The Black Tide

by Hammond Innes

  Just after midday Ahmad Khan arrived, the jacket of his blue suit slung over his shoulder, his tie loosened. ‘There is no ship,’ he said in his rather high lilting voice. He was standing in the middle of the room, his dark eyes watching me closely. ‘Muscat report their aircraft have overflown all the khawrs of the Musandam Peninsula. There is no tanker there.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Also, Gwadar report no body being washed into the coast.’

  ‘Was there any sign of the man who jumped overboard?’ I asked.

  ‘No, nothing. And no sign of the ship.’

  ‘I told you they would have sailed the morning after we escaped. Have they made a search along the tanker route?’

  ‘Oman say they are doing it now. I have told my office to let me know here as soon as we receive a report.’ He threw his jacket on to the nearest bed, picked up the phone and ordered coffee. ‘You want any coffee?’

  I shook my head. Just over two days at full speed, the ship could be nine hundred, a thousand miles from the Straits, clear of the Oman Gulf, and well out into the Indian Ocean – a hell of a lot of sea to search. ‘What about other ships? Have they been alerted?’

  ‘You ask Mr Brown that. I have no information.’

  His coffee came, and when the waiter had gone he said, ‘You don’t wish to amend your statement at all?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Okay.’ And after that he sat there drinking his coffee in silence. Time passed as I thought about the route the tanker would have taken, and wondered why he was here. It was just on twelve-thirty that the phone rang. It was Brown and after a moment he handed it to me. All shipping had been alerted the previous night. So far nothing had been reported. ‘I’ve just been talking to the Consul. I’m afraid they’re a bit sceptical.’

  ‘Do you mean they don’t believe me?’

  ‘No, why should they? I don’t think anyone’s going to believe you unless the tanker actually materializes.’

  ‘Do you?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘I might if it wasn’t for your story about Choffel. Let’s wait, shall we? If the body turns up, or we get a sighting of that tanker …’ His voice drifted away apologetically. ‘Anyway, how are you feeling now – rested?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

  ‘Good, good.’ There was a pause while he searched around for something else to say. ‘Glad you’re all right. Well, if I hear anything I’ll give you a ring.’ There was a click and he was gone.

  The conversation left me feeling lonely and disconsolate. If he didn’t believe me, the little Sindhi intelligence man sipping noisily at his coffee certainly would not. Hussain arranged for lunch to be brought up from the café below, a spiced rissole, chilli hot, with slices of white bread and some tinned fruit. Ahmad Khan hardly spoke and I was speculating what was going to happen to me when it was realized the tanker had vanished. Obviously, once outside the Gulf of Oman, it would be steering well clear of the shipping lanes. Clouds were building in the white glare above the rooftops and the kites were wheeling lower.

  Suddenly the phone rang. It was Ahmad Khan’s office. Muscat had reported both reconnaissance planes back at base. They had been in the air over 3½ hours and had covered virtually the whole of the Gulf from the Straits right down to Ras al Had, south-east of Muscat, and had also flown 300 miles into the Arabian Sea. Of all the tankers they had sighted only five or six had approximated to the size of the Aurora B, and none of those had answered to the description I had given. Also, most of the ships sighted had been contacted by radio and none had reported seeing anything resembling the Aurora B. All the ships sighted had been in the normal shipping lanes. They had seen nothing outside these lanes and the search had now been called off. The same negative report had been made by seaborne helicopters searching the Musandam Peninsula and the foothills of the Jebel al Harim. That search had also been called off.

  He put the phone down and picked up his jacket. ‘I am instructed to escort you to the Airport and see that you leave on the next flight to the UK. Please, you will now get ready.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t think it matters that you know. Your allegations have been discussed in the highest quarters. They are regarded as very sensitive. Accordingly your Consul has been informed that you are persona non grata in this country. You understand?’

  I nodded. I felt suddenly as though I had some contagious disease, everybody distancing themselves from me. But at least I was being allowed to leave.

  ‘You come now please.’ Ahmad Khan had his jacket slung over his shoulder and was standing waiting for me. I had nothing, only the shirt and trousers in which I had arrived. ‘I’ll need a sweater, something warm. It’s winter in London.’

  But all he said was, ‘That is for your Consul. Come please.’ Hussain was standing with the door open. We went back down the cement corridors, the room bearer following us a little forlornly. We left him at the lift muttering to himself. A driver was waiting for us at the reception desk, a big, serious-looking man with a black moustache and a sort of turban, who led us out to an official car. We went first to the Abdullah Haroon Road Bazaar, where I had passport photos taken, and after that we drove out on the Khayaban-i-Iobal road to the British Consulate, which was close to the Clifton seaside resort. I had been there once before. It was up a long drive through a well-tended estate and gardens.

  I asked to see the Consul himself, but he, too, was distancing himself from the whole affair. He wasn’t available and I had to be content with a grey-haired, harassed-looking Pakistani, who issued me with temporary papers and then, by raiding some emergency stores, produced a pair of patched grey flannel trousers and a blue seaman’s jersey, socks and a pair of boots.

  It was in this peculiar rig that thirteen hours later I arrived at Heathrow. Ahmad Khan had stayed with me until I was actually on the plane. In fact, he saw me to my seat, accompanied by the senior steward. It was a PIA aircraft full of emigrants going to join relatives in Britain, a bedlam of a journey with the toilets awash and one or two children who had never seen a flush lavatory before in their lives. I don’t know what the chief steward was told about me, but he and the stewardess kept a very careful watch over me with the result that I had excellent service, my every want attended to immediately.

  Brown had not seen fit to see me off and I had been refused permission to telephone. However, I was told he had been informed of my time of departure and flight number, and I presumed he would have passed this on to Saltley so that he would know my ETA at Heathrow. But there was nobody there to meet me and no message. I was delayed only a few moments at Immigration and then I was through and just one of the great flood of humanity that washes through London Airport. There is nothing more depressing than to be on your own in one of the terminals, all of London before you and nobody expecting you, no plans. The time was 08.27 and it was Sunday. Also it was blowing hard from the north-west and raining, the temperature only a little above freezing – a typical late January day. I changed my salt-stiffened franc notes and Emirate currency, got myself a coffee and sat over it, smoking a duty-free cigarette and thinking over all that had happened since I had left for Nantes ten days ago. No good ringing Forthright’s, the office would be closed and I hadn’t Saltley’s home number.

  In the end I took the tube to Stepney Green and just over an hour later I was back in the same basement room, lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette with the legs of passers-by parading across the top of the grime-streaked window. I was looking at the typescript of my book again. ‘You left it here,’ Mrs Steinway had said to me when she brought it down from her room on the ground floor back. ‘The girl found it lying on the floor beneath the bed after you’d gone.’ From flipping idly through the pages I began to read, then I became engrossed, all our life together and Balkaer, Cornwall, the birds – it all flooded back, the bare little basement room filled with the surge of the Atlantic breaking against the
cliffs, the cry of seabirds and Karen’s voice. There was a strange peacefulness in the words I had written, a sense of being close to the basics of life. In this moment, in retrospect, it seemed like a dream existence and I was near to tears as the simplicity and richness of our lives was unfolded, so vividly that I could hardly believe the words were my own. And at times I found myself thinking of Choffel, those bare hills and the simplicity of his boyhood, Cornish cliffs and Welsh hills, the same thread and at the end the two of us coming together on that dhow.

  Next day I phoned Forthright’s, but Saltley’s secretary said he would be at the Law Courts all morning. He was expecting me, however, and she said I could see him in the late afternoon, around four if that was convenient. I was back in the world of marine solicitors, insurance and missing tankers.

  3

  ‘Yes, but what’s the motive?’ I was sitting facing Saltley across his desk and when I told him I didn’t know, he said it was a pity I hadn’t stayed on board instead of jumping on to the dhow just because I was determined to destroy Choffel. ‘If you’d stayed, then you’d have discovered their destination, and sooner or later you would have had an opportunity to get a message out by radio.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘There are always opportunities.’ And when I pointed out that at least he now knew the tanker was still afloat, which was more than he could have expected when he employed me, he said, ‘I appreciate that, Rodin, but I’ve only got your word for it.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ My voice trembled on the verge of anger.

  ‘Oh, I believe you. You couldn’t have made it up, not all the people and the astonishing sight of a tanker against cliffs at the head of that inlet. But the ship isn’t there any longer. To get a claim for millions of dollars set aside we’ve got to be able to prove the Aurora B is still afloat.’

  ‘And my word isn’t good enough?’

  ‘Not in law. Now if Choffel were still alive …’ He was leaning on his desk, his hands locked together on top of the thick file his secretary had left with him. ‘Is there anything else he told you that’s relevant? Anything at all? You were two days on that dhow together.’

  ‘He was wounded and a lot of the time he was unconscious, or nearly so.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ But then he began to take me through every exchange of words I had had with the man. I found it very difficult to recall his exact words, particularly when he had been rambling on about his boyhood and his life up there in the bare Welsh hills, and all the time those blue eyes staring at me unblinking. Finally Saltley asked me why I thought he had seized the dhow. ‘Surely it wasn’t just to get away from you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you really going to kill him?’

  ‘Possibly. I can’t be sure, can I?’

  ‘You said his daughter had told him, in that letter of hers, that you were going to kill him. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what he said.’

  He was silent for a long time, thinking. ‘If I put you in court, as a witness, they’d dig that out of you right away. They’d say you were mentally unhinged at the time, that you weren’t responsible for your actions, and that you now don’t know what is true and what is the product of your imagination.’

  ‘They’ll know soon enough,’ I told him angrily. ‘In a few weeks from now the Aurora B will appear in some port or other and Sadeq will carry out his mission. They’ll know then all right.’

  He nodded. ‘And Choffel gave no hint to you at any time what that mission might be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or the destination?’

  ‘I tell you, no.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘About the destination?’

  ‘Yes. Did you specifically ask him what it was?’

  ‘I think so,’ I murmured, staring at him and trying to remember, feeling as though I were already in the witness box and he was cross-examining me. ‘I think it was during that first night at sea. We were through the Straits then and into the Oman Gulf and he’d somehow dragged himself up to the poop to tell me the engine needed oil. He started talking then, about the ships he’d been in, the Stella Rosa and the engineer whose name he’d taken. I asked him about the Aurora B and the other ship, and what they were going to do with the oil, where they were going to spill it. It had to be something like that and I thought it was probably a European port, so I asked him where. I remember I kept on asking him where and shaking him, trying to get it out of him.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, I was too rough with him. He was screaming with pain, his mind confused. He said something about salvage, at least that’s what I thought he said. It didn’t make sense unless he was harking back to the first ship he destroyed, the Lavandou, which was supposed to have sunk in deep water but drifted on to a reef instead.’

  ‘Salvage.’ Saltley repeated the word, staring past me into space. ‘No, I agree. It doesn’t make sense. Do you think he knew what the destination was?’

  But I couldn’t answer that, and though he kept on at me, probing in that soft voice, the blue eyes fixed on mine in that disconcerting stare, it wasn’t any good. ‘Oh well,’ he said finally, ‘we’ll just have to accept that he hadn’t been told the ship’s destination.’ He relaxed then, that crooked mouth of his breaking into a smile that made him suddenly human. ‘Sorry. I’ve been pressing you rather hard.’ He took his hands from the file and opened it, but without looking down, his mind elsewhere. Finally he said almost briskly, ‘If we accept your story as correct, then there are certain assumptions that can be made. First, the Aurora B is afloat with a full cargo of oil. Second, since the Omani air search has failed to sight her, she has sailed from the inlet where she has been hiding and is at sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The Pakistan airforce also flew a search. Did you know that?’

  I shook my head and he tapped the file. ‘A report came in yesterday. Search abandoned, no sighting. Now we come to the main assumption.’ He hesitated. ‘Not so much an assumption as a pure guess, I’m afraid. The Aurora B, you think, is headed for a European port, which means she will pass south of the Cape and head up the Atlantic coast of Africa. We will say, for the purpose of our assumptions, that the Howdo Stranger is well ahead of her – has, in fact, passed the Cape into the Atlantic. Is that your reading of the situation?’

  ‘It could be anywhere,’ I said guardedly. The man was a lawyer and I wasn’t going to commit myself.

  He smiled. ‘The first hi-jack was bungled. That’s your theory, isn’t it? The evidence being the damaged radio room and the crew imprisoned in the chain locker. Incidentally, there’s no report of that man who jumped overboard being found, so we’ll have to presume that he’s dead. They then hi-jacked a second tanker and the operation is successful. They now have two tankers. One is despatched on its mission. The other is to follow when it is crewed-up with what one might call Baldwick’s mercenaries. And since the second one has now sailed it seems obvious that the plan is for a joint operation. That means a rendezvous. You agree?’

  I nodded. ‘That’s what I was trying to get out of Choffel.’

  ‘You said it was the destination you were trying to get out of him – the target in other words.’

  ‘That and where the two ships were going to meet.’

  ‘And he said something about salvage.’

  ‘I think that’s what he said. But he was confused and in pain. I can’t be certain. I was very tired.’

  ‘Of course.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he said, ‘That’s it then. They’ll meet up somewhere and then they’ll act in concert, the two of them together.’ He leaned back and stretched his arms, yawning to relieve the tension of the half hour he had spent taking me step-by-step through my story. ‘We don’t know where they’ll meet. We don’t know the target or what the motive is. And unless the ships are sighted, or alternatively that man is found alive on the Musandam Peninsula, there’s absolutely nothing
to substantiate your quite extra-ordinary story – and I use the word there in its original and exact meaning.’ He took a slip of paper from the open file and handed it to me. ‘That was posted in the Room at Lloyd’s yesterday. The Times and the Telegraph both carried it this morning on their foreign news pages.’

  The slip was a copy of a Reuters report from Muscat referring to rumours emanating from Pakistan that a Russian tanker was concealed on the Omani coast south of the Hormuz Straits. It stated that the airforce, having carried out a thorough search of the coast and of the Arabian Sea adjacent to Oman, had proved the rumours to be quite unfounded.

  ‘And this came in this morning.’ He handed me another Reuters message datelined Karachi. This referred to me by name as the source of the rumour – a shipwrecked Englishman Trevor Rodin has been repatriated, his story of a tanker concealed in an inlet on the Omani side of the Gulf having been proved incorrect. It is considered possible that Rodin may have had political motives and that his story was intended to damage the friendly relations existing between Pakistan and Oman, and also other countries. ‘I think you may find yourself the focus of a certain amount of official attention,’ he added as I handed it back to him. ‘The whole area is very sensitive.’

  Saltley’s warning proved only too accurate. The following day, when I returned from buying some clothes after opening an account at the local bank and paying in the cheque he had given me, Mrs Steinway informed me the police had been asking for me. ‘Haven’t done anything wrong, have you, luv?’ She was a real East-ender, and though she said it jokingly, her eyes watched me suspiciously. ‘Cos if you have, you don’t stay here, you understand?’

  They had asked when I would be back, so that I was not surprised to have a visit from a plain clothes officer. I think he was Special Branch. He was quite young, one of those shut-faced men who seem to rise quickly in certain branches of the Establishment. He wasn’t interested in what I could tell him about the hidden tanker or about Choffel, it was the political implications that concerned him, his questions based on the assumption that the whole story was a concoction of lies invented to cause trouble. He asked me what my political affiliations were, whether I was a communist. He had checked with the Passport Office that I was the holder of a British passport, but was I a British resident? Was there anybody who knew me well enough to vouch for me? He was a little more relaxed after I had told him I owned a cottage on the cliffs near Land’s End and that my wife had died in the Petros Jupiter explosion. He remembered that and he treated me more like a human being. But he was still suspicious, taking notes of names and addresses and finally leaving with the words, ‘We’ll check it all out and I’ve no doubt we’ll want to have another talk with you when we’ve completed our enquiries. Meanwhile, you will please notify the police if you change your address or plan to leave the country, and that includes shipping as an officer on board a UK ship. Is that understood?’ And he gave me the address of the local police station and the number to ring. ‘Just so we know where to find you.’