Against All Odds

by R. A. Lang

  This time my visit was for a very different reason. I went into his office and as always, he’d pick up his phone and ordered some Saudi coffee to be brought in. Saudi coffee didn’t contain any coffee, but instead cinnamon and cardamom, which he knew I enjoyed very much. He could sense something was wrong by the look on my face and wasted no time in asking me if there was something he could do for me.

  I asked him if he could help me with a domestic problem regarding my wife by cancelling her re-entry visa to Saudi. He gave me a warm, somewhat sympathetic smile and picked up his phone. After he had spoken just a few words in Arabic, he put the phone back down and asked if there was anything else he could do for me; it was done.

  He was a gentleman and didn’t ask any questions with regard to why I didn’t want my wife to return to the Kingdom. Maybe he had figured that out for himself, or was just being his usual courteous self.

  When my wife arrived back after her sleazy stint in Benidorm, her brother explained that I’d called and discovered where she’d gone. Suddenly worried that I’d found out, she became nervous and wanted to return back to Jeddah as soon as possible. She immediately called me and claimed that she missed me and couldn’t wait to return to Saudi to be with me, yeah right.

  With the pain I was feeling due to my newly broken heart, it was a real pleasure telling her that her re-entry visa had been cancelled and couldn’t be revoked.

  She didn’t believe me and went to London Heathrow airport to try to return to Jeddah. Only at the Saudi Airways check-in desk, when they did their routine check, did she believe her visa was no longer valid.

  She wasted no time getting both my offshore and onshore bank accounts frozen. That was great: she couldn’t continue shifting money out of my accounts and into her own as she’d done since I first left for Saudi. It was clear from the beginning that she was probably following her five-times-divorced mother. We had got married on a Saturday, and she had made me give her access to all my accounts that Monday!

  Three days after she got access to my money, she claimed she needed to go shopping, but when I offered to drive her, she snapped at me. She said she wanted to go alone. Several hours later, she returned without any shopping bags but instead told me she had met up with a friend and didn’t make it to the shops.

  I found out two weeks later that she had had a secret abortion. When I quizzed her why she’d done it, she said, “You have to take me all over the world before we can start a family.”

  My friends in Saudi laughed when I told them she’d frozen my accounts because I was paid in Saudi, and the funds went directly into my Saudi bank account. It didn’t affect me at all; rather, the move had protected what I’d already made in Iran and Saudi until its destiny was decided in the divorce court.

  I just looked at the experience as a blessing because it had happened so early in my overseas life.

  Saudi Arabia became a whole new place to live without my wife around. I was able to enjoy parties again without watching her dancing cheek to cheek with other bachelors’ hands all over her.

  I was able to take up scuba diving again, and I became a dive master in a few months. I was able to spend money on myself for the first time since meeting her. Life was great again!

  I moved from the compound in Jeddah to an apartment that was closer to the site where I worked. I met a Filipino woman at a friend’s party called Myatt, and she became my maid and visited my apartment every morning at eight o’clock.

  A few of my Riyadh colleagues later joined me in Jeddah, so it wasn’t long before all the complaining started all over again. In Riyadh, we used to work twelve hour shifts six days per week, alternating weekly from day shift to night shift. That had been torture because the body couldn’t adjust from one week to the next.

  In Jeddah, it was set up differently. There were only morning and afternoon shifts with no night shifts. The day shift was from six o’clock in the morning until half past four in the afternoon. The afternoon shift started at four o’clock and went until one o’clock in the morning. I only needed to see the rest of the team for half an hour before having the entire site to myself.

  When it came time to choose our work shifts, all my colleagues selected day shifts, thus, I grabbed the chance and volunteered for permanent afternoons. Everyone immediately agreed. After that, I visited my favourite prince in the world’s office to explain what had been discussed and agreed upon and asked if it was okay with him, which it was.

  I already knew there were no afternoon shifts on Thursdays, so I got paid the same for working a five-day week. This left the others with six days per week waking up at half past four in the morning and leaving at five to start at six.

  It took a couple of months for my colleagues to realise their mistake, but it was too late to change things. I used to leave my apartment at three in the afternoon, Saturday through Wednesday, for my one-hour drive out into the desert. I would arrive home just before two o’clock in the morning after a relaxing drive on quiet roads to enjoy a bottle of home brew.

  This had so many advantages: the traffic was light in both directions, so much safer, plus I could enjoy the luxury of my home brew every night before going to bed.

  Because I was the sole client representative on afternoon shifts, I could organise things exactly how I wanted them to be with the contractor. It was certainly the best move I could have made. Soon, the Swedish friend of mine who was representing the contractor changed to permanent afternoons to join me, and that allowed us to scuba diving together in the mornings whenever we felt the urge.

  I was able to build up quite an impressive stock of beer, wine, and rough brandy. I was working when my British colleagues were free, so they couldn’t visit me, like they had in Iran. Due to my impressive reserves, I allowed Myatt to invite all her friends to my apartment for a party at the end of every month. Quality of life couldn’t possibly have been better now that I was free to enjoy myself again.

  Due to my permanent afternoon shifts, I had a lot of spare time to do whatever I wanted. I could visit my favourite fishing equipment shop in the centre of Jeddah or take my scuba tanks to be refilled with air whenever I wanted.

  Because I was well settled in Jeddah, I could go scuba diving every day or every night. I preferred night diving, but it wasn’t without its dangers, as I discovered one night whilst diving with my instructor. It was a Thursday night at eleven o’clock that we were on the corniche in Jeddah, just a ten minute drive from my compound.

  It was surprisingly quiet that night, and I was using a new high-pressure tank, which I’d just bought. It was made in Sweden, like all my diving equipment. The normal scuba tanks were made out of aluminium, and their maximum working pressure was 200 bars, which is equivalent to 3,000 pounds per square inch.

  The new tank I had bought was much smaller, but it contained the same volume of air and made of steel. The tank was very heavy on my back, and its working pressure was 300 bars, which is equal to 4,500 pounds per square inch.

  As it turned out, this dive was the last night dive I would ever make.

  Once fully equipped, we had to climb down the large, hazardous rocks in the dark until we reached the water’s edge. Before entering the Red Sea on a night dive, we broke the glass inside our chemical lights and shook them until the fluids mixed together and began to glow brightly. I always took two underwater lamps on my night dives: a primary, rather powerful lamp and a smaller, standby lamp for when my primary lamp had inevitably depleted its batteries.

  My primary lamp was a ridiculously powerful dive lamp. It was capable of turning total darkness into bright daylight. It burned up eight D-cell batteries in just forty-five minutes, so the end of each night dive required the use of my spare little lamp, which instantly developed a more claustrophobic atmosphere in the darkness. On this dive, the powerful lamp was probably what saved my life that night.

  We began our descent to just ten metres, and we tied a red chemical light to some coral to mark our entry/exit point. We c
ontinued our dive, exploring the coral and placed additional green chemical lights every so often as markers to trace our way back to where we started as we proceeded in the northerly direction. We wanted to have our cars close by when we finished the dive so we’d ensure we returned back in time to find the marker before the red light had died.

  While underwater, it was a little difficult to stay positioned with all the weight on my back, still everything seemed okay at first. I always wore a wetsuit which was made of Lycra and Polartec, mainly to help protect my body from the razor sharp coral. It wasn’t to help me stay warm, as it was 28ºC in the Red Sea.

  We completed our first thirty minutes of the dive and turned to complete our second thirty minutes in the direction from which we’d come. We were heading back to our starting point exploring a slightly shallower level of coral to ensure that we both had spare air left in case of any unforeseen event and to cover new places.

  After about ten minutes, while I was busy stroking a large, sleeping grouper, I experienced one hell of a surprise. Night diving offers a whole new meaning to the word darkness. The only possible view was in the direction the dive lamp was pointing.

  I was focused on the sleeping fish when something caused me to roll over uncontrollably. All I could do whilst struggling to roll back over was swing my dive lamp around.

  It is well known that sharks like to eat at night in shallow water. After all, fish also need their sleep. Coral reefs present a perfect lunch venue because most fish like to live in the first ten metres depth and that’s exactly where I was.

  As I managed to spin around and aim my powerful dive lamp into the dark abyss, I saw what had moved the water in such close proximity to me. It was the tail of a shark of enormous proportions. I had a brief but clear view of the shark’s tail, which was tall enough to make it at least sixteen feet long. It was only a few feet away, but in the darkness I only briefly caught sight of it before it disappeared into the night.

  I quickly swam over to my dive buddy and indicated a big mouth by spreading my arms. I pointed in the direction the shark had gone, and we both pointed in the up direction at the same time, so we wasted no time in clambering over the coral drop-off where we would be safe and relax again.

  Diving at a depth of only ten metres does not require any decompression stops, which was just as well because we weren’t in any mood to hang around.

  The following weekend, a fellow expatriate stole the show. He had just returned from diving alone, which I never did, in just the same place where we had night dived the week before. His scuba tank had a strong nylon net over it to protect it from getting scratched and to keep it looking like new, but the netting had been ripped to shreds.

  There were teeth marks in the tank’s hard, enamelled paint that covered most of his tank.

  He had been attacked from behind by a large shark that shook him vigorously by his tank and pushed him face first into the sand. He was very lucky that he had been pushed into the only little patch of sand in that area. Had he been forced into the coral, the outcome would have been very different, especially for his complexion!

  When he was forced into the sand, his demand valve was ripped from his mouth so he couldn’t breathe. Luckily for him, the shark didn’t like how the hard aluminium tank felt in its jaws, and it released him. He was able to go on an emergency ascent and clamber over the same coral as I had the week before.

  During my stay in Jeddah, I managed to go on over three hundred dives in the Red Sea, and I will always be grateful to Saudi Arabia for granting me a diving license that allowed me to enjoy its west coast reefs.

  It is not my intention to deter anyone from diving in the Red Sea; quite the opposite. With over three hundred dives that enabled me to map parts of the seabed of Jeddah for others to enjoy, I can’t complain. Therefore, I will only elaborate on two more instances that have remained in my memories.

  One instance was when I went on a chartered dive boat fifteen kilometres off the coast of Jeddah. The day and the sea started off too perfect for my liking. The surface of the ocean was like a kind of still calm. The Red Sea is well known to change unexpectedly, but the Saudi coastguard allowed vessels to leave the safety of Jeddah’s marina that morning, so off we went.

  We did one dive in the morning, which wasn’t terribly special because there wasn’t very good coral to explore. But the second dive in the afternoon was something quite different. We were diving at a depth of twenty-two metres on a shipwreck. The shipwreck was nicknamed chicken wreck because it had been a cargo vessel carrying thousands of chickens bound for Jeddah when it hit a reef in a storm, broke its back, and sank.

  The dive started off fine. The waters were unusually calm. After just twenty minutes, however, the tranquil dive became a different world. I became aware of movement up above me, which caused me to look back up to the surface where our dive boat was hovering.

  Due to the Saudi environmental policies in those days, dive boats were not permitted to drop their anchors, which might have damaged the coral.

  When I looked up, I could see the ocean’s silver surface becoming turbulent and dangerous. As the dive master on that day, I aborted the dive by tapping every diver on the shoulder and indicating that everyone should return to the surface.

  At the surface, the real danger became apparent. Everyone’s objective was to get back on the dive boat while it bounced more than ten feet off the surface of the water. The main danger was at the transom, where we needed to climb up a ladder. That part of the boat was hammering down on the water, easily capable of smashing one’s skull.

  Eventually, we could account for each and every diver, and we started our journey back to the safety of Jeddah’s marina, which was still a long ride away.

  In Jeddah’s direction, all we could see was a sky full of sand. The coast was out of sight, which explained the waves we were riding on the way back. We estimated the swell to be around twenty-five to thirty-five feet.

  Our dive boat was struggling to ride up the waves, and each time we got to the top of a wave, half the hull would be out of the water, only to come slapping down again on the other side. We had a Filipino skipper who was very experienced and knew what to do. He began to zigzag the waves one at a time.

  It was a much slower way to get back, but it was also much safer. We sat on bench seats on either side of the back of the boat. We all gripped the benches with white knuckles: one minute we would be high up in the air looking down towards the guys on the other side of the boat, and the next minute we would be looking up at them.

  All the while, we were slowly but surely getting closer to Jeddah and we could see the battering the sandstorm was giving the mainland. It took us several hours to reach the marina, by which time the storm had calmed down a lot. We took advantage of the lull and pulled up against the quayside without being slammed against it, as it was still quite windy.

  There was a lot of sand in the air, and all the roads were a mess. We saw sand dunes piled up against buildings and other similar sights. When I got back to my apartment, there were many messages left on my answering machine from concerned friends who knew I was going out on a boat dive that day. I called everyone back to put their minds at rest.

  We went on several more boat dives after that event, and they were all well worth the effort. One such dive took us far away from shore to another shipwreck. That ship had been carrying heavy duty electrical cables. Just like the previous wreck dive, the ship had broken up on a coral reef in a storm, which had blown the ship well off its intended course.

  The wreck was decently intact. The tonnes of copper cables had been salvaged years before due to their value. As we gradually made our way around it, we found a small oceanic white-tip shark sleeping. There were seven of us, and I was the only diver without a camera. Everyone was busy taking photos of the shark until it suddenly became aware of our presence and darted out quickly, pushing straight through the middle of us.

  As it did so, it hit me in my chest wit
h its fin, knocking all the air out of me. It was too deep to make an emergency ascent to the surface, so I had to struggle to get my breath back while the other divers were busy laughing, with clouds of bubbles pouring out of their demand valves.

  When I began to start breathing somewhat normally again, I noticed something that could best be described as a small submarine not too far from where we were.

  The submarine moved very slowly, but it had noticed our presence. I motioned to the others to look over their shoulders to see what I was looking at. The ‘submarine’ could have been the small shark’s mother, but if so, it was a fully grown mother, approximately sixteen feet long.

  This is something new, I thought. We didn’t exactly know what to do. The shark slowly swam around us as we huddled against a large coral head until our dive computers starting beeping to alert us of low air. There was no more time to think; we had to go back to the surface regardless of the shark, which was getting closer every time it circled us.

  We all began our ascent together and with the dive boat directly above us, it wasn’t long before we were all clambering at the transom trying to get the hell out of the water as quickly as possible. The worst part was needing to make a safety stop half way up to decompress with the small amount of air we had left. We stopped at ten metres and again at five metres so I was sucking air by the time I surfaced.

  Of course, nobody admitted to being afraid, but there was a strange smell among us … and it wasn’t coming from me.

  During these months, I’d met a guy from Cornwall who also worked on the same project, managing the site security. He was ex-British military and his wife worked in a nearby hospital in Jeddah. He had a boat in the marina, so it wasn’t long before we teamed up and went fishing every Friday.

  They invited me to their compound every Thursday night, which was on a Swedish compound. Someone was always having a party there on a Thursday night, so it was a great place to be. The idea was that I stay the night so we could leave together early in the morning to take the boat out by seven o’clock. We bought squid for bait and sacks of ice on the way to preserve our catch.