2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (20 page)

But the sheikh believes he can do it. He believes that Allah wants him to do it, and therefore he must and will complete his task. He never contemplates failure. He never shows fear or doubt. And he manages to keeps us all believing, just as he believes. We concentrate on the detail of each step we have to take, and think ‘If this can be made to work, then maybe we can take the next step. If we can get the salmon, alive and well, into the holding tanks in the mountains. If we can keep them reasonably cool in the holding tanks until the rains come. If the rains come and the flows in the wadi are good enough, we can release them through the gates into the wadi. If they turn upstream and run…If, if, if…But, as Fred keeps saying, we have the technology. The rest is up to the salmon.

I try to think of other insane projects where belief has overcome reason and judgement: the Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall of China—the Millennium Dome, come to that. We are not the first and will not be the last people to defy common sense, logic, nature. Perhaps it is an act of monumental folly. I am sure it is. I am sure people will laugh at us and scorn us for the rest of our lives. You won’t be able to marry me because I will always be the girl who once worked on the Yemen salmon project.

Last night we sat late in our office together, going over equipment inventories, cash flows and project milestones. The sheikh maintains an iron grasp of the detail of his project. If we fail, it will not be because he has forgotten something. While I was clearing papers away and switching off computers he said, ‘Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, I shall always be in your debt. You have worked for me diligently and well.’ He nearly always calls me by my full name. I don’t know why. Anyway, I blushed. He usually gives instructions, rarely praise. ‘You think our project will fail.’

It was not a question. I stammered something in reply, but he brushed aside my words. ‘Think of it in a different way. The same God who created me, created the salmon, and in his wisdom brought us together and gave me the happiest moments of my life. Now I want to repay God and bring the same happiness to my people. Even if only one hundred fish run, if only one fish is ever caught, think what we will have achieved. Some men in my position, with great wealth and the freedom to spend it as they like, have built mosques. Some have built hospitals or schools. I, too, have built hospitals and schools and mosques. What difference does one more mosque or one more hospital make? I can worship God outside my tent on the sands as well as in a mosque. I want to present God with the opportunity to perform a miracle, a miracle that he will perform if he so wills it. Not you, not Dr Alfred, not all the clever engineers and scientists we have employed. You and they have prepared the way, but whatever happens will be God’s will. You will have been present at the delivery of the miracle and you will have been of great assistance to me, but the miracle is God’s alone. When anyone sees a salmon swimming up the waters of the Wadi Aleyn, will they any longer be able to doubt the existence of God? That will be my testament, the shining fish running in the storm waters of a desert land.’

My poor attempt on paper, my inadequate recollections of the sheikh’s words, full of error and omissions, can’t capture the power of the man’s personality. When he speaks like that I can imagine the effect on their listeners that the prophets of the Old Testament must have had. His words, his very thoughts, get inside my head and echo for a long time in my memory, and my dreams.

Now I come to something dark, something I wish had not happened. But I must tell you about it.

When I left the office with the sheikh, his car appeared from somewhere and pulled up beside him and, as he often does, he offered me a lift back to my flat. The chauffeur drops him off first at his house in Eaton Square and then takes me on home, and I usually accept the offer. But tonight I had a headache from looking too long at tiny figures on computer screens, so I said I’d rather walk for a bit, and then jump into a taxi.

I was walking up St James’s Street in the direction of Piccadilly when a tall man in a long navy-blue overcoat fell into step beside me. I hadn’t seen or heard him coming and it gave me one hell of a start. My natural instinct was to turn away from him and cross the street, but before I had a chance to move off, he spoke. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m a friend of Bob Matthews.’

He stopped then and let me have a good look at him in the street light, and my heart rate slowed down to something like normal. It was so obvious to me that he was a soldier. When my father, and your father and you, and a good many other of one’s friends and relations either are or have been in the forces, it doesn’t take a lot to spot a soldier. He was tall, thin-faced, rather dark-complexioned, with slightly receding black hair and arched black eyebrows over a pair of brown eyes. I don’t know if you will recognise him from that description. He didn’t smile.

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ I asked him. I think my voice must have been trembling. He had startled me, appearing so suddenly and silently from nowhere.

He didn’t tell me his name. He simply said he was a friend of yours and in the same regiment, and that he had something to tell me. Then he said, and his words chilled me, ‘It’s a lot better for both of us if you don’t know my name. I want to tell you something, but not out here in the street. Do you trust me enough to let me buy you a drink? There’s a place I know nearby.’

I wasn’t so alarmed by then. Instead, I was overwhelmed by the need to know what it was he had to tell me. I knew he would no more harm me than his sister, if he had one. I nodded, still not sure I could trust myself to speak again without a quaver in my voice, and again he scared me by saying we had better not walk together, but that I should follow him after a moment. It made me feel something I never expected to feel, a sense of being watched, a sense of threat in the shadows beyond the light from the street lamps and shop windows. He turned and strode off up the street without waiting for my reply.

He crossed Piccadilly and went down Dover Street. I followed him into a side street where he turned into the doorway of a small pub. It was cramped and noisy and busy inside, but there was a quiet corner where I found your friend sitting at a table waiting for me. Before I could ask him any questions, he suggested we had a glass of wine. I nodded and mumbled something and in a very short time he was back at the table with two large glasses of white wine.

‘I’m not supposed to speak to you,’ he said, without any preliminaries. ‘I’d probably be in a lot of trouble if it was found out I had given information about operational matters to a civilian. So please forget we ever met as soon as I leave here.’

I promised him I would. I looked at him, willing him to get on with it, say whatever dreadful things were as yet unsaid. I knew we would not be sitting there if he could tell me anything good, anything I would want to hear. I thought ‘Oh God, I hope you’re not dead.’ I think he understood, for he reached across the table and patted my hand briefly. Then he told me he was the officer I had spoken to when I rang up the regiment. I didn’t recognise his voice. A cheerful voice had spoken to me; this man was not speaking to me cheerfully.

I told him that everyone kept telling me your whereabouts couldn’t be made known for operational reasons, even though you told me when you went out to Iraq you were just doing a short tour in Basra province.

‘You’re being given the runaround.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said. He paused, then took a slow sip from his glass of wine. He raised his eyebrows and looked at my glass, and I knew he was telling me to have a drink before he spoke again. I drank some wine. It was not very cold or nice but I barely tasted it. The wine went inside me and the alcohol briefly warmed me.

‘I mean that Bob’s somewhere he shouldn’t be. He’s with a team inside Iran, and they’re stuck. The bad news is, the IIGF know roughly where they are.’

‘Who is the IIGF?’

‘Their army. Western operational command. That’s the bad news.’ I didn’t ask what the good news was. I didn’t see how there could be any good news. I took a second gulp at my wine. I had to use both hands to get the glass to my mouth, I was trembling so much.

‘The good news is the same. The IIGF know
roughly
where they are; they don’t know exactly. There are a lot of places to hide in that part of the world so Bob may be okay for a while. A while.’

‘So what will happen to Robert?’

‘He and his team must be extracted by helicopter. Soon.’ I asked why they just didn’t extract you, if you were in such danger. ‘We aren’t allowed to overfly Iranian air space. We aren’t allowed to admit that we have any teams in Iran, although of course we’ve had teams in and out of there for years. It’s a black operation. If we sent helicopters in and they were spotted, the Iranians would raise hell about it. Then it would have to be admitted that we’d sent people into the area. Questions would be asked in Parliament. There’d be a hell of a row. Unfortunately, sending helicopters in is exactly what the IIGF expect us to do right now.’

I asked him who had sent you into Iran in the first place, if we weren’t supposed to be there. ‘We never know who dreams up these things, but of course it will go all the way back to Downing Street. Bob and his team were supposed to infiltrate, blow up something that somebody decided had to be blown up and then get out. Bob got in all right, but someone saw them coming.’

‘What can we do?’ I said. I must have spoken very loudly because your friend looked around the bar. I must have almost screamed. One or two heads turned briefly in our direction and then looked away from your friend’s stare. I made an effort to calm down. ‘So what can I do?’ I repeated. ‘Why are you telling me?’

He leaned across the table and spoke with great intensity. ‘Someone needs to blow the whistle. Your father, General Chetwode-Talbot, is pretty well known and respected. Bob’s father still has a few friends and admirers in the forces. You have to tell one or both of them. Get them to talk to their MPs. Get a question asked in Parliament and drag it out into the open. Then they’ll have do something about Bob.’

‘But what should I say?’

‘Get your father to call his MP and say that he has received specific and detailed information that Captain Robert Matthews of 41 Commando and his unit are trapped inside Iran, having accidentally crossed the border in hot pursuit, following an operation against insurgents around Lake Qal al’ Dizah in eastern Iraq. Write that down.’ He gave me a moment to find a pen and a scrap of paper inside my handbag, and then spelled it out for me. ‘Tell him Bob was in hot pursuit of an insurgent group, but now he and a six-man team are pinned down on the wrong side of the frontier, inside Iran.’

‘But that’s not what you told me before.’

‘It doesn’t matter. If everyone thinks they were there by accident, it may be possible to cut a deal with the Iranians and get them out. Any other way is too risky now.’ He paused, and finished the last of his wine. Then he added, ‘The important point is you should say that you are acting on information received, that you are absolutely convinced it is genuine, and that the British government urgently needs to obtain safe conduct for these men from the Iranian government, to allow them to be extracted by helicopter and returned across the frontier into Iraq.’

‘Will they do it?’

‘If you can get your MP to ask a question in the House, they’re going to have to do something. Put it another way: I don’t like to say this so bluntly, but Bob’s in a hell of a lot of trouble, and he’ll be in a hell of a lot more if someone doesn’t do something.’

He stood up. ‘Don’t go,’ I begged him, grasping at the sleeve of his coat. ‘There must be more you can tell me.’

‘Nothing more,’ he said, staring down at me. ‘For your sake, for Bob’s, do whatever you can, and do it tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.’ Then he left.

And now I am at home, and I have rung my father, and he has rung my MP for me because by then I was in such a state that I could hardly string two words together. How pathetic I am whenever there is a real emergency.

I have written everything out as it happened. I won’t post this letter to you because it will never reach you and the wrong people will read it, but there must be a record kept of what happened tonight. I can’t believe they have done this to you, Robert. I just can’t believe you could be betrayed like this. But we’ll get you out. My father has friends who have friends that the government can’t ignore or silence. If only you could hear me speaking out loud the words as I write them down, hear them wherever you are:
we will get you out
.

Love

Harriet

Intercepts of al-Qaeda email traffic (provided by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency)

From:

Tariq Anwar

Date:

21 October

To:

Essad

Folder:

Outgoing mail to Yemen

I send you my greetings and messages from our brother Abu

Abdullah.

We hear the goatherd failed to get his goat. We hear some hasty or ignorant people gave him the tribal robes to wear that were not the tribal robes that should be worn in those regions of Scotland. And so he was seen, and he was taken, and now he is back in your country, talking to the authorities, we do not doubt, as fast as his cursed tongue can shape the words.

Abu Abdullah is aware that you will be very concerned to make amends for this failure, or worse than failure, and asks you to do three things for him.

First, find the goatherd. You know the building in Sana’a where they will be keeping him. Gain access. You know which of the guards in that building are enlightened and which are not. Seek out the enlightened guards. Pay them whatever is necessary to further their enlightenment. Gain access to the goatherd and take him to join his goats. Take him out from the place where he is and remove his head, and bury him on the same hillside as his foul diseased animals.

Then, find his family. You know who they are. You know how to find them. Find them, and remove their heads also.