The Network

by Jason Elliot

  Above the coast I turn south and the lonely Red Sea port of Suakin passes under us. It’s an ancient place, abandoned by the Ottomans in the 1920s, now inhabited by a dwindling local population and crumbling steadily into the sea. A few minutes later I spot the airstrip and make a single low pass. There’s a solitary white jeep parked by a tin shed at the end of the runway, and beside it stands the driver, waving his arms slowly above his head. I think almost warmly of Halliday, who hasn’t had long to make the arrangements I’ve requested.

  It’s a dusty landing. I taxi down to the shed, turn and cut the engine. There’s a blissful silence. The driver runs forward to help us with our bags, and we bundle into the jeep and head for Suakin. At the ramshackle port we transfer to the boat he’s found for us. It’s an ageing Zodiac with powerful twin outboards, and I don’t ask where it comes from. Nor does our driver ask where we’re going. Some black identification numbers on the prow suggest a military provenance, so perhaps he’s got a cousin in the army. He runs over the controls with me and points out the several large jerrycans of water aboard, as well as a box of fruit which he indicates was his personal idea. I reward him appropriately and arrange when we’ll meet. In the meantime he’ll return to the aircraft and guard it in our absence.

  Not far away we see several fishermen selling fresh catches from their boats. One of them is hacking steaks off what looks like a small version of a tuna fish. He cuts two wedges of the dark flesh for us using a blackened machete, which he has to knock through the fish with a mallet. We stow it in the Zodiac with our things, I set the GPS to start acquiring, and the engines splutter into life.

  We motor out of the channel and into the open sea, bouncing across the water under the sun. It’s burningly hot, and I’m grateful when Jameela, who’s been eyeing me throughout all this with a mixture of suspicion and admiration, takes off her scarf and ties it over my head. It’s the first time I’ve seen her without it. She runs her fingers through her long dark hair as if a portion of her spirit has been released with it, leaning into the wind like a dog from the window of a car, and she’s loving it as I hoped she would.

  Fifteen minutes later the coastline behind us is a thin black line. But ahead, just where the GPS predicts, a dozen deserted islands have sprung out of the sea. Some are tiny and barren, others larger with thick bands of vegetation stretching along the bleach-white sand of their coastlines.

  ‘Choose your island,’ I say.

  She points her slender arm to a small sandy cove a few hundred yards distant, flanked by rocky entrance spurs, between which stretches a dark green canopy of trees. We haul the Zodiac onto the beach and take the extra water and bags to the treeline, where I fuss over an improvised camp. There’s no sound but the ticking of the cooling engines. I look up to see Jameela running to the water and plunging in, fully clothed.

  Then she races back to me and flings her arms around me.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ I hold her wet body against mine, savouring the scent of her skin for a few moments until she releases herself and rummages in her things to find her swimsuit.

  She changes under a towel and I struggle not to show any reaction as she throws it aside. She wears a cream two-piece swimsuit which I’m guessing she bought in Paris and which makes her skin seem all the darker. I keep forgetting she grew up in Paris. The headscarf she wears in the city sends out a protective signal that cools the physicality of encounters between the sexes. Out here she’s not wearing it and the signal has evaporated, and the shock of closeness makes me faintly nervous. I see her body silhouetted as she turns towards the water and adjusts the strap of her top. Her legs are long and graceful and my eye rests guiltily on the flare of her hips beneath her slender waist, and I am filled with longing.

  We walk to the beach with the fins and snorkels. For the next couple of hours, hardly aware of the time that is passing, we float on the water’s surface, gazing into the silent world in front of our masks. The water is spectacularly clear, and every fish we see is a strange and unexpected shape, and each one seems as bright and delicately coloured as a living rainbow. Then we walk along the sand together, picking at shells until she notices the redness of my shoulders and suggests we return to the shade above the shoreline.

  I collect some wood from under the canopy of trees, and when I’m out of sight of Jameela take the satphone from its waterproof case and send our exact location to Seethrough via the GPS function on the keypad. He’ll relay it to the buffoonish Halliday at the embassy in Khartoum so at least he’ll know where to find us if, as I fantasise, I get stuck on the island with Jameela. Then I make a small fire, wait for it to burn down, wrap the fish we’ve bought in thick green leaves and put it into the embers. The white wine I’ve procured from the regional security officer who doubles as barman at the Pickwick Club is slightly warm but hits the spot, and in the heat it makes us pleasantly drunk. It’s the first time I’ve seen Jameela drink wine. She allows me to feed her slices of mango, and we let our faces get very messy.

  She sees me look at my watch and asks when we have to leave. We need to fly before dark, I tell her. I can fly at night but I’d rather not.

  She looks pensive. ‘Let’s stay,’ she says. ‘Here on the beach. Under the stars.’

  I have, as it happens, considered this possibility, and brought two nylon hammocks with us for the purpose. She’s impressed, as I hoped she would be.

  I tie them between the trees, side by side a few yards apart.

  ‘Separate beds. I must be old-fashioned,’ I say.

  There’s a force of attraction between us that’s no longer a secret. It’s invaded my body and thoughts. I wonder how long we can preserve its innocence, which is a fragile thing that won’t survive if we both cross the line that we’re now drawing towards and from which it will be impossible to turn back. But we both know what intimacy is and the pain that comes with its dissolution, and perhaps it’s this that gives us the strength to approach the line more cautiously.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, but then she doesn’t make things easier by drawing her body against mine and resting her head on my shoulder, so that I can look down the muscles of her long back towards the swell of her hips.

  I build up the fire and we sit by it as the sun falls into the sea and the world turns to shadows. Jameela’s face gleams in the light of the flames and seems more beautiful to me than ever. When I add wood to the fire a shower of sparks rises and imprints itself among the stars overhead. They’re so bright, and there are so many more stars than are visible in England I can’t even make out the constellations I can see at home.

  We clamber into our hammocks. She’s close enough for me to hear the sound of her hand against her skin as she rubs mosquito repellent over her arms. We’re tired and happy.

  ‘I enjoy our friendship, Jameela,’ I say, half to myself.

  ‘Moi aussi,’ she answers from the edge of sleep.

  When I wake, Jameela’s not in her hammock and I have a sudden sense of panic until I catch sight of the splash of her fins. She’s already in the sea, snorkelling. We breakfast on mangoes, wash in the water, and then it’s time to pack. As I’m doing up the bags I imagine once or twice that I hear the sound of an engine, dismissing the thought each time because the islands are uninhabited and the water is too shallow for fishing. Then as we’re getting ready to put the bags in the Zodiac, we hear the distinct whine of an outboard motor, which gets suddenly louder as a boat rounds the mouth of the cove and heads for the very spot where we’ve dragged the Zodiac onto the beach.

  ‘Fishermen,’ says Jameela.

  They don’t look like fishermen to me. We watch them together in silence, and Jameela’s look of unease mirrors my own as they come to a stop a few yards away from the Zodiac and cut their engine.

  Without acknowledging us, they point out the Zodiac’s features to each other as they drift nearby. I wave, but the wave isn’t returned, which is unusual. I wave again, thinking that perhaps they haven’t
seen us. But we’re less than a hundred yards away and they must have. They lift their propeller from the water and one of them jumps overboard to pull the boat to the shore. The other, who is bare-chested, picks up what looks at first like a harpoon, but it isn’t.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispers Jameela, ‘he’s got a gun. They must be pirates.’

  ‘Keep very calm please,’ I tell her. My mind is going through a list of options which is not as long as I’d like it to be. I have no weapon. We are barefoot. There is no shelter and nowhere to run.

  They look the part. The one who pulls the boat ashore is a bulky man with cropped hair and deep black skin. His chin protrudes like the kind of fish that patrols the floor of the sea. The bare-chested one has wild-looking hair and seems to be giving the orders. The weapon is an AK-47 with a folding metal stock, a variant known in Russian as the Partisan. He barks something at us as he approaches but I can’t tell what language he’s speaking. Whatever he’s saying it’s not particularly friendly, and as he nears us he shifts his grip on the weapon so that his left hand moves under the stock as if he’s planning to use it. He’s lean, strong and young, which is not good from my point of view.

  ‘Speak English?’ I call out, to try and slow down the whole process.

  He’s asking a question which I can’t understand a word of, but it doesn’t sound like he’s inviting us back to his place.

  ‘He’s speaking Amharic with a weird accent. He wants the key to the boat,’ says Jameela in a shaky voice. ‘Give him the key.’

  She’s standing next to me and has wrapped a towel protectively around her waist, but she’s still a sight to behold and the effect is not missed on our visitors. The one with the weapon looks at her and says something to his partner, who advances towards Jameela. He tries to grab her wrist, which is still wet and allows her to break free, so he has another go and the same thing happens. On a third try he pins her arms against her body from behind and lifts her from the ground as she kicks frantically and uselessly against him.

  It’s obvious they want to take Jameela, and once they’ve got her, getting the key to the Zodiac isn’t going to be too difficult to achieve after a 7.62-millimetre round has passed through my head. But there’s something so improbable about the timing of their arrival and the fact that only Seethrough knows our exact location that I’m not too bothered. I’m impressed, in fact, with the thinking that’s gone into it, but I mustn’t let it show because I’ve got a part to play.

  ‘Tell your friend not to do that, please,’ I say to the one with the weapon. ‘It’s rude.’

  I take a step towards him because I need to see the position of the selector lever on the right side of the AK. And to put a little more space between him and his friend. The safety’s on, which gives me a slight but meaningful advantage. I raise my hands a little further, take another step towards him and now start babbling in English, which I’m hoping will make him think I’m telling him something important.

  He bares his teeth in a snarl as I near him and raises the line of the weapon so that it’s centred on me. The muzzle resembles a giant cannon, which gives me an unpleasant feeling, but his finger hasn’t moved to the safety yet. I hope Seethrough has built in some form of compensation for the men he’s sent, because they’re not only doing a very good job of pretending to be pirates, but what’s about to happen is going to hurt one of them a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.

  He raises the barrel of the AK to my chest and pokes it into me, barking another incomprehensible instruction. I raise my hands a little higher. It’s a textbook replay of the very same defensive drills I did with H all that way away in Herefordshire, which does indeed seem a very long way away.

  He pokes it into me again, stepping towards me now, and since all good and probably bad things come in threes, I wait for the third time. At the instant he gives another push with the weapon, I bring my left hand down hard and fast onto the barrel and turn my body to the left. He lurches forward and my right hand connects with his chin and drives it up and back, forcing him to try and regain his balance by stepping away from me. But my foot is there to meet his, and as he begins to tumble his left arm leaves the weapon by reflex in the attempt to break his fall. I yank it by the barrel and it passes almost miraculously into my hands. His efforts to scramble to his feet again are put to an abrupt end by the single round I fire into the sand just near his ear.

  There’s a scream of fright from Jameela, and then an immense shrieking fills the air as a cloud of birds erupts in a single swarm from the trees behind us. Jameela and her attacker are momentarily frozen in surprise. She breaks free from him, and in an impressive move whacks him squarely on the jaw. He’s about to retaliate, but seeing his friend cringing on the sand has a different idea and sprints for the trees. I fire two rounds by his feet and he gets the message.

  We need to leave. Jameela gathers up the bags as I cover the two men, make them take off their shoes just in case anyone feels like running anywhere, and direct them on their knees back to their own boat. I’d rather they didn’t go and fetch any of their friends, so I break off the top of the spark plug of their outboard with the butt of the AK. Having to paddle with their hands will slow them down and have the added advantage of keeping their minds off robbery and kidnap.

  Jameela finishes loading the boat and throws a look of contempt at the men.

  ‘They would have killed us,’ she says in a frightened voice. Then she shouts something at them in what I suppose is Amharic and probably a curse.

  ‘Want to shoot them? The sharks will be happy if you do.’ I offer Jameela the AK, guide her hand to the grip and the trigger, and point out the foresight for her to line up on her cowering targets.

  ‘They would have killed us,’ she repeats.

  ‘Women with guns.’ I shrug my shoulders at them as if the decision is out of my hands. ‘Scary, isn’t it?’

  They’re not laughing.

  We move out of the shallows and throttle up the engines. The two stranded men are stooping over their boat as we gain distance. Jameela sits next to me, gripping me in silence and looking back from time to time as we race across the water. At the halfway point I pass the AK to Jameela. I’d love to keep the weapon, but it would be hard to explain. She flings it into our foaming wake and returns to my side.

  The first moments of intimacy are never really equalled. She hasn’t tidied up the rose petals, and their perfume wraps itself over us as we fall onto the bed and submit to the momentum that feels as though it was set in motion the instant we first saw each other. A frontier rushes beneath us as if we are entering territory new to us both, and where before there has always been restraint, there is now abandon.

  Her skin is still salty and smells of the sea, like a mermaid who has miraculously survived the journey ashore. She laughs, weeps and laughs again, grips me repeatedly with unexpected force, then gives way again as if her body has returned to liquid and been reclaimed by the sea. I have never given myself so fully before, nor received so generously.

  I wake in the night with a shock, as if roused by a gunshot. The shots I fired on the beach have been carried into my dream. Somewhere a dog is barking. Jameela is asleep next to me like a baby, half-wrapped in a sheet. I go to the bathroom to drink from the tap and notice the pattern made by all the sand washed off our bodies in the shower. Then I retrieve the satellite phone and step onto the balcony, where the air smells of dust and jasmine. I prepare a coded sitrep for Seethrough and thank him for his part in the arrangements of the previous day. I’m not really expecting an immediate reply and I’m just sitting in the silence thinking of Jameela when I see the blinking light in the phone display that signals his reply: your reference ‘pirates’ not understood please confirm.

  And it’s only after about a minute of thinking this over that it really hits me.

  I see Jameela every day, and return to her home with her after she’s finished work. The hours of daylight are spent in anticipation of the hours of darkn
ess, when we can travel ever deeper into the territory of intimacy that has opened itself to us. I planned nothing of this when we first met. But now it has us in its grasp and we are powerless against it, and care nothing about where it will take us.

  The elements themselves seem to be conspiring in our favour. One afternoon Jameela calls to say she’s returning home early. I drive to her apartment to meet her, and we sit on her balcony, where the air smells so strongly of jasmine, and drink cold white wine. I notice that the sky seems darker than it usually is and wonder if a storm is coming in.

  ‘Not a storm,’ says Jameela, as if she knows something I don’t. ‘Come.’

  We climb to the roof by some narrow brick stairs and she points over the rooftops. Beyond the river to the west, rising out of the desert beyond Omdurman, is a sight I’ve never even imagined. A billowing wall of sand, a thousand feet high I’m guessing, is rolling towards the city. It stretches for what must be miles, an opaque, boiling, blood-orange wave, creeping visibly towards us. The scale of it is stupendous, like a biblical plague. The outline of the city seems puny against the advancing bulk of sand, and the sky grows darker as it nears as if under the command of an irritated god. I have no idea what will happen when it reaches us.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’

  ‘It’s a haboob.’ She smiles. ‘The desert’s way to clean itself. It’s beautiful.’

  It’s a magnificent reminder of the scale on which nature prefers to do things. We watch its course for a few minutes. Its beauty is inescapable. But as I look at it I feel more than anything a sense of foreboding, as if a kind of reckoning is about to unfold. It signifies only danger to me. Then I turn to Jameela and see her beauty and am reminded how often beauty and danger can be found close together, and the symmetry of the moment seems complete.