by Finn Óg
Back then I’d been a “volunteer” in a special unit, the SBS, or Special Boat Service. It’s a bit like the SAS, except wetter. Our orders were to board an Irish ship, which was attempting to carry humanitarian aid into Gaza. The brief was to locate some dodgy old Semtex explosive, and extract with it. All I could work out was that the agent must have been worth keeping. Sending us into the middle of yet another upsurge in conflict between Israel and Hamas was no everyday call. What I couldn’t work out was why British Intelligence had allowed the explosives to get on board the boat at all. If the Israelis ever found out that their allies, the Brits, had known that such a volatile substance was being shipped to its enemies, they’d be pretty pissed off. Anyway, it seemed fairly straightforward to us. Swim, land, locate the ship, take the stuff, extract. Of course, it didn’t quite turn out that way.
3
The night I met my wife, Shannon, rattled through my mind on the flight home from Afghanistan. I stared at the coffins lashed to the base of the C17’s cargo bay, and thanked God that I hadn’t known the poor unfortunates inside. It was almost laughable that some idiot at Kandahar Airfield thought it acceptable to place a bereaved Bootneck beside caskets. I imagine that was part of the grieving process, seeing death in everything, and tumbling through a life short-lived. It seemed important to remember our beginning together, now that we had our end. It was almost comforting to interrogate the detail about how we’d bonded over a terrible conceit.
I was ushered off the plane on the blind side. This prevented the relatives of the dead from seeing a bedraggled Marine emerge on foot, while their loved ones were carried, draped in the symbols of an unreciprocated loyalty. The dead Guardsmen had been woefully unprepared for Taliban tactics. I’d often seen them, marauding through the dusk, sky-lined and making noise, unconscious to the signs of mines and ambush.
From the Royal Air Force Base Lyneham, I was taken to the nearby military town of Wootton Bassett to buy some civilian clothes. English officers could travel freely in their kit, but I had to fly from Bristol to Belfast, where attitudes towards the UK military varied hugely.
It wasn’t until I reached the civilian airport that a plan began to emerge. It has always been thus, my mind and heart darkening for long periods as I wallow in the horrors, but on every occasion, something has pointed me in the right direction. Thereafter, I have been able to work hard to get to that point in my imagination, where everything will be as good as it can be. Perhaps it’s a form of internal therapy, where I listen to myself moan, and eventually shake it off.
Dressed in badly fitting clothes, I found myself starting to struggle with the imminent reunion with my daughter. My throat grew thick, and I could feel the backs of my eyes flounder in a rising tide. I knew that without a distraction, I might lose a fight I’d become accustomed to winning; that against any betrayal of emotion.
Mercifully, there was a vacant seat with a discarded newspaper upon it. I whipped it up before me and opened it at a random page. Breathing deeply and scanning hard, my eyes fell upon an advert for an auction to be held just outside Belfast. “No reserve!” it screamed, listing an aluminium sailing boat as the key lot. I had no idea at that stage what it was worth, or what it might sell for, but I knew that I would buy it. It felt as though my dead wife, in her gentle way, had drawn me towards it. From that point on I had a goal. The plan fell into place on the short hop home.
In truth, my wife had become my life-guide years before. If I am re-programmed at all, it is down to her. She somehow instinctively knew that I needed to find a purpose for the skills instilled in me, and that a simple departure from life as a Commando would leave a void that would prove impossible to fill. When I saw her for the second time, she looked into my eyes so probingly that I felt she’d reached inside, and choked the indifference out of me.
Of course, there never should have been a second contact. We were not supposed to spend any significant time in Gaza at all, but the intensity of the assault unleashed by Israel on that dry, dusty, dismal strip of land disrupted our plans. The Palestinian group Hamas was in control in the area, politically and militarily, and had enormous support among the population. Using that cover, Hamas had decided, on the same bloody night we landed, to resume rocket attacks over the fence into Israel. The Israeli Defence Force reacted with its usual restraint, by blowing up anything and everything, and filling the few unoccupied patches of land in Gaza, with make-shift coffins.
Although we’d been shown satellite images of the port, and had been briefed on its layout, it still struck me as woefully inadequate for a city so heavily populated. We’d yomped across beaches and through shitty, holed streets all night, avoiding everyone, which took time. We dug in for a day’s rest at the edge of the breakwater, as the sun snuck its tuft over the Mediterranean. It gradually revealed a harbour no bigger than some of the fishing ports I’d worked in my youth. Despite the increasing daylight, we could hear the Israeli attacks continuing inland, and it began to dawn on us that the op could be in trouble.
Day passed into night as we waited for the ship, one of us on sentry, three asleep. We had no firearms, but we were well-equipped for hand-to-hand combat. By the second night we were defecating in small bags, our bodies encrusted with salt, and we contemplated the looming need to eat discarded fish from the small boats, a few hundred yards away. We could not afford to get sick though, and of greater concern was our water supply. We knew that at some stage we’d have to break cover and fill our deflatable bottles.
Of course, the ship never did arrive. With Hamas pinging missiles, the Israelis had blockaded the shipping lanes, and were occupying sea space with their own war ships. Hungry for information, and sure now that extraction was the best course of action, we decided to make contact. Deniability was essential, so we had no military communication devices, just smartphones in watertight, commercially available cases. There were applications on them which encrypted or scrambled conversations, but Israel is on the ball with all comms, and we knew that any signal out of Gaza stood a more than an even chance of interception. Such concerns were secondary however, as we had to get a signal first, and it was clear that we wouldn’t get one from our make-shift bunker on the breakwater.
I decided that I would go alone in search of what, at best, would be 2G. I cast off my kit, discarded all but the blade sheathed against my inner left leg, and headed for the city. My Arabic was pretty limited. I was confident with please, thank you, and excuse me, my three essentials for any deployment. I had hoped to secure comms long before I left the harbour, but like everything on that bloody Op, it went pear-shaped.
The glow from the smartphone screen lit my face every time I stroked it to life, and so I left a good five hundred metres between each check. That led me straight into Gaza City, and as I plunged deeper into its density, I became increasingly conscious that my bearings were becoming muddled. Anyone who grew up the way I did can sniff out the sea though, and I was confident that I would find my way back quickly. What I hadn’t qualified for were the patrols.
The first one I encountered was a collection of three, each man carrying a heavy weapon. Rocket-propelled grenades were silhouetted over their shoulders like tulips before bloom. Hamas fighters, demonstrating to the population that they were prepared to take on the Apaches, Cobras, and whatever other helicopter gunships the Israeli Air Force had at its disposal.
This gaggle was far from alert. They smoked and talked, oblivious to my presence, as they passed less than two feet from me. Stupidly, I assumed that there would be spacing between the patrols marauding the streets. I emerged from a doorway and watched their backs weave around a corner, before igniting the screen on the smartphone. It turned out to be the best and worst action of that night. I immediately heard a shout as a second patrol picked up the glow and started barking orders at me. I assumed I was guilty of breaking some sort of curfew, and knew that it was fight or flight. There was no way I was going to talk my way out of it, and I certainly didn’t want to
draw fire in such a crammed area. So I stood still, and decided to disable the men when they arrived.
They arrived in one lump, as if glued together in a spittoon. That made my work so much easier. I placed the phone in the pouch above my coccyx, and eased one foot behind for stability. The patrol men noticed my stance and raised their arms immediately – an AK, and a homemade Carl Gustav pistol.
They came too close. They always do. Untrained assailants always believe a few metres to be sufficient distance to prevent an un-armed attack. Not only is that just wrong, it also narrows their options considerably. The Gustav weapon is dreadfully inaccurate, and a Klak is hard to handle. Of the three men, the only one with any wit appeared to have been issued a mortar tube.
What I didn’t want was collateral damage – dead children in the houses on either side of me, or noise to attract anyone else to the scene. That meant the three men needed to be taken down hard, and that they would more than likely suffer permanent damage, or even die.
The youngest was the most excitable; perhaps he had most to prove. He gesticulated his Kalashnikov at me and, predictably, edged forward in the process. There was no shoulder butt on his model, so I dipped to the side and grabbed the barrel and mag to take his teeth out with the stock. I heard them shatter as I ducked and rose with my fist to hammer the holder of the Gustav with a disarming blow to the sweet meats. As he folded, the gun presented nicely and I twisted it from his grip, turning it on the leader, who was suddenly outnumbered by two guns to one. He gave up immediately, and crouched to his knees with his hands in the air. I walked behind him and kicked him in the back to make sure he was face down and unnerved at the prospect of what would happen next.
I set the guns down and incapacitated the younger man with a blow so heavy it could have killed him. The moaning of the second fighter had to be stopped, so I placed my knee across his shoulder blades and choked him until he too passed out. The leader panted and prayed, so I tore strips off his scarf and stuffed them into his mouth. I found cable ties on the belt of the second man, attached two together, and clicked them tight around his face, before securing his hands and feet similarly. Then I dragged each into a side street, and had to leave it at that. I needed to place distance between the scene and me, so I began a steady-paced run north. I knew the wounded men could be discovered within minutes, and that I needed comms immediately.
I had only covered about twenty metres when I saw yet another patrol, and realised that their station or briefing room must be close by. I was exposed; there was no obvious side street or gloom to shelter in, and my heaving chest betrayed my breath on the cold air.
The new patrol was different. I watched them as they rolled down the street, fingers parallel with their gun barrels, evidently much better versed and prepared than their predecessors. They were properly spaced, and I knew my luck had expired. I’d left one of their friends conscious, and I had visions of him flapping like a seal, head and tail raised as his pals went past. There was virtually no chance of evading capture, and less prospect of fighting my way out.
I had no need to run through my options. I’d done all of that before we got into the sea. Capture would be a nightmare. Hamas would assume I was Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli equivalent of our Special Reconnaissance Unit, or worse. Given the way I was dressed, they might assume me to be Shayetet 13, Israel’s answer to my own SBS. Either way, I would be considered a prize hostage, or even an opportune candidate for slaughter and revenge, given the brutality of the air assault on Gaza. There was no way my own unit could claim me without upsetting Israel and the Palestinians, and the United States might not be too happy with the UK either. I was on my own.
The Hamas fighters spun on the balls of their feet, marking out sight lines and using what little light there was to clear the area. They were so much better than the previous unit. I began to wonder whether they had tried to make contact with the incapacitated men, and had taken the lack of response as an indicator of an incursion.
As the first man approached I pushed aside the urge to offer a gentle surrender. I was keen to avoid unnecessary shooting, but the risk that the hysteria of an arrest would lead to an instant execution was high. I’d seen tempers in the Arab world explode in a matter of seconds. I’d witnessed crowds goad gunmen into extra-judicial murder.
I stepped forward, but was immediately masked from the patrol when a door to my left was flung open. Instinct told me to pause, and I heard a woman barking at the men in what seemed to my un-trained ear to be faltering Arabic. I had no idea why the Hamas fighters were listening instead of firing, but their boots soon battered off a stream of echoes around the walls of the tight little street.
I had backed in behind the open door in the hope that the woman would simply close it again, and remain unaware of my presence. Instead, when the men were out of sight, I heard her speak. “I think you’d better come in.”
4
I’d never known the comfort of human contact in that way before. Death, when it often visited, had been on deployment. We almost expected to die. There were no hugs in the field. That is not to say that there was no reaction; there was always a reaction. Usually, more death. But to be smothered in hugs, as I was when I stepped off that flight, was a relatively new sensation, and was simultaneously comforting, and terrible.
First was Isla, who didn’t run to me as I had expected. She walked slowly towards me, and raised her little arms for a lift. To bury my face in her neck and smell her hair was to finally acknowledge that her mother was dead. That was the point at which I nearly lost it. I felt her relief course through me like a shot of strong whiskey. I clung to her nearly as much as she did to me, a little limpet mine, threatening my detonation. I turned and twisted, unable to raise my face to Shannon’s parents, who stood by patiently. Both were in tears, as were my own folks at their side.
Eventually, with Isla still on my shoulder, I walked towards my in-laws, and swung an arm around them too. I had never done more than shake her father’s hand. A bear of a man, he hugged back and shook out his grief against me. Her mother, often given to emotion, was probably the steadiest of us all. Then came my parents, who uttered “so sorry son.” My dad told me that there were reporters outside. At that point practicality returned, and I was able to compose myself. We needed a means to get out of the airport, and, well, that seemed like something I could usefully distract myself with.
I knew George Best Airport well. After we got married, Shannon and I decided to build a home in Northern Ireland, and ever since, I’d flown home a lot. Nesting perhaps. Preparing for Isla.
I knew there would be no easy exit past the press, so I told the others to leave and tell the reporters that I had missed the flight and would catch the next one. I watched through the sliding doors as the journalists gathered up their kits and wandered off. Then I strolled out over the flyover to re-join my family. I’d made a life’s work of not having my photograph taken. I had exploited social media, but never been used by it. I was confident that I would not be recognised. In all honesty, I was relieved at the distraction, and the chance to get a breath. My heart hurt, and I promised myself that nothing would ever cause that to happen again.
For the next week, we were soaked in sympathy. Ordinarily, I would have shunned such intrusion. My intensely private nature could not have been more different from Shannon’s. She made friends easily. Where I recoiled at a stranger’s touch, she was huggy, touchy, happy. So it was that my parents’ house became like an arrivals terminal, as people I vaguely knew streamed through the door and crowded the rooms, grappling me and kissing Isla. The sheen on their faces reflected a loss which had evidently affected them deeply.
They were of a kind. Overseas aid or charity workers for the most part, those who picked up the pieces amid the destruction left by people like me. Contrary to my instincts, I found myself drawing huge comfort from their presence. They told me stories of my wife, of a life well-lived, of her importance on the planet. I took in with gratitude
the tales of the little acts of kindness which she performed to make life valuable again, in places where the inflation of war had depleted its currency.
Isla never left my side, which was just as I wanted it. We slept at my folks’ house, given the mess that forensics had left in our own. Eventually, I had to dose her with Calpol to make sure she’d sleep, while I performed an unavoidable task. I walked up to what had been our home, and stood in the living room to absorb what had happened there. It was one long, angry stand. Then I walked the half-mile to the house of horrors, the root of the evil that had taken my wife from our daughter. It had been emptied of the scum that had caused her to act as she had. The landlord, a local factory owner, had finally done what should have been done years earlier. I would have my time with that greedy bastard too.
I can’t even bring myself to describe the funeral, other than to say that music can be a comfort, yes, but it can also draw the most insulated mind into the shuddering bleakness of bereavement. My wife had loved singing, and she eventually coated me with a blanket of country, turning steel guitar from a migraine-inducing screech, to a tolerable whine. It became an indication of her happiness. Any time I heard Waylon or Jonny blasting from the kitchen, I knew she’d be swaying around with Isla, laughing hard and smiling that beautiful smile.
Two days later I was back on a plane, my daughter at my side. She had no idea where we were going; I had no idea what she would think of my plan. But when we arrived at an obscure auctioneer’s yard in Maidstone, Kent, she got it immediately. There, standing clear above the fence, was a 54-foot Norwegian-built cutter.
