You can’t ship them by air any more, the regulations and the spot-checks being what they
are. I used to fly them ten to twenty at a time from the East to the West very nearly
every week in an old US DC3. Nowadays every bent official heads straight for any private
plane and the bribes became ridiculous, let alone the risk of some ‘straight’ idiot
handing you over to a lifetime behind bars. So I had to find another way. I don’t collect
the girls or have anything to do with them except moving them from the East to the West;
they get delivered to my boat, I ship them, they get collected. I operate from – let’s say
– somewhere south of Koper in Slovenia to – let’s say – a little north of Manfredonia on
the Italian coast; best not to be specific. About two hundred kilometres. I traded-in the
DC3 for a battered old twenty-metre fishing-boat – I could put thirty girls below with no
problem but usually there are about fifteen. The trade my contacts are in, it doesn’t
matter too much what sort of condition the cargo is in on delivery; girls destined for the
sex-trade have to be kept in a reasonable state but my cargo is for the slave-trade.
Slave-trade in the ‘developed west’? Look, there’s always been and always will be a slave
trade anywhere on the planet you care to look, anytime. The very rich and powerful, once
they have the money and the possessions and the status always want to own the last
impossible thing and a candidate for the last-impossible-thing is a slave. I don’t mean a
servant, I mean a slave. Owned, to do what they like with. The ‘customers’ are about
seventy-percent middle-aged men, twenty-five percent middle-aged women; I’m not supposed
to know but two of ‘my’ girls are owned by a twenty-three year-old man in, well, one of
the most developed countries of the European Union.
Anyway, you don’t want to know this. Once the cargo is aboard I potter out of the
harbour, ostensibly to go fishing – I fish on the way back and am a bit of a joke because
I always sail single-handed and always come back with damn all saleable fish. Harmless old
Nicolae, that’s me – ‘bit gaga, soft in the head’. Good cover. Harmless old Nicolae makes
a lot of money, enjoys the sea and enjoys his cargo for every three week round trip.
Harmless I may be but not in any way gaga.
First thing I did once out of the harbour and on my way was to check the hold. Ideally
there would be up to a dozen girls shackled to the boat’s frames, all nicely gagged. I
didn’t pack them in like the old slave-traders, a dozen girls means they have plenty of
room. They were shipped naked, the reason being that’s how it always was. None of them had
any illusions that they’re destined for the sex-trade, they’d not been lured by promises
of jobs or anything; they’d almost always been lifted off the street or bought from some
local police-station – as an alternative to prosecuting them for some reason or other,
genuine or not. So I had a dozen scared, often sobbing, naked girls chained in my hold.
The sobbing was muted by their re-usable rubber gags, of course, but occasionally needed
silence below when some other vessel came my way – no sobbing, no rattling chains so the
very first thing I do is explain to that to them – if I ring the electric bell in the
hold, they freeze, stop moving, stop mmmf-ing in their gags. As they’re slave-stuff you
could be pretty firm so to make sure they understand I used to pick one at random and
thrash her. You can do it any way you like but they’re slaves - so what do you did you do
except whip? Lot of bloody nonsense talked and written about whipping a girl, ‘fifty
lashes’ and all that rot. Just five or six cuts with a proper whip – I had – have - a
proper whip: the girl usually fainted in the middle of trying to scream; then the others
go very still.
That done I dodged on deck again to make sure we were on course, checked the engine –
and old British Gardner diesel which probably misses a beat once in a hundred years, is
sixty years old, turns at fifty revs and is worth more than the whole boat. Sorry, the old
Gardner is my pride and joy. Anyway, so then I usually went back below to organise things.
Had a look at each one, handled a few tits and slits if they took my fancy, picked one or
two for my use – spreader-bar to keep the legs open is all that needed, waved the whip
about and there we were. There’s nothing so likely to give a clear-view of things to an
office-girl - or a woman-doctor for that matter – who finds herself manhandled perhaps all
the way from Kazakh or somewhere – and then finds herself chained up in a hold with
others, all naked and having to watch one being whipped – of shafted for that matter. Some
will have been on the road for weeks so don’t kid yourself, they know what’s happening to
them. Reading about slaves and about whippings is one thing but being one and witnessing a
whipping is something else. Clarifies the mind. So I didn’t get any trouble at all really.
Or I didn’t until the night the ‘special’ turned up.
All was set to go, everything battened down when Dragovic clambered aboard from the
jetty. Absolutely forbidden; I never see them and they never see me.
“What the shit do you want, Drag? Get off my boat…”
“Gottanother. Special. Must go…”
“It’ll be daylight in half an hour. No. You know the arrangements…”
“Thousand US,” he said, looking as nervous as hell.
“Where is she?”
“Two minutes. I bring two minutes. Is special.”
I held out my hand for the thousand – he probably had two thousand to give me but there
it is – and said, “I sail in five minutes. Cash now. If you’re late it’s your problem.”
He and some other Serb came in the three minutes with a girl. Special wasn’t in it and
I was scared out of my mind that someone would see. The girl was walking between them, in
the open… Well, trying to run with them really. In a dress. So, what’s wrong with a girl
in a dress? This one was in neat, expensive bright steel fetters – ankles and wrists and
one of those chin-cup-lower-face-mask rubber gags you see in catalogues of sex-toys. In
the open, hustling and clinking across the jetty.
“What the hell’s this?” I hissed at Dragovic as we hauled her aboard and between us
dumped her in my cabin – no time to open up the hold. She moved as if she was drunk –
meaning drugged – and was the scariest thing I’d ever had aboard. I mean, merely fettered,
dressed, ‘Western’-looking and not knocked-about at all. I clipped her wrist-fetters to
the bulkhead and hustled the two thickies back on deck.
“Tell me,” I advised Dragovic “or she goes over the side after an hour…”
“Is gift from – he mentioned a name from the old Soviet nomenklatura, a big nasty name –
“to Vassily Stepanovic. Lives in West now like the others. Girl is Western student.
Stepanovic wanted fresh Western girl, must be fresh. I not lie, this one volunteer right.
All I know. You get more dollar when you deliver. Here is chains-key.” Not half I wouldn’t
get more dollar…
“Get ashore, take your thug. Never, ever do this again…” I got under way…
‘Volunteer’ my eye. Thought I did think she just might have been, in the sense that she
may have been given some choice or other – sold as a slave or got rid of some less
pleasant way.
Now usually they – the cargo – are quiet, shaky, scared-stiff and the last thing they do
is try to take their gags out, having learned that doing anything at all would get them a
great deal of nastiness. Well, an hour after clearing the jetty I went back, armed with
the whip, to figure out what to do about the ‘volunteer’. She was sitting – sitting mind
you – wedged up in the corner with her shackled hands high – as they were chained to the
bulkhead – with her gag rolling about at her shackled feet. As I got in view she said, a
bit oddly because she’d probably been gagged for some time
“Where are you taking me?” Just like that, in perfect English. Bold as brass.
I mean, she was trembling but was doing what the Brits call the ‘stiff upper lip’
thing; every single Britisher I’ve ever met was a mad as a hatter, male and female alike:
there’s this story about an English – the English are totally insane – an English General
who gets his leg blown off in some war a while ago.
‘Mannering,’ he says to another officer, “I’ve been hit. Lost my damn leg.”
“No Sir,” says the other one, “it’s over there.”
“Damn me, so it is.”
That’s what they mean by ‘stiff upper lip’ – no yelling, screaming, calling on gods,
just ‘damn me’. Mad. Well, that’s what my ‘volunteer’ had to be doing, though I hoped like
hell she wasn’t a Brit or a Frenchie or Dutch or anything like that; visualising instantly
‘straight’ police, courts you couldn’t buy and nice, comfortable jails you couldn’t get
out of. France, Germany, Holland, the UK, maybe Belgium, maybe Spain were no-nos,
absolutely. I’ve had a brush or two with the Gendarmerie and with a ‘sergeant’ from the UK
police and I didn’t want any more thank you. Anyway, she was sitting up, shaking;
expensive if grubby and torn dress, bra showing through the tear, smear of lipstick round
her mouth. Red hair, green damn eyes and all of eighteen.
“You shut your mouth and you do as you’re told,” I said, snaking the whip, “or this will
make you…”
“Probably,” she says, still trembling. “I’ll try to do as I’m told then. Where am I
going?”
Bright. No so keen on bright – you have to watch them. Be bright back.
“I don’t know where you’re going, I’m just the postman. Someone wants a slave and you’re
it. You’re going below with the others…” Bang! The whole boat hove down to port and I
lurched across to collide with my bunk. Bang! Again and she heeled the other way, shoving
me backwards and flailing; the girl slid on her arse across the flooring as far as her
wrist-shackles would let her. Thud-thud-thud-blam-blam-blam-thud-thud went the Gardner as
the screw came out of the water and plunged back. A green sea hammered the skylight over
us and scattered wet about. So Miss chained-up clever-bitch says quickly;
“Backed south. Go get your mizzen up, I’m not going anywhere…” She was quite right of
course, needed some steadying-sail quick, but when I’d done that – and it was blowing a
Seven to Eight out of nowhere - I clambered back into the cabin, soaked and having dropped
the whip somewhere, hauled off my belt and shoved her onto her face with my boot; gave her
five welts across her neat, dress-covered arse with it. She didn’t say anything at all,
just took it and when I stopped she twisted herself back up to sitting. I did notice the
hah of breath-intake as she sat on the stripes though…
“You need your gag back in, Miss,” I said.
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