Read Online Zero Hour by Andy McNab - Free Book Online

‘I have to go to Odessa today to collect a girl off the ferry from Istanbul. There’s usually somebody on it for us. As for the airport, sometimes I think I should just take my bed up there and move in.’
    Brothel raids in countries like the UK, Germany and Holland produced many of her clients. Her number was on the walls of police stations all over the world.
    Lena tapped her cell phone. She’d positioned it carefully in front of her and kept checking the signal every minute or so. ‘I never switch it off. Sometimes they’re just metres from the pimps. I might have only seconds to get their details. Often they don’t even know what country they’re in.’
    ‘What do you do then?’
    ‘I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I’ll get caller ID, but I can’t call back unless they tell me to. It’s too dangerous.’
    We needed to cut to the chase here. ‘Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?’ I leaned in. ‘What’s the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?’
    ‘Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don’t need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it “happy trafficking”. These ones are even given fake passports if they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty - or whatever else it is they’re trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they’re not bruised and battered they’ll earn more as prostitutes.’ She sighed. ‘It’s only when the person who meets them has taken away their passport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it’s too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.’
    She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena’s desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.
    ‘There isn’t anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?’
    The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn’t quite know where to begin.
    ‘I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.’ Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.
    ‘Another “friend” met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. “Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?” We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.’
    She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. ‘In Italy, the “friend” took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.
    ‘I kept saying to them I must go back to Mother. My mother was sick. She needed medicine. They didn’t listen. I had to work seven days a week, from the afternoon to early