Watching the Wind Blow (The Greek Village Collection Book 9) (13 page)

With her heart full of love for Petta, it is easy to feel sorry for Sam. There is something about him that is almost like looking into a mirror to a time before her dancing butterfly settled into her life. If Sam has a wife, a family, he is a long way from home and heading even further away from England to Casablanca. It must be tearing him apart, and it’s not as if it is just distance, either; he is being hunted by the police and must feel so very, very alone.

He has not fallen asleep. Instead, he is very much awake and he is still looking at her.

‘Why Casablanca?’ Her question comes out softly.

‘I am a mercenary.’ He says it like it is the most normal thing in the world. Irini raises her eyebrow, not sure how shocked she should pretend to be to avoid suspicion. She lets her mouth fall open a fraction, too.

It seems she has judged it right, as he continues. ‘I have contacts there. It is a good place to get my next job.’ He speaks as if the words have nothing to do with him, and some of the spark that was lighting up his eyes grows dark. He slaps at something on his neck.

‘It’s a long way to Casablanca. We will hit Italian or Libyan water first and as far as I know, Greece is on good terms with both. The port police will alert them. Don’t you think Turkey would be safer? Closer. Less friendly?’ Irini offers.

‘I’m trying to avoid too many borders. I have no passport; it was taken.’ He rolls onto his back, his hand to the wound on his side. ‘How long do you think it will be before we leave Greek waters?’

Irini blinks and then closes her eyes at the question and tries to conjure up a map but has no way of knowing any of the distances.

‘I really have no idea. A day, no, more. Two perhaps. There are charts below.’

His hair is sleek against the teak deck and shimmers as he shakes his head slowly. In line of sight behind his head is the mast and then the pulpit at the front of the yacht. The chrome of these railings is reflecting the sun, throwing rays back at them that cut across his profile, blurring his lips and chin. Whatever was irritating his neck returns and he skims it away with his fingers.

‘You want to go back to Casablanca to take another job?’ Irini asks.

‘You mean "why haven’t I changed my plans now I have met you?"‘ Sam scoffs.

Irini does not like the way he turns from friendly to cruel so suddenly. Just as she begins to feel she knows him, he then stabs with his words. He must be very frightened to be so defensive and she cannot help the anger it ignites within her.

But maybe she did expect that to some degree. Their meeting has certainly changed her. The past has become a little more explainable, the events on the streets a little less personal. She certainly feels less removed from people, more normal.

‘Well no, of course not. But maybe you have more to offer the world than you think,’ she defends and he turns back onto his side to look at her.

‘You think?’ He smirks.

‘Yes.’ She leaves the one word to hang there, open and honest.

‘I think that is very easy for you to say from the comfort of your life that is full of love and support.’

‘Love and support will come if you are brave enough to stay still somewhere,’ Irini says, aware that her voice is just slightly sulky.

He laughs. ‘You think your village will open their arms to me, do you? Offer me their friendship and support?’ He laughs again. Irini rolls from her side onto her back, lies still for a minute and then sits up, her arms around her bent knees.

‘I think you are being unkind.’ Her mouth pinches shut; her eyes are slits against the sunlight.

‘I told you I was not a nice man, or did you think you had changed that, too?’ He is playing now, but he is playing on his own at her expense. She is the toy.

‘That is just plain nasty.’

He doesn’t answer her.

‘I think you are scared in case I am right. I think to stay anywhere to find out if you would get support and care is the ultimate fear for you, in case you get rejected all over again,’ Irini says, keeping as much harshness out of her voice as she can, but her jaw tightens when she has finished speaking and she finds she is grasping her knees tighter than is necessary.

‘Which is why I don’t.’ Sam sits up too, resting on his arms behind him.

‘But you could.’ Irini turns to look at him. ‘You could try it once and see what the world thinks of you and if it doesn’t work out, then you could return to Casablanca.’

He looks out to the horizon. She follows his gaze. Somewhere beyond the curve of the earth in that direction is Crete and then Libya.

‘Do you know how many islands there are in Greece?’ Irini asks, but does not wait for an answer. ‘Six thousand, but only a couple of hundred have people on them, and less than a hundred have a lot of people on them.’ She waits for this to sink in.

‘You see what I am saying?’ she asks.

‘You are saying something?’ he answers. He sounds amused.

Letting go of her legs, her knees fall to one side and she turns to face him. The sun’s rays are still glinting off the chrome work at the bow and it creates a halo of light down one side of his face. A dark side and a light side.

‘You can do it.’ Her feet tap, her arms fidget, an excitement runs through her. ‘You can start again, take any island you want, choose a new name, and have a whole new life.’ She smiles. It feels like such a perfect solution. He says nothing. ‘Tell me how you would like it to be if you had a whole new life to invent.’ She can hardly sit still. This is his solution.

With his eyes focussed down on the deck, he draws his feet in towards him, his hands clasping around them.

‘It would be easy,’ she says. ‘We could sail to an island of your choice…’

‘And what about the port police? They are just going to watch me jump off the boat and do nothing about it?’

‘No, you could wait till dark…’

‘You think they would stop watching the boat in the dark? You think they would not be looking for someone jumping in and swimming?’ Sam says.

Irini thinks. ‘Here’s what you could do. You could slip into the water as it grows dark and work your way down a line that we tow behind us and when you are ready to let go, just let go. The port police will be watching the boat and they will not notice you some distance away, swimming quietly to shore.’ She smiles her triumph and holds her arms out, palms up at the simplicity of the solution.

He looks up from the decking and makes eye contact. That sad look is back, and something else that she can only describe to herself as a yearning. But a yearning for what, she cannot tell. A new life maybe?

‘What do you think?’

He shrugs his shoulders.

‘Oh, we are back there, are we, where a life is worth nothing more than a shrug?’ With these words, she looks to the stern. The port police have advanced a little bit closer, but they still pose no immediate threat. How will it all end?  Is he to be arrested and put in handcuffs? Why have they not come alongside and done that already?

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ Sam says unlocking his arms, his posture opening out, the scars on his chest all visible, the thin skin puckering across his stomach and the chords in his neck still tense.

She knows he is talking about her intention to jump. Is he glad because she is still with him on the boat or just glad that he didn’t have to shoot her?

‘How long before you got married?’ Sam remains seated but stretches upwards until his bandaged midriff pulls taut, reminding him that he needs to heal, and his body retracts, his hand going protectively to his side.

‘Not long. We saw each other in Athens for a couple of weeks, and then he was offered a job on Orino Island, his home village. Well, it wasn’t so much a job as the loan of a taxi-boat with permission to run it as a service. It had all its licences and things, so it just made sense. Petta did that for a year. I got a job at a bar but it didn’t last. The taverna was closed for illegalities, but then it re-opened and I got my job back because someone gave the men with power a big fat bribe, but they closed it again later and by that time, it was summer and all the jobs on the island were taken, so I didn’t work.’

‘How does that answer my question?’ Sam asks but he is smiling. This is his humour.

‘Well, it was because we only had the one job between us that we couldn’t afford to get married. But then, through an extraordinary turn of events, Petta found his birth mama. He’s adopted; she couldn’t keep him. Anyway, he found her and she invited us to the village to live with her. So then. It was then that we got married, in the village. Everyone in the village helped us out. We had tables in the square. It was lovely.’

She turns away from him slightly. He does not fit with these thoughts. That is her life with Petta, and she is not sure that he is welcome there.

Something tickles her arm. Without looking, she rubs it away to find it is Sam’s fingertips, almost hovering over her skin, so light.

‘What?’ she asks.

‘I just wanted to touch you. You know, feel your warmth, the softness, know you are real,’ Sam says. She cannot tell if it is a joke or not so she tuts and frowns in a light-hearted way. It would be better if it was a joke.

‘If I was to sum up being a mercenary in two words,’ he speaks as if it is a secret, ‘I would say
Idiots
and
Cold, hard, metal
.’ Irini is about to point out that is four words when he adds, ‘And you are neither an idiot, nor are you cold and hard.’

She swallows. The hairs on her forearm stand on end. Her stomach flips and she twists her tongue on the roof of her mouth, trying to relieve the dryness. She is not sure whether to be afraid or flattered.

‘The army provided no direct support, just a lot of leaflets and telephone numbers, charities, do-gooders.’ His lips curl over the words. ‘After asking the right people, I found that my father had been posted out in the East somewhere. I was discharged without an address to go to and I knew no one. No one at all.’ He is still touching her. He doesn’t speak quickly, but there is an urgency in his voice, as if this is something he needs to tell.

‘I slept under a bridge the first night. Woke up thinking the trucks running overhead were tanks, looked everywhere for my rifle.’ He sniggers, but there is something self-critical in the laugh. Irini frowns and runs her left hand under her short, dark hair at the back. It is wet at the nape of her neck where she has been sweating. Her right arm she does not move, allowing the tips of his fingers continued contact.

‘Anyway.’ He shifts his position. His finger slides across her skin and his hand wraps around her forearm, his thumb rubbing across the muscle and back. ‘Long story short. Met a man in a pub and he made a joke about joining the foreign legion, so I did.’ This time, his laugh holds only sadness and he dips his head toward her, watching his hand caressing her skin. There are more scars on the back of his neck that she had not noticed before, thin and faded.

‘You know there are forty-eight thousand professional soldiers?’ His words are almost a whisper.

‘Is that what they call mercenaries now?’ Irini does not feel at all comfortable with him bowed before her like this. She needs to either enclose him within her arms and rock him or he needs to sit up.

‘We are the biggest force in some places, outnumbering the countries’ forces. They rely on us.’ With these words comes energy; he does sit up, his back straight, and he lets go of her arm, which tingles with the memory of his touch. ‘It’s an industry that’s worth two billion a year.’

The hard veneer has slipped back over his features. She has lost him again.

‘Green berets, ex S.A.S., SEALS, the elite. Average pay used to be two-hundred-and-fifty to one thousand quid a day. Tax free.’

Irini converts the sum into euros in her head and a little gasp escapes her. ‘But then they realised that instead of the Australians and the Americans and the English, they could use the Chileans, the Filipinos, the Nepalese, and the Bosnians. Those guys will work for twenty quid a day, and they’re happy with it. It kicked the guts out of the industry.’ And, as if to demonstrate, his spine curves and his stomach collapses inward, the bandage around his side crumpling on itself.

His face also sags, the muscles lifeless, dimples gone, mouth formless.

‘I work alongside English guys in their early forties, ex-army, having a mid-life crisis.’ He sniffs and then snorts. ‘That or they are kids who have joined the army at seventeen and done their four years’ military experience so they can join a contract company. The podgy middle-agers are coming to war instead of buying a red sports car and the kids are just looking for the big payouts. Most of them joined the army so young, they don’t really know what civilian life is. Either way, none of them should be there.’

‘I always presumed mercenaries were convicts on the run. You know, bad guys that were hiding,’ Irini says, but she is wondering if he is one of the ‘kids’ who doesn’t know what civilian life is really like.

What she said seems to have amused Sam and he laughs until he has to hold his bandaged side. His dimples deep on either cheek take longer to fade than his smile.

‘You have to be Interpol-checked these days. They turn down eight out of ten men. They look for non-commissioned officers with supervisory experience. There are no leaders, no one to tell you what to do. You have to think for yourself, make decisions. Anyone going in there with a lust for combat, which there are, occasionally, psycho lads thirsting to do harm, quickly get let go or end up dead.’

Irini nods but she can’t understand why anyone would want to live in such a world.

‘As mercenaries, we do not clear houses.’ Sam looks her in the eye. He seems to be forcing the point that he has chosen not to be party with such action. His words are clipped. ‘As part of a private security company, we conduct inherently military operations, but we do not conduct offensive operations. We do not hunt down terrorists. We detect, defer, and defend against threats for the client, whoever they may be, person or post.’

The hard veneer is not there. She has not lost him, but he has stepped into another world, a world of jargon and precise language. This man she could imagine not only shooting her but cutting her from stem to stern if the situation required it.

‘If we get into gun fights, we are not doing our jobs properly and we need to re-think. We give operational support to legitimate governments.’

His manner sends a shiver down her and she looks away.

She can see no future for him. If he just goes from one job to the next, when will he have a normal life? What chance will he have of finding a wife and having children, and what happens when he gets old? Where will he call home? If indeed he makes it to old age.

‘You don’t think starting again is a better idea?’ Irini looks to the stern. The port police are inching their way towards them. If they are closing the gap, presumably they have a plan, but if they have a plan, why do they not just carry it out? Sam looks too.

‘Frogs, eh?’ he says with a smirk.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do we know when the water is too hot?’

‘What?’

‘Or the police too close?’

‘Oh, I see.’ She looks again. They are close enough now to make out some detail. ‘What will happen when they get too close?’

‘They’ll try to arrest me.’ Sam sounds quite calm.

‘So why don’t you slip away now, start a new life? Could you swim to shore?’

He judges the distance. His lips purse and he nods his head.

‘Probably, but a new life to do what?’

‘Have a family?’ Irini suggests.

‘Most of the men I work alongside have families.’

‘Really?’ It is beyond her imagination.

‘Why not? The rotations are usually only three or six months. Short stints. It’s not like the SEALs, for example. They do anything up to fifteen, and you would not be surprised at them having a family, a wife waiting, would you? So with mostly short deployment and, if you do get longer contracts, significantly better rest periods, it attracts a lot of married men.’

‘Do they have children?’

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t they?’ Sam seems to find her amusing.

‘Do they tell their children what they do?’

‘Some of them do, some of them don’t.’

‘It would be hard enough for a wife, but how would a child cope with the thought that every time their baba goes off to work, they might not come back?’

Sam shrugs.

‘Not really my problem,’ he says and goes to sit in the cockpit. Irini notices that he stays low as he moves. Does he expect the port police to have a sniper take a shot at him?