As we took off, the smallest knot of tension began to form itself in the base of my stomach. I’m used to helicopters, so that wasn’t it. I remembered, in a brief flash of something I imagined was deja vu, a dream I had once had about the boss and me standing in a wadi. The dry heat was running like flames across our skin. He had pointed upstream and said something. I couldn’t remember what he had said to me or whether I had really ever had such a dream. It was probably jet lag. I shook my head and concentrated on the immediate situation.
We sat there talking, laughing and joking with the security people in the back, and pointing out the grey and white tower houses and mosques of Sana’a, as they receded into the distance. Then we were approaching the mountains, and everyone fell silent as we approached the enormous walls of rock. We flew over mountain ridges, above great canyons a thousand feet deep, through cloud and mist that caught upon the peaks. The sky was grey, and cloud was boiling up in the south. It was pretty boring scenery, but the weather looked right.
‘Look at all those clouds,’ I said to the boss. ‘The water in the wadis will be rising with all this rain coming in.’
The water in the wadis will be rising-hadn’t those words been in my dream?
I was right. When we looked below us, we could see the occasional thread of white where water was running through the wadis; and where the flat gravel plains met the foothills of the mountains, pools of lying water had formed here and there.
I was so excited. This was so different to a normal trip. There were no men in grey suits waiting at the end of it, no tough negotiations, no speeches to be made. Instead of men in suits, there would be the sheikh and those great-looking guys who had made a guard of honour for me when I visited Glen Tulloch. It would just be an hour or two of fun, pure and simple. Jay would press a button to open the sluice gates and let the salmon run down the channels that lead into the wadi. Then he would go and stand in the river with his fishing rod and cast away for the benefit of the photographers. Fred had promised me the boss would catch a fish, and that would be it. There would be a short speech, followed by pictures of Jay standing in the river in his waders, with his fishing rod in one hand and a salmon in the other. I could picture how it would look on the front pages the next day. Mission accomplished. A great trip, a day in the desert, and well on the way to swinging several million voters across to our side.
Then we started to lose height, and the helicopter dropped down between the rock walls of the wadi towards a flat patch of ground and what looked like a giant construction site.
As the blades stopped turning we ducked out of the helicopter and walked through the swirling dust to a wooden platform. I could make out the sheikh, Fred Jones and a group of men in hard hats, presumably the site engineers. Beyond them stood a couple of dozen or so of the sheikh’s people in white robes and emerald-green turbans, some armed with rifles, others empty-handed.
Behind the platform, curving out from the side of the mountain, were the walls of three huge concrete basins: the holding tanks. For a moment I was truly awestruck by the enormity of this construction project. Listening to Fred’s presentations back in Downing Street I had thought, it’s like building another primary school or another supermarket. I simply hadn’t grasped what an enormous undertaking it was. This was more like the Aswan Dam, or the Pyramids. I hoped the photographers would capture the drama of the site.
In the centre of each basin wall was a pair of iron doors connected by a concrete channel to the wadi bed. Looking across to the wadi, I saw a wide, shallow river running down it. The sun had emerged for a moment from behind white towers of cloud and the sunlight glistened on many streams winding around islands of gravel or cascading over boulders. The fronds of green palms waved in a rising wind on the far bank. Behind us mountains rose, familiar as something once seen in a dream, of a staggering savagery and beauty, into an overcast sky.
I said to the boss, ‘Look at that! The river looks perfect. This is going to work!’
The boss looked at me in surprise. Of course it was going to work, the look said; you wouldn’t have dragged me 6000 miles for something that didn’t work, would you, Peter? Not if you wanted to stay in the job you like so much for another day. Before I could explain, we were at the platform, shaking hands again, smiling, joking, talking. Behind us I heard the second Chinook, with the press on board, coming in to land.
Of course the boss expected it to work. He had no conception of how much work had gone into the project, how much effort I had put into making sure it happened against all obstacles, how I had supported Fred Jones and the sheikh. I looked around me while the boss and the sheikh started shaking hands all over again for the benefit of the journos and the TV cameras, and I heard Fred at my side say, ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ I said, with real enthusiasm. ‘I had no idea of the scale of all of this.’ I gestured to the concrete walls of the holding basins and the channels waiting for the gates to be opened and the salmon to come tumbling and leaping out. ‘Our project is going to be a huge success, Fred.’ I saw he was holding a landing net.
‘We hope so,’ he said, and gave me a smile of real friendliness. For a moment I found myself liking the guy. I’d never given him much thought before, not as a person, I mean. ‘Come and look at the salmon,’ he said. The boss and the sheikh, the boss’s security people and some of the press were making their way up a ramp to the edge of a holding basin. The sheikh’s men mostly held back. I noticed again that a few of them held rifles and remembered where we were-in the heart of the Yemen, not visiting a new hospital in Dulwich. But, I thought, the Yemen must be safe now, mustn’t it? The security people would never have let the boss come if it hadn’t been. I mean, there had been that strange story about al-Qaeda attempting to murder the sheikh in Scotland, but we had all discounted that as a piece invented by some Scottish newspaper.
We stood at the top of the ramp and looked over the edge of the wall. The basin was full of silver salmon, darting here and there or else lying motionless in the shaded parts of the water. At intervals around the edge of the basin were machines that looked a bit like huge outboard motors, churning and aerating the water.
‘How are they doing?’ I asked Fred.
‘We’ve had a few deaths from stress, but whether that was from the heat or the journey I’m not really sure. Anyway, the number of deaths is well within our projections, and the temperature of the water in here is quite stable.’
I stared at the fish, quite fascinated. Then I looked around me at the towering mountains, the slopes of sand and gravel below us, the palm trees and the Yemeni tribesmen standing guard on the top of rocks and on the nearer ridges.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said. ‘If I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes…’
‘You see,’ said Fred, ‘the sheikh was right. He has made us all believe. And now we are ready to open the sluice gates, and the miracle will begin.’
‘Will it?’ I asked him. I could see Fred was tense, but I think it was anticipation and not doubt.