Heavy Duty Attitude (20 page)
Being careful to watch out for the dog shit, I edged my way down a track that ran through beside the unit from the concrete apron out front and onto some wasteland behind that looked an ideal spot for a bit of shagging and glue sniffing for the yobs from the estate on the other side. Here a thick bank of brambles and stinging nettles separated the narrow tarmaced path from the yard’s fencing which had an added facing of rusty and corrugated iron sheeting, again decorated in various sized tags mainly by someone called something that looked like
Tozer1
, and gave an added deterrent to the barbed wire above.
At the end of the plot the path went over a small ditch of black glutinous looking mud sprinkled with old drink cans on a thick planked bridge and opened out into the blackness of shadowing trees. Turning across the grass I walked on, along the back of the site until I saw what looked like about as good a place as any for what I had in mind.
There was a bit of a gap in the brambles and reeds on either side of the ditch so I jumped across easily. The fence ahead of me was about ten foot high and immediately behind it were looming black ranks of piled dead cars between me and the shed inside. I’d seen no sign of an alarm and I doubted that they had one since the local kids would set it off too regularly, so I was prepared to take the chance.
I had thought about bringing bolt cutters to make a hole in the fence but had decided against it as it would leave behind evidence that someone had been visiting. Instead I had decided to climb the fence. I had brought my bike gloves with me anyway to wear since I didn’t want to be leaving any fingerprints behind and there was nothing for it but to take my chances with the three strands of barbed wire at the top.
It was a bit of a scrabble, and for a moment I thought I was going to do the striker’s trick or worse on the spikes, but I managed to get my legs over without ripping my nuts off and was quickly down the other side.
I stood stock still for a moment, waiting for any noise of an alarm or shouts or hurrying feet that might have meant I had been heard, or spotted on CCTV or set off some alarm that I hadn’t noticed. Shit what did I know about it? I was a journalist not a cat burglar for Christ’s sake.
But over and above my pounding heart and gasping for air after the unaccustomed exercise there was nothing I could hear. So after a minute or two to get my nerves and my breathing back under some kind of control, I began to worm my way cautiously into the yard.
The one thing I had been able to get out of Danny was that there weren’t any guard dogs here, which was something I had been afraid of. Danny said Scroat had tried them but found they were too much hassle with the numbers of people he had coming and going; while when they bit the general punters it just brought the cops sniffing round, so reluctantly he’d got rid of them.
‘Got rid?’ I had asked.
Danny had cocked his fingers and fired silently.
Great, I thought.
The serried stacks of cars stopped a dozen or so yards short of the building. Beside it lay an open apron, on the other side of which was the huge shape of a car crusher and the parked skeleton of a mobile crane which I guess was there to feed it.
From this angle though I was now looking at the back of the building, which had a couple of roller shuttered entrances and I could see that unlike at the front, here there were vehicles parked outside and glimmers of lights showing from inside.
There didn’t seem to be anyone on watch. Was whatever they were up to too hush hush even for strikers I wondered? So I decided to take the chance and get closer.
As quietly as I could I crept along the line of the stacked body shells until I could scurry across the open space to the shelter of the shadow of a parked up transit van. Scanning the building behind it I saw that a row of windows ran along the wall beside the shutters. So crouched over, I slunk across the gap and peered in through the glass.
No joy. It was just some kind of office. There were desks covered in papers and phones, with a girlie calendar from some tool suppliers hung on the wall above battered looking filing cabinets, next to a whiteboard with scribbled notes of jobs to be done in overlapping smudged blue marker.
More offices. But this time with an open door and a glazed internal wall that gave a restricted view into the shed’s interior where there were lights on and figures working.
I shuffled sideways a bit more, still keeping my head just at the level of the windowsill to prevent any chance of being seen from the inside although in reality there was little chance of that, and I settled down to watch.
At first, I couldn’t work out what it was that I was seeing going on. *
Inside there were three guys working, no, four, I corrected myself, as another figure emerged from a blind spot behind the wall of the first office. I recognised Scroat immediately of course, as well as Toad. He seemed to be in charge and was peering into the maw of some kind of a machine that looked a bit like a cement mixer painted yellow on a blue stand, and then, as if having made some kind of judgement, pointing at two pallets of sacks stacked in a corner. The other guys walked over and began picking them up and bringing them over to where the machine was rotating. The sacks looked heavy from the way they were being carried. I guessed at around twenty-five kilos each.
Scroat had a knife opened and he began to slit the top of each bag as it was brought over so that the other Brethren could pour the contents, which were some kind of off-white granules, into the mouth of the machine discarding the sacks into a bin bag, of which I noticed there were a couple already stacked and tied beyond the machine. The guys were working quietly and efficiently, as if it was something they had had plenty of practice at.
They put six bags of whatever it was into the machine, leaving a whole stack more on the pallet, and left it to rumble on for a while. Whatever it was they were doing, they were doing it in batches, presumably based on the capacity of whatever the machine was.
As Toad disappeared out of view, the others slowly tipped the maw of the machine sideways and then poured out the machine’s contents onto a blue tarpaulin they had spread in front of it at which point I understood what it was.
They had used the machine to grind the granules down into a fine powder and from the careful way they were handling it, they evidently didn’t want to make any mistakes with whatever it was. Then they dragged the tarpaulin away from below the mouth of the crusher so the next batch of granules could go in.
Toad reappeared from behind the other office bearing catering sacks of what I could clearly see from the labels was icing sugar. What the hell does he want that for I wondered? Only to see him take out his knife again and slitting the first of the bags, he dumped the contents onto the pile of powder already there.
Then as the other two recharged the crusher with fresh supplies of granules, Toad and Scroat each took one of those big plastic shovels, they sort they sell for clearing snow, and began to carefully and thoroughly mix the heap of powder on the tarpaulin.
When they had finished to Toad’s satisfaction, one of the other guys was instructed to fetch something else, disappearing somewhere inside the workshop and reappearing a moment later carrying an oil drum that he set down on a wooden pallet beside the tarpaulin.
They packed it carefully. First in went about a quarter of the powder to fill the bottom of the can, then as the other guys kept shovelling, Toad bent down and picked up a length of steel piping which was about three quarters of the depth of the drum in length and perforated along its length with lines of drilled holes. As he held it in place, the other Brethren continued to fill the drum, packing powder in around the pipe with the plastic shovel until at last it was full to the brim and Scroat could gently ease the top back on with just the wires from the end of the pipe sticking out through the holes that had been drilled in the lid for them.
Then calling the others over to join them, the men between them cautiously manhandled the full drum up and into the back of a white transit van parked in the shed. From the angle I was looking at I could see that the bed of the van was covered with a thick layer of corrugated cardboard to act as packing. I watched while the outlaws carefully slid the drum along it until it butted up against the two others that were already in place, and cushioned it against them by yet more packing materials.
Then they jumped down from the bed of the transit and went back to the barley crusher to work on the next batch. From the stores of sacks and drums it looked as though it was going to be a long night for them if they were going to process all of it.
The bags of grey-white granules had to be fertiliser, ammonium nitrate granules, which ground down to a powder and mixed with icing sugar made pretty effective explosives, after all the Provos had used the same recipe to make the docklands bomb back in 1996.
The fertiliser mix was used to provide the main body of the bomb, but the Provos always used a thing called a gaine to set it off, a booster made from a length of old scaffolding pole, stuffed with about five kilos of a mix of PETN and RDX, the major components of most plastic explosives. That had to be what Toad had been sticking down the centre of each drum. The drilled holes were there to help ensure the booster set off all of the bulk explosives packed around it as efficiently as possible.
I’d had a long talk with a techie from the army’s bomb disposal squad, the Royal Engineers, and he’d given me all the detail I had wanted for my piece, right down to the fact that the gaine materials were reasonably sensitive, so the Provos used a number six detonator, equivalent to a gramme of an eighty percent mercury fulminate and twenty percent potassium chlorate mix just to be sure to set it off, which in turn would detonate the surrounding drum of homemade powder. I’d thought he was about to give me the recipe for each to try at home.
Hence the use of a tarpaulin and the plastic shovels for mixing. That’s why the drum was stood on a wooden pallet to be filled and not the concrete floor of the shed. That was the reason for all the packing on the bed of the truck and between the drums.
I froze as I felt the arm around my neck and the cold steel of a hunting knife at my throat, just as a cold voice whispered in my ear, ‘Gotcha! They said you might be here. Now don’t you move a fucking muscle until I say so.’
10 Executive action
The pain exploded.
I got a kicking of course. Down on the ground, heavy boots stomping into ribs, kidneys and groin, arms wrapped over my head, my body scrabbling around on the floor, desperately trying to avoid the next kick as waves of blinding pain and gut sucking nausea swept over me.
Charlie had dragged me inside, the knife still at my throat and announced to Scroat that he’d caught me sneaking around outside and spying in through the window.
I had been stupid anyway to think that The Brethren would do anything like this without having some security outside. It was just that instead of a few lounging strikers having a smoke, this time Scroat had had the likes of Charlie patrolling the yard.
And all the while I was acutely aware that it was more than that. Charlie hadn’t just found me; he’d come looking for me. I’d been damn lucky not to have run straight into him and his knife out there in the dark as I made my way through the yard. He, they, whoever they were, had known that I might have been going to be there. And I very much wanted to know how.
But that didn’t make any sense, there was no way Danny would have told anyone, he was just too scared, I was sure of that. Unless he’d been caught and they’d forced it out of him of course.
I think if he’d had the choice, Charlie would have slit my throat then and there and then just dropped me into the car crusher, but Scroat was more thoughtful and through my haze of body wracking pain, to my utter astonishment I realised he was responsible for probably saving my life.
Although whether that was just because he had other plans for me I didn’t know. So, he had a couple of the guys reached down to drag me up from off the vomit covered floor where I was lying, moaning and keening in a foetal ball, my hands thrust down helplessly at the agonising pain in my crotch, and outside where they threw me into the back of another smaller van that was parked in the yard.
Powerless to resist, they quickly trussed me up in gaffa tape, securing my wrists and ankles and then ignoring my sobbing attempts to breathe, more went across my mouth and eyes.