by Paul Torday
On this trip it was just the two of us again. I don’t mean that literally. In the back of the plane was a carefully selected group of media people to cover the launch of the Yemen salmon project; there were the security people; there were communications people. But there were only two real players on the plane on that trip—the boss and me. We sat up at the front, in a private part of the cabin.
The boss sipped at the cool wine when I handed him the glass and said, ‘You know, Peter, I give you a lot of marks for spotting those angling votes. No one else saw that. Not the party chairman, not the campaign coordinator, none of them. And it’s so obvious.’
‘Well, boss, it took me long enough to get the point,’ I said.
‘It certainly underlines the importance of this trip. It was important beforehand, but now it is crucial. We can gain so much from this if everything goes right. Who are the media people on the plane?’
I looked at my list. ‘Well, we’ve got the usual BBC and ITV people. You said no Channel Four.’
‘Not after the coverage of my visit to Kazakhstan.’
‘They’ll have a reporter on site anyway; it can’t be helped. At least they’ll have to pay their own air fares.’
‘Who else?’
I looked down at the sheet of paper again. ‘Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Times, Independent, Mirror and Sun. We didn’t ask the Guardian. Their whole line on this project has been bloody patronising and actually we’re on non-speaks at the moment. And we have some new faces.’
‘Oh,’ said the boss. ‘Who?’
‘Angling Times, Trout & Salmon, Atlantic Salmon journal, Coarse fisherman, Fishing News and Sustainable Development International. All the broadsheet and tabloid boys are having gin and tonics in the back, but this new lot are huddled together away from the regular journos, drinking tea out of Thermos flasks. They’ve even brought their own sandwiches.’
The boss seemed pleased. ‘I must make a special effort with the fishing press. I want that photo of me with a fish on the front cover of every angling magazine in the country next month.’
‘It’ll be there,’ I said. ‘I guarantee it.’
The boss stretched again and poured himself another glass of wine. ‘How long have we got until landing?’ he asked.
‘Another three hours.’
‘I might have a kip before we get in. You know, Peter, I’ve been having some private tuition in fly-fishing for the last week or two. I want the photos to look right.’
‘I’m sure they will, boss,’ I said loyally. ‘You pick up that sort of thing really fast.’
‘Yes, I do, luckily. But I tell you what, I think fishing might be quite fun. I really do. I wouldn’t mind trying it again when I have more leisure. I mean, I suppose I’ll only have time…How long have we got at Wadi Aleyn?’
‘Thirty, forty minutes, then back to Sana’a and on to Muscat for your speech to the Gulf Coordinating Council.’
‘Yes, I’ll only have time to catch one salmon, perhaps two at the most. But I’d like to have another go, on another occasion, when we get back to the UK. Do you think you could arrange it?’
‘I know exactly the place where you could catch loads of fish, boss,’ I said, thinking of McSalmon Aqua Farms.
‘Good,’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘Let’s make a plan. And now I think I’ll go next door and have a rest before we land.’
§
When we landed at Sana’a it was early evening and dark. But the heat radiating from the tarmac hit us in the face as soon as we stepped out of the door of the plane, and with the heat came strange scents which could not be drowned out by the normal airport smells of aviation spirit and diesel. They were unsettling scents, hinting of a strange and unfamiliar world somewhere beyond the city lights. Then we were tripping down the steps and shaking hands and climbing into the air-conditioned limo.
The evening in Sana’a was long, polite and tedious. I don’t think we expected to achieve anything, and I don’t think we did, except that by dining with our host we implicitly received his sanction for our ‘private’ visit to the Wadi Aleyn. He seemed bemused by the whole thing and at one point over dinner asked me, in a low voice that the boss could not have overheard, ‘Why is your prime minister interested in this salmon project? Everyone here thinks it is quite mad.’
‘It has captured his imagination, President,’ I replied.
‘Ah,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and looking baffled.
I could see he had decided not to ask me any more questions on the subject, as I was clearly not going to tell him anything of use. The conversation became general again, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing how to put the Kazakhstan peace process back on the rails.
§
The next day we got up at dawn and had an early breakfast at the embassy. I can still feel the sense of almost childish optimism with which the boss and I boarded the helicopter. It was such fun to be going off to fish for our country! That was how we both felt. The boss was all smiles, shaking hands with the journalists, who were following on in a second Chinook, shaking hands with the ambassador, who had come to see us off, shaking hands with the pilot and co-pilot. He only just remembered in time not to shake my hand as well. Then we were in the helicopter, and the ground was slipping away sideways below us.
As we took off, the smallest knot of tension began to form itself in the base of my stomach. I’m used to helicopters, so that wasn’t it. I remembered, in a brief flash of something I imagined was deja vu, a dream I had once had about the boss and me standing in a wadi. The dry heat was running like flames across our skin. He had pointed upstream and said something. I couldn’t remember what he had said to me or whether I had really ever had such a dream. It was probably jet lag. I shook my head and concentrated on the immediate situation.
We sat there talking, laughing and joking with the security people in the back, and pointing out the grey and white tower houses and mosques of Sana’a, as they receded into the distance. Then we were approaching the mountains, and everyone fell silent as we approached the enormous walls of rock. We flew over mountain ridges, above great canyons a thousand feet deep, through cloud and mist that caught upon the peaks. The sky was grey, and cloud was boiling up in the south. It was pretty boring scenery, but the weather looked right.
‘Look at all those clouds,’ I said to the boss. ‘The water in the wadis will be rising with all this rain coming in.’
The water in the wadis will be rising—hadn’t those words been in my dream?
I was right. When we looked below us, we could see the occasional thread of white where water was running through the wadis; and where the flat gravel plains met the foothills of the mountains, pools of lying water had formed here and there.
I was so excited. This was so different to a normal trip. There were no men in grey suits waiting at the end of it, no tough negotiations, no speeches to be made. Instead of men in suits, there would be the sheikh and those great-looking guys who had made a guard of honour for me when I visited Glen Tulloch. It would just be an hour or two of fun, pure and simple. Jay would press a button to open the sluice gates and let the salmon run down the channels that lead into the wadi. Then he would go and stand in the river with his fishing rod and cast away for the benefit of the photographers. Fred had promised me the boss would catch a fish, and that would be it. There would be a short speech, followed by pictures of Jay standing in the river in his waders, with his fishing rod in one hand and a salmon in the other. I could picture how it would look on the front pages the next day. Mission accomplished. A great trip, a day in the desert, and well on the way to swinging several million voters across to our side.
Then we started to lose height, and the helicopter dropped down between the rock walls of the wadi towards a flat patch of ground and what looked like a giant construction site.
As the blades stopped turning we ducked out of the helicopter and walked through the swirling dust to a wooden platform. I could make out the
sheikh, Fred Jones and a group of men in hard hats, presumably the site engineers. Beyond them stood a couple of dozen or so of the sheikh’s people in white robes and emerald-green turbans, some armed with rifles, others empty-handed.
Behind the platform, curving out from the side of the mountain, were the walls of three huge concrete basins: the holding tanks. For a moment I was truly awestruck by the enormity of this construction project. Listening to Fred’s presentations back in Downing Street I had thought, it’s like building another primary school or another supermarket. I simply hadn’t grasped what an enormous undertaking it was. This was more like the Aswan Dam, or the Pyramids. I hoped the photographers would capture the drama of the site.
In the centre of each basin wall was a pair of iron doors connected by a concrete channel to the wadi bed. Looking across to the wadi, I saw a wide, shallow river running down it. The sun had emerged for a moment from behind white towers of cloud and the sunlight glistened on many streams winding around islands of gravel or cascading over boulders. The fronds of green palms waved in a rising wind on the far bank. Behind us mountains rose, familiar as something once seen in a dream, of a staggering savagery and beauty, into an overcast sky.
I said to the boss, ‘Look at that! The river looks perfect. This is going to work!’
The boss looked at me in surprise. Of course it was going to work, the look said; you wouldn’t have dragged me 6000 miles for something that didn’t work, would you, Peter? Not if you wanted to stay in the job you like so much for another day. Before I could explain, we were at the platform, shaking hands again, smiling, joking, talking. Behind us I heard the second Chinook, with the press on board, coming in to land.
Of course the boss expected it to work. He had no conception of how much work had gone into the project, how much effort I had put into making sure it happened against all obstacles, how I had supported Fred Jones and the sheikh. I looked around me while the boss and the sheikh started shaking hands all over again for the benefit of the journos and the TV cameras, and I heard Fred at my side say, ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ I said, with real enthusiasm. ‘I had no idea of the scale of all of this.’ I gestured to the concrete walls of the holding basins and the channels waiting for the gates to be opened and the salmon to come tumbling and leaping out. ‘Our project is going to be a huge success, Fred.’ I saw he was holding a landing net.
‘We hope so,’ he said, and gave me a smile of real friendliness. For a moment I found myself liking the guy. I’d never given him much thought before, not as a person, I mean. ‘Come and look at the salmon,’ he said. The boss and the sheikh, the boss’s security people and some of the press were making their way up a ramp to the edge of a holding basin. The sheikh’s men mostly held back. I noticed again that a few of them held rifles and remembered where we were—in the heart of the Yemen, not visiting a new hospital in Dulwich. But, I thought, the Yemen must be safe now, mustn’t it? The security people would never have let the boss come if it hadn’t been. I mean, there had been that strange story about al-Qaeda attempting to murder the sheikh in Scotland, but we had all discounted that as a piece invented by some Scottish newspaper.
We stood at the top of the ramp and looked over the edge of the wall. The basin was full of silver salmon, darting here and there or else lying motionless in the shaded parts of the water. At intervals around the edge of the basin were machines that looked a bit like huge outboard motors, churning and aerating the water.
‘How are they doing?’ I asked Fred.
‘We’ve had a few deaths from stress, but whether that was from the heat or the journey I’m not really sure. Anyway, the number of deaths is well within our projections, and the temperature of the water in here is quite stable.’
I stared at the fish, quite fascinated. Then I looked around me at the towering mountains, the slopes of sand and gravel below us, the palm trees and the Yemeni tribesmen standing guard on the top of rocks and on the nearer ridges.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said. ‘If I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes…’
‘You see,’ said Fred, ‘the sheikh was right. He has made us all believe. And now we are ready to open the sluice gates, and the miracle will begin.’
‘Will it?’ I asked him. I could see Fred was tense, but I think it was anticipation and not doubt.
‘There’s every chance. The air temperature has dropped steadily for the last few days. It’s only about 25 degrees Celsius now, and we are coming up to the hottest part of the day. The water temperature in the wadi is perfect and…’ He glanced up at the sky, where fluffy grey and white cumulus now obscured the sun. ‘I think we can expect some more rain soon.’
We trooped back down the ramp and walked past the platform to a row of Portakabins. Jay and the sheikh went inside to change into their fishing kit and Colin McPherson, whom I hadn’t seen in the crowd before, started unloading rods from the back of a pickup, and then assembling them and making up the cast and flies. A crowd of excited tribesmen gathered around him shouting and gesticulating. Not all of them, though; I could still see a watchful ring of guards further away, staying aloof from the proceedings and scanning the hills around us. One in particular, it struck me, would make a particularly dramatic photo: he stood higher up than the others, on a rocky promontory overlooking the river, his robes fluttering in the strengthening breeze, his rifle resting on his shoulder, the muzzle pointing uphill. I thought of asking a friendly cameraman to take a picture for me, but then there was a roar of applause as Jay and the sheikh both appeared from the Portakabin, wearing chest waders and tartan shirts. They walked towards the pickup, where McPherson was handing out rods to a select few of the tribesmen. When Jay and the sheikh drew near, he picked out two rods he had reserved for them and handed them over. There was another roar of applause, and some of the tribesmen started ululating. Even the journos were entering into the spirit of the moment. I saw old McLeish from the Telegraph, a hardened cynic if ever there was one, brush something from his eye. I like to think it was a tear but it may only have been a piece of grit.
Jay and the sheikh walked back to the wooden platform beside the first holding basin. As they did so, I felt something hit the back of my neck, and I looked up in surprise. It was beginning to rain: just a few drops, big, surprisingly cold drops, which made little craters in the dust where they fell. Somebody handed Jay a portable transmitter, and everyone started going, ‘Sssh! Ssssh!’ Gradually the silence spread, until the only sound was the busy murmuring of the water a few hundred yards downhill. Into that silence, the boss spoke. ‘What a tremendous honour it is,’ he said, ‘to be asked to be here today.’
More cheers and ululations, but the boss held up his hand, and dead silence fell again. He turned to the sheikh. ‘Thank you, Sheikh Muhammad, for inviting me, and from the bottom of my heart I say this: yours is the vision, yours is the imagination, yours is the boundless financial generosity without which this project would never have been realised. And we are proud, proud that you have chosen to work with British scientists, British engineers, and indeed engineers of many nations, to realise this project and bring it to fruition. Who would ever have dreamed that one day salmon would swim in the rivers of the Yemen?’
He paused again. The silence was again absolute.
‘You dreamed it, Sheikh Muhammad. You had that courage and that determination, and now today, at last, the moment has come. Let us go together, you and I, and fish for salmon in the Wadi Aleyn!’
Tremendous cheering started, faded away and then started again as the boss held the transmitter up in the air, so that we could all see what was happening, and then pointed it, like a TV remote, at the sluice gates. He pressed a button. Slowly, the gates began to open. They did not open fully, but enough for a steady flow of water to emerge, enough for the fish to swim in. In the water spouting from the foot of the sluice gates and in the concrete channel I could see glistening shapes tumbling and wriggling as they were
swept down to the river.
At once the crowd started moving towards the river. It was beginning to rain quite steadily now, and it was getting darker. We all bunched up together near where the concrete channel debouched into the wadi itself.
‘Make way for Dr Alfred,’ cried the sheikh in a clear voice, and the crowd fell back to allow Fred to come forward. He was not wearing waders, but nevertheless he strode in his boots into the stream and peered down into the water. We were all going to get wet soon enough anyway, I thought. It was raining harder and the sky far above us at the head of the wadi was almost black.
Even from where I stood I could see the fins of the salmon cutting through the shallow waters of the Wadi Aleyn. Some of them leaped from the water, almost dancing on its surface. And they were turning upstream! A few were going the wrong way, downriver, but most of the salmon were going upstream. The salmon were running the waters of the Wadi Aleyn, in the heart of the mountains of Heraz!
Jay and the sheikh waded into the river holding their fishing rods, and picked their way carefully over boulders until they were each standing in the centre of the wadi about thirty yards apart. The press cameras and TV videocams were now all pointing at the two of them. We had live feed to Sky TV, BBC2-4, ITV, CNN and al-Jazeera. Amidst all the press crouching or standing on the riverbank, I saw Colin keeping an eye on his master. I saw our security people take up positions on the bank opposite Jay, their eyes watchful, their hands never far from the concealed holsters they wore, scanning the rocks and ridges on either side of the river. A dozen Yemenis carrying their fishing rods and landing nets strode past, along the new track that ran along the wadi, heading for the casting platforms that had been built further upstream.
Then the sheikh cast out his line, and a moment or two later so did the boss. I had to hand it to the boss; he looked like he’d been doing it all his life. The line went straight out and didn’t make much of a splash when it hit the water. It was typical of the man: everything came easily to him. If he’d been told he had to ski the next week or play in a water polo match, he’d have done it, and looked good doing it, as well.