Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  The rat unfurled a page as if he were a courier in ancient times about to make an announcement. He stared at his document, plucked at random from his shallow sea scroll and scanned the list and descriptions. His gaze fell upon one name and he paused for a moment, deliberating. He peered into the darkness of the shelter behind his desert hole and called for the man to come forward. There was a shuffle and a patter of sandals, and a ragged head emerged from the gloom.

  “You are a doctor?” Habid inquired.

  “I am,” said the man.

  “A medical doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have references?”

  “References?”

  “If you go to Europe, can you get work as a doctor?”

  The man looked wary and confused.

  “Can a hospital call your employers and confirm you are a doctor?” Habid rephrased.

  “Of course, but my former colleagues, they hate me.”

  “Because you worked for Gaddafi. Well, keep that to yourself for now. When you get to Egypt there is a man who will ask you questions. You do not need to tell him your references are … questionable.”

  “What is this about?” asked the man, excitement building that he may be the next person to be extracted.

  “You do not need to know,” said Habid. “Have you got credentials? Have you got something to prove you are qualified?”

  “I have a medical card. It gives me access to the hospital, or at least it did. And I have my certificate at my home.”

  “Address?” Habid barked. He had become accustomed to the process of rummaging through the houses of his charges. If their bank details could be found, they made it across the border. If not, they remained in the desert.

  The man duly obliged.

  “I’ll be back,” said Habid, “if I can find your proof.”

  “It was on the wall in my study,” said the man, pleading. “Whoever lives there now, they may have taken it down. Please look everywhere.”

  I will, thought Habid. I will.

  Twenty-five hours, Sam reckoned. Five knots of speed, just under one hundred miles, and any amount of uncertainty ahead. His options were many: he could aim for a small harbour and hope to approach unnoticed, but the chances of that working out were slim. Irish Customs had proved pretty efficient in recent years at checking sailing boats. He had benefitted from their diligence after all. The yacht that was home to him and Isla had once been a drugs boat bought for cash in the Caribbean, laden with cocaine and sailed across the Atlantic. Customs, whether acting on US intel or on their own initiative, had intercepted it, thrown the crew in jail and unceremoniously ripped the boat apart. At least he had managed to pick it up cheap at auction.

  Crosshaven was his preference as he knew it well from his days working at boats, but Cork Harbour was one of the island’s major ports and approaching vessels were likely to be picked up on radar and stood a good chance of being intercepted for routine questioning. Sam didn’t fancy that. He’d spent a lot of time disrupting people traffickers and he’d given the notion of being considered as one a whirl and it wasn’t appealing. Besides, he was reasonably confident his past behaviour would be recorded somewhere in a law enforcement database and arrest was a prospect he could do without.

  Sam dipped the diesel tank confirming they’d be sucking air soon. They had enough food to see them through two more days, but the wind was dropping and he didn’t fancy a drift around the south coast. Isla eventually broke his dithering.

  “Daddy, can Sadiqah come and live with us?”

  “What? No,” he said, without thinking. “No, love, there’s not enough space on the boat.”

  “I know but we could live in a house when we get back to Ireland,” she said, rolling her tongue around the landmass as if it were now unusual and exotic to her.

  “Houses cost a lot of money, wee love.”

  “There’s lots of money under the floorboards,” she pointed out unhelpfully.

  Sam mused at how little he could conceal from her as she became more alert, more worldly-wise. Boats weren’t places fit for secrets unless – it appeared – the secrets were being kept from him.

  “Not enough to buy a house,” he said, which was almost true.

  Sam didn’t rate his chances of getting a mortgage for the remainder given that his means of income was invisible and a tax investigation would do him no good at all. But the conversation served to confirm that they couldn’t afford to put in at any major port. They’d be much safer going somewhere small, somewhere sleepy. He asked her to bring up the chart of the Irish south-east coast.

  “How long?” Alea looked up from the galley. She’d gradually added an extra piece of clothing every day since they’d left the Med and he’d caught her shivering a few times.

  “One day. Nearly there.”

  She climbed the steps of the companionway. “Then what?”

  “Good question,” said Sam, taking the map Isla offered from below.

  He’d noticed how his daughter had declined any opportunity to get between him and Alea when they were speaking. He wasn’t sure why. Any other time a stranger spoke to him she’d been right in the middle of it interrupting or sucking in every word.

  “Where your friend take us?” Alea asked.

  “Dublin, probably. That’s where she lives.”

  “And what then?”

  “Honestly, Alea, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t care, is true.”

  Sam thought for a moment, realised she was right and lied.

  “I do care,” he said, “but I have my own child to look after, Alea.”

  Sam got back to the chart. He could get Charity to meet them further west – Baltimore, Unionhall, Skibbereen. They were attractive destinations in that fewer people meant fewer cops, but it also meant that new arrivals were more likely to be noticed, particularly exotic-looking women and children no matter how Western their attire. Such places were also further from where Sam wanted go with Isla. His plan was to head north and east not south and west. He followed the coast in the desired direction – Youghal, Dungarvan, Tramore, Dunmore.

  Kilmore was familiar to him but he remembered a bar brawl there, a village teeming with fishermen if not fish, each of them fairly hostile to sailors. Those who made their living on the sea tended to have little regard for those who took their pleasure from it, and there were often minor battles when yachts tied up alongside commercial vessels. Sam recognised that the fishermen often had a point – some yachts people acted like they owned each place they visited. For them the sea was a playground; for the fishermen it was a workplace. Each tended to look down their noses at the other and Sam could do without the hassle, so he ruled out Kilmore and Dunmore, and as far as he could remember Tramore was a sandy beach with little or no harbour. Dungarvan was unfamiliar but the pilot books suggested it was no longer a fishing port, so he set a loose course for it. He looked again at Alea, softening with the knowledge that he had a plan.

  “Look, Alea, Charity is a good person, a really good person. This is what she does all the time. You’ll be in good hands, you and Sadiqah.”

  “Who are the people she helps?”

  Alea had obviously been working through scenarios. Sam plumped for the truth.

  “Sex workers mainly. People who thought they were coming to the UK or Ireland to do other work, as far as I could see. They’d been promised cleaning work or whatever and they ended up being used for sex.”

  “I am not hooker,” said Alea disgusted.

  “Well, I know that, and you know I wasn’t suggesting you are a hooker,” Sam’s exhaustion wasn’t up to any protracted discussion, “but the fact remains that my friend has expertise in helping women who need help – foreign women. That’s all.”

  “And you and Isla will just sail away.”

  “Yes, Alea, yes, we bloody well will. I mean, do you think we owe you something?”

  Alea plunged into bitter silence again and stayed there until Sam
’s temper rose once more.

  “What? What do you think we should do? Stand by until we know you’re in the asylum system and in a house somewhere?”

  Alea turned to stare at him.

  “You have dead wife. You are left with child. I have dead husband. I am left with child. Is good for you to be a man. You are in your country. Is good for you. I am woman. I am Arab. I am alone. I have not money. I have not home for my child. You have boat. You have money. You can go everywhere you wish to go. I am left with woman I not know.”

  For the first time Sam put himself in her place. He was stunned. He couldn’t fault her. She was looking out for her kid just as he was looking out for his. She was fighting for her survival just as he had on countless occasions. But she made him recognise what he’d always taken for granted: he had skills few others could call upon. She was right. He could just leave them on the quay, turn his transom and forget about all he had left behind. He had cash, he had a floating home, he had independence, freedom and his tiny family. She had Sadiqah, which was her love and her fear, and she had a terrifying unknown ordeal ahead of her. She was being expected to rely upon a woman she’d never met, and she knew that with all likelihood she would face hostility as a Libyan in Europe.

  Sam had been used to responsibility – the weight of taking kids to war regardless of how well-trained they were. When he’d led his Marines or his small SBS units, he had felt every ounce of their expectation – that they were in the hands of a seasoned commando, that his call would be correct. But since he’d left the navy,he’d stretched and cracked as the crush of that responsibility had been lifted from him.

  And here it had returned. The same expectation; the same demand.

  Help keep me safe for I am scared.

  18

  The hotel was one of the most frequently attacked on the peninsula yet still they came – wealthy tourists, Russians dressed like hookers, even Israelis on occasion but they booked less frequently nowadays. It was literally a stone’s throw from the border crossing with Eilat, which made it within winking distance of the Red Sea, Israel and Jordan.

  The man Waleed had tasked with destroying the GPS and phone recovered from Big Suit’s car was sent to carry out a routine inspection. It was always good to have a man with a machine gun walk the perimeter of such establishments. It had the curious effect of making guests feel safe: nothing like having a heavily armed guard show up. It was one of Waleed’s routine orders from Cairo: keep the tourists coming at all costs. It confused him. How holidaymakers could take comfort from such sights was a mystery. Surely, he thought, it would remind them of the intense threat they were under? Less than a few years had passed since check-in had been disrupted by a bomb-laden lorry that had barrelled through the lobby windows and exploded. No man with a machine gun was going to stop that.

  In the same foyer of the rebuilt hotel the guard sidled up to the car-hire clerk perched at a small office desk amid leaflets with images of tired old Japanese saloons. The guard knew most of the vehicles didn’t even have locks, which was fine because car theft wasn’t an issue in Egypt. Even in cities cars were left unlocked to allow parking attendants to wheel them about to create space. Besides, many people couldn’t afford fuel. But the guard’s advantage was in the age of the hire fleet – no fancy inbuilt navigation systems in these vehicles. They barely had blowers to circulate the stifling air.

  “Hello,” he said to the bored man at the desk.

  “Hello,” the man said back, suddenly transfixed by the machine gun across the guard’s chest.

  “How much will you give me for this?” he said.

  “The gun?” asked the baffled clerk.

  “No, this.” The guard furtively gestured to the GPS and cable in his spare hand.

  “Oh … ehm … it is old,” said the clerk.

  “How much?” pressed the guard furtively glancing around him, keen to do business and move on.

  “I need to call my boss,” said the clerk.

  The guard gathered up the kit and moved off. “Hurry,” he said, “I’ll come back in five minutes.”

  He wandered outside and took a tour around the swimming pool, soaking in the tits and arses of the privileged tanning team. Satiated, he headed back to the shade of the reception, approached the clerk, took the first price offered and went back to his vehicle.

  An uncharacteristic fluster.

  “This is Sinead. Leave a message.”

  Then calm. Sam tapped red. He seldom left voicemails and wasn’t about to start now. Paranoia. He’d seen how easy it was to hack a phone. But at least the call confirmed that they had service, intermittent as it was.

  “Daddy, who are you ringing?”

  “A friend.”

  It was almost a shock to hear that voice again, even on an answering service. He had to stop calling her Charity. He owed her more than that.

  “Who?” Isla asked.

  “Charity,” Sam muttered absently.

  “That’s not a name.”

  “Sinead,” he said.

  “A woman?” Isla seemed surprised.

  “Yes,” said Sam, unwilling to elaborate.

  He could see the cogs turning in his daughter’s mind. She had watched his odd stand-off with Sadiqah’s mother and no doubt heard the frustration in those conversations, and here he was phoning a woman Isla had never met while out of sight of land. Sam wondered what she was thinking, and yet he didn’t want to know because lurking somewhere behind it all was a sense that there was some inappropriate thought, some subtle betrayal, as the scent on the T-shirt weakened.

  “Can Sadiqah and I go to the cinema when we get back to Ireland?”

  Thank the Lord for the attention span of children, thought Sam.

  “Maybe,” he said, doubtful whether Dungarvan had a picture house and of the wisdom of taking such a liberty given the risk of being stopped and questioned.

  “That means no,” sulked Isla.

  “I’m sorry, wee love. I need my friend to come and help Sadiqah and her mam as soon as we get ashore.”

  Shock crossed Isla’s face. “You’re sending them away again?”

  Her eyes were like frisbees, as if he couldn’t have done more to disappoint her.

  “Not like last time,” he said. “This time they’ll be properly looked after and be safe.”

  “With Charity?”

  “Sinead.”

  “Who is Sinead?”

  “Sinead is Charity. Charity was just my nickname for her, my friend. I shouldn’t have called her that.”

  “Why?”

  “Just cos. Never worry about it.”

  “Charity’s not a bad word, Daddy,” Isla said, teacher-like.

  “No.”

  “Then why—”

  “Look, Isla, it doesn’t matter. Sinead is going to help Sadiqah, that’s what matters, and we’ll keep an eye on them. We’ll go and visit them for play dates. Honestly.”

  Sam caught Alea turning her head slightly. Her back was to him as she sat below but she’d obviously overheard them.

  “Where will Sinead take them?”

  “To Dublin, darlin’. They’ll be safe there.”

  “We can go and visit them and stay in a hotel!” She fizzed with excitement.

  Sam and Shannon had once taken Isla on a trip to Dublin. The family room had provided great excitement for Isla and the grandeur of the hotel lobby had made her feel like she was in a movie.

  “Ok, Isla,” he said. “I promise we can do that.”

  And he meant it at the time. He was sure such a simple request would be achievable.

  At the time.

  Habid was adamant – no easy outs. If someone had to die to give the doctor what he wanted, then the doctor had to do the deed.

  Tassels was happy with the plan. His cousin had become a serious pain in the arse, nagging and threatening him at every opportunity. He’d considered having the doctor knocked off just to get some peace, but Big Suit’s absence meant he’d hav
e to carry out the dirty work himself and in that regard he and the rat were remarkably similar.

  Habid had called Tassels and explained what was to happen. He would bring a new batch of migrants across the border and expect to be met by a police escort in the normal way. Tassels would drive the minibus and deliver the expectant, filthy rabble to the banks where they would make their transfers and Tassels would get paid. They would then be offered a free medical with the doctor before making their way to the beach. The final person to receive an examination would be a man identified by Habid.

  And so the doctor sat in a plastic chair and examined the small group one by one, waiting to meet his salvation, his passport, his victim. Because the victim was a fellow physician, the doctor had been forced to plan the process well in advance. The man was unlikely to allow himself to be injected, so Habid had settled on a seasickness remedy, gambling that the chances of his quarry being a seafarer in his spare time were few and that unfamiliarity with the sea would encourage the physician to swallow the pill. When he had taken the vitals of each of the migrants with his usual negligence, he sweated gently and waited for his new identity to reveal itself.

  Habid had chosen wisely. Before him stood a man of equal height and colouring, haggard, for sure, but in age they could have been similar had the Libyan not spent the past few years in a hole in the desert.

  “Hello, how are you?” he began.

  “Fine,” said the Libyan suspiciously.

  “I need to check you for dehydration and make sure you are ready for the trip – the sea is a serious place.”

  “I am fit and well,” snapped the Libyan, nervous that the examination could result in his exclusion. “Nothing wrong with me. I am a doctor, I would know.”

  “Ah, a doctor?” he said, eager to learn more about his future persona. “Where did you practise?”

  “Tripoli, in a hospital and I had private patients too.”