by Finn Óg
Charlie
Published by Gatekeeper Press
3971 Hoover Rd. Suite 77
Columbus, OH 43123-2839
www.GatekeeperPress.com
Copyright © 2017 by Finn Óg
All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
ISBN: 9781619847293
eISBN: 9781619847309
Printed in the United States of America
“One crowded hour of glorious life,
is worth an age without a name.”
For Lachlan, never forgotten.
One Zero
I knew that they’d come for me. Deep down. It was inevitable really, despite my precautions. I think I might have been waiting for it. Perhaps even willing it.
Guilt is unfathomable. I felt a lot of guilt. About how I’d chosen to earn a living. About the risks I was taking. About not having been there, when I was truly needed. I was guilty of pursuing vengeance, satisfaction, and purpose. I was guilty of grief.
As soon as I woke that night, I knew I hadn’t been clever enough. I had planned, certainly, but they’d found us. My initial thought was that I had underestimated them. In actual fact, I had misidentified them.
*****
I really had tried to stick to what I knew, when I got home. The problem was what I knew. I knew boat work, so that was where I began. But that notion slipped away, like the ashes I’d shaken into a gentle sea breeze. My principle concern was Isla, our daughter. Well, my daughter. For three days, she had suffered without me, as the Corps thrashed around to get me replaced and repatriated from Bastion. She was with my folks, which was as good as it could possibly have been, but nothing makes up for a parent, and she had only one left. I knew she would be terrified of losing another, and so I knew too, that I would never wear webbing again.
The mind, well mine at least, tends to turn to the practical as a protection measure, an escape from emotion. For three days, I kept the grief at bay, slowly working through what I would do, and how I would do it. Others said I was in shock. I wasn’t. Perhaps because of my training, perhaps because of my nature, I just worked towards securing a way forward for us.
The end game was to wrap Isla in love, to assure her that nobody could harm her, or me, and that she was safe. I knew how obsessed she could become with little things. I recall being similar myself, when I was so small. Because of what had happened to her mum, she would be terrified of every noise at the house, every opening of the front door, every coming and going. The solution presented itself in a straightforward fashion; we wouldn’t live in a house. But then the problems crowded in, as the head-banging judder of the transport flight rattled me all the way home. Who would buy a house like ours, given what had happened there?
Admittedly, there was a part of me that enjoyed the musings of revenge. I had been equipped with the necessary skills, and I would use them. I tried again and again not to focus on such urges, but my planning was frequently overcome by them. In between such blistering impulses, I carved out a future for my daughter and I.
Much revolved around her nature. She deserved a beautiful life, to be sheltered from the type of conflict that had brought her mother and I together. I suspected that one day, Isla would follow in her mother’s footsteps – a frightening prospect. Her Mam and I had met amid horror, as she worked to preserve life, and I to extinguish it. Isla had inherited her kindness. I could see it in every subtle gesture she made. She was programmed to be as gentle, as I was built for brutality. Admittedly her mother had managed to coax some dormant empathy from deep within me, but keeping that at the surface was a constant challenge.
*****
Amid the slapping and tapping of rigging and waves, a single creak seemed out of place. It was possible that an army of otters had clambered aboard again, and that I had been roused by their tails hammering the deck. But I’d been around some tight corners in the preceding months, and it just didn’t feel like that.
A barely perceptible heave of the hull to port confirmed it; there was someone above me. I stood silent, waiting for the next step to betray the visitor’s position. The aluminium hull was solid, but only a ballerina would have the grace and balance to move undetected, just a few inches over my head.
The days of sweat and screaming with Yank SWAT teams told me to draw the intruder below deck, to let the confined-combat training kick in, but I had more to protect that night than a nuclear submarine. I opted for the rear hatch. The cover lifted silently. My emergence was masked by the rubber dinghy I’d slung on deck before dinner. I was half in, half out of the boat. I felt the same exposure my pals must have endured in the desert, gunning out the roof of our amphibious Vikings vehicles, as I’d gazed at their bootlaces below. I lifted myself up. And that’s when the darkness returned.
I’d never felt fear like that. When I came around, the alarm hit me instantly. Where was Isla? I jolted my face upwards from the deck of our cutter. My cheek had been glued to the teak by my own slabber. Again, the thought crossed my mind, where was my daughter? What the hell had happened?
I rounded on myself. Instinct I suppose. What was behind me? Had I been hit? How long had I been out?
I saw the hulk of a man lying a few feet away, belly-up, motionless. I rolled over the coach roof, landed on his chest, and struck him hard, but he was plainly gone. His eyes betrayed his method of departure. Who the hell was he?
I tore below deck, through the main cabin, and wrenched open the bunk door. There lay Isla, sound asleep, her little arm hanging from under the covers. I crouched beside her and hugged her tight. Then I paused, muttering my thanks. Over and over. She could sleep through a gale, my wee five-year-old.
“Hallo, Daddy,” she muttered, not even half awake, and rolled back into the heat. As she turned away from me, I noticed the blood on my thumbs.
I returned to the deck, and scoured the surrounding sea. Nothing. I walked around the boat, eyes trained towards the water line, looking for a kayak, or dinghy. Still, nothing. Realising that time was short, I skipped below and fired up the radar. It took an interminable time to acquire its position and begin sweeping. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I returned to the dead man on deck. I tried to re-boot my memory as I searched him.
We were anchored miles from land. If he had been delivered by boat, surely I would have seen it escape? Surely the radar would have picked it up?
But there was no dinghy, he had no identification, and worst of all, he was dry.
Two
It was her smile that had disarmed me, as I squelched up a beach in Gaza. Thankfulness shone out of her.
The call had come as we were training at our home port in Poole, in the south of England. From there we’d been flown to Faslane Naval Base in Scotland, a place with which we were all familiar. We’d gathered our kit together, been briefed, and boarded a submarine. It had dived mid-Med, and one hundred nautical miles off the shore of Egypt, we were launched to the surface. In the swell, we inflated the boat, ripped the outboard engine from its waterproof bag, and motored further east. The risk increased as we got closer to Israeli territorial waters. The boat had to meander at a snail’s pace to avoid radar interest. Ten miles from the coast we attached our fins over lightweight boots, and returned to the sea. The coxswain, a Marine attached to our SBS unit, turned tail, and left four of us to kick ashore. Then it all started to go tits up.
Two miles from the sand, and on top of a rolling sea, we watched as rockets, presumably from an Israeli helicopter gunship, lit the night sky. I knew instinctively that they’d struck
where we had intended to land, and that our chances of success were narrowing with each explosion. Because of the nature of our operation, we had virtually no comms. Israeli action so close to the coast meant that our commanding officer would not be able to send an assault craft to collect us. The search would take too long, and the Israelis would probably spot the boat, sparking a diplomatic inquiry, and a shit-fight with an ally. So we swam, and beached in hell.
Two of my team fanned right, the other left, as I made my way up the beach, tired and restricted by my wet kit. The night was black, as we had predicted, and we were wary of any impact the gunship attack might have had. We had not expected to find it so quickly. I was nearly on top of them before I realized what was happening. I stood stock still as another rocket flash lit the sky to my left, and betrayed the bodies before me. One appeared to be crouched over another, as it lay prostate on the sand. There was a moment before the darkness was restored, when a face turned towards me.
I clutched my knife, ready to remove the obstacle if necessary. My intentions were subverted though, when I heard her speak. “Who’s there? For the love of God will ye not help me?”
I had been away from home for a very long time. In my early twenties, I’d taken a train with its own special stop to Devon. Thereafter I’d only returned to Ireland for holidays. Now, on a beach in the Middle-East, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a war, I was being asked for help by an Irishwoman. Her voice stripped me of all my sensibilities. I was supposed to lead the operation, to ignore all else and get the job done. Against all reason, I took my LED light from my belt, and shone it in her face.
That smile. In the midst of deepest misery, that’s what caught me. It was a smile of hope, of faith. I hesitated longer than I should have on her beautiful face, and then panned the torch down. Her arms, to the elbows, were smothered in blood. The child at her knees was labouring for air, and my decision was made. The med pack in my kit was unrolled, and without a word I went to work, packing what was plainly a catastrophic bleed. I applied a tourniquet to the boy’s upper leg, knowing that with it, he would lose his limb-without it, he would lose his life.
I refused to speak to the woman for as long as I was able, but the compulsion, as I finished, overwhelmed me. She asked me a few questions-I responded with silence. She must have sensed that I was not there for good reason, and so she, too, fell silent. As I packed up to go, she put her arms around me, and hugged me hard.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
‘’No hassle,” I replied, and I felt the shock shudder through her. Even with just two words, my accent is indisputable. She pulled back and although the white light had burned my night vision, I could sense her staring at me. Just then my team crawled up from behind, and swearing like the sailors they were, made clear their feelings on contact with the natives.
We extracted, my mates still cursing me. I knew though, somehow, that I’d see that woman again. I could not have imagined how, such was the simultaneous humanity and depravity of what our next meeting would bring.
*****
The fact that the intruder had not swum to our boat, really unnerved me. I’d chosen the anchorage for security, and privacy, so where was his accomplice? How had the dead man got on board, and where was his dinghy?
The closeness of the call summoned huge anger in me. What if he had killed me and left? What would my five-year-old have done? She would have been terrified. Called out for me, and like a good wee woman, she would eventually have put on her life jacket to come and find me. If I’d been forced overboard, she’d have been stranded. If I’d been killed, she’d have been orphaned.
I knew instantly where to dispose of the man. Isla and I had roamed an island not three days before which had a natural fall in the centre. From its marshy middle grew bracken and reeds, and the stagnant damp struck me, even then, as a perfect place to dispose of someone.
There is no easy way to transport a body. Even small people seem to weigh more when dead. This was something I had learned the hard way in Helmand, when a tough little Bootneck had bled out down my back. I wasn’t prepared to take my daughter ashore with a body in the bilges. I feared that whoever had accompanied the intruder might arrive at the dock with a car full of cops. Isla had lost too much already, and separation from her daddy was not an option.
The answer came easily enough. I opened the deep cockpit locker and hauled out an enormous canvas bag, which contained the old mainsail. I lashed the sail soundly, toppled it back into the locker, and took the bag on deck. Tearing through the dead man’s pockets proved fruitless, save for a packet of Drum tobacco, papers, and a wind resistant lighter. All of this was sealed in a small plastic sandwich bag, the type I occasionally sent my daughter to school with. At least it told me that he wasn’t a man accustomed to being indoors.
His features lacked the Slavic, Eastern European angularity I’d half expected, given the way I had been occupying my time until then. His identity really was a mystery. His shoes were from Clark’s, his jeans were from Next, and his t-shirt could have been from any high-street store. His belt was equally unremarkable, but for the fact that its circumference was tiny, in comparison to his shoulders. The base of his shoes had a bit of a tidemark, like he’d stepped in a puddle, but his feet had not been submerged. His back was moist, and his t-shirt stuck to it, and he looked fit enough, despite the fags.
I unfastened the main halyard shackle, looped it around his ankles, and winched him into the air, cursing the deep bloodstain he’d left on my timber. I took twenty feet of spare chain from a bucket in the bilge, and dropped it into the bottom of the canvas bag. Opening it at the neck, I drew it up and over the dangling corpse. It stopped just beyond his waist, and I could hear the man’s head make contact with the chain. I had little time left before he stiffened beyond manipulation, so I let him down and folded his legs into the makeshift shroud. A rolling hitch with a loop secured the bag, and I used the main halyard again to lift the whole lot over the side, and into the water.
With the carcass secured about three feet below the hull, and the deck scrubbed as clear as I could make out in the half-light, I did two things I generally tried to avoid. I sat in the cockpit and rolled myself a dead man’s cigarette, and worked backwards through my past. I had to fathom out who had planned to kill me, in light of what that would have meant for my daughter, now that her mum was gone.
*****
We’d been deployed, we thought, to protect a CHIS, a Covert Human Intelligence Source. I assumed it had been a request from the spooks, from Mi5 or 6, but we were never told. It seemed likely that some British agent inside an Irish republican paramilitary group, had found themselves at the centre of an arms swap with Palestinian militants. That agent must have passed the intelligence to his or her handlers, and that resulted in the four of us being sent to Gaza.
Back then I’d been a “volunteer” in a special unit, the SBS, or Special Boat Service. It’s a bit like the SAS, except wetter. Our orders were to board an Irish ship, which was attempting to carry humanitarian aid into Gaza. The brief was to locate some dodgy old Semtex explosive, and extract with it. All I could work out was that the agent must have been worth keeping. Sending us into the middle of yet another upsurge in conflict between Israel and Hamas was no everyday call. What I couldn’t work out was why British Intelligence had allowed the explosives to get on board the boat at all. If the Israelis ever found out that their allies, the Brits, had known that such a volatile substance was being shipped to its enemies, they’d be pretty pissed off. Anyway, it seemed fairly straightforward to us. Swim, land, locate the ship, take the stuff, extract. Of course, it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Three
The night I met my wife, Shannon, rattled through my mind on the flight home from Afghanistan. I stared at the coffins lashed to the base of the C17’s vacuous cargo bay, and thanked God that I hadn’t known the poor unfortunates inside. It was almost laughable that some idiot at Kandahar Airfield thought
it acceptable to place a bereaved Bootneck beside caskets. I imagine that was part of the grieving process, seeing death in everything, and tumbling through a life short-lived. It seemed important to remember our beginning together, now that we had our end. It was almost comforting to interrogate the detail about how we’d bonded over a terrible conceit.
I was ushered off the plane on the blind side. This prevented the relatives of the dead from seeing a bedraggled Marine emerge on foot, while their loved ones were carried, draped in the symbols of an unreciprocated loyalty. The dead Guardsmen had been woefully unprepared for Taliban tactics. I’d often seen them, marauding through the dusk, sky-lined and making noise, unconscious to the signs of mines and ambush.
From the Royal Air Force Base Lyneham, I was taken to the nearby military town of Wootton Bassett to buy some civilian clothes. English officers could travel freely in their kit, but I had to fly from Bristol to Belfast, where attitudes towards the UK military varied hugely.
It wasn’t until I reached the civilian airport that a plan began to emerge. It has always been thus, my mind and heart darkening for long periods as I wallow in the horrors, but on every occasion, something has pointed me in the right direction. Thereafter, I have been able to work hard to get to that point in my imagination, where everything will be as good as it can be. Perhaps it’s a form of internal therapy, where I listen to myself moan, and eventually shake it off.
Dressed in badly fitting clothes, I found myself starting to struggle with the imminent reunion with my daughter. My throat grew thick, and I could feel the backs of my eyes flounder in a rising tide. I knew that without a distraction, I might lose a fight I’d become accustomed to winning; that against any betrayal of emotion.
Mercifully, there was a vacant seat with a discarded newspaper upon it. I whipped it up before me and opened it at a random page. Breathing deeply and scanning hard, my eyes fell upon an advert for an auction to be held just outside Belfast. “No reserve!” it screamed, listing an aluminium sailing boat as the key lot. I had no idea at that stage what it was worth, or what it might sell for, but I knew that I would buy it. It felt as though my dead wife, in her gentle way, had drawn me towards it. From that point on I had a goal. The plan fell into place on the short hop home.
