The Sea and the Sand Read online

  Greed got the better of him. He twisted around for a while and eventually sat up in bed, decision made. His clothes were still soaked from the wash he’d given them in the vacuous bath, so he couldn’t just dress and leave, but in gazing at them hanging from the retractable line in the marble bathroom, his eye was drawn to a hatch above the toilet. Presumably an access point for the recessed spotlights.

  Habid rushed to the main suite and looked at his phone and navigation kit but decided the cash was of more consequence, so he lifted the booty bag and stood on the toilet seat to deposit his wages into the ceiling.

  “Daddy!” Isla screamed.

  If anything, the woman on the boat was even more concealed than the woman in the sea. A burka clung to her body, shrink-wrapped and wringing. She moved with efficiency for someone who’d been struggling in the sea.

  When faced with a choice: your child or someone else’s, it doesn’t need computing. Sam pushed the girl towards the woman who’d been attacking him and tore the line arm over arm as he drew himself towards his boat. As he did so the woman on board turned to face him, and although he couldn’t see her eyes or face he sensed some indecision.

  Isla kept her station but looked with alarm at the woman in the cockpit. She’d never seen someone in a burka before and was clearly afraid.

  “Daddy, please!” she yelled, panic setting in.

  Sam hauled harder as the woman turned towards his daughter. Even the adrenaline wasn’t enough to launch him above the freeboard to grasp the toe rail, so he had to swim to the transom and mount the bathing ladder just as the woman had. He kicked his body from the water, but as he rose the rope snagged, holding him back. His eyes opened in panic as he realised what had happened. The drifting slack on the rope had caught the propeller shaft, and he realised it would soon wind the line back beneath the boat and pull him under.

  “Knife, Isla!” he panted, as his numbed hands worked at the knot at his chest.

  “What, Daddy?” she shouted, the wind and engine muffling her hearing.

  “Knife!” he yelled, and she immediately ran to the life raft where they kept a timber-handled blade in a sheath. She drew it and ran in her little Crocs towards her father. At the same time Sam caught a feint from the woman in the cockpit, as if she’d been inclined to move or assist but had instinctively decided against it.

  Isla presented the knife just as Sam’s ribcage tightened and the rope began to draw him back into the sea.

  “Stop the engine, Isla!” he yelled as he was dragged back.

  The waves caught his breath. He became wedged against the hull and he tried to get the blade between the rope and his skin, but it was dug deep into his flesh. His body rolled with the pressure sucking him towards the slowly rotating prop. Under water he flailed for the rope tail that was now behind him, dragging him towards the centre of the hull. He lashed wildly and his hand hit the propeller, snapping the knife from his paw. His breath began to combust and he was forced to gently exhale.

  Then came a dawning: this is it. His mind hummed and pulsed; his heart, straining for oxygen, beating like a bass. But then a switch flicked from disciplined calm to desperation. His thoughts shuttled through what his drowning would mean for Isla – left with the woman on the deck, the people in the sea. There was something wrong. He felt the prop hit his belt, his back, rip at his flesh.

  Then slowly the judder in the hull stopped and the propeller halted. Isla had strangled the engine. The realisation summoned a second chance, a last effort. He rolled as far as he could and forced his stomach towards the skeg in front of the prop shaft. The air was gone from his lungs and his chest began to whoop and buckle. The skeg wasn’t sharp, designed only to prevent weed or sea debris from fouling the propeller, but with the vigour of what little panic was left in him he rubbed the rope against it, his face lacerated by the blade-like barnacles gripping the hull. His rhythm slowed as he asphyxiated and Sam didn’t even get to see the rope part and his hands open as a priest’s might during the offertory. What air was left in his bloodstream carried his spent body towards the surface.

  They didn’t knock. Habid didn’t suppose they were obliged to. Egypt was a law unto itself these days – the Spring had seen to that. No matter how authoritarian any regime had been, the rising had wiped out the established order like a societal tsunami sweeping east; no matter how long any leader held power, nothing was stable any more. Rank and privilege had all but vanished along with any and all accountability.

  That’s probably why they kicked the door in. Because they could.

  It fell like a concrete slab and landed at Habid’s bare feet. Two suited men walked across as if it were a drawbridge. Each grabbed an arm. They dragged him into the corridor and down the opulent staircase.

  Later he sat, like the fishermen he’d laughed at, in his underpants. His frame shook behind a rickety desk to which his hands were manacled as the two men – one small and one huge, took it in turns to reach across and slap or punch his face and head.

  “Why did you come here?” they wanted to know. They’d obviously worked out that there was a game in play. It didn’t take much detective work, thought Habid, staring at the small Garmin handheld GPS they’d bagged and tagged and placed before him along with his phone. But they were confused. “Why not just use the coast of Libya?”

  Habid held out for a short while until they went to work on his genitals, and then he pretended to crow like a cock.

  “They’re too expensive,” he gasped, to save a testicle.

  “Who are?” inquired the small suited man, his eyes slight as a snake’s.

  “The tribesmen. They charge to let boats through to the beach. And the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Officials. The coastguard is difficult,” he said. “The men at sea, they cannot be bribed. But their bosses,” his voice tailed off, “too expensive.”

  “They’re supposed to stop the boats.”

  “They do. This is the problem.” Habid just shrugged.

  Of course they were supposed to stop the boats, but why stop them when you could tax them? Everyone has to make a living.

  “Where did you get the boat?”

  Habid said nothing, so the skinnier one nodded to the brute who unlocked the cuffs and dragged him to the wall. Habid started to panic as his arms were raised to a hook and he was half hung to an inverted and painful dangle.

  “We carried it,” Habid said.

  “I asked where you got it!” screamed the skinny suit, who found Habid’s apex with a shiny loafer.

  For some reason Habid noticed its leather tassels as he slunk towards the grimy floor but found himself dangling from his bloody wrists.

  “A man, from Suez,” he managed, as he was unhooked and shoes began to dance on his head.

  When he came round he stared in horror at what they were doing to him and more fuzzy details were imparted. He lied about organising long courier journeys from China and Bangladesh west to Arabia and beyond. He was asked about the process at sea. The suits didn’t take any notes but wanted names and know-how, and Habid realised he was being fleeced for commercial rather than criminal information. He might as well have hosted a webinar.

  They forced him to explain the plan, the route. He’d created a life based on dishonesty and disinformation and had no intention of changing now, so he reserved a lot and shared a little in the hope of retaining a bollock. They’d already deprived him of a finger and toe.

  When he talked he conjured the hallucination that he and these cops might work together, these people who’d disfigured him. Despite the kicking he hunted for an opportunity. How else could they get the required flock? Egyptians didn’t really want to leave their country, not yet anyway. Even if they did, they wouldn’t possess the sort of money Habid was becoming accustomed to. He dealt with Libyans – and not just any Libyans either – taking them across the desert, the sands. Habid’s happy place.

  “How do they get out to sea?” barked Tassels
.

  “The boat comes with engine,” Habid said, trying to impress them with the efficiency of his operation.

  “Where does the engine come from?”

  “Container. Stolen engines, from Europe. They are wrapped in the rubber boats. Then we collect and carry.” Habid paused at his mistake, which apparently went unnoticed. “It takes only four people to lift the package to the sea, then it is pumped up.” Habid made as much movement as he could with his leg to suggest a foot pump, but he didn’t want to draw attention to his good leg with its complete complement of toes, lest he should be deprived of a digit.

  “What about fuel, gas?”

  “In plastic cans,” said Habid.

  Until this trip he hadn’t ever checked and didn’t really care how far offshore the boats had managed to get.

  “So what happens when they get out to sea?”

  “They keep going. They have compass, and moon and sun, north and west.”

  “They know how to do this – the people in the boat?” Tassels asked incredulous.

  “We have ways,” said Habid, shelling up, keen to keep some information for himself, conscious he’d already gone too far.

  His reticence earned him a hammering – blows to the lower back, stomach and kidneys. When he could breathe again he was treated to a smack in the face.

  “We put someone on board who knows the sea.”

  He then returned to lying while forging a plan of false information.

  “But the fuel must run out?”

  “Then they wait.”

  “What for?”

  “For NGO or foreign navy to pick them up.”

  “But foreign navies won’t always pick up refugees,” said Tassels, his curiosity growing.

  Habid felt he was drawing the small suit in.

  “Ah,” he replied, keen to show he had the knowledge. “This is where I can help you.”

  He got a slap for the suggestion.

  “When they see lights, they must knife the boat.” He thumped the table with his good fist.

  “So they get rescued or drown?” said Tassels.

  “Yes, makes it hard not to pick up.”

  “And they do it – the people? They destroy the boat? They go into the sea?”

  Habid neither knew nor cared. In the past the boats had left his mind the moment they left the sand. This time was a little different though. This time there was another play. But he didn’t tell the suits about that, or that the boat wasn’t the only thing due to get stabbed on this outing.

  Four

  A damp drape lifted up Sam’s neck and chin as if he’d been stroked with a facecloth. He opened his eyes to catch a glimpse of the lithe neck of a woman before the flap of her head covering fell back as she righted herself. He could hear his daughter’s forceful little temper.

  “Get away from him!” she was shouting. “Leave my daddy alone!”

  He scrabbled upright, seeking grip on the cockpit floor. He rose to find another, slightly broader, woman sitting beside the child he’d rescued. The smaller woman scuttled back to join them. He felt no threat from her but turned to Isla for some sense of what was happening.

  “Daddy, they wanted to start the boat but I wouldn’t show them how,” she said, in a mixture of proud conviction and desperation that almost immediately gave way to tears. She threw her little arms around his neck.

  “I thought you were dead, Daddy,” she said into his waterlogged ear.

  “I’m not dead, darlin’,” he said, wrapping her tight and feeling a heavy pain in his right arm. He looked beyond her hair and saw that his hand was covered in blood – his own, he assumed. In fact, the floor around them seemed awash with the stuff. His back ached too, the slab of meat at his hip – a pain he’d never felt before.

  “It’s ok, wee love. I’m ok, I’m ok.”

  “No, you’re not, you’re cutted really bad and you’re still bleeding and they just looked at you,” she sobbed.

  He wondered how he’d managed to get back on board but Isla was in no fit shape for explanations.

  “Ok,” said Sam, now only half caring about whatever had gone on while he was unconscious, “get me the first aid kit and we’ll get sorted out.”

  Isla’s muscles didn’t flinch; she stayed clamped to his neck.

  “Isla, come on, get me the kit and we’ll get cleaned up.”

  “No, Daddy, they might kill you,” she whispered into his ear.

  “They’re not going to kill me, Isla. They couldn’t kill me,” he said, looking at the two women and the little girl.

  But then, Sam didn't see what Isla saw.

  Two days in the dark and Habid didn’t know what way was up. The throbbing had kept him awake. He’d tried to elevate his arm and his foot to reduce bleeding through the congealed stumps of his extremities, but he’d tired quickly. A chain had been clamped around his arm which prevented him from reaching a wall to rest his limbs against. Big Suit had wanted to clamp it around his neck but Tassels didn’t want him hanging himself, which gave Habid hope that his usefulness wasn’t yet exhausted and he might still strike a deal with these cops, or whatever they were.

  In an office two cells away, Big Suit was asking stupid questions and Tassels was pontificating.

  “I don’t know what you want from this rat. Why can’t I clip him until he tells us where the cash is?”

  “Can you not see there is something else going on here? Why else would he risk crossing Libya into Egypt? If you’re going to traffick people away by sea, why not do it from your own country?”

  Big Suit sat silent for a while. Above the neckline his wheels span slowly. “Because Libya is a mess since Gaddafi got ousted?” he said eventually, looking at his senior for affirmation.

  “Exactly my point. It’s a bigger risk, isn’t it, trekking across Libya. Yes?”

  “I suppose so,” said Big Suit, who was broadly aware of the turmoil traversing the cities of the coastal highway, west to east, Tripoli to Benghazi and beyond.

  “And why here? If the rat really just wanted to avoid the taxes of the Libyan elite, why not launch the boats closer to the border? How many cities are there between the Libyan–Egyptian checkpoint and Alexandria?”

  Big Suit looked into the space in front of him and imagined the map of North Africa: the straight lines down from the sea, the jagged horizontals. His head actually juddered and rotated slowly clockwise as he charted the Libyan coast, the border and then counted the towns on the way to his own.

  “Ten maybe?” he offered.

  “So why here? Why bring them all the way to a bigger place, with more police, with its own coastguard and soldiers?”

  “Maybe he likes the posh hotels?” Big Suit ventured.

  “That rat is not an idiot,” said Tassels. “He came here for a reason and we need to know what it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the time is coming when we may have to get out,” said Tassels.

  “Out?” repeated Big Suit, struggling.

  “Of Egypt.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the beards are coming. And when they do they’ll probably stop thinking about Cairo and turn their attention to other cities, like Alexandria.”

  “The beards,” spat Big Suit. “They never last. Eventually we will have a strong president again and we can carry on as before.”

  “You really don’t see it, do you?” said Tassels, withering in his contempt.

  “See what? The Arab world needs order. It needs strong leaders. Like Mubarak was.”

  “Mubarak was thrown in prison, you fool, and why was he put in prison?”

  Big Suit had watched all the happenings from the television screen in the custody suite. Tahrir Square. The revolution. The sweeping clean of the cobblestones. His hero arrested and thrown in jail. Anyway, the army was still in charge. Much of the detail escaped him at the time, the rest had vacated his mind as more pressing information poured in. Like eating. And breathing. And sleeping. He sh
rugged.

  “Why did the Arab Spring begin?” Tassels tried another tack, willing his muscle man to grasp the importance of what he was trying to say.

  There was no response.

  He pressed on. “Because people got tired of this – what we do. They’d had enough of corrupt governments, and Mubarak was corrupt. And the people were sick of it.”

  Big Suit’s eyes were looking at Tassels but there was no ignition. He sat there like a truck full of fuel with no keys.

  “Things are back to normal now.”

  Tassels tutted. “You think like an Egyptian, not a man of the world. Look at what happened in Tunisia.”

  “Tunisia is next to Libya, not Egypt,” said Big Suit, as if his grasp of North African geography earned him an unexpected point.

  “That’s not the issue, you fool. The issue is what happened there and why it matters to us.”

  “I don’t care about Tunisia or Tunisians. Nobody in Egypt does. That’s not the way Arabs work,” said Big Suit dismissively.

  “You’re right,” said Tassels, which led to a proud buttock clench and a shimmy of the shoulders from Big Suit. “But what started it all and what did it create?”

  “A grocer got cross and set himself on fire.” Big Suit shrugged – no big deal.

  “But why?” Tassels tried to lead his colleague to the obvious conclusion.

  “Because he was sick of taxes?” attempted Big Suit, which was sort of correct.

  “Because of people like us,” said Tassels, “taxing and taking a cut, and because the government allowed it to happen. The authorities turned a blind eye – and probably taxed the corrupt collectors in turn. That grocer set himself on fire because he was sick of corruption.”

  “So?” said Big Suit. “He died. What of it?”

  “What of it?” shouted Tassels. “What of it is that Arabs everywhere saw an opportunity! What of it is that the Tunisians took down a regime!”

  Big Suit stared at the floor for a while. “What’s that got to do with our thing?”