Shadow

by James Swallow

  Verbeke heard the accent—Japanese, it sounded like—and he sneered reflexively. He jogged down to the vehicle, still dangling the dead cop’s revolver at the end of his arm.

  “Who are you, eh?” he demanded. “My welcoming party?”

  He had been right about the driver’s ethnicity. Another foreigner. The man moved like he was a fighter, but he favored one side as if unconsciously protecting the site of an old injury.

  “My name is Saito,” said the Japanese, in clipped and mechanical English. “You have my employers to thank for facilitating your escape.”

  Verbeke’s knuckles whitened as they tensed around the revolver, a passing memory rising to the front of his thoughts.

  “I know who you are,” he said, thinking it through. “Oh, yes. The little soldier for the rich men.” He brought up the gun and waved it around carelessly. “Did you forget that conversation we had? I told your masters to go fuck themselves.” He turned his head and spat. “You want to get into bed with the blacks and the ragheads, that’s up to you, but the Lions don’t want any of your shit.”

  “You would prefer us to put you back on the train?” Saito said evenly.

  “You can try.” Verbeke punctuated his statement by cocking the revolver’s hammer.

  A couple of years ago, after they had started making an impact on the European scene, men with money and flashy cars had tracked down Noah Verbeke and offered him suitcases full of euros in exchange for doing them “a few favors.” They had a list of targets they wanted to be hit, and for a generous cash payment, they wanted the Lion’s Roar to do it for them.

  It was coming back to him now. Toussaint, that arrogant crone who ran a dozen TV stations—she had been behind the meeting. This Jap had been there, lurking in the background like he thought he was some kind of ninja. His presence had immediately pissed Verbeke off, and in the end the Lions rejected the offer. They fought for white nations, for white men and white men’s hegemony—and that didn’t involve making pacts with a gang of trust-fund assholes who were willing to sell out anything and partner with anyone, as long as they stayed wealthy.

  “The Combine,” he said, sounding out the name, “can eat my shit.”

  That was what the group called themselves, a shadowy means-nothing designation that was designed to obscure fact and encourage disinformation. Verbeke knew enough of the truth about them, though—quaking old bastards and overripe bitches in their billion-dollar bubble, who traded power and influence between themselves like poker chips among card players. They had built their fortunes on having no cause of any kind other than making a profit, selling weapons to all sides and pouring fuel on the fire to keep everyone scared. His disdain for them was all jealousy and dismissal. These were weaklings who allied themselves with animals and traitors. They had no code.

  He stepped back, getting enough distance to keep Saito and the other two men in sight. The one with the beard had his shotgun at the ready, while the second was changing out of the train conductor’s jacket, seemingly oblivious to the tension in the cold night air.

  “If I may?” Saito reached into a deep pocket of the coat he wore, making no sudden movements, and removed a satellite phone. He flipped up a tube-like antenna and hit a speed-dial button. “My employers are aware of your issues with them. But they are also aware of the problems that have plagued your confederates in recent months.”

  Verbeke’s jaw hardened, annoyance flaring as Saito’s words brought up a truth he had no business knowing. The fact was, the Lion’s Roar was on the back foot. A concerted effort by Interpol, led by that asshole Jakobs, had seen them lose a dozen of their safe houses in as many weeks. Two of their high-profile backers had been arrested on trumped-up charges, and a handful of Verbeke’s best soldiers were trawled up in raids across Central Europe.

  He was arrested in Slovakia because circumstances forced him to be there, for a meeting with representatives of a neo-Nazi collective that the Lions were looking to ally themselves with. They needed numbers and support, but no one was supposed to be aware of that. His scowl deepened. Had somebody talked? If so, he would lock them in a cage and burn them alive.

  “You don’t know a fucking thing,” he spat.

  “I know at this moment in time you have limited options.”

  Saito was infuriatingly calm about the whole thing. The sat-phone connected with a beep, and he offered it to Verbeke.

  “What is this?”

  He took the phone warily, eyeing the encrypted dialing code on the illuminated display.

  “Speak to your comrade before you decide what to do next.”

  “Piss off!”

  Verbeke’s anger was building at the Japanese man’s emotionless affect, and he thought about how much he would enjoy using the phone handset to beat him. Still, he raised it to his ear.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Noah,” said a familiar voice. “How was the Bastille?”

  “Axelle…” Like her pale face, the French woman’s words were cold and honey-sweet, but his annoyance prevented Verbeke from being distracted by them. “What took you so long? They had me for nearly two months!”

  “Are you grateful?” She purred the question. “You don’t sound grateful.”

  “Don’t play games with me,” he retorted, and he heard her sharp intake of breath. She knew she had stepped over a line.

  “The police made you hard to find. I had to take steps.” She paused, becoming contrite. “You’re angry.”

  He glared at Saito. “This was the best you could come up with?” When the Combine had first come to them, Axelle had been one of the few Lions who wanted to work with the group. It made sense that she would have turned to them for help—but he was furious she had done so. “You’ve made us weak by doing this.”

  “Connard!” she shot back. “You would still be rotting in a prison cell if I hadn’t done this. Don’t be too arrogant to see the opportunity here!”

  Something in her words gave Verbeke pause. He would not admit it, but the woman was the smartest of his people, smarter than him and as loyal as she was sadistic.

  “What opportunity?” he asked, at length.

  “I made a deal to get you out,” Axelle told him, and a chill smile came into her words. “Trust me when I tell you … you’re going to like it.”

  Verbeke listened to her explain the high points of the arrangement, and gradually his annoyance faded, in turn replaced by a feral grin.

  TWO

  It was the second night they had been at sea. Somewhere during the first day, the fishing boat’s engine began to stutter and belch black smoke, and the men who had been put in charge of sailing the little vessel told the rest of them that they would have to drift with the currents for a while. Oil leaked out behind them on the surface of the waves, as if the old boat was bleeding.

  Fatima tried to pass the time by counting the clouds in the sky and the faces of the dozens of other people packed into the overloaded boat alongside her. Her elder brother Remi still had the fever from the days before they had paid their way to the smugglers, and he spent most of his time asleep. When he was awake, he didn’t talk much. Sharing mouthfuls of tepid, metallic-tasting water from the bottles they had brought with them, they rationed each sip as much as they could.

  The smugglers who put them to sea said that the boat would get them across the ocean to an island near a country called Italy, and once they were ashore there, they would be safe. There were good people in Italy, they said. There was no threat of constant attack, there was food and medicine and clean water. And for people who were willing to work hard, there could be a better future.

  Remi believed that, but Fatima didn’t. Remi had many beliefs that seemed foolish to his little sister, but she was smart enough not to call him out about them. She might have been younger but she was definitely the more adult of the two siblings, forced to grow up quickly after their parents had been killed in a bombing on the outskirts of Tripoli. If anything, Remi seemed to have stopp
ed where he was, as if losing their mother and father had frozen his maturing.

  Fatima took care of them both, but still she couldn’t stop Remi when he told her he had decided they were going to escape to a better life. And truthfully, there was nothing for her in Libya anymore—no prospect for a safe future, no education, no job, no money. She was old enough to understand that her country was coming apart around them, and that one day another bomb might take her or Remi, erasing them from the world in a screaming blast of dust and smoke, as it had their parents.

  So they went. They sold what little they owned, until sister and brother had only the clothes on their backs, trading one uncertain tomorrow for another. As the boat was pushed out on to the waves, Fatima looked back to see her homeland falling away. She wanted to stay. She wanted to live a good life there. But angry men, soldiers and fighters and politicians who cared nothing about her and Remi, had stolen away that possibility for … what? She wondered what reward the chaos could ever bring.

  Across choppy waves under a burning sun, they sailed into the unknown. There was some shade under a corrugated steel awning at the stern of the boat, and at first people took it in shifts to get out of the heat. But gradually the shade was colonized by those who were sick or those who simply refused to give up their places. The vessel was an old tuna trawler, barely patched together and steadily leaking. It stank of rot and dead fish, of diesel fuel and human fear.

  By the morning of the second day, there had already been two deaths from heatstroke, and those bodies were hefted over the shallow gunwale and into the ocean. As the day drew on, even the youngest of the children stopped crying as they learned that it made no difference, and that no matter how many tears they shed, the murderous heat and the sickening lurch of the boat would not ease.

  Now the sun was long gone and the temperature had plummeted. The boat’s passengers were packed into every square meter of available space, bodies lined up next to one another, keeping warm against the ocean chill beneath a cold and starry sky.

  “I think we are going to die out here.”

  It took a moment before Fatima realized that she had said those words aloud. She licked her dry lips and tasted salt.

  “No, little one. Have faith.”

  The woman lying next to her against the frame of the hull was called Aya, and she said she was from Nigeria. Her skin was darker than Fatima’s, and it reminded the girl of the teak of an old chair her father had owned. Somehow, the association made her want to trust the woman. Aya spoke with a lilting accent and she was pretty, her face peering out at the girl from the folds of her dun-colored hijab. In the darkness, Aya’s bright eyes glittered like jewels.

  Fatima felt so tired and so empty of energy, she couldn’t understand how Aya was able to keep her spirits up.

  “I am afraid Remi will not make it,” she whispered, glancing at her brother as he twitched in a fitful sleep. “Or I am afraid I will not, and he’ll be lost without me.”

  “That won’t happen,” Aya insisted. “I promise you.”

  But there was a shadow over her expression, and the older woman couldn’t hide her fear.

  “Thank you,” said Fatima, “but you can’t promise that.”

  Her mother had said something similar, and never come home again.

  Aya sighed and shifted, pulling up the sleeve of her dress to reveal a large watch around her wrist. It was bulky and it looked out of place, like something a rich lady would wear and not a fellow refugee. Fatima guessed it was worth a lot by the way Aya kept it concealed from everyone else. Her face was lit by a soft glow as she touched the watch’s face and it briefly illuminated, then dimmed.

  The woman stiffened, and the watch was hidden again.

  “Listen to me,” she told Fatima. “You and Remi need to keep your heads down. I mean it. Don’t do anything silly, just concentrate on keeping each other alive.”

  There was a new urgency in Aya’s words that Fatima didn’t understand. The woman found her own water bottle and pressed it into the girl’s hands.

  “I can’t take this,” Fatima began, but Aya shook her head sternly.

  A man at the bow, hanging half over the frame of the boat, suddenly burst into life, his motions jerky and panicked. He scrambled backward and stepped on his neighbors, in seconds creating a ripple of angry curses from all around him. He was a Berber, so it took Fatima a moment to think through his dialect and figure out what he was so animated about.

  “A boat,” she said automatically. “A ship! Out there.”

  People who understood the man were standing, turning to look in the direction he was pointing, and Fatima sprang up, her curiosity momentarily overwhelming her fatigue and her wariness.

  She glimpsed a dark shape, angular straight lines like a giant shark’s fin, a shadow against the night’s blackness moving off beyond the fishing boat’s prow. The wind changed direction and brought with it the low murmur of idling engines.

  In the next second the pitiless glare of a spotlight flooded their vessel with a blinding white glow, and Fatima reflexively put up her hand to shield her eyes.

  At her feet, Remi awoke and his jaw dropped open in shock.

  “Is … Is that a rescue ship?”

  People started waving and shouting, calling out for help in as many languages as they knew. A surge of hope stirred the refugees and they scrambled to get a better look at the approaching vessel.

  Five times the size of the old fishing boat and much better suited to the waves than the old shallow-water trawler, the ship was painted a deep green, and Fatima thought she could make out people on deck moving back and forth. There was a symbol like an arrowhead on the hull and words in English written after it, but the girl had no idea what they meant.

  She turned back to Aya, and the woman’s expression had changed, so much that she seemed like a different person.

  “What’s wrong?” said Fatima.

  “Stay behind me,” Aya replied, as a metallic noise issued out over the sea. The rattle of guns being readied. Fatima knew that sound and wished that she did not.

  * * *

  “Look at them,” Lazlow said with disgust, spitting over the rail and into the sea. “Packed in like stinking rats.” He jutted his chin at the deck of the refugee boat and the snarl of bodies atop one another. “We should sink it and let them go to the bottom.”

  The big, sweaty deckhand kneaded the butt of his AK-47 and toyed with the idea of firing off a few rounds. He glanced at Maarten, who stood alongside him, but the new guy said nothing, holding on to his own gun with a glum, unreadable expression on his face.

  “Eh?”

  Lazlow gave him a prod, trying to elicit an agreement from the young Dutchman, but all he got was a weak nod.

  He scowled and looked away. They were recruiting idiots these days, he told himself.

  “That won’t be enough,” said DeVot, in answer to his declaration. “We need a deterrent. They’re simple-minded. We have to teach them a lesson. They have to spread the word, and they can’t do that from the bottom of the sea.”

  The sour-faced man was the closest thing the ship had to a captain, but he was paunchy and narrow-eyed, and none of the volunteer crew had a good word for him. He was marginally in charge because he had the money and the connections.

  “Bodies washing up on the beach tell the tale well enough,” insisted Lazlow. He was never one to let anybody have the last word. “Eh?” Again, he elbowed Maarten, trying to get him to agree. “Eh, Genius? That’s right, yes?”

  “Maybe,” offered the Dutchman, as he watched the other crew lash the refugee boat to their ship and sling a cargo net across the rails. The men didn’t offer to help the ragged immigrants make the transfer up on to the bigger ship, but they made it clear with menacing gestures that the refugees couldn’t stay where they were.

  “Maybe?” echoed Lazlow, and he spat again. “Are you sure you got the guts for this, Genius?”

  Maarten didn’t reply. Lazlow had coined the
nickname for the wiry, blond-haired Dutchman soon after they left port in Naples, needling him with it at every opportunity after the new guy had made the mistake of talking shit about the symbol on their flag that recalled the shields of the ancient Spartans.

  DeVot had given a talk that first night out, stirring up the men with the promise of getting a bit of blood and action out here, telling them that they were warriors just like those Greeks.

  Their ship was a defender, a bulwark in the undeclared war that the gutless politicians and spineless lawmen were too afraid to admit was being waged. DeVot said there were hundreds, thousands of people who thought the same way they did, who were sick of the tide of immigrant parasites flooding in to Europe, looking for handouts, taking homes and jobs from the decent people who lived there. This ship, paid for by a group called the Bastion League, drew support from nationalists all over the continent and further still—and it also drew in men like Lazlow, who hadn’t been able to make selection into the German army but still wanted to carry a gun and have a little swagger with it.

  Lazlow firmly believed, if the government or the bleeding hearts found these animals in that shit-heap boat, they would have handed them a wad of cash and the keys to a new house.

  The Bastion League had different plans. The sea was a big place, and the so-called navy “peacekeepers” sent by their New World Order masters couldn’t be everywhere at once. So, like the Spartans who had defended their nation from the invading Persians—Lazlow had seen that movie a bunch of times—the men on this ship were turning back the tide of these foreigners, one refugee boat at a time.

  But Genius over there said something about how the real Spartans weren’t all that history painted them. He was even stupid enough to say that they’d been okay with queers.

  Where the fuck did you hear that? Lazlow had shouted.

  I read it in a book, replied the Dutchman, like he thought that made him smarter than the rest of them, like he was some kind of clever bastard.

  Lazlow had made the man’s life hell from that day onward, and that stopped the little shit from talking out of turn.