The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  “You jammy bastard, Jake.”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “You’re shagging a… hostess or whatever she is. While I’m stuck dealing with Aussie fucking Mick.” He was pretending to look annoyed, but I knew he wasn’t really.

  “You realise I have to get my own back now?” He said. “I’ll have to show you what a boat like this can do.”

  The yacht shook gently as it drove through a set of small wavelets. We cleared the shelter of the marina, the Prima Donna beginning to find its rhythm as it rode into the swells. Ben pointed at more ropes and told me to pull them, not moving from his position on the wheel, in charge. I did what he told me, and with a lot of effort, I winched up the mainsail, and then pulled out the genoa at the front and winched that tight too. Once I’d finished winching, sweat had broken out on my brow and I felt like I’d just done fifty press ups. Then I looked up. The sails were enormous, a huge expanse of white filling the sky, and buckling and cracking since we were still motoring into the wind. Then Ben kicked the engine into neutral and laid us off, and the sails filled with wind. At once, the yacht yawed over to one side, and I swore and grabbed hold of what I could to keep from slipping over. Ben steered more and more off the wind so that the whole of the sails filled with wind. The boat was leaning right over on one side now, and surging forward, waves already crashing over the front and sending rivers of water down the side decks.

  “Fucking hell,” I said, not meaning to speak out loud. The boats I’d practiced sailing on back in the Solent hadn’t been anything like this, but then, they were tubby little cabin cruisers, and there hadn’t been much wind.

  “You know she’s been all the way around the world?” Ben told me. “She’s an ocean racer; that’s why I chose her. Shouldn’t have any problem taking us where we need to go.”

  And that first experience was nothing, just a light breeze to get me started. As the island lurched and gurgled away in our wake, the wind picked up, and the boat threw herself forward, faster and faster, crashing now through some of the ocean swells, surfing down the valleys between others. She lay down harder too on her side; the deck I’d come to feel familiar on was now a steep slope that bucked and crashed as we ploughed through the walls of ocean. I clung on, my feet not on the floor but on the angled sides. The detail of the port behind us quickly faded, and with it the mast of Miss Adventure acting as my marker for where Jenny was. Then even the tall, mountain top of Tenerife faded as well, and then we were alone in the ocean, a charging thoroughbred racehorse of a yacht at full speed, heading for the Moroccan coast.

  40

  “Here, take over for a minute.” Ben had seemed settled in his position behind the wheel, bare feet braced wide apart, a yachting jacket zipped up to keep off the worst of the spray. We’d been sailing for about two hours. We were passing the southern tip of the island of Fuerteventura.

  “Steer one thirty-five.”

  “Where are you going?” I guess I sounded worried, because he grinned at me.

  “I’m going to take a nap. I’ll be on watch tonight.”

  I felt my eyes widen.

  “You can sail a boat. You’ll be alright.”

  I made my way cautiously and awkwardly over to the wheel. It was hard to move anywhere with the angle of heel, but when I got there, he moved to one side, to let me stand beside him. I copied his position, widening my stance. Then I joined him with my hands on the wheel.

  “If the wind picks up any more, we’ll have to shorten sail. For now, just keep an eye out for the bigger waves. Let her head up into them. Let ’em roll underneath us.” Ben gave me a grin. He was doing what he loved.

  “You got her?”

  I nodded, and Ben let go. Immediately, the wheel began to slip through my fingers, spinning round one, then two full turns. At once, the yacht began turning into the wind, the sails losing their shape and flapping angrily. Ben grabbed the wheel again and fought it back around. Slowly, the boat fell back onto its original course. It was like it was alive, like you had to tame it.

  “You sure you got her?”

  Annoyed with myself, I gripped the wheel much harder and nodded.

  “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He let go.

  “Well, wake me up if there’s an emergency.” He thought for a moment. “Or if you see dolphins.”

  I watched as Ben made his way forward to the hatch. I don’t know how, but he seemed already to be in tune with the movement of the boat, not clinging on but moving lightly and easily. He dropped down below, and I concentrated instead on steering the boat. My eyes swept between the compass, mounted on a pedestal right in front of the wheel, and watching the waves sweep down on us from upwind. The wind was from the north; Ben said it almost always is in this part of the Atlantic, so that it builds up great rolling ocean swells, like creases in a rug, that are shaken out down the entire western coastline of Africa. We were crossing them now. One by one, they picked us up, carrying us higher in the sea where the wind was stronger, then allowing us to slide part-sideways in to the deep valleys between them. And as the hours passed, I found that if I let the yacht bear away, she would ride down the face of these ocean valleys, picking up speed, and the whole boat would thrum with vibrations. The rigging would whistle and hum as the wind screamed past ropes iron-tight with the tension from the sails. I was awestruck. Somewhere between euphoric and terrified. On one level it reminded me of a game, like something on the Xbox that Ben and I used to play, only it was nothing like that. It was so much bigger, it encompassed me. I was part of this awesome machine, its power like nothing I’d ever experienced, power I had no idea even existed. I found myself wanting more and more. Looking out for a bigger wave so that I could set up another sleigh ride down its face, with the fresh spray whipping past on either side.

  The colours were amazing. I’d never seen anything as white as those sails against the sky. And the ocean was such a deep blue, it was close to black. I don’t know how deep it runs there, but it’s inky, the streaks of white where the wave’s tops are blown apart by the wind like snowdrifts against coal. It was hypnotic.

  “Hey, Jake.” I snapped back to the present, seeing the hatch slide back and Ben’s head appear. “You taking it easy up there?”

  I’d been watching a big roller approach us from the side, and at that moment, I spun the wheel hard to turn her bow off the wind. The wave picked up the entire yacht and sent her careering downhill, sheaths of water flying through the air on either side. For a full thirty seconds, we rode the swell down, the boat’s steering light and responsive to my touches on the wheel; then we reached the bottom and crashed hard into the swell in front. Rivers of water came sweeping down the side decks, Ben reached above him and closed the hatch cover so that the water from the coach-house roof ran straight into the cockpit and drained away behind me.

  “I’m having fun!” I shouted, matching Ben’s grin from before. “Why didn’t you tell me how much fun this is?”

  “I did. You didn’t listen.” Ben yelled back. “But you can have too much fun. Pull her into wind. We need to reef.”

  I steered as Ben pulled the ropes and did whatever he had to do to make the mainsail smaller; then he took the genoa—the sail at the front—in as well, rolling it back up around itself. When we returned to our course, the noise and the speed of the yacht were both less, and Ben pointed to a low smudge on the horizon.

  “That’s Africa,” he said. “We don’t want to crash into it.”

  He needn’t have worried. As we came closer, the wind dropped. It went from force six—like sticking your head out the window of a fast-moving car—to a light breeze, and then twenty minutes after that, it had dropped to nothing. Our speed dropped with it. From fifteen, nearly twenty knots surfing down the swells, to just cutting sharply through the water, and then, with the coast of Africa now looming large across the horizon, to almost nothing. The sea became almost glassy-still. We put the engine ba
ck on and took down the sails and motored slowly closer for a while, Ben flicking through the GPS and the radar as we waited for word. Then we saw them.

  41

  There were three boats, small, open wooden vessels, painted blue and already close enough that we could see the figures in them. Ben had a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes, and he focussed on the boats now.

  “That them?” I asked, a little nervous now. This was always the worst part, where you feared something might go wrong.

  “Yep. That’s them,” Ben replied, and using his foot he pulled back the throttle lever so that our speed dropped to just a ghostly glide through the water.

  “Get a couple of fenders out there.” Ben pointed to our port side. I swung open the locker under the cockpit seat, and dug around for where I’d stored them. Then I stepped carefully to the middle of the boat and tied them to the guardrail. Then I waited. The only sound was the higher-pitched whine from the outboards on the closing boats, and a little lapping noise as the near-still sea fussed at the Prima Donna’s waterline. It was late in the day now, and the sun was low behind us, shining on the three boats as they closed in. Now, I could see a familiar figure standing in the front of the first boat, his hand up, shielding his eyes from the glare.

  Ten metres away, the first of the fishing boats throttled back off the plane, coming to match our speed. Even from that distance there was no mistaking the driver was a local, the guy at the front too, standing ready with a rope. But the figure in the middle wasn’t. He dropped his hands now and formed them into a funnel around his mouth.

  “Nice fucking boat boys!” he called out, it was weird to hear Paul’s voice this way after not seeing him for over a month. “Any chance of joining you or is this a romantic cruise?”

  “Sure,” I shouted back. “Come aboard.”

  Moments later, the first boat was alongside, the driver shouting instructions that I couldn’t catch. I offered to hold a rope but the bowman pushed my hands away, instead threading it through a cleat and holding it secure, pulling the two boats close.

  “Good to see you, mate.” Paul said, once we were secure. He looked good, a white t-shirt highlighting the tan on his face and arms. As always he looked larger than life. We gripped hands for a long moment.

  “Let’s get the stuff onboard, and we can get out of here, huh?”

  Around Paul’s feet, filling the bottom of the boat, were a dozen cheap shopping bags, the kind you can get in markets all around the world. Although they were zipped up, I knew each was filled with clingfilm-wrapped cubes of product, ten per bag, arranged that way because it was the biggest size we could lift onto the yacht easily from the much lower fishing boat. Paul handed them to me one by one, and in turn, I passed them back to Ben, who dumped them down below in the saloon. It took three, maybe four minutes to empty the first fishing boat, no more than that. Then Paul pumped fists with the boat driver, whose white teeth flashed in the evening sunlight, and then he took my arm and I pulled him aboard the Prima Donna. We didn’t waste time. He waved the second fishing boat to come alongside from its position a few score metres behind. When it too was alongside he dropped back down into it, and we did the same as before, him lifting the bags of product from the fishing boat, me taking them and passing them to Ben who placed them out of sight inside the Prima Donna. Then the third boat came alongside.

  “Hey, honey,” Julia said to me when she was close enough. I’d nearly forgotten how pretty she was. “Missed you.”

  “Missed you too,” I replied.

  “Come on guys, let’s get this done fast.” Paul heard the exchange and cut it short. It wasn’t because he was unsentimental. He just wanted to minimise the time the product was exposed. That was how they worked, they did everything practical to reduce risk. With the four boats there at that point, if an aircraft happened to fly over and saw us it might create suspicion. It probably wouldn’t but it might. Better to get it done and get the fuck out of there. That was what Jimmy had told us time and time again. Julia handed me the first of the bags.

  “Don’t drop it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money there.”

  I closed my grip around the bag’s handle and took the weight.

  Now, I’m going to stop you for a second here. How much do you think that bag was worth? I’ve already told you it weighed ten kilos, and you know a kilo of Moroccan hashish is worth about a thousand pounds? So each bag was worth about ten grand, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. You see it wasn’t Moroccan hashish in those bags. It was extremely pure cocaine, on the final leg of a long journey from the rainforest refineries of South America, where Paul had negotiated its purchase, via container ship from the Columbian port of Buenaventura, through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic to Agadir on the coast of Africa where Julia had intercepted it and diverted it into these fishing boats. And now here I was, ordinary little me from my ordinary life, pulling it aboard for the final voyage back to the UK. So, how much do you think that bag was worth? Go on have a guess. Ten thousand? Try eight hundred thousand and you’re getting closer. You really don’t want to drop that.

  But then again, there was a float in every bag, so if we did drop them, we’d just pick them up again. We weren’t idiots. We knew what we were doing by then.

  We emptied the third boat, and this time, both Paul and Julia said hurried goodbyes to the local driver, Julia giving him a hug and kissing his cheeks. He was beaming and I wasn’t a bit surprised. Not because of Julia, because of how much cash he’d just made. Then Paul pulled her roughly aboard the yacht and it was my turn for a hug. Then when she was done with me she made her way back to the cockpit where Ben was still standing at the wheel. I couldn’t hear what they said but I watched them embrace and then kiss each other deeply, and I smiled. It made me feel good.

  “The fuck you smiling about? Let’s get this hidden away.” Paul told me.

  We worked fast to load the product into the compartments I’d created, and I got to work right away finishing them off so that they’d pass a cursory inspection. We had way too much on board to save us if they ripped us apart—but what reason would anyone have to rip apart the Prima Donna? None at all. She was totally clean.

  And then the four of us sat together in the cockpit, while Paul motored us north along the African coast. We drank cold beer and watched the sky to our left descend from oranges and reds and golds until it reached purple and then became punctuated with pinpoints of silver blue sparkling stars. Eventually it matched the shimmering black darkness that hung over the Sahara.

  42

  Ben divided us up into two watches. Neither Julia nor Paul had any sailing experience so it made sense for each of us to lead a watch. I thought he’d put himself with Julia but he didn’t. He said it wasn’t a good idea for a couple to be on watch together. He and Paul took the first watch, they sent Julia and me below to cook some food.

  It was warmer down there and Julia stood so close to me our bodies were touching in the tiny galley as she chopped vegetables and I fried them on the stove. After a little while we heard the sounds of the sails going back up, and then the throb of the engine changed tone, and then went silent altogether, replaced by the gurgling sound of water flowing past the hull. Then the yacht took on a little heel, not as much as before, just enough that she pressed herself forward through the water.

  It took me a while to come to terms with the whole Julia thing, in case you’re wondering. When Andy was off the scene she and Ben became an item officially, and that meant she became a part of our thing with Jimmy and Paul. At first I had to work hard to hide how I felt, to smother my resentment at Ben for having her, and my resentment at her for taking him away from me. But over the weeks and months that followed, my eyes were opened to a world I hadn’t known existed, and certainly never imagined I’d be a part of. I came to see how well she and Ben fitted together. In a strange way I developed a sense of pride at how well they worked together, and especially of how they both still valued me as a friend.
/>   And their closeness meant I became closer to Paul and Jimmy than would otherwise have happened. I think Paul suspected how I felt for her, and I know Jimmy knew because his wife Sarah talked to me about it a few times, telling me gently to accept what Ben and Julia had together, and assuring me that I would have the same one day. I came to see that Julia was never right for me, and I never right for her. That it hadn’t been love I felt for her but the shock and novelty of sudden and unexpected proximity with a girl more beautiful than any I had encountered up to then.

  Speaking with Sarah helped me most of all. She was equally beautiful in her own way, dark where Julia was light. Deep, where Julia was—for me at least—just a little bit shallower than I needed. Their second child had been born by then and Sarah would calmly and naturally expose one of her own breasts in the middle of our conversations to attach the baby for its feed. Perhaps the contrast helped me grow up a little.

  Ben did buy Julia her fake tits, though, in case that’s what you’re wondering. Right after we agreed to Jimmy’s deal. We went back to Brighton with a nice pot of cash, and that was one of the things he got sorted out early on. She showed me them too, once they were done, so I got my before and after viewing. I think I preferred the before, but she was happy about them. And I know Ben was.

  We ate all together, the autopilot steering us north, and we popped the cork on a bottle of champagne that I’d bought in the Tenerife supermarket for just this occasion.

  My first night onboard—my first night sail—was beautiful. Ben had told me it would be, and Jenny had too. The wind stayed light, and we tacked north against it, changing sides every couple of hours just for the variety of it, and to pump a little blood by changing the sails across. The boat was much more mannered than it had been on the crossing the day before. It cut crisply through the water, close hauled, those huge sails knifing through the air. Above them, the sky was ablaze with the universe of a billion stars. Julia and I put the deck stereo on loud and argued good-naturedly over what music to play. Everything I liked she hated and vice versa. Yeah. Julia and I were never meant to be. Once I accepted that we were able to become just about as close as friends could be. We drank coffee to stay awake and talked. It was good to see Julia again.