by Finn Óg
“I am a mother and I am widow,” said Alea looking stunned at what she had just said.
“It seems we have something in common, so,” he said softly.
“More,” she snapped at him, shaking herself from hurtful thoughts.
“I have been sailing on and off since my wife was killed.”
She gathered pace as if spitting it out would make it easier, like ripping off a plaster.
“I am wanted better life for Sadiqah. We were living in hole in ground.” She fixed her stare at the horizon. He could just make out the sheen on her left eye as the light faded.
“I wanted Isla to heal, but I went about it the wrong way. I took her away from other kids. I was being selfish. I wanted her close to me. I didn’t want to lose her too.”
“We were rich. We were rich and other people poor. They hated us. When Gaddafi killed, they hunted us. We lived like animals. In filth. In yards. We could not keep living like this.”
Sam didn’t know what to say without a prompt. Conscious of the rules he resisted the urge to ask a question.
“You did the right thing for Sadiqah. You got her out.”
“I got my husband murdered,” she said, which seemed an odd phrase to use for drowning but Sam could just about see the logic.
Although the light was gone he knew she was weeping. He reached out to place his hand on her shoulder but she drew away and eventually went below. He knew he wouldn’t see her again that night.
It didn’t take long for Habid to work out what had happened. His gluttonous imagination allowed him to envisage it unfolding.
The sky had been peppered with rounds from reckless runts and their trigger-happy Kalashnikovs. Dozens must have died as gravity dictated – a law lost on idiots issued with rifles they have no idea how to use. They would have besieged the jails hunting for their comrades – enemies of a state that was crumbling around their ears. Gaddafi was on the run, the Jamahiriya was over. Prisons doors would have been rammed and the guards would have fled. The inmates would have wrecked and ruined as they left, destroying the fabric of their incarceration. Furniture and filing cabinets would have been tossed from the landings, fires might have been set. But above all, they would have groped for the gates, for freedom, for open space and their families and revenge.
They would have hunted the wardens, their torturers. They’d have beaten them to the ground, seized their weapons and summarily executed them in a frenzy. Then they would have streamed into the streets, kicking up dust, jubilant and ignorant of the papers they’d left coasting in the breeze at their backs.
And then came cunning in the shape of Habid, a man able to play for both sides and none, with no ideal greater than himself.
“Let me go,” he pleaded. “The regime is collapsing. If you show me mercy, I shall tell them you are to be spared.”
Habid lifted the butt of his rifle and swung it into the teeth of the moaning prisoner in the back. He laughed at the notion. He knew it was over – that anyone with a whiff of the opulent scent of the leader and links to the regime would be dragged out and slaughtered. It was convention. Saddam, the Baathists, dug up from the dirt and swung by the throat. It would happen to Gaddafi’s men too if they were lucky. The man in the back could identify him in such a manner, so he hauled the wounded wretch from the jeep and bundled him into the prison searching for a cell far from the front entrance where cries wouldn’t be heard. Inside he found cage doors thrown open, defecation smeared on the cell soles. The escapees must be ripe, he thought, as he plunged deeper into the darkness. They found a staircase and descended slowly, a sixth sense cautioning them. There was no noise, no reason for alarm, yet Habid and his prisoner adopted the same approach, their instinct being to creep, alert to movement. They were afraid of attack but neither knew why.
Down corridors they padded as silent as their moist sandals allowed. The stench came like steam barrelling towards them – a mixture of faeces and decomposition. Their heightened senses insisted they turn but Habid’s greed drove him on. He had an opportunity like no other and he wanted no loose ends. The prisoner could not be allowed to share his story.
Yet Habid had not the appetite for killing. Not directly. He didn’t care if people died, so long as he was in the clear. If he just did what he was told, then he was fine: he had delivered the accused to prison – no problem. He knew they would die there but not by his hand. He had been in a firing squad once but hadn’t pulled his trigger. He’d felt nothing for the victim yet ensured his prints weren’t on the corpse.
Similarly, he had chosen not to dispatch the prisoner in the yard. He would leave him in the bowels of the jail and his questionable conscience clear. Death, if it came, would be natural, not of Habid’s doing.
Then a shuffle, like a dog on a chain, alerted them to the presence of a stranger. Habid froze and his prisoner stiffened beside him. They stood in silence for a full minute hunting for confirmation. Had they heard metal links drag? In the unlikeliest of alliances, prisoner and guard looked at one another bound by a predicament in which a greater enemy might unite them. Habid took his hand from the man’s arm and gently reached out to undo the cuffs. The prisoner’s jaw had been badly broken by the rifle butt – he was unable to speak, yet he looked up with gratitude. Habid doubted his usefulness in a fight but if their enemy was animal, surely it would attack the weaker target first.
A whisper came to them, a ricochet off the corridor wall. Habid relaxed. Their foe was human. He had feared the feral dogs used in the prisons. He called out.
“Who is there?”
“Help us, please. They have locked us up. We have children here. Please!”
The voice was a woman’s and she was immediately hushed. He heard a whimper of a child and then a man’s voice.
“Whoever is there, please release the women and children. They have done nothing wrong.”
The logic of what was happening appeared to Habid like an epiphany – his intellect so keen that he moved immediately to cash in. A fast turn with a raised elbow rattled the prisoner’s hanging jaw unnecessarily ensuring his silence. He reattached a cuff to one wrist and dragged the mute man into the darkness.
“I have a man here, a filthy dog,” he called, willing his instincts to be correct but hedging his bets. If he’d got it wrong, he’d require some wriggle room.
He edged closer to the noises and eventually came to a cage door. It was hard to make out but there were a dozen shapes inside, some huddled, some tensed, all utterly contained.
“Who are you?” said Habid.
A man stepped forward from the gloom.
“We are ordinary families taken from our homes by Gaddafi’s men. They beat us and brought us here. We do not know why.”
Habid’s instincts had been correct. He’d stumbled upon payday.
“What men?” He sought confirmation.
“From the regime.”
Habid’s eyes narrowed in knowing suspicion. “If that is true, then why were you not released when the others escaped?”
Even in the gloom the man could be seen to shift uneasily. “They are like a pack of rats,” was all he managed.
“Why would they leave you here? You and women and children? Why would they not take you in the excitement of the Spring? What is different about you?”
The man stood silent while others turned away. That was enough for Habid. All the pieces fitted.
“You were of the regime,” Habid stated, “but Gaddafi turned against you.”
The man in the cage came to the bars and stared at him, a silent confirmation.
Habid pressed on. “Now you have enemies everywhere.”
“How can you say that?” asked the man.
Another adult stepped forward as if to hush their spokesman but the man held his arm behind him, his palm flat to stop the advance.
Habid sneered. “Because I have found your papers in the yard outside. I have read what people like you did.”
The second man in the cell c
ould hold his tongue no longer.
“So what did we do? What is it that we have done to justify this? We have not eaten in days. We have been tortured, beaten.”
“That is what Gaddafi has always done to informers – you must have known that.”
The first man held his stare, the second turned away.
Habid secured his position. “I have read arrest papers,” he riffed, speaking to the second man’s back. “Information to the Americans.” He tutted, mock scolding as a teacher might a child.
The man rounded, incensed. “Shut your face, you do not know what you are speaking of!”
A woman whimpered and Habid suddenly realised that his confirmed suspicions had come as news to some in the cell. The prisoners’ families had been unaware of their menfolk’s offences.
The first man held up his hands again, appealing for calm. “What we did, we did for Libya,” he said, uneasily. “We needed free of the leader. He was destroying our country.”
“What you did was pass on information for airstrike targets,” said Habid. “Little wonder the other prisoners had no sympathy for you. Little wonder they left you here to die. It is one thing to depose a leader, it is quite another to work for America and direct the slaughter of civilians.”
Habid’s tone was pragmatic rather than critical, which the first man sensed. He tried to appeal to Habid’s better nature.
“So what would you do with us, with our families?”
“You were well placed in the regime once upon a time,” said Habid – not quite a statement but not quite a question either.
“Yes,” the man said.
“So you have money?”
“Not in Libya but, yes, we have money.”
“And you must have had a plan to escape if you got caught?”
“We had prepared but we have no way of leaving. Not any longer. Now the tribes have taken over they will see us as people of the regime and will kill us. They will hang us in the streets and leave our bodies to rot.”
A woman behind him wailed at the description.
“There are others?” asked Habid.
“Many more,” said the man.
“Where is the money?”
The man stayed silent until a woman behind him rasped orders. “Tell him. Pay him. Get us out of here.”
The man took his gaze to a distant nothing and began to speak.
“The money is everywhere – Europe, Uganda, Egypt. We spread it to keep it safe.”
“How can you access it?”
“Not from Libya, but outside, yes. From a bank.”
“So,” Habid said with a little bow, “I can help you. I shall become your travel agent. Your very expensive travel agent.”
15
They needed a plan – they couldn’t just keep sailing west. They needed to know where they were headed to plot a course according to the weather forecast and get there before their food ran out. Feeding four wasn’t like feeding two, and Sam couldn’t afford another Sicilian escapade. There would be no unnecessary stops because under no circumstances could he afford to be boarded by customs. He was wary that a radio call may well have been issued seeking a yacht carrying migrants intent on depositing them somewhere in Europe. He knew any such alert would include critical information – the length and type of boat they were sailing, the description of the adults and children, the fact he was Irish.
Sam set the autohelm and began banging around the cupboards and bilges recovering every tin and packet they had stowed. He drew up an inventory and checked the water maker. Twelve days, he reckoned, of iron rations. He sat at the chart and realised how tight the whole thing would be. Although he hadn’t yet acknowledged it to himself, he knew where they were going. He needed people he could rely upon, not nutters and strange priests – trustworthy as he felt Father Luca to be.
He plotted a worst-case scenario based on the wind forecasts. As usual the breeze looked to be funnelling straight towards them from the Strait of Gibraltar where the Med met the Atlantic. It was a place he loved and hated passing through. On the way into the Mediterranean it often meant build-up and preparation for something dangerous; on the way out it represented a return home, to his family, to Ireland.
Eight days. Assuming they hit no seriously bad weather. He snapped a pencil in frustration, realising he had stabbed the needles of the navigation dividers right through the chart and impaled it on the table. They would be forced to sail through any storm – he couldn’t put into port and risk them all being sent to jail. When it was just Isla and him bobbing about, he’d avoided any and all foul weather. They simply found a harbour or marina and rocked it out tied up behind some breakwater. His anger at having to place her in a precarious situation grew, and he thought yet again about how his decisions had led him to a place where Isla’s level of safety, not just his own, was reduced.
The worst of it was that they needed to sail two full days into the Atlantic before they would get fair enough weather and wind direction to turn for Ireland. Three hundred nautical miles, he reckoned, of hard, brutal, bow-banging graft. Then they could bear north for an endurance run of nearly nine hundred miles with the breeze on the beam, sailing fast but rolling – a further six days.
It was no way to treat children – he didn’t want this for Isla. He wanted to cruise slowly off the coast of Europe, tying up every night, eating fresh fish not tinned curry. He wanted to hug the coast of Portugal, to throw down the anchor and row ashore and explore. To give Isla time to swim off sandy beaches, to savour every moment with her. He wanted a short dart across the English Channel to the Scilly Isles, a meal on Tresco, a last night in blue water and then a hop past the Tusker Rock and a spin up to Dublin. Instead they’d have to battle past the Bay of Biscay with its notorious seas and storms and rattle every bone in his little girl’s body. On current stocks they’d have to aim for Cork – Crosshaven probably, Kilmore Quay at best.
And the children would get sick out there in the Atlantic. The swell and the need to keep them below decks so much would take its toll, he was sure. So Sam was pissed off – angry at the world, at the weather, at their rations, at Alea for being angry with him, but most of all with himself for taking Isla and hiding her away, for not ignoring the screams in the water, for headbutting the cops, for not leaving the woman to the care of the Italians.
But he knew somewhere in the back of his conscience he had done what Shannon would have done. Despite his frustration and irritation there was that whisper in his ear.
It will be ok. You’re doing the right thing.
Habid had poured through his beautiful papers every chance he got. They were a fascinating, beautiful, intriguing and beguiling mix of information: who had done what, their confessions, their misdemeanours, their betrayal. It was all leverage. To a man like Habid it was cash.
He’d laid them out on the floor of an office in the prison while he worked out what he would do. He’d calculated that the safest place in Benghazi was the jail because nobody would want to return there, and the establishment of civic control was a short age away. He guessed this from the noise beyond the walls – the gunfire, the screaming vehicles, the shouting. There would be no prisoners, he concluded, not for a long time. Enemies of the new reckless and lawless state would be contained in the ground not the jail.
Gradually he built up
a picture by laying the rap sheet of the most senior at the top and cascading to the lowliest. It was quite a network. Among those working for the Americans were some of Gaddafi’s most senior men in security, in finance and, of course, in resources: oil. What the west was really interested in. The papers revealed how each informer had been recruited – some through blackmail, some with cash, all with the promise of a life outside Libya when the time came. Ohio, Florida, San Francisco were all listed in their interrogations as places they’d been promised homes for their families with an education and a solid job; the Americans had offered a life in the soft sun far from the desert sands.
An
d then something curious. The revelation that one man kept appearing in the accounts of the informers. An Englishman. Careful, precise and polite, this man was consistently present at debriefings where information was downloaded into the minds of the American handlers and fresh promises made or cash handed out. Not that these men required cash – they were at the very top of the regime, well paid and living comfortable lives.
How had they been caught? The question preoccupied Habid. There was no reference in the documentation – but of course there wouldn’t be. Gaddafi’s interrogators knew how they’d been caught and the prisoners were unlikely to dwell upon such matters, not while their dangly bits were wired to a twelve volt battery. It intrigued Habid because it was a key part of his research. If he was to become rich as a result of his discovery, he would need to avoid similar pitfalls. He had no intention of ending up in prison. And so he marched back down the black corridors of the jail to demand answers. What he was told was more than a little unnerving.
“Africa,” she said slowly, in awe, mesmerised by the view.
Alea hadn’t seen land for several days. She’d spent most of her time with the girls below deck, playing, drawing and creating. Isla literally looked up to her, eyes like saucers, captivated. Sam wondered what was going on in his daughter’s head, whether she viewed Alea as a mother figure or more of a teacher-type. He had dark moments where he imagined Isla might be jealous of Sadiqah because she had a mother instead of a father. He was under no illusions, given the choice a little girl would opt to keep her mum. It was natural. He’d have chosen the same. If he could swap places with Shannon, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
Alea emerged on deck just as the sun rose to reveal one of the planet’s most beautiful sights.
“Turn around,” said Sam, curious to see how she would react. “Look what’s on the other side.”
Alea did as she was bid and rotated gently. “Europe?” she gasped. “We are leaving Mediterranean?”