Static

Amateur radio is not a lonely hobby. Amateurs will tell you this at length, usually while you are trying to leave.

There are nets and clubs and contests. There is a global community of hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom would help you rebuild a rig at two in the morning if you asked properly.

Sabir knows all of this. Sabir has been licensed since he was sixteen and has, in his time, worked ninety-one countries.

What Sabir does at 23:00 every night is not that.

At 23:00 he goes down to the shack at the end of the garden and he transmits, on a frequency nobody uses, for about eleven minutes, and then he listens for forty, and then he goes to bed.

He does not use his callsign. This is, he is aware, a licence condition, and he is in breach of it every night, and has been for six years.

What he transmits is a set of numbers.

Not a code. A date, a time, and a set of coordinates, repeated at intervals, in a slow clear voice, in English and then in Somali.

The coordinates are a stretch of water in the central Mediterranean. The date is 4 October 2019.

Why

His brother Guled was on a boat that left Zuwara on the night of 3 October 2019 and did not arrive.

There were seventy-one people on it. There were eleven survivors, picked up by a merchant vessel forty hours later, and none of them was Guled, and all eleven were interviewed, and their accounts do not agree about the last two hours in any way that a person can build anything on.

Two of them say a smaller boat came alongside.

Nine say it did not.

That is the whole of it. That is the entire evidentiary basis for six years of a man in a shed in Bristol transmitting coordinates into a dead band at eleven o'clock at night.

Sabir is not a fool. He is a structural draughtsman with a mortgage and a daughter and a completely ordinary life in which he functions well. He knows what the two survivors' accounts are worth. He knows what shock does to memory, and he has read the same literature everyone reads.

He knows that the frequency he uses is quiet because it is useless — a stretch of HF that propagates badly and is monitored by nobody.

He chose it for that reason. He has never been able to explain the reason properly, even to himself. The closest he has come is: if it were a frequency people used, then the silence would mean something. On a frequency nobody uses, the silence means nothing at all, and he can go to bed.

Six years. About two thousand one hundred nights.

Tuesday

At 23:41 on Tuesday, in the listening period, something came back.

Not a voice. A carrier — a bare unmodulated signal, someone keying a transmitter without speaking — for about four seconds. Then nothing. Then, ninety seconds later, four seconds again.

Sabir sat in the shed with his hands flat on the desk.

He knows what this almost certainly is. It is almost certainly a fault, or a harmonic from something else, or a person somewhere on earth doing something entirely unrelated on a frequency they assume is empty, because it is empty, because that is why he chose it.

He also knows that in six years it has never happened.

He did the right thing first. He recorded it. He checked his own equipment. He took a bearing on the third and fourth occurrences — it kept going, on and off, for two hours — and got a rough direction that resolved to somewhere between Sicily and the Gulf of Sirte, with an error margin so wide it was almost meaningless.

Almost.

Wednesday

He went down at 23:00 and transmitted the numbers.

At 23:12 it came back. Four seconds.

He said, off-script, in English: "If you can hear me, key twice."

Silence.

Then, at 23:14: two short carriers, ninety seconds apart.

Sabir has told his wife. She listened to the recording twice and asked him what he intended to do, and he said he did not know, and she said, "Sabir," and he said, "I know."

He knows what this is. It is a stranger somewhere near the Mediterranean who has noticed a repeating signal and is doing what any amateur would do, which is to key up and see whether anyone is there.

He knows that.

Tonight he will go down at 23:00 and transmit a date and a set of coordinates in English and then in Somali, and then he will listen for forty minutes.

He has started listening for longer.