The Sea and the Sand

by Finn Óg

  He was Coptic.

  Ten

  Valuable data was wasted forming a plan. Sam always felt better when he’d a plan but begrudged his allowance being used in satellite time to plot their passage. He preferred to save data as treats for Isla – a new movie download, maybe an audiobook or a game for her tablet, yet here he was hoovering it up and navigating via Google Earth. Not ideal. It grated badly for an ex-naval officer to use such a tool but there was no doubt it was good, and the charts and plotter cards Sam had aboard simply didn’t have the detail.

  Portopalo di Capo Passero, Italy. Sicily to be exact. The village looked fairly tired – pretty enough but also remote enough, Sam hoped, to be of little interest to the authorities. To the east was a channel facing a small town, but to the south was a harbour, a breakwater, and even a cradle lift for boats. That sealed it.

  He looked at Sinbad’s gnarly feet through the window beside the navigation table. He was sitting in the cockpit keeping watch with the binoculars. Apparently. Sam wouldn’t trust him to look after a bowl of Rice Krispies if he’d any other choice, and he wouldn’t leave Isla above with him. The man seemed reluctant to spend time below deck or with his wife. It seemed they only conversed when the going got tough. After the boarding by the Greeks they’d spent time in the forecabin talking, hushed but urgent. When the container ship passed, the man had stern words with his wife. Sam had heard them being delivered but was baffled as to what they might be, and he’d heard nothing back from the woman. He put it down to culture, of a kind.

  Shannon would have struggled to hold her tongue. Sam’s instinct was to avoid getting involved – they all had to sleep and he wanted his as undisturbed by threat as possible. Interfering in other people’s marriages didn’t seem like a wise course to him. He wasn’t about to change centuries of subservience by remonstrating in an unintelligible language with a man who would only take it out on his wife at the first opportunity.

  The man’s toenails were inches from his face, separated by reinforced Perspex but repulsive all the same. Sam looked forward to the day, soon, when he would see those feet patter away up the quay in a Sicilian harbour.

  His plan was that he would sail to within a few miles of the Sicilian shore at night with his AIS and VHF and all other instruments switched off. He would prepare the little rigid inflatable that hung from the davits at the stern and attach the twenty-horsepower outboard. He would show the man how to use the engine – steering was easy from the console in the middle, the throttle was a lever, the direction dictated by a wheel. Even an idiot such as his unwelcome stowaway could master that, Sam thought. He had, after all, managed to get his family far offshore once before.

  Then it was a case of the man doing his thing. They would have landed safely in Europe, and as far as Sam could tell that had been the man’s aim. His family would enter whatever asylum system Italy operated, they would be fed and watered and given shelter.

  Sam sketched out an appreciation, a risk assessment, of what could go wrong and what he would do in the event of a disaster. The risks were many. First, the name of their boat. Isla and Sam had made it their home, and their home wasn’t complete without Isla’s mam, Sam’s wife. Her death had left them with no prospect of full repair, but they’d decided, together, to name the boat after her. It did, after all, give them protection just as Shannon had. It was where they turned for privacy, solace, comfort and rest. It was the prospect of adventure and new things. They had settled on the Irish spelling Sionainn, but always referred to her as Sian or Shan – it avoided confusion when speaking to relatives or friends. The problem was the name was burned into the backboard of the rigid inflatable tender Sam proposed sending the Arabs ashore in.

  Next was the evident ineptitude of the man. There wasn’t much Sam could do about that other than sketch the plan on a piece of paper and hope he understood how to steer towards the lights. How they might get ashore undetected was largely up to the man himself but there did appear to be a sandy bank they could drive the boat up. Which presented the next issue.

  Sam wanted their boat back. It wasn’t a cost thing, although the boat was worth a few thousand, as was the engine; it was because the boat represented a safety net for him and Isla. The RIB offered an alternative to a life raft in the event of a major problem. If Sian hit a half-submerged container and become catastrophically holed, he and Isla had the option to get into the RIB under their own propulsion. Depending on where they were, that may be preferable to floating aimlessly without any control in a wobbly life raft hoping for rescue. Sam had two emergency grab bags stitched into the RIB and a sun cover in preparation for such an eventuality. He wanted the little boat back. He also wanted to avoid it becoming associated with trafficking. His working life after the Marines had been consumed with preventing people trafficking, so few things would be more repulsive than being charged with being involved in it.

  He would have to land himself, but at a distance from the family. His idea was they would abandon the boat, he would saunter ashore a few days later like a salty sea gypsy and inquire after a missing dinghy. If the Arab managed not to drown everyone and get ashore as directed, the chances were high that someone would hand him the boat and ask no questions. Then, with luck, he would be able to pay a few hundred euros to get Sian lifted out with the travel hoist he’d seen on Google Earth and sort out the fouled propeller and engine without infecting his wounds.

  It was a fine plan riddled with holes, and if it all worked out, Sam would eat his woolly hat.

  Big Suit was woken with a gentle toe to the head. He was lying on the floor, a position he was gradually becoming accustomed to. The foot before his face was readying for another tap.

  “Don’t. I’m awake,” he said, gathering his surroundings and predicament while stirring inside was a vague memory that something exciting had occurred to him. He struggled to remember what.

  “Get up. Your boss is calling you.”

  Waleed. His former friend now his wake-up call.

  “What will I say?” asked Big Suit struggling to his feet.

  “Nothing, for now. Listen to what he has to say, then I’ll brief you and you’ll call him back. Tell him you stopped for a piss.”

  Big Suit looked at Waleed and rallied as his memory returned. He knew something about Waleed that Waleed wouldn’t want anyone else to know. The sadness he felt that a man he admired was treating him like a dog turned to loathing. He ignored the proffered phone; a deliberate act of defiance.

  “What is your real name?”

  Waleed stared at him for a long moment. “What?” he spat dismissively.

  “Your real name,” Big Suit repeated, eager to discover whether he was correct and if so, find a way to turn it to his advantage. As usual, he hadn’t thought it through. “You have no tattoo.” Big Suit nodded towards Waleed’s wrist, which betrayed him as he clutched it with his free hand. In that flinch Big Suit confirmed his suspicion. “Many Coptic Christians have tattoos on their wrists – crucifixes. Not you. Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a Copt, you fat fool,” Waleed replied with remarkable calm.

  “Obviously,” the now smug Big Suit responded, “because Copts are not allowed in the security services or intelligence. They’re barely allowed into the police, so you can’t be a Copt … except you are.”

  Waleed looked at Big Suit for a long while, curious that after all the years he’d managed to conceal his background a genuine idiot had worked it out. But what Big Suit had failed to work out was that by playing his supposed ace, he may well have condemned himself to a life in a forgotten cell in the middle of a dangerous desert.

  “Call your boss back and say what is written here, then we will … negotiate.”

  Big Suit smiled in leering triumph. He looked at the paper he’d been handed, read what was printed and snorted. “He’ll never do this.”

  “Just ring him back and read it.”

  Big Suit shrugged, selected the missed call and hit dial. His boss
answered almost immediately.

  “Where are you?”

  “Route fifty. Stopped to pee. Sorry.”

  “Where on Route fifty?”

  Big Suit looked at Waleed who was now wearing a headset, apparently listening in. He wrote on the piece of paper for Big Suit to read out.

  “Near Nekhel,” he said. “I think.”

  “The doctor thought you could be sick from blood loss but you sound fine. Keep going. I will know more when I call again.”

  Waleed nodded, and scissored the air with his palms. Big Suit took his lead.

  “Ok,” he said and cut the call.

  “We will wait for information,” Waleed said.

  “You’ll never get him to come here to the desert.”

  “Let’s see what his plan is first. We will take it from there,” said Waleed.

  “It will give us time to negotiate,” said Big Suit.

  Waleed had no intention of being beholden to anyone. He leaned forward and plunged his thumb into Big Suit’s left eye forcing him backwards off the seat, screaming.

  Then the lights went off and the large, stupid torturer lay writhing in panic on the floor in full realisation that the deck he felt he was dealing was in the hands of someone else.

  Exhaustion breeds hallucination, and anger. Sam knew that. He’d been exhausted plenty of times – often deliberately – during selection, special forces, during training, on operation. The key was being able to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined, and crucial to that was knowing when you were exhausted. And Sam knew. He was falling asleep as he spoke to Isla, curious at her father’s insistence she be clipped onto him rather than the jackstays, as per normal. He kept repeating that if anyone came on deck she was to shake him hard until he woke. He had frightened her a little.

  “If the man comes up, you wake me, understand? Shake me as hard as it takes – smack me if you have to, but wake me up, Isla.”

  “Oh-kay, Daddy,” she said, looking at him as if he’d lost it.

  “Anyone, Isla. If anyone comes up, you wake me. And you stay clipped onto me, and if anyone comes near us or your clip, you hit me hard, ok?” He was vaguely aware he was rambling and sounded daft but the point had to be made.

  The darkness of sleep deprivation had conjured some pretty unwholesome suspicions about Sinbad and for some reason the image of his gruesome toes kept floating into Sam’s head. He’d looked at the man not thirty minutes previously and saw him in an entirely different light. Sam had been at the helm coasting the cutter over the swell, driving forward at just under seven knots on a tight reach when he was aware the man was watching him. Sam didn’t need to look over, he just knew he was being appraised, and instinct made him believe he was being scrutinised, learned from. Sam’s addled brain threw those numbers into its busted calculator and came up with the notion that the man had been skimming him all along, observing how the boat and sails worked while pretending to be an automaton. But Sam had shaken his head, reminded himself that Sinbad couldn’t even walk the deck without falling on his arse let alone grasp how the compass worked. Then he asked himself again how the man had managed to get so far offshore in generally the right direction if he really was such an idiot? Which led Sam to ideas about inflatable beach dinghies being swept to sea, and then inevitably to Shannon who would have helped the man regardless. Probably. So he decided the time had come to risk sleep, before he strangled an innocent man in front of his family.

  He shut down. A plummeting sleep at fifty fathoms and diving. He could feel the free fall and worried whether he’d ever resurface. It had been days upon days since he’d got more than twenty minutes at a time.

  If Big Suit was in shock, Waleed was in a stunned state of his own. He’d just half blinded a man for whom he once had the kindling of affection – perhaps not, sympathy, maybe. That man had threatened him and all he had worked for despite being the least likely person in the whole of Egypt to have solved the equation.

  Waleed sat in his desert office and contemplated the predicament he suddenly found himself in. He knew much of it was his own making – why had he ordered the detention of his former roommate? Why had he cared that the brute was rolling around Sinai with just a spud gun to protect himself? Why had he taken the hard approach with him – why not just turn the hulk around and send him back to Suez? Curiosity, in part, he supposed, dressed up as professionalism. He’d wanted to know what the big man had been up to, for sure, but in a way it was more that he’d felt a sort of nostalgic protection for the fool. Waleed had always known that his roommate was borderline educationally subnormal and easily led, and that any evil in him had generally been massaged to the surface by more manipulative elements. When the pair shared digs at the academy, he got to know the vulnerabilities of the boy despite his bulk. He had coaxed out the background – how he’d been bullied as a child and abused by his father and had grown a brutal shell to protect himself. Waleed could chart it and understand how it had developed: soft big lump learns to protect himself, toughening hulk of a boy begins to understand that the best way to avoid being attacked is to strike first, bulging teenager understands that other boys admire physical strength, youth learns that a tough reputation makes life easier and brings friendship. All of that, turn by turn, had led to him leaning on others in the same manner that his father had leaned on him. Waleed considered it learned behaviour and so tested it again and again to see whether he really was plain bad or whether there was something more in him.

  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.