Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  They took turns to prepare the samples gathered by the Nautile. The treatment was mechanical. The scrapings were soft, whitish and stank of rotten eggs. The vent fluids were gathered using titanium bottles, which did not corrode. Each bottle had a snorkel and a trigger, which could be released from inside the submersible.

  They used a spectrophotometer to test light absorption in the sulphides and a microscope showed up the teeming yellow cities on the glass slides. They did their own quantitative culturing and made use of the microscopy, microprobes and spectroscopies the astrobiologists undertook. It was the embodied end of mathematics.

  She finished work at three o’clock. She slept a few hours and then ran and punched in the gym. She had a brunch of toast, pasta and an apple, then went to a meeting with the other senior scientists on the bridge to specify the scientific payload for each dive.

  She was distracted; there was something like a hair-drier blowing out hot air by the door where she was standing. She kept looking out of the windows at the sea.

  When the meeting was over she stayed on the bridge and studied the undersea charts for the Greenland Sea. They were fictitious. The soundings were off. Even with its clumped lines of reversed contours, the charts failed to capture the depth of the ocean, the day spent sinking into it.

  Odile is an early novella by the French writer Raymond Queneau. Odile waits for her husband Travy at the docks in Marseilles when he returns from Greece. Travy looks out from the deck of his ship at all the piled-up pieces of the port and sees her at last at the barricade behind the customs shed, among the hustlers and porters.

  Living in 1920s France as Travy and Odile lived was harder than chasing your own tail or balancing on a pinhead. People often went to bed hungry. Yet Travy fell properly in love with Odile. The story ended and the boy started to live. Or rather, he started to live again.

  The scene at the docks in Marseilles would be very different if Queneau wrote it today. Indeed, he could not write it in the same way. It would be a flight from Athens to Paris. A budget airline, not a proper one. There would be less tension and a diminished sense of arrival. Travy would come out of arrivals at Charles de Gaulle. Ignoring the minicab drivers and the policemen, he would follow the directions she had texted him, and they would embrace at a newsstand beyond.

  The mosquito net was the only barrier between James and the monkeys. A colobus grabbed the netting in its small fists and began to tear it. He batted it away and was surprised at its flimsiness, how little it weighed.

  He reflected on the violence in his life. Not the violence of his youth, in combat operations, but in his more recent intelligence work. He was like anyone else. He had different faces.

  You hit fast and hard. A flurry of punches was best. He had dealt with two Welsh mercenaries who wanted to sell arms to Somali jihadists. One was from a pit village, the other was of Somali extraction. Instead of going through procedures, he found a Ugandan to beat the men and pour sand in their eyes. He tricked them into thinking it was the work of the jihadists.

  It was no longer safe to travel to Chiamboni: he was told that Yusuf had gone to Kenya and from there to Tanzania. Water became a problem at the camp. The filters were broken. There was no more iodine. The water from the well was boiled. Still, it was spewed up. They sucked on sweet fruit and drank coconut milk, but could not quench their thirst. The spring water served in metal cups at the shepherd’s hut in the badlands was a luxury from a past life. The hope was always for rain. The downpours saved them. The thirstier the fighters were, the more solicitous they became. How must we store the rainwater? How do we keep it clean? He told them. When the rain filled their makeshift cisterns, he shouted out until they gagged him. It was pathetic. His anger was ridiculous. But they were so puerile. They had ambitions of dominion, but could not feed themselves. They were like hyenas in an African story who stack themselves up into the sky, one atop the other, because they had been told the moon was a sweetmeat they could reach up and eat.

  The gunmetal Thames, the jinn pit, his swimming pool in Muthaiga – then there was Winckler, the French spy he cooperated with, standing there, winking at him. Winckler? There was nothing to remember about the man. They had met in busy bars in Nairobi and other African capitals. Their business was conducted quickly. Winckler always insisted on buying beer in bottles. It was Winckler who had got him smoking again. What else? Winckler wheezed. He had a facial tic that made his eyelids flutter. Yellow bridgework. There was no more. It was like the bony Russians. There was no reason. Winckler swimming, Winckler underwater; fleshy, grey lips, snaggy teeth, an abyssal fish with a lantern shedding bioluminescence where his balding forehead had been.

  One time he looked up and saw a passenger jet flying unusually low. It looked like a Yemeni Airways plane. It was probably heading for Sana’a. Just to sense the world moving about him seemed very important. He tried to remember what it was like to be a small child and all the little things his mother had done for him which he had forgotten. Bedtime again, much earlier: feeding him, bathing him, reading to him, laying down next to him until he fell asleep.

  He was taken to wash himself in the creek in the evenings. He watched the boys catching crabs on its banks. They were featherweight, yet sank to their hips in smooth mud. They took long hooked sticks and worked them into the crab holes. They pulled quickly when a crab attacked the stick. A single jerk, not allowing the crab to dig itself deeper in. They held the crabs by their back legs. It was one of the only times he saw them laugh, holding the crabs away from them, and watching them snip the air.

  He was finally the man with bones made of mists who could find no solid banks. There were flies, a whirring of beetles. He wanted to be done with it and put his head in the water. It was silent. He imagined the fighters in the water. Most of them could not swim. They would go blindly, flailing, not ever barrelling forward, their penises would be small and curled up like seahorses, and water would pour in when they opened their mouths.

  *

  The embers of a fire were burning low in the dark. He saw mouths moving. One exclaimed, another told it to shut up. There were theological disputes. There were martyrs’ tales.

  One night he was allowed to sit with the group while Saif told the story of how Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan was killed by an American air strike in Pakistan. May the blessings of Allah be upon him.

  He smiled. Swedan was a Kenyan who had run a transport business in Mombasa and been recruited into al-Qaeda through a football team run by Usama al-Kini. The team targeted young men from poor families – frustrated because there were no jobs and no money for them to get married.

  The aft-hangar was large enough to hold a helicopter. The Nautile sat on a cradle inside of it. French rock music blasted out.

  It was her turn – she was to dive in the morning – but she hung back and let the crew get on with it. The Nautile dived a hundred times a year. The preparations had become routine. The submersible was washed down with freshwater to reduce corrosion, then everything was methodically checked: valves, radios; the computer booted up, the floats attached, finally the science payload in baskets, snorkel bottles, cameras, thermal-imaging devices and the robotic arm which was to stretch out to scrape a sample. When they tested the lights on the craft it was like a UFO landing inside the hangar.

  ‘Professor Flinders? We’re ready now.’

  She examined the payload. She had her checklist. She went through it. When she was finished she smiled.

  ‘Perfect! Thank you.’

  She gifted them some bottles of wine and they went outside the hangar and drank and smoked together. It was a treasure sky just then, streaked with gold. There was a barbecue. They grilled fish that had been caught on the hooked lines hung off the sides of the boat. She ate a salmon steak with salad and a baguette and washed it down with wine. Everyone spoke English. A Norwegian scientist poured out glasses of aquavit. She might have fallen for someone in a moment like that; in the Arctic, so capacious, so soothing. But she f
elt herself to be half of a whole and was no longer interested.

  She was focused: for the hours she was underwater she wanted to be as sharp in her thinking as it was possible to be.

  There was a red lever under the floor in the bottom of the craft which when pulled in an emergency caused it to jettison its floats and gear and shoot to the surface. It was not a joyride. The Nautile could get trapped. It could break. If it did, she thought, she would be lifted up by the flooding water and banged around at the top of the sphere. The cold would trigger in her the same mammalian diving reflex found in seals. Her heart would slow, blood would pour into the thoracic cavity to prevent her lungs collapsing, and the instinct to open her mouth and breathe would be more than the certain knowledge that doing so meant death. She would open and her larynx would constrict. Her nose and throat would be filled with water. The laryngospasm would not relax. Her lungs would be sealed off, and she would die a dry drowning by acidosis and hypoxia, head thrown back, eyes glassy and fearful like a doll’s.

  Saif got into the habit of laying down next to James in the evenings and talking at him. The most eloquent aside he made was about the plans to build the tallest building in the world in Jeddah.

  ‘Have you been to New York?’

  ‘Yes,’ James said.

  ‘This will be better. Twice the height of the Twin Towers! It will be a purity never seen before. Islam and the future will mix up in the sky. The lifts will play religious verse. You can be on the ground floor and watch the sun setting and then take a lift to the top and watch it set again.’

  Mostly, Saif preached martyrdom. ‘I expect to die soon,’ he said, sucking on a mango skin. ‘I welcome it. I expect you’ll be killed too.’ Saif turned to him. ‘That is why I want you to convert to Islam.’

  ‘No,’ James said, firmly.

  There was no chance he would convert. It was not just a question of Islam, it was the way life was constructed. A man lived his threescore years and ten, less than a whale, less than a roughy fish, and the only way to come to terms with his mortality was to partake in something that would outlive him; a field cleared of stones, a piece of jewellery, a monument, a machine. Every man was a loyalist for what he knew. Even tramps fought for the tramping life. Life was too short for him to renounce the English parish church, once Catholic, with their knights’ tombs, prayer cushions, flower arrangements, the brass lectern in the shape of an eagle. No, the quiet of those places – the ancient front door, the graveyard, the meadow, the damp – gave him a sense of belonging. He was loyal to them. It was too late to abandon the English canon, from Chaucer to Dickens, the First World War poets, Graham Greene typing through the smog and drizzle … He had said it before: he was an intelligence officer who reached out, spoke Arabic, read widely, but if the Crusades were invoked – and Saif was invoking them – then he was a Crusader. If he had to die at the hands of fanatics, he wished to remain familiar and coherent to those whom he loved and who loved him.

  *

  There existed around them a closeness of birds and silver bars of tarpon fish and elephants at their crossing. The tides turned. If you were lucky, the rain fell. It was very green. The question of paradise presented itself. Saif did not speak of the intercourse with houris due to those who were martyred in Ramadan (to which he was entitled), but of the many nightingales that were in paradise, the scented flowers, the lawns stretching away. It was Persian and unconvincingly iridescent, and more so coming from a Saudi who knew of gardens only as the strips of grass at the back of hotels and office blocks in Jeddah and Riyadh which were watered with treated sewage before dawn. Saif, the lion, had been happier in the wadi, eating camel meat, because the life there was closer to the steady state universe of prayer mat and sand, and the heating up and cooling down of days.

  English Catholics often regard Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as Protestant propaganda. Some may even agree with a Jesuit view at the time which held it to be ‘a huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs’.

  Foxe was a fanatic, yet also a kindly and gentle man, a good friend, by many accounts. He was tutor to the children of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was executed for treason in 1547. Among those children were Thomas, 4th Duke of Norfolk; Jane, Countess of Westmoreland; Henry, Earl of Northampton and their cousin Charles, commander of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada. Despite his close connection with the Catholic Howards, Foxe was involved in suppressing the cult of the Virgin Mary. He escaped from England during the reign of the Catholic Queen, Mary Tudor, and lived in poverty among the Protestants in Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Frankfurt. He wrote his first account of Christian martyrs in Geneva, with particular attention to the Protestant martyrs, and returned to England when Elizabeth took the throne. The cathedrals and all the wealthy churches purchased a copy of the book, as did every bishop and vaulting churchman. Foxe became a literary celebrity. Later editions of the Book of Martyrs ran to thousands of pages and listed the death sequence of each martyr with formality and a level of detail no jihadist will ever match. Indeed, if the standard of martyrology is set by the dim standards of al-Qaeda, Foxe could by comparison be held up as a trustworthy historian.

  He was an English Catholic, far removed from Saif’s gap-toothed insistence. He was descended from St Thomas More and, on his mother’s side, from the Blessed William Howard, who was executed in Titus Oate’s Popish Plot and beatified by Pope Pius XI. He revered Donne, read the republican Milton, and celebrated his recusant ancestors and the whaling captains who followed, also lawyers, farmers, priests and vicars, Jesuits who worked on the English Mission and who were buried in Rome, many Benedictine nuns who entered the convents in Leuven and Cambrai, colonial officers, newspapermen, spies for Rome, and spies for London; his father was Thomas More XVI.

  God help him. He was a pocket of moisture, emptying into the sand.

  He wanted to make a run for it like the French security officer in Mogadishu, who tiptoed away from his captors while they slept, and escaped barefoot through the streets of the shattered city at night, making it after several hours to the safety of Villa Somalia, which serves as the Presidential Palace of the Somali Transitional Government.

  England had lost him, Britain had. Everything was green above and around him, but it was no paradise. The quarrel of leaves, vines, sloughs and quicksand brought him back to the comics he had read as a boy, which often dealt with the fight against the Japanese in Burma in the Second World War. The Japanese wore thick glasses, always squinted, and paced through the jungle with their bayonets attached, like insects, until there was a shout of ‘Tommy let them have it!’ in the caption box and the British and the Americans fired and those Nips, as the comic had it, exploded backwards with a resounding aieeee! Aieeee: a word which as a boy he thought was Japanese.

  The American naval base at Manda Bay was even closer than Lamu. A few hours by speedboat. Hidden inside, he knew, was a helipad and huts belonging to a covert unit which flew SEALS and other specialised personnel into Somalia after an air strike on the enemy. The unit was charged with proof of kill: getting DNA samples from corpses after an air strike.

  The sky could always open up. In 2010, one of the leading al-Qaeda commanders, Saleh Ali Nabhan, was killed by an American missile. He had been travelling in a convoy on a coastal road between Mogadishu and Kismayo. A few minutes after the kill the men from Manda Bay rappelled down from helicopters. Grazing Somalia only with their boots, not ever unclipping their harnesses, they zipped Nabhan’s corpse and another into body bags, and took them up into the helicopters.

  It was macabre how many fingers and parts of Muslim martyrs the United States of America had held on to. They were frozen solid and given a number. Who knew where these relics were stored, or for how long, or if a Muslim chaplain was ever brought to pray over them?

  There was no way for him to signal the Americans. The camp was undetectable by satellite, unless you had an idea where to look. Even if they found it, it would be almost impossible for them to kill the holy
warriors and save him alone.

  There were prayer beads, sweat, raindrops. The men sat cross-legged on the sheeting. In their disillusionment talk of battles increased. He was raised to be merciful, but combat always reverted to blockbuster action. His captors deserved to die. Let them be martyrs. It was import ant to kill them before they launched another attack on innocents as they had in Kampala in 2010. The jihad could not win.

  Say it did. The caliphate would have its own power structures and careerists. Everything would be scrubbed with cheap soap. Women would be hooded and put in their place. Macroeconomics would be beyond such a regime. Organised crime would flourish because the clerics have no idea how to deal with pornography, gambling and drug addiction other than by public beating and execution.

  He read the jihadist literature. He respectfully spoke the words aloud. The Arabic was powerful, but his mind was settled on other books. He preferred Bacon’s New Atlantis to More’s Utopia. He had read it again and again. The first time had been by chance, in the army. It comforted him nearly as much as the rosary he recited for protection: it propounded a celebration of a society organised around the pursuit of knowledge and the duty of compassion.

  He placed himself once more on the ship which in 1623 sailed from Peru bound for Japan. The vessel lost its way in the unexplored vastness of the Pacific. The sailors were without victuals and were preparing themselves for death when they spotted land on the horizon: New Atlantis. Drawing close they were amazed to see it was not a squalid atoll, but an island with the low and certain boscage of a northern country – a Gotland or an Anglesey. They sailed into the harbour of the capital, Bensalem, a small town, finely built in a style reminiscent of Dalmatia and manorial Somerset, and were met in cordial order by a man in a headscarf more daintily made than a Turkish turban. This Oriental personage, with hair falling down from under the fabric, with the aspect of a gentle Sufi, was a Christian. New Atlantis had been converted to Christianity at a very early date through the miracle of a cedar ark which had sunk in the Mediterranean Sea, travelled improbably on the currents, and bobbed up not far from New Atlantis. There was an orb of light over it and when a theatre of boats approached, it broke apart to reveal a pillar of light, ‘not sharp, but in form of a column, or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven; and at the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplendent than the body of the pillar’.