by Finn Óg
“LE Niamh, this is migrant vessel. Holding position. Listening sixteen.”
Sam turned his attention to the people in his charge. “I need you all to look forward – look for the ship. It is an Irish naval vessel. It is patrolling these waters to rescue migrants. Do not look into this boat or you will get sick. Keep a lookout for the navy ship, do not look into this boat. Keep the children looking forward. Understand?”
The woman spoke to the children and hunkered them down, facing front. The men too all peered into the darkness. The women had gathered at the front of the boat and were transfixed on the horizon.
Sam reached out and pulled Habid towards him by the foot. His body was small enough to bundle behind him while he kept a hand on the tiller and throttle of the outboard. One of the men turned to look at what Sam was doing but Sam pointed at him to look ahead again. The man did as he was bid. Then with a sweep he scooped Habid’s waist up with one arm and levered his head and shoulders over the side tank. He gave the engine a little blast of throttle and leveraged the moment of the boat forward to flick the rat’s legs over. The noise was no more than a seal might make slipping into a rising tide. Only the oldest man in the boat noticed what he’d done but if he disapproved, he said nothing.
Chapter 26
The Irish navy treated the Libyans with total respect. They were corralled on a deck at the stern of the ship and processed, prepared for a wash and given food.
Sam had produced his Irish passport and set about the necessary explanations. Initial suspicions were that he’d been part of the trafficking racket. He had remonstrated during an interminable interrogation and had eventually been obliged to make a call he would rather have conducted in private.
“How are you?” Sinead answered immediately.
“I’m grand. We’re on an Irish navy ship.
“We?”
“Eh, yeah.”
“More waifs and strays?”
“Actually, as it happens—”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s a long story.”
“Sure, what’s new, Sam,” she said, more in admiration than admonishment. “There’s a few things to fill you in on this end too.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Anything serious?”
“Depends how scared you are of my sister.”
“That’s quite serious.”
Sinead didn’t laugh. “When will you be back?”
“Well, that depends. I could do with a favour,” he said sheepishly. He looked up at an officer who was listening to every word.
“Like I said, what’s new?”
“I need you to explain to some of the officers on this ship what I’m about.”
“Oh? That’s a bit of a break from the norm, Sam. You’re usually pretty protective. You want me to divulge the whole works?”
“If you could just explain some of the work I do for you,” he looked again at the officer, careful not to lead the witness, “hopefully they’ll understand.”
“So not the whole back catalogue – not that I’d be able to tell them much about that, frankly,” she nipped.
“And then, could you ask, ehm, the woman you met in Dungarvan to give me a call?”
Sinead coughed out air testily as if to say – are you fucking kidding me?
“Not like that.”
“No,” Sinead relented. “I know, I think.”
“Here’s the officer.”
He handed the phone to his observer and listened to one end of the conversation.
“We have a man here claims to be Sam Ireland,” he began, but with the skill of an investigator he paused hoping the gaps would fill themselves with useful information.
Sam could hear the buzz of dialogue from the other end.
“I need to be satisfied that this man poses no threat to my crew or to the people he was rescued from the sea with.”
More chat.
“Over how long?”
Sinead was obviously doing her bit.
“And was this work legal or licensed in anyway?”
Sam heard her pause, then chat, then the man’s eyes locked on his own. The officer leaned across and scratched Sinead’s name on a Post-it and beckoned forward an NCO. The note was handed over and the gesture clear – check her out.
“These women, they were brought into the country illegally. Why did they not seek asylum?”
Sam’s tiredness began to coast over him like puffs of breeze. His confidence in Sinead was absolute, so his cares began to fall away.
The NCO returned with a printout that the officer read as he listened.
“Ok, thank you for your time,” he said, and handed back the phone to Sam.
She had hung up, which he tried not to take to heart. “So?” he said, looking at the officer.
“You’re ex-navy.”
“Yes.”
“I suspect you’re more than that.”
Sam said nothing.
“Your record is limited in detail.”
Nothing.
“You will be given quarters and confined to your deck. You appear to be who you say you are but we’ll let the authorities deal with that when we land.”
“Where are we headed?”
“Catania,” came the reply.
“Where is that?”
“Italy, Sicily,” he was told.
Sam closed his eyes and gave thanks. “Can I make another call?”
“It’s your phone and you’re not under arrest,” the officer said.
Sam found the name and number and tapped the green button.
The answer was slow and the phone all but rang out.
“Buongiorno?” He’d obviously been woken.
“Luca, it’s Sam. Father, I could really use your help.”
He’d slept soundly for three hours when the handset buzzed at his ear. He longed for it to be morning in the UK so he could hear the voice he craved but the screen revealed an Irish code.
“Hello?”
“Is Sam?”
He closed his eyes, straining to think through what he could say so it would be understood without betraying him to anyone who might be eavesdropping.
“How are you,” he began. “How are you both?”
He was keen not to use their names on an unsecure line.
“Fine,” Alea said. “How is yourself?”
Sam noted how the vernacular was already creeping into her English.
“I wanted to let you know that the man you told me about, he is gone.”
There was a silence for a while, then her voice cracked. “How about the people under the ground?”
Sam paused for a moment not having anticipated the question.
“Some are with me on their way to Europe. They are safe.”
“Some,” she repeated.
“How many were there?”
“Ten. Sometimes. Twenty. Sometimes more.”
Sam closed his eyes. “Some of them are safe and the rest are no longer in danger.” The truth has many interpretations, he thought.
“Thank you, Sam,” she said.
His phone bleeped as the battery began to give up. He pressed the red circle and dialled again. His mother-in-law had read the tea leaves and immediately put Isla on the line.
“Hallo, Daddy.” She sounded sleepy. She’d obviously been woken.
“Hello, wee darlin’, how are you?”
“Good. What ya doing?”
“I’m working, wee love, what ya doing yourself?”
“I love it here, Daddy,” she said. “It’s really fun on all the rides.”
“Brilliant, darlin’. Listen, I can’t talk for long but will you tell Nanny I’ll be a few days late getting back from my job?”
“Ok.” She was all but drifting back to sleep.
“I love you so much.”
“I love you too, Daddy-o.”
Afterword
Thanks a million for reading.
I can’t
overstate how helpful it is for writers to obtain reviews - no matter the verdict. I’d be enormously grateful if you could drop a rating or even a few words about the book on the outlet from which you bought it, or ideally - on Amazon.
Thanks a million,
Finn.
Amazon.com
Amazon UK
About the Author
Finn Óg lives and works in Ireland. He is surrounded by rogues and the sea. This book is the second in a trilogy. If you’re ready for part three - Too Close to Home - is next, keep reading.
twitter.com/@fiercelyprivate
facebook.com/finnbarog
Acknowledgments
Thanks, always, to the women - tall and small - whose words and ways litter this text. To my pal in stroke city for always being the first eyes across. To Stuart Bache for the covers, to Victoria and Emma for editing and to my belter or a family for absolutely everything.
Copyright © 2019 by Finn Óg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Too Close to Home
For the woman on the radio, and all like her.
Before
Sam had watched an innocent man be removed from his home. Two known players flanked him. He’d called it in over the net and followed them to a block of flats. He heard the Scots accent of his gnarly little friend, Min, pick the party up inside the block. Min and his men had been embedded in the flats for weeks, listing through the walls. He heard his pal describe a bath being filled. They all knew what that meant. What they couldn't work out was why it was being allowed to happen.
Then they were ordered to absorb the sounds of the interrogation of an innocent man. Sam’s friend patched it through to the ops room. Min repeatedly asked for permission to intervene. He was repeatedly denied. They listened to the man break. They listened to the interrogators setting up a recording device. For his family, they said. So his family would understand what had happened. But Sam and Min knew the tortured man had not done a thing. He had not been the informer.
Sam listened from his car at the foot of the flats. He heard the fabricated confession, he heard the man describe a shame he could not possibly have felt. He heard the victim plead for his family, that they not be told he was an informer, that he had been killed for some other reason – he didn’t want them saddled with the stigma of thinking their father was a tout. Which he wasn’t - a fact Sam and Min’s commanders seemed content to ignore.
Sam felt his secondment coming to an end as he unlocked his vehicle and made for the stairwell. He heard Min on the net now demanding permission to intervene. Sam’s signal cut out as he wound up the concrete steps to the thirteenth floor. The first Min was aware that his buddy had left the vehicle was when he heard the door to the flat next door smash open. Min immediately cut the audio feed and ran to help.
It was too late. The lights had already flickered. Two hundred and forty volts had been dropped into the bath alongside the innocent man. Sam and Min did what needed to be done, the two others who had been in the flat with Min helped tidy up.
All four addressed the subsequent inquiry with total silence. They refused to answer any questions.
Their own interrogators were in a tricky position. They were asking why four of the best trained operatives in covert intelligence gathering had tried to save an innocent man’s life. It was an odd position to take.
Stalemate.
So the four ops were punished with a cover-up and sent back to their home units. One to the airborne, one to signals, two to the marines. They sucked it up – they’d disobeyed orders - but they could live with it.
They left with skills that many years later, would come in handy.
1
Isla was buzzing. A little bundle of worry and excitement. Sam was struggling.
They debated the packed lunch. He stared at the lunchbox and dropped in a few extra treats, breathing deep and hard; then he heaved the brand-new bag full of sharpened colouring pencils and freshly covered books onto her back. For two months he had made notes about what she might need and of what her mother would have packed for her. A change of knick nocks, a bottle of water, a teddy, tissues. And wipes. Isla’s mam never went outside the door without a bundle of moist bricks. Isla looked up at him with her beautiful big eyes and Sam dropped to his knees, gripping her in as her little arms tightened around his neck.
Eventually they climbed the little ladder out onto deck and they drove the dinghy ashore. Isla asked a million questions about what school would be like. She wasn’t beginning as other kids had – dreadful circumstances had made her a late-starter, so primary three was where her formal schooling was beginning, after a few false starts. In her absence from education she had gathered skills no kid her age could have, but she’d learned about life in ways that Sam would have preferred she had not.
He cast her off in the playground and Isla turned to him with fear in her eyes. She wasn’t used to being around lots of other kids, she wasn’t used to being anywhere other than at his side – she was barely used to dry land. But his salty little sailor was tough, and when the teacher emerged, as planned, to take Isla under her wing – she went. Just as she started to climb the steps of the mobile classroom, Isla turned.
“Daddy, I’ll be ok. Don’t worry.”
That choked Sam more than the departure. He nodded rapidly and turned into the wind before she could see his struggle.
Grim slapped his prodigy on the shoulder. He seldom made physical contact with anyone, so the nudge went a long way.
“Well done, son,” he said to the youth, who didn’t smile but beamed with pride at being selected and trusted to carry out the job.
Anthony. As names went it wasn’t the worst but he yearned to be known as something else. Anthony was ordinary – a name among many in an estate where nobody was going anywhere. The best he could manage was Tone, but the options were few: Ant was rubbish and Tony too obvious. A name like Grim, though, that said a lot. That spoke authority, serious business, respect. Anthony wanted a name like his mentor. To be known only by that short name, a menacing name, a name that inspired respect – or at least fear.
“Well, get on then,” Grim told him. “And remember, if you’re scooped, we’ll look after ye, so long as ye say fuck all.”
The lad wouldn’t utter a word. He was afraid of Grim but not of the police. Prison, if it came, would be a tattoo to be proud of in a slum where there was nothing to boast about. If the kid went to jail, he’d come out a man feared of nothing. In deeper, in harder and out of options but to keep going. Just as Grim wanted. Grim was clever that way. He could make men do things – inspire people, and inspiration was hard to come by in places where everyone’s future was the same: the dole, benefits, a house in the same old hole.
Grim watched the lad get into the passenger seat of a waiting car and be driven off. Home for a kip before being delivered to the middle of nowhere.
Grim leaned in against the door frame. He didn’t rationalise his own skill set but he was conscious of it. What he offered were prospects of a kind. Progression. He could make the local populace wary of a young man just by paying him some attention. That young man’s shoulders would swell, his chest would barrel like a bouncer’s and he’d become someone among the no ones. It created a hierarchy, and in return the young man would do whatever Grim bid.
Routine took a bit of getting used to. Sam had to install a washing machine on the boat – no fun when he watched the battery power drain like a sink. He even considered moving to dry land such was the mountain of washing school created. And Sam hadn’t ironed since he’d left the navy. Gone were the days of the pair padding about the decks in bare feet and sawn-off jeans, hanging T-shirts and cut-offs on the rigging to dry in the breeze.
With the exception of underwear, one outfit could last a week at sea. They had washed in a fresh-water rain barrel – body and clothes. But structure had brought chores and homework and tiredness and frustration.
Sam loved to watch Isla learn, but she was behind. He’d insisted she begin her education with kids her own age, determined that she wouldn’t feel out of place, yet he doubted the wisdom of that decision every night as she struggled with sums and words and spelling, and so he read to her, long into the evenings, and with time and the odd tussle she spelt out the random words he selected to test her.
As time went on they settled into a pattern. She no longer rose with the dawn – she needed every minute of sleep she could get, and instead Sam sat alone on deck with tea as black as tar dealing with his demons and waiting for Isla’s seven o’clock alarm. Then they’d recap tables and spellings as he fed her toast like a bullet belt into a machine gun before Isla struggled into the rigours of her school uniform. Isla hadn’t had any real structure to her life since the day they’d decided to leave dry land and live aboard the cutter, yet every day at 8 a.m. they clambered through the cockpit, over the rails and into the dinghy. Ashore they’d climb silently into the van for the short drive to school.
And then Sam to his worry as the cash dried up and he fought the instinct to return to what he knew best.
Anthony couldn’t swallow. His mother looked at him but didn’t seem to care whether he ate or not. She didn’t know it was his last night. She blew a little puff through her nose, turned away and went out onto the doorstep to finish her smoke.
Later, he wrestled around on top of his childhood mattress – full of sharp stabs and pinging springs. Eventually he rolled over and lifted the scrapbook his grandmother had kept. Page after page of gnarled card peeled back as he examined three days of newspaper cuttings. Three days in which his family’s history had been written. It had been short, their involvement – but it gave them something to cling to. The death of his uncle was marked annually by a loyal but dwindling audience who marched to the spot of his obliteration. They laid wreaths and made speeches. Well, a speech these days, just the one, now that the family was no longer with the mainstream.
