Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said. ‘Might I ask one more favour?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘I need a haircut. Do you think you could cut my hair?’

  ‘I’ve never cut gold hair!’

  They took a communal taxi across the town. They were squeezed in the back with another woman. He was buttock to buttock between the two. They didn’t seem to mind. They were Muslim, but not so religious. Monique rested her hand absently on his knee. They stared at him, and he looked away. Women had rights on the island. They could vote, they could drive cars. The biggest hope was for a grand marriage, which bought entry into the island’s aristocracy.

  If the terrorist had gone to France, if he had saved up and had a grand marriage, if he had been a maths teacher, if he had invested in Monique’s salon, if, if, he would never have blown up the United States Embassy in Nairobi, in an operation al-Qaeda called Kaaba, which killed 212 people and injured 4000 more.

  ‘I need a haircut. Do you think you could cut my hair?’

  ‘I’ve never cut gold hair!’

  They took a communal taxi across the town. They were squeezed in the back with another woman. He was buttock to buttock between the two. They didn’t seem to mind. They were Muslim, but not so religious. Monique rested her hand absently on his knee. They stared at him, and he looked away. Women had rights on the island. They could vote, they could drive cars. The biggest hope was for a grand marriage, which bought entry into the island’s aristocracy.

  If the terrorist had gone to France, if he had saved up and had a grand marriage, if he had been a maths teacher, if he had invested in Monique’s salon, if, if, he would never have blown up the United States Embassy in Nairobi, in an operation al-Qaeda called Kaaba, which killed 212 people and injured 4000 more.

  Aziz was giving a clinic in the Bari slum when the fighters broke into the surgery and snatched James. The gap-toothed Saudi, Saif the lion, ordered him to get dressed. He was manhandled down the stairs and hauled into the back of a lorry idling in the street. Saif had been instructed to take some fighters and hide Mr Water in the badlands for a time, then reappear at an agreed spot. It was early in the morning. Kismayo did not stir.

  The lorry was a cattle truck, smelling of animals, with benches on either side. A tarpaulin was drawn down over its metal ribs. He was jammed in near the front, between the Chechen who was called Qasab and a Somali boy – small and coiled like a snake – who was unceasingly enraged by real or made up crimes against the body of Islam.

  His hands were bound, not his eyes, and so he was able to see the outskirts of Kismayo, framed through the back of the lorry. The exhaust fired, tins of bullets rattled on the metal floor, and the vehicle swayed and slammed on the broken road.

  It grew hotter. Donkeys stood in the shade. The lorry turned onto a tarmac road dotted with starving people hobbling to the sea. Sometimes they collapsed on the road, so the fighters had to get down and carry them to the side before continuing. There was no food in the land. The rains had failed again and insecurity had kept the people from harvesting what little they had.

  They passed an Italian plantation which had grown tomatoes and bananas for export. That was in the 1960s, when the seaside restaurants in Kismayo, Marka, and Mogadishu were full of customers, the waiters in uniforms, the bands playing, the sea azure, streaked with foamy white, and the pasta always al dente.

  The gates into the plantation were broken now and the earth was split and ruined and the Italians were long gone. There was only a man in rags, scratching around under the trees for fallen fruit. When they went by he waved his stick over his head at them slowly and weakly.

  The trees in Somalia were festooned in plastic bags of different colours, carried by the wind and snagged on branches. You could work out how many people lived in a settlement by the number of plastic bags on the trees. As they drove on there were fewer and fewer and then there were none. That was how he knew they had left inhabited Somalia behind and rattled into the badlands.

  He put his head around the door of the hotel office and asked if he might briefly check his email on the hotel computer. He scanned the messages and then searched for her. He found a homepage on the Imperial College website. She looked younger in the photograph. She was smiling. The page explained her work. The terminology was difficult to follow. At the bottom was a reference to a hydrothermal vent field she had named: the northernmost vent field yet discovered. He read in the online dictionary that ‘flinders’ described moths as well as shards and that Matthew Flinders was a Royal Naval officer who had circumnavigated Australia for the first time.

  He took his morning coffee in the billiards room with the busts. He opened a window and looked out over the parkland. There was a tree whose branches reached down to the snow like an arm. There was a redbrick chimney visible in the woods: early industrial, slender, tapering and long disused. To breathe the clean air, turf, sea, snow, was a luxury after the dirt and jet fuel smog of Africa. There was a mirror in the room and he stood looking at himself; or rather, because he was not vain in that way, he regarded his other self caught inside the mirror.

  Darkness, where is its place? In the ocean. In rock. In a passage of caves, for example, newly found in Europe’s Moravian karst, some with cathedral-sized chambers 70 metres long, 30 metres wide and 50 metres high.

  The end of these chambers has not been reached because an underground river flows too swiftly and deeply to be crossed. The breathing apparatus available to professional cavers is not sufficient. Behind the river, continuing down for kilometres, are chambers which have never been illuminated.

  It was what the United States Army called off-grid. It existed on maps and satellite photos, but was without water, so without settlement. The only tracks were those the camel herders picked out across the pubic scrub of thorn trees and in the wadis.

  Saif held up his mobile phones for a clearer reception. He received a final text message before the signal gave out. James saw the screensaver on one of the phones was of Giggs scoring a goal for Manchester United over and over. Saif passed the phones along to Qasab, who put them in a knapsack together with some hand grenades. The knapsack looked to have been lifted from some long-ago day trip; filled with sandwiches wrapped in paper, cake and a flask of tea.

  Saif pulled out a small and finely bound Koran and began to read aloud. Quietly at first, then sonorously. When he was finished he moved down the lorry and squeezed in beside him.

  ‘I want to tell you not to be frightened,’ Saif said. ‘We are not heading for battle. The jihad has no frontlines. The battle is all around, it is everywhere.’

  They had guns, but they were not an army. There was no likeness to the units he had served with. They were skinny men. Apart from Qasab, he had no doubt that all of them would be beaten to death in a confined space by the average British paratrooper. He welcomed the thought.

  Nonetheless the jihadists showed their stamina over a longer period. The paratrooper – the Crusader – was stronger and heavier, but grew tired and demoralised more quickly. The paratrooper was limited in his rules of engagement by the need to protect civilians. The paratrooper did not want to die. The jihadists drank water from the ditch and were resigned to the slow rhythm of the insurgency, walking for days in jeans and sandals, shouldering their guns like skis. Some of them sharpened their teeth with metal files. Over time the jihadists might wear down a much larger force. They were the opposite of the United Nations peacekeepers in Africa, who were all logistics and no fight. Those UN outposts were guarded by machine-gun nests, while on the inside the Portakabins were arranged around a mess tent with a television playing one code of football or another, and the only cheer in those places was when a goal was scored, or a try – a ball puncturing a plane. He had been in one remote camp in Sudan and noticed a beautiful half-naked Dinka girl standing at the edge of the tent bathed in the glow of a football match on a television.

  There were seventeen fighters in the lorry. They were
self-sufficient. They shared with paratroopers only a care for their guns; they were constantly cleaning them. Most did not even own a prayer mat. They were empowered by the prospect of martyrdom. Famines, flash floods, malaria, the bones that were set wrong or not set at all, the hole rotted through the jawbone, the infections, the gamut of psychiatric disorders, all of this assured them that their fate was in every way and in every place an uncertain one, a medieval one. They would not be missed, and no matter that they lacked common sense, information, and adequate equipment, fatalism gave them a durability the paratrooper lacked.

  He tried to strike up a conversation with Saif but the road had become rough again and it was hard to make himself understood over the noise. They fell into an uneasy silence.

  Somewhere along the way the land just died. It was bleached out and the cracks that were in the soil in the old Italian plantation had here become deep enough to fall into. The insides of these cuts were twisted with roots and there were flints and fossils exposed. The badlands stretched out of sight. He was thirsty. He longed for water.

  Rain was coming. They could all feel it, the prospect of it, the weight of it. The light was faded, the clouds were bruised and full. He scratched at his arms with his bound hands until there was a thickness of dirt and skin and blood under his nails. It was the flea bites. The lorry trundled on over the badlands. It rocked him to sleep. When he awoke his mind was fogged. His face hurt and his skin tasted salty. It had not rained.

  They stopped the lorry under a canopy of acacia trees. It was late afternoon. He was hauled out. He begged to be allowed to piss. They untied his hands and led him to a bush. An infection had crystallised in him. It was excruciating; it dribbled, there was pus, then a jet. He could smell the camels in a herder’s camp nearby. Slow, loping, farting beasts, they smelled like they moved. They tied him to a tree while they set up camp. Qasab was the eldest, then Saif. The rest were boys. They laid out the blankets. The stars began to appear in the sky, hidden by clouds. They seemed to know nothing about camping; how to pick out a sheltered spot, or where to place the fire so the wind would not turn it and smoke them out.

  The rain came in the night. It was a downpour so sudden and torrential it had even the most pious fighters shouting curses. The weapons and the blankets were thrown in the back of the lorry. There was not enough room and he was made to lay down under the lorry with some of the fighters. The tarpaulin was ripped and other fighters joined them and then they were lined up together; the sky bright with lightning, there was the closeness of human bodies, the camels could be heard, and Qasab called out a prayer with a hoarse voice. There was a shout. He was dragged out, he stood there, it was hard to see, it was an immersion, then he made out a fighter crouched behind a thorn tree and just on the other side a gazelle kicking in the mud and a lion closing off its nostrils with its paws.

  When the rain eased and they were back under the lorry and they could hear the lion feeding he had a strange feeling, which was something like the speed of his passing through the world, hardly stopping, and his understanding that lions had for so many generations taken hoofed animals in the cover of rain in the desert, and that the sound of them in the dark would outlast him and all of his kind, just as even the mud under the lorry would outlast him.

  Later, in a hallucinatory lightning strike, he glimpsed another lion coming to the kill. She was gaunt, her tail split, heraldically, the Bohemian way, also bent like the course of his river at home. Someone raised his gun, it was confusing, the prayers, needing to urinate, the engine dripping, the sense of being made of sugar and dissolving, a lantern, a torch, then nothing, a blankness. He saw the fighter taking aim at the lioness and called out: no! Before the trigger was pulled, Saif sprang out from the lorry and kicked the fighter into the mud and kept kicking him. Whether this was discipline or just alpha-male posturing was difficult to say. But the lioness got away.

  The night spun on. Mosquitoes moved between their bodies and the drive shaft of the lorry. Each of the whining insects was crimson with blood that might have come from the fighters, from him, from the camels. He felt further from home than he ever had in his life.

  What was he? Not an astronaut floating in a void after a spacewalk gone wrong. For all the puddles, not one of her aquanauts. He was an unfortunate spy, tethered to men and boys who wanted to convert or murder him. They had no understanding of where he came from, what was in his head, his country memories; Sassoon memories, a certain tree, a stile, a hedgerow, the flints in the clay of a Yorkshire field; or else, the rest of it, uncontrived, the blur of city life, friendships, faces, the noise and colours streaming in the early hours of a party in Fulham.

  These men and boys had gone through the training camps and been made to see a light he could not see. What face? He did not know. Mohammedanism was without a face.

  He was not wholly unsympathetic. He had read the Koran. He supported the Palestinians, mostly, as did many in the secret intelligence service. He had gone on foot through hostile country for days to reach the minaret of Jam in Afghanistan. The beauty of it had moved him to tears. His views were conventional: he was set against appeasement. The Muslim world had to allow laboratories and churches to be built. There should be a compulsory reading from Voltaire in every madrasa. Gay bars and nudist beaches on the Saudi Riviera could wait. Whatever words he might speak under the weight of his captivity, he was an unbeliever. These men of Islam held up a sword with a Koran. That was their strength; that was what made them abhorrent to him.

  The drizzle continued through the night and the next day winged termites rose from within the earth in great numbers. He was leaned against the side of the lorry, and the droplets fell softly on his face, with no more force than a tear. Through the campfire the droplets fell, through the growing light, causing termites to glitter. Falling in such a way that it became bewitching. It was little wonder the Musulman was consumed with the idea of paradise as a garden on which rain fell softly. It seemed irrelevant whether paradise was on this planet, or in another place entirely, but the rain was important.

  The grass, the thorns, the floor of the encampment and the bed of the lorry were silvered with tens of thousands of termite wings. Grounded, without sight, the termites trembled and died in silence, not deafeningly like bees; without protest, one alone from the other. He watched them and made himself believe that their only flight produced in them an ecstasy which their body had evolved to receive and magnify and that, at the moment their wings peeled off, the quivering height of their creation was not laughter or speech, but a single sustained orgasm. Some of the fighters went around the camp picking up the termites and fried them for breakfast. He was given flat bread like a pitta, filled with them. He bit into it. There was a crunch, then juices.

  He was allowed to walk with Saif in the morning and together they found the remains of the kill the lion had made.

  ‘A lioness and cubs,’ he said. ‘You saved them.’

  ‘Our fight is elsewhere,’ Saif said, dismissively.

  The sun shone. The fighters dried themselves and their possessions and their guns. They were less bedraggled and looked cleaner than before the rain.

  When the camel herders left they went by the camp and shouted obscenities. He did not know what, but it was brazen. The herders were wild men, the kind who used to castrate their enemies and use their genitals for snuff pouches. Several of the younger boys ran out after them. The herders turned and shouted more abuse and spat through closed teeth like cats. One of them pulled down his gun, the other ran for cover. Shots were fired. The herder with the gun dropped dead. They chased the other herder and shot him through the shoulder blades. He fell down into the brush.

  James was tied to a boy. The boy ran and he ran with him. The other fighters were already crowded around. The herder was on his knees. The exit wound was small. All the jihadists watched him die without looking away. James did also. The herder crawled forward. His lungs were punctured. Blood puffed into the air with his every breat
h.

  ‘They were going to report our position,’ Qasab said, in Arabic. ‘They had to be killed.’

  It was Qasab who butchered the camel calf, then let the other camels go.

  They drove down into a wadi, such as he had seen Yusuf standing in, his arms sunk in the jar of spermaceti.

  It was slow going. At some points they all had to jump down and walk beside the lorry, removing the boulders blocking the way, while Saif checked their position on a GPS. The mosquitoes rose hungrily from strips of filthy water. At points the wadi widened into a ravine. The lorry ground on over olivine basalt polished by the hoofs of camels gone before them. They halted under a tree whose trunk and branches were butter yellow. The lorry shone in the shade, shone all the way to space, to the American satellite they had taken their coordinates from, or so Saif thought. He was scared of being spied on more than anything else, and decided that they should stop there, camouflage the lorry, and continue on after sunset; stupid, because the satellites or Reaper drones with their thermal indicators were more likely to spot a lorry moving at night than in the day.

  They took the munitions out of the lorry and kept their distance, in case it was taken out in an air strike.

  Later, they gave him a plate of camel meat and rice and tea. The water was from a hole they had dug in the riverbed. It was not syrupy like the tea the others drank. He was beaten for refusing to collect firewood. It was part of his plan. By being selectively uncooperative, he could win favour by being unexpectedly cooperative.

  ‘Everyone else is already here,’ she whispered.

  It was a formal dinner. Her dress shimmered purple and brown and in and out of those colours, showing off her breasts and hips. She took his arm as they went in. He was uncomfortable. He doubted he would have gone by himself. He hated regimental dinners and balls.