Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  Buddy eased the speedboat’s outboard into reverse and drifted back until he was abeam Invincible’s stern. By looking at the markings on the ship’s hull, he could gauge the depth of the water she drew. He’d already guessed twenty-four feet. At eight metres, he was only about two feet out.

  He turned the speedboat to starboard again, and headed for the marina, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. When he was exactly on course, he checked the tiny portable compass he’d suckered to the dashboard. Returning to the marina, underwater, he’d need a course of 260 degrees magnetic. He checked the course against the chart he’d already bought at the marina chandlery. The course was spot on. He then measured the distance between the two points, estimating it on the chart at a little over five hundred metres. Swimming in slack water, with full gear, five hundred metres would take about twenty-five minutes. With two bottles, and a maximum work depth of twenty-six feet, that would give him a residue of fifteen minutes to find the ship, locate the target area, and plant the charges. Fifteen minutes. He glanced over his shoulder at the huge warship, wondering whether it would be enough, marvelling at how cool he was about it all. Just another calculation, Just another job.

  It was nearly lunchtime on the second day before Connolly realized how badly Jude needed help.

  He’d taken her out in the morning, pushing the wheelchair up the narrow road beside the farmhouse. They’d walked for perhaps a mile, the road getting steeper and steeper, a cold damp windy day, the tops of the mountains hidden in cloud. Scullen’s male nurse, a dim, rather sullen man of about thirty, had dressed Jude for the trip. She was wearing an extra pullover, and a heavy green anorak that didn’t quite fit. She looked paler than ever, and she didn’t bother to answer the odd question that Connolly addressed to the back of her head.

  After a while, they stopped. Connolly had made some sandwiches from a loaf he’d found in the kitchen, and a couple of tins of sardines. He unwrapped them, offering one to Jude. She nodded, and he knelt by the wheelchair, feeding them to her. She chewed for a moment, and then swallowed the first mouthful.

  “Nice,” she said. “Real good.”

  They talked for a while about picnics they’d enjoyed, Connolly sitting on the ground, leaning back against one of the wheels. She told him about holidays she’d taken as a kid, out on a bunch of islands off the North Carolina coast, place called Cape Hatteras. They’d had bake-outs on the beach. They’d eaten clams and fresh mullet. It had seemed a rare adventure. She asked for another bite of sandwich, and Connolly reached up. The skin on her face was cold to the touch. She bit the corner off the triangular sandwich and played with it in her mouth, and Connolly found himself wondering what kind of woman she really was, she’d really been, when her body worked properly, and life wasn’t the gift of passing strangers.

  She fell silent and he glanced up. She was staring down at her lap.

  “Is it me,” she said, “or do I hear water?”

  Connolly smiled. Ireland was full of water, especially round here, out in the west. The mountains were crisscrossed by streams, ribbons of water tumbling down the rocks. The previous night, the sound had sent him off to sleep, water in a gully outside his window. He smiled.

  “You hear water,” he confirmed.

  “No. Look. Underneath. Please.”

  He glanced up at her. She looked frightened. He turned round, and looked beneath the wheelchair. She was right. Water was dripping through the canvas seat, onto the gravel beneath. He dipped his finger in the puddle and smelled it.

  “Yours,” he said, “sorry.” He got up. “What do you want me to do?”

  She looked round. Fifty yards away there was a clump of pine trees in a hollow amongst the rocks. The wind had stripped the pines and the ground beneath was soft with needles.

  “Take me there,” she said. “We have to do something. It’s bad otherwise.”

  Connolly pushed the wheelchair to the trees. The wind felt cold on his face. He stopped. “What now?” he said.

  “You lift me off,” she said, “you bend down and I fall forward over your shoulder. Grade One stuff. Fun if you’re into contact sports.”

  Connolly smiled at her. “I’m a humble Volunteer,” he said. “That’s the last thing I’m into.”

  She looked at him.

  “OK, wise guy,” she said, “just do it.”

  Connolly did what she asked, folding back the footrests on the wheelchair, getting down on his hands and knees, and pulling her body towards him. She fell over his shoulder, slack, like a bag of coal. In the open air, the smell wasn’t quite so bad. He laid her body gently on the pine needles. She looked up at him. She winked.

  “You’ve done this before,” she said, “for real.”

  He returned the wink. “Maybe,” he said. “What now?”

  “Take my bottoms off,” she said, “roll up my sweater. You’ll find a tube and a plastic bag. The tube comes out of me. The bag’s full. There’s a valve on the tube. You seal the valve and change the bag.” She smiled. “Like I said. Grade One.”

  Connolly rummaged in the holdall they’d brought with them. He found two spare bags. They were marked “Sterile”, sealed in Cellophane. They were about the size of a paperback book. He turned back to her and unzipped her anorak. Underneath, she had two sweaters. He rolled them both up. Then the T-shirt. Then, finally, the tops of the tracksuit trousers. He glanced up at her face.

  “Everything’s soaking wet,” he said.

  “Yuck.”

  “I mean it.”

  “OK.” Her eyes flicked left, to the holdall. “There’s spares in the bag. Change the sweaters and the tracksuit. There’s no spare T-shirt. Forget it.”

  Connolly nodded, arranging the dry clothes on the pine needles beside her body. Then he turned back to the bag. The bag was full, seeping urine at one corner. He found the valve on the tube and shut it. He moved her body slightly, easing it to one side. Then he saw the bandage.

  It was huge. It was high on her left buttock, an untidy oblong of lint, taped at the edges with sticky brown plaster.

  “Your bandage,” he said, “that’s wet too.”

  “Shit.”

  “What shall I do?”

  He glanced up at her. Her eyes were closed. If she could die, he thought suddenly, if it was within her grasp, under her control, this would be the moment, half naked, up some freezing Irish mountain, in the hands of a man she didn’t even know. She opened her eyes. Her voice was very quiet. She didn’t phrase it as a question. She just told him.

  “There’s a fresh bandage,” she said, “in the bag.”

  Connolly reached for the holdall again. He found the bandage. He used a towel to mop her dry. He glanced at her face. She was staring up at the trees.

  “Change the bag first,” she said quietly, “before you do anything else.”

  Connolly did what she asked, removing the full bag of urine, and attaching one of the new ones. He put the full bag beside the wheelchair.

  “OK?” she said.

  He nodded, opening the valve again, and watching the thin trickle of urine emerge from her belly and trickle through to the new bag.

  “OK,” he said.

  “So now take the bandage off,” she said, “and clean it up.”

  Connolly nodded, glancing up at her. Then, as carefully as he could, he began to ease the wet bandage off, loosening the strips of plaster inch by inch.

  “Be brave,” she said. “Rip it. I can’t feel a thing.”

  He looked at her for a moment. Then he did as he was told, pulling the bandage diagonally, one corner to the other, a single movement. The bandage came off. Underneath, there was a hole the size of a tea-cup. It was black and yellow at the edges. It went deep. He could see glimpses of bone at the bottom.

  “Shit,” he said quietly.

  He folded the soiled bandage and buried it under the pine needles. Then he returned to the ulcer. He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like a war wound, the kind of hole a lump o
f shrapnel makes, cratering the flesh. Here and there, the flesh was still healthy, still red, but for the most part, the wound oozed pus, the tissue turning to yellowish slime, and then dying completely as the infection bit ever deeper.

  There were balls of cotton wool in the bag. Connolly took a handful and began to clean out the wound, scouring out the pus and slime, trying to get down to the healthy tissue. He had no idea whether what he was doing was medically recommended, or even safe, but the stuff offended him. It represented death and decay. It was death and decay. He looked up. “This hurting?” he said.

  Jude looked at him and shook her head. “Wish it did,” she said.

  Connolly registered the answer and mumbled an apology, working as fast as he could, knowing that a chill could be as dangerous as gangrene. Jude had given him a brief account of the conditions that could hurt her the previous evening. He’d asked for it because he had some dim belief that he was now responsible for her well-being, perhaps even her survival. She’d gone through the list without any evident emotion – damp, cold, kidney infection, bladder infection, chest infection, bedsores, ulcers, gangrene – smiling at the end when he’d asked her how badly each of these afflictions could affect her.

  “Affect me?” she’d said. “They’ll kill me. Any one of them.”

  Now he scissored an oblong of lint and laid it carefully over the ulcer. The lint dimpled in the middle where the hole was. He taped it round the edges, noticing that even here the flesh was beginning to yellow.

  The bandage secure, he quickly checked the new bag for drips, and then changed her trousers and her top. She was thinner than he’d imagined, the bones of her rib cage noticeable beneath the pale flesh. He pulled down the bigger of the two replacement pullovers and nodded at the wheelchair.

  “Party’s over?” she said.

  He smiled. “Afraid so.”

  He lifted her up, very slowly, and folded her over his shoulder, careful to avoid touching the top of her left leg. He carried her back over the pine needles to the wheelchair, and settled her as comfortably as he could, only realizing at the end of it that comfort was irrelevant. She could feel nothing. She was dead. He kicked the full pack of urine over the edge of the road, watching it bounce for twenty or thirty feet, and then burst on a rock. Then he began to push the wheelchair back down the mountain towards the house. Off to the right, the flank of the mountain fell away, nearly sheer, to the valley floor. The weather was clearing a little now, shafts of yellow sunlight spearing through the ragged overcast. He could smell heather, after the rain, and peat. The wind keened as they left the last of the trees.

  They walked in silence for a minute or two. Then Jude asked him to stop.

  “Tell me something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “How bad is it?”

  “What?”

  “The ulcer.”

  Connolly stepped round the wheelchair, and chocked one of the wheels with a rock. It seemed rude talking to the back of someone’s head.

  “It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s very bad.”

  She nodded. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at her. “You need help. Proper help. You need a hospital. I’m going to fix it.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll phone.”

  “There is no phone.”

  “I’ll find one.” He shrugged. “Somewhere else.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her, recognizing the tone in her voice. It began as scepticism, but it ended up as something else. She didn’t want a hospital. She wanted out. She was eyeing him, anticipating him, enjoying the brief telepathic comforts of this unspoken conversation of theirs. She turned her head to the right. The road clung to the side of the mountain. There was nothing between this thin ribbon of pocked tarmac and the drop to the valley floor. She glanced up at him.

  “Well?” she said.

  Connolly shook his head.

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you won’t do it?”

  “No.”

  She thought about it for a moment or two. It started to rain again, a thin fine drizzle. Then she looked up at him.

  “You’re like Buddy,” she said glumly, “you have absolutely no imagination.”

  When Buddy finally got down to the yacht, midafternoon, Harry had been waiting for nearly an hour. The old man emerged from the cabin and levered himself carefully onto the marina pontoon.

  “Bloody silly boat,” he said, “to go across the Channel.’

  Buddy shrugged.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he said.

  “I thought they were paying you?”

  “They are.”

  “Then get yourself something half-decent. This thing belongs in the bath.”

  He looked Buddy in the eye and grunted, and Buddy watched him limp off towards his van, wondering what he was doing in the cabin in the first place. The boat was supposed to be secure. There were charts in there, the whole story mapped out in pencilled lines and tide tables and scribbled estimates of bottom time. Harry opened the back of his van. It looked nearly as old as he was. There was a skirt of rust around the bottom, and one of the tyres was completely bald. He glanced back over his shoulder.

  “You want this stuff,” he said, “or not?”

  Buddy walked across. The gear he’d asked for was piled neatly on the floor of the van. There was a closed circuit diving set with twin cylinders and a dive vest. There were two metal boxes about the size of cake tins, and a pair of magnetic clamps. There was a rubber dry suit, and a couple of face masks, and a weight belt, and a pair of flippers. Buddy looked at it all.

  “I don’t need the suit,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ll use my own.”

  Harry nodded, tossing the suit towards the front of the van. His hand strayed to the dive set.

  “You know this one? The Mark Six?”

  Buddy looked at it. The Mark Six was an American design, US Navy issue. Two cylinders of oxygen sat in a back frame. The back frame attached to a dive vest. At the front of the dive vest were two pockets. Each of these pockets contained a breathing bag. The diver inhaled air from one bag, and exhaled air into the other. The exhaled air was passed into a scrubber, which removed all the poisonous carbon dioxide, and was then recirculated into the inhalation bag. Oxygen from the cylinders at the back was carefully fed into the circuit, topping up the recirculated air. Buddy had used the system on a number of jobs, and liked it. It was efficient and it was safe. You stayed down longer and you didn’t produce bubbles. He smiled. Bubbles underwater would give him away in seconds, leaving a tell-tale trail on the surface. He looked at Harry and nodded.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  Harry frowned. “You going deep?” he said. “Big tanker?”

  Buddy shrugged. “Deep enough,” he said.

  “How deep?”

  “Thirty feet.” Buddy looked at him. “Why?”

  The old man shrugged. “Nothing,” he grunted. “Piece of piss.”

  He picked up one of the oxygen bottles.

  “They’re both fully charged,” he said, “one’s oxygen. One’s oxy-helium. You set the flow rate yourself.”

  “OK.”

  Harry gave him the cylinders. Between the two cylinders was a smaller bottle, black. Harry touched it.

  “I did the Baralyme this morning,” he said, “if you have to do it again, make sure the stuff settles. There’s more Baralyme in the box there.” He nodded at a small cardboard box in the back of the van. “Keep tapping the cylinder when you put it in. Otherwise you’ll be in the shit.”

  Buddy nodded. Baralyme was the chemical you used to fill the scrubber. The stuff removed all the carbon dioxide, and it came in granular crystals. If you weren’t careful when you refilled the scrubber, you got holes between the crystals, which meant you ended up breathing your ow
n exhaust. He’d worked with a guy in the Middle East who’d done just that. The funeral had been a quiet affair.

  Buddy stepped away from the van for a moment. He could see Eva walking down the pontoon. She was wearing an oilskin and a pair of yellow wellies. Just like any other weekend sailor. He looked at Harry.

  “What about the explosive?” he said.

  Harry nodded at the metal boxes. “You’ve got two charges,” he said, “RDX. Five kilos each.”

  “Detonators?”

  “They’re in the front.”

  Buddy looked at him for a moment. “How did you get aboard,” he said, “into the cabin?”

  “I knocked on the door.”

  “And?”

  “Your friend let me in.”

  “Ah,” Buddy nodded, “my German friend.”

  “Yeah. She went off for a while and left me to it.” He paused. “Who else is going?”

  Buddy shrugged. “Couple of guys,” he said, “no one you know.”

  “Need any help?”

  “No.” He smiled. “Thanks.”

  The old man looked at him for a moment or two, and then nodded, and Buddy sensed that something was wrong. Eva joined them. She’d bought fresh milk and some biscuits. She asked Harry whether he’d like a cup of tea. Harry shook his head and said no thanks. She smiled at him, and stepped aboard the yacht, disappearing into the cabin. Harry watched her go.