by Finn Óg
“Yes, that one, Mum. It should come up automatically.”
“Yes, dear, it has.”
“Ok, just click ‘send’.”
“That’s it away to you now. I’m sure it will be with you today.”
Libby shook her head in annoyance. “It’ll be here right now, Mum. Hang on.”
She took her phone from her ear and opened up her mail app. Among the rubbish was a message from her mum. She opened it and stared at a picture of her and her superior sitting in a car. “Mum, sorry, I gotta go,” she called into the handset without returning it to her ear.
Sam wasn’t confident about the seabed. It seemed too sandy to definitely grip the anchor, so he was restless. He was reluctant to set the anchor alarm to alert him if the boat began to drag because that would require his position to be identified by GPS coordinates and place him where he didn’t want to be placed.
He’d been determined not to sail into Greencastle – to do so would draw attention in a small Donegal fishing village. Fishermen and sailors seldom enjoyed a harmonious relationship; the former generally taking the view that sailors were pompous toffs who caused mayhem in working harbours. Sam had some sympathy with them.
Instead, he had headed north-west to Culdaff, just off a beach, for a bit of peace and thinking time. It was sufficiently isolated – the nearest neighbours being abandoned static caravans oxidising a mottled brown in the salt air.
Eventually he gave up on sleep and decided to bring a sleeping bag up to the cockpit. After two hours in the dark he became distracted by a sweeping headlight. He wrestled down into the bag and thought of other things until, five minutes later, he saw the light again. He rose, cocooned, and peered out to sea. Nothing. Sam turned and watched the headland, from where the light must have come. For ten minutes, nothing. His eyes began to water in the gentle breeze and then suddenly, the unmistakable flash of headlights aimed out to sea.
He dismissed it at first as likely to be teenage shaggers bumping the dimmer lever ith a bare arse. But caution crept in and he thought about what Min had said. They’d questioned the opso – they had a trail. They’d even pulled Min in for a going-over. When it came to hunting, he knew the DET were more than adept.
He kicked off the bag and in his socks went forward and pressed the windlass button to raise the anchor. Then he shook out the small jib and quietly slipped away from shore.
But the scenarios kept coming at him. Here he was assuming the lights had something to do with him, which was paranoia, was it not? He was hauling ass away from a phantom surveillance vehicle that was signalling to someone at sea. Perhaps he was headed the wrong direction – straight into their hands? Surely, if someone was looking for him, they would get the police to make an arrest? Police don’t do boats. His mind was leaping and diving, especially when he realised he had just unfurled a great white sail. Even on a moonless night a light sweep would pinpoint him. He rolled it away and started the engine, deciding to motor hard offshore and stay there until he worked out what to do next. He reminded himself that sleep deprivation made for dark imaginings – hallucination, even, so he tried to calm his mind and simply make out into the Atlantic. With sea, space and rest would surely come a plan.
And then the engine stopped with a bang.
Diving at night was no craic. Sam could well remember his first combat dive course after passing selection. One day he was a Royal Marine, the next he was part of a squadron, a troop, a member of the Special Boat Service, and far too buoyant for his own good.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the instructor had yelled. “You’re like a cork out of a bottle.”
Sam couldn’t argue. He had to tuck more weight than anyone else into his kit to submerge properly. While others struggled with their eyes and ears and orientation, he couldn’t even get beneath the surface without working hard to stay down.
Nonetheless, he curled and flipped under the boat to try and see what was going on with the engine. The bang had been very loud and he assumed he’d hit a plank of driftwood or debris. Again and again he thrashed his feet to try to get a good look at the driveshaft, his waterproof torch about as useful as a candle. Three inspections later he determined that there was heavy plastic baling involved. He sawed along the propshaft in the hope of freeing something he couldn’t see, before gasping to the surface for a few minutes to recover. The boat began to turn stern to the wind. He held still, trying to work out what was happening, and realised that whatever he had hit was securing Siân in the water.
Not a random piece of debris, then, he thought. But it was deep, really deep. Two hundred feet or more. That would be a lot of line for a lobster pot or mooring. Had he hit a navigation buoy? If so, how had he not seen it on the chart?
Then creaking began, like a tautening, a strain. Sam instinctively pushed himself away from the hull, now alarmed at what he didn’t understand. Like a blast of a landmine, water exploded around him and a huge black something burst from the sea. At first Sam thought it was a basking shark, so violent had its arrival been – then it settled on the surface, static, inert, definitely non-biological.
Sam tapped it a few times and was satisfied that it was a container of some kind, bound heavily. New energy entered his lungs and legs and he used the davit lines for lifting the dinghy to haul the box aboard. In the cockpit he set about attacking the outer shell, his anticipation building. In his haste and excitement he forgot that the box was no longer anchoring him and Siân was now drifting aimlessly. Inside were tightly packed flare canisters – the type used by any commercial boat. His heart sank a little. Flares were hard to dispose of legally and some fisherman had likely dumped out-of-date stock over the side. He sat back in abject disappointment – and then he heard it.
He had barely turned towards the noise when his whole visibility was filled with the looming bow of a fishing boat, steaming fast towards him. Sam leapt to the console and pushed the starter. The exhaust coughed, the impeller span and three seconds later the turn over converted to combustion and he hammered the throttle forward as hard as he could. He reached for the wheel but even the spin he gave Siân wasn’t enough to avoid a glancing blow. Sam cringed as he heard the tear of aluminium and the crunch of timber below. He looked behind to see the fishing boat wheel to starboard.
“What the fuck!” he yelled after her.
Computation takes time when cold, wet and distracted. It hadn’t dawned on Sam that the fishing boat, ten times the mass of his own yacht, hadn’t hit him by freak accident.
The bigger boat had nearly turned but its circle was too large. It wouldn’t be able to hit Siân again without slowing, reversing and coming at him again. Sam realised that that the fishing boat could do nothing to him so long as he remained amidships. If she were to come at him from any significant angle, weight, height and power would finish him. So Sam hammered the bow thrust, gunned the throttle and spun the wheel to draw himself parallel to the fishing boat, which predictably began to buffer up against the hull side-on. The grubby bigger boat had a necklace of old tyres strung along its hull, suggesting it hadn’t been long at sea. They took some of the impact as Siân and the brute came together again.
For ten minutes the fishing boat and Siân kept pace with one another. The fishing boat ought to have had more speed but Sam had Siân opened up more than he’d ever attempted before – 8.6 knots, and worked into the larger hull so that the fishing boat dragged him along at the same pace.
Where was the crew? he wondered. Why had nobody come on deck to throw stuff at him?
And then he realised – there was no crew.
If there had been any spare hands aboard, they’d have fired a flare or hit him with a grappling hook – a fish box, even. He was ten feet beneath them and a sitting duck. So it was clear: there were only two people in the tussle. And where there were two, Sam had an advantage.
He looked around, up at the imposing hull to his left. He grabbed one of the knives he’d been using but he wanted something that
would give him leverage to swing from a distance. The dinghy had been dumped by the davits, so he grabbed an oar from its side tank, set the autohelm to keep Siân in towards the fishing boat and then used the old tyre dangling from its side to spring up and onto the deck of the trawler.
The boat was a mess. She plainly hadn’t been used for fishing in a very long time. The winches were rusted and looked all but seized, there were no nets and the hold cover had been welded shut. Sam moved towards the wheelhouse and put his boot to the door, nearly defacing himself as it swung back in anger at the force of his own blow. Inside, the console was equally antiquated – there were no modern fish finders, radar or instruments. Nor was there anyone at the wheel.
What the fuck is going on? Sam thought, as he moved forward to see how the boat was being steered.
“Don’t be touching anything, now,” came a gruff country voice from behind.
He’s calm, thought Sam. Confident. He must be better armed than me.
“Put the wee knife down.”
Sam ignored the command and turned to find a fit-looking fifty-something in grubby jeans and a shoulder-patched jumper staring at him intently. Sure enough, he had an old Stirling rifle in his hand. Sam had never used a Stirling but it had been the weapon of choice of clandestine units that had preceded him. From the pictures on the walls of the ops room he knew the rifle loaded from a magazine at the side – which, in this case, was missing. His head was warmer now, and working better, so he hedged for a moment to see where this would take them. He dropped the knife but kept the oar.
“You tried to sink me.”
“You lifted something that wasn’t yours.”
“Salvage,” Sam said.
“Did you open it?”
“It’s just flares.”
“Aye.”
“Hardly warrants a sinking.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m sailing. Who are you, more like?”
“You Irish Navy?”
“In a sailing boat?”
“Are ye?”
“Don’t think navy personnel travel alone.”
The man grunted. He had been wedged in behind a cupboard, but as he pushed to full height Sam became aware of the scale of the challenge.
“You shouldn’t have been so nosey.”
“Your flares hit my prop and stopped my engine. What choice did I have?”
“You didn’t need to go hoking in the box.”
Sam began to realise that he might have hit the jackpot. The box was evidently more important to this man than a simple illegal dumping of flares. He thought about the manager’s final words, and cut to the chase. “You a bomb maker?”
The man’s brow crunched immediately, his left eye all but closing. “What d’ye say?”
He was clearly flustered but Sam already knew all he needed to know. Somewhere on this boat would be enough information to get to the next stage. He walked forward.
“I’ll put a bucket of lead in ye,” the hulk warned.
“There’s no magazine in that gun,” Sam said and whacked the man as hard as he could in the temple with the oar. The man caught it as Sam retracted for a second blow and he lurched forward like a sprinter out of blocks, pushing the oar at Sam and keeping the pair apart.
Sam hit the console and his back pressed up against the window of the wheelhouse. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Siân’s mast. He grabbed the knife and raised it towards the man’s head, but the older bloke was lightning fast. He snapped Sam’s wrist in his massive clutch and began to twist. Sam had no option but to begin some groundwork – he needed to take the man’s legs from beneath him. An ankle stamp and a knee kick freed him from the grip, but he’d lost the knife and was left only with the oar. The man was now on his knees in front of him, so Sam used his left hand to go for an eye and using the oar as a spear he aimed – not for the first time, at the now screaming and gaping hole of the throat. As he’d done once before, he gripped the oar at the point of thrust, as a pole-vaulter would, and rammed it into the airway.
The heaving began. The man, speared like a fish, flailing like catch, exhausting and expiring; the remaining eye bulging in disbelief.
Sam opened the few files in the wheelhouse while the hulk settled into death. There was no time and he hadn’t been wearing gloves. The boat would need torched. He tore out a sheet from the middle of one folder – an insurance cover note with an address at the top. In another folder he found a fishing licence, laminated and ready for naval inspection. The address on both was the same. He then turned to the body on the floor and began a shakedown. He found a wallet and an old phone with actual buttons on the front.
Someone values his privacy, Sam thought.
He looked at Siân’s mast. She had slipped aft marginally – he had to move quickly. He skipped over the side, threw the papers and the phone below deck, and lifted the dinghy’s petrol can. Back on the fishing boat he doused the wheelhouse, ripped out the VHF radio, rubbed the brown and blue wires together and then, for ease, used matches that were sitting by a small camping stove to accelerate the process. The whoosh of flame was gentle enough to allow him to get out easily, and he took his canister with him back onto his own boat. He turned the helm to starboard and the two vessels parted, the fishing trawler heading out into the Atlantic – a burning funeral pyre to a man who thoroughly deserved his cremation.
And them Sam turned to the dinghy and spotted his mistake.
25
Libby had debated at length whether to inform her superior. They’d been seriously compromised and to not tell him was to risk his life – but she was so cross with him that she reckoned she would manage to get over his death. That would have resulted in an investigation, during which the email from the anonymous contact would be discovered and she would be exposed for withholding vital information. Hence the bollocking she was getting.
“You let someone follow you?”
“Well, with respect,” she began, although she meant no respect at all, “they may have been following you.”
“Then why did they use your personal email address?”
“They actually emailed my mother.”
“Your mother!”
“Yes,” she conceded. It did indeed appear that she was the target.
“And now my face is in the hands of some, well – who knows? Could be a fucking foreign agency, Libby!”
“It appears so,” she replied calmly. Her days in the service felt numbered, which was ushering in an odd sense of relief and detachment.
“Do you wish to keep your job, Libby?” he growled.
“Ideally,” she replied, astonished at her own ambivalence.
“Are you goading me?”
“Yes, I want to keep my job.”
“Then find out who compromised you. More importantly, find out why!”
The phone slammed down and she heard a commotion outside. She walked down the corridor, still slightly stunned and oddly nonchalant about what her superior had said, to find six military cars in the yard between her accommodation block and the operations unit. The doors were open and DET staff were being ushered into the back seats of the waiting vehicles. She hurried outside and asked one of the spanners what was happening.
“We’re being shut down.” He shook his head.
“What?”
“Seems there’s been some internal investigation. The opso’s been taken away and the staff are being driven to Belfast for debrief. Only me and the techs are staying.”
“The opso’s gone already?”
“He’s in the front car – on his own.”
“What’s it about?” Libby asked, pretending to know nothing.
“You’d know more than I would but I’d say they reckon all the X-rays being bumped off was our fault.”
“They didn’t tell me they were doing this,” she said.
“It’s not your lot. This is our team – military. I asked if there would be a replacement staff but nobody answered. Some
other detachment will likely take over our area. Probably Lisburn, or West Det.”
“Bloody hell,” Libby muttered as the first of the vehicles pulled away. “All the techs are still here?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell them I want to speak to them in the ops room, 1600 hours.”
Lough Swilly looked shallow, so Sam decided to cut his losses and limp into the marina. As such installations went, it was pretty isolated, not a human in sight, although the facilities were in good order. He examined the damage and was pleasantly surprised to find it all repairable without the need to bring in specialists.
He woke from a four-hour sleep, showered and set about the next bit of his plan. It needed to be finished before the burning fishing boat was found, towed and examined. His sleep began to feel like a luxury.
He looked at the map and reckoned on a fifteen-mile yomp across manageable terrain. When he was twenty-five he’d have allowed four hours max, complete with bergen, webbing and a rifle. Now he settled realistically on six hours, with half the kit. He gathered up his little helicopters, food, water, the dead man’s mobile and set off.
On the climb he felt every month he’d been away from the Marines. His calves strained like the shore lines on a ship, his quads roared and he thanked God he didn’t have to carry weight on his shoulders – at least his lower back was spared that pain. By mile four, though, his body and mind had settled into a familiar, if distant, routine; one commanding and calming the other, muscle memory easing the shock and generating a rhythm. As in years past, he ran downhill and walked the inclines, using a paper map to avoid dwellings and farmhouses. No electronic navigation.
Throughout he thought back to his escape exercises in the final throes of selection to become a member of the special forces. It had been horrific, the hours spent evading capture, but his mind back then had been fit for it. He had gained a reputation for deviousness, a canny ability to find his way out of tight situations.
