J. Ledgard - Submergence

He ate ravioli and drank whisky. He gave the impression that he was a privately contracted water engineer who was determined to push through with his work and needed a trip to the port town of Kismayo in order to secure funding for a project there. Over dinner it was agreed that the charity would be paid a generous consultancy in return for facilitating his visit.

When he landed in Kismayo, he was taken to a shed that served as the arrivals lounge and informed that the community leader who was to host him had been summarily executed that morning for showing sympathy to Christianity, which was the jihadist way of saying he was spying for Ethiopia. James expressed his regret. He asked to return on the same plane, but was beaten and cast into the darkness.

It was his fault. He had met with his counterparts from the CIA in the food court of the Village Market shopping centre in Nairobi, not far from the new United States Embassy. He found their comments sweeping, without nuance, or solution. The pair said they had found the hand of a suicide bomber in Mogadishu. ‘We think it’s an Arab hand, don’t we, Bob.’

He took the risk because he had collected a businessman with ties to the al-Qaeda cells in Somalia. This man had agreed to supply information on foreign fighters in return for British citizenship. A passport was not on the table, but a residency permit and cash were. He had to see for himself whether the information was good.

The stakes were high: a Somali jihadist bomb-making unit was operational in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi. It was only a matter of time before they exploded a device in the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport or the United Nations Headquarters. The bigger worry in Legoland was of clean-skin Somalis — young men with nothing on their record to arouse suspicion — making it into the European Union and committing acts of terrorism there. In a confidential report to the Home Office he had recorded that possibility as ‘likely to very likely’.

He squatted over the pit. He swayed. He picked apart his last trip to Addis Ababa. He had met with Ethiopian intelligence and they had warned him against travelling to Somalia. They did not know, they said, which faction was in charge in Kismayo. It was too dangerous. Why had he not paid attention to them?

He remembered meeting a standard informant by the pool at the Hilton Hotel. He had negotiated the terms of the arrangement and the secure ways the information should be passed on. They had shaken hands. He had taken a lift to his room on the executive floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a slum on the hillside and to the office buildings on Josip Tito Road. Gum trees at the top obscured the old palace. He stood to one side of the curtain and trained his binoculars at the pool. It was built in cruciform in likeness of an Ethiopian cross. The delicate wives of Ethiopia’s most powerful men swam down the cross and across it in the signature crawl of graduates of the Addis Lycée: sharp elbows, hands cupped, chest turned to reveal little breasts. Expatriate families sat at the ice-cream bar enjoying an afterschool sundae. There were Italians, Americans and a North Korean family. The informant was still sitting there. No one approached him. Rain clouds darkened the scene. The wind gusted and only the Russian mechanics who maintained MiG jets for the Ethiopian Air Force stayed in the water. He saw two other Russians sheltering under a cabana. One wore a claret tracksuit. The other was in a white T-shirt and briefs, the better to show off his Spetsnaz thighs. What else?

He stood up in the unfinished bathroom. He switched off Addis. It was nothing. There was no clue, no mystery, no spy story. It always ended with the two Russians, who had nothing to do with him or with Somalia. Just another pair of Slav intimidators making their way in Africa. Yet they haunted him. Bony, with shaven skulls, cigarettes in mouths, they could be bought by any intelligence service. So why not buy them? Why not gift them national symbols, religious icons and holy water and set them loose? Why not make them Cossacks of neo-conservatism, to be called upon when everything else went wrong? He had no doubt they would kill a young jihadist, then smash his face through a windscreen.

He accepted there was little chance of escape. Somalia was not Afghanistan, where it was possible to pass as a local by growing out a beard, wearing a shalwar kameez, and speaking a few words of Dari. It was not Kipling. He could not turn his white skin black. He could not imitate the languid walk of a Somali. Even if he spoke the language, it would have been impossible for him to know all the clan histories and feuds over water or grazing for camels, which allow one Somali to pin down the identity of another in a few questions. His only luck was not to get found out: they really believed he was a water engineer.

His reports had not been read at a ministerial level. Downing Street was interested only in pirates and could not be made to see that piracy was minor. Half of Somalia needed food aid to stay alive. Hundreds of thousands of people had been driven out of the city and were camped in makeshift shelters along the road to Afgooye. Somalia needed help. If a decision was taken to abandon and contain the threat, other African countries would also be abandoned. There was no question about it, Somalia was the future. It was the canary singing for the world to hear, but no one was listening.

Che Guevara said as a young man his greatest hope had been to play rugby for Argentina. Even as a hero of the revolution, when his plane from Havana to Moscow stopped to refuel at Shannon in Ireland, he insisted on watching Munster play in Limerick, and on getting drunk with the fans. If he had worn the powder-blue and white strip of the Pumas as a scrum half, he would never have become a revolutionary and there would have been another face on the T-shirts.

When you watch international rugby, you observe movement and collision, spaces opening up and closing. But what you remember of the match, what stays with you, is the flow and clash of primary colours. Red against blue, green against white. It is painterly in that way.

He could see under the door the saturated colours of a television in a darkened room. It was like a line of lipstick. He thought of Osama bin Laden watching news in a cave, long before the mansion in Abbottabad. Somewhere primitive, elevated, in the mountains — with snow on the ground even in the summer. Osama making a point to his retinue about the news item of the day, lifting a finger, sometimes smiling, never ironic, and never able to sit through the sports report without reaching for the remote.

She liked to run in Hyde Park before work, with sweetness in the spring, laundered in the autumn with the unpolluted damp of fallen leaves, and with women going by on horseback, up and down in the saddle.

She cooked for herself in her large kitchen and enjoyed concertos or comedy quizzes on the radio while she ate. She worked until late. She sipped a glass of Australian wine while she worked, always Australian, to please her father. She smoked cigarettes, which she held away from her in the French way, as if they were leaden.

The ceilings in her flat were high, the doors were original, heavy and exact. This was her life, there was solidity to it, although with a window open to the garden and all of South Ken going softly, softly into the night, it was possible to imagine Peter Pan alighting there.