Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  He’d placed temptation before his roommate on dozens of occasions – opportunities to exploit other students, to get on the make when out and about in the local area, yet the big dope had only followed; he’d never led. Not once had he taken the initiative to grab money or dole out harm. Only when coaxed, prodded or ordered into it had the fool become involved, but when that switch was flicked everyone in his presence had to take a step back. It was as if some inner rage came to the surface, some muscle memory that fuelled the pummelling beatings he meted out, as if he were remembering his father, or the bullies, and all the kickings he’d endured as a kid. Afterwards he seemed able to shrug it off as normal – one of those things. You told me to do it, I did it, it’s done. Violence comes as no shock when you’ve always been served it for breakfast.

  In the right hands he was harmless, and with the right guidance he was useful. The Egyptian Police could use a man like that. The army would have been a better bet but he hadn’t applied. Waleed had considered using him for the finer arts, interrogation and the like, but he was just too thick to take on board the subtleties involved; the fine line between giving and taking during a protracted period of high-level questioning would have been lost on the big man, so Waleed had allowed him his space and let him drift off into a local unit.

  Obviously that had been a mistake. Somewhere along the way, Big Suit had grown to enjoy his trade, to relish the abuse and the power. How he’d leapt at the prospect of blackmailing Waleed was a clear example. The large, slow unit that Waleed had once known would never have jumped to that option by himself. He’d obviously learned – probably under the influence of a user. Waleed decided to deal with the dope after he’d dealt with the dope’s boss. Waleed’s remit was to wipe out extremists in the Sinai Desert, but he’d watched with deepening sadness as a growing number of people took to their certain deaths at sea having paid for the privilege.

  Sam woke with a yelp like an unexpected outburst from a nervous dog. Isla had tugged on the line between them, as she, with the diligence he had taught her, had kept watch. She was staring through the binoculars over the top of the spray hood.

  “I can see lights, Daddy.” She was breathy, not speaking aloud but conspiratorial.

  “How long have I been asleep?” he asked her.

  “Ages and ages,” she said.

  It was pitch-black and the auto-steering gear was working hard making adjustments according to the wind and set course.

  Sam realised it was the first time Isla had kept watch at night. He glanced at the chart-plotter readout, then stood with her. He returned to the GPS and then the radar to make sure there were no dangers ahead. He must have been out for at least three hours.

  “You must be freezing, wee love,” he said. He’d never expected her to be on deck with him for so long.

  “I’m ok,” she shrugged.

  Tough little nut. Like him, she struggled more with the heat than the cold.

  The coast appeared clear with no ships or rocks blocking their way.

  “Did any of the others come up on deck?” he asked his daughter.

  “No,” she said. “They’re sleeping, I think.”

  He did the sums: forty miles from shore, visibility must be very good for the lights to be so clear and they were sailing at six knots. Not good. It would take them about six hours to get close enough to put his plan into action. By then the sun would be up. There were no circumstances in which he would make the same mistakes he had in Crete – no assumptions this time. He didn’t imagine for a moment the Italians would welcome stray migrants or that their suspicions wouldn’t fall on him as they had in Greece. He wanted the family off his boat and safely ashore before anyone realised where they’d come from. Then he wanted to retrieve his dinghy and fix the engine. Deniability was essential, so they had to land at night, which meant they were going too fast. Sam unclipped himself from Isla and reclipped her to one of the cockpit hoops. He took the furling rope for one of the headsails and began to pull it in, noticing how much better his back felt as he did so. The sleep had performed wonders and his muscles ached just a little less. They would sail around at forty miles offshore and get some rest while the sun shone, then make their way towards land a few hours before sunset. It would give him time to brief the family and demonstrate the dinghy and outboard engine to Sinbad. Sam’s excitement grew as he relished the prospect of ridding himself of the unwelcome presence, but his anticipation was tempered with the inevitable backlash and sadness that the loss of a friend would bring to Isla.

  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.”
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br />   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.