October Song

by Ru Pringle

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says, relieved at this last bit of information. ‘Not urgent. Would be nice to find a shop, though. I might need … supplies.’

  He looks questioningly at her. Then his eyes widen. ‘Oh.’ She can’t help smirking. He’s like an embarrassed little boy. ‘Well,’ he says, scrutinising the sand, ‘I had considered heading up to Skye. The island’s bound to have shops open. Although we’ll likely get fleeced for it.’

  ‘You’re heading north?’

  ‘Think so. No firm plans.’

  ‘What about the fighting? Do you know where the front is?’

  ‘Front!’ he grunts, contemptuously. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice – some tidy dividing line across the country; separatists to the north and Her Majesty’s Heroic Armed Forces and other loyal subjects to the south. As far as I can tell, insurgents are hitting targets over half the Highlands. Even in areas we supposedly locked down. That’s what caught us out at Oban, and it’s what’s making it so hard for the armed forces to stop them. These people have clearly studied their history – Afghanistan, Iraq and all that. They know how to engage a superior force. Drones seem to be inflicting heavy casualties, but whenever army units get involved my impression’s been that it’s the other way round. A lot of the guerrillas seem to be ex-army themselves. From what I heard, quite a few defected from English units of the British army. I think they’ve been passing on intelligence about the UK forces.’

  Oh, crap. She glances anxiously overhead. She’s felt so snug in her bubble of fake normality that she’d quite forgotten about drones. Not to mention satellites. With the cloud cover of previous days gone, she’s completely exposed. Just hours after her near miss with that character in Oban …

  Coira knows an MI5 officer when she sees one. She can picture the recognition in the officer’s face. It was like she’d been expected. Assuming the visual confirmation got reported, all the authorities need is a satellite sweep of nearby coasts and they’ll find her, displayed like a shop exhibit on this stupid beach. As long as skies remain clear, once locked on, they can track her every move automatically. She’s even heard of satellite sensors using wavelengths at which clouds are transparent. She hopes it’s propaganda.

  ‘I get the impression islands are safer than the mainland,’ Alistair is saying. ‘From separatists, at least. Tactically, they’re bad places to be.’

  Studying her, he cocks his head. ‘Afraid of eavesdroppers?’

  You always were a perceptive bastard. ‘With the fighting so close, I suppose I’m embarrassed at the thought of some teenage drone or satellite jockey perving at me with his equally spotty buddies.’

  She makes herself shiver.

  ‘Look – I’m a bit cold, to be honest. Mind if we go back?’

  CHAPTER 31

  ______________

  Damage

  SEBASTIAN STANDS at the top of the stairs, grasping the railing as he looks down on the ops room. He doesn’t like how much he needs the railing for support. He must look like a priest at a lectern, he thinks. An errant priest, preaching Bad News to his crowd.

  No matter: this is currently the most practical place for him to be.

  It’s been a long, long night. Now it’s over, he can’t quite believe what’s happened in the last few hours. ‘Carla – any word on Kapoor and Neeson?’

  Carla Stout is shaking her head. She has the eyes of a heroin user. ‘Only Bojko and Dickson have reported in.’

  ‘Video?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Voicemail. There’s only bandwidth for voice calls. Local infrastructure must have taken a hit. Or been deliberately sabot –’

  ‘Can you play it over the speakers?’

  The room quietens as Sara Bojko’s husky, still slightly panicked voice describes the attack on Oban. It sounds as if the town had been infiltrated by separatists in a carefully planned trap for both the army and the navy. Given the roadblocks and other security, this wasn’t opportunism. It took planning, organisation and worryingly good intelligence.

  Bojko describes hundreds dead, and the centre of the town virtually razed to the ground. Once the fighting began, both field officers clearly had their hands full just trying to stay alive. Gareth Dickson had taken shrapnel to the chest. This was after his face had already been lacerated by masonry coming through the windscreen of the electrical van he was using to stake out the harbour. The two were now waiting at an army field hospital. Bojko for orders, and Dickson for evac.

  However things pan out, Sebastian Blakeslee knows he no longer has a prayer of signing off this operation by merely filing a report. He’ll be officially hauled over the coals. To make matters worse, no one got so much as a glimpse of Keir.

  There won’t be much time before he finds his wings clipped.

  ‘There’s still a chance,’ Lorna’s telling everyone, including herself. ‘Kapoor and Neeson could be injured. Or lying low.’ Sebastian stretches his neck. Feels vertebrae crackle.

  ‘We got taps on any army satellite feeds yet?’

  Soo-Ling Campbell clicks a few buttons and a satellite image fills the main screen. It’s breathtakingly clear. The sea is a slick of blue-green, with grey and turquoise shallows picked out by the sun. White V-shapes inch across it: the wakes of powerboats shuttling between Oban and the island to the west. The town’s harbour is obvious, with a big navy vessel anchored in the bay. Another warship at the ferry port is billowing smoke. Half its deck is underwater. Of the town itself, only outlying houses are visible. The rest is obscured by a dark smudge. It looks like someone spilled coal dust on a photograph.

  ‘Still no availability on the satellites,’ Soo-Ling is saying. ‘The officer I spoke to was pretty rude when I asked.’

  Sebastian grunts. Unsurprising, in the circumstances. Even so it’s exasperating, now that the weather’s allowing useful imagery for the first time in over a week. ‘Any intel on the separatists?’

  ‘Reports are that they’re in the wind. Hit and run tactics again: they’re not trying to hold ground, just inflict damage. There were a lot of panicked locals escaping the fighting. Army Intelligence reckons a lot of insurgents escaped by mimicking fleeing civs. The insurgents took casualties, but it looks like the army had two battalions pretty much wiped out. By all accounts it was like a skittle alley on the main street.’

  ‘What about the navy?’

  ‘Severe damage to the destroyer Nelson. Multiple fatalities.’

  ‘I mean, can they help us?’

  Soo-Ling’s finely sculpted black eyebrows go up as she cottons on. ‘Nice try, chief, but it’s the same drones and satellites. With the Navy at high alert we’re pushed further down the queue if anything. They’ll be wanting those bastards just as much as …’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Sebastian drops his head and pulls on the railing. The truth is, he’s starting to wilt. Faced with what’s happened at Oban, capturing Coira Keir seems trivial. Pointless, even. ‘Give me some good news, someone. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of forensics, or at least a body search?’

  The expressions of the experts around the room tells him all he needs to know. Lorna’s treating him to a resigned stare. ‘What’s left of the town centre is locked down,’ she says, quietly. ‘We can barge in. But it won’t win us friends. The army is hurting badly right now.’

  She’s right. Christ. What a clusterfuck. ‘Is the Red Cross there?’

  A couple of nods.

  ‘Good. Lorna – explain the situation to the top brass in the town. Say we’ve men down; that we need quick ID of the bodies because of a link with the Holyrood bombing. Try and find an angle – milk any connection with the separatists you can think of. I also want the descriptions of Kapoor, Neeson and Keir sent to the Red Cross – and make sure the army medical corps gets them too. Be diplomatic, try and get them on-side. Yes, Carla?’

  Carla’s bruised-looking eyes are bulging. She looks like she urgently needs the toilet.

  ‘Sir – I’ve
someone on a non-secure landline who claims to have seen Coira Keir. Ehm – not sure quite how, but checks out as one of ours. Last night. In Oban.’

  Sebastian blinks.

  ‘Run that past me again?’

  YOU PUT THE OLD battery-powered handset in its cradle and stare at it for a moment. You’ve taken your eye off the old couple on the sofa, you realise, so you hastily raise the P99 towards them again. They’re looking at you with an expression not far short of hate.

  Inside, you’re churning.

  You thank them for the use of the ’phone. Ask politely where the key is to the Renault that’s parked outside.

  You tell them you’ll be taking it.

  The Renault proves to be an electric car with continuous transmission. It’s compact, comfortable and modern. Usefully, it can be driven single-handed. You don’t put the pistol in the door pocket until the house is well out of sight.

  Near the water’s edge, a few kilometres down the single track road south-west of the town, there’s a caravan park. You hesitate, then swing the car slowly into the drive and switch it off. Everything is scruffy and overgrown, but some of the static motorhomes still look habitable. Information you file away for future reference.

  You’ve just been given what amounted to a severe bollocking.

  The shore below the caravan park is rocky, with a sparse scrub of rosebay willowherb, bramble and Japanese knotweed. You push through, thorns tugging at your trousers, and sit on a lichenous rock. Across the narrow sea-channel, a bracken-orange island fills the view. Kerrera, you think it’s called. There’s a strong smell here – guano, or something equally rural and excretory. Seawater burbles among the rocks. Damp is starting to seep through your sensible black trousers, but you can’t find it in you to care.

  Ainsworth and Blakeslee were angry at you disobeying orders. You get that. They were angry that you lost an undercover-prepped Service pool car on duty. You get that too. Apart from the dent it’ll leave in the department budget, there’s the paperwork, which is a trial at the best of times. And it makes your bosses look bad.

  What you’re struggling with is your orders.

  More specifically, the fact that there aren’t any. Beyond going to ground and awaiting instruction.

  Is this punishment, you wonder? What have you done that’s so out of line? You’re far from the first field agent to have taken a little initiative: something that, as you recall, was actively encouraged in training. As a direct result of which, despite everything – and with the most tenuous of leads – you came within metres of collaring her. When four officers posted to Oban specifically to pick her up not only conspicuously failed, but look likely to have got two of their number killed.

  And now …

  Now you have the unsettling feeling you’re being cast adrift. Replaying everything that’s happened, it strikes you that things have felt subtly off-kilter for a while. Since Edinburgh? No – not so soon. Besides, you could easily be falling into the trap that MI5 psychs call “subjective validation”: subconsciously cherry-picking information to support an existing belief. You have to filter out the subjectivity.

  Was there any point at which you can say with conviction that you noticed a change?

  You realise there was. The feeling crystallised as soon as you mentioned Oban.

  But why?

  You’ve proved your instincts are good. Proved your worth. So why aren’t they tripping over themselves to use you? When, again, the trail is cooling rapidly. You don’t even know if Keir’s travelling by land or sea any more. Assuming she made it out of Oban alive.

  You clamp your teeth together and throw stones at the sea.

  CHAPTER 32

  ______________

  Iona

  AT COIRA’S INSISTENCE, Alistair assigns her some straightforward tasks as he preps the boat for sail.

  The first is unstrapping the faded nylon cover from the mainsail, which proves to be lashed in a kind of concertina along the top of the boom. He shows her how the ropes – which he calls lines – are guided through pulleys and grouped so that the boat can be sailed by a single person raising, lowering, and controlling the position and tension of both sails from the front of the cockpit.

  Knowing Alistair, or at least how he used to be, she’s unsurprised to find each line neatly labelled with black marker on electrical tape stuck to the deck. To make things even clearer, they’re different colours. Lines that need infrequent adjustment, like those for raising the sails, can be locked in place by levers he calls clutches. All can be wound round low-geared winches: two mounted either side of the cabin hatch, and two on the fibreglass “coamings” which form the backs of the cockpit benches and shelter the sides of the cockpit from waves, spray and the wind.

  It’s all very ingenious.

  As he hoists the mainsail up the mast, Alistair sends Coira to the cabin to flip a switch closing the seacock: a valve draining the toilet into the sea, which could flood the boat if left open. ‘Which,’ he says with that grin of his, ‘would be undesirable.’

  She stores all of this carefully away.

  He shows her how he wants her to hold the tiller. Having hauled an impressive length of dripping anchor chain into its storage locker in the foredeck, he asks Coira to push the tiller away as he seats the anchor in its slot at the bow.

  Sail filling, the boat begins to move.

  MULL’S SOUTH COAST is rugged, with glacier-scraped low hills fractured into countless crevices and rocky islets. Apart from a couple of deserted-looking farmhouses behind a big, sandy bay, there’s no sign of habitation, roads or people. After half an hour or so they pass a headland, turning due east according to the compass, with the sun on the boat’s left. Alistair wants her to start using “port” and “starboard” instead of left and right. They’re terms she supposes she knew, but having to use them feels annoying.

  He explains how the loose-ended red and green threads glued incongruously all over the sails can be used to optimise how the boat sails. ‘If everything’s perfect,’ he says, gesticulating, ‘all the telltales should be flying horizontally. Otherwise, you need to haul in or let out the sail towards whichever side has its telltales blowing upwards, until both sides are flying level.’

  She listens to all this lounging at the front of the cockpit, face hidden under a broad-brimmed hat from the clothes locker. Despite thick haze, she’s stripped to her blouse and still sweating. He seems satisfied the hat’s to avoid sunburn. She hopes he hasn’t noticed how she avoids looking at the sky. Fortunately, a draw-cord that fastens beneath her chin means she doesn’t have to hold the ridiculous thing down on her head.

  ‘What if the telltales are all flapping at different angles? Like they are now?’

  Alistair seems pleased with the question. ‘Then you adjust the carrs,’ he declares, waving a finger at ratcheted aluminium rails either side of the cabin, to which each jib sheet is connected by a pulley. ‘The sails and rigging deform as the wind strengthens. The carrs compensate. Why not try it? There’s less wind today, so hike both pulleys forward a couple of notches. It’ll be difficult on the lee side with the sail full – you might need to wait until we tack.’

  He seems to enjoy telling her things. Sometimes, when they had been together years ago, it had seemed as though the enjoyment came from telling her what to do. As she got to know him, she began realising it was more that he liked to feel helpful. Which could seem either endearing or an exasperating form of insecurity.

  With the wind blowing from the south-east, they’re at what Alistair tells her is a very fast point of sail. The shore certainly seems to be passing steadily, although with the wind travelling in almost the same the direction as the boat, it doesn’t feel as exciting – and certainly not as cold – as when the wind was near the bow. Alistair asks Coira to take the tiller. At his suggestion she finds a reference point to steer for: a group of small islands. ‘Without something to focus on, it’s easy to drift.’
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br />   He busies himself with a fishing line, whistling terribly as he baits it with a piece of something pale from a tub from a cubbyhole in one of the coamings. Whatever it is, it smells appalling: like rotten fish, but worse. He hurls it over the stern. She watches him with amusement.

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’

  ‘Born that way.’

  ‘What the hell is that, by the way?’

  ‘Squid.’ He leans over the side to wash his hands. ‘I know … only has to be dead a couple of hours before it stinks the place out. Dropped some down the back of the cabin cushions once. Found it three days later. I had to lob the cushion astern and tow it in the sea for a week to get rid of the smell.’

  A scatter of small islands pass to port. Alistair asks her to bear north a little, letting the sails swing forward until they’re almost at right-angles to the boat. It really feels like they’re moving now. Coira looks at the GPS readout, and sees a boat speed of nearly eleven knots. The achievement generates an inexplicable bubble of excitement. ‘Tide’s with us,’ Alistair says, watching her with a knowing expression, but she’s distracted by a sudden nasty thought.

  ‘This GPS …’ She chooses her next words carefully. ‘I don’t suppose the coastguard could use this to find the boat? You know – if we got into trouble. Hit a rock or something.’

  To her relief, he shakes his head. ‘It uses satellites for triangulation. It’s not like a ’phone – there’s no transmitter or communication hardware. If you’re worried about emergency location, us yachties use something called EPIRB. Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. Mine needs to be turned on manually. In fact, good point: I should probably show you where it is, and how to use it. It’s a wee bit elderly though, and I haven’t checked the batteries recently. The truth is, I probably wouldn’t expect anyone to notice if it was triggered now anyway.’