Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  But then, ‘There it is,’ said Saiid, and the road swung round another steep cliff outcrop to reveal the outward thrust of Taba itself.

  Richard’s eyes narrowed automatically, as though if he squinted he would be able to see the smugglers’ trucks more clearly. But all there was to see at first was the municipal area of the town – what looked like offices and public buildings on the left – overlooking a square tarmac heliport on the right, then the dark blue of the sea with the red mountains of Saudi and Jordan increasingly close beyond. Here also, there was movement, but nowhere near as much as there had been in Taba Heights. There were tourists hurrying to and from the Movenpick and Hilton resorts. There were gardens, trees, shops and restaurants, all blazingly lit. There were no dark and half-ruined dock facilities. But there were jetties. ‘Are any of these big enough to take the kind of vessel the smugglers would need?’ wondered Richard. His tone made it clear he didn’t think so.

  ‘These are jetties for pleasure craft, swimming and scuba diving,’ said Saiid. ‘We’ve only seen one actual pier.’

  ‘Right back along the coast, almost as far as Saladin’s Fort,’ agreed Richard. ‘Where all those apparently deserted dock facilities were.’

  The conversation, short as it was, took them past the snowy mound of the Hilton and almost as far as the Israeli border crossing. ‘So …’ said Saiid.

  ‘Turn us round,’ said Richard. ‘We go back as fast as we can.’

  ‘And hope Sabet sees what we’re doing and decides to follow us?’

  ‘Yes. Given only that we don’t want her backtracking so suddenly and so quickly that she upsets the Israelis. God alone knows what they’d start throwing at us if they thought we were up to some Jihaddist trick.’

  ‘Ansar Bayt al-Maqdas are called Supporters of Jerusalem because they will kill to bring it under their rule, not because they want to protect it the way it is now,’ Saiid observed. ‘They’re apparently linked with ISIS. And they’ve supposedly killed people at this very checkpoint early in 2014. If the Israelis think we’re anything to do with them, they’ll be sending drones.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Richard. ‘Whatever happened to my enemy’s enemy is my friend?’

  Even so, Saiid swung the Land Rover round and headed back through town as fast as the pedestrians and the sleeping policemen would allow. Richard kept an eye on the rear-view mirrors until he was sure that Sabet had come to the same conclusion he had and was turning the trucks to follow the Land Rover. It took a good ten minutes to get back to the municipal area and the heliport, but then the road was clearer and Saiid was able to put his foot down hard. The trucks initially fell much further behind – slowed by the tourists and the traffic calming bumps even more than the Land Rover was, but by the time Saiid was powering down the straighter road towards Taba Heights, they were at least beginning to get free of the busy main drag. They swung right, following the road in from the coast past a facility Richard had hardly registered. Another road led up into the hills closed off by a wall and a gate. Then they were down on the shore again and barrelling into Taba Heights. Once again, pedestrians, crossings and traffic calming measures took their toll. Another ten minutes passed before Saiid got them free of the bustle, and this time there was no sign of Sabet’s trucks in the rear-view as they pulled out on to the next clear stretch. ‘Nearly there!’ said Saiid as he swung the Land Rover round the tall white outcrop and the docking facility was laid bare before them. ‘Damn!’ swore Richard. The view this time could hardly have been more different. There were three trucks drawn up at the outer end of the jetty and, moored beside them, there was a battered but powerful-looking boat. ‘Go!’ shouted Richard, and Saiid floored the accelerator. The Land Rover swung on to the jetty and roared down towards the trucks. Shadows were gathering and there were no lights either on the jetty, in the trucks or aboard the boat – but it was still possible to see the prisoners being roughly herded out of the trucks and over towards the boat. There was only one long, thin gangplank down, however. And at the moment that looked to be blocked by Amir and his immediate cohorts who were apparently going aboard to arrange a reception for their prisoners, and taking aboard the weapons, drugs or whatever else they were smuggling in an assortment of bundles, packages and crates. The deck was bustling with contraband, crewmen and smugglers. The gangplank was jammed and the men and women Richard was here to rescue stood under the guns of the guards on the concrete pier head.

  Saiid hit the headlights and the brakes all at the same time. The Land Rover skidded to a halt and the three passengers leaped out, guns at the ready. Richard opened fire first, aiming high above the heads of the dazzled men and women. The other two joined in, doing the same. Then all three dived for cover as their shots were returned, but the smugglers and the boat crew did not aim high. Miraculously none of them was hurt, though one of the Land Rover’s headlights and its passenger window were shattered.

  Richard hardly had time to catch his breath before Sabet’s trucks came roaring round the corner from Taba. Even before they swung on to the pier, their arrival caused confusion among the smugglers. The prisoners were being herded towards the gangplank even though it was still blocked. The men in charge of the smugglers’ vessel were shouting at the guards to hurry up and the boat itself was pulling away to the limit of its mooring ropes, putting the gangplank at serious risk of falling into the water, taking everybody with it.

  From the top of the wheelhouse a single white searchlight struck back at the Land Rover’s one headlight. Saiid put it out immediately with a shot that Kareem the sniper might have envied. Sabet’s trucks arrived and the police contingent began to pile out of the back. The smugglers began to panic then. From his position behind the Land Rover, Richard watched them herding their screaming victims off the pier head and on to the gangplank faster than the unstable walkway could be cleared at the inboard end. The result was inevitable. People started falling into the sea. And, Richard saw all too clearly, the first two to go – either by accident or because they were taking a desperate gamble – were Aman and the slight figure next to him.

  No sooner did the Eritrean couple tumble into the water than the crew got the gangplank clear. The rest ran aboard with the guards fighting a rearguard, still firing at the Land Rover and the trucks.

  Richard wormed forward, consumed with concern that the smugglers would shoot the pair in the water as well, but their focus seemed to be exclusively on the police trucks and the Land Rover from which a steady stream of fire was issuing. Because of his position, a little further forward than the rest and at an angle to the smugglers’ trucks and the boat, he saw the movement on the top of the wheelhouse, just beside the shattered light, before anyone else. He saw it and understood it.

  ‘Watch out!’ he bellowed. ‘Incoming!’ He rolled away and pulled himself to his feet, sprinting across the concrete pier. Behind him, the others did the same, scattering like a flock of starlings that had just seen a hawk.

  The boat pulled away, leaving its mooring ropes and its gangplank to fall into the sea. The smugglers along the main deck rail kept up their automatic fire, emboldened by the fact that their pursuers all seemed to be running away. But then they too were ducking down and looking up, wonderstruck, as the missile from the Igla MANPAD came roaring off the top deck like a space rocket gone astray. It streaked across the pier in an instant and impacted with Saiid’s Land Rover like the stroke of doom. The whole vehicle vanished into the heart of a ball of fire that lit up the whole area and released a blast wall that starred the windscreens of the five trucks on the dockside and reduced their canvas coverings to smoking rags. But, mercifully, that was all the damage the explosion caused. While the Land Rover burned like a Viking at his funeral, the men who had been riding in it and hiding behind it began to pick themselves up, safe in the knowledge that even the most warlike of the smugglers was standing, awestruck, watching the destruction as their boat pulled away into the gulf. As they stood up, so did Sabet’s men, slowly and shaki
ly. Richard was first to come fully erect. Giving the immolated Land Rover a wide berth, he ran down to the pier head, where he crouched on one knee, looking down into the water. And there, clinging to the discarded mooring ropes, were a lovely woman who could only be Tsibekti and, beside her, looking a good deal less lovely, Aman.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he called.

  Tsibekti disregarded his question. ‘They still have Nahom,’ she called in thickly accented English, her tone desperate. ‘We have to go after them!’

  ‘You’d better pray,’ snarled Aman, ‘that they don’t decide to come back after you!’

  ‘Nobody’s going after anybody at the moment, as far as I can see,’ said Richard. He looked across the water, feeling, for the first time since he had become involved in this adventure, helpless.

  Saiid joined him, towering silently behind his left shoulder. And no sooner had he done so than the cell phone he carried in his right trouser pocket started ringing. He pulled it out and put it to his ear. After a second, he looked down. ‘It’s for you,’ he said, and handed it down to Richard.

  Disorientated, almost in a dream state, Richard put the little instrument to his ear. ‘Mariner?’ he said.

  ‘Hello, you bloody man,’ came Robin’s brusque voice. ‘I’m here on Katerina’s bridge with Captain Husan and we’re just coming past something that I believe is called Saladin’s Fortress. Do tell me if I’m wrong, but I assume you are somewhere near that massive column of fire we can see burning almost dead ahead. Assuming you’re not actually responsible for it …’

  TEN

  Shamaal

  Pushing Katerina’s impending arrival to the backs of their minds, Richard and Saiid concentrated on the far more important business of pulling first Tsibekti and then Aman out of the water.

  As they eased Tsibekti up into the dancing light of the Land Rover’s funeral pyre, Richard was struck with three main impressions about the young woman. The first was her similarity to her twin. The next was her radiant loveliness, which was even more apparent in the flesh than it had been on the pictures on Nahom’s phone. Her face was all sculpted lines, huge eyes, sharp cheekbones and a square jaw which should have looked mannish but which somehow seemed the epitome of femininity. A wide, full-lipped mouth parted as she gasped to reveal perfect white teeth. And she had a riot of hair that contrived to look lovely even when reduced to rats’ tails by the dirty dockside water.

  The third thing that struck him was her modesty, though her culture, religion and her recent experiences should have warned him. Even as Saiid and he were pulling the rope to which she was clinging up the side of the pier, she was dangling one-handed, little more than a black shadow against the shimmering darkness of the water, fishing in the heaving waves for her burqa, which she slung over her shoulder before taking a firm, two-handed grip on the rope, and began to walk up the pier wall into the flickering golden light. She put it on as soon as she was able to stand, and became at once a pair of huge dark eyes staring around guardedly, as though the two-dozen policemen observing her silently were just another set of people smugglers with evil on their minds. And she could be right, thought Richard, as his gaze flashed from her to them and back again. Her clothes were soaking and, under the gathering power of the shamaal, adhered to her in a disturbingly revealing manner – even though she kept pulling the clinging material away from her long thighs and deep chest. Sabet came over at once and moved her to the gathering shadows where the eyes of the men could not follow her so easily. This gave Tsibekti the chance to speak more forcefully, repeating that they had to chase the smugglers’ vessel and rescue her brother.

  Even before Tsibekti was under Sabet’s wing, Richard and Saiid had turned their attentions to Aman. The double-dealing smuggler had used their focus on Tsibekti to try and escape, letting go of the rope, turning and blundering clumsily out into the bay, hampered by his clothing, even though it consisted of little more than jeans and a T-shirt. When Richard and Saiid looked down over the edge of the pier he was some way out in the dark water, fruitlessly following his smuggler friends – a black beach ball of a head with eyes and teeth that glittered when the light caught them. ‘It’s hopeless,’ Saiid called down to him. ‘You can’t catch the dhow and you can’t swim all the way to Saudi. Especially if this wind kicks up much more of a chop. And there are sharks …’

  ‘If you keep splashing around like that, you’ll be talking to a tiger long before your friends get back,’ emphasized Richard. ‘Even if you’re right and they are about to turn round when they find Tsibekti’s gone.’

  Aman twisted clumsily and floundered back to the rope. ‘They already know she’s gone!’ he shouted as he took firm hold and pulled his torso clear of the heaving surface. ‘Bisrat and I stopped them going over together. Then I slipped and fell in with the silly bitch. But they know. Amir saw what was happening. Just because he has a cast in one eye doesn’t mean he’s blind. He sees everything. They’re probably just getting their weapons ready, then they’ll be back!’ His sneering tone showed how much he wished for his smuggler friends to revenge his pain and humiliation, and how little he understood or cared about the vital information he was giving away.

  But the first vessel to come nosing alongside was Katerina.

  Robin jumped nimbly from the upper deck straight on to the pier even before Captain Husan could order the mooring ropes attached and the gangplank secured, even though the powerful vessel was frisking about like a skittish Derby winner in the gathering wind and the choppy water. She strode across to Richard as Ahmed and Mahmood hurried the other way, heading back to the vessel they usually crewed, worried that whoever was handling the mooring ropes and securing the gangplank might have replaced them as permanent crew members.

  In spite of her harsh words on the cell phone, Robin stood on tiptoe to kiss Richard’s lean cheek as he handed the bedraggled Aman over to Saiid. ‘Everything shipshape, Sailor?’ she asked quietly, her wise eyes taking in the blazing wreckage, the serried trucks, the well-armed soldiers, and the fact that Saiid immediately put the protesting Aman in a hammerlock and frog-marched him towards Sergeant Sabet, clearly minded to have the two-faced smuggler under close arrest like his erstwhile colleague Hakim the Silent.

  Richard slid one arm around Robin’s trim waist and gave her a swift hug. ‘Shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ he answered. ‘Especially now that you’re here.’

  ‘Hmmm …’ she answered, unconvinced. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be the only new arrival. Any minute now, whatever Taba has in the way of police, security and fire-fighting services are going to come in like Gangbusters. You’d better have a pretty good story to tell them.’

  ‘You’re right. But Major Ibrahim sent a load of paperwork up with Saiid. Sergeant Sabet’s got it. Hopefully that will cover us and keep the local authorities happy. But there’s more than the Taba people to worry about. Aman says that the smugglers will be back.’

  ‘Really? I would have thought their best bet was to cut and run.’

  ‘I’d have thought so too. But apparently not. Maybe there’s something we’re missing in this nasty little equation. However, my next plan was to chase them and see whether we could rescue Nahom somehow. It’s the first thing Tsibekti asked us to do after we pulled her out of the water.’

  ‘Tsibekti? You’ve rescued Tsibekti?’

  ‘Well,’ he allowed. ‘She rescued herself. She threw herself off the gangplank while there was some confusion on the pier. She would have brought Nahom with her, but she got Aman by sheer bad luck.’

  ‘So the shoe’s on the other foot now: we have her but we still have to rescue Nahom.’

  ‘Looks like it. Tsibekti’s certainly up for it in no uncertain terms. And I thought we were in with a chance. I reckon Katerina is faster than the battered old dhow they’re using. But appearances can be deceptive. They could have a couple of big Perkins turbocharged diesels in her for all I know. It’s not unusual for smugglers’ vessels to appear deceptively decrep
it on the outside but be geared up like powerboats on the inside. Then, if Aman’s right and they’re coming back after Tsibekti anyway …’

  Apparently apropos of nothing, Robin suddenly asked, ‘What actually happened to Saiid’s Land Rover? I assume this is his Land Rover doubling as something out of Bonfire Night?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘That was hit by an Igla …’

  There was a brief pause. The shamaal gusted again, bringing the stench of burning rubber and a breath of wind from the hottest hole in hell to join the overwhelming roar of the trusty old vehicle’s immolation. ‘I see,’ said Robin. ‘So, when Aman’s friends return in search of Tsibekti, at the very least they’ll be armed with Russian shoulder-launched missiles will they?’

  ‘Possibly. They’ve been reluctant to use them so far though,’ answered Richard at his most positive cup half full. ‘They’re probably planning to sell them on at an enormous profit, you see. Using them too often would be like throwing packets of heroin, crack or crystal meth at us. Costly.’

  ‘And that’s what you call being in with a chance, is it?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve had lots of chances to use the MANPADs so far but they haven’t made much use of them.’

  ‘Tell that to Saiid’s poor old Land Rover.’

  ‘I think someone will have to tell it to more than the Land Rover,’ observed Richard, tightening his grip on her as several official-looking vehicles led by a fire engine roared off the Taba road and on to the landward end of the pier. ‘Sergeant Sabet,’ called Richard. ‘We have company. I think it’s time to get Major Ibrahim’s paperwork out.’

  But Sabet had seen the new arrivals coming as soon as they swung round the outcrop of cliff, lighting up the tall white rock face with their multicoloured flashing lights; only seeming to move in silence because the roaring of the Rover’s funeral pyre drowned out the screaming of sirens and the rumble of racing engines. As she moved towards the newcomers, so the men of both the Sharm and Nekhel commands fell in behind her, leaving Tsibekti standing beside Saiid, who was armed with her handgun and was in charge of Aman and Hamid.