Brute Force

74

It was a fishing boat, but like nothing you'd find in Grimsby.

It looked as if she'd been built at the tail end of the nineteenth century – a hulk of a vessel, as big as the Predator, but streaked with rust and grime and with thick black smoke belching from a battered stack. As we drew closer, a breeze parted the mist and we got our first half-decent view of it. She had a bit of a list, about fifteen degrees to starboard, but that wasn't too surprising – there were around 150 people leaning over the rail, staring at us.

She was only a couple of hundred metres away, but in the diminishing light it was difficult – even through the binos – to make out the faded writing on her bow. The clues to her origin and purpose were a green flag, riddled with holes, that was flying from her stern mast and the people hanging off her side: I'd seen pictures of survivors from Belsen and Auschwitz who looked better fed.

Lynn chopped the throttles and we stopped dead in the water. He took the binos off me and raised them to his eyes.

The families looked like a meeting of the African Union. Sub- Saharan black faces, fine features and curly hair of the eastern Somalians and Arab North Africans. They had one thing in common: they were fucked and desperate.

'She's called the Marhaban. It means "Welcome".' He studied her a while longer and sighed.

I was about to tell him to open up the throttles and carry on heading south, when an image filtered into my mind of the champagne and caviar sitting in the fridge below decks.

I told Lynn to bring us as close as he could to the vessel, then shot downstairs and unlocked Gary's cabin. When he saw me, the fear reappeared in his eyes. He gulped. 'Yeah, mate. What?'

'There's a migrant ship. You ever seen one of them before?'

Gary shook his head.

'I'm letting you go, Gary.'

He nodded pathetically and walked over to pump my hand. 'Thank you, thank you . . .'

I stopped him in his tracks. 'Shut the fuck up and listen. This bit is important, because it might just stop you from winding up dead. Tell your friend Electra to wipe off her make-up, cover her hair and put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. If there's nothing in the wardrobe, lend her something of yours. Water – you'll be taking as much bottled stuff as there is on the Predator. Food too. And the First Aid kit and any other medicines. Tell them that Electra's a nurse and that she can treat some of their kids. You got all that?'

Yes, he said earnestly, he'd got it.

'One more thing, Gary. I'm giving you our GPS and the charts. They're not going to harm you if you look like you're in charge.'

'What are they going to do to us?' The words frying pan and fire must have been bouncing around inside Gary's skull.

'We're around fifty miles from Malta, and a hundred from Sicily. Help whoever's driving that thing, Gary, and you'll have done your good deed for the day.'

Fifteen minutes later, we were on our way again. I watched from the back deck as the Marhaban slipped into the darkness. Lynn blipped the throttles and we accelerated away. It was now approaching six o'clock. Above us, the stars shone brightly out of a cold black sky. We had 2000 litres of diesel left, easily enough, if we maintained a steady speed of twenty knots, to get us where we wanted to be: twelve miles off the Libyan coast, with eyes-on the bright lights of Tripoli, sometime around 2300 hours.