by Finn Óg
He couldn’t fault her scepticism. “Yeah, could be,” he conceded. “Whatever it was it seems to have worked, in part at least, but I’ll tell you this for nothing, Alea – I had nothing to do with it.”
The tears cascaded down her face and she eventually began to nod. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry, Sam.”
16
It felt peaceful to be back in the barren stone-strewn desert. Habid, his staff in hand and with a scarf wrapped tightly around his face, struck out for his hidey-hole halfway between Benghazi and Tobruk. He chose to travel on foot for the roadsides were riddled with rival tribes attempting to assert their authority. It was hard to imagine how but it had never been easier to get shot dead in Libya.
Habid couldn’t help congratulating himself. He’d retrieved the next batch of papers from his underwater hideaway and had them tucked safely into his belt. He’d selected the next group of travellers and would announce their names as if they’d won the lottery. They would emerge pale but grateful, their eyes batting in the sun – and they would do whatever he told them. There was nothing like a few months in a hole in the ground to instil discipline, even among those more accustomed to giving orders than receiving them.
He had held their feet to the fire from the moment he discovered them. Habid smiled at how clever his instincts had proven. Had he simply demanded a ransom for their release from that Benghazi jail, they would have known they were going to die and been unlikely to pay up. Anyone who chose to take that risk would part with money only once. Habid wanted security amid the madness into which his country was free-falling. He wanted repeat business, and the only way to get it was to supply a good service and receive recommendations so that others might present themselves for extraction. His wasn’t the sort profession one advertised on Facebook, so he had offered the prisoners something – a carrot to informers more familiar with a stick. It was something they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Hope.
Hope that they might one day live free again as the CIA had promised them but failed to provide. Hope in exchange for money that was useless amid their own detritus in the colon of a forgotten jail.
They were scared of everyone – of being caught by the militias, the tribes, Gaddafi loyalists, Egyptians, anyone. It made them subservient to Habid. He could ask them to strip naked and run barefoot over the rocky ground and they would do as they were bid.
Of course he had the expertise and the contacts – friends and colleagues at the border crossings who would let his little flock flow through. He knew how to pay enough but not too much. He knew to mix it up to prevent using the same checkpoint each time, which kept the border guards hungry for the little they got rather than cocky enough to ask for more. They too were glad of his business and eager to provide passage.
And it just got better and better. His deal with Tassels may have been forced upon him, and it was early days, but it was working well – so far. Months had passed since they’d first met and the dynamic between the two men had changed utterly. The few runs they had collaborated on had thrown up unexpected advantages – when Habid’s little caravans reached Egypt they were guaranteed a police escort, no less. Not official, not in uniform, but Tassels let everyone know he was a police officer and was there to help them. Habid delighted at the awe in which the flock held him when they heard that. They gazed upon Habid as if he were Moses leading them to safety across the sands.
And then in Alexandria they entered a bank and make the transfers. Habid always allowed them to make their calls to other exiles in Libya with enough cash to make a similar trip. Later, when he was sure the boats were in place and that Tassels was not about to stroke him, he extracted a sum of cash and shared it with the loathsome little cop. Placated, the jumpy Tassels then arranged to have him driven back to the border to begin all over again.
Yes, he mused as he struck out from Benghazi, it was a fine plan that refined like oil – added value and accumulated interest. And the best bit of all? Tassels was at his beck and call.
The weather forecast for the trip ahead was favourable – no storms, no floods. The desert was a dangerous place when the wind rose or the rain came. A person could end up swimming in the sands – drowning even. Most people refused to believe the speed at which rivers could be created from nothing but Habid had seen it many times. The gushing flow created by a downpour, the stones from the desert surface swept up -barrelling at shins and feet, wreaking damage, inspiring infection.
Habid looked at the stump of his own toe sticking out of his sandal like a beacon. The infection had passed but the pain hadn’t. He thought of Tassels and the deal they had reached. Then he thought of Big Suit and wondered where that thug had vanished to. And as his anger rose he again resolved to cut them out at the first opportunity – while causing them as much pain as possible.
Blind panic. It was a look similar to a first-time flyer’s face when their aircraft hits violent turbulence. Alea remained silent but her mouth was open and her eyes enormous as she stared askance at Sam pleading for confirmation they weren’t about to drown.
“This is how it will be for a few days,” he shouted. “It will be tough but we have to sail through it.”
“Days?” she yelled back, incredulous.
He just nodded, making wild adjustments to the helm to keep the boat on her feet. He’d reefed her down hard, two slabs and a storm jib, yet Sian was still on her ear, heeled hard over, riding the waves slowly, plummeting down the far side and hitting the trough with a shudder and bang.
Alea was reliving her hell. “Turn back,” she screamed.
“You will get used to it,” Sam assured her.
“No.” She shook her head with certainty. She moved to turn back into the cabin.
“If you feel sick, come up here,” he said. “You will feel better up here,” he yelled, but she was gone.
Sam had the engine running. He was confident the wind strength would carry them home when he turned, and even if they did run out of diesel, he would prefer to get through the hard part as quickly as possible. Besides, the batteries needed a good charge – without them the iPad would go flat and the children would go mad with boredom. That would also mean he’d have to navigate the old way because his screens would dim and he’d be compelled to spend long periods dead reckoning their position and down below at the chart table. Not good. At least the movies and games would distract the children while the boat was hurled all the way towards Biscay.
The previous day had been disciplined: Sam had laden his crew with information. He needed to be confident they understood his directions. He’d walked them around the boat, explained that they needed to clip their harnesses on at all times. He had shown them the life raft, the trigger line, how to cut its tethering straps and throw it into the water. He had stood Alea at the wheel and made her sail the boat for two solid hours, gently explaining how the sails worked, how to tease the boat closer to the wind and when to bear away. He wasn’t confident she had fully grasped the science of it – only time could teach her to feel how the boat behaved – but she was intelligent and the time wasn’t wasted.
His deepest fear was injury – not just to the girls or Alea, but to himself. If he got hurt, they would all be in real danger. As a leader of young Marines it had been Sam’s job to identify risks and threats and mitigate wherever he could, and now it was his job to keep those kids safe. As a consequence he found himself running through scenario after scenario, identifying dangers and flaws and loading Alea and the girls with instructions on what to do if A, B or C occurred. It had frightened them a little, he knew, but it was for the best.
Almost anything could go wrong in such a sea: the rig could come down potentially damaging the boat in the process; hands could get trapped in winches and under such loads fingers could get lost, blood spilled; catastrophic bleeds; concussions for those hurled about below deck; and the constant threat of being swept overboard were all real dangers. He’d tasked Alea with watching the radar like a hawk, another reas
on to get the batteries as full as possible. Sam didn’t tell her but he knew that in weather like this merchant ships routinely lost their cargo. Semi-submerged metal containers as big as their own boat could be hit at speed, which would send them to the bottom in seconds. Sam wanted to maximise the chances of spotting anything ahead of them.
As the hours passed they settled, uncomfortably, into a routine. He would call out once in a while and Alea’s hand would appear, acknowledging that she had consulted the radar screen and her thumb up indicating all was clear. If that changed, Sam would adjust course immediately then run below to the chart table to take a look. The girls were tucked in behind their lee cloths, full of Stugeron seasickness tablets. Sam was rotating them between Kwells and other brands, dosing them slightly beyond the recommended limits. He hoped they would sleep through as much of it as possible but the noise was atrocious. His approach was to act with confidence in the hope that his ease might spread among the others. In truth he was addled with guilt, seething like the hissing sea, that Isla was once again in danger because of his decisions made in haste.
Tassels resented having to collect the strangers. They went on the trips with the arrivals from the desert, but they certainly weren’t prisoners. They arrived all sorts of ways – by train, by road, even by sea. The rat had refused to explain where they came from or what their role was. Some were African, some could have been European – or Albanian perhaps, maybe even Bulgarian or from somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. He couldn’t tell because they refused to speak. They had the air of seasoned men ready for work. They had bags slung over their shoulders and were the only people permitted luggage. Each one of them declined the offer of life jackets.
Tassels didn’t like it one bit. They ignored him as if they’d been briefed to give him a wide berth. Worse still, they didn’t appear to pay. Tassels suspected the rat was doing back-door deals cashing in on extras while cutting him out. It infuriated him but he had no choice. Somehow he had become dependent upon the desert rat and he couldn’t quite put his finger on the point the wind had changed.
Tassels had become irritably familiar with his role, his routine. He took a little comfort that he had created his own sideline. As far as the rat was concerned Tassels collected one or two boats at a time and ferried them across the sand sea of Sinai at reasonable risk. Tassels did indeed collect in Nuweiba, but he was now accustomed to the purchase of six or seven boats at a time, five of which were transported to Suez. For this he marked-up the cost charged by the courier and then bartered with the commercial shipping reps who seemed awash with cash. He had bundles of American dollars now, unconverted and ready for his next life; like a pharaoh stockpiling for an imagined re-incarnation. From Suez the going got easy. His police ID saw him through the rest of the journey and only occasionally was he required to part with a few green bills to ease his progress. It was the Egyptian way, he thought: add value, get paid.
There were two loose ends, well, one loose one, one fat one. Big Suit’s disappearance still troubled him. If the beards had abducted the big man, they’d have beheaded him on the internet by now. If the army had him, Tassels was sure he’d have heard – probably through his own arrest.
The other irritating unknown was the doctor, his cousin. Tassels accepted that there had been little choice but to bring him in on the racket, but the doc was yet another intelligent individual who could hold him to the heat. Between the rat and the doc Tassels was compromised. They knew what he had done and they could and would exact their price, just as he would do himself if the roles were reversed.
The last issue to keep him awake at night was Alexandria itself. It never slept. As Egypt had plunged deeper into an economic depression, every idiot, his wife and children had taken to trying to feed themselves from the sea. The Spring was starving some Alexandrians and they would gather at all hours to cast nets. Folk were strung out along the beaches many miles from the town’s seafront. Thieves had taken to stealing the precious nets at night, so sentries were posted – often the eldest child in any family, to keep an eye out for robbers. It had forced Tassels and the rat to venture further and further from the town and increased the possibility of being spotted. They had become more and more furtive as they prepared to cast the migrants to the sea, occasionally having to part with cash to ensure the silence of some wide-eyed observer. They opted against violence, for violence bred bitterness, which made the recipient talkative.
Not that Tassels ever saw the boats off. He was ordered to stand guard beyond sight of disembarkation. It was demeaning, but it allowed him to disassociate himself if they did get caught. Yes, the process was functional and lucrative, yet Tassels was haunted by the prospect of discovery. He worried that it was all too good to be true, that it would fall apart and he would end up as many of his prisoners had – wired to the mains, juddering and salivating like a feral dog.
There are few things worse than seasickness, Sam knew that from bitter experience. He had been a sufferer. In fact, at the start of a journey he could still become ill if he spent too much time below deck peering at charts or plotters.
Thirty-nine hours of beating into the forty-knot breeze had, remarkably, not disturbed any of his charges. They’d seen it through with a fortitude that made him proud of each of them. But as he turned further north the pitch of the boat changed to a sideways, uncomfortable roll – a yaw that turned Alea pale, then green. She sat in the cockpit with her back to the cabin heaving nothingness into a bucket, all life drained from her.
Sam had placed the children on shifts at the radar. Isla knew a little about what the instrument panel was telling them, and as he explained it all to Sadiqah he became aware of how much English the child appeared to have subsumed in the short time the girls had been together.
Sam had unfurled one of the big jibs and it was drawing them forward at about eight knots. If they could maintain that sort of hourly rate, they would shave considerable time off their ETA. They would also have enough food to get there – Alea’s consumption was nil and Sam struggled to even get the pills into her. He knew the sickness stood a reasonable chance of passing before she became so weak that he had to worry and that many people eventually adjusted to the sea and her ways once the shock had worn off.
The pills, for the children, appeared to be working well though. They pottered around and chatted and clutched at items as they fell from shelves. The only hassle was cooking. Sam was running on vapour, awake only because he was too scared to sleep. The boat warbled so badly that he was reluctant to boil water and the flask had long since been emptied of coffee. He poured stodgy bolognaise into a pan and heated it a little. He and the girls ate it directly from the pan, ladling it down their throats, legs apart, wedged against the furniture. The smell turned Alea into a retching fit but they had to eat.
Fifteen more hours, Sam reckoned, before the sea would calm a little and he could get her back on her feet.
The doctor was getting antsy and it was making Tassels angry. The constant pestering like that of a child.
“You owe me,” he kept saying.
“I am aware of this,” Tassels replied, “but you must wait.”
“How hard can it be?” his cousin persisted. “There must be a doctor among these refugees. They have doctors in Libya, you know. Gaddafi must have had a personal doctor surely.”
Tassels had rounded at that. “So you want to subsume the identity of Gaddafi’s physician?” he mocked. “How comfortable do you think your new life will be with that hanging round your neck? You’ll be thrown in a European jail and forgotten about.”
“Another doctor then, so long as they have papers. Qualifications.”
“Like you once had?” sneered Tassels.
“I just need a reference. A real reference. Find me a doctor and your problem goes away.”
“What problem?” Tassels narrowed his eyes, staring his cousin down.
“The problem you have in me,” said the doctor, shakily but gathering courage. “The
problem that I know what you did and what you are doing.”
Tassels stared for a long while, then spoke as he turned away.
“There are often many ways to deal with problems.”
17
The silence gave Sam time to think, and the more he thought the more he was sure there were things needing to be discussed.
He stared at Alea who was gradually gaining colour. As the swell eased he had found renewed confidence in the kettle and taken to making her hot black tea, spooning sugar into it to give her some energy. Her head still hung between her shoulders, swinging as if on gimbals. She was just beyond that state associated with prolonged seasickness where the sufferer no longer cares whether they live or die. He wasn’t sure she would ever be fit for questionning, so he reckoned now was as good a time as any.
“Alea?”
Her head lifted. Her paleness exacerbated by her jet-black hair made her look skeletal. She bid him speak without making a sound.
“I need you to tell me. The man. The trafficker. When he took you into the cabin, did he harm you in any way?”
“You mean did he rape me.” She stated it. She didn’t ask.
“Yes,” he said softly.
“What does it matter?” She shook her head slightly as if to say that Sam didn’t care one way or the other. “Are you afraid he raped me on your precious boat?”
“What?” he said, disgusted.
“Are you scared that man took me on one of your beds?”
Sam looked away.
“Mmm,” was all he heard, as if him looking away had confirmed her thought.
Perhaps that was his thinking. Sam thought about why it was important to him. He wrestled with the genesis of his inquiry. There was some truth to what she said. This woman appeared to understand the worst of men. His mind flashed to the violence of what he had suggested, the idea that it had happened in the confines of one of the cabins his daughter played. Where she, on occasion, slept. He wanted to believe that the selfishness of such thoughts hadn’t been a factor in his question but he couldn’t even persuade himself never mind Alea.