by Finn Óg
Anyway, panic was unusual to me. I’d wake hard, eyes wide open, ready to burst out, and realise that sleep had taken me to hell again. But the anxiety didn’t end there. It endured for hours, as I lay awake and listened and jerked; I was frightened, and I am virtually never frightened. Even under extreme fire, even with bits of Bootneck hanging from rocks or plastered over walls, I was not frightened. But there is no adrenaline to protect you at night, in bed, beside your wife. There is no rifle or General Purpose Machine Gun with which to appease your fear and shoot up the enemy. There is just silence, and darkness, and cowardice. And it crept through me like the dawn over sea, enveloping and exposing me, and, according to my wife, making me human again.
Isla and I were happy, hand in hand, on an escalator in Belfast’s Victoria Square shopping centre. The plan was to buy her mother a Christmas present, and Isla was full of chat. I always scan, I can’t help it. I’m not saying I’m ultra-alert or anything, but I take in my surroundings, probably seeking out threat, and making sure I have the capacity to react. Ahead of me was a man who was turned astern, looking past me, at my little girl. His mouth was open like a hyena, his tongue wide and flat, his head nodding slightly. There was no doubt in my mind, he was a slobbering, salivating pervert who had forgotten himself, and was ogling my child. This guy’s leery desire immediately took me back to the Middle East, and a cacophony of rage rose in me, like he’d tossed a grenade into a bunker.
The end of the moving stairs reached his feet as I reached for him, plucking him from the ground and throttling him back against a glass wall.
“Fuck are you looking at?” was all I could manage to growl, my teeth ground shut in anger, his body giving way to shock and fear. Then there was screaming and slapping and Isla was crying and the man was in a mess on the ground. Somebody called for security and two women arrived and were right in my face calling me for every name they could muster. I lifted Isla up and drew her in and turned to walk away, and it was only then that I realised what I had done.
“He’s got a learning disability you bloody animal!” I heard a woman shout.
Somehow, I knew it was the man’s sister. I turned back again and looked at the scene, people gathered around him. All I could see were his feet. The other woman could have been his mum. She was distraught and wailing beside him. My eyes closed as my heart sank, and a swollen ball of nausea travelled up my chest. I had the overwhelming urge to return and plead an apology, but I could see the sister would wear none of it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed, incredulous.
And then I prioritised. I chose Isla over my conscience, and I turned and left, holding her tight and saying over and over again that everything would be all right, ignoring her questions about why I had hit that man. I don’t even remember hitting him, I don’t know if I did. If she was right, I knew he could be in real difficulty. I took her away.
There were still tears and terror and snot when we got home. Isla ran straight to her mother and told her everything in one great diatribe of distress. Shannon looked at me in horror, and then relented, as it dawned on her that remorse, rather than anger, was my main affliction. She calmed Isla down, as only she could back then, and later she coaxed it all out of me. I made no reference to the excuse that tried to force itself out, to mitigate my behaviour, but she somehow sensed that there was precedent for what I had done, and that she had been complicit in it.
She reasoned it out, truthfully. Had she tried to shower me with shit and niceties, I would have had no comfort. But she drew me to a conclusion of sorts, without letting me off the hook.
“You fucked up today,” she began, which was cutting, but necessary.
“I know, I’m sorry Shan. It’s just there, it’s in me.”
“That’s why it won’t be the last time. You’ll do it again, but you need to address it each time, to feel the hurt. Then maybe it will happen less often.”
“Don’t hold back, Shan, will you love?”
“No point, Sam. You need to realise that other people aren’t like you. You’ve been surrounded by commandos for years, hon, so it’s not your fault that you’re tuned to the fucking moon. But if you’re going to get out, you’re going to have to learn to live like us. Not everyone is the enemy. There isn’t risk ‘round every corner. And you need to realise that other people are no match for you. They chucked in red meat and wanted you to come out cross. Now you have to re-train for ordinary life.”
I stared at her. I knew she was right, but I didn’t know how to get there.
“What you did was out of love and protection.”
I snorted.
‘It was, Sam. Your instincts are good, to protect Isla, to look after me. But your instincts are to fight immediately. You need to fight clever, you need to consider that fighting isn’t the first and only option. You have to get used to being around different types of people, gentle people, confused people, folk who aren’t familiar with fast decisions and quick reactions. That man must have been so scared when he saw you coming at him today.”
“He was terrified, God love him,” I rasped, as the shame overwhelmed me. And then it came. I told her of the sleepless nights, of the horrors in the dark, of the weakness I felt. Shannon drew out the pain like a syphon, and when the flow began it was hard to stop. In the end, I even told her of the dreams in which I had imagined harming her and Isla. She assured me that I didn’t scare her, that she felt safe with me, and that she was sure I would never hurt them. The relief, eventually, was enormous.
That was the beginning of my final extraction from the Marines, of a phased dislocation, designed to make me a normal man again. And then the person who shackled me to sanity was murdered, and I needed to find a way to do it, alone.
9
“Swimmer canoeists” was how members of our service were once known. Back then it was called the Special Boat Squadron, and during the war the stuff those guys got up to was genuinely heroic. Having been dropped into the sea from a submarine, with virtually no kit, and balls as big as mangos, they raided and bombed all over Europe. Their canoes were flimsy and slow, and they even greased their heavy woollen jumpers to try to keep themselves warm when they swam. It seemed like madness to us when, during our own training, we were regaled with stories of their exploits. At least, it seemed that way then; it didn’t so much now.
I stared at the boats that Shannon had obtained for us. The team I was leading was made up of four highly-trained kayakers, who could blast rapids and paddle for two days without sleep. But that was in Navy-issue boats. What I was looking at were dangerous canvas-coated tubs, with no spray deck to keep the water out, and little legroom. Each man in my team was a big unit, in fact at fifteen stones I was the smallest. How we were going to navigate around the might of the Israeli navy in these yokes was beyond me. I dated the tubs to the seventies, and despite my reservations, I thought back to what our predecessors had achieved, and rather imagined that they would have envied our craft.
The whole thing seemed full of irony, and I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I mused over what I was about to ask my men to do. Our call sign was Charlie. Yet because we had been deployed covertly behind the lines of an ally, we were deniable, and therefore had no radio. I thought of a line from the movie, Apocalypse Now, “Charlie don’t surf.” I looked up from the kayaks to the rolling waves crashing up the beach, and begged to differ. In these daft little boats, Charlie was indeed about to surf, all the way to the most militarised waters in the Mediterranean.
I still look back on that Op with mixed feelings. It was on that deployment that I found my wife. It was on that deployment that Shannon and I removed a threat to decency. But it was on that Op that I got busted back to a Bootneck. Don’t get me wrong – the effort, work and pride that had gone into earning a Green Beret was enormous. The endurance and pain we had gone through will never leave me. But a few years later I’d done it all again, only in a more extreme form, to progress through Special Forces selection
and get my SBS badge. My wife and I later came to refer to that operation as ‘“the Ashdod incident.’” After it, the sense of achievement associated with having made it into the Special Boat Service, was stripped from me; with the taking of one conscious decision, and one life.
The sea state was shocking, beyond “marginal.” Had we been training, I’d have pulled the plug. Plenty of our number had died above or below the sea, and it seemed to me that we stood a pretty fair chance of adding to that toll. My only consolation was that if we were careful, there was virtually no way our matchbox-like vessels would appear on any Israeli radar.
There was a certain satisfaction when the burn began in my shoulders, as the muscle memory kicked in and I shovelled the running sea beneath me to climb over the breakers. After ten minutes, we had each got beyond the rip, and we paused to muster and sponge out. The kayaks were tippy, and rolled all over the place. Their round hulls made them hard to steer, but we got in phase with their peculiarities after a while, and the six-hour paddle gave me time to process what the woman had done for us, and asked of me.
I had hoped that her eagerness to help me was inspired by the connection I felt to her. Those eyes had captivated me, and that woman stayed in my sights as I reached and hauled the paddle. She dulled the pain in my trapezius, deltoids and triceps.
I had insisted on a tandem configuration. Four kayaks in a straight line was the safest way to avoid losing one another, but it was also the surest way to be detected. To an observer, from the air or satellite, a line could be mistaken for a larger vessel. So we opted for pairs, and I trusted the other team to look out for one another, just as my buddy and I were doing. It seemed inevitable that there would be capsizes, but Eskimo rolls in these ramshackle boats would only result in a sinking. We would need one another to invert and empty the canoes of water, before clambering back in.
My main concern though, was to work out how I might complete the task that Shannon had set me. I’d briefed the others on what we would do when we arrived at the port, but I hadn’t told them that I would be vanishing again.
Shannon was tough, headstrong, and committed, a bad combination. I insisted that she involve nobody else, but she ignored me. I tried to negotiate, but I had nothing to offer. I stood in her flat, on the marble floor with its fine dusting of sand, and eventually accepted everything she requested. It seems like madness now, but she was so compelling and so determined that hers was the right course of action. All I was asking for were some small boats – what she was demanding was totally out of whack.
“He’s a predatory paedophile,” she said, failing to understand my reluctance. “He rapes kids, surely you can see the sense?”
I stared at her, frustrated at being side-tracked like this. “I have to get my team into Israel, and out of the Middle East as quickly as possible. This is not what I’m here for,” I explained, but I knew this was a mistake as soon as I said it.
“Well, what are you here for?” she countered. I closed my eyes, paused, and dismissed the question.
“I need the boats.”
“And I need a favour, and you appear to be the type of person that can help me with this, and frankly, if you don’t, then you and your little band of brothers are on your own-ee-oh.”
I will always remember that phrase. It was said to me when I was wee, and it wedged a little space in my mind. “Well, where is he?” I must have resigned myself to her request about this man.
“He’s in Jerusalem, probably.”
“Jerusalem’s a long bloody way from Ashdod.”
“It’s two moons by camel,” she said, which again nearly made me laugh, given the country we were in. “But for someone who is proposing to ignore a naval blockade, international protocol, and the might of the Israeli Defence Forces, I should think that would be a piece,” she paused, “of piss.”
This woman seemed to have a dictionary at her disposal. Her access to vocabulary unbalanced me ever after. Words just appeared to devote themselves to her. She seemed to have a capacity to pluck the pertinent phrase from the air in front of her, and insert it into any argument, as if stacking pigeonholes in a post room. She could gut any adversary. I gave up.
“So, I find him, in the middle of a major city, and…”
“You’ll find him no problem because he’s at the U.N. building.” She had an answer to everything.
“And then what?”
“And then you do what you do,” she said, rather matter of factly.
“I kill him?”
She just stared at me. I stared back. It seemed pretty clear that she wanted me to kill him.
“So, a senior figure in the U.N. peacekeeping outfit turns up dead, and the Israelis ignore it?”
“Not the point,” she said. “Point is, he won’t be able to abuse children every time he comes to Gaza under the pretence that he is here to help them.”
“And you have evidence that this guy is doing this?”
“Well, if you want to hang around, I can bring you half a dozen little boys who have been left bleeding by this bastard. If you want to hang around, I’ll bring you their distraught parents. If you want to listen to how their lives have been ruptured like their….” She paused, and choked up, I relented.
“Ok,” I said. “But why doesn’t someone here just take him out? Hamas or someone?”
“Cause he’s dishing out money, and he’s feeding families, and he’s supplying hospitals and he’s the dog’s balls to the right people. You think this place is any less vulnerable to corruption than any other hell hole on earth?”
I said nothing. It was a well-trodden path, that of the paedophile. I was broadly aware of all that had occurred in my own country, how those attracted to children had insinuated themselves into positions of moral superiority, in order to feed their addiction. I had never managed to understand how anyone could justify satiating their own desires, when the distress of children was evident. They often claimed to believe that what they were doing was not wrong, but the lengths to which they went to cover it up always suggested otherwise.
“So, do you want the boats?” she pressed.
“Yes.”
“A friend will bring them to the harbour tonight.”
“I asked you not to involve anybody else,” I said.
“Well, I’m not carrying the bloody boats, and you lot can’t very well walk around Gaza in your cargo pants and face paint, can you?” This woman was infuriating, and stunning.
“You trust this bloke?”
“I don’t trust anyone really. But yes, he’s not about to bust your bollocks.”
I did wonder whether her Irishness was part of the attraction. Almost everything she said reminded me of home. It felt as if there was a point of reference for us, right from the outset. She made me smile, like we had a secret language.
And so it was set.
I was soaked. And chafed and rashed. Every bloody job I did as an officer in the SBS seemed to result in the extremities being punished. Feet, fingers, arse, sack. The unhappy quartet that often froze, rubbed or blistered under extreme conditions. The sponging of water kept the crotch sodden with salt water, like we were ladling pain onto our penises. The rubbing of the caked salt had built up abrasion as I pulled stroke after stroke, distracted as I was by running through the various scenarios with Shannon. What if she was trying to stroke me? Could this be a woman scorned who wanted an ex-lover removed? I honestly didn’t think so, but I had no evidence of the man’s offences. I had no idea how I would even manage to get to Jerusalem; I had never been there before. I had never been to Israel, or Palestine for that matter.
I have always taken a read on the people I meet, and tried to remain realistic about them. Nobody is without flaws, least of all me. I erred towards trust, which was a weakness, and I was aware that the woman had caught my breath, and sucker-punched me, and that made me vulnerable. After all, she could be the contact who was due to receive the old IRA explosives, she could be a militant sympathiser. She
could be a bloody Hamas operative for all I knew. I traced her, her ability to speak Arabic, a white Irishwoman in a war-torn state, giving aid, in possession of a satellite phone. Had I not already fallen in love with her, I would very likely have placed her at a remove from us in one way or another. Little wonder my team was incredulous at my decision to accept her help, and to carry on with that ridiculous operation.
But thoughts of her made the paddle pass more easily. Like the horrendous yomping of my training days in Devon, I allowed my mind to carry me away as my body thundered pain signals towards my brain. My legs could be screaming at the inferno burning in my thighs, but my mind could counter it. It was on the crest of such distractions that we arrived at Ashdod, an industrial, stinking port on Israel’s South West Coast. The sea was alive with plastic and detritus, and we picked up bag after bag on our paddles as we lapped quietly around an enormous breakwater. We entered a enormous harbour with multiple berths, and an astonishing military presence. It was going to be a challenge to even locate the correct ship without being caught, never mind getting aboard and removing the explosives.
During other operations, I would have had a wetsuit-waistcoat full of flares, and kit. Inside the kayak would be my rifle of choice, an L119 carbine, the stubby little C8. I’d also have a handgun, a Sig usually. We couldn’t deploy with any of that though. All we had were our suits, boots, and fins. We stood next to no chance.
10
I was at an enormous disadvantage. I could not speak Lithuanian. Nor had I any Russian, other than the capacity to order two beers and to inquire of strangers whether they spoke English. At least Lithuanians used the Latin alphabet. I’d spent time in the Russian caucuses, up to no good, but it wasn’t sensible for someone like me to be found in that part of the world with no explanation. I recalled particular problems finding my way around because of the Cyrillic script on the road signs. A young woman came to my aid on the plane to Vilnius, though. She was a bubbly, friendly girl with a pretty, portly face, who tried to strike up a conversation from the moment of buckle-up.
