Andy McNab - Zero hour

'The men took me on a boat. I was on it for a long time. I had to…' She turned away, overcome by shame once more. 'I had to pay my fare…'

'You came here, to Amsterdam?'

'No, Copenhagen. Your picture, the girl – she is here now. She came here also. She told me Copenhagen. The men there…' She rubbed an index finger over where her eyebrows should have been. 'The men there did this.'

'You both stayed at a house there, an old, cold house?'

She nodded. 'A week, maybe ten days, I do not know.'

'And Lilian, the girl in the picture – she stayed there with you?'

She nodded. 'For maybe three or four days, with three other girls.'

My mind went back to the meeting with Robot, and what had been happening above us.

'Then they put us into a truck with lots of furniture and brought us here. But I escaped. I climbed up the tower.'

She wasn't celebrating.

'Angeles, how many men are there in the building? Where do they stay, what do they do? Do you think you could do me a drawing of the layout?'

She shook her head. 'I'm sorry. It was dark when we arrived and then we were kept in the room.'

'Did you go out of the room to eat, use the toilet?'

She shook her head. 'There is bucket in the room and they bring food from a takeaway. I don't know what else, I-'

'It's OK. Don't worry.' I didn't want to put her through any more of that shit than I had to. 'What about your parents? Brothers? Sisters? Family? Did they try to find you?'

She shook her head. 'My father? The Ukrainian men said they have given my father money. If he says anything or I go home they will burn our farm down. No one will help. My mother? What can she do?'

'The men, maybe they lied… Maybe they just said that so you wouldn't run home. You know what? My friend has people in Moldova who will help you. One of them was like you, taken away and all alone. But she is safe now, like you will be. They can find out if it's true what the Ukrainian men told you. Whatever happens, they can help you go home. Would you like that?'

She nodded. The tension was starting to ebb out of her face and neck. She gave me a small, shy smile. 'My brother… he looks like you.'

'Poor guy!' I gave Angeles as much of a grin as I could manage and left her to finish her picnic. The Bergen was in the loading bay, where I'd left it. I dragged out the twenty-litre plastic container and went back upstairs. I was going to need a lot of water for what I had in mind.

She watched me as she tidied empty cans into a bag.

'Stay here. Get some sleep. I've got to fill this, then do some work downstairs.'

She looked scared again.

'I'm not going anywhere, but do not come down, OK? Just stay here. Do you understand?'

She nodded.

'It's not long now. Then you'll be safe.'

She took a breath. 'What is your name?'

'Nick.' I turned away quickly and disappeared to fill the container. My head had filled with images of what had happened to her and Lilian in the green house. I had to cut away.

I took the showerhead off and used it like a hosepipe. It was easier than fiddling around in the sink.

I hobbled down the stairs again with the full container and the bundle of vomit-soaked clothing. I laid out the kit at the back of the loading bay, behind the two vehicles. The fluorescents flickered uneasily. It didn't matter. I didn't need much light.

I took out the camping stove and screwed in the fuel, then opened the Russian-doll nest of pans.

The bulkiest item of all was the aspirin. I'd picked up 320 tablets of the stuff, and was going to use them all – minus the two I'd already taken, the two I swallowed now, and a couple more for luck.

The red-hot poker perked up again, but I found myself grinning like an idiot. I was going to sort out the bastards who'd done those things to Lilian, Angeles and the kids I'd spotted in the green house, and I was going to use 314 aspirin to give those fuckers the world's biggest headache. The kind of headache you got from an Improvised Explosive Device.

I didn't need much high explosive to totally fuck up the silo and anyone in it. CNN and the BBC were going to end up with some great footage. Two lumps would do it: one of about a kilogram, to produce a kicking charge; and one half that size to produce a firebomb.

Picric acid is magic stuff, but a fucker to make. To get there, I was going to have to separate the acetyl-salicylic acid in the aspirin from its bulking agent, add a couple more ingredients, and do a bit of mixing and distilling. The trouble was I only had the kit to make it in small batches. The whole process was probably going to take me all night.

I knew it better as Explosive Mix No. 7. As part of my anti-terrorism experience, I'd had to learn to be a terrorist. A lot of the time I was doing pretty much the same as they were, infiltrating a country, buying everything I needed in corner shops and pharmacies, and mixing those items with others in my basket so I wouldn't get noticed by the guy on the checkout. Then, like a terrorist, I'd go back to my hide, make and plant my device, and get out of the area before it went off.

The big difference nowadays is that we're in the age of the suicide bomber. They go in and stay with the device to make sure it goes off. Sometimes they're even wearing it. Neither of those things featured in my plans.

The first demolitions course I did when I joined the Regiment had lasted twelve weeks. I loved every minute of it. Even as a kid, I'd been fascinated by the TV footage of Fred Dibnah dropping power-station chimneys, and tower blocks imploding within their own perimeter. The principal task I trained for back then was to fuck up an enemy's industrial base.

Their troops might be giving us the good news at the front line, but no army can function if it can't get supplies. We might want to drop a bridge, railway line, hydroelectric power station or crude-oil refinery – or render docks useless, open floodgates, destroy military or civilian aircraft. So much damage can be done with just two pounds of plastic explosive. Why send in an air force to destroy a big industrial complex when the same result can be achieved by taking out its power source? It might be easier for a four-man team to infiltrate as civilians, do the reconnaissance, then buy ingredients over the counter to make the devices.

Destroying something doesn't necessarily involve removing it from the face of the earth. A large factory or even a small town can be neutralized by taking out an electricity substation. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an inch with explosives into a particular piece of machinery. That might be all that's needed to disturb the momentum of the moving parts inside it. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying where the weak point is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.

The problem is, you're not going to have a notebook in your pocket with all your formulas and bomb-assembly instructions. We'd spent the first few weeks of the demolitions course having to learn them by heart. There were nine basic mixes: nine different types of explosive for nine different types of job, from low explosive – a lifting charge if you want to make a big crater in a runway or blow up a road or vehicle going along it – to high explosives, which can be used with enough precision to cut steel if you want to destroy a power station or drop a bridge or a couple of pylons. It's horses for courses, different explosives for different attacks. High explosives were going to be perfect for me on this job.

I pressed forty aspirin tablets out of their foil and crushed them in the first of the three 5mm-thick juice glasses I'd bought in the market. I used the hard plastic spoon from the knife-fork-spoon camping set. It couldn't be metal. I was making picric acid because it's easy to detonate. The downside is that the slightest friction or percussion can set the stuff off. What's more, it attacks metal, creating salts that are just as explosive. It can only be safely in contact with wood, glass or plastic.