October Song

by Ru Pringle

‘I can pack extra drums. There will be enough.’

  ‘I pay you half now. You get the rest, the gun, and the car, when we’re finished.’

  He nods, as though expecting this, and the two of you shake on it. The man’s palm feels like tree bark. Lina’s looking concerned.

  As you fetch a wad of cash from the car, the man goes back to his house, shouts something, and a ragged youth appears. After a brief exchange, the youth jumps on a rusting mountain bike and disappears up the road.

  ‘This will take time,’ your guide tells you, counting your cash with the efficiency of a bank teller. ‘The boat is here, but the outboard is not. It will need to be checked and serviced. We will need to stock provisions for the journey, and we will need to find you clothes for the weather. There will be no point finding this boat of yours if you are dead from the hypothermia.’

  While cursing under your breath, you’re heartened that at least he’s thinking ahead. ‘How long?’

  ‘Three hours.’ With every passing second you can feel your quarry getting further away. ‘However, that will leave us with only two hours of daylight. We will need to find accommodation. Perhaps it would be better to depart tomorrow …’

  ‘No!’ You rein your voice back. ‘We need to leave today.’

  He looks appraisingly at you, nods, and then makes his way down towards what looks like a boatshed at the corner of the harbour.

  BACK AT THE FARMHOUSE, Lina cooks you lunch. You pay her out of the slush fund, and she doesn’t protest. You do your best to bury your frustration as you wait.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’ you ask afterwards, as you sit on the old sofa in the corner of the living room with her head on your thigh, watching pigs root in mud between corrugated sties beyond the window. You stroke her wiry, dark hair. She has a pleasant face, with luxurious lips and a broad snub nose. An endearing twist to the corners of her mouth gives the impression she is smiling at some secret joke even when her large, round eyes make it clear she is not. ‘I see his boots by the door, and his jackets on the coat hooks. There’s a photograph of him on your wall. You’re wearing his ring.’

  ‘Dead,’ she says. You feel her wiry body tensing. ‘At least, I think so. One day he went north to Fort William to pick up equipment. He never came back.’

  It isn’t what you’d expected.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She reaches up and puts a hand on yours.

  CHAPTER 43

  ______________

  Rùm

  COIRA HAS TILLER DUTY AGAIN, but she doesn’t mind. The boat feels quite different with the mainsail down. She has to keep pressure against the tiller in the opposite direction to keep it sailing straight, but it’s still making five knots, according to the LED. With the wind from the south there’s a balmy tang to the air today, with just a hint of autumn nip. The anti-slip coating of the deck is pleasantly rough under her bare feet. Everything she sees has that liquid golden wash that she’s experienced only on Scotland’s west coast.

  Ben More, Mull’s highest peak, looks like it’s been spray-painted on the sky. It fades slowly astern as Alistair busies himself with a soldering iron powered by the boat’s battery, cauterising nylon threads in the sail’s bullet holes to stop them fraying. This task finished, he begins laboriously sewing little patches of blue fabric over them, swearing once or twice as he pricks himself. He’s a curious man, she thinks. He has a thimble, but not a ’phone or a transistor radio.

  He’s still at it when they pass the little island of Lunga an hour later.

  Alistair takes a break, going below to check the charts. He comes back with instructions for a new bearing to take them north past the island of Coll, and – to her surprise – glasses of what transpires to be gin and tonic, complete with twists of fresh lemon.

  ‘I’m a bit low on tonic, but it seemed like that kind of day.’

  The wind’s behind them now. The genoa doesn’t seem happy about this, expressing its displeasure by filling and collapsing like a bellows, so Alistair pins the sail to the side using a fat aluminium pole that’s been lashed to the foredeck. Finally satisfied with the mainsail, he polishes off his G&T, hauls the sail up the mast again, and shoves the boom forward so that a sail is sticking out on each side of the boat.

  Otter’s Pocket surges forward, and the air in the cockpit goes almost still.

  ‘It’s called sailing “goose-winged”, he tells her, making her laugh.

  ‘I can see why. What a lovely thing to call it!’

  It’s bizarre – it might be the gin, but, despite everything, she’s okay. Not just okay, in fact. She’s having a good time. Better than in a long while. The sky’s a nearly cloudless dome of brassy blue. It’s noticeable, she thinks, how in the last few years the vapour trails which were omnipresent during her earlier life have largely disappeared. The haze hides what other traces of man’s existence might have been visible. It’s easy to kid herself that she and Alistair are the only people alive.

  It won’t last. She knows that. She’s had plenty of time to think, and the best approximation to a plan she’s been able to come up with has been Alistair’s.

  The subject of her ruminations resurfaces from the cabin with strips of fibrous mat and a black pot she guesses contains epoxy. He announces he’s off to repair the bullet damage to the hull. Ahead, beyond the northern tip of Coll, she can identify the familiar outlines of the Small Isles: a corner of terraced, low-lying Canna, Rùm with its peaks of black gabbro, and Eigg with its preposterous volcanic cock’s comb. Suspended in the sky beyond them she can just detect a row of teeth. The crest of the Cuillin on the island of Skye: the “shield” of Norse navigators. For the first time in her life she feels she’s discovering something of the Norse mindset. Seeing the sea not as a barrier, but as connecting places, like a motorway. Even as a space to be lived in.

  After another hour or so the coastline of Coll is quite close: a knolly plain of glacially-smoothed rock and relict peat, meeting the sea in wounds of grey-pink. There doesn’t seem to be anyone about, and the two of them briefly discuss going ashore. Alistair’s against it. Virtually all the habitation is further south or on the west coast of the island, he says. They have no way of gaining anything useful without either a long walk or a lengthy reconnaissance by boat.

  She concurs, and the last rocks and islets of the island’s coast slide by as the sun swings west into afternoon.

  FEELING GUILT at Alistair spending his morning repairing things, Coira offers to do the washing, and spends an hour kneading clothes and bed sheets in a bucket of detergent-laced seawater. It’s not long before her healing hands are splitting and her forearms are burning. Alistair locks down the blades of the boat’s little wind turbine and ties a cat’s cradle of cord between its pole, the backstay, and the frame of the nylon canopy sheltering the front of the cockpit.

  Having clothes-pegged everything up to dry, Coira goes below to make sandwiches. Fried egg again, with butter. To her surprise she finds some lettuce. The leaves are wilted but smell okay, so she puts them in as well, with a sprinkle of soy sauce. Once again, the boat’s soft pitching is making her queasy. She has no idea how she’d cope in a storm, and hopes she never has to find out.

  Returning to the cockpit she finds Alistair steering with a foot, peering at the distant mainland with binoculars.

  ‘Anything?’ She has a premonition that her bubble of unexpected contentment might not last the day.

  ‘Smoke. On Ardnamurchan. Too much for a bonfire, I think, but who knows? The peninsula always was stuck in a time warp. Maybe they’re heather-burning.’

  She borrows the binoculars for a squint, but the haze is too thick now to see detail. She scans the horizons: the coast of Moidart, the Small Isles, Skye … A full three hundred and sixty degrees. The only definitively human presence is a boat, way off west towards the barely visible two-hundred kilometre barrier of the Western Isles. She can’t tell how big it is. From its outline it looks l
ike a container ship, although no containers are visible. It’s producing its own weather system of black smoke.

  She’s interrupted by a yelp.

  ‘Whale!’ exclaims Alistair, pointing.

  She sees nothing for a while. Then a dark torpedo-shape breaks the surface only a short distance away, quickly disappearing. Long seconds pass before it’s up again. A minke, she thinks. Quite a big one. It’s not porpoising, exactly. It thrusts its glistening snout from the water like a periscope before slipping back into the waves, seeming more concerned with looking around than saving energy. She hasn’t seen one since she was a child. Alistair seems as thrilled as she is.

  Buoyed by the whale and the gin, they watch the Small Isles inch closer. The wind backs slowly eastwards, forcing Alistair to take the pole off the genoa and gybe it to the same side as the mainsail. ‘Thought I’d skirt close to Rùm,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what’s going on there these days, but the way it’s shaped means we should spot any trouble before we go to land. I’m also hoping it’s forbidding enough to have discouraged migrant boats or raiders. With a bit of luck, the inhabitants might be chilled enough not to shoot us.’

  Her pulse quickens. This could be it, Coira thinks. The place where she and Alistair have to part company, before he discovers he’s obliged to turn her in. The thought is making her more mixed up than she would have imagined.

  The isle of Muck slides past in the haze a few kilometres to the east: a wild little scrap of rock and earth tossed into the sea. Beyond it, Eigg is a blue cut-out. Having chewed things over, Coira’s beginning to think the only way out of her predicament might be trying to contact Ken or Rajiv about a plan B. It’s risky, but without papers her chances of entering a Hanseatic nation will be virtually nil, even if she finds a way there. If they’ve received news about Craobh Haven, hopefully they’ll have been working their contacts to devise an alternative for her. Assuming, of course, she isn’t the only one to have evaded capture …

  For now, however, she’s faced with the thorny conundrum of making contact while preventing Alistair either speaking to anyone – especially his employers – or learning anything that could make him suspicious.

  Assuming, of course, that he isn’t suspicious already. Assuming he doesn’t know.

  On paper at least, achieving the first part of this is straightforward. If there’s network coverage, she needs a throw-away ’phone with a one-time OS or SIM. Internet’s another possibility, though she suspects MI5 would make short work of the aliases and encryption she’ll have to use, and she’ll need to wait for a reply. Either way, if her pursuers can triangulate her communication, a grid search based on the transport she’s likely to use and time elapsed since the trace is all they’ll need to find her within hours. On balance, ’phoning seems marginally less risky – and she suspects she has a better chance of buying or borrowing a ’phone out here than finding a working ’net hub she can access anonymously.

  The real headache is the second part. She can’t think of a single realistic scenario in which she could use a ’phone without Alistair wanting – and being able – to use one too. She considers confessing her situation to him. What she’s done. He’s been surprisingly open to her about his own history.

  The thought makes her shiver. Telling an actual member of MI5 that you’re on the UK’s most wanted list? Great idea, Coira!

  That hunted feeling is returning.

  Alistair’s voice breaks into her thoughts. ‘Beginning to think we might have heavy weather in the next day or two.’ He’s casting suspicious glances at the sky. ‘We’ll need to work out where we want to be when that happens.’

  ‘Alistair?’

  ‘What?’

  She bites her lip. ‘We could just … keep going, you know.’

  He studies her, eyes unreadable.

  ‘I mean, look how it is round here.’ She makes an encompassing gesture. ‘What have either of us to look forward to? We don’t actually have to go back.’ She can hardly believe what’s just come out of her mouth. It would solve so many problems, on some levels. But on others …

  He blinks. ‘You mean, just sail away? The two of us?’

  She swallows. Nods. Alistair seems to digest this.

  ‘But, where, Coira? Nowhere’s exactly stable right now. Any crossing we make will be hazardous. Especially with winter coming. Besides – anywhere we’re likely to find that’s better than here wouldn’t let us in.’

  ‘Law and order has to be a growth industry in places that are still holding it together. There could be demand for people with CVs like ours.’ She shrugs. ‘Greenland’s hot property these days. The climate’s getting more temperate; there’s still plenty of room. I hear they’re doing great things with hydroponics.’

  ‘Greenland?’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘No one knows yet if the Gulf Stream switching off will trump the warming of the Arctic. Some predictions still put the north Atlantic in a local ice age.’

  ‘That’ll affect us here, too.’

  ‘Less badly.’

  ‘We could end up colder than Norway used to be.’

  He still isn’t buying it. She feels herself flagging.

  ‘Canada’s not doing too badly. There’s plenty of unguarded coast. With the ice gone, we could even sail right round the north …’

  ‘Have you any idea how dangerous that passage is?’ He’s starting to get that look. ‘It’s dodgy enough in a drilling ship with a toughened hull. Besides, the Canadians are building a wall to keep the Americans and Mexicans out – how welcome …?’

  They turn in unison towards a low vibration.

  Flying directly towards them from the south is a lone helicopter. It’s not military. As it closes, Coira can see it’s a big private shuttle with counter-rotating rotors. Shiny and sleek, it roars almost overhead, disappearing slowly against the mountains of Rùm.

  The two of them look at each other. She can tell what he’s thinking. Where on Earth is that going?

  They both know better than to resume the conversation. Rùm’s wild coastline approaches in silence until she can pick out individual trees. ‘Might be wise to keep a lookout,’ comments Alistair, handing her the binoculars. ‘We don’t want another Iona.’

  He dives below to check the charts again, returning seconds later to take the tiller and trim the sails. He seems preoccupied.

  Maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe it means he’s thinking about what I said.

  The island begins to loom: a layered wall of volcanic rock rising to blue-black pyramidal summits. Deer watch their approach from copper-leaved young forest near the shore. Coira scans out to sea. She has a good view south-west now, right down to the open Atlantic. In the far distance, vessels of all sizes are moving about: tiny cut-outs against the glare of the sun. These days, she thinks, it sometimes feels like the whole world is in motion. Convecting, like the contents of a boiling pot.

  Underlining her thoughts, Alistair taps her on the shoulder and she looks up to see an aeroplane glinting above the faint, hummocky skyline of South Uist far to the west. ‘It looks huge,’ she says, squinting through the binoculars. ‘Silver; not civilian. It’s got swept wings and … propellers?’

  ‘Tupolev 142. Those things are eighty years old. I didn’t realise the Russians were still using them. Must mean they’re as cash-strapped as us.’

  ‘Russia?’

  Alistair scratches behind an ear. ‘Russia has issues, but so far their agricultural productivity’s stood up well. They have Arctic oil and, possibly because their economy’s been rocky for so long, they’ve weathered the crises better than most. They’ve been sniffing round the ex-NATO and EU states for a couple of decades now.’

  He jabs a thumb at the sky.

  ‘That’ll be them poking the ant-hill with a stick. Seeing what happens. I’ll bet they’ve a nuclear sub this side of the Western Isles as we speak. We’ll retaliate with a couple of old Typhoon fighters to shoo the ’plane away, and the R
ussians’ll add the encounter to their models of UK defence. This is why Westminster administrations were so keen to keep our nuclear capability. And –’ he sweeps a hand towards the mainland, ‘– you think the arsenals the separatists are using, and all the other weapons sloshing around here, were brought from Africa and the Middle East? Sure, traffickers get paid for arms, but they’re paid a lot more for people, and most of the weapons reaching the UK on boats with migrants on them are for their own defence. No, between you and me, it’s the Russians. Although groups within the Hanseatic League are rumoured to be using surface effect boats to deliver them to northern beaches.’

  ‘This you speaking, or MI5?’

  ‘If I told you that …’

  ‘Sure. You’d have to kill me.’ Join the queue.

  Great. Now she could add gun-runners to their list of potential nemeses as well.

  CHAPTER 44

  ______________

  Orca

  THERE’S A SMALL CROWD on the slipway as Orca finally noses out of the harbour. Thick with haze, the sky is already tinged coppery by the sun, which is just a few degrees above the rumpled skyline of the island of Kerrera. Your captain, Somhairle – a name he pronounces something like “Sawerley” – is smoking a self-rolled cigarette as he clutches the wheel. He looks incongruous in a tattered black and yellow drysuit and Canadian trapper’s hat.

  Orca was a diver’s boat once, he explained as you waited for the fuel to arrive. Built in a time when people dived for fun. In his twenties and thirties Somhairle himself had been a diving instructor. He’s lent you a second drysuit: a watertight GoreTex shell over a kind of fleece romper-suit. The outer layer has integral boots, tight rubber seals at the neck and wrists, and an oversize waterproof zip across the chest. He claims you could survive in the sea for a couple of hours in it, even in winter. Which is good to know, and almost compensates for how sweaty, unwieldy and generally objectionable the thing is.