Andy McNab - Brute force

The 150 tonnes of weapons were bound for the Provisional IRA. I wasn't going to unload each box to make sure Lynn was right, but he'd told me there were a thousand AKs; a million rounds of ammunition; loads of GPMGs; 450 hand grenades; rocket-propelled grenade launchers and grenades; SAM ground-to-air launchers and missiles, each one capable of downing a British army helicopter; anti-tank launchers, and thousands of electric dets and fuses. There were even a couple of crates of flamethrowers, apparently, and to top it all off, two tonnes of Semtex explosive, lovingly fashioned in the old Czechoslovakia.

Mansour was organizing the shipment. It was en route to the west coast of Ireland, and from there to the streets of Derry, Belfast and the UK mainland. It seemed bizarre to me that the task wasn't to sink the thing. That, it seemed, was Two Cells' job if the shipment was compromised.

He wouldn't fuck about. According to Lynn, he was the best of the best when it came to making IEDs, and prepared to die for the cause. He'd even offered himself up as a suicide bomber – to wrap himself around Maggie and then press the detonator button – but the boyos thought he was too good to waste.

The dim glow of a torch appeared at the far end of the aisle, heading my way. I flattened myself against the stack.

The beam slewed across the gap between the crates and brightened with every footstep. Its owner moved closer to where I was hidden. As he came into the light from the corridor, he switched off the torch. He passed below me.

I moved my head fractionally and saw Two Cells walking towards the entrance I'd just come through. His hair hung lank and greasy down the back of his neck.

He closed the door behind him.

I jumped down and headed over to see what he'd been up to.

Not that I couldn't already guess.

He'd glued the timer power unit directly to the bare steel to the right of the bow. I could still smell the Evostik.

The TPU consisted of a blue wooden box about twenty centimetres square and four deep. The top was screwed down and the detonator leads emerged from a small hole in its side. The det itself, an aluminium cylinder the size of half a cigarette packed with HE, was gaffer-taped to a length of brown det cord. Essentially washing line with a high-explosive filling, it snaked away down the aisle.

The boy knew exactly what he was doing. He'd left a good fifteen to twenty centimetres of cord hanging before he'd attached the det, in case any moisture or shit had contaminated the end of the line. He wanted to make sure that when he was detonating, he was only detonating good HE.

I followed the ring main of det cord along the floor, down the narrow aisle between the weapons and ammunition boxes and the hull. I saw the first device straightaway.

The tin dustbin lid was flush against the hull, held in position by two wooden stakes wedged back against the cargo. The det cord disappeared into a hole drilled centre-rear, from which a bead of yellow PE extruded; I knew Two Cells would have knotted it inside the lid before feeding it back through to continue the ring main.

Twelve charges had been set around the hull. Lynn was right: this boat wasn't going to be taken alive. In fact, Lynn had been right about everything so far.

Two Cells had used a dustbin lid because its shape would do the most damage. Instead of the brisance – the shattering effect of the explosion – dissipating in all directions, it would be sufficiently focused to cut a dustbin-lid-sized hole through the hull.

The det cord running along to the next charge would detonate in a split second – and so would all the others.

I went back to the GPMG box and took out the cleaning wallet, a small tool roll with slots.

There was no need to follow the ring main any further than the first charge. The business end was back at the TPU.

The wallet contained a combination tool, a sort of purpose-built Leatherman used to split the weapon so you could clean out the carbon deposit that glues itself to weapons after firing.

I used the flat-head screwdriver bit to remove the four brass screws holding down the lid. Two Cells had been taking no chances. He didn't want anyone or anything getting inside to mess with the device by mistake. He was the only one going to kick this thing off.

My job was to disarm the devices while making it look like a malfunction. I also had to kill Two Cells, and make it look like an accident. As Lynn must have said to me a hundred times, the charges must not go off. The shipment must be preserved at all costs. That suited me fine. I didn't want to spend the next few days bobbing up and down in the Med.

The TPU was made out of a mechanical Parkway timer, the kind you used to be able to buy on a key ring as a parking reminder. They were made illegal when it was discovered that more of the things ended up inside TPUs than in motorists' pockets.

The Parkway was a small disc powered by a spring mechanism. You put your money in the parking meter, turned the disc to twenty minutes, say, and away it would tick. When the twenty minutes were up, the disc would hit zero and the device would start ringing. Bomb-makers didn't care about that – they just needed a small and reliable mechanical timer. Keep it simple, stupid: you didn't have to worry about anything going wrong – you just set it for any delay up to an hour and walked away.

The TPU only had four main components: the twelve-volt battery that would provide the power to initiate the det connected to the ring main; two short lengths of steel about twice the size of a sewing needle, and, of course, the Parkway timer, all Evo-stuck down to prevent anything moving that shouldn't. A thin blue wire linked the negative terminal to one of the leads from the det.

The positive lead was only partially glued down; it coiled its way to a small steel rod glued vertically on top of the Parkway's zero marker. Another wire joined the second det lead to the second rod, embedded horizontally into the wood so the two would complete the circuit when the time ran out. For the time being, a rubber pad was wedged between the two to stop the current completing its journey.

All Two Cells had to do was turn the Parkway to whatever time delay he wanted, pull out the rubber pad, and let the TPU do the rest.

I felt myself break into a smile. These things always worked better when they were kept simple, but you had to be really smart to put them together this competently. I'd been wrong to call him Two Cells. This boy really knew what he was doing. My smile widened. I double-checked the joints between the terminal wires and the det leads and knew exactly where he'd learnt his craft. Unless he was an Afghan, it was right here in one of the terror training camps in Libya or Algeria. Nobody else used this variation of the Chinese pigtail to join their wires.

The Chinese labourers working for the Western Union in the Wild West used it to repair downed telegraph lines. They took the two cut ends, crossed them left over right to make the first part of a reef knot, and then twisted the two ends together. They didn't finish the reef knot because it just wasn't practical. The wires hung between poles, making it close to impossible to tie the second part of the reef – and the half reef and pigtail twist both guaranteed conductivity and held the connection, even with a couple of vultures sitting on the wires, waiting for Jesse James to come by and leave them lunch.

When we went to teach the Mujahideen, we found that they flapped a whole lot more than the average Chinaman. They'd do the half-knot but forget the twist, or do the twist but forget the half-knot. So we taught them the complete reef knot, left over right, right over left, then a pigtail twist with what was left of the wire – exactly as Big Ben had done here. It wasn't long before the TPUs we taught the Muj, and the tricks we'd learnt from PIRA, were being taught in the crazy colonel's terror schools.