Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

  Concentrate.

  He will have to remember this. He will have to keep this in mind, for as long as his mind holds.

  His eyelashes have frozen shut. He nudges his goggles aside to rub his eyes. They tear up in an instant against the beat of sun on snow. Refracted by his tears, the sunlight curls into a coloured rope. It moves around him on the ice: a snake. He catches his breath, the illusion is so beautiful, essing towards him through colour fields that change as his tears cool, leaving their salt to crust around his eyes.

  And then, without warning, the snake strikes at his eyes, all fangs and scales, shards of colour, glass fragments, glass dust, and he shakes and squirms, squealing, frantic to be free of his hallucination. His eyes are burning in the light. Where are his snow goggles? In a panic, he wrestles off his mittens and feels for his goggles. They are hanging over his right ear. His fingers are frozen and without feeling, and he uses his hands like blocks to knock the goggles back over his face. He tries to put his mittens back on but he cannot think straight enough or move freely enough to manage it. He crawls on his hands and knees over the ice. ‘Bonfanti, listen! The gale is passed!’

  His fingers are swollen white tubes. Weeping, Eling uses his teeth to pull the mittens over his clubbed hands. He staggers to his feet. The wind has dropped, the sky has cleared. What time is it?

  All around him, ice lies piled: there is no level ground. Edging out from behind a nearby hummock, topped by an unlikely crown of ice spires: something black. A rock.

  It is Foyn. Again: the island of Foyn. Their destination. Their goal. Lothar Eling explains to Giovanni Bonfanti that the hull of the ferry is trapped in standing waves on the boundary between water layers of different density. The ferryman can spin his propellers as fast as he likes, his vessel will make no headway.

  The logs of every voyage of Arctic discovery, from the Dobbs to the Fram, contain reports, sometimes several in a day, of how their steering suddenly gave way. A hull can come unstuck from these waters as surely as the wings of a plane, caught in an eddy, can lose their grip on the air. When waters of different densities and temperatures pour into each other they do not mix. Instead, they settle into layers. Run a propeller through these layers and you will make no headway, however fiercely you drive the engine. You’re just cavitating: chopping up waves into froth.

  ‘The locals have a name for it,’ he says.

  Who says?

  He says.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Dead water.’

  Eling has forgotten that Bonfanti is dead.

  Bonfanti’s huddled form casts a shadow over the hideous red leather something in which Eling writes, the pencil jammed between crooked black fingers.

  The notebook falls out of his grip. He bends down, but his fingers are swollen, he cannot pick it up, and as he bends over, staring at it, it – flexes. It squirms uselessly. The ice provides no purchase, it cannot get away. A hideous red leather something. Eling thinks of the flexible keelson of the Italia: equipment, shapeless under blood-brown tarpaulin, squeezed between sleek metal bones, like the compact muscles of the back.

  Eling sits frozen to the ground, marvelling at the compact musculature of Bonfanti’s back, laid open before him upon the ice as though upon the marble slab of a mortuary.

  Bonfanti’s spine, torn away at last, a hideous red something, spasms and contracts to form a shallow spiral. Eling blinks, dazzled, unbelieving. The meat snake sparkles. Glass shards rise between knuckles of bare bone: new scales, new skin. It esses. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. It is waving to him. Signalling to him. It is trying to tell him something. Eling copies the spiral in his notebook. Beneath it he writes:

  ‘Towards a Unified Theory of Ocean Circulation.’

  He puts the book away in his jacket, topples forward, and hits the water again and again and again. He descends. On the sea floor there are sponges. He picks one. He will give it to Vibeke, Professor Dunfjeld’s daughter, as a present. He jackknifes, gazes up at the silver undersides of the waves, and strokes powerfully for the surface – but he does not rise.

  In his sudden terror he exhales. The bubbles go straight down. These are forces Lothar Eling understands only now, after years of study, and too late. Why the weather will not die. Why the waters will not stop in their courses. Why the winds will not cease to blow. Why the heart will not cease to desire.

  He glimpses open arms, outstretched arms, the arms of his mother perhaps, waving to him from her garden in Stockholm, reaching for him, drawing him in. The blow from those arms is so powerful, so fast, he does not see it coming. It all but decapitates him. In the few seconds left to him he is vaguely aware of a lump in his throat. How the lump pulses. How it squirms and explores.

  But the bear has gorged on Bonfanti already and it leaves most of Eling to other bears, to arctic foxes, and gulls.

  TWO

  The Musandam peninsula extends into the Strait of Hormuz, guarding the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It’s a rocky fretwork, an outlandish calligraphy. There is no level ground. In the folds of its cursive script pale green squares stand for gardens, their soil gathered laboriously from miles around and contained by dry-stone walls. Alfalfa one year. The next year, nothing. Musandam is the homeland of the Shihuh, the ichthyophagoi of Ptolemy, who speak Kumzari, a language all their own, and spring from some nameless corner of Central Asia; who are said to bark like dogs after a meal and who, having nowhere else to put them, once buried their dead under their floorboards.

  Musandam’s coastline is so scooped, so ragged, only a thread of broken rocks attaches the place to the mainland. West of this thread is a deep scoop of all-but-landlocked water called Elphinstone Inlet. In the middle of the inlet, Telegraph Island, so called because from 1864 to 1869 it was the terminus for the Persian Gulf telegraph cable. Signals were received here from Europe and retransmitted along another cable under the Arabian Sea and beyond, across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Calcutta.

  George Curzon, Viceroy of India and later British Foreign Secretary, was convinced the station was vital to British security. He made sure that Britain flew a flag here. The Admiralty grumbled: flags must be defended, and how was the Navy to defend this godforsaken mote, surrounded by treacherous down-currents, whirlpools, rips?

  The Admiralty won the argument and the flag got taken down.

  A century later to the day, David Brooks, a British Desert Intelligence Officer seconded to the Armed Forces of the Sultan of Oman, hobbles on his stick through the hamlet of Khomsa. In common with every village on the peninsula, Khomsa is accessible only by sea. He sailed in past boats, each high prow painted with an eye. The men are all out fishing, so he’s walking through streets populated entirely by women and children. Not that there are streets – just a series of interconnecting backyards.

  The children follow him, the women ignore him. Some are bare-faced; others wear a stylized version of the rigid masks he’s seen used in the Empty Quarter – objects monstrous to Western eyes but which act like chimneys in the heat, cooling the wearer’s face. The masks here are purely decorative, their panels reduced to a meshwork of rods: exotic spectacle frames.

  David moves gingerly, careful with his walking stick. The bone’s mended, more or less, and he needs to put on muscle now to bind his shattered leg together. It’s a precarious business.

  David’s seen action, quelling the rebellion in Dhofar in the south of the country. He’s driven Gurkhas into battle and dragged one away under fire, his jaw shot off and dying. He’s led raiding parties up ‘beaches’ that, when they got there, black-faced and saddled with artillery, turned out to be cliff-faces. His unit, outflanked, once defended a stone house against Yemeni-backed mortar fire armed with nothing but small arms, command of the local dialect, and guile. He’s come through all this, commended, congratulated, only to crash his Land Rover into a gully, avoiding a camel. The damage to his leg was severe enough; he was flown back to England, to the RAF hospital at Wroughton, and it was wh
ile he was having his leg pinned together that he first caught wind of the British-backed plot to bring the Sultan’s son to power.

  He should not be playing here, he should not be risking himself on loose scree, dust and tumbled rocks, but with every foot he gains above the hamlet the freer his breathing becomes. He is still a young man after all. The time of adventures is not over.

  In a cleft in the rock towering over the town, David casts around for a place to rest. There really is no level ground in Musandam: even finding a rock to sit on is a challenge. David leans his backside against a canted boulder. His eyes adjust to the dimness. He takes off his sunglasses. There’s a sack lying near the entrance to this shallow cave. Even a sack is a point of interest around here. Whose sack? Is it one of his?

  Since his return to Oman, and while he recuperates, David’s been assigned to what could well be Britain’s smallest military base: hardly more there than a couple of chairs under a sumr tree. Day after day he sits under the shade of the tree, doling out supplies of water, rice and coffee to the Shihuh tribesmen. The bay here is shallow, so supplies are brought in by landing craft and dumped on the sands, and if he’s called away for any reason the Shihuh forget all about the supplies. Whole consignments have been ignored, left to float away on the tide.

  What’s in this sack that’s worth anyone caring about?

  David levers himself to his feet and shuffles over. It’s not a sack. It’s a scrap of some unfamiliar material. It’s impregnated with a greyish powder. He turns it over with his stick and the cloth shatters. He cannot kneel: he hunkers down. He rubs a tatter of the cloth between his fingers. The dust is slick on his fingers. Not rock dust. He tastes it. Metal. He picks up the cloth and the sun-rotted parts fall away, leaving a lacework bound together with a bituminous black paint.

  A metallized skin. He thinks of biplanes. Mail-carriers from the heroic age of aviation. Saint-Exupéry at the mercy of unmapped thermals. John William Alcock, imprisoned on the shores of Moudros in Turkey, assembling a plane from the parts of other crashed aircraft. Europe’s empires were held together with seaplanes and the coasts here are dotted with old refuelling stations.

  Long as he’s been stationed here, there’s a limit to the level of interest David can bring to a scrap of cloth. He tests his knee. The soreness there is trivial: he’s good for another half-hour’s tottering before he minces back to town.

  Round the corner, through a defile thick with goat droppings, the ground falls away and opposite, on a hill-face so broken, so rotten, it looks more like the workings of a quarry, an expanse of silver cloth flutters. Metal dust catches the light. Staring without sunglasses, David’s eyes tear up. Black letters flex and bend and ess, fragmenting even as he reads:

  I T A L I A

  A year goes by, it is Thursday, 23 July 1970. A sea fog is sweeping across the town of Salalah, in the region of Dhofar, facing the Arabian Sea.

  There is a royal palace at Salalah called Al Hisn. Each summer, come the monsoon, fog smothers the beach, then the palace, then the avenue, palm tree by palm tree, then the double-gated tower. Reaching inland, it swallows the nearby RAF aerodrome with its toffee-coloured leather armchairs, pale pine panelling, and inevitable David Shepherd print. Soon it has smothered the whole city.

  The afternoon is hot, humid and foggy, with bursts of heavy rain. Sheikh Braik bin Hamid Al Ghafri, son of the Wali of Dhofar, arrives at the tower with his usual retinue and seeks an urgent audience with his sovereign. Braik is a regular and esteemed royal visitor, and Sultan Said bin Taimur’s personal servants, the Khadeem, descendants of African slaves, have no qualms about opening the gate. Plumes of frankincense rise from incense burners in every winding corridor as Braik and his men dog-leg their way through Al Hisn’s maze, towards the Sultan’s private chambers.

  The plot has had a comparatively easy ride through Whitehall. In office barely a month and with his focus set firmly on Europe, the new prime minister, Edward Heath, signed off on the plan after only the most cursory glance. The plan makes sense. The Americans’ honeymoon with the House of Saud has let the Wahhabi genie out of the bottle, undoing over a century of British containment. Replacing the obscurantist Sultan of Muscat and Oman with Qaboos, his Sandhurst-educated son, will rebalance power in the region, maintain British oil interests after the meltdown of Suez, and do something to contain the threat of Soviet insurgency through Yemen. It may even lead to the building of a few hospitals and schools if Qaboos has his way.

  So Sheikh Braik has come to request that Sultan Said bin Taimur abdicate. At once. Braik does not anticipate trouble. Qaboos is, after all, Said’s own son, and already named as his successor.

  Said, alas, has no desire to step down.

  Braik, nevertheless, will not take no for an answer.

  And it is at this point that Said feels obliged to give Braik a definitive royal response. Braik has no time to defend himself and in any event he would never dream of drawing a weapon against his sovereign. Said’s like an uncle to him!

  Some uncle. The slug to his stomach comes as a complete surprise and Braik wanders around for a while, looking bemused, clearing his throat, before falling flat on his face.

  There are no metalled roads in Oman and most towns are accessed by sea or by Skyvan, a British military transport rigged to carry paratroops. David Brooks, his knee a screaming bolus of pain, clambers stiffly in through the cargo door of the plane, followed by a dozen goats. There are canvas seats strung down either side of the fuselage and crates of fish stacked in the central aisle. A whiskery old shepherd offers him a handful of cotton wool, none too clean, for his ears. The noise in the unpressurized cabin is terrible. It’s cold, too: even on a short-haul flight a Skyvan climbs to seven thousand feet.

  Around 4.00 p.m. they enter the fog bank rolling in over the city of Salalah. David arrives at the palace early in the evening in the company of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Turnhill of the Sultan’s Desert Regiment. Braik’s men are manning the entrance tower and open the gate.

  For an hour and a half the British-backed conspirators have been chasing the Sultan through the labyrinthine corridors of his palace. In this region rulers and their nobles carry guns, but they don’t all know how to use them. Two men lie dead: one royal bodyguard and one of Braik’s men. Braik is still alive, his condition stable. Said, meanwhile, has contrived to put a bullet through his own foot.

  Pinned down at last, Said says that he is ready to capitulate – but only to a British officer. He wants to look the men who’ve betrayed him in the eye. David lays his Browning aside, straightens his tie, and grips the pommel of his stick. He wishes to God he hadn’t gone clambering over the rocks like an idiot yesterday. He can barely think, he hurts so much. He marches as evenly as he can down the stone-flagged corridor, careful not to slip in the bloody smears the Sultan has left behind. He clears his throat, hobbles one step at a time up a flight of spiral stairs up to the open door, and salutes.

  The room is lit by two windows, one opposite the other. Above one window there is a second, semicircular, window made of plaster wrought into the form of the word ‘Muhammad’. Gaps in the ornate Arabic calligraphy are filled with coloured glass.

  ‘What a cunt.’

  The room is full of parrots. Some share tall cages – gilded cages – that sit either side of a samovar so huge and so complex it looks as though it could serve as the controls for a steam locomotive. In the middle of the room is a generous four-poster bed in carved wood. The Sultan sits at the foot of the bed, his injured foot extended. He holds his gun by the barrel, ready to present it to the man come to depose him.

  ‘What a cunt.’

  The Sultan does not stir. His face is an empty bag. Above him feathers rustle. There’s a line of parrots above the bedpost. Favoured birds. Familiars. Uncaged. Presumably the sounds mean something different in Arabic. ‘Pretty Polly.’ ‘Who’s a clever boy, then?’

  David bows. ‘Your majesty.’ There is a form of words for this. A protocol, if
you can believe this, for throwing an old man out of his realm. David’s been practising, he’s got the form down pat, but he’s not ready for the Sultan’s stare. The face is lifeless but the eyes burn with an intensity David finds increasingly frightening. He employs a schoolboy trick, focusing on the tip of the man’s ear – black and dry as a scrap of boerewors – as he recites. An Edwardian pupil tackling Casabianca was not more proper, or more nervous.

  The Sultan makes to stand. David hobbles forward, but the Sultan waves him angrily away. He’ll surrender on his own terms. He’ll exit the world’s stage under his own power, thank you. If necessary, he’ll hop.

  In fact, they can both hop. Christ, thinks David, teeth gritted against laughter, what a pair they make.

  At the door, the Sultan presents him with his gun, an old service Browning, and David tries again, offering the old man his arm. The Sultan’s birds, outraged, take flight around the room. In a mirror hung in the hall, David glimpses them: a rope of many colours snaking, shiny as glass, above the bed. ‘What a cunt,’ they cry. ‘ What a cunt.’ ‘What a cunt.’

  David sees Said and Braik on to the same plane, a Bristol Britannia headed for Bahrain, where doctors are waiting. He flies on to the UK the same night and is there waiting on the apron when Sultan Said lands at Brize Norton. A cold, rattly car ride bears them to the RAF hospital at Wroughton in Wiltshire. Once discharged, Said and his favourite parrot take a suite in London’s Dorchester Hotel. David Brooks quits the army and acts as the Sultan’s Home Office liaison until Said’s death, on 19 October 1972. It’s during this period that he meets and befriends Havard, adopted son of the eccentric shipping magnate Eric Moyse.

  Towards the end of 1972, David returns to Oman, where, working as a civilian consultant, he runs the public affairs office of Moyse Line. He meets Ann, an Australian geologist, and they move to Melbourne, Ann’s home town, in time for the birth of their daughter.