The Sea and the Sand

by Finn Óg

“You are almost able to get out of bed but you cannot expect to drive or travel yet.”

  “I have no intention of either,” said Habid.

  “Well, I can assure you I am not going to Sinai,” said the doctor.

  “No,” said Habid. “You are staying to care for me. To keep me alive. You must tell Tassels I have deteriorated and that if he wants a piece of my business, he must go and get the boat himself.”

  “He will not do that.”

  “Then he must find someone who will – and tell him that will come out of his cut.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “It is a choice. Simple. Either he is greedy enough to go or he takes a risk and brings in another person. I know what I would do.”

  “How much further?”

  Isla was complaining. To be fair to her, for all the exercise she got through sailing the boat, walking wasn’t something she’d been used to for weeks.

  “Don’t know, darlin’,” Sam said.

  “Well, check your phone,” she suggested, exasperated.

  “I’m trying to save data, Isla, so that you can watch films and Scooby-Doo. Just keep an eye out.”

  “We’ll never find them,” she said.

  Isla was still cross he’d let them go in the first place. Sam could understand that, but he wasn’t about to concede.

  “Just keep your eyes peeled. We won’t find them if we give up before we’ve even started. What do we say?”

  Isla huffed and puffed like a teenager but said what he wanted regardless. “We never roll over, never, never, never.”

  “Never, never, never,” Sam repeated.

  It was important to him that she believed that. It had got him through so many tight spots. No matter how many times his life expectancy appeared to have expired, he had muttered that simple phrase, taken something from it and fought his way out. No matter how tight the corner, how stacked the odds, it had served him, and it would serve his daughter too.

  “There’s Mary,” he heard her say, drawing him from his drift.

  He looked up to see a shrine, right there by the sea. He wondered how three Muslims walking around the area might be greeted, given that one of them was a man dressed as a woman.

  “People here must be Catholic,” Isla said, but Sam didn’t have the energy to inquire how she knew the difference.

  He had spent considerable time avoiding any talk of denominations or differing religious beliefs. He had told her that God was God and loved everyone and had left it at that. Religion had played an enormous role in Sam’s life, the wars he had fought, the operations he had been sent on, the surveillance jobs he had carried out. All of them had some genesis in opposing views on faith. He was happy to believe what he believed and not get involved beyond that. Shannon had modified that slightly when she’d been around. She had faith beyond his own, a belief that drove her every day. Not that she went to church much, or lit candles or believed in what some black-clad pontificator preached. But she had an inner peace and an absolute sense of what was right and wrong, and there was never any hope of persuading her otherwise. It was hard to be around someone like that without some of it rubbing off.

  They covered four miles before Sam was persuaded that they had turned the wrong way. The terrain was getting flatter, the roads smoother, the buildings better tended. The area grew more in keeping with what he expected from a coastal Mediterranean town: commoditisation of the spectacular scenery, restaurants, shops, stuff to be sold. That’s why he felt sure three Muslims would have avoided it. Too many folk, too many questions, too many people in positions of authority. That’s what Sam would have done anyway. His rule of thumb when arriving somewhere unannounced was to keep as low a profile as possible and move around only at night.

  “Darlin’, I’m sorry. We’ve come the wrong way. We’re going to have to walk back.”

  “Oh-wuh, I told you to use your phone,” she said.

  “Isla, quit giving out. You want to find them, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then give over and come on.”

  “Use your phone map,” she insisted, the stubborn little tyke.

  Sam made a rigmarole of producing the phone and switching on the data. He then lectured her on how she couldn’t complain in days to come that she was fed up with the old TV shows downloaded on her tablet.

  “Ok,” she said and, as usual, she was right. As soon as Sam consulted the map, he knew where they would be.

  Big Suit was starving. He began to kick the door of his room. It wasn’t a cell – Big Suit doubted they had one – but it was basic: dirt floor, block walls with reclaimed windows at a height well above his head. The roof was flat but there were no air gaps. Attention during construction mostly appeared to have gone into the placing of a steel cross member that spanned the block walls. Red paint had flecked and fallen from a foot-long section in the middle. Big Suit knew what that meant: it had been used to tie something – or someone – up. It was above head height, so the pain endured by its victims must have been considerable. Big Suit had no intention of trying out the attraction, and if it came to it during interrogation, he would sing – it was the least painful journey. Not that he knew a great deal. Emptying his mind of information wouldn’t take long.

  He heard a faint sound and pressed forward to listen. A doorbell. A doorbell he’d heard before. Back at the station. The rat’s phone – he’d heard it when his boss had tested the number. It was dinging quietly away in whatever room lay beyond the door. They must have charged it, he thought. At least someone is looking for me, he thought, and imagined his boss and the toxic atmosphere at the station. Big Suit grinned. There was hope. He leaned against the wall rubbing his back against the concrete blocks in a shuffling scratch as cattle might at a standing stone. He had barely quelled his sweat-induced itch when the sound came again, broadening his smile. He crouched against the wall by the doorframe willing the phone to ring again. His immediate concern wasn’t torture, but dinner. He wanted food and water.

  Eventually the chime restarted and was followed by impatient footsteps. The sound of the phone momentarily grew louder and was then cut-off. Big Suit strained to hear what was happening. There was silence for a moment and then a man’s voice.

  “Sir, the prisoner from the highway? That other phone he had, it keeps ringing.”

  There was a pause that Waleed was presumably filling on the other end of the phone call.

  “Possibly, it was left just feet from the interrogation suite.”

  Big Suit worked out that Waleed wasn’t in the barracks. He longed to hear what was being said at the other end of the connection.

  “I was wondering whether I should switch it off?” There was a pause and then, “Nuweiba, sir? Ok, I could send it with a patrol headed east, but do I leave it switched on?”

  After receiving a curt answer to that question, the conversation was finished. Waleed was evidently busy, or very firmly the boss. Or both. Big Suit listened with a plummeting resignation as the guard, or whoever he was, passed his frustration down the chain of command.

  “Get a patrol together. They’re going east, probably some distance. And tell the driver to come to me before they leave. I have something they’ve got to take with them.”

  From the road the roof of the building reminded Sam of a skateboard track – all swoops and jumps, or a Viking longboat designed to bend and roll with the waves. He and Isla looked down at it from a height as it faced the ocean, Egypt and Libya. Sam couldn’t say what had brought him here but he knew he was right. If the woman and child weren’t close by, they’d been here. Such notions seldom took him, but on the occasions they presented he had learned to trust them.

  “What is that?”

  “See that sign?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you think that is?”

  “A house with a big chimbly.”

  “Chimney.”

  “A house with a big chimney.”

  “No, it’s
not, it’s a church.” Sam began to wish he hadn’t got all educational and had just answered Isla in the first place. “Chiesa,” he read. “I think that means church. Madonna di Eleusa, that’s what the sign says.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Dunno, darlin’, but Madonna is Mary.”

  “Madonna is a singer,” Isla said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mammy.”

  Sam smiled at the thought of Shannon’s endless playlists and her dancing round the kitchen with their daughter. He packed in the explanation. “I think they were here.”

  “Why?” said Isla, suddenly interested.

  “I’m not sure. I think it may be lit up at night – the cross I mean. The picture shows a cross at the front facing the sea. I think the man might have aimed the boat at the light. He probably got the lights mixed up.”

  “Good thinking, Daddy-o,” said Isla in an American accent robbed straight out of Scooby-Doo.

  “The church kind of faces Libya, where they maybe came from.”

  “They came from Egypt,” Isla chirped.

  Sam rounded on her. “Is that true, Isla? I need you to tell me the truth now, how do you know they came from Egypt?”

  Isla reeled back a little, startled at her father’s intensity. “Sadiqah,” was all she said.

  “She definitely said Egypt, not Libya?”

  “She did say Libya,” said Isla, getting confused. “Libya and Egypt.”

  Sam realised he’d startled her and crouched to give her a hug. “I’m sorry, wee love, I got excited. I just need you to tell me everything Sadiqah said to you, ok?”

  “Now?”

  “No. Now we’ve got to break into this church.”

  “Daddy!” she hissed in a stage whisper. “You’re not allowed to break into a church – that’s where holy God lives.”

  “Isla, you’re not allowed to break into anything, never mind a church, but we have people to rescue from that man, so it’s justified.”

  “Justified?”

  “It’s just … it’s allowed, that’s all.”

  “Doesn’t look like a church,” she said, staring down at the funky roof.

  “No,” said Sam, distractedly. He gripped the galvanised gate and hauled up and rolled over it, landing on his feet. He put an arm through the bars and hoisted Isla as high as he could, allowing her to grab the top, then he caught her on the other side.

  “The police are going to get us,” she said.

  “No, they won’t,” he replied.

  “Yes, they will,” she said, and pointed. “Look, Daddy.”

  “He won’t go,” said the doctor, fresh from a screaming match.

  “Then my supplier will terminate the arrangement – no more boats.”

  “There must be another way.”

  “It took months to set up. Months. There are people in Libya waiting to be collected. If we do not move soon, someone else will move in. End of business.”

  “He wants to know how you normally get the boats from Nuweiba and why we cannot use that supply chain.”

  “Because the person who saw to that left on the last journey.”

  “So how did you plan to get it?”

  “I was going myself but I can’t do that now, can I? Tell him that. Tell him if he hadn’t cut my fucking toe off, he might have been able to sit on his ass and count his money. But now he will have to work for it, and it is his own fault!”

  The doctor didn’t need to relay the message. Tassels could hear it being screamed from his office.

  There had been an accident. That much was plain. Sam turned to see the tail end of a dark blue car with a red stripe and writing up the side. As they walked down the slope he realised that, as usual, Isla had been quite right. There was rack of strobe lights on its roof. Aside from the carabinieri, which Sam vaguely recollected as being part military, part police, a coastguard van came into view and his heart plummeted. Had he sent the woman and child to their deaths? He half crouched to speak to Isla.

  “You’re going to have to stay outside until I see what’s happening.”

  “Has there been an emergency?” Her face was shaken with alarm.

  “Well, there’s no ambulance, so that’s good,” he said, which truthfully could be good or bad – ambulances didn’t come for dead bodies. But if they were already dead and laid out in the church, he didn’t want Isla seeing them. “You sit on that bench and I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Sam placed his hand on the door handle under the sheltered pointed alcove, its prow aimed towards the sea and Africa. He lowered his head, said a prayer and pushed inside.

  Nautical, he thought, as his gaze rose to the beams in the roof. It’s a boat, a church boat. Made sense. How many from this fishing village had died at sea? It seemed as much a memorial as a place of worship; like the dozens of monuments scattered around the harbours of Ireland, names etched against the brutal winds, indelible carvings that only the weather could take, just as it had taken the humans who owned them.

  Just short of the altar a woman sat wrapped in a foil blanket, glistening like a Christmas decoration. Sam’s heart leapt a pace but he didn’t recognise her, and he was grateful for it. She was being admonished by a man in a blue coastguard vest, her head dipped, enduring it. Sam muttered his thanks and turned to leave when he heard another voice, a tiny one, call out. He froze.

  “Daddy?”

  It wasn’t Isla but he knew in an instant who said it and why. He turned to see Sadiqah sit up from a pew. She too was wrapped in foil, her hair like a bonfire, stiff with salt and all over the place. The woman’s head lifted immediately and she began to sob. Everything became clear.

  The coastguard turned and called out to two carabinieri who made towards Sam. He knew he was about to be arrested, that he’d allowed himself and Isla to be compromised, and that Sadiqah knew him only as daddy. He knew too that the woman whose face he had just seen for the first time had been his companion at sea for days, that she had clawed him to save her child, that she had been silent for some dreadful reason. And he could see for the first time her vulnerability, her fear and her beauty now that she’d been stripped of her niqab.

  Tassels hadn’t been in good humour, even before his cousin arrived.

  “Well, did he say where the boats come from?”

  “China. The network is intricate, hence why the rat says it took six months to set up. The boats are made in some far-flung province, transported to a port, hidden in containers and offloaded in Nuweiba away from the authorities. Then they are loaded onto a lorry and concealed. They travel west, taxes to pay, bribes. But he was clear about this – if one boat goes missing or is not collected, the deal ends.”

  “Well, we will pick up the boat, won’t we?”

  “I thought … your colleague had gone missing?” the doctor almost referred to him as Big Suit.

  “He’ll show up.”

  “He’d better show up soon. The rat says the boat will be ready for collection. And if it is not collected—”

  “Has it been paid for?”

  “No,” said the doctor, who had no idea whether it had or not. “Did you not give your colleague any money?”

  Tassels ignored his cousin’s question but the answer seemed obvious.

  The doc pressed his advantage. “And is he driving a lorry or even a van? The rat says the boat won’t fit in a car.”

  Tassels’ head fell forward between his shoulder blades, his hands gripping his filthy desk. Eventually he sat. “He can get one when he gets to Nuweiba. He can hire one.”

  “So he has money?”

  Tassels rounded on his cousin. “Look, just get all the information you can from that rat. You leave the details to me!”

  The doc was dismissed. It had gone better than he could have hoped for.

  Two police officers grappled Sam who had decided against flight. Isla was outside and he wouldn’t leave her, but he cursed himself.

  “I’ve got a chi
ld outside,” he shouted as they tried to wrestle him to the ground, finding him much more solid than expected. “I’ll be calm if you agree to bring her in here and look after her.”

  “English,” said the coastguard to the officers.

  “Irish, Irelandese, European,” stated Sam as he allowed the men to slip a cable tie around his wrists. If necessary, he could twist and snap his way out in a matter of seconds.

  “Ireland?” queried the coastguard.

  “Yes, Irish,” he shouted. “We rescued them.”

  The coastguard evidently had some English because he nodded sagely as if he knew what was really going on. “Yes, yes,” he said. “And how much did she pay you?”

  “Bring my daughter in. She’s outside the door on her own. Bring her in and I will explain everything.”

  The coastguard said something to the police, who didn’t appear to like the idea of taking direction from a coastguard. Whatever was said, it was the coastguard who walked warily to the church door and opened it, apparently cautious that he might be on the cusp of attack. There was a dreadful pause during which Sam struggled to turn to face the door but for no good reason was prevented from doing so by the police. He could hear the door close as a muffled, softer conversation was had. Eventually the door creaked open again and Sam breathed in.

  “Daddy!” she called and pattered up behind him before confusion set in. “Hey, let go of my daddy!” she shouted, and to Sam’s astonishment she kicked out at one of the policemen, nipping him right on the shin bone with her little brown boot.

  The policeman yelped and swiped at her but got lucky and missed. If he’d connected, Sam would have finished him. He stared at the officer who felt the full weight of his mistake as Sam’s body tensed to the point of detonation.

  “Isla, calm down, wee love. It’s a mistake. They don’t understand what has happened,” he said as he held the cop’s gaze.

  “It is certain we understand,” said the coastguard. “You are not first man to bring people from Africa.”