J. Ledgard - Submergence

A nuclear submarine is a killing machine, a destroyer of worlds, yet it is fragile. It implodes when it sinks out of its depth. In 1963, the United States submarine Thresher was wrecked with such violence that parts of it were scattered across an area several kilometres wide. There is no comparison between the technology of a submarine going across and the unadorned submersible diving deep. This is because our world is firstly about power and only secondly about knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, most advances in submersible technology have come from secret military projects. The United States Navy developed its own submersibles to clear up its own submarines and to locate and recover fragments of sunken Soviet submarines. A Soviet missile, if recovered, would have been worth years of spying on land. One of these submersibles was called Deep View . It had a glass nose and dived into the Sea of Okhotsk. Later there was the NR-1 . It was powered by a small nuclear reactor and could stay submerged for weeks. The director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme handpicked its crew of two scientists and ten sailors. It was NR-1 that recovered a gold sextant from the debris of a Soviet sub, from which the navigator was able to calculate the sub’s position, according to the stars.

The Challenger Deep of the Marianas Trench is named after Her Majesty’s ship Challenger , a Royal Naval vessel whose 1872–75 voyage was the first and greatest oceanographic expedition. Challenger ’s mission was to plumb the remote seas and trawl them for new life. It was backbreaking and tedious work, but tens of thousands of new species were discovered. Sometimes a hundred creatures never seen before were returned in a single dredge, then nothing for days on end except the commonest fish and whale bones adorned with nodules of metal. Yet we know now that the slime which covered the inside of the dredge each time it was brought up was not the unexceptional ooze the ship’s scientist believed it to be. Not whale snot, either. It was all that remained of the most exquisite forms of millions of sea squirts, salp, and jellies, whose diaphanous musculature — more remarkable than any alien species yet conceived — had lost its form in air.

To push inwards is hard, to descend even more so; it challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from. This is why, even though we are inundated with seawater, the advances of our oceanographic agencies do not match those of our space agencies.

He had tracked the family of a senior al-Qaeda commander in Africa to an island off Madagascar. The terrorist’s mother lived in a neighbourhood on the slopes of a volcano above the island’s capital. It was a steep walk up from the town. The air grew thin, there were showers of hail. The massif rose lividly above the shacks. Smoking lines of lava ran down it and were glowing welts at night.

The terrorist was near the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. There was a $5 million bounty on his head. He was elusive: the New York Times reported him dead on the day of a State of the Union address. The missile was not even close. He moved between Somalia and Kenya on foot, on donkey, in lorries and on dhows. According to the FBI, he was a bomb maker, an expert in urban warfare, a computer hacker, a forger, and a master of disguise who spoke many languages. The bureau could not accept that it was easy to buy a new identity in Kenya and move up and down the Swahili coast and that several languages were spoken there. His information indicated the terrorist was running scared. He thought of the man as an untrained hunter who had wounded an animal and then did not know what to do. He knew he was hidden in Somalia, in rooms where the television played all day, shaping him in new and unexpected ways.

The mother’s neighbourhood was filled with music and interspersed with Jurassic-looking trees. Volcanic ash fell on its corrugated iron roofs, lava flowed around it. The people were a Creole particular to that island, descended from runaway slaves and pirates who had landed there. She ran a kiosk a few steps back from the street. It was the kind of shack where most of the world goes each day to buy its milk, tomatoes and sundries. She sat on a stool outside, watching the passers-by. She wore a blue dress and crescent moon earrings. She was not veiled. She looked like she was about to pluck a goose, hands on knees, legs set wide apart. He climbed the steps and asked for a drink. She knew immediately why he was there. He followed her into the shack. She pulled a Coke bottle from a bucket of iced water and opened it for him.

‘I’ll give you nothing,’ she said, refusing to look him in the eye. ‘We paid for his education and not a sou did we get. He didn’t even turn up for his father’s funeral.’

She minded very much being found. He could not remember whether her voice had been rough, or not, only that she had struck him like a character in a fairytale — a cottager in a forest — not someone in a shack on the side of a tropical volcano.

He had zigzagged down to the town, pushing away large moths that brushed his face and stumbled into a courtyard where old men were slapping down dominoes on a wooden table under a swaying streetlight. The capital was built with its back to the sea. There were no beaches. The escaped settlers had chosen to face the volcano which sooner or later would spell their doom. There were hardly any animals left on the island. The mongooses had killed the snakes, the people had killed the mongooses. The islanders were ruled by superstitions. There was a miracle mosque that had built itself at night and a crater lake which granted wishes into which a Belgian scuba-diving expedition had gone down and never come back up. There were witches in every village who were paid to cast spells: for a successful visa application to visit France for instance. It was an extreme case of islandism, with no reference to the surrounding ocean. It was as if the rest of the world did not properly exist.

The next day, he remembered, hot ash had fallen on the town and out to sea. Apparently this was quite normal. It was difficult to breathe and the tarmac on the roads bubbled. He met with the terrorist’s sister in a café across from a tennis club called Roland Garros, which had beautiful red clay courts. Her name was Monique. She was more forthcoming.

‘I don’t want money or that,’ she said. ‘You can buy me breakfast if you like.’

She was a hairdresser. She wore a miniskirt and sunglasses with plastic diamonds glued to the sides.

‘The thing about my brother is he’s really shy. At least he was,’ she corrected herself, ‘I haven’t seen him in years.’

The volcano was still rumbling under the town. The morning was heavy with languor. She lit a cigarette and inhaled. The magma, the weather, himself; everything felt saved up.

‘He was the best student in his class. For some reason the French didn’t give him a scholarship. That’s how he ended up in Pakistan. If France had come through for him, he’d probably be a maths teacher now.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He liked maths. This word terrorist. I don’t like it. My brother only fights to support his family. The rest is made up.’

‘Your mother says she hasn’t had any money from him.’

‘Don’t listen to a word she says. I bet she was wearing the earrings he sent her.’

‘Crescent moons?’

‘That’s them. He sends money every month. His wife and kids live with me. She gets money transfers too. We’re a close family.’

She was unguarded. She even told him which money bureau the terrorist’s wife picked the transfers up from.