The Lost Island

by Paul Kearney

  Hanlon was scowling.

  “I thought you were soldiers. Now I know you’re just lunatics.”

  “That we are, Skipper. That we are.”

  ***

  The day drew on, and the Liopleurodon did not return. The soldiers cleaned their weapons in shifts, fighting to keep the rust off them.

  Stephen joined Abby and Connor amidships. They were going through their gear methodically, for the third or fourth time. Connor swore softly.

  “What’s up?” Abby asked him.

  “Forgot my iPod. Knew I’d forgotten something.”

  “You’ve forgotten something else, as well,” Stephen told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your seasickness.”

  “You’re right! I feel fine now. My stomach is still on a trapeze, but it doesn’t bother me — how about that?”

  “Fear is a wonderful healer,” Abby said.

  “Fear — oh, come on Abs!”

  “I was watching you, Connor. You stopped vomiting the moment you laid eyes on that sea monster, and you haven’t had a heave since.”

  “That’s adrenaline that is — it’s my primordial survival instincts kicking in.”

  “Who was it said, ‘If you push a civilized man into a corner, you’ll eventually find the hot, red eyes of the caveman staring back at you?’” Stephen said with a smile.

  “That’s right — that’s me that is,” Connor said, beaming. “Caveman — man of action.” He paused. “Can I have a gun now?”

  “No!” Abby and Stephen said together.

  “According to the GPS, we are now thirty-two nautical miles south-southeast of Guns Island,” Willoby said, studying the device in his hand.

  “It’ll be dark again soon,” Cutter said, staring out of the salt-streaked windows of the wheelhouse. “Hanlon, you know the island. We need to find a spot where we can land the equipment on the shore, something with a sheltered approach.”

  “No such thing as a sheltered approach to Guns Island,” Hanlon said. “I can take you to leeward, and edge in close, hold her there while you disembark. On your map, that dotted line you’re relying on to get you to the top, it ends at the shore in a wee cove maybe fifty yards wide. It’s where the bird-watcher scientists park their boats in the summer, when they come to count the gannets. If you can make it in there, you should have calmer water, even at this time of year.” He sucked his teeth moodily for a second. “You don’t have survival suits, do you?”

  “Just these,” Cutter said, tapping the collar of his life jacket.

  “Then don’t for Christ’s sake fall in the water. The cold will knock you out in a matter of minutes, and that’ll be that.”

  Soon it grew dark, and Hanlon switched the arc-lights of the trawler back on. The wind had fallen again, and the swells had shrunk somewhat. Instead of the fifteen- and twenty-foot waves they had become accustomed to, ten footers ran under the boat in smooth succession, like a series of huge speedbumps.

  Cutter was at the wheel, the skipper having gone below to catch an hour’s sleep. He was standing with the sweat cold on his back despite his warm clothing, peering out at the arc-lit darkness, then at the compass, then at the endless sweep of the sonar. Below his feet the deck throbbed with the steady beat of the engines.

  “Four miles,” Willoby said, studying his GPS. “I’d better wake Hanlon.”

  “Give him another ten minutes,” Cutter said. “The poor bastard has to drive this thing all the way back to Crosshaven on his own.”

  “He’s a brave man — or a stupid one,” Willoby said.

  “Brave and greedy, like the conquistadors.”

  “And you, Professor — does that describe you, too?”

  Cutter turned his head to look at him for a moment.

  “I’m not in it for the money.”

  “No, but I saw your face when that thing turned up at the side of the boat. I’ve seen squaddies look at strippers the same way. You’re in it for the thrill.”

  Cutter snorted, a half laugh.

  “Lusting after dinosaurs — what does that make me then?”

  “A dangerous man, Professor.”

  “This, from the big bad SAS officer.”

  “I’m just following orders.”

  “Don’t give me that shite. You volunteered, Willoby. I’ve seen your file, remember — you’d volunteer for anything. If any of us is a thrill seeker, it’s you.”

  Willoby smiled.

  “I’m a professional soldier — I go where the action is.”

  “And I’m a professional zoologist. I go where the monsters are.”

  Willoby leaned forward and switched off the arc-lights of the trawler. At once, the world beyond the windows went dark.

  “Hey!” Cutter exclaimed.

  “One moment, Professor, let your eyes adjust. Keep staring out there.”

  They stood side by side at the wheel, the engines churning endlessly beneath their feet, the boat rising and falling.

  “There,” Willoby said. “You see it?”

  Cutter’s eyes had adjusted. The sea was a lighter colour now, a pale livid slate in front of him. Above it the sky was darker, and speckled with stars — the clouds had blown clear at last. But something was bulking up out of the sea to blot out those stars, looming closer and taller every moment that the trawler powered westwards. A blank blackness on the edge of the world.

  “Land ho,” Willoby said quietly. “Professor, we have Guns Island, dead ahead.”

  “There be monsters,” Cutter said grimly. He throttled back on the engines so that their incessant thudding slowed, and the boat lost speed.

  “Best wake up the skipper,” he added. “In a few minutes we’ll be right up against those cliffs.”

  It was silent on the boat. The team stood on the after deck amid their mounds of gear and weaponry whilst Bristow and Fox stood by with the two inflatables. Cutter was by the open wheelhouse door relaying information back and forth between Hanlon and the others. He was soaked through, freezing cold, and he had not slept in twenty-four hours. The adrenaline rush of the Liopleurodon was only a memory. All he wanted now was to be warm and dry, and to lay his head somewhere dark for eight hours.

  Instead, he thought grimly, I have to climb a thousand-foot cliff and mix it up with a crowd of unknown prehistoric animals. Who’d have thought getting a Phd could land me in stuff like this?

  The seas had eased, and the wind had dropped off to no more than a fitful breeze, the bulk of the island cutting off the malice of the storm, which was still hammering off to the northeast. Looking up, Cutter could see a magnitude of stars, the trailing glimmer that was the Milky Way, and a sliver of moon that came and went through rags of streaming eldritch cloud. It was bitterly cold. He stood in a perpetually renewed cloud of his own breath.

  Ahead of the boat, the towering cliffs of Guns Island loomed, a thousand feet of Atlantic-hammered basalt that had once been the lava plug in a great volcano. The seas had risen and worn away the sides of the mountain eons ago, leaving only the igneous central pillar standing. This vast chunk of fire-forged stone had remained here as the world had changed around it, the continents shifting underfoot, the seas deepening, growing colder. Ice ages coming and going, millennia passing as quickly as the pages in a book.

  What in the hell was waiting for them up there?

  “I see white water ahead, three or four hundred metres!” Doody called from up on the masthead. And then, “Breakers! I see breakers. There’re rocks in front of us, boss!”

  Cutter poked his head into the wheelhouse. “You get that?” he asked Hanlon.

  “I got it,” the skipper said. His mouth was a tight line in his beard, his eyes bloodshot and staring wide. He nosed the boat forward metre by metre, one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttles. “There’s a current here, works round the island to the east. We’ll be in it soon. When we get into it, you get your people off as quickly as you can, because I’ll be fighting that water to keep of
f the rocks. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Cutter said quietly. “Thank you, Captain, for sticking this out.”

  “I don’t want your thanks. I just want to get home in one piece, and I want my money. Start sorting out your dinghies. I’ll flick the lights when it’s time to launch them.”

  They stood on the deck, ten waterlogged, shivering people. Willoby and Cutter knelt by the two inflatables, still cocooned in their white plastic cylinders. They flipped open the catches and tossed aside the top halves of the containers, revealing tightly wrapped bundles of dayglo rubber within. When the lights of the trawler went off for a second, they both pulled on the ripcords and booted the bundles into the sea. Still attached by nylon guidelines, the two inflatables exploded outwards, blossoming and uncurling like living creatures, cellular growth magnified a billion times and speeded up into a few seconds.

  “I’d give a lot right now for a decent Zodiac,” Willoby said.

  “This is all we could fit in the shipment,” Cutter told him. “Break out the outboards, Captain.”

  The team had two small Seagull outboard motors. Bristow and Fox leapt down into the two dinghies and these were handed down to them, no easy task in the rolling sea. The two soldiers clipped the little engines to the sterns of the dinghies, and then sat bobbing there, the rubber boats bouncing against the side of the trawler. Connor looked down at the little vessels as they bobbed, toy-like against the bulk of the ship.

  “I never thought I’d say this,” he groaned, “but I think I prefer the big boat.”

  “Come on Connor.” Abby nudged him. “Another couple of hundred metres and we’re home and dry. I’ll heat you up a nice mug of hot chocolate.”

  “Oh, don’t, Abby,” Connor rasped. His hand went to his mouth.

  “Gear first,” Willoby ordered. “Come on lads, we haven’t all sodding night.” He turned and looked up at the masthead, where the signaller Watts stood, sweeping the horizon with an infrared scope.

  “Watts! All clear?”

  “All clear boss — not so much as a sardine in sight.”

  “All right, get down here. Cutter, I want your people split between both dinghies.”

  Teeth clenched to stop them chattering, Cutter nodded.

  “Stephen, you and Connor in the left one; Abby, you’re with me.”

  The dinghies were dangerously overloaded. As the team settled into them they found they had only inches of freeboard, and the swell, which seemed reasonable when experienced from the deck of the trawler, became a roller-coaster motion under them.

  Hanlon appeared at the trawler’s rail. He cast off first one line, and then the other. As the dinghies drifted away from the Polar Star they saw him raise a hand, a mere black silhouette against the garish lights of the boat.

  “May God go with you!” they heard him shout, and then he disappeared back into the wheelhouse. The trawler’s engines took on power and noise, and the big steel boat began to move away, back out to the southeast, her bow pointed towards Ireland.

  There was a moment of silence in the two dinghies. The wind was roaring high overhead, a sound not unlike a train passing by, and both Bristow and Fox were pulling viciously on the starter-cords of the outboards. Finally, the little engines caught, sputtering and coughing like excited lawnmowers. The dinghies began to move.

  Cutter looked back and saw the lights of the trawler recede into the black night. Watching it go, despite the close-packed nearness of his companions, he somehow felt incredibly alone.

  NINE

  Jenny Lewis had seen the interior of a police cell only once before, when as a university student she had been part of a crowd of drunken, gilded youth at Oxford who thought it would be a fine idea to race wheeled refuse containers down the middle of the High Street at 3 a.m. Back then, her incarceration had lasted for only a few hours. A caution had followed, and no more.

  This, she thought, might be decidedly more tricky.

  For some reason, she craved a cigarette, a habit she had not thought of in years. It just seemed the thing to do, a kind of adjunct to the bare-walled room, the heavy formica-topped table with the slot in it where a handcuff could be locked, and the paper cup of vile instant coffee that sat cooling in front of her.

  She fiddled with her mobile phone as it sat warm in one pocket. There was a camera lens in one corner of the room, and she had been told not to make calls without permission. Absently, she wondered if they would rush in here, truncheons raised, if she raised it to her ear.

  It didn’t matter, the battery was dead. Of all the times for that to happen, it had happened now. She hadn’t been able to call Lester to warn him. That was a major error. She was paying for it already.

  But he must know of the situation by now, she assumed. A British Home Office official had been detained by a foreign government. He must be working on it already.

  Had to be.

  Jenny looked at her watch. It was 5 a.m. I’ll bet he’s still in bed, she thought wearily. God, I’m tired.

  The door opened and a man stepped in, dressed in a rumpled suit. He looked as though he had dressed in the dark, and his tie was askew. He sat down opposite Jenny and set two more paper cups on the table from which steam rose, along with a delightful smell.

  “Cappuccinos,” he said with a smile. “There’s a wee Italian café down the road that opens early. You look as though you could do with one.”

  She sipped at it gratefully, saying nothing.

  “My name is Kieran Madden. I’m just here to ask you a few questions,” he said. He had a kindly face, square, framed with greying hair. His eyes were pale blue, and tired though he seemed, they were clear and piercing. This man is no fool, Jenny thought, and she drank her coffee to gain herself a moment or two of thought.

  Madden watched her closely.

  “At approximately one-thirty this morning a trawler by the name of Polar Star left the harbour at Crosshaven. The skipper’s name was —” Here he drew a notebook out of his suit pocket and flipped it open. “— Liam Hanlon. A local man. On board the boat were ten passengers, who took with them a large amount of equipment. That equipment came through Shannon Airport this afternoon, on a chartered airfreight Shorts 360. It was then loaded onto a truck and driven to Crosshaven for the rendezvous. You, Ms Lewis, were also at that rendezvous.”

  Jenny raised an eyebrow over the rim of her cup.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. I believe the right to remain silent exists here in Ireland also, Mr Madden.”

  “Inspector Madden,” he said, correcting her somewhat curtly.

  “Forgive me. I wasn’t aware of your rank. Inspector, I have given your people my name, and a number to call. Once that contact has been made, this will all be cleared up very quickly.”

  “Where was that trawler heading, Ms Lewis?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Those men on board were soldiers, were they not?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Madden took out a packet of cigarettes, lit one with a plastic lighter, and blew out blue smoke with an obvious air of satisfaction.

  “All right,” he said patiently, leaning forward. “We’ll start at the beginning, shall we?”

  Lester did not like being summoned to Whitehall in the middle of the night, yet it seemed as if it was happening all too often these days.

  It reminded him of his early days in the service, when he had burned away much of his twenties in endless midnight meetings amid sheaves of documents and interminable committees. He was supposed to be above that now. But when Lord Brooke telephoned in the early hours, one jumped.

  Lord David Brooke CMG, or “Call-me-God”, as civil servants knew the title. He headed a committee in the Lords that oversaw a great deal of internal spending within Whitehall. If one were coarse about it, one could say that he was the man who paid Lester’s wages.

  The meeting was at his private residence, too. From experience, Lester knew this couldn’t be good. There hadn’t even been time to summ
on his own car. He paid off the taxi and rang the bell, standing in a little portico supported by white pillars. Brooke still lived in Kensington, near some of his clubs. He was a man of the old school. Which meant there would be no fobbing him off with Home Office legalese.

  A butler — an honest to goodness butler, in a dark suit — showed Lester upstairs. It was 5 a.m., and he wagered enviously that Jenny was sleeping comfortably in a warm bed, somewhere in Ireland.

  Brooke was waiting in his study, and it appeared as if he had been awake for some time already. The look on his face wasn’t pleasant.

  “You know why you’re here,” he said. He did not shake hands, or offer Lester a seat. He stood in his dressing gown with his back to a flickering fire. The flame-light danced off cut-glass decanters, leather wing-backed chairs, the gilt spines of books, mahogany, silver. The room breathed of an older, more privileged world. A world that still remembered the past glories, when London had been the hub of international affairs.

  It’s a different ball game now, but still these old dinosaurs keep their hands in, Lester thought to himself, but he kept his silence.

  Instead, he said, “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage my Lord.”

  “Don’t you keep track of what’s going on in your own department, James? My God, man, my telephone has been ringing off the hook for the last hour.” His face reddened, and he looked at a ticking tallboy in the corner. “In a few hours, the Minister will be informed.”

  A chill crept up Lester’s spine.

  “The Irish Ambassador will be requesting a meeting with the Foreign Minister this afternoon, an interview without coffee, by all accounts. Perhaps you will have the courtesy to fill me in on your side of the story. If the episode is to go public, then we must be prepared.” He fell silent, and waited for Lester to respond. “Well?” he said impatiently.

  Lester breathed out quietly.

  “I take it this has to do with my department’s presence in the Republic of Ireland.”

  “You’re damn right it does! One of your officials is banged up in a police cell at this very moment, and the Irish Navy is fitting out a minesweeper with a team to go and chase your Flying Dutchman of a fishing boat. What the hell is going on, Lester?”