Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  The ardent young Saudi who had stood over him on the beach and fired his gun into the air and covered him in his headscarf breathed in close and fed him sultanas one at a time: Saif was there. Saif the gap-toothed, who was also known as Haidar, the lion, because he was a suicide bomber who had done all that was asked of him: whose vest had not exploded, and so was between the living and the dead, invincible, a martyr who went among them still.

  Saif’s smile was misleading; he was calibrated, in this other respect a detonation waiting to happen, prone to violent mood swings and other reversals. He had memorised scenes from Pink Panther films, poured sweet tea for the poor, slit the throat of a student in Jeddah, and without regret threw a grenade into a video shack in Mogadishu, killing those inside for the crime of watching a Bollywood film.

  Yusuf picked up mobiles at random and texted orders to the battle lines. When he finished he scooped rice into his mouth with his fingers and sipped tea. He ate in silence. He stood up and stepped over the legs of his men with care and courtesy. He paused over James, read aloud the words on the Englishman’s T-shirt, and continued out into the starry night.

  A wind blew in off the sea. The courtyard of the mosque was sifted with sand. Yusuf washed his hands and feet and entered the mosque. He carried a lamp into the dark and knelt behind a pillar in the back and prayed. The jihad had been hard. His men had fought Ethiopian soldiers, African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, and the Somali Transitional Government troops and its allied militias. At one time in Mogadishu the Ethiopians fired in phosphorous shells with a petroleum-jelly-like napalm which ignited and burned through shacks and stuck to the flesh of his men and smouldered through them. There was another offensive where they had to scrape together the pieces of the boys who had been directly hit by mortars and gather them for a funeral. He had resorted to the methods of Iraq, hiding among the poor, using them as decoys, placing improvised explosives in the marketplaces, and training suicide brigades for attacks on Crusader targets.

  On the day they made love for the first time, she spoke to him about her work. They were sitting by the table in her room. Her papers and photocopies were stacked at one end. The filing cards were loosely arranged at the other. In the centre of the table was a glass ashtray. She pulled from among her papers an aerial photograph of a ship. It was her way of easing into the subject.

  ‘The research vessel Knorr. Home port: Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It carries all of the instruments that are meant to assist oceanographers. On longer expeditions there is often a submersible on board.’

  It was summertime on the Arctic Ocean. There were fragments of ice. The decks were arranged in rectangles. There was a hangar at the back of the vessel. It struck him as industrial compared to the whaling ships in the paintings hung in his family home, which were curved, studded with whale teeth along the rails. Then again, what he did know? He was a paratrooper who had become a spy.

  ‘I have a French view of science,’ she said. ‘Very romantic. Don’t get me wrong. I am sensible. It’s just I have to stop myself from falling for comments like “exploration is a hunt whose prey is discovery”.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Anyway, I’ve never worked in France. When I began my doctorate I divided my time between Zurich and a town called La Spezia in Italy. Do you know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The locals call it Spesa. It was convenient; not so far along the coast from my parents’ place. It’s the Italian naval base for the Ligurian Sea. There’s a lovely mural by the Futurist Prampolini in the town post office. There’s also a submerged statue of Christ in the harbour, a few metres down. You can’t see it, but I always felt it under me when we headed out, the hands stretched up’ – she held her two hands over her head – ‘blessing all the boats passing above.

  ‘The Ligurian Sea is one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean. It looks like this’ – she doodled with a pencil a gash on a line she indicated to be the sea floor – ‘it goes down to 2850 metres. An underworld within touching distance of the Riviera. Amazing.

  ‘I’d gone to Spesa to work on a NATO project to protect the Cuvier’s beaked whales in the Ligurian Sea. They needed a mathematician to understand how noise reverberated in the undersea canyons. The hope was to track the diving range of the Cuvier’s and see if the navy sonar was damaging them. There were dolphins in the Tigulian Gulf and fin whales, pilot whales and very occasionally sperm whales further out. In my work I only had eyes for the Cuvier’s. They’re rough-toothed whales.’ She sketched one. She was a teacher. ‘Seven metres long from short beak down its sloping head to its tail fin, here. They’re shy and difficult to spot. They live to eighty.’

  Her drawing made them look like dolphins.

  ‘Are they playful?’

  She thought about it. ‘No, I wouldn’t say so. They’re hard to place. At first I felt they hadn’t grown up, that they were childlike, but the more we studied them, the graver their lives seemed to be. What is really interesting about them is how deep they go. They are the deepest diving creatures in the world. They stay underwater for an hour, to a depth of 2000 metres, using sonar to hunt for squid there.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Not for me.’

  He poured himself a whisky.

  ‘I appreciated the way they looked, they were pretty things, chalked up under the jawbone, with heavily lidded eyes. The work wasn’t challenging, I grew tired of it, by the end the whales did not interest me any more than a partridge, or one of those funny three-legged dogs you sometimes see in the parks in London. The Cuvier’s are K-selected under the constant conditions of the ocean: slow maturation without predators; large brains, long gestation and low birth rate. If I had been an engineer like you I suppose I might have been interested in how they were at one time rendered for watch oil, causing the seconds to tick on Swiss watches.’ She tapped her dial. ‘If I was a biologist I would definitely have been interested in how they can’t swim into the rivers that flow into the Ligurian Sea because their kidneys can’t clean out the bacteria that’s in freshwater. I probably should have marvelled at their intelligence. Instead there I was on the boat, and the boat was tipping, the boat is always tipping, listening for them, first at this many fathoms, then deeper, and … do you know what a whale sounds like underwater?’

  ‘A cow?’

  ‘Like a piece of plastic bending and snapping. Or sometimes telephonic clicking. Finally I got the message. The Cuvier’s were showing me the way, that was all. Nothing was the same after that. Instead of looking at creatures, I started looking at the sea itself, how it filled the canyons, and what is it like at the bottom, what happens there.

  ‘I think I first started to think of this when my colleagues began to study the decompression the Cuvier’s suffered when they came up for air, they came up and it was as if they had left the world and the coming back to it was violent. They stay motionless at the surface and we still don’t know whether it is the pain of the bends, the osteonecrosis fizzing in their bones, or that they are blinded by the light.

  The strategy of the jihadists allied to al-Qaeda in Somalia is to create chaos in order to establish a supreme Islamic nation pure in its religion: a caliphate of Greater Somalia at the forefront of the global jihad. Local and foreign fighters will strike at Christian Ethiopia and Kenya, seeking to liberate the Muslims in those countries, thereby dragging America, Europe and the other Crusaders into the fray. The goal of the global jihad is to replicate itself through force of arms, creating a Muslim superstate: intercontinental, without borders, adjudged by the same laws and united by prayer.

  Yusuf prostrated himself behind the pillar in the mosque by the sea. He was a zealot, a soldier, an Arsenal football club fan, and Allah alone knew he prayed for clearness of mind and motive. He prayed for religious men. He prayed for the submission of Somaliland and the return of the Ogaden to Somalia. He prayed for the city of Mogadishu. He prayed that the thieving and whoring pirates be dragged by their hair into the burning presence
of God, or else be strangled.

  He was al-Afghani – the Afghan – because he had trained at the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan as a sniper, then in tactics. He had been a bodyguard to Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar until Azzam’s assassination. He had later been assigned to protect Hamza bin Laden, one of Osama’s younger sons. It was Azzam who laid out the path for Yusuf to follow: jihad and the bullet alone; no negotiation, no dialogue, no surrender.

  He had been with Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 for some days. He returned home to Somalia in 2002 a few weeks after escaping a raid on a safe house in the Asir mountains in south-western Saudi Arabia. When the counter-terrorism police burst in they found a bowl of porridge steaming on the table and a stack of passports from different African countries, each with Yusuf’s photo on them, each with a different name. The escape was celebrated on jihadist websites and bundled on videos along with bomb attacks and decapitation of infidels. Yet it was only a deception: an inside man in the Saudi police redirected the search team while Yusuf scrambled down a cliff.

  He was at war with the warlords and the faithless others who had destroyed Somalia after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991. They were illiterate, syphilitic, irrational killers. But then, so were his men. The jihad attracted more than its share of sociopaths. What he needed were boys with pure motives who were prepared to go into battle, or strap explosives on and blow themselves up. He had spent his childhood as a shepherd in Somalia and he knew how tough and resourceful and undismayed boys were and always preferred them to men, who were unreliable, or who were in the jihad for pay or clan loyalty. He personally indoctrinated the boys in his camps: Kill in the name of Allah! Kill until the end of the world! If you are the last believer, kill! If you are killed, Allah will avenge you. If you are killed, paradise will be yours! He chanted the Koran. He told the boys how he had found no home in the twentieth century, with its Crusader and Communist empires, with the state of Israel and the Zionist plot, but had found a home for himself in the jihad in the twenty-first century. The boys quieted and hardened the more he talked. They punched the air. They hid their faces in scarves and performed forward rolls down rocky slopes with their machine guns. They were taught to fire mortars by a white-skinned former United States Army Green Beret, who had converted to Islam after serving alongside mujahideen units in the Bosnian war. Yusuf ended the training by talking about the caliphate. The caliph was coming, he said, the holy times were returning. The caliphate was a state of innocence protected by severe laws, where musicians and all people who acted like strangers were flogged, the hands of thieves lopped off, liars branded, and agitating Sufis, Christians, and Marxists beheaded. There were fewer parties, no cigarettes and no qat.

  To pay his way, give to the poor, and support his wives and children, Yusuf traded in frankincense. The money for his militia came in tax revenues and extortion from the towns he governed and private donations from Arab countries. His weapons arrived by dhow from Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, and by plane from Eritrea. He fought alongside the jihadist factions under the command of Muqtar Robow and Hassan Turki, who called themselves the Shabab, or youth; he kept his distance from the rival Hizbul Islam of Hasan Dahir Aweys.

  He was sometimes disappointed. Words were used instead of guns, and guns were fired where words would have done. He was a tactician, and his first tactic was absolute trust in Allah, the most merciful, the most benevolent. He had hidden at various times the al-Qaeda operatives wanted for the attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and on Israeli tourists in Mombasa in 2002. Some of those operatives had been picked off in American air strikes or captured by the Mogadishu warlords and sold on. He himself was always on the move. He spent most of his time in the desert or in the swamps. In towns, he slept in mosques or close to the marketplace. He hid his face, or went in disguise.

  He cut out tongues in broad daylight. He won battles. Together, the jihadists controlled south Somalia and most of Mogadishu. He had established terrorist cells of three men in Nairobi and Dubai and he had sleeper agents in Mwanza, Johannesburg, Cardiff and London.

  His true beliefs were not much different from the indoctrination he handed out in the camps. He was in it to the death. It was only that he was more experienced. Belief came first for him. For the boys, martyrdom preceded understanding.

  Still, there was a question of what religion meant to a jihadist. There was no introspection, except what was needed to look within yourself and decide to die for a cause. There was a detestation of science and an abhorrence of philosophy. Their wives, sisters and daughters were elsewhere. They had not considered a place for them in the caliphate, not even any place they might go and get medical care.

  Yusuf prayed and prayed. He looked to the right and to the left. He banged his forehead on the ground. He was leaving Kismayo early in the morning to coordinate the fighting in the Medina district of Mogadishu. The prayer was that he would not be reduced to an animal, like the jihadist commander who smashed in the headstones in Sufi cemeteries for pleasure, and killed an old Italian nun at a hospital in Mogadishu, emptying bullets into her until her body came apart. There was no justice without the possibility of mercy, for instance for the Englishman they had taken hostage.

  ‘Allah, protect me from the fire of hell,’ was his last prayer.

  ‘The Cuvier’s,’ she continued, ‘have learned to dive deeper over a million-year evolution. They edged further in from one mutation to the next. Thinking about the way a beaked whale dives is a good way to think about the dimensionality of the ocean.’ She selected a softer lead pencil and drew in thick lines on the paper she used for her calculations: a cross section of the planet from its stratosphere to its molten core.

  ‘The oceans cover 70 per cent of the planet surface. You know that. It has five layers. The first is epipelagic. OK. That’s wristwatch depth. It contains all the plant life and coral reefs and all the shipwrecks that can be dived with aqualungs; all of Jacques Cousteau. Whatever memory we have of baptism or any other form of submersion is here in blue water.

  ‘The next layer is the mesopelagic. This is the twilight zone, into which blue and all the other colours and light vanish.’ She drew more lines. ‘Everything under the mesopelagic is night. First the bathypelagic zone, then the abyssopelagic, finally the hadopelagic.’

  She looked up. They both did.

  ‘The hadopelagic is what interests me. Hadal from the Greek hades, meaning unseen. This,’ she said, shading it in, ‘is the other world in our world. The only light is the bioluminescence of fish who move under the weight of a thousand atmospheres.’

  She drew circles representing the inner parts of the planet.

  ‘There are 3481 kilometres of molten rock and 2690 kilometres of mantle. No one knows much about the mantle. It has no life and therefore no possibility of reanimation and so is without scientific interest. I disagree. I’m studying what I think is the living bit of the mantle, the first few kilometres underlying the Hadal deep. I believe the fissures on the sea floor into the mantle are filled with microbial life.’

  Her pencil lingered on the core and mantle.

  ‘The biosphere is the dermis. All life and regeneration in our world belongs to it. Thick as it seems to us, with our histories of evolution and extinction, exploration and colonisation, the abiotic mantle is several hundred times thicker.’ She drew another scale showing how nearly all the biosphere was in the ocean.

  ‘We exist only as a film on the water,’ she said. ‘Of course, this goes against the religion of the Garden of Eden and the canon of political documents ending with the international law of the sea which promote the primacy of man on the planet. Just take a look at it,’ she said, running the pencil again over the lines and curves. ‘We’re nature’s brief experiment with self-awareness. Any study of the ocean and what lies beneath it should serve notice of how easily the planet might shrug us off.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said.

  ‘We use the words
“sea” and “ocean” interchangeably in English, and that’s fine, I do it myself, “sea” is a powerful word. A yacht belongs to the sea, it’s aimed always to the next port of call. Surfers likewise belong to the sea, not the ocean. You saw how tiny they were on the waves today. How they’re spun around like in a washing machine when they fall off their boards. Sometimes they’re ground into the bottom. When they ride out a wave, it carries them home, to land. The sea has its transformative power, its own history. I told you my mother is from Martinique. For Martiniquans the history of the sea is slavery. The sea goes across, that’s the point. The sea is a pause between one land-bound adventure and another. It joins lands. The ocean goes down and joins worlds.’

  She had not even begun with chemosynthetic life and the rest – the refractory molecules of anoxgenic photoheterophotic bacteria – but she could not recall having spoken so acutely with a lover. Perhaps it was because they were so close to the Atlantic, or that he lived in Africa and she would not see him again, or perhaps it was the opposite, that she would see him all the time.

  They talked into the night and were awake to each other. The uprightness of the chairs worked against intimacy. There had already been a consummation and their courtship was subsequent; in talk, not in the silence of touching.

  He felt a brittleness inside him. He was not able to share his career with her, and it was the imbalance in their conversation that perhaps made him speak about the Midgard serpent, which lived so enormously in the ocean the Norsemen believed it encircled the world.