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  ‘Meet Rufus,’ said the woman. ‘He’s coming on patrol with you. He’s not the brightest, but he’ll hear and smell people you’d walk right past.’ And she handed the lead to Donna.

  Donna soon wished she hadn’t. Rufus was a big red bundle of enthusiasm who appeared utterly incapable of doing anything on command. ‘Nose like a bloodhound,’ said Corporal Reweti encouragingly, as Donna wrestled Rufus into the electric runabout assigned to the patrol. By then, Donna was wishing her mother had never gone beyond having a budgie.

  THE MUD STANK OF BRINE, of fish, of chemicals. Nasimul lay in the mud and stank along with it.

  He had been woken by something brushing against his trailing leg. Panicked, he tried to pull his leg out of the water and onto his de facto raft, and pain flashed along his nerves. But it was nothing more serious than cramp. Though it burned in his limbs, he tried again and managed to get the whole of his slender frame inside his impromptu boat. He drifted, wet, cold. I’m going to die like this, he thought. But death, although he sensed it hovering, refused to come into focus.

  The tide carried him – he could not say where, but it carried him. The strong winds from the south had died away and a breeze blew from land that could not be far away, carrying familiar smells of wet vegetation, and other smells he did not recognise.

  Sometimes he saw shapes off in the dark, but nothing came near until he heard a small boat approaching, the sound of its engine borne towards him on the wind. The boat was running without lights: he did not see it until it was within fifty metres of him. For a moment, he feared he might be run down, but then he realised the boat would pass a few metres to his left. He lay as flat as possible, hoping that no one on the boat would spot a dark man in dark clothes lying on a damp and waterlogged hunk of wood. No one did, and the boat passed him by. Where were they going in such secrecy? Why were they trying to hide? He did not know.

  An hour later and an unknown distance closer to shore, twin beams of light swept across the water, approaching him from either side. Again he pressed himself flat, praying that they would pass him by. The edge of one light cone did sweep over him, but to the operator, he must have seemed just another piece of flotsam on the tide. The lights swept away, and nothing changed for an hour – for two hours – he could not tell how long. He went where the sea dictated.

  He felt the curved plank on which he was floating brush against something. It broke free, drifted twenty or more sluggish metres, and then ran aground, if ground it could be called, on a mud bank.

  Nasimul lay there, too weak and tired to do anything, until the barking of a dog – distant, but not too distant – spurred him to action. Plainly, he was not far from land. That meant opportunity – the chance of escape – but also danger. He did not know how long this moonless night would last, but when it ended, he would be as visible as if he had lit flares to announce his presence.

  And he was hungry, and cold: this whole land seemed made from cold and mud. How could anyone live here, how could anyone even make it ashore?

  Perhaps they could simply walk. That thought lasted him as long as it took to straighten one leg, bend his knee with aching slowness, and put part of his weight on the mudflat. His foot sank, smoothly and deeply, and the more weight he put on it, the deeper it sank. He pulled his oozing foot and calf out with an effort.

  Would the tide rise and refloat him? He waited a few minutes, then a few more, but got no sense of whether this harbour was on the waxing or the waning tide.

  He could not afford to wait any longer. He abandoned his faithful vessel, slid into the shallow water, and began to swim towards the tantalising smell of the shore.

  IT HAD BEEN A SHIT of a night. With each tired footstep, with each half-heard noise in the darkness that set Rufus, the stupid bloody untrained bloody mutt, barking and straining at his leash, Donna wondered what the flying fuck she was doing here with this bloody dog, with the bunch of grinning morons who were no help whatsoever – and Mere worst of all.

  Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts. She looked at David’s arse rounding out his camo trousers. It didn’t help.

  She tried to think positive. Good things came if you joined the Shore Patrol. First there was the extra pay, which looked better and better the more Mrs Alberts cut back Donna’s hours at the shop, because south of the Harbour Bridge no one could afford to buy clothes any more. Then, if you stuck with it for long enough, there were the free fees to AUT and Unitech, and God knows Donna wanted to get trained and get out of working in a shop that never sold anything and into a job where she could actually get shit done and get paid for it, maybe a mechanic or something.

  Or maybe the regular Army. Donna was short and not that muscly, but from what she heard, the Army would take pretty much anyone it could get who could stay off the pills and shoot straight. Donna knew she could shoot straight.

  But for now she was stuck with Rufus.

  In the right hands – say, the hands of a loving owner with a big house and big grounds and a lot of time on their hands – Rufus the red setter would have been a lovable scamp. But in a paramilitary setting in which stealth, concealment and surprise were meant to be the modus operandi, Rufus was about as useful as tits on a bull. He had proved at their last break – five minutes for hot, bitter coffee from a flask – that he could hump an enemy’s leg to death; at least, he could hump David’s leg to death, and that was pretty much the same thing. To be fair, though, he had settled down a bit since the humping incident, seeming to accept that this night was just a very long bout of walkies.

  So here they were, swinging down Arthur St one more time. In these years of the relentlessly rising sea, wealth bought elevation: the only people who lived close to the ever-advancing shore line were those who could not afford to live further away. The top end of Arthur St was still well-lit, houses diligently repaired after each ravage of the wind and rain, but as they neared the sea, the streetlights disappeared, the footpath devolved to gravel and mud, the houses slumped and shrank back from view. If anyone still lived here, they had no wish to be discovered.

  Beachcroft Ave, and beyond it, the old waterfront motorway, deserted, half-awash. There were no lights above or below. The country was up to its eyeballs in debt trying to pay the massive cost of managing its retreat from the sea: no one was going to waste a cent down here, where the battle was already lost.

  Donna mooched down the street, and the patrol mooched with her: Mere, David, and the old lags, Norman the former car detailer (and boy, did he know a lot of details about cars), and Corporal Rewiti, officially in command but seemingly possessed only of the desire to smoke one after another of his thin, poisonous rollies.

  ‘How long to go, Sarge?’ asked Donna.

  ‘Corporal,’ corrected Corporal Reweti. And, ‘ten minutes less than when you asked last time.’

  Still the best part of two hours, then. Bloody hell.

  Along Beachcroft Ave they marched, and it seemed to Donna that the night might never end, that already, on this her first night of duty, she had passed out of time’s regular cycle and into a parallel kind of time, military time, where everything was repetition. Put one foot in front of another for long enough and you would find yourself back where you started, on and on, while the clouds refused to lift and the sun refused to rise.

  So maybe mechanic was the go, not Army. She could—

  Rufus pulled the lead out of her hand with a jerk so strong that it wrenched her wrist. He had seen what no one else had seen, heard what no one else has heard, and without waiting for orders to be passed down the proper chain of command, he was off in hot pursuit.

  ‘Shit!’ said Donna. ‘Fucking dog!’ Wrist still smarting, she chased after the rapidly disappearing beast.

  Corporal Reweti was lost deep in a dream of nicotine when Rufus and Donna took off. The Corporal wasn’t clear what had spooked either of them, but it seemed reasonable to assume that it had military significance. ‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ he ordered the
rest of the platoon. ‘After them!’

  So they ran after the wildly barking Rufus. One thing’s for sure, thought Donna as she panted after the dog, any infiltrators will have made a run for it by now. They’ll be miles away, doing ... her imagination failed to come up with a picture of what they would be doing, seeing as she had never seen an infiltrator herself and had no idea where these particular infiltrators were from. Infiltrating, anyway, and trying to blend in, trying to look like regular New Zealanders – whatever they looked like.

  Rufus led them to the doorway of a long-abandoned, half-decayed house that would soon have high tides washing beneath its warped and peeling door. And there he stopped, quivering.

  ‘You stupid mutt,’ said Donna, but then Corporal Reweti arrived and told them to be quiet, they didn’t know who or what was on the other side of that door, or what they might be armed with. ‘You two,’ he said to David and Norman, ‘check round the back. If you find a back door, stand outside it and wait for my call. And have your guns drawn. If anyone tries to come out, apprehend them. Otherwise, await my command.’

  David, inflated by his new responsibility, disappeared around the back of the property with his shoulders high. Norman strolled after him, dreaming of classic cars: Daihatsu, SsangYong.

  Donna and Mere stood beside Corporal Reweti, their guns also drawn, waiting for orders. Rufus, finding nothing better to do, lolled with his tongue out, giving Donna the chance to recapture his lead.

  They waited long enough that Donna got bored. God, she thought, if every night is going to be like this I am going to go crazy in a week. I am going to be begging Mrs Alberts to give me more hours, even if I have to spend all of them cleaning the toilets and looking after her snotty grandkids. I am going to—

  ‘Now!’ And Corporal Reweti kicked the door in – first time, too. They pounded up the stairs, Rufus going crazy, Donna trying her best to hold him back. At the back of the house, more noise, and the sound of splintering wood. Just ahead of her, Corporal Reweti kicked another door open, gun drawn. ‘Put—,’ he said, and a shot winged past him, splintering the doorframe. Donna froze, and Mere dived past her just as Corporal Reweti fired. A scream from inside the room, and then, as Donna peered around the doorframe, she saw Mere tackling a man and knocking the gun from his hand while next to him a woman cried out in pain and clutched her left shoulder.

  While Mere and Corporal Reweti subdued the struggling man, Donna tied Rufus to the leg of a sagging bed and bound up the woman’s wound. The bullet had passed through the fleshy part of her shoulder, leaving a messy exit wound. A few centimetres to the right, and she would have been in a lot of trouble. But if Corporal Reweti had been trying to hit the man with the gun, he sure wasn’t much of a shot.

  There was a lot of blood, but Donna had seen blood before. By the time she had torn up bed sheets to bandage the wound, her racing heart had quieted, though that only brought the memory of her cowardice in the hallway into sharper relief. Mere had been so brave...

  The woman was short, brown-skinned and very frightened. As she should be – from what Donna had heard, detention centres were not good places to be. And as for the man – tall, Pākehā, struggling less now after a couple of good socks to the jaw – he was facing a long, long time inside, or worse. She didn’t know which of them she envied less.

  It ended up with four of them manhandling the guy out of the house, and Donna being left with the woman. She didn’t seem like much of a threat – she was smaller than Donna, her face was drawn with pain, and her left hand was clutching her right shoulder – but Donna wasn’t taking any chances. She needed her full attention for the woman, so she had no alternative but to leave Rufus behind.

  The dog whined and strained at his lead, and Donna, much to her surprise, felt bad about leaving him behind, but she had to do it anyway. Keeping her gun trained on the woman, she took a bowl from the table and filled it with water from her canteen. ‘Here you go, boy,’ she said, and set the water down in front of him. As they left the room, he was drinking happily and wagging his tail. He’ll be all right, she told herself.

  When they got back out onto the street, Corporal Reweti called for backup. The man called him a fucking prick, and got another clip on the jaw for his pains. It took a couple more before he finally shut up. They waited in the deserted street in front of the abandoned house for what seemed like forever before the radio squawked again.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Corporal Reweti. ‘No backup, and Anderson’s other squad requisitioned the runabout. We’ll have to drag these two back to base. Come on, let’s go.’

  Another burst of swearing, another clip across the jaw, and a chokehold around the neck. Some people never learn. Meanwhile, the woman let go a little sound of pain, and Donna put her arm almost protectively around her. They started back the way they had come, where soon a shortcut would lead them uphill and back to base. As she walked away supporting the injured woman’s weight, Donna fancied she could hear Rufus whining.

  NASIMUL RAHMAN WAS a strong swimmer. But he was a strong swimmer in the warm waters of Bangladesh: the water he had plunged into when he jumped off the Jamalpur-2 had shocked him with its implacable desire to suck the heat from his bones.

  The shallow harbour in which he now swam was nowhere near so cold but, in his weakened state, nevertheless cold enough to drain the energy from him, to make his strokes less certain, his breathing shallower. His legs began to cramp once more. If he was unable to escape the water soon, he would die here – but on this dark night, he was unable to judge the distance to shore. All he could do was to swim on.

  Then the small night sounds were swept aside by a volley of barking, by voices calling, by running feet and wildly swinging beams of torchlight. Nasimul realised that he was much closer to shore than he had thought. With that realisation came the certainty that he must get out of the water and find shelter to survive. Despite the noises approaching from his left, he swam until his feet touched bottom, then pulled himself out of the water, bent as low as possible, like some ancestral lungfish reaching for new territory. He lay in the damp grasses at the water’s edge and watched.

  It was his misfortune that the building thirty or so metres directly ahead of him, an old and ramshackle house that would not have looked out of place on the banks of the Lakhya, was now the centre of attention. The barking dog and its human deputies had come to a halt in front of the building. A torch was played across the closed front door. Stealthy footsteps moved off to one side. Time passed. He began to shiver, clenching his teeth to prevent the noise carrying.

  The scene erupted into noise and movement. The front door was kicked inwards. Boots pounded on timber. He heard a cry. Two shots rang out. A voice wailed, and was cut short.

  Soon afterwards, a man and a woman were half-marched, half-dragged out the front door of the building. The man was arguing furiously with his captors, so furiously that he was backhanded across the face for his pains. The woman, and the girl guarding her, stood quietly.

  He heard the squawk of a radio, voices he could not catch, more vociferous swearing. At last the lot of them moved away, voices then footsteps dwindling to his left. He waited, waited though he was beginning to feel delirious, waited a little longer still, and then climbed at last onto solid land. Ten steps, twenty, thirty. He reached the shattered front door. He was shivering harder now in the cool night air. He could choose to die of exposure on the doorstep, or he could choose to go inside. He went inside.

  He heard the noise as he crept along the hallway, and the hairs rose on the back of his neck: a whining noise, the wail of an unhappy spirit...?

  The wail of an unhappy dog. When it saw Nasimul peering around the corner of the bedroom in which it had been tied up, its ears lifted and it started wagging its tail: this was not a dog trying to defend its territory.

  But the dog could wait. Dry clothes were more urgent, and there was a pile of them in one corner. While everything in the house was half-fallen into disrepair, the clothes
were new, if dirty. They belonged to a man broader and taller than Nasimul, but they were a great deal better – an infinite deal better – than shivering. He dried himself off on the bedspread then dressed in the clothes that fitted him least badly. The dog, no longer whimpering but still not happy, watched him with liquid eyes.

  Shelter, and now clothing: and someone had left their water bottle behind, with enough for a few precious sips. But with those needs satisfied, his hunger rose to the fore. He had not eaten since well before the Jamalpur-2 sank, and even then he had been on the shortest of short rations. Surely, if people were hiding out here, there must have been food?

  But if any food remained in the kitchen of this house, the rats and mice had disposed of it long since. He searched everywhere: high, low, in cupboards, on shelves. Nothing but a few bags with holes gnawed in them.

  He returned to the bedroom, looked at the dog reproachfully. ‘You’re lucky you’re haram,’ he said, ‘or you’d be going straight into the pot.’ The dog wagged his tail enthusiastically, as if he was being praised.

  The bedroom window faced the harbour. He twitched the rotting curtains aside and looked over the water, then as far as he could see up and down the street. Nothing there, but it had started raining, and as he watched, the rain grew heavier. If he went out to forage, he would be soaked again – and the man whose clothing he had taken had not thought to leave a raincoat for him.

  He found another pile of clothing besides the room’s sole armchair. This was women’s clothing – clothing for a small white woman, not at all what was suitable for a Bangladeshi woman to wear.

  Then, as he pushed aside clothing he would never wear and would have been horrified to see Hasina wear, he felt his fingers brush against something firm but not hard and, digging in the capacious pocket of a raincoat, extracted a block of Cadbury’s chocolate. He remembered his father, in a rare moment of fatherly success, buying the family one once. He remembered how it tasted.