by Finn Óg
Militants had been pouring into the Sinai Peninsula and he could see their rationale: it might be arid but its sands were not Saharan; there was rock and shelter and enough resources to survive; and there was next to nobody out there save for a few towns, disparate and unprotected. If a group wanted left alone to plot military campaigns, Sinai was hard to beat. Infiltration was impossible: anyone who joined the militants were brought in by the fighters themselves, vetted and transported from who knew where, so Waleed couldn’t send in an undercover agent, and, anyway, this wasn’t an area someone could simply wander in off a dusty road – there weren’t any. Besides that the beards had so many rules, hang-ups, stipulations. Each group he looked at would invariably kill anyone suspected of being a different brand of Islam, never mind a Jew, a Christian or a Coptic for that matter.
The beards could be dealt with from the air, of course, but Egypt wasn’t in the habit of shooting up settlements from the sky. Not without the proper intelligence, and that intel was hard to obtain without boots on the ground, in the camps. The Brits or the Yanks would probably blow them up with one of their drones if Egypt requested it, but that would require asking, and the country’s leadership had changed so often in recent years it was difficult to keep track of who its allies were. The Israelis would have the capability in spades, and Waleed was of the view that Israel had most to gain from wiping out such groups, close as they were to the Israeli border. Yet, again, Israeli intervention in Egypt was a no-no, even in such unstable times. The peace accord between the two countries had to hold fast otherwise Israel would fall out with Egypt and Jordan and would once again have hostility on all fronts. So Waleed spent most of his days analysing satellite data, being briefed on movements and trying to guess which town, village or settlement was next to get the militant treatment.
Meanwhile the guilt built up as his former friend whimpered in a room down the hall. Big Suit’s boss still hadn’t phoned, which rendered Waleed’s own plan far from clear. As the days passed, he grew to wish he’d never intervened and had simply left the idiot to IS or similar. He simply didn’t have time to deal with people smugglers, much as he hated them. Waleed couldn’t even leave Sinai – he was the senior commander in the dust and hadn’t been home for forty-nine weeks, there was too much going on. If he’d left the big fool to the beards, it would’ve saved him having to confine his friend indefinitely, or worse, which increasingly seemed like his only option now that the hulk knew his secret.
“No, this is to rev the engine. It’s not throttle - not power.” Sam wanted to throttle the man, never mind the boat. “Once engine is running, then put this lever down. Ok? Then use this one – red button, to drive off. See?”
He’d been at it for thirty minutes and still the man was struggling. It was as if he couldn’t hear the revs in the engine, the differences in high and low. Sam gave up and decided to try the woman instead. He called to the cockpit from the dinghy they were bobbing around in at the stern of the boat. Isla’s little blondie head appeared, an open look on her face.
“Try and get the woman to come down here, please, Isla.”
She shrugged and vanished from view. The impact was immediate. The man started shaking his head and made a rare vocal contribution.
“La. La.”
The decision was complete. He had evidently understood what Sam was intending and was having none of it. Chauvinist idiot, Sam thought. Can’t do it yourself but won’t be shown up by a woman.
The woman’s clothed head eventually arrived over the stern above them. The man barked something at her and she promptly disappeared.
Sam again considered toppling the idiot over the edge and holding him under. Sinbad was no longer a joke of a name, it was appropriately offensive. He stared at the man, but the idiot just hardened his repose into a kind of trout pout. How Western, Sam thought.
“Get back aboard,” he ordered, not one bit concerned to conceal his disgust. “If you can’t work the throttle, I’ll point you at the shore and you can at least steer towards a certain point. You can manage that, can’t you?”
But Sinbad simply stared back, hardened, berated – embarrassed, Sam hoped.
In the cockpit Sam looked at what he was about to explain to Sinbad and breathed through his nostrils like a bull. He had little confidence this fool could land his family in the neighbourhood of Italy let alone on a specific beach.
“We are here.” He flicked an x on the chart in open sea. “Here,” his pencil stroked another mark on the chart beside the Sicilian harbour, “is where you are aiming for.”
Sinbad looked at him and nodded an agreement of the delusional. He seemed to be suggesting that he got it, now move on. So Sam moved on, suppressing a hankering guilt that he was casting them adrift and clearing his conscience all at once, and that he didn’t care that much whether the idiot was understanding him or not.
He moved to the chart plotter, again showing first their current position and then where Sinbad was to steer towards. “Now,” he said, “this is a light, and it flashes.” He picked up a torch and held it upright, flicking it on and off. “Look, watch. Count – one, two, three, then stop.” He paused for five seconds. “Then again – one flash, two flashes, three flashes,” he said, and covered the bulb end. “Then stop. See?” But he didn’t believe for a moment that Sinbad saw at all.
He pointed to the light on the chart plotter and counted off again, then looked up to the woman who was paused pensively on Sinbad’s shoulder as if nervously eavesdropping. Sam hunted into the letterbox of her concealment and willed even a slight nod from her. “This could save your daughter,” he appealed, pointing at the child. “You need to understand.” Through the gap he imagined he’d seen a glint, a hint, that she at least got it. They had to hunt for the flash and drive to the light. That was all. It wasn’t hard, surely, even in a different language? Yet what use was it that the woman understood? If the patriarch didn’t, he would hardly listen to her anyway. He didn’t seem the type.
Sam had one more option. He flipped open the laptop and raided Isla’s data again. Google Earth. What use it would be in the dark he didn’t know, but at least they would get a sense of what it was they were to point at. He could only offer them the street view but the light would look broadly the same from the sea. He started flashing with the torch again and abandoned a notion he’d had about giving them a compass with a bearing to follow. She might manage but Sinbad wouldn’t. Losing a boat was one thing, losing his handbearing compass for no benefit was another.
Sam’s frustration would wear off eventually.
He told the adults to get some sleep while Isla told the kid to “come on” and they gathered on different sides of the cockpit table to draw. Sam watched them for a while, growing drowsy again in the sunshine, warming again to the kid and her little gestures of generosity. The girls handed one another pencils, colours and Isla chattered away about how lovely the kid’s drawings were.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and the other child glowed, then stole a glance at Sam whose eyes were all but closed. The sway of the boat and the hot breeze coating him was taking him back to the garage for repair.
“I love your flowers,” he caught Isla on the drift.
“Thank you,” pricked a flicker of alarm in Sam, but it wasn’t enough to bring him back from sleep.
“How likely is he to let me go?” Habid asked the doctor. “You know him, he’s your cousin.”
“Not at all likely. He will try to get the information from you, through me, then he will try to put all my talented work here to waste.”
“You mean let me die?”
“Oh, no. He will want to kill you himself. He is evil to the core, that man.”
“So he needs to understand that he requires me,” said Habid, as the drugs that were saving parts of him were hooked up at his shoulder and applied through the cannula in his arm.
“Well, then you better have something else to tell him. He’s an impatient man.”
“You pair aren’t screwing me, are you, doc?” Habid asked.
The doctor paused, looked at the wall and said, “At some stage, Habid, you’re going to have to place your trust in someone. You know more about me than I would like you to but that is my risk. If you want to stay alive, I would suggest that I am your best bet.”
“And if you want a new life, I am yours. But there are things you will need to know – which I shall keep to myself until you are ready to leave, things that could give you a life of luxury wherever you land.”
“Really?” said the doctor, with his best effort at disinterested scepticism.
“Really,” said Habid. “One day I shall explain what the tenth person on the boat is for.”
The doctor paused a beat, a stiffening not lost on Habid.
“Ah, so your cousin has not let that query go then?” he prodded, knowingly. “You tell Tassels there are parts of my process that could make him a rich man but that shall remain with me until I am persuaded that this is a partnership and I will not end up dead on the banks of the Nile.”
The doctor turned to face him. “Ok,” he said, nodding.
Something about his acceptance gave Habid confidence they were on equal terms.
“We must ensure the next boat gets collected. Where is Big Suit?”
The doctor snorted. He’d grown accustomed to Habid’s descriptions of his interrogators. “Somewhere between Suez and the ferry port, halfway across the desert.”
Habid was silent for a moment. Priorities, he thought. Number one, keep the boats coming. Number two, get well enough to get out of bed. Number three, get released.
“Right, doctor, you can give him the next instalment.”
“It had better interest him. His ability to concentrate is somewhat limited,” the doctor mused as he tapped the fluids and checked the syringe driver, pretending not to be curious.
“Explain that you have got more from me, about the route and method I use, and that I have been given drugs in return.”
“Ok …”
“Tell Tassels that the people I smuggle from Libya have wealth beyond his wildest imagination.”
“He already knows that – you told him during your interrogation.
“But he does not know how I get their money.”
“How do you get the money? You hardly transfer it back to Tripoli?”
“I never do anything through Tripoli or Libya. Only a madman would bank in an Arab country in this climate.”
“So how do you do it?”
“I keep bank accounts in Europe, of course.”
“But how can you guarantee they will pay?”
“Ah,” said Habid, “with absolute certainty. What is the one thing a wealthy person will take with them when they flee?”
“Their family?”
“Of course,” said Habid. “But what thing?”
“Their phone?”
“Think, doctor. What would you take?”
“Cash?”
“On a boat?”
“Ok, the means to get my cash – a card or bank details.”
“There you are, doc. You got there in the end.”
“But why would they hand over their bank details to you before they leave? That would not make sense. They would have nothing left when they reached Europe.”
“Oh, they don’t hand it over before they leave, just a deposit,” said Habid, his lips snarling. “That’s what the tenth person is for.”
Three hours before darkness fell, Sam began to narrow the distance between the shore and the boat. He aimed to shave almost twenty miles off the gap, leaving the family just one hour, at full speed, to get ashore. The little RIB was fast if the man could keep it in a straight line. Sam cursed the thoughts that passed through his head as he readied the kit. Not giving them life jackets, for example. His instinct told him that any rescuer or investigator would look at the decent gear they had on and conclude that they had come from a yacht run by people who knew what they were doing. The safety clothing Sam had was in stark contrast to the safety procedures adopted by the people who had helped the family set to sea in the first place. They’d been cast off with an old deflated rag of a yoke, probably robbed from the abandoned fuselage of a plane in repose in some African desert scrapyard.
Yet Sam wouldn’t abandon the child – he couldn’t. There was something quite lovely about her, about the friendship she and his daughter had forged. There was a gentleness, a caring in her, that Sam admired. Little wonder they had become pals. Sam may not care for her father, but the child probably did.
The boat slid through the night, fetching on her fastest point of sail. Sam’s anticipation built as he neared his goal, his excitement tempered by the impact achieving it would have upon Isla. The chart plotter’s estimated time of arrival at the waypoint he’d set ticked down fast, and he eventually shifted to make the final preparations.
He piled three expensive life jackets on top of one another and added water to the repository. He checked the little rigid inflatable, pumped air into the sponsons making sure they were rock hard. Eventually, he lowered the boat into the water, hove the yacht to, and turned to face the music.
Placing his hands on either side of the companionway he pressed his head into the saloon and said, “It’s time.”
The man looked at the woman who said something to the child who immediately began to sob. Groundwork had evidently been laid.
“What’s happening?” asked Isla, alarmed.
“They’ve got to go, wee darlin’. They’re going to safety, ashore, where they’ll be looked after.”
“No, Daddy, they can’t.” The distress rose in her voice. “They can’t go in the sea again.”
“They’re taking the RIB, wee love, our dinghy. They’ll be fine. I showed the man how to use it.”
Isla looked at him, distraught and shocked but unsure what to say or do. The family stood, and the woman smoothed her filthy outfit and breathed a deep fill of preparation. Then Sam’s heart nearly broke as the little arms of the two children reached out and hugged like they’d known one another all their lives. There’s something particularly endearing, thought Sam, about watching kids behave the way they’ve seen adults do when they’re touched by real affection. Both girls were crying now, not dramatically or petulantly but with resign, regret and deep sadness. On some level one knew the other was being dispatched into danger and was helpless to prevent it. Those wee arms, little hands. That hug nearly made Sam change his mind all over again. And then the man stepped in, offering Sam his limp hand, presumably in thanks. Sam took it, astonished by its lack of vigour, and then they swept on deck in a flutter of black cloth and urgency.
Sam fastened the kid into the life jacket, her mother watching intently and then copying. The man left his unzipped – Sam couldn’t have cared less. He hardly noticed their clambering over the stern as Isla was gulping her sadness in heaves of tears, and Sam wrapped her up and felt his shirt soak as her anguish poured out. What am I doing? he thought, his daughter’s distress almost too much to take. And then, to his amazement, he heard the engine start. The man had managed to get it going without assistance. He lifted Isla onto his shoulders to see them off, stooping and straining his stitches to untie the painter. And then the three black souls set off, the man at the centre console incredibly having managed to work the throttle. Sam turned to face the light and gestured his palm at their destination. Not a nod, not another look and they were gone as the man pressed forward the lever and the boat rose by the bow before eventually settling back down onto the plane. Glad as he was to see them depart, Sam was slightly bewildered at the speed of it all.
“He’s driving that boat alright,” he muttered.
Isla’s wet face peeled from his neck to look after the wake of the boat as it tore into the distance.
“Go way,” he said, as if against the odds the man had come up trumps. “He’ll look after them, wee love, just like I look after you.”
“What do you
mean?” she said.
“Well, do you not think I look after you?” he asked, hurt.
“Yes, but what do you mean he will look after them?”
“Well, he’s her daddy,” Sam said, “and daddies look after their little girls.”
What she said next changed everything.
Tassels stared at his cousin. “What did he mean?”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “That’s all he said before he lapsed into sleep. Not surprising given the drugs swimming round his system.”
“He’s playing you,” said Tassels. “He’s just playing for time to get better, stronger. You need to lean on him harder.”
“I think he’s telling the truth. I think he’s starting to trust me.”
Tassels spat in contempt. “I don’t even trust you.”
“People do in situations like this. It’s Stockholm syndrome – anyone who shows kindness in a time of great stress is often treated as a friend. The bar has been lowered so far that even a person the victim would normally hate becomes a valuable comrade.”
“Do you think I am not familiar with the process?” said Tassels. “It’s just good cop, bad cop.”
“Except you prefer the bad cop, worse cop routine. And look where that got you,” the doctor said, bristling at not being trusted even by a tramp like his cousin.
Tassels gloried in the jibe. “I want to know what he’s talking about – how he get their bank details, and what is this tenth person all about?”
