by Ru Pringle
She collapses into the heather.
As she lies there, recovering, it occurs to her that she has a dilemma. Her colour scheme would be little more conspicuous if it featured neon lights – and with coastal recreation the preserve of a foolhardy few, a kayak will be noteworthy. She should really travel only while it’s dark.
This could be worse. Nights at the moment are moonlit, and almost fifteen hours long. On the other hand, any head start she still enjoys is evaporating by the minute. Unless she’s lucky, her pursuers will find the kayaker sooner or later. Meaning they’ll guess, or know, that she’s taken a kayak.
Despite the risk, she has to travel in daylight.
Wishing she knew more about tidal currents, she drags herself to a sitting position and cleans gory fingers on her trousers. She can tell from looking at the shore whether the tide is moving in or out, but there’ll be no way to predict which way the sea will flow in the maze of waterways beyond the loch. Googling is out. To avoid being tracked, she lobbed her ’phone on to a passing flatbed lorry two days ago. And the problem isn’t academic: not only are currents round here faster than she could hope to paddle, but not far to the north, between the islands of Jura and Scarba, is Corryvreckan: one of the world’s largest tidal whirlpools.
She ransacks the kayak, dumping the contents of the drybags on the heather. Two muesli bars and a very battered apple. Never enough to keep her going. Regardless, she feels a strange spurt of gratitude to the boat’s previous owner before snapping that part of her mind back shut. Munching a muesli bar, she repacks. Having stripped to her knickers, she pulls the appallingly cold wetsuit back on and tightens her life-jacket.
After a quick but careful check around, she pushes the kayak down to the water.
SHE HUGS THE SHORE, hoping its patchwork of vegetation will disguise her, at least from across the loch. She’s always been confused by people describing Highland colours as pastel. Screaming orange autumn rushes, copper-pink bracken, and crimson berry bushes paint the landscape in impressionistic daubs, shot through with the electric greens of meadow grasses. Here at least, perhaps her colour scheme’s not so bad after all.
The woods near the migrants’ camp seem quiet. Their hulk of a boat looks like it could have beached years ago. It’s hard now to remember how that first Mediterranean trickle of overcrowded vessels became a global tsunami that turned nations in on themselves and united the majority in hate. A ferry serving the hundred-odd population of the wild island of Jura used to run up the loch twice daily from Tayvallich, but there’s been no sign of it. Above, two gulls and a severely graceful gannet patrol listlessly.
No sign of drones so far. She tells herself she wouldn’t miss them in the daylight.
The tide is draining out of the loch. The speed at which the shore’s gliding past shows how much it’s helping her. The rain which looked like setting in has eased, and sunlight is threatening to break through. Perfect visibility. Just what I need. At least paddling conditions are benign.
She sets a steady pace, ignoring the pull of her makeshift stitches.
The coast flattens, becoming a series of scrub-backed beaches. The blackened remains of a caravan park drift by. She feels vulnerable, so close to the shore yet with space on each side. As before, the kayak won’t go in a straight line. Every few strokes she’s forced to make tiring extra digs with the paddle to stop it turning. It seems well-appointed: she doesn’t understand why the contraption didn’t come with a rudder, or why it’s so badly behaved. She’s starting to suspect that there’s some vital technique she’s missing, though she can’t imagine what it might be.
Above the southern tip of the peninsula forming the sea-loch’s western shore, Jura’s breast-like mountains grow imperceptibly until, by late morning, she finds herself overlooking the choppy waters of the Sound of Jura.
SHE STARES ABOUT IN DISMAY. Compared to where she’s been, the sound seems appallingly open and exposed. And big. If she capsizes out there, it dawns on her she’ll be in real trouble. Scraping dregs of apple from its brown core with her teeth, she attempts to rerun a kayaking video she’d watched years ago with an outdoor-nut boyfriend. For as long as she can remember, hoarding information has been a habit of hers, or a game, or obsession – she isn’t sure exactly what. She might have excelled at pub quizzes, if she’d had any interest in either quizzes or celebrity trivia. Unfortunately, until yesterday she hadn’t even sat in a kayak, let alone thought her life might depend on one.
The trick with righting a capsized kayak, according to the buff and unnecessarily chirpy instructor, was to stretch sideways while you were upside down and use your paddle like a lever on the surface. You flicked the boat upright with your hips. It was important, apparently, to leave your head in the water for as long as possible, so you weren’t fighting the weight of your upper body.
Near the mouth of the loch she finds a sheltered little beach. Having positioned herself near enough to touch the bottom with her paddle, she braces herself, takes a deep breath …
… and tips the boat over.
Once more, the cold is a shock. She takes a moment to orientate herself. Everything’s blurred and dim, but she can see where the surface is. Striving for calm, she reaches out with the oar and, feeling like a drowning contortionist, tries to twitch her uppermost hip away from her.
By pushing against the oar, she manages to get her face above the water, but she already knows she won’t make it: the boat hasn’t righted nearly enough, and she’s pushed the oar down so far it’s braced against the bottom. She takes a desperate breath and plunges under again.
It feels like all her stitches have torn out.
Her second attempt is worse. She barely has time for a breath.
Relax! Go limp. Let your body follow your hips, like the video said.
Then, suddenly, she’s upright. She experiences a flash of elation, but the achievement’s so unexpected that she overbalances the other way. Then she’s breathing water, scrabbling free of the splashdeck, and choking and spluttering as she flounders ashore, towing the half-sunk kayak behind her.
She sits on the sand for a few minutes, elbows on her knees.
Having turned the boat over to empty it, and slaked a raging thirst from a nearby burn, she tries again. This time she fails completely, and has to return to shore almost immediately.
Her third attempt is better. She screws up the first try, swallowing alarming quantities of seawater, but snatches enough air for a second. Then, suddenly, she’s upright, saved from overbalancing by a jab with the opposite paddle blade. Coughing and burping, she ponders trying to drill the manoeuvre until she can do it reliably, but quickly decides against it. If she tries this again, she won’t have the energy to lift the paddle. She’s acutely aware that when she does it for real, things are unlikely to be so easy.
She sighs. Rolling aching shoulders as she distractedly scans the other side of the loch, she’s brought out of her reverie with a jolt.
Watching her from the high-tide mark not far from the peninsula’s southernmost point, half hidden among the scrubby trees, is a straggling group of people. They’re so still that they could be sculptures. Must be chilled to the bone, she thinks. Their colour and something in the way they’re standing makes her think they’re African, and few are wearing more than jeans and T-shirts. It strikes her that even if they can avoid being massacred, they’re unlikely to survive the winter.
Three that she can see have automatic weapons over their shoulders. They’re close enough for her to recognise the familiar outlines of Kalashnikovs.
CHAPTER 6
____________
Roadblock
SHE DESCRIBES a respectfully broad arc around the tip of the peninsula. It’s not clear why anyone on the shore would waste ammunition on her, but she’s taking no chances. Stealthy figures shadow her through the trees.
Sunlight is breaking through the sheet of stratus. It intermittently warms her face, inflaming
the water turquoise. The land’s bones are obvious here. The steep bedding of the rocks has created intimate coves and slim headlands fractured into islands that she itches to put between her and the sea. Unfortunately, this will make her a sitting duck from the mainland, so she takes the long way round.
With wild deer these days on everyone’s menu, the shore behind the chain of little beaches has become a jungle of saplings. In other circumstances the place might have seemed lovely. It looks deserted, but on each stretch of sand, stone-ringed camp fires are still smoking. She finds the last beach occupied by an ancient, rust-browned boat. It’s propped upright by tree trunks. Bright cylinders trailing dark hoses are scattered in the nearby sand, as though hastily abandoned. Welding torches?
Glancing anxiously over her shoulder, she passes the final headland and begins crossing a deep, tongue-shaped bay that’s as wide as the loch she’s just left. Feeling very naked, she quickens her strokes. Somewhere towards the middle, she becomes aware of a distant, low throb.
She holds her paddle and listens.
Rotor blades.
The bay’s opposite shore is a southward-thrust spine of land. She paddles towards it for all she’s worth, not daring to raise her head as the throbbing grows louder. Soon she’s breathless and in all kinds of pain, but she keeps pushing until she finds a tiny rocky bay at the peninsula’s very tip. The swell’s big enough for her to fear capsizing against the barnacled rocks, but with a series of urgent sculls she manages to heave the boat around, poking its nose back into the open as she scans the skies to the south.
Helicopters – two of the army’s new tilting-rotor jobs – are thundering north up the Sound of Jura. They’re not hanging about. Combined with their close formation, this is reassuring. Unlikely to be a search mission. Even so, she waits until they’re out of sight before creeping round the headland.
Probably headed for the front line, she thinks, though she suspects what’s been happening these past six months renders the concept of a “front line” little more than a soundbite. The separatists might be outnumbered and outgunned by the government, but they aren’t stupid. They withdrew to the Highlands in the first days of the uprising because it was terrain they could use to fight a guerrilla war.
She moves out into the waters of the sound.
Already, she feels terribly exposed – both to the elements and to watching eyes. The sound is like an immense funnel: four kilometres wide to the north, ever-widening southwards between the islands of Jura and Islay to the west and the hundred-kilometre long peninsula of Kintyre to the east. Once she’s in the funnel, anyone with binoculars will be able to see her. She lambasts herself for not taking the time to estimate the distance to her rendezvous. The old marina at Craobh Haven had been barely thirty kilometres from where she abandoned the car, but it’ll be much further by kayak, especially if she has to pick her route to avoid being seen. She ponders taking a break to read the – by now utterly sodden – map, but is too wary either of going ashore or fishing the map from the deck cord and reading it while trying to keep her balance.
All she knows is that an awful lot of convoluted coast lies between her and where she needs to be.
SHE’D BEEN PERHAPS TWENTY MINUTES away from home and dry when she hit the road block at Lochgilphead. Classic mistake: target’s finally in sight, so you let your guard down. It had been almost too late to avoid either a flight on foot (which was likely to have ended in a somewhat one-sided shoot-out) or a car chase. And with just one road to choose from, she knew how that would have turned out.
She had been lucky. Seeing the brake lights of a tailback through the trees ahead, she had looked quickly in her mirrors and to either side, killed the lights –
– and driven the car straight off the road.
The little electric hatchback had vaulted cleanly over a drystone wall, mangling itself as it ploughed a furrow down a steep bank, flipping on to its side as it hit a half-buried boulder and slamming to a stop against a tree.
As she sat suspended, watching airbags deflate, she could hear police sirens approaching. She didn’t dare move.
PERHAPS THREE MINUTES LATER, a police convoy screamed past. As if it would help her, she sat stock still as the sirens were killed. Flashing red and blue lights illuminated tree-tops where the vehicles had pulled up a few hundred metres further on.
She disentangled herself as stealthily as she could, standing on the driver’s window to squeeze out of the passenger one. Once on solid ground, she gave herself a brief once-over. She was shaken, but unhurt. By pure chance, the car was quite well hidden from the road. Heart in her mouth, she took a few minutes using a sleeve to rub fingerprints off bits of the car she thought she might have touched, then began covering it as best she could with dead bracken and the few branches she could find that had been brought down by the wind.
All in all, it had been a fortuitous escape. If she’d joined the queue, or driven a couple of minutes more slowly – perhaps even if she’d had time to think things over and turn back the way she’d come – she’d be in handcuffs or a body bag by now.
SHE HAD GRABBED the only items she had brought with her: a cashmere sweater, and her wallet. She still couldn’t quite believe the panic there had been in Edinburgh. The police and emergency services had responded in such numbers they’d jammed the city’s exit routes. She didn’t know what to make of that, other than that something was amiss. By the time radio reception fizzled out north of the Highland Line, her promise to avoid distracting herself listening for news reports felt like a mistake. A reaction had always been inevitable, but she’d had every reason to believe it would be low-key; that the authorities would suppress information for stability. Even given the unexpected chaos, she really hadn’t prepared for this very well. And why the roadblock, here of all places? Had they blocked all the roads? Already?
So much for choosing somewhere obscure for her getaway.
She was beginning to wonder if her rendezvous was compromised. But if it was, what then? There was no plan B. If her contact was out of the picture, she couldn’t imagine what she could do.
Could she walk there? While her footwear wasn’t exactly rugged – black, lace-up duty-shoes with urban soles – she had little doubt she could walk overland if she had to. What made her doubtful was that, to make the coast, she’d have to travel increasingly close to the road, and eventually cross it. She had no map, and no compass. And if the police were already looking for her here, drones and helicopters would be out, scanning heathery hillsides likely to offer little in the way of cover.
So what to do? Go by water? A small, fast Rigid Inflatable Boat, or RIB, was probably her best bet.
But how to get one?
Steal it?
There was an old canal linking Lochgilphead with Crinan on the opposite side of Kintyre. However, she was fairly sure it was tolled, which would put her at the mercy of whatever local gang or little Hitler was in control of it.
She studied her fuzzy mental map of the area.
Perhaps she could strike out west, towards the head of the sea-loch there? What was the damn thing called: Loch Sween? There was a village on the other side. Tayvallich, from where, in her childhood, ferries to the Isle of Jura had run. She had cash. Perhaps enough to buy a small boat. Or at least hire it. Aye, very funny. Well. Maybe if she was desperate there were other things she could offer …
She had no real idea what kind of land lay between her and the loch. Only that it was likely to be rough.
If she’d realised quite how rough it would be, she might have chosen differently.
SHE WADED A KNEE-DEEP RIVER, trudging across tidal mud at the head of Loch Gilp. There was a road, unlit, with no sign of traffic. She darted across to find progress blocked by a broad ribbon of inky water. The Crinan Canal. She’d forgotten how it curled around the west side of the loch.
Breathless with tension, she jogged north along the towpath. A mechanical lifting bridge appeared: a
bright strip in the gloom. Tied to a pontoon beside it was a barge. Its curtained windows were lit, and what sounded like a radio was playing inside. A toll collector for the bridge? A dog barked as she approached. She broke into a sprint, seeing curtains parting and a bearded face peering out as she passed.
She pounded over the bridge, up a short section of single track road, and into scrubby woodland on the far side.
The lights of the village became obscured as she moved uphill. Soon she was soon lost in a maze of endless ridges and troughs, spattered with peaty lochans. The entire area was choked with an infernal combination of stinking, waist-deep bog, barely penetrable plantations of Sitka spruce and more recent thickets of brambles, hawthorn, burr-shedding plants, and other shrubbery that ripped skin, tore clothes, and snagged in her jumper and her hair until she was dragging entire branches behind her. She stumbled and floundered, cursed and swore. She was exhausted after half an hour. The sky was overcast, with a chill westerly that was too capricious to navigate by. Without stars, her most reliable guide was what felt like a grain in the landscape; running south-east to north-west, judging from her last view of Lochgilphead.
Hints of dawn were in the east when, having covered what couldn’t have been more than six kilometres, she saw Loch Sween like a slick of mercury in the distance. Further off, the streetlights of what had to be Tayvallich curled around a deep bay. The sky was bright enough that boats were discernible, dotting the harbour. She could make out the shapes of power-boats, RIBs, the odd fishing boat … even several yachts. And beyond, in the town …
Red and blue lights.
She collapsed on her backside in the sphagnum, head between her knees. Her tension was turning to dread.
Why were they there? Why stake out a tiny village like Tayvallich? Especially when it was the wrong side of the Lochgilphead roadblock if they knew she was coming from the east.