by Paul Kearney
It was dark early, and when the truck pulled up on the quayside Cutter and Willoby met it with the hoods of their parkas pulled up against the unending downpour. Willoby and the truck driver shook hands; they knew each other from Hereford. Jenny clambered out of the cab looking drawn and tired. She nodded to Cutter.
“Nice trip?” Cutter asked her. He’d had more than one whisky, and the bright fire of the alcohol had banished the cold from his system. God, he thought, looking at her, she’s beautiful.
“Interesting,” she told him, keeping her voice low. “Strange to think that with the connivance of the British establishment, I’ve now become an international gunrunner.”
“What about getting them back afterwards?” Cutter queried, smiling.
“We don’t. When the thing is done, they all get tossed in the sea. Simpler that way.”
“We seem to have a generous budget,” Cutter said.
“You don’t know the half of it. Have you hired a boat yet?”
“We’ve been making enquiries.”
“Before or after the pub?” she asked, frowning.
“This is Ireland. Half the time the enquiries can only be made in the pub.”
“We have to talk, Cutter.”
Jenny took his arm and led him away from the truck. Willoby and his driver friend had climbed into the back and were examining the crates stacked within. The rain shone in Jenny’s hair. Cutter felt like kissing her, and realised that he had drunk more than he had intended.
He did not greatly care.
“I’ve had word from Lester at the ARC,” Jenny said.
“Let me guess; the anomalies have gone.”
“Yes and no. They’ve disappeared within the usual timeframe, but then others have taken their place. They’re flicking on and off like cheap Christmas tree lights, but the hub is always on the island. At least four seem to be coming and going upon it, and two or three more in the sea within fifty nautical miles. Something odd is going on out there.”
“Odder than the opening of holes within the space-time continuum?” Cutter asked, then realised it sounded more flippant than he had meant.
“Odd as in we haven’t seen the like before. Lester wants your team on the island as soon as is practicable. He wants you to use a helicopter, if possible.”
Cutter shook his head. “We looked into that; they’ve all been grounded by the storm. Even the Coast Guard isn’t flying the North Atlantic right now. It’ll have to be a boat.”
“Then it has to be tonight. We’ve no time to lose.”
“You won’t get a reputable captain at such short notice. Willoby and I were talking to a chap who thought he could get us out there in a day or two.”
“Then we go with disreputable. Speed is of the essence.”
Surprised by the intensity of her words, Cutter’s head cleared.
“There’s something else. Something you’re not telling me.”
Jenny looked away. “It’s not important.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She went to protest but he interrupted.
“Jenny, please will you tell me what’s going on? Because in a day or two, maybe less, I’m going to be sitting on that island with my life in my hands, and the lives of others depending on what I know and how I respond to it. So please, tell me.”
It was Jenny’s turn to be surprised, and she relented.
“All right, it seems as if our little diplomatic bag raised a few eyebrows in Dublin. It was tracked to Shannon, and may well have been followed here. Lester tells me that the Irish Special Branch are on their way to interview you and your team. We can’t let that happen.”
Cutter blew air out through his cheeks.
“They think the old enemy is up to something, eh?”
“Something like that. Your cover hasn’t yet been blown, but the operation is in danger of becoming compromised. You need to be at sea tonight.”
“Charming. Just charming.” Cutter rubbed his eyes. “All right then, we’ll do it your way. Any boat we can get, so long as it floats — and may God help us.”
***
Any boat, so long as it floats, Cutter thought. Luke Skywalker’s first impression of the Millennium Falcon; that about sums it up. And then he caught himself.
I’ve been spending way too much time with Connor.
The Polar Star was an aged, steel-hulled stern trawler. At one time she had been painted red along her waterline and white on her superstructure, but the rust had so streaked her steel that there was no real colour scheme left worth speaking of. She was some sixty-feet long, and was tied up to the bollards of Crosshaven’s quay with a row of old car tyres slung along her side as protection from impact with the concrete. Despite this, she resembled a prize fighter who has just lost a bout, being dotted with dents and scores right down to the bare metal.
Liam Hanlon, her owner, master and skipper, stood to one side of her wheelhouse and waved an oily woollen cap at the team as they unloaded their truck onto the quay next to his boat. It was after midnight, a filthy winter’s night with the wind roaring above their heads and the harbour utterly deserted. Every sensible man and his dog were in their beds or at the pub, and so far as it was possible to surmise, Cutter thought they were relatively unobserved.
The soldiers unloaded a series of stoutly built crates whilst Willoby looked on. The Special Forces officer seemed to have grown taller with the approach of something approximating action, and he murmured “Ammo, longarms, sidearms, radios, batteries,” as the crates were bumped onto the quayside one by one in front of him.
Hanlon was gesticulating and bellowing at the soldiers, telling them to mind the paintwork or he’d be claiming for it. “You think this character can keep a secret like this for more than fifteen minutes?” Cutter asked Jenny as they stood watching.
“I’ve scared him a little,” Jenny said with a wicked smile. “He thinks that if he opens his mouth for so much as a peep, he’ll have masked men on his doorstep soon after. It helps that in this country not so long ago that was actually what happened some of the time. Plus, we’re paying him a rather exorbitant fee.”
“John Bull still has a bit of life in him, then?” Cutter said.
“And a fat chequebook,” Jenny told him. She looked at her watch. “We need to hurry this up a little.”
“Where’d you find him?” Cutter asked, still staring fascinated at Hanlon. The fisherman was dressed in a greasy, darkened woollen sweater and waterproof dungarees. He had a thick grey beard and black eyebrows which met above his nose. He looked like Captain Birdseye’s evil twin.
“In a pub, where else?” Jenny said with a grin.
Finally the last of the equipment was on board. Stephen, Connor and Abby leapt over the side of the quay onto the pitching deck of the trawler. Connor slipped on the slimy deck and went head first into the tangle of a seine net which was roughly rolled up in the scuppers. He straightened at once with a look of startled disgust on his face. Hanlon laughed and helped him to his feet.
“Don’t worry son. We’ll all smell like that in a few hours.”
Only Cutter and Jenny were waiting on the quay. Hanlon disappeared into the wheelhouse and a moment later the big diesels of the boat began to cough, grunt, then snarl angrily into life. The reek of exhaust and diesel rose up along with the stench of rotting fish. From inside the wheelhouse, Hanlon shouted.
“Get on board, will ye, if you’re coming. And cast off fore and aft, some one of yous!”
“The magical mystery tour begins,” Cutter said, and went to jump from the quay. Jenny’s hand on his arm stayed him a moment. She leaned close, so as to be heard above the roar of the engines. Her breath tickled his ear.
“Be careful, Professor.”
“I feel a hundred years old when people call me that.”
“Be careful, Nick,” she said, and squeezed his arm.
He jumped onto the deck of the trawler. Stephen caught him as he slipped, and steadied him. Cutter thank
ed him and exchanged a rueful grin with Connor. Two of the soldiers cast off the thick mooring ropes from bollards fore and aft, and the Polar Star began moving away from the quay.
Her hull became a live thing under their feet, a creature with movement, force and will. In a matter of moments they were sixty yards from the quay, and Jenny was a mere shape in the darkness. Behind her the lights of Crosshaven receded as the trawler picked a way out into the estuary, beyond the sheltering mole of the harbour, towards the open sea.
SEVEN
“I’m dying,” Connor gasped. “I can’t take any more. Shoot me with something Abby, please. Oh, God —”
He bent over the bucket again.
In the tiny cubbyhole which was the Polar Star’s midships cabin, most of the team were sprawled across their mounded equipment with their hands and feet braced against the metal bulkheads. The boat was rising up and down under them, rolling from side to side for good measure, and the bare bulbs in the deckhead above them flickered weakly as the diesels struggled with the sea outside.
“How long did he say it would take?” Private Doody asked. The medic’s dark face held a tinge of green.
“Fifteen hours,” replied Watts, the signaller. She was trying to read a paperback, but had to keep one hand free to brace herself when the boat made a particularly vicious roll. She had tied her black hair up in a tight bun and wore a woollen cap over it. Her military issue combat boots made her feet seem outlandishly large.
They were all in black now, dressed for the occasion. Getting changed had been a minor ordeal in itself, and all of them were fielding bruises from the unforgiving steel of the Polar Star’s innards. The soldiers had donned their webbing; that complex series of straps and pouches that held their basic equipment close to their bodies. The weapons had been broken out also, but even the sight of Bristow’s US-made Minimi light machine gun couldn’t raise Connor out of his torpor. Abby held back his hair as he retched into his bucket again.
“I didn’t volunteer for this,” he groaned. “I’d rather be eaten by something prehistoric than spend another fifteen hours of —” His intestines took over the conversation once more. Abby turned her head away.
“I’ve got some more Dramamine,” Doody offered.
“He threw up the first lot as fast as he got it down,” Abby said. “Best to let him suffer.”
“Oh, that’s nice; let him suffer,” Connor complained, coming up for air.
“Just think how nice the island will seem after this,” Abby said. “It’ll be a doddle.”
In the wheelhouse, Cutter, Stephen and Willoby stood at the stern bulkhead as Liam Hanlon wrestled with the ship’s wheel, humming to himself and periodically breaking out into unmelodic snatches of song. He talked to his boat as he steered her, cajoling the Star up the back of each wave, and praising her as the seas ran aft and the bluff bow of the trawler came out of each white foaming trough of broken water.
The ship’s forward lights pierced the gloom fitfully, and the radar flickered like a blue TV showing nothing but static, but somehow Hanlon knew where they were. He steered by the compass set in the binnacle before him, glancing occasionally at the dog-eared chart he had unrolled and pinned to the wood of the console. It was fly-blown and wrinkled, but he seemed perfectly happy to rely on the creased and mug-ringed square of paper.
Willoby was less sanguine. He was standing behind the Captain with a hand-held GPS, studying the changing co-ordinates on its LCD screen and sometimes shaking his head in something approaching bafflement.
“I don’t know how he does it,” he said to Cutter.
“I’m bred to the sea, is how I do it,” Hanlon shouted back at them. “Yous can keep your newfangled electronics. A good fisherman can smell what’s ahead of him, and feel out the sea like it was the road outside his house.” He grunted as the boat was tossed by a particularly brutal wave. The wheelhouse door shuddered as a great mass of water broke hammering against it and then flooded aft along the deck outside.
Cutter wiped cold sweat from his face. Even Stephen looked pale as chalk. But Hanlon remained unfazed.
“‘Course, some nights it’s easier than others. But I done this trip a thousand times, out for the shrimping grounds west of Bantry. I’m a midwater man — none of that deep ocean scraping for me. Shrimp and mackerel is what I hunt, except there’s not so much shrimp left in this part of the world now. Bloody French and Spanish have gone and hoovered it all up with their bloody factory ships.”
He wrestled with the wheel for a while, humming to himself and muttering the occasional profanity as his boat slugged it out with the waves.
“That’s an eighteen-foot swell, by God. There’s not many would be chancing their arm in a sea like this, at this time of year. You’re a funny bunch of people.” Almost to himself, he added, “Them girls is far too pretty to be soldiers.”
Cutter lurched forward to the binnacle and peered out at the arc-lit fury of the waves ahead. He raised his voice so Willoby would hear him. “You think our inflatables will make it in water like this?”
“We’ll land in the lee of the island,” Willoby told him. “It’ll be sheltered there; we’ll be out of the wind.”
“I hope you folk have brought long ladders,” Hanlon said dubiously. “There’s thousand-foot cliffs all round Guns Island. A goat couldn’t so much as scratch a way up.”
“The cliffs are lower on the southeastern side,” Stephen told him. “There’s a path there up to the plateau above.”
“A path?” Hanlon laughed. “I never heard it called that before. The monks made it, a thousand years ago. They had stone cells on the island, sat there praying and hacked out that path from the living rock itself, God love ‘em. But a thousand years of wind and sea has been at work on it since. It may look like a nice dotted line on an OS map, but boyo, I’m telling you, I hope you packed a pair of wings.”
“We packed rope,” Willoby said. “It’ll have to do.”
A shattering boom sounded as the trawler smashed its bow into a great black and white wave, a foaming monster that roared right up to the wheelhouse windows and their ineffectually whirring circle-wiper. Cutter felt his stomach lift and bounce within his torso, and for the tenth time that night, regretted the whisky he had drunk onshore. Or else regretted that he had not drunk more; he wasn’t sure.
“You were briefed on the Coast Guard report?” he said to Willoby.
“About the Cormorant? Yes, of course.”
“I knew Jim Mackey well,” Hanlon called back at them. He had the hearing of a bat, even amid the bellowed rush of the storm and the struggling diesels. “The Cormorant was an old boat, wooden built. He’d been having a hard time making ends meet, had Jim. He should never have taken that old boat out so far, God rest his soul, and the four boys who went with him. They were talking in Cronin’s, wondering if you were some kind of salvage team heading out there, but I told them, what can you salvage without a ship to sit in?”
“Very clever of you,” Willoby said, raising his eyebrows at Cutter.
“And what do you think we’re up to, Captain?” Stephen asked Hanlon.
“Me? Yonder pretty lady said that if I so much as wondered about that she’d have me taken care of the old-fashioned way. You want to watch that girl, lads. She’s got ice water in her veins.”
“You’re right there,” Cutter muttered.
“‘Course, you’re no faint flowers yourselves. I never seen so many guns since the old days, when they brought them in from Libya by the shipload. Still, your business is your own. There’s nothing but birds on Guns Island, and you can shoot as many of them as you want, for all I care. I just know to keep my mouth shut.”
Once again, Cutter and Willoby exchanged a glance. “Fifteen hours to landfall?” Cutter said.
“It’s going to be a long night,” Willoby admitted.
The hours drew by. Down in the cramped midships cabin, most of the team slept by fits and starts, jerking awake only when some almighty crash
of water sounded against the hull.
Slack jawed and green-faced, Connor was snoring gently with his noisome bucket propped between his knees. Abby was squashed next to him, her head nodding. The rest of the soldiers were dozing, their heads lolling in time with the pitch and roll of the trawler. Only Joe Bristow was wide awake. He was humming quietly to himself as he brushed the working parts of the Minimi with an old shaving brush, and sprayed them with a small tin of WD-40. He looked supremely content.
***
It wasn’t Cutter’s imagination; the wind was dropping, though the waves were still steep as cliffs in the trawler’s arc-lights. There was less broken foam about them now though; these were slab-sided, smooth-rolling hills, and the trawler was riding up and down them as deftly as a toy duck in a bathtub.
Hanlon cocked a lever, and a steady thudding noise started up to underline the throb of the engines.
“Pumps,” he said to the three others in the wheelhouse. “We’ll have taken on a lot of water. Now the worst of it is past, they’ll not strain the engines so much. I put new pumps in just last May. If the boat sank, they’d still be pumping all the way to the bottom.”
“Well, that’s nice to know,” Stephen said.
“It’s getting light,” Cutter said, rasping a hand over his stubbled chin and yawning. “What time is it?”
“Just gone seven,” Willoby said. “Skipper, can’t you make this thing go any faster?”
Hanlon laughed.
“What do you think, son? I’m just happy we’re still this side of the sea. She’s pounding along nicely; don’t you be fretting now.”
Willoby studied his watch, frowning.
“What’s the problem?” Stephen asked him.
“At this rate, it’ll be dark again by the time we’re getting ashore on the island. It’ll make things a lot more awkward.”
“Then we’ll anchor and wait for daylight,” Stephen said with a shrug. He was the same height as the army officer, and of a similar build. Cutter, looking at them both, wondered when the inevitable pissing contest would begin.