Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  Some people recover quickly but the doctor had never seen anything like Habid’s healing: the speed at which the scabs appeared, the infection drifted back, the stumps repelled the infection. Even amid the detritus of his Egyptian prison cell, the rat had managed to convalesce at a remarkable pace.

  “Any news from Sinai?” Habid asked, as the doctor’s saucers poured over his abrasions, replaced dressings and tinkered with the syringe driver.

  “Apparently he’s gone off-grid,” the doctor said. “My cousin cannot reach him.”

  Which was gratifying and disappointing at the same time.

  “How far did he get?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Well, where was he last?”

  “Suez, I think.”

  “He’s probably done a runner.”

  “Don’t think so. My cousin sent him east across Sinai to the ferry port at Nuweiba, just as we agreed.”

  “We don’t have long to get the boat. If it’s not collected soon …”

  “I know. You said. The route will dry up.”

  “It took a long time to negotiate in the first place,” said Habid. “It will take a long time to find another supply route. Word spreads fast. People will not trust us. They will think we have been turned, that we are working for the state.”

  “So,” said the doctor, “we will find someone else to get the boat.”

  “You could go,” suggested Habid.

  The doctor looked distinctly uncomfortable at the proposition. “Who would look after you?”

  “Then we need to send Tassels.”

  “Tassels?” inquired the doctor.

  “Your cousin, the cop. He’s got tassels on his shoes.”

  “Mmmm, he’s unlikely to leave Alexandria.”

  “You will need to persuade him.”

  The doctor just grunted and raised his eyebrow.

  But Big Suit was progressing Habid’s wish all by himself.

  Shuffling and tapping were the first indications the man had spotted something. Sam stopped working on his dressing and chuckled when he settled on Sinbad as the name of his watchman. He could be from Baghdad, Sam supposed, relishing the irony – a more useless sailor he’d never encountered. The man had shown a certain bravery in taking to the sea in the first place, so Sinbad seemed fitting, if probably politically incorrect. But Sam was an ex-marine and cultural sensitivity wasn’t an immediate priority.

  He twisted slowly out of bed, attempting to protect his tightening stitches, and looked at the brass clock on the bulkhead. Forty hours had passed since they’d – as commanded – left Greek waters. He had a rough idea of where they should be, provided Sinbad had managed not to knock off the autohelm.

  Dancing a jig, he was. Bare feet slapping on the teak, binoculars dangling from his scrawny neck, eyes alight with discovery. Sam reached out to prevent his expensive glasses bouncing off the stainless-steel binnacle, then choked the cord towards him angrily, forcing the man to calm down and remove the leather strap from his throat. Sam turned towards the sun plummeting into the west, and caught the shadow low on the surface. Land. At last. He checked their speed: four knots. A short age away, but still. He was filled with the promise of unloading the easterners, stocking up with food, fuel and water, and cutting a course for Ireland. He nearly danced a jig himself.

  He had no idea how premature such a sentiment would have been.

  Big Suit had a penchant for vacancy. Ordinarily he could sit and stare at a wall or a spider and remain clear of conscience and devoid of thought. He never mused upon the mutilations he’d performed and he never felt pangs of guilt. He was grateful for that. Yet today, or tonight as it may be, he was experiencing something new: panic. His old friend was going to finish him. And the absence of his boss meant he had to think for himself. Again, a new sensation.

  There was a layer to Waleed that Big Suit hadn’t noticed before, something else going on. That lecture about corruption was almost religious, as if he’d been driven by some faith. That flew in the face of all they’d done at the academy, but then Big Suit thought back to what actually occurred during training and what Waleed’s role had been. He thought of the room they’d shared and realised, for the first time, that he’d never once seen his roommate pray. He guessed he’d put it down to rebelliousness and acknowledged that he’d admired that in the man. Waleed didn’t give a rat’s ass for any authority as far as Big Suit could tell, yet he excelled at everything. Why? In every class, physical or mental, he was streets ahead of the other recruits. It was as if he’d been through it all before.

  His thoughts turned to survival. Big Suit’s skills were limited. If he got expelled from the police, what could he do? How could he turn this around? What weakness was there – what opportunity?

  He combed through their conversation but his mind wasn’t even working at its usual pedestrian pace; the lack of blood in his system made him light-headed and dreamy. And maybe that’s why the notion came to him as he drifted into sleep on the grimy floor. Waleed’s hatred of the extremists, his disregard for the beards at the academy, his refusal to roll out a mat and pray – his apparent lack of a mat. Why didn’t Waleed have a mat? Big Suit had never wondered about that before. He’d never seen Waleed at the mosque either. Why had nobody questioned that? And then it came to him as the blackout draped him: Waleed wasn’t Muslim.

  He was Coptic.

  10

  Valuable data was wasted forming a plan. Sam always felt better when he’d a plan but begrudged his allowance being used in satellite time to plot their passage. He preferred to save data as treats for Isla – a new movie download, maybe an audiobook or a game for her tablet, yet here he was hoovering it up and navigating via Google Earth. Not ideal. It grated badly for an ex-naval officer to use such a tool but there was no doubt it was good, and the charts and plotter cards Sam had aboard simply didn’t have the detail.

  Portopalo di Capo Passero, Italy. Sicily to be exact. The village looked fairly tired – pretty enough but also remote enough, Sam hoped, to be of little interest to the authorities. To the east was a channel facing a small town, but to the south was a harbour, a breakwater, and even a cradle lift for boats. That sealed it.

  He looked at Sinbad’s gnarly feet through the window beside the navigation table. He was sitting in the cockpit keeping watch with the binoculars. Apparently. Sam wouldn’t trust him to look after a bowl of Rice Krispies if he’d any other choice, and he wouldn’t leave Isla above with him. The man seemed reluctant to spend time below deck or with his wife. It seemed they only conversed when the going got tough. After the boarding by the Greeks they’d spent time in the forecabin talking, hushed but urgent. When the container ship passed, the man had stern words with his wife. Sam had heard them being delivered but was baffled as to what they might be, and he’d heard nothing back from the woman. He put it down to culture, of a kind.

  Shannon would have struggled to hold her tongue. Sam’s instinct was to avoid getting involved – they all had to sleep and he wanted his as undisturbed by threat as possible. Interfering in other people’s marriages didn’t seem like a wise course to him. He wasn’t about to change centuries of subservience by remonstrating in an unintelligible language with a man who would only take it out on his wife at the first opportunity.

  The man’s toenails were inches from his face, separated by reinforced Perspex but repulsive all the same. Sam looked forward to the day, soon, when he would see those feet patter away up the quay in a Sicilian harbour.

  His plan was that he would sail to within a few miles of the Sicilian shore at night with his AIS and VHF and all other instruments switched off. He would prepare the little rigid inflatable that hung from the davits at the stern and attach the twenty-horsepower outboard. He would show the man how to use the engine – steering was easy from the console in the middle, the throttle was a lever, the direction dictated by a wheel. Even an idiot such as his unwelcome stowaway could master that, Sam thought. He had, after all, man
aged to get his family far offshore once before.

  Then it was a case of the man doing his thing. They would have landed safely in Europe, and as far as Sam could tell that had been the man’s aim. His family would enter whatever asylum system Italy operated, they would be fed and watered and given shelter.

  Sam sketched out an appreciation, a risk assessment, of what could go wrong and what he would do in the event of a disaster. The risks were many. First, the name of their boat. Isla and Sam had made it their home, and their home wasn’t complete without Isla’s mam, Sam’s wife. Her death had left them with no prospect of full repair, but they’d decided, together, to name the boat after her. It did, after all, give them protection just as Shannon had. It was where they turned for privacy, solace, comfort and rest. It was the prospect of adventure and new things. They had settled on the Irish spelling Sionainn, but always referred to her as Sian or Shan – it avoided confusion when speaking to relatives or friends. The problem was the name was burned into the backboard of the rigid inflatable tender Sam proposed sending the Arabs ashore in.

  Next was the evident ineptitude of the man. There wasn’t much Sam could do about that other than sketch the plan on a piece of paper and hope he understood how to steer towards the lights. How they might get ashore undetected was largely up to the man himself but there did appear to be a sandy bank they could drive the boat up. Which presented the next issue.

  Sam wanted their boat back. It wasn’t a cost thing, although the boat was worth a few thousand, as was the engine; it was because the boat represented a safety net for him and Isla. The RIB offered an alternative to a life raft in the event of a major problem. If Sian hit a half-submerged container and become catastrophically holed, he and Isla had the option to get into the RIB under their own propulsion. Depending on where they were, that may be preferable to floating aimlessly without any control in a wobbly life raft hoping for rescue. Sam had two emergency grab bags stitched into the RIB and a sun cover in preparation for such an eventuality. He wanted the little boat back. He also wanted to avoid it becoming associated with trafficking. His working life after the Marines had been consumed with preventing people trafficking, so few things would be more repulsive than being charged with being involved in it.

  He would have to land himself, but at a distance from the family. His idea was they would abandon the boat, he would saunter ashore a few days later like a salty sea gypsy and inquire after a missing dinghy. If the Arab managed not to drown everyone and get ashore as directed, the chances were high that someone would hand him the boat and ask no questions. Then, with luck, he would be able to pay a few hundred euros to get Sian lifted out with the travel hoist he’d seen on Google Earth and sort out the fouled propeller and engine without infecting his wounds.

  It was a fine plan riddled with holes, and if it all worked out, Sam would eat his woolly hat.

  Big Suit was woken with a gentle toe to the head. He was lying on the floor, a position he was gradually becoming accustomed to. The foot before his face was readying for another tap.

  “Don’t. I’m awake,” he said, gathering his surroundings and predicament while stirring inside was a vague memory that something exciting had occurred to him. He struggled to remember what.

  “Get up. Your boss is calling you.”

  Waleed. His former friend now his wake-up call.

  “What will I say?” asked Big Suit struggling to his feet.

  “Nothing, for now. Listen to what he has to say, then I’ll brief you and you’ll call him back. Tell him you stopped for a piss.”

  Big Suit looked at Waleed and rallied as his memory returned. He knew something about Waleed that Waleed wouldn’t want anyone else to know. The sadness he felt that a man he admired was treating him like a dog turned to loathing. He ignored the proffered phone; a deliberate act of defiance.

  “What is your real name?”

  Waleed stared at him for a long moment. “What?” he spat dismissively.

  “Your real name,” Big Suit repeated, eager to discover whether he was correct and if so, find a way to turn it to his advantage. As usual, he hadn’t thought it through. “You have no tattoo.” Big Suit nodded towards Waleed’s wrist, which betrayed him as he clutched it with his free hand. In that flinch Big Suit confirmed his suspicion. “Many Coptic Christians have tattoos on their wrists – crucifixes. Not you. Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a Copt, you fat fool,” Waleed replied with remarkable calm.

  “Obviously,” the now smug Big Suit responded, “because Copts are not allowed in the security services or intelligence. They’re barely allowed into the police, so you can’t be a Copt … except you are.”

  Waleed looked at Big Suit for a long while, curious that after all the years he’d managed to conceal his background a genuine idiot had worked it out. But what Big Suit had failed to work out was that by playing his supposed ace, he may well have condemned himself to a life in a forgotten cell in the middle of a dangerous desert.

  “Call your boss back and say what is written here, then we will … negotiate.”

  Big Suit smiled in leering triumph. He looked at the paper he’d been handed, read what was printed and snorted. “He’ll never do this.”

  “Just ring him back and read it.”

  Big Suit shrugged, selected the missed call and hit dial. His boss answered almost immediately.

  “Where are you?”

  “Route fifty. Stopped to pee. Sorry.”

  “Where on Route fifty?”

  Big Suit looked at Waleed who was now wearing a headset, apparently listening in. He wrote on the piece of paper for Big Suit to read out.

  “Near Nekhel,” he said. “I think.”

  “The doctor thought you could be sick from blood loss but you sound fine. Keep going. I will know more when I call again.”

  Waleed nodded, and scissored the air with his palms. Big Suit took his lead.

  “Ok,” he said and cut the call.

  “We will wait for information,” Waleed said.

  “You’ll never get him to come here to the desert.”

  “Let’s see what his plan is first. We will take it from there,” said Waleed.

  “It will give us time to negotiate,” said Big Suit.

  Waleed had no intention of being beholden to anyone. He leaned forward and plunged his thumb into Big Suit’s left eye forcing him backwards off the seat, screaming.

  Then the lights went off and the large, stupid torturer lay writhing in panic on the floor in full realisation that the deck he felt he was dealing was in the hands of someone else.

  Exhaustion breeds hallucination, and anger. Sam knew that. He’d been exhausted plenty of times – often deliberately – during selection, special forces, during training, on operation. The key was being able to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined, and crucial to that was knowing when you were exhausted. And Sam knew. He was falling asleep as he spoke to Isla, curious at her father’s insistence she be clipped onto him rather than the jackstays, as per normal. He kept repeating that if anyone came on deck she was to shake him hard until he woke. He had frightened her a little.

  “If the man comes up, you wake me, understand? Shake me as hard as it takes – smack me if you have to, but wake me up, Isla.”

  “Oh-kay, Daddy,” she said, looking at him as if he’d lost it.

  “Anyone, Isla. If anyone comes up, you wake me. And you stay clipped onto me, and if anyone comes near us or your clip, you hit me hard, ok?” He was vaguely aware he was rambling and sounded daft but the point had to be made.

  The darkness of sleep deprivation had conjured some pretty unwholesome suspicions about Sinbad and for some reason the image of his gruesome toes kept floating into Sam’s head. He’d looked at the man not thirty minutes previously and saw him in an entirely different light. Sam had been at the helm coasting the cutter over the swell, driving forward at just under seven knots on a tight reach when he was aware the man was watching
him. Sam didn’t need to look over, he just knew he was being appraised, and instinct made him believe he was being scrutinised, learned from. Sam’s addled brain threw those numbers into its busted calculator and came up with the notion that the man had been skimming him all along, observing how the boat and sails worked while pretending to be an automaton. But Sam had shaken his head, reminded himself that Sinbad couldn’t even walk the deck without falling on his arse let alone grasp how the compass worked. Then he asked himself again how the man had managed to get so far offshore in generally the right direction if he really was such an idiot? Which led Sam to ideas about inflatable beach dinghies being swept to sea, and then inevitably to Shannon who would have helped the man regardless. Probably. So he decided the time had come to risk sleep, before he strangled an innocent man in front of his family.

  He shut down. A plummeting sleep at fifty fathoms and diving. He could feel the free fall and worried whether he’d ever resurface. It had been days upon days since he’d got more than twenty minutes at a time.

  If Big Suit was in shock, Waleed was in a stunned state of his own. He’d just half blinded a man for whom he once had the kindling of affection – perhaps not, sympathy, maybe. That man had threatened him and all he had worked for despite being the least likely person in the whole of Egypt to have solved the equation.

  Waleed sat in his desert office and contemplated the predicament he suddenly found himself in. He knew much of it was his own making – why had he ordered the detention of his former roommate? Why had he cared that the brute was rolling around Sinai with just a spud gun to protect himself? Why had he taken the hard approach with him – why not just turn the hulk around and send him back to Suez? Curiosity, in part, he supposed, dressed up as professionalism. He’d wanted to know what the big man had been up to, for sure, but in a way it was more that he’d felt a sort of nostalgic protection for the fool. Waleed had always known that his roommate was borderline educationally subnormal and easily led, and that any evil in him had generally been massaged to the surface by more manipulative elements. When the pair shared digs at the academy, he got to know the vulnerabilities of the boy despite his bulk. He had coaxed out the background – how he’d been bullied as a child and abused by his father and had grown a brutal shell to protect himself. Waleed could chart it and understand how it had developed: soft big lump learns to protect himself, toughening hulk of a boy begins to understand that the best way to avoid being attacked is to strike first, bulging teenager understands that other boys admire physical strength, youth learns that a tough reputation makes life easier and brings friendship. All of that, turn by turn, had led to him leaning on others in the same manner that his father had leaned on him. Waleed considered it learned behaviour and so tested it again and again to see whether he really was plain bad or whether there was something more in him.