The Sea and the Sand

by Finn Óg

  “Irish Ireland, Irish Ireland, please come immigration,” echoed over a crackly speaker system. In his distraction Sam only picked up on the Ireland bit. He seldom heard his surname used. He would have to go back to his pre-officer days to remember a time it had been routinely used to his face.

  He left the madness of the arrivals terminal and eventually found a small hut in a vacuous loading bay where his passport was returned. He’d been reluctant to hand it over on the ship – expecting some bloody backhanded fundraising activity to be behind it – but there was no other option. Kick up a fuss and maybe have to buck a few people over the side, or hand it over peacefully and hope for the best.

  And the best had prevailed. His third passport remained Israeli-stamp free and he exited the ferry port exhausted but strangely elated to be back in business. He was about to get stuck into something he was good at as opposed to parenting – in which his skill level still rested with the jury.

  He walked one mile north, found a beach, dug a hole in the sand and slept to the sound of the sea while he waited for his ship to come in.

  Sam looked up at her, imposing, dangerous, full of menace – and smiled in the sure knowledge that few people would imagine him capable of what he was about to do.

  Teetaya. Her name was plastered on the transom. He toyed with the notion of shimmying up the lines tying it to the harbour, but he wasn’t confident in his own fitness having been at sea for such a long time. It had meant virtually no walking, and save for a bit of habitual core work and winching sails in and out, he’d done no exercise and was softer than usual.

  In the end he didn’t have to do anything so exotic. He simply strolled up the walkway and punched the man standing at its top in the face. He took the man’s radio and phone, kicked him down the steps and swung the walkway away from the quay.

  He worked his way below and found a fire axe right where it should be. Deeper again he identified the enormous seacocks that allow water in and out of the ship. Every vessel sucks seawater – to flush toilets and, more importantly, cool the engines. Sam merrily swiped the metal fixings with the axe as he passed, pishing water in at a furious rate. Within minutes he was wading around just below knee level.

  Sam started to climb the steps in search of the real workers – the ratings. He found some running about trying to identify why the alarms were going off.

  “Sinking,” he barked at them. “Get off the ship immediately!”

  They turned and ran up the metal rungs. He cleared each deck as he rose through the bowels of the boat, kicking or throwing open doors to make sure nobody was left behind. Up and up he went until eventually he made it to the bridge where all hell was breaking loose with buzzing and beeping and the wailing of sirens.

  “Who is the radio operator?” he screamed as he burst onto the floor.

  A man Sam assumed to be the captain turned towards him and began with a barrage of questions in a language he didn’t understand.

  Sam ignored him. “Radio operator!” he screamed again, and in their confusion at this axe-wielding apparition two of the four men present pointed at a burly chap by a window.

  “I am from the yacht Tuskar. Remember me? You refused to give us help,” he said, his voice more even as he lowered his heart rate.

  The burly man’s eyes widened in sudden understanding. He made to move from his seat but Sam caught him with a well-aimed hurl of a small fire extinguisher. It left the operator nicked but not out.

  Sam turned to the others. “Refusing to help a fellow seafarer in distress is an incredibly serious issue, gentlemen. The punishment for such a transgression,” he somehow found himself adopting Fran’s flowery prose, “is a spell in Davy Jones’s locker.”

  “What?” spat the captain, evidently understanding the reference.

  “To the seabed, my friend, but first you must give me the sea books of your crew.”

  “No!” yelled the captain, so Sam chased down the radio operator, opened the bridge’s side door, dragged the man a few feet across the walkway and swept his feet from beneath him, depositing him over the rail and into the harbour below. Then he returned to the bridge and surged for the captain.

  “Moment, moment, moment,” shouted the skipper who made for a large chart table and crouched beneath it.

  Sam was wary and stayed tight to the captain’s back in case there was a gun in the ship’s safe. The captain rooted around and came out with a clasp of passport-sized brown booklets and held them over his shoulder.

  Sam nodded and took a step back. “Vessel Teetaya, you are currently sinking. That is why the alarms are screaming. This is because you refused to help people who were in trouble and because you have abused your crew for years. You can leave the ship by walkway for another few moments, or if you prefer to wait, you can test your dodgy lifeboats. As you are at dock in this fine port, the ship will not go under but will remain here clogging the place up. I am quite sure that this will cause your employer some anger and distress – and you will deserve every bit of what is coming to you.”

  With that Sam gathered the books for the ratings and left the bridge to its wailing commotion.

  Living life impulsively might be fun in short bursts but it always leaves a low when the excitement is over.

  Sam returned to his hole on the beach and realised he had very little to go on and nothing to do next. Around him sat a few circular beach huts, all abandoned. There was a dilapidated backpacker’s retreat nearby with no customers but little else. He decided to take up residence, and stock of his situation, in the shelter of a straw mud hut.

  What had he been thinking? That this people trafficker could be traced in a town just because his phone had last been here? That he would somehow find this man, batter him and return to Ireland with a job done? Sam’s darkness crept over him. He had been distracted of late, had had purpose and direction – across the Med, to Ireland, getting Isla back to routine. When she’d gone on holidays he’d leapt at the first opportunity to avoid thinking, and he’d applied himself, as usual, one hundred per cent, but that was finished now and he was flapping around like a hooked mackerel in a bucket. The high of sinking Teetaya and wreaking revenge was wearing off. He needed a lead but he didn’t even have a sniff to follow. So against his better judgement and fearing the awkwardness of the call he dialled Sinead.

  “I didn’t think I’d hear from you for a while,” she said sheepishly.

  “I mean it. I am sorry. I’m just not there. Not yet anyway.”

  “I get that,” she unhooked him, her generosity boundless.

  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be in touch with you, Sinead. If that’s not an annoyance.”

  “You know it’s not.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was an easy and long silence between them, a peaceful understanding.

  “You’re on the boat, I take it?” Sinead asked.

  Sam laughed. “You would not believe where I am, Sinead.”

  “Where?”

  “Egypt. I just sank a ship with a hatchet.”

  “Fuck off,” she said, which surprised him as she seldom swore.

  “Serious.”

  “Why?” Sinead was struggling to make sense of it.

  “When we were at sea with Alea and Sadiqah I called a passing ship and told them I’d people on board who needed help. They told me to fuck off. It made me cross.”

  “Bloody hell, Sam, remind me not to make you angry.”

  “I feel better now.”

  “Did anyone, like, drown?”

  “No, no, I just sank her in the dock. She’s lying against the quay wall clogging up the harbour, but on the seabed all the same. Most of her is above the waterline.”

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “So are you.”

  And there was silence as he computed how that had managed to come out of him unguarded.

  “So are you in that place, Noobia?” Sinead broke it.

  “Nuweiba,” he said. “Yea
h.”

  “Are you going looking for this trafficker then – the fella who sent Alea into the sea?”

  “I’d like to but I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well, what was your plan?”

  “I didn’t really have one.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “You said that before.”

  “This time I meant it,” she sniggered.

  “Maybe you could rub Alea up for me a bit. See if there’s anything she can remember that would help me find this fecker.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what he looks like or what he wore or his kit, or whether he was the type to rough it or if he drove a pimped-up wagon. Anything like that could give me a start.”

  “I can’t believe you went all the way out there and didn’t have a clue what you were going to do.”

  “Well, Isla’s away, so I’ve got a week and I might as well be at something useful.”

  “I’ll give it a go with Alea. I’ll call you soon as.”

  “Thanks, Sinead.”

  “And Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “No pressure, seriously, but do you think you might ever be there?”

  Sam paused for a long moment looking at the waves and the sunset and gave an honest answer. “I don’t know, Sinead. I really don’t know.”

  Waleed looked in the rear-view mirror, closed his eyes for a brief moment and kissed Arish goodbye. Four months he’d spent in the town. Useless months during which he’d discovered no more than the little his instincts had told him the day he’d arrived. Regardless, the air force had carried out seven air strikes on known terrorist locations in Sinai and there were unconfirmed deaths in the hundreds. Egypt’s latest leader looked decisive, the security situation had momentarily stabilised and Waleed had been ordered to return to his Sinai outpost to continue intelligence gathering.

  Until he got a call to say there had been another attack.

  “Where?”

  “Nuweiba, sir.”

  “A bombing?”

  “No, it’s …”

  “Hurry up,” Waleed barked, irritated at yet another distraction and keenly aware he had another matter to deal with back at base. An enormous matter in a grungy suit.

  “They’ve sunk a ship, sir.”

  “What?”

  “The harbour is completely blocked. The captain claims some terrorist came aboard and scuttled his ship while it sat in port.”

  “Terrorist or terrorists?”

  “Well, sir, just one, apparently.”

  “One man sank a ship? Where was the crew?”

  “They were all on board, sir.”

  “Then why didn’t they stop him?”

  “They say he was armed.”

  “With what?”

  “Ehm, an axe, sir.”

  “An axe. One man sank a ship in front of its crew with an axe.”

  “That’s… that’s what they say, sir.”

  “Did he chop through the ship’s hull with the axe?” Waleed was struggling to understand.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “And why do you think it’s a terrorist incident?”

  “Well, the captain says it was terrorists, sir, and, well, aren’t all ports getting tighter security?”

  Waleed sighed. It did sound like an attack, which was positive in a way. That an axe was used rather than explosives suggested the Islamist groups were low on resources.

  “There’s one more thing, sir.”

  “What?”

  “The attacker – apparently he was a white man who spoke English.”

  “Right,” said Waleed, thinking about the countless recruits IS and others had managed to attract from England and elsewhere. He struggled to remember one who had been white, though.

  “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  “Secure the area,” he said. “Monitor all mobile phone activity in the vicinity and get Cairo to track any unusual comms. I’m on my way.”

  “Ok, so,” Sinead began. “He’s small, Libyan, gnarly and his hair is black.”

  “Hello to you, too,” said Sam.

  “Yeah, sorry. Hello.”

  “So this is Habid.”

  “You know his name?”

  “His brother gave it away – the bloke in the detention centre.”

  “Right?”

  “Anyway, tell me what Alea said. What about his habits?”

  “I didn’t ask about habits – you didn’t ask me to ask about his habits, but you did tell me to ask about kit.”

  “Ok, ok, well, what does he use?”

  “He’s got a phone, as you know, which Áine tried again and still can’t find. She says it’s probably been destroyed. And he had a GPS.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Yeah, so we tried to find out what type of GPS it was.”

  “Good girl,” said Sam.

  “Girl?”

  “Woman,” he corrected himself. “Sorry.”

  “You’re grand.”

  “So was she able to say what type?”

  “Kind of. We showed her loads of pictures on Google and finally she found one on eBay. It’s a really old yoke, Sam, with a twisty aerial that sticks out the side.”

  “What make?” Sam asked, feeling like this was going nowhere.

  “A Garmin. It took us ages to find it. It’s really old – from the nineties.”

  “Right,” said Sam with a sigh.

  “Hold on, Sam,” said Sinead, detecting his ambivalence. “I’m going to put Áine on.”

  Sam’s resignation got deeper as he waited for the sarcastic sister to start.

  “Hello?” came the curt voice of Sinead’s twin.

  “Áine,” said Sam.

  “That the GPS is so old is actually an advantage.”

  “How come?” he asked, refusing to brighten.

  “Because,” said Áine, mounting her high horse, “nobody ever tries to update the software on obsolete devices, do they?”

  “Haven’t a clue, do they not?”

  “No, Sam,” he could almost see her expression, “yet somebody recently did just that on a device similar to the one we’re looking for.”

  “And how does that help us?”

  “Well, Sam, it doesn’t help me one bloody bit. It’s you that’s looking for the help, so perhaps you’d do well to be a little less dismissive.”

  “Alright, Áine,” he said, “how does that help me?”

  “It helps you because the software was downloaded at a hotel not a million miles from where you are.”

  “Serious?”

  “Serious.”

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “I could tell you but Neanderthals like you would never understand, Sam. It’s all to do with whizz-bang computers and stuff.”

  Sam had to smile. “Thanks very much,” he said, feigning offence.

  “Well, I’m told you just sank a ship with a hatchet. You’ll be off to paint your remarkable personal development on the inside of a cave this afternoon. You know, how you’ve evolved so far in the last few years from trained killer to, oh wait, trained killer.”

  “Nobody died, Áine.”

  “I take it all back,” she said. “You’ve clearly become cultivated. Make sure you capture that in your cave art.”

  Sam shook his head in wonder at her relentless hostility, but he’d learned to firewall her jibes and could hear Sinead hissing at her sister to ease up.

  “Will you text me the hotel details?”

  “Fine,” she said, and hung up before he could speak to Sinead again.

  In a rare display of efficiency, Cairo came through before Waleed had even made it to Nuweiba. His phone buzzed on the dash and he punched the answer button on the Bluetooth, anticipating yet another distraction.

  “Yes?”

  “This is a secure line from central,” a woman said.

  Waleed was no stranger to such calls. They came from the GID, the General Intelligence
Directorate, known to most as the Mukhabarat. His own position was an extension of that agency, although more military than spook. The two wings were rarely without tension. He went through the security checks and confirmed his staff credentials and passwords.

  “We have information regarding your inquiry this morning.”

  Such conversations were always formal, the operator generally permitted only to relay what was written in front of them.

  “Yes?” said Waleed.

  “I have instructions to ask whether this is connected to a similar inquiry from the police in Alexandria.”

  Immediately Waleed’s antenna shot up. Big Suit was a member of Alexandria’s police force.

  “What inquiry do you have from the police in Alexandria?”

  “There is a similar request to track phone signals last positioned in your jurisdiction,” said the operator.

  “A specific phone?”

  “I have no further details, sir.”

  “Can you not tell me whether the request is to track unusual calls or a phone unit itself?”

  “I have no further details, sir.”

  Waleed thought for a moment. He was tired and didn’t have much capacity to play this information.

  “As far as I’m aware, my inquiry is not connected to the Alexandrian police in any way. However, as head of military intelligence in this area I would like to formally request sight of that monitoring in full.”

  “I shall relay your request, sir,” said the operator.

  “So what of my own inquiry?”

  The operator began to read. “You requested notification of any unusual cellular phone communications in the area of Nuweiba and Nuweiba Port over the past twenty-four hours.”

  “And ongoing,” Waleed chipped in.

  “Noted, sir. We have a record of two unusual calls being made. Notification of the calls came through a cellular mast six miles north of the port at Helnan.”

  “Who made them and to where?”

  “The calls were made from a phone registered in the United Kingdom to a phone that connected in the Republic of Ireland.”

  Waleed sighed. Tourists.

  “What type of place is Helnan?”