Submergence (12 page)

‘You will go to see the doctor,’ Yusuf said, quietly. ‘He will take care of you. You will eat, you will drink. Understand?’

He looked away. ‘Yes.’

‘Hold out your hands,’ Yusuf said.

He held them out.

‘Take this.’ Yusuf placed in his hands a small bottle of perfume with a sticker of a rose on it. ‘Open it.’

It was cloying; the substance was sticky, like deodorant dispensed from a plastic ball. ‘Thank you.’

Nothing more was said. There was only the tick-tock of the plastic clock above the door and the sound of the surf and the wind coming through the cracks in the thick walls and the muttering of the mujahid – he was a Chechen. Yusuf stood up and slung the satchel with the machine gun over his shoulder. He sat up and watched the clean-shaven commander go down the whitewashed steps to the beach and seemingly into the sea.

The Chechen hauled him to his feet.

They were half in and half out of the light and he saw a powder of frankincense on the Chechen’s fingertips of a quality that might have been presented to Christ at his Nativity.

The Book of Psalms says the Heavenly Father gathers the waters of the sea together and lays up the deep, as in a treasure house.

What the hell is down there? 91 per cent of the planet’s living space, 90 per cent of the living creatures. For every flea; nine sea fleas. No dogs, no cats, but so many other creations with eyes and thoughts, moving in three dimensions. It needs to be explored. With what?

There are only five submersibles in the world capable of diving deeper than 3000 metres. These tiny submarines can spin on a coin, yet have trouble braking in the water column. Among them are the twin
Mir
submersibles of the Russian Academy in St Petersburg; Japan’s
Shinkai
, sailing out of Yokosuka; America’s
Alvin
, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and France’s
Nautile
, named for Jules Verne’s
Nautilus
, jointly operated by the French Navy and IFREMER, the national research organisation. Their operating depth ranges to 6500 metres, or 680 atmospheres, putting 96 per cent of the ocean within reach of man (including most of the Hadal deep),
but none of these submersibles are capable of matching the feat of bathyscaphe
Trieste
, which in 1960 touched down on the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench; at 11,034 metres, the very bottom of the known world.

An aquanaut is someone who explores the ocean in the same way an astronaut explores space. The first aquanauts were dangled on a cable in a steel ball to depths only those buried at sea had previously plumbed. There were trays of soda lime in the ball to absorb the carbon dioxide the aquanauts breathed out. ‘I felt like an atom floating in illimitable space,’ one said.

In 1954, two French naval officers made the first dive into the abyss, descending 4023 metres in the waters off Senegal in the FNRS-3 bathyscaphe. This unremarked dive marks the beginning of ocean flight, less celebrated than space flight, but no less heroic.

Because in many ways the ocean is more hostile than space. Space flight is a journey outwards. You can see where you are going, which is why the crews in spaceships generally sit in swivel chairs facing a giant window or screen. Space is about weightlessness and speeds never before achieved by machines and which can scarcely be felt; the discharge of an aerosol is enough to propel a vessel forward, a nudge of a pencil sets its course, and all the while the air inside of it presses against the void outside. Ocean flight is, by contrast, a journey inwards, towards blindness. It is about weight, the stopping of the craft on thermal layers, the pressure of water pushing in, and the discomfiting realisation that most of the planet you call your own is hostile to you. There will never be a Neil Armstrong moment in the ocean. There is nothing to light the way, no prospect, no horizon; even encased in a metal suit the human body is too liquescent to contemplate stepping out onto the deep sea floor.

He was left alone in the courtyard to wash. He was emotional like an animal that had been cornered and then inexplicably left alone. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

Other fighters appeared. They gave him a clean shirt, a clean kikoi and a pair of sandals. They made him wrap his face in a scarf and pull down his shirtsleeves and they walked out together down empty sandy streets and across Kismayo’s deserted town square. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the Indian Ocean and something in him was set true at the sight of that expanse, he was straightened out, he was a part of the world again, not a consciousness removed from it, and Kismayo was a beggared town, not part of the madness that had spun too close to the sun. He was out, under the sky, exultant. He walked with sandals on his feet. He was no longer playing memories to himself, he was making them. The fighters flanked him. Their weapons were slung over their shoulders. They wanted to give the impression that he was a white-skinned mujahid, free to come and go as he pleased.

They went by another mosque that was lit with white-and-red neon lights like an ice-cream shop. Next to it was a clinic run by an Iraqi doctor who attended patients in the morning and planned the jihad in the afternoon. Several mujahideen reclined on a balcony on the first floor, eating fruit. On the door to the surgery was a ‘No Guns’ sticker; a red circle with the machine gun crossed out. It was from an earlier time, when there were aid organisations working in Kismayo. It meant nothing. There were a lot of guns on the balcony and there was a Dushka anti-aircraft gun packed in with sandbags.

He was pushed inside. It was a sterile place, for Somalia. The floor and surfaces were scrubbed. There were buckets of water. The windows and the glass door had been painted on the inside with white paint. There was a medicine cabinet. A woman in a hijab appeared from behind a screen. A nurse. She laid him on an examination bench. She opened his shirt and touched his chest. His head swam. She pressed malaria pills and anti-inflammatories into his hand. The brush of fingertips seemed illicit.

The nurse stood by the door. After a few minutes, a doctor entered and brushed her aside. ‘That’s my job,’ he said brusquely, in English. He addressed James. ‘We need blood and urine samples from you.’

Doctor Abdul Aziz. He was not the Abdul Aziz al-Masri, expert in chemical weapons, who served on al-Qaeda’s consultative council. He was the man known in Arab intelligence reports as the Iraqi with metal in his arms, who had flown on a Tupolev jet the Sudanese laid on in 1996 to transport the by then impecunious Osama bin Laden from Khartoum to Kabul. He was the doctor who was arrested by Pakistani intelligence in 1999, who had his arms tied to the steering wheel of a lorry and the door slammed on them, shattering them below the elbow. The one who, escaping Pakistan, underwent a number of operations to recover the feeling in his hands, worked as a paediatrician at a polyclinic in Riyadh, learned to hold an infant again, and to write out prescriptions. He was the man who eventually grew tired of life in Riyadh and who travelled to Somalia to give medical care to the poor. He had gone and the jihad had followed, or the other way around.

What was true was when Aziz placed hands, coolly, softly, on his ribs to determine the fractures, it was possible to see the scars on the forearms where the metal pins had gone in, like holes in a ring binder.

Seeing her at work the next morning, he kissed her tenderly on the cheek and went to his room.

He lay on the bed and read the newspapers, then downloaded one of Jacques Cousteau’s television shows on his tablet. Even though she had not explained the calculations required for her work, he sensed Cousteau missed the point in the shallows.

If she had attempted to explain her latest paper to him she might have used by way of example the complexity of the maths needed to work with the micromillimetre on the surface of the water which moves
between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and something else entirely.

Some of the punch-hole scars on Aziz’s forearms were covered by black hairs, others were warmed over in the light cast by the whitewashed windows. However, a man cannot be reduced to a single physical detail – a scar, a limp, a squint – except in a police report. His trousers and the crocodile belt that held them up made a more striking impression. They suggested a certain dash.

Aziz’s hands were unblemished. James got a good look at them when they rested on his broken nose. The fingers of a pianist: manicured, long, thin, alien. it was peculiar how Islamists were set apart by the length of their fingers the way moustaches used to set apart the maniacs of Nazi Germany and the Kremlin and thick necks the lesser apparatchiks.

There was a click and the nose was set with a thumb and forefinger. Aziz took a step back.

‘Straight enough.’

‘For an infidel,’ James said.

Aziz wagged a finger, but his face was friendly, not at all sallow or vulpine.

The doctor indicated his injuries on a wall chart of the human body that had the names of bones written in English and Somali. There was no X-ray machine.

‘What about the blood in my urine?’

‘Not serious. Drink a lot, Mr Water.’

‘My name is James More.’

Aziz gave a hard little laugh. ‘More? What kind of name is that?’

‘It has its history. What about my groin?’

‘That will heal. I will call you Mr Water.’

‘I have to get out of here. Can you help?’

‘No,’ said the doctor, smiling.

The nurse floated into the surgery again and stitched the cuts on him under Aziz’s direction. Her veil brushed his face. Her breath was scented. She was scented. This time, she was wearing latex gloves. Aziz examined the stitches, nodded approvingly, and the nurse left through the door with the no guns sticker.