by Ru Pringle
‘I’ve tried his handler,’ Carla tells her. ‘Last she heard, he was still waiting for sign of Keir. Since the bombing there’s been radio silence.’
‘Do we know who it is?’
Carla looks aghast. ‘No way! Ma’am. He’s undercover – only his handler knows who he is.’
‘Find out who it is. Tell the handler that’s an order from me! Christ …’ She puts a thumb and forefinger to her eyes.
Sebastian, meanwhile, is in a cold sweat. ‘Do we have any more imagery?’
Carla shakes her head. ‘Cloud cover.’ Anticipating his question, she continues: ‘Our only intel source is two local eyewitnesses, and what they’ve told the police. Hence the delay. From the police report the strike was …’ she puffs out her cheeks. ‘Thorough.’
Sebastian bares his teeth in a snarl. He kicks out against the table. ‘Bloody fuck. Shit!!’ Members of the team look away uncomfortably.
Realising he’s losing it, he pulls himself together.
‘Okay: I want an official response from the Air Force, pronto. Then the unofficial one. Find out when, how and why. If they stonewall, pull strings, call in favours, apply pressure. Get dirty if you have to. And I want a team at the site.’
‘We’re going to struggle for resources,’ Lorna points out. ‘Unless we pull them off other things.’
She’s being diplomatic. What she means is they’re stretched almost to breaking point, and risking the ire of every agency they work with. ‘Then get staff flown up from Thames House! Tell them I’m authorising it. If you get stonewalled, say you want to speak to the Director General and patch my ’phone through.’ Lorna nods. Begins talking with Carla.
‘What about forensics?’ Andrew Campbell this time.
‘Good idea. See what’s left. Get the ground team to look for traces of our kayak. Or Keir, or anyone who might have been her contact. In fact, anything unusual. Jump to it!’
He claps his hands together. A few of them actually jump.
‘Lorna – meet me outside.’
Sebastian stamps up the stairs, Lorna following in his wake. He doesn’t stop at the doors, but marches along the corridor and commits subtle violence on the buttons of the coffee machine. He hands Lorna a steaming cup, and they sit on the stackable chairs in the waiting area, saying nothing as she inhales from her vaper.
The hands holding his cup are quivering.
‘So,’ he asks eventually. ‘What do you reckon?’
Lorna shrugs, plastic cigarette cocked. It’s interesting, he thinks, that while his response is anger, hers is detachment. ‘They’ll claim it was targeted at separatists.’
‘You believe that?’
She exhales a cloud of white vapour. It smells of cherries. He watches her study the stains in the textured ceiling panels. ‘Protocol would have been to check with us first. Our operation should have been flagged up as priority.’
‘So just a clusterfuck then.’
‘It’s not unknown for communication to suffer in times of conflict.’
‘But the timing …’
‘Sebastian. Much as I enjoy playing devil’s advocate, and much as we both know how imperfectly the military are capable of conducting themselves …’
‘But seriously. What are the alternatives?’
She shrugs. Takes another drag. ‘You mean – who might have an interest in Coira Keir, and the ability to come in over our heads?’
‘I don’t know exactly what I mean.’ He sets his jaw. ‘Where have Itchy and Scratchy got to? I was expecting them back by now.’ Lorna smiles weakly at this description of Tomlin and Planter.
‘Apparently there’s a problem.’
Somehow this is unsurprising. ‘What kind of problem?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough.’ Tendons stand out in her neck. ‘How’s our favourite field officer?’
‘You mean, did the strike …?’ He shakes his head. ‘Stayed well clear. Thank God. Still on the hunt.’
‘So, all might not be lost.’
‘Let’s hope.’ He stares at the coffee machine.
‘How many did we lose?’
‘Six. Unconfirmed, but …’
‘Were they mercs? The team …’
‘I don’t like that term, Lorna. They were private contractors. I needed low-profile people we could trust.’ Lorna’s eyes widen.
‘They were army buddies.’
‘The team leader and two of others were … friends.’ Lorna looks down. Studies her vaper.
‘All this trouble. I don’t know whether or not I hope she was killed in the blast.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Sebastian releases a long, calming breath. Comes to a decision. ‘You know what – it’s late. I doubt we’ll know anything useful now until the morning.’
He rises, stretching his arms extravagantly as he yawns.
‘I’m winding things down for the night. We can keep a skeleton crew fielding any fresh intel so it’s ready for us first thing. I don’t think we’ll achieve anything grinding ourselves down.’
Lorna looks unconvinced.
‘I’ll take care of loose ends. Go home.’
She blinks tired eyes. ‘Eight?’
‘On the dot, pet.’
‘Sleep well, Sebastian.’
‘You too.’
Lorna puts the coffee in the bin and walks towards the cloakroom desk for her jacket.
CHAPTER 21
______________
Retaliation
DAWN IS WELL UNDERWAY as they reach the shelter of the east coast of Luing.
The night was Coira’s second spent wrapped in the flysheet of the kayaker’s tent. Both women were already dangerously cold, and they waited out the darkness huddled together beside a ruined stone building on the shore of Shuna’s northern bay. To Coira’s surprise, Karen seemed to sleep soundly. Coira managed a fitful couple of hours at most.
As soon as it was light enough to see they inspected the boat, which Karen had tied to a bush by the water’s edge.
While the boat was still floating, most of the air in the left-hand air chamber was gone. It was obvious why. A half-metre-long steel spike that looked like it had been part of a yacht was embedded in the rubber skin. Coira’s kayak had also suffered. Its nose was covered in gouges, and a big chunk was missing from the deck just forward of the cockpit, leaving a hole she could slide a hand into.
Fortunately there was a locker under the RIB’s steering wheel, containing – in addition to life jackets and a couple of flares – a puncture repair kit, a foot pump, and a roll of gorilla tape. The repair to the RIB took ten minutes, but re-inflating the chamber with the undersized pump took considerably longer. Coira used the tape to patch the kayak as best she could. The clouds were an ugly crimson by the time they were ready to leave.
Having made the crossing back to Luing as fast as they dared, they head north. While hugging the coast will increase the risk of being shot at if anyone on the island spots them, Coira hopes it’ll make them harder to see. There’s barely a breath of wind this morning. It’s not a good thing, as the sound of the engine will travel. They keep it to a quiet burble, ghosting forward no faster than the kayak would have gone.
The eerie call of a lone bird echoes over the flat water. Nothing is moving that Coira can see, save for slowly undulating ripples from the boat and an otter glimpsed amongst the kelp. The previous day seems like a disturbed dream. But for the threat of imminent gunshots, they could be holidaymakers on a morning cruise.
From the map, Coira knows that around the next headland is a bay, narrowing to a waterway just metres wide between Luing and a smaller island to the north. Overlooking that bay is a house. She’s trying to weigh the risks of it being occupied by Karen’s rapists against those of detouring north round the island and having to dog-leg back around the jutting southern tip of the island of Seil. The alternative, the absurdly narrow strait separating Seil from the mainland, seems like
asking for trouble. The strait is crossed by an old stone bridge and, once in it, there’ll be no escape for three kilometres. It would be the perfect place for anyone with ill intent to lay an ambush.
She settles on the channel south of the smaller island. Karen, who knows the waters better than her, agrees, and steers them round the headland.
That’s when they see more than a dozen animated figures, waiting for them on the heather at the top of the shore just metres away, yelling at the top of their lungs.
COIRA FLINCHES SO HARD she almost falls. A yelp escapes from Karen as she guns the engine, turning the boat smartly away from the shore.
Looking back, Coira notices that some of the people are waving. In fact, all of them are waving. Instead of the expected automatic weapons, two are carrying what look like infants.
It’s not a wave. It’s a plea for help.
Karen turns the engine to idle. As the boat slumps down off its bow-wave, the girl’s eyes are nearly circular.
‘What should we do?’
Coira gnaws a thumb. ‘I don’t know.’ Fuck! She spits out a bit of thumbnail. ‘Could easily be a trap.’
‘I don’t see guns.’
‘It’s what we can’t see that worries me.’
‘You mean …’ Sweeping hair out of her eyes, Karen looks around, and leans closer. ‘You think they might be bait?’
Coira’s admiration for this kid goes up another notch. ‘It’s possible.’ She pulls her binoculars from the kayak. Having studied the crowd and the shore to either side, she hands them to Karen, who gives the group a long, hard inspection.
‘They don’t look … you know. Coerced. They just look like they want to get off the island. And look at where they are. It’s like, maybe they didn’t realise this was an island, and they tried to escape north or something. But then they reached the sea and didn’t have anywhere else to go.’
‘They look like those men from yesterday.’
‘You mean, black?’
‘Do you recognise any of them?’
Karen takes another lengthy squint through the binoculars. She shakes her head. Coira swallows.
‘We just made a very loud engine noise, and that racket they’re making will be heard for kilometres.’
Her throat feels very dry.
‘We’ll have to be quick.’
OUTBOARD GURGLING, they creep towards the shore. ‘Stay at the wheel,’ Coira hisses. ‘The instant there’s any movement either of us don’t like, get yourself out of here, fast as you can.’
The bow nudges the rocks. A slender man in stained brown trousers and a blue shirt comes to take the rope Karen throws him. His fine, intensely black face is etched with worry.
‘Help us,’ he is croaking, hitching the rope expertly around a rock. ‘Please!’ He gestures at the others, who look on with beseeching expressions. Several are women; two of them clutching toddlers, who look on with thumbs in their mouths and suspicious eyes. It’s impossible to tell the women’s ages. They could have been young, but something has happened in their faces that makes them look old.
‘My friend escaped from men in the south of this island,’ Coira tells the man, doing her best to look and sound like someone not to be messed with. ‘They have her family. Do you know these men?’
She feels a little jolt of fear as the man nods. Disconcertingly, his bloodshot eyes wander everywhere but her face. She wonders if he’s afraid to look at her. His eyes are very large. Then it strikes her it might seem that way because the flesh on his face is so shrunken.
‘This men, from Somalia,’ he says. His consonants are so thickly accented that she finds herself repeating the words in her head before she understands. ‘When they children, only war. All of life, only war. And gun. Now they like animal. Yes – wild animal!’
He gestures at the imploring crowd behind him.
‘We – from Eritrea, from Sudan. Also from Yemen. We meet this men – this Somalis – on …’ The man has a rapid exchange with one of the other men, and Coira hears the word “boat”. ‘Yes, on boat. This men say: “Yes, yes – we take to England. For money, big money”.’
He places his hands exaggeratedly on his chest.
‘I doctor. I luck, have money. So … I take family, my family.’ Here he walks back into the crowd and pulls forward a gaunt woman and a youth she thinks must be in his early teens. ‘I take family on boat. But this men – men you speak … This men make very bad.’
The woman’s empty gaze sinks to the ground.
‘They – very bad, my wife. They – they kill my son.’ He holds up three fingers. There are tears in his eyes as he grabs the youth by the arm. ‘Only one, Aklilu, is survive.’ He gestures at the others. ‘We prisoner, this boat. Many day prisoner, this boat. All here, same-same.’
Coira realises her own eyes are welling up.
‘So, we leave. We leave this, now. Please!’ He extends a hand towards at the RIB. It’s shaking. ‘Take us!’
Coira knows she’s never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes. Her tongue seems too thick to speak, but she hears herself say: ‘Will they – these men – know you are here?’ The man’s eyes grow even larger.
‘Yes, yes! They come.’
This is one of those moments, she realises. This will bite you.
‘What is your name?’
The man gives a little bow. ‘Yemane.’ For a moment she thinks he’s about to offer a hand-shake, but he doesn’t.
‘Yem … Yemane? One condition.’
She leans close to the man’s ear. Lowers her voice. His smell – of an unwashed body combined with the burnt-rubber reek of pure terror – is almost overwhelming.
‘My friend … these men treated her badly. You understand?’
He nods as though she's just described something so routine it’s barely of note.
‘Do what you can for her.’
COIRA USHERS THEM down to the waterline while Karen leaps in the water past her knees to help the more infirm up on to the boat. There are more here than she’d thought. Twenty, including the babies and toddlers. Three of the women and two of the men are limping badly. Expressions flicker between gratitude and fear. Some of the women touch Coira’s clothing in a reverent way that freaks her out.
As they scramble in she wades round the back and, with Karen’s help, slides the kayak into the water. She secures a length of cord from the RIB’s locker to a steel ring beside the engine, passing the other end through the handle at the kayak’s bow and tying it to an eyelet beside the cockpit. No one needs urging to hurry, but embarking seems to take an eternity. With dismay she sees that, with five grown men still on the shore, the RIB is already overloaded.
They aren’t going to fit.
‘I’ll go in the kayak,’ she tells Karen. The girl is watching the skyline with the expression of a hunted animal. ‘Tow me.’
She gives Coira a startled look ‘Won’t it tip over?’
‘We’ll find out.’
It’s a squeeze, but everyone eventually finds a place, with the dozen seated on the floatation chambers clinging to those standing in the middle. With Karen barking instructions for them to balance the boat better, they creep away from the shore. The kayak’s more stable than Coira feared, although when the RIB starts to turn it needs a bracing stroke to prevent it being pulled over.
As the convoy crawls across the bay, everyone’s eyes turn silently towards the house that’s swung into view a couple of hundred metres away. Even the babies seem to be holding their breath.
There’s a white van parked outside the house. Old, but with inflated tyres. The house looks in good repair. The garden is tidy. Nothing is moving.
They gurgle on, into the jaws of the strait.
Coira can hear whispers from the boat, silenced by hisses of ‘Shhhh!’ She does her best not to cough. She’s right in the cloud of fumes from the engine.
She risks a look at the map.
Coverage
ends well south of Oban, but from what she knows of the coast north of here, the town can’t be much more than twenty kilometres away. Probably forty minutes for a speedboat with the throttle open.
Coira knows little about boats, but the RIB worries her. It’s so low in the water it looks like a moderate wave might cause it to founder. They’ve been lucky so far with the weather, but given the flaming sunrise, and clouds she can see building above the island of Luing to the south-west, she’s wondering how long it’ll be before the next storm. And we’ll not be escaping anywhere in a hurry …
They pass the narrows of the strait: just a stone’s throw wide. The rising tide is pouring through, creating a gentle current. They enter an islet-studded bay encircled by the three larger islands. On Luing to the west, Coira can see a road. The Eritreans, Sudanese and Yemenis have also seen it. They chatter in low, urgent voices, glancing nervously inland. Houses dot the shore.
‘People,’ Karen hisses at length over the engine, pointing for Coira’s benefit.
Coira pulls the binoculars from under the deck straps. She feels trapped, tied like this to a boat over which she has no control. Putting the binoculars to her eyes, she sees a modern wood-frame house above a jetty with a powerboat roped to it. Lights aren’t on, but she can make out shadows moving behind the house’s windows. Sat on a bench under the eaves with a rifle across his knees, a man with binoculars is staring right back at her.
Coira jerks back with fright. Then takes another look. The man’s barely moving: just panning the binoculars slowly between Coira and the RIB. She takes some comfort from the fact his appearance isn’t what she’d expect of an average Somali. Perhaps this is part of the island they haven’t overrun yet.
Karen nudges the throttle forward a little. The kayak starts to wobble. Coira hangs the binoculars round her neck and grabs the paddle. The RIB sits up slightly, its bow-wave increasing. The engine is louder now, but she knows the girl is trying to find a trade-off between stealth and speed. The narrows between Luing and Seil are approaching. It’s the place where the old ferry once crossed. Speedboats are moored on each side. This really isn’t good …