. Yet another tank was mounted on a ramp beside me, the third T55 I’d seen as a monument to Communist glories since we’d crossed the border.

  Heavily armed police loitered on every street corner, twiddling batons and pushing up their peaked caps. Old women in headscarves and long, threadbare coats shuffled past. Rainwater dripped from gutter pipes that disgorged their contents straight into the street.

  Irina and I sat double-parked on Constitution Street, staking out Manik. Anna had gone in to check if Slobo was already at the bar. The right-hand side of the road was pulsating with life. On the left was the inky blackness of the graveyard where some of the fifteen thousand dead from the USSR’s eight-year war in Afghanistan lay. A massive billboard hung above the gates. This one featured the hard-line president, Igor Smirnov, shaking hands with Dmitry Medvedev, the president of the Federation. It looked like an ad for a sci-fi convention. With his big eyebrows and bald head, Smirnov was the spitting image of Ming the Merciless, Flash Gordon’s nemesis, and Medvedev was a ringer for Captain Kirk.

  Neon lights splashed the bar’s name across the night. It was one of dozens along this stretch. Tinted-glass frontage had fucked over the ground floors of the faded ex-Soviet stucco buildings. It sounded like each bar was trying to out-music the last. The noise poured out onto the cobbled street like a demonic DJ’s mix.

  BMWs and Mercs waited outside with their engines running. Each of the new Mafia élite who piled out of them had a couple of heavy-looking lads to keep an eye on them. This was where some of the millions of dollars changed hands each night that made it a dangerous town.

  A lone figure moved down the road towards us, leaving a trail of smoke in her wake. The tip of her cigarette glowed with each inhalation. Her blonde helmet and long dark coat began to take shape as she got closer.

  Anna opened the passenger door and jumped in. ‘I felt like a grandmother in there.’ She shivered as I powered down her window. She got the hint and threw out what was left of her cigarette. ‘He hasn’t shown yet.’

  Brake lights glowed, then sidelights, in the middle of the line of cars nearer the bar. I fired up the Skoda’s engine to take the space before anyone else. I glanced at her. ‘Now we wait, yeah?’

  Anna kept her eyes glued to the bar entrance. Irina leant forward. ‘I hope Mr Lover Man hasn’t stood me up.’

  I pulled into the kerb and closed down the engine. ‘Maybe he had second thoughts. Maybe you’re too old for him.’

  My reward was a punch in the arm.

  We settled down and watched
in silence.

  I opened my window a few inches to cut the condensation. I could feel the bass notes pounding through the darkness. Lights flashed and bodies gyrated in the bar’s murky interior.

  A group of men came past us, leather-jacketed and smoking. They made their way up the three concrete steps and through the double glass doors.

  ‘Don’t take any chances, Irina. This guy has a weapon.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’ Irina stretched her legs along the rear seat. ‘Don’t worry about me. I will do my part and we will nail him together, yes?’

  A flash of red bounded up the steps. I had a glimpse of kneelength coat, fat face and a mop of frizzy hair. ‘We’ve got a possible.’

  I kept focused on the entrance. ‘Where did he come from? Anyone see his car?’

  Neither of them answered.

  Irina was already reaching for her door handle. I leant back and gripped her arm. ‘Anything that isn’t right, just walk. OK?’

  She nodded, but not convincingly enough for my liking. ‘Let’s hope our friend likes what he sees.’ She slipped out of the car, along the short stretch of sidewalk and disappeared inside.

  I peered at my G-Shock. A quarter of an hour later, she was still nowhere to be seen. I unpeeled a stick of gum and popped a couple of Smarties down my neck at the same time.

  ‘Anna?’

  We both kept eyes on the bar.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said . . . You know, Moscow and St Petersburg . . . Sounds a good plan.’

  She looked at me, waiting for the catch. ‘That would be . . . lovely. How long for?’

  ‘I don’t know – a month or so?’

  I wanted to keep on talking, to tell her everything, but felt like I was standing in front of the phone in the kitchen all over again. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t get the words out.

  Irina came out of the bar. Thank fuck for that. Slobo was close behind her, downing the last of a beer before tossing the bottle over the wall. He looked very happy with himself. They turned towards the Skoda. He was porkier than his pictures suggested. His baggy jeans were hardly baggy at all. But you had to hand it to him. He certainly knew how to make the best of a bad job.