He had turned to look at the noise, but he wasn’t moving. I think he was smiling. I don’t think he had seen the tribesman either shooting or being shot, although he knew something had happened, because he had turned to look downstream.
I saw him look at the sheikh, who was bent over, supported by Colin, who was now at his side and struggling to keep his balance against the weight of water. Maybe the sheikh had been shot. I don’t know.
Behind the boss I saw a wall of white and brown water come round the corner of the canyon and surge down the wadi towards him. I could see, rather than hear, Fred still screaming to him to get out. Then Fred, too, turned and started to scramble towards safety, up the bank.
The boss was still smiling, I think. I was some distance away by then, but you can tell sometimes from a person’s posture that they are smiling. He was facing away from the wall of water coming towards him. He must have heard it. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t. They say you can get very absorbed fishing. At any rate, I like to think-I am as sure as I can be-that as he lifted his rod to make another cast, he was very happy. He was far away from politics, far away from wars, from journalists, from MPs, from generals, from civil servants. He was in a river and there were salmon running past his feet, and with the next cast I am sure he believed he would catch a fish.
Then the surge hit him. A boiling torrent of brown water, mud, rocks, palm fronds raced down the wadi with a noise like a train, and in a moment Colin, the sheikh and the boss instantly vanished without trace. The wave then powered on and disappeared round the next corner into the canyons far below.
One second the boss was standing there; the next he was gone. And I never saw him again. Or the sheikh. Or Colin McPherson. They never found their bodies.
That was what happened when we launched the Yemen salmon project, and the salmon ran in the Wadi Aleyn.
32
Dr Alfred Jones:
From a scientific perspective, the Yemen salmon project was a complete success.
I knew it was a success from the minute I looked down and saw the salmon entering the water flowing down the wadi. A few days ago they had been thrashing about in a huge cage in a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland, now they were wriggling down a concrete chute from a concrete basin high in the mountains of the Yemen.
It did not matter to them. The salmon came wriggling down into the wadi, and a few simply went with the current and disappeared downstream. But most of them turned upstream, heading against the flow, not knowing where they might be going, only knowing that they had to head upriver until they found a place to spawn. Their instincts told them what to do, just as I had hoped they would.
Most of the fish were silver, but a few were already coloured, an indication that the hen fish were ready to spawn the thousands of eggs they carried, and the cock fish ready to inject their milt and so fertilise the eggs. My eyes filled with tears as I thought of it alclass="underline" here, at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, though thousands of miles from their home waters, the salmon were ready to do their duty.
As I watched their fins cutting through the water, I felt a sense of elation. And I remembered the sheikh’s words, that we would see a miracle, and I knew that was what I had just witnessed. I remembered Harriet telling me the sheikh would think the project had been a success if one single fish ran up the wadi. Now there were hundreds. One fresh fish was already netted and killed, inside my jacket. I had to somehow insert it onto the end of the prime minister’s line, to make sure he caught his fish.
Then I noticed the colour of the water changing, the sound of the river beginning to grow, the noise of the waters cascading down from the peaks far above becoming angrier and more threatening. The sky was darkening to a deep, inky black.
It was a plug. I should have anticipated it. Such things are not unknown on spate rivers, and that is essentially what the Wadi Aleyn is: a river that goes from almost dry to flash flood and back again in a few hours. Salmon running spate rivers learn to wait for the water. They smell the rain, they know a flood is coming, and then they surge upriver, meeting the torrent with impossible strength and courage, leaping the waves or hanging in the water at the sides of the river when the speed of the flow becomes too great even for them.
And in spate rivers sometimes you get a plug. The rain is too heavy to soak away into the ground. It runs straight off, and the run-off carries with it mud, dead trees, rocks, and if the debris should come to some constriction in the riverbed, then a temporary dam is formed. The water builds up behind the obstruction until the force is so great that the plug is breached, and then a wall of water goes surging through the breach and on down the river. You don’t want to be standing in the water when that happens.
And the rain was heavy. The summer rains in the Yemen are really just the tip of a vast system of monsoon rains which miss the rest of Arabia but brush the southern coast of Oman and the Yemen for a few weeks. In those few weeks the rain can fall with the force of a tropical storm, causing flash floods of just the sort we experienced that day in the Wadi Aleyn. I suppose I should have known, but I’m a fisheries scientist not a hydrologist, nor a meteorologist. Nevertheless, I still blame myself for not foreseeing it. Not one of our computer models predicted what happened.
I remember shouting at the top of my voice to the sheikh and the prime minister to get out, but the growing noise of the river and the hiss as the rain struck the surface of the water drowned out the sound of my voice. Colin saw the change in the river, saw the colour go from clear to brown and heard the menacing change in its song. He knew exactly what was happening but he still waded out into the river to try and save his master. It was calculated heroism. Someone should give him a medal. But too much happened that day, and Colin’s gallantry has been forgotten by most. But not by me.
I turned and shouted at Peter Maxwell to do something, but Peter’s face was white and strained with fear, and I don’t think he heard me. He started scrambling up the bank to get away from the river. The security men all knew that something was wrong, but they hadn’t worked out where the danger was. They thought it would come from the ridges above; they thought in terms of a human enemy, not a natural one. They were looking the wrong way.
Then there was a flash, and a shot was fired from somewhere. That distracted the security people even further. I heard afterwards that one of the sheikh’s bodyguards had been shot, but I never found out why. I didn’t see it. I was looking upriver and screaming at the prime minister to get out of the water.
Then I saw the wave come round the corner, about 300 metres away, and I thought we would all die. It was a surge about ten feet high, brown and white, coming towards us at the speed of an express train and making much the same sort of noise. In that moment I remember thinking, I hope the salmon don’t all get swept downstream, and then my own instincts took over and the next thing I remember was hanging on to a boulder at the top of the bank while the water tugged at my feet.
When the waters receded and most of the security people and the sheikh’s bodyguard had headed off downstream to see if they could find the bodies, I stood by the mouth of the channel feeding salmon into the wadi. I watched fish after fish enter the flow, turn as it smelt the water, and head upstream. I stood there without moving for a long time, and my heart was too full to speak. At first a few journalists and TV people came down and tried to get me to comment on what had just happened, but they weren’t interested in my salmon. They only wanted to talk about the accident and the prime minister. They weren’t interested either in what had happened to Colin or to the sheikh. I had nothing to say to them. After a while they went away, and an hour or two later I heard one of the Chinooks lift off, taking them all back to Sana’a to file their stories.