They had little water and no food, but she knew they could survive for weeks without eating. She looked at the two bottles lying in the far corner. The two of them would not last many days on their meagre contents. She wedged them in the corner of the raft with the equipment pack.
Taking another look at the handbook she read that there was meant to be an emergency transmitter fitted to the slide raft which would send out a distress call on an international radio frequency. She studied the location diagram and then crawled off to the corner of the raft where it should be fitted. Sure enough there was a recess and some Velcro straps but there was no transmitter. She sank back down onto the floor of the raft and buried her face in her hands and swore a few times while she came to terms with the disappointment.
She was aroused from her despondency by a retching sound from Ali. She crawled over to him.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I feel like throwing up again, but my stomach’s empty.’
Gerry studied his bloodshot eyes. ‘Does your head hurt much there?’ she asked, pointing to the dried blood matting his hair.
‘It aches a bit, but not too bad.’ He felt carefully at the wound in his head and then looked for a moment at the blood smeared on his fingers before washing it off in the remaining water that sloshed back and forth across the raft.
‘You must have been barely conscious when you got out the aircraft,’ she said, ‘so maybe God was looking out for you.’ She frowned at the wound. ‘Your head doesn’t look so good. I can try and clean off the old blood and take a look.’
He stared at her for a moment and then gave a small smile. ‘You don’t look so good either. Your hair’s a great tangled mess; your mouth looks awful with a missing tooth and a split lip. You also have a black eye. You look dreadful, Gerry.’
‘Then it’s lucky I don’t have a mirror. But of course if I did it would be a good signalling device for any passing ships or aircraft,’ she added thoughtfully.
‘How much water do we have left?’ he asked.
‘About a litre and a half. We need to reduce our sweat loss. No moving around, try and stay as cool as possible.’
‘So if we’re not rescued in a few days, we’ll be dead,’ he sighed. ‘It will be God’s will.’
‘We need a ship to come by,’ Gerry said. ‘I wish we had some signal flares.’
‘Maybe an aircraft will fly overhead.’
‘I doubt they’d see us; we’d just be a tiny speck on the ocean.’
‘So there is nothing further to do but sit and wait, but perhaps my prayers will be answered.’
‘Perhaps, but it looks like it’s going to be a hot day today,’ she said.
‘Yes, but maybe we’ll get a rainstorm.
‘Did you pray for rain?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ she said, ‘and of course a ship. Did you see the film “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks?’
‘No, they didn’t show us many films in the camp.’
‘This one came out nearly ten years ago I think. Anyway Tom Hanks is trapped alone on a desert island for a couple of years, but he eventually escapes on a raft. He’s drifting alone on the Pacific Ocean when he’s picked up by a passing freighter.’
‘Was it based on a true story?’ Ali asked.
‘I don’t think so, but maybe life will imitate art.’
They sat in silence for a while, and then Ali asked ‘So while I’ve spent the last few years in Guantanamo Bay, what have you been doing?’
Gerry stared at him. ‘I’ve been locked up in prison,’ she said.
He was reduced to an open mouthed silence for a moment and then asked ‘Why?’
‘For the murder of Dean Furness.’
He stared at her, wide eyed. ‘Did you do it?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I was set up for it. And that’s why, if you’ve nothing else to do now, perhaps you could tell me about Gilgamesh? Because I think it might help me understand why this has happened to us. Do you remember when we were in that aircraft with Hakim Mansour flying back to Kuwait? Mansour was in the toilet and I was trying to have a look in his briefcase but you stopped me from reading any further, otherwise I might have learned something about it back then.’ She gazed across at Ali Hamsin now slumped in the corner of a life raft in the Atlantic Ocean, rather than enjoying the comfort of an executive jet and aged beyond his years by his incarceration in Guantanamo Bay detention centre.
‘I remember stopping you,’ he said, ‘but Hakim Mansour came out the aircraft toilet with his trousers down and if he had found you reading it then there would have been hell to pay, for me anyway and probably for you too.’
‘So what was it all about, that agreement? What were you hiding from me?’
Ali tilted his head back and sighed. ‘If it wasn’t for that agreement and my association with Hakim Mansour I could have sheltered in Baghdad with my wife, or perhaps we would have left for Amman, where her brother lives, but I wouldn’t have finished up in Guantanamo Bay.’ He suddenly gave Gerry an accusing stare. ‘Maybe Rashid would have stayed safe in England, and you wouldn’t have arranged for the abduction of my son.’
‘Oh crap!’ she said to herself, and then aloud ‘So you know that was me.’
‘Rashid explained that a tall attractive woman named Sandra who spoke excellent Arabic in the Gulf style befriended him, but at the end of the evening he was snatched away from his home by some Americans. He also mentioned that Sandra had a scar on her neck. Apart from the name, that’s a fair description of you.’
Gerry’s hand automatically reached for the scar that ran down the right side of her neck and across her collar bone, remembering how the blood had flowed down her chest and how lucky she was not to have been slashed across the face or had her artery cut. She stared out of the raft where the sun was hidden behind some shower clouds, giving the two of them a respite from the heat.
‘It was just a few weeks after that meeting in Frankfurt.’ She shrugged ‘Depending on your point of view I’m a conniving bitch or a loyal and patriotic member of my country’s security service… or at least I was back then…I was carrying out orders to abduct Rashid. It was shortly before the invasion. Of course I never told him that I’d already met you. I asked my boss what was going to happen to him. First of all he told me to mind my own business, but then he told me that there was a job for your son, but not to worry, he would be going to Baghdad to re-join his family. Then a few days later I was given set a task in Oman, and planning that rather put him out of my mind.’ She paused. ‘Anyhow he arrived safely back at home with you.’
‘Safe? He was in Baghdad, on the eve of an aerial bombardment! Where he was safe was back in Southampton, before you and your people kidnapped him!’ He looked at Gerry. ‘You see how hard it is for me to trust you?’
‘Yeah I can understand that, but after the invasion he did get back to Southampton.’
‘But thanks to you he was involved, even if he didn’t know what he was carrying across the border.’
‘So he was carrying the Gilgamesh documents?’
‘Yes. Have you any idea what happened to him when he arrived? He told me he was interrogated by the secret police. They were convinced that he might have read them, but fortunately Hakim Mansour turned up just in time before they got really rough with him. Have you ever been interrogated?’
Gerry ran her tongue over her missing tooth, and stared toward the distant horizon for a few seconds while she suppressed an unpleasant memory. ‘So what happened to Rashid after I delivered him to the CIA?’ she asked.