The Black Tide

CHAPTER ONE

It was a six and a half hour flight from Paris to Dubai and nothing to do but sit there, thinking about my meeting with Choffel, what I was going to do. Up till then I hadn’t given much thought to the practicalities. I had never owned a gun, never even fired one. I had no weapon with me of any sort, and though I had seen death out in the Hindu Kush when I was a kid, it was death through cold or disease or lack of food. Once, in Basra, I had watched from a hotel balcony as an armoured car and some riot police gunned down a handful of youths. That was before the Iraqi-Iranian war, a protest by Shia sect students and again I was only a spectator. I’d never killed anyone myself. Even the little Baluchi boy, whose doll-like features haunted me, had been thrown into the Creek by the others. I had taken no part in it.

Now, as the big jet whispered through the sky at 37,000 feet, my mind was on Dubai, and the thought that tomorrow, or the next day, or when we boarded the tanker, I could be confronted with Choffel caused my skin to prickle and perspiration to break out all over my body. I pictured his face when we met, how he would react, and the excitement of it shook me. So vivid was the picture my imagination produced that, sitting there, with the seat at full recline and a blanket round my waist, the lights dimmed and all the rest of the passengers fast asleep, the blood drummed in my ears, fantasies of killing flickering through my brain so that suddenly I had an overwhelming orgasmic sense of power. A knife. It would have to be a knife. One of those big silver-hiked, curved-bladed kanjar knives the Bedu wore tucked into the belts of their flowing robes. Getting hold of a knife like that wouldn’t be difficult, not in Dubai, where Axab merchants along the waterfront sold anything from gold and opium to slave girls, and a pistol would be equally available. Still, a knife would be better. But then what did I do? And where would I find him? At one of the hotels in Dubai or holed up in some desert hideout? He could be in one of the neighbouring sheikdoms — Abu Dhabi or Sharjah, or at some Bedu house in the El Ain oasis. And the tanker, where would that be berthed? The only place Baldwick had mentioned was Dubai. If it was in Port Rashid at the entrance to the Creek, then Choffel could already be on board. I pictured myself going up the gangway, being taken to my cabin, then joining the other officers in the mess-room and Henri Choffel standing there, his hand held out in greeting, not knowing who I was. What did I do then — wait until the end of the voyage? A full shipload of Gulf crude, that would mean Europe most likely — down Africa, round the Cape and up almost the full length of the Atlantic. Five weeks at least, presuming the evaporators were in good condition and the boiler didn’t start cutting out, five weeks during which I would be meeting Choffel daily, in the mess-room at the evening pour-out, at mealtimes in the saloon.

The thought appalled me, remembering what had happened, thinking of Karen. Even now, with Balkaer and the Cornish cliffs far behind, I could still feel the soft smoothness of her skin, the touch of her as she lay in my arms — and just remembering the feel of her I was aroused. She had always had that ability, to rouse me instantly, by a touch, often just by a look, or the way she laughed. And then, just when we had come to Balkaer and she was doing a lot of heavy carrying, discovering she was pregnant. I could see her face. It was so clear in my mind it seemed framed in the perspex window against the star-bright night, her eyes alight with happiness and that big mouth of hers bubbling with excitement as she came out of the back room the doctor used as a surgery on his weekly visits to Sennen. ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she’d cried and flung her arms round my neck, right there in front of the doctor’s patients.

And then six months later she’d lost it. The pains had started at dusk, quite suddenly. One moment she was sitting in that junk chair of hers, the next she was writhing on the floor, screaming. It had been a black, windy night, rain driving in off the sea in sheets. The Kerrisons’ telephone line was down and I had had to run all the way to the Cunnacks’ farm, which was over the hill. God, what a night that had been! So much of it waiting, helpless, first for the doctor, then for the ambulance, with Karen clutching at us, her face screwed up in agony, her hair dank with sweat. And in the dawn, a wild wet dawn, carrying her up the hill to the ambulance.

By then she had miscarried and was quiet, sunk in a coma of exhaustion. She never told me what exactly went wrong, or what they did to her in the hospital in Penzance, only that she would never be able to have another child. It was then that she began to develop that deep emotional feeling for the wildlife around us, the birds in particular, and also for the book I was struggling to write.

I was thinking of her off and on all through that long night, and of Choffel, excitement, love and hatred all mixed up, until at last, exhausted and so utterly drained I could have slept for a week. The engine note changed and we began the long run down the diamond-studded sky to our destination. Soon there was movement in the body of the aircraft, then the lights were turned on full and the defense de fumer sign lit up. Blinds were raised and through the porthand windows the first pale orange glow of dawn showed the Gulf horizon in silhouette, and beyond it, just visible, the pale snow tops of the Iranian mountains. To starboard there was nothing, only the shadowy brown darkness of the desert stretching away in limitless monotony to the great wastes of the Rub al Khali — the Empty Quarter.

It was full daylight by the time we landed, but the sun not yet risen and the air still pleasantly cool as we crossed the tarmac to the terminal building. The Arabs who had looked so incongruous at Charles de Gaulle Airport in their flowing robes, with the black agal of the Bedu encircling their white kayfftah headgear, now blended into the desert sandscape and it was the Europeans in their crumpled suits who looked out of place. Varsac, who had hardly spoken during the flight, became suddenly talkative as we approached the immigration desk, and when he handed over his passport, I noticed his hand was trembling. The immigration officer glanced up from the passport, staring at him curiously. ‘Vous etes francais.’ It was a statement, the dark eyes in the dark face lighting up. He turned to me. ‘Et vous, monsieur?’

‘English,’ I said.

He took my passport and stamped it almost perfunctorily, talking all the time to Varsac in French. He was a Pakistani, proud of speaking French as well as English, and it seemed an age before he let us through with a flash of white teeth and a murmured ‘Have a good time.’

‘What were you worried about?’ I asked.

Varsac shook his head, still nervous, his face longer and sadder-looking than ever. ‘Rien. I am afraid they might have some records, that is all.’ He shrugged. ‘You can nevair be sure, eh?’

‘Records of what?’ I asked him.

He hesitated, then said, ‘It is in the Gulf, an old cargo sheep from Bombay to Khorramshahr. It is

August and we are lying with no engines, the sheep so hot the metal is blistering our hands. No morphia. Nothing.’ There was a long pause. ‘He is broken — crushed in the main drive. An engineer. Finally — I shoot him.’

I stared at him. ‘You mean a man, you killed him?’

‘He was my friend.’ He gave a half-shrug. ‘What else? And such a nice boy, from Indo-Chine.’ He wouldn’t say anything more, only that it was a long time ago and he had had to jump a big dhow bound for Muscat. The baggage appeared, and when we were through Customs we were met by a pock-marked Libyan in a smart new suit who drove us into town through dusty, crowded streets, to a hotel just back of the Creek.

It was five years since I’d been in Dubai, yet now it seemed but a few weeks, the smell of the place just the same, a compound of spices, charcoal fires, sweat, putrefaction and desert — the dust of ages everywhere, the dust of old mud stucco crumbling into decay, of desert sands swirling against the concrete breakwaters of high-rise blocks, the scuff of countless human feet. I removed my tie and put it in my pocket. The sun was already throwing deep shadows and it was getting hot.

Deeper into the town I saw how quickly oil had made its mark, the skyline altered and new buildings everywhere. The Persian wind-towers, those dainty filigree turrets that were the earliest form of air-conditioning, tunnelling the sea breezes down into the rooms below — they were all gone now. They had been such a feature of the place when I had first come here with my mother, and the business section of the Creek had been crowded then with great merchant houses, ornate stucco walls that kept the world at bay, the secret inner courtyards inviolate. Now banking houses and company offices paraded their wealth in a facade of marble and glass.

So much had changed since those faraway days before the oil-tide reached Dubai. But not the crowd. The crowd was still as thick, still as cosmopolitan, a constant flow of movement, with only the Bedu Arabs motionless in the cafes waiting for the metallic Tannoy voice on the minaret of the nearby mosque to call them to prayer. And the Creek itself, that was still the same, except that even more of the dhows had converted entirely to power, hardly a mast to be seen. But there were just as many of them rafted against the wharfs, a jumble of sambuks, booms and jalibuts loading tramp ship goods from all over the world for distribution through the Gulf, most of them still with the traditional thunderbox built out over the side like a small pulpit.

When we reached the hotel, the Libyan, whose name was Mustafa, gave us his card, which was gold-embossed with an address in one of the back alleys near the suk, also the name of a nearby store where we would be provided with lightweight trousers and sleeveless shirts. We would be at the hotel for at least two days, he said — until LB arrived. No, he didn’t know the name of the tanker, or where it was berthed.

He was a travel agent. He knew nothing about ships. Anything we spent in the hotel would be paid for, food, drinks, everything, but if there was something special required we could contact him. The dark eyes stared at us coldly and I wondered what a Libyan was doing running a travel agency in Dubai. He left us with the information that two of our ship’s officers were already billeted in the hotel and another would arrive tomorrow. Choffel was not among the names he mentioned.

After checking in, I went straight to the store. It was a cheap place, if anything could be called cheap in Dubai, the trousers and shirts poor quality cotton and not very well cut. But at least they were cool, for by the time I had had a shower the sun, beating on to the balcony of my room, was very hot. I went down to the desk again and had them check through the names of all the guests in their hotel. The place was a microcosm of modern Dubai, business men from Japan, Germany, France, Holland, Britain, anywhere that produced the machines and infrastructure the Gulf exchanged for its oil. There were even two Chinese and a little group from Byelorussia, all of them with briefcases brimful of specifications and optimism. There were oilmen, too, and air crews staying the night, as well as men like ourselves, officers from coasters in the Creek and ships in Port Rashid, all vocal testimony to the fact that Dubai remained the mercantile centre of the Gulf, the entrepot for the United Arab Emirates.

But there was no Choffel, no Speridion, not even anyone with a name that looked as though it might be Welsh. Something I did discover, however — there had been half a dozen guests booked in by Mustafa’s agency the previous week and they had left three days ago, not in taxis, but in Land Rovers. Again, Choffel had not been one of them. Before that there was no record of any of Mustafa’s clients having stayed at the hotel, though back in October he had booked accommodation and then cancelled it. The receptionist remembered that because the hotel had been fully booked and the last minute cancellation of four rooms had upset the management.

I walked down to the Creek then, turning left towards the bridge and found a place where I could sit in the sun with a coffee and a glass of water and watch the world go by. There was a coaster coming in from the Gulf flying the Iranian flag, lighters and launches and small boats bobbing in its wake, the whole waterborne concourse a pageant of movement with a big ocean-going dhow, a boom by the look of it, though it was hard to tell as it lay like a barge right in front of the coaster’s bows, its engine presumably broken down. Noise and movement and colour, every type of dress, every coloured suit, the smell of dust and spices, and the bloated carcase of a goat floating slowly past with its legs stiff in the air like the legs of a chair. I finished my coffee and closed my eyes, dozing in the warmth of the sun. The unhurried tempo of the desert was all about me, men walking hand-in-hand or squatting motionless, the leisurely, endless haggling over price at every shop and stall in sight. Time stood still, the Muslim world of Arabia flowing round me, familiar and relaxing. It is an atmosphere in which fatalism thrives so that, dozing in the sun, I was able to forget my worries about the future. I was tired of course. But it was more than that. It was in my blood, the feeling that I was just a straw in the stream of life and everything the will of God. Insh’Allah! And so I didn’t concern myself very much about the reaction of Baldwick and his friends if they were to discover I was visiting the Lloyd’s agent and GODCO. My only problem, it seemed to me at the time, was which of them I should visit first, or whether to go at all. It was so much easier to sit there in the sun, but I did need to check those crew details with the oil company’s marine superintendent.

In the end, after cashing a traveller’s cheque at one of the banks, I went to the GODCO building first, largely because it was there in front of me, a towering new block dominating the downstream bend of the Creek. After the noisy, saffron-scented heat of the waterfront, the cloistered air-conditioning of the interior hit me like a refrigerator. The marine superintendent’s offices were on the fifth floor with a view seaward to a litter of cranes, masts and funnels that was the Port Rashid skyline. Captain Roger Perrin, the name Saltley had given me, was the man in charge of the whole of the Company’s fleet, and when I was finally shown into his office, he said curtly, ‘Why didn’t you phone? I’d have had everything ready for you then.’ He was bearded, with pale cold eyes and a presence that I suspected had been carefully cultivated in the years he had been moving up the Company’s marine ladder. He waved me to the chair opposite him where the hard light pouring through the plastic louvres of the Venetian blinds shone straight on my face. ‘Well, why are you here? What do the solicitor people want to know that I haven’t already told them?’ And he added, ‘I’m responsible for Casualty Coordination, but I tell you now, in this Company we don’t expect casualties. And in the case of these two tankers there’s nothing to co-ordinate. They’ve just disappeared and your people know as much about it as I do. So why are you here?’

The only reason I could give him was the crew pictures, but when I asked to see them, he said, ‘I sent a full set of the pictures to our London office. That was three days ago. You could have seen them there.’

‘I had to go to France.’

‘France?’ The fact that I hadn’t come straight out from London seemed to make a difference. He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt you have your own lines of enquiry to follow.’ He reached behind him to a bookcase where a potted plant stood like a rubbery green sentinel, picked up two files and passed them across the desk to me. I opened the one labelled Aurora B. There were copies of design drawings for the ship’s hull and engines, detailed specifications, and, in an envelope marked personnel, a crew list, together with a full-face close-up of each individual. This was the only item of real interest and while he was telling me how the Indian airforce had mounted a search in the sea area west of Sri Lanka and the oil company’s representatives had appealed through the local press and media for anybody who might have picked up a radio signal or voice message, I went slowly through the pictures. I had met so many odd characters in cargo runs around the Gulf that there was always a chance.

‘Also we have checked the background of every officer — wives, girlfriends, sexual eccentricities, everything.’ He had a flat, rather monotonous voice and my mind kept drifting away, wondering vaguely whether the Lloyd’s agent would have heard from Prit-chard yet. My contact was Adrian Gault. I had met him once, a little shrivelled man who was said to have his ear to the ground and spies in every merchant house on the waterfront. An old Gulf hand like that, surely to God he would know by now what dhow had picked Choffel up, where it had taken him. It was four or five days since the man had left the Corsaire, time enough for news to filter through, for rumour to get its tongue round the story and spread it through the cafes and among the Gulf Arabs cooking over fires on the decks of dhows.

‘… no wreckage, only the dumped remains of ships’ garbage and one oil slick that was traced to a Liberian cargo vessel.’ He said it in an aggrieved tone, resentful of the trick fate had played on him. ‘I always run a tight ship here at GODCO, maintenance, damage control, everything Al. Our record speaks for itself. Since I took over this office we’ve had a long run…’

‘Of course. I understand.’ I found myself embar-

rassed at his need of self-justification, concentrating on the pictures then, while he began talking about the absence of any radio signal. Not a single ham operator had responded to their appeal, and in the case of the Howdo Stranger, with the very latest in tank cleansing equipment…

I wasn’t listening. There, suddenly, staring up at me, was a dark Semitic face I had seen before — in Khorramshahr, on a stretcher. The same birthmark like a burn blurring the full lips, the same look of intense hostility in the dark eyes, the womanish mouth set in a nervous smile. But it was the birthmark — not even the dark little beard he had grown could hide that. Abol Hassan Sadeq, born Teheran, age 31, electrical engineer.

I turned the picture round so that Captain Perrin could see it. ‘Know anything about him?’

He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. ‘You recognize him, do you?’

‘Yes, but not the name. It wasn’t Sadeq.’ I couldn’t recall the name they had given us. It had been six years ago. Summer, and so hot you couldn’t touch the metal anywhere on the ship, the Shatt al Arab flat as a shield, the air like a steam bath. Students had rioted in Teheran, and in Abadan there had been an attempt to blow up two of the oil storage tanks. We should have sailed at dawn, but we were ordered to wait. And then the Shah’s police had brought him on board, shortly after noon. We sent him straight down to the sick bay and sailed for Kuwait, where we handed him over to the authorities. His kidneys had been damaged, he had three ribs broken, multiple internal bruising and his front teeth badly broken.

‘Interrogation?’ Perrin asked.

‘I suppose so.’

‘He wasn’t one of the students then.’

I shrugged. ‘They said he was a terrorist.’

‘A terrorist.’ He said the word slowly as though testing out the sound of it. ‘And that’s the same man, on the Aurora B. Does that make any sense to you?’

‘Only that a bomb would account for her total disappearance. But there’d still have to be a motive.’ I searched through the file, found the man’s dossier and flipped it across the desk to him. It simply listed the ships he had served on.

‘We’ll check them all, of course,’ Perrin said. ‘And the security people in Abu Dhabi, they may know something.’ But he sounded doubtful. ‘To blow up a tanker the size of the Aurora B…’ He shook his head. ‘It’s got to be a hell of a big explosion to leave nothing behind, and no time for the radio operator to get off a Mayday — a suicidal explosion, in fact, for he’d have to be resigned to his own death. And it doesn’t explain the loss of the other tanker.’

I was working through the pictures again, particularly those of the Howdo Stranger crew. There was nobody else I recognized. I hadn’t expected there would be. It was only the purest chance that I had ever set eyes on Sadeq before. And if it hadn’t been for the GODCO practice of taking crew pictures for each voyage… I was still trying to remember the name the Shah’s police had given us when they had rolled him screaming off the stretcher on to the hot deck plates. It certainly hadn’t been Sadeq.

We discussed it for a while, then I left, promising to look in the following day. After the cool interior of the oil building it seemed much hotter outside on the crowded waterfront. Noisier, too, and smellier. I crossed the Creek in a crowded launch to one of the older buildings just upstream of the warehouses. Gault’s office was on the first floor. There was no air-conditioning and the windows were wide open to the sounds and smells of the wharfs with a view over the rafted dhows to the mosque behind the financial buildings on the other side. Gault was at the door to greet me, a thin, stooped man in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt of virulent colour. He had a wide smile in a freckled, sun-wrinkled face, and his arms were freckled, too. ‘Heard you’d arrived safely.’

‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ I asked him.

‘Well, you never know, do you?’ He stared at me, still smiling. ‘Salt telexed yesterday. Last time we met you were mate of the old Dragonera. Then you left the Gulf.’ He took me over to the window. ‘There you are, nothing changed. The Gulf still the navel of the world and Dubai the little wrinkled belly-button that handles all the traffic. Well, why is he employing you?’

‘He seems to think my knowledge of the Gulf—‘

‘There are at least two ships’ captains on Forth-right’s staff who have a bloody sight more experience of the Gulf than you, so that’s the first thing I want to know. Two tankers go missing down by Sri Lanka and you come out here, to Dubai — why?’

I began talking about Karachi then, but he cut me short. ‘I read the papers. You’re after Choffel and you’re on to something. Something I don’t know about.’ He was staring at me, his eyes no longer smiling and his hand gripping my arm. ‘Those tankers sailed from Mina Zayed loaded with Abu Dhabi crude. But still you come to Dubai. Why?’

‘Baldwick,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ He let go my arm and waved me to a leather pouf with an old mat thrown over it. ‘Coffee or tea?’

‘Tea,’ I said and he clapped his hands. A small boy with a rag of a turban appeared at the door. He told him to bring tea for both of us and squatted cross-legged on the Persian carpet. ‘That boy’s the son of one our best naukhadas. He’s here to learn the business. His father doesn’t want him to grow up to be nothing but the skipper of a dhow. He thinks the dhows will all be gone by then. You agree?’ I said I thought it likely, but I don’t think he heard me. ‘What’s Baldwick got to do with those missing tankers?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘But he knows where Choffel is hiding up, is that it?’

I nodded.

‘You’d better tell me about it then.’

By the time I had given him an account of my dealings with Baldwick the tea had arrived, hot, sweet and very refreshing in that noisy, shadowy room.

‘Where’s the tanker you’re supposed to join?’ he asked.

‘I thought you might know.’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘No idea.’ And he had no information to give me on Baldwick’s present activities. ‘There’s rumours of Russian ships skulking in the Straits of Hormuz. But it’s just bazaar talk.’ As a youngster he had served in India and he still referred to the suk as a bazaar. ‘You know how it is. Since the Red Army moved into Afghanistan, the dhow Arabs see Russian ships in every hidey-hole in the Gulf. And the khawrs to the south of the Straits are a natural. You could lose a whole fleet in some of those inlets, except that it would be like putting them in a furnace. Hot as hell.’ He laughed. ‘But even if the Russians are playing hide and seek, that’s not Len Baldwick’s scene at all. Too risky. I’ve known the bastard on and off now for more than a dozen years — slave girls, boys, drugs, gold, bogus oil bonds, anything where he takes the rake-off and others the rap. Who owns this tanker of yours, do you know?’

I shook my head.

‘So you’re going into it blind.’ He finished his tea and sat there for a moment thinking about it. ‘Tell me, would you be taking that sort of a chance if it wasn’t for the thought that Choffel might be on the same ship with you?’

‘No.’

He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Well, that’s your business. Meanwhile, this came for you this morning.’ He reached across his desk and handed me a telex. ‘Pritchard.’

It was the answer to my request for background information on Welsh national servicemen in the engine-room of HMS Formidable in 1952. There had been two of them. Forthright’s had then checked four sinkings in suspicious circumstances in 1959, also two in late ‘58. There followed details of the sinking in October 1958 of the French cargo vessel Lavandou, an ex-liberty ship, off the Caribbean island of Martinique. She had been abandoned in deep water, but the edge of a hurricane had drifted her into the shallows north-east of the island so that divers had been able to get down to her. They had found extensive damage to the sea water inlets to the condensers. Second engineer David Price, accused of sabotage by both captain and chief engineer, had by then disappeared, having taken passage on a vessel sailing for Dutch Guiana, which is now Surinam. The enquiry into the loss of the Lavandou found Price to blame. Final clincher for us, the telex concluded, is that he was signed on to the Lavandou as engineer at the port of Cayenne in French Guiana in place of Henri Alexandre Choffel who fell into harbour and drowned after a night on the town. Company owning Lavandou registered in Cayenne. A David Morgan Price served HMS Formidable 1952. Thank you. Pritchard.

That settled it. No good his daughter, or anybody else, trying to tell me he was innocent. Not now. Price, Choffel, Speridion — I wondered what he was calling himself now. None of the names, not even Price, was on the hotel guest list. I asked Gault about the dhow that had met up with the Corsaire in the Straits of Hormuz, but he knew nothing about it and wasn’t really interested. ‘Dhows gravitate to Dubai like wasps to a honey-pot. If you think he was brought in here, then you’d better try the carpet dealers, they know all the gossip. As far as I’m concerned, the Petros Jupiter is a UK problem. Choffel’s no concern of mine…’ He sat staring down at his coffee. ‘Who do you think would employ a man like Baldwick to recruit ships’ officers?’ Another pause. ‘And why?’ he added, looking straight at me.

‘I hoped you could tell me that,’ I said.

‘Well, I can’t.’ He hesitated, then leaned towards me and said, ‘What are you going to do when you meet up with this man Price, or Choffel, or whatever he’s calling himself now?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to find him first,’ I muttered.

‘So you’re letting Baldwick recruit you.’

‘Yes.’

‘A ship you know nothing about. God, man! You don’t know where she is, who owns her, what the purpose of the voyage is. You’re going into it absolutely blind. But you could be right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘About Choffel, I mean. A man like that — it makes sense. There has to be something wrong about the set-up or they wouldn’t be offering double rates and a bonus, and Baldwick wouldn’t be mixed up in it. When’s he get in to Dubai, do you know?’

‘Mustafa said tomorrow.’

‘Have you got his address here?’

I remembered then. ‘A telephone number, that’s all.’

He went to his desk and made a note of it. ‘I’ll have somebody keep an eye on him then. And on this Libyan travel agent. Also, I’ll make enquiries about the tanker you’re joining. But that may not be easy, particularly if she’s over the other side of the Gulf in an Iranian port. Well, that’s it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nothing much else I can do, except tell you to be careful. There’s a lot of money washing around this port, a lot of peculiar people. It’s much worse than it was when you were last here. So watch it.’ He walked with me to the stairs. ‘That boy who brought the tea. His name is Khalid. If my people pick up anything useful I’ll send him to you.’

‘You don’t want me to come here?’

‘No. From what you told me it could be dangerous. And if it’s politics, not money, you’ve got yourself mixed up in, then my advice is take the next flight home. Your background makes you very vulnerable.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Salaam alykoum.’

I walked back to the hotel, changed into a pair of swimming trunks and had a light meal at a table by the pool. The courtyard, airless in the shadow of piled-up balconies, echoed to the murmur of voices, the occasional splash of a body diving. Afterwards I lay in a chair sipping an ice-cold sherbet and thinking about the Aurora B, what it would have been like on the bridge, on watch, when spontaneous combustion, or whatever it was, sent her to the bottom. The people I had contacted in the insurance world — underwriters, Lloyd’s agents, marine solicitors, everyone — they had all emphasized that marine fraud was on the increase. Like ordinary crime, it was tax free, and as the stakes got bigger… I was thinking of Sadeq then, suddenly remembering the name the Shah’s police had given him, a name he had confirmed to us as he lay in the Dragonera’s sick bay. It had been Qasim. So what was Qasim, a man they had claimed was a terrorist, doing on board the Aurora B under another name? Terrorists were trained in the handling of explosives, and instantly I was seeing the fireball holocaust that was so indelibly printed on my mind, knowing that if a bomb had been cleverly placed there was no way the radio operator would be able to put out a call for help.

Was the tanker we were joining intended to go the same way, delayed-action explosives attached to the hull? And us promised a bonus at the end of the voyage! But at least Baldwick was predictable. There was nothing political about him, or about Choffel, and fraud was almost certainly less dangerous. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself, but Adrian Gault’s warning stayed in my mind. Here in Dubai anything seemed possible.

In the cool of the evening I took a stroll through the suk, looking in on several stall-holders I had known. Two of them were Pakistani. One, an Afridi, dealt in old silver jewellery — bangles, Bedu blanket pins, headpieces, anklets. The other, Azad Hussain, was a carpet merchant. It was he who told me about the dhow. It wasn’t just a rumour, either. He had heard it from a naukhada who had recently brought him a consignment of Persian carpets. They had been smuggled across the border into the little Baluchistan port of Jiwani. There had been two other dhows there, one waiting to embark cattle fodder from an oasis inland, the other under charter to Baldwick and waiting to pick up a group of Pakistani seamen being flown from Karachi.

He couldn’t tell me their destination. It’s a question naukhadas are wary of asking each other in the Gulf and he had only mentioned the matter to Azad because he was wondering why an Englishman like Baldwick should be shipping Pakistanis out of a little border port like Jiwani. If it had been hashish now, trucked down from the tribal areas close under the Hindu Kush or the Karakoram ranges of the Himalayas… He didn’t know the naukhada’s name or the name of the dhow, only that the seamen embarked numbered a dozen or so and the dhow had left immediately, heading west along the coast towards the Straits of Hormuz.

That night I went to bed early and for the first time, it seemed, since Karen’s death I slept like a log, waking to bright sunlight and the call of the muezzin. Varsac was waiting for me when I went down, his eyes shifty, the pupils dilated and his long face wrestling with an ingratiating smile. He wanted a loan. ‘Ees tres cher, Dubai,’ he murmured, his breath stale, his hand clutching at me. God knows what he wanted it for, but I had seen the ragged-turbaned little boy hovering in the entrance and I brushed Varsac off, telling him to stay in the hotel where everything was provided. The boy came running as he saw me. ‘What is it, Khalid?’

‘The sahib send you this.’ He held a folded sheet of paper out to me. ‘You read it inside please, then nobody see.’

It was very brief: Dhow chartered by B came in last night. Loading ship’s stores. Khalid will take you to see it. Take care. You were followed yesterday. A.G. I stuffed the note into my pocket and went out into the street again, Khalid clutching hold of my arm and telling me to go down the alley opposite the hotel and at the Creek I would find his uncle waiting for me with a small boat. I should hire it, but behave as though it were a sudden thought and argue about the money. He would cross by one of the ferry launches and meet me somewhere by the wharfs. Having given me my instructions he ran off in the direction of the mosque. I stood there for a moment as though savouring the warmth of the sunlight that slanted a narrow beam between two of the older dwellings. A casual glance at the Arabs hanging around the hotel narrowed it to two, and there was another inside the entrance who seemed to be watching me, a small man in spotless robes with a little pointed beard and a khanjar knife at his belt. I went back into the hotel, bought an English paper, and then sauntered across to the alley that led to the Creek.

I walked slowly, reading the paper as I went. An attack on the Government by the conservationist and fishing lobbies for failing to do anything about oil pollution in the North Sea had ousted the Iranian bombers as the lead story. At the waterfront I paused, standing with the paper held up to my face, but half turning so that I could see back up the alley. There was nobody there except a big fair-bearded man strolling with his hands in his pockets. His face was shaded by the pale khaki peak of his kepi-type cap.

Khalid’s uncle proved to be a hook-nosed piratical-looking rascal with a headcloth pushed well back to reveal a thin untidy fringe of black hair that straggled down each cheek to join a neat little wisp of a beard. The boat was from a boom loading at one of the wharfs. It was little more than a cockleshell and crossing the Creek it bobbed and bounced to the wash of power boats, launches, ferries, runabouts and load-carriers. I lost sight of the man with the kepi cap and on the far side of the Creek, where we were out of the shadow of the high bank buildings and in the sun, it was hot and the smells stronger as we threaded our way through the dhows, through narrow guts between wooden walls that sun and salt had bleached to the colour of pale amber. He rowed me to what I think he said was a baghla. ‘Khalid say is this one.’

It was a big dhow, one of the few that hadn’t had its mast sawn off and was still capable of carrying sail. It had its upcurved bow thrust in against the wharf. Two men were unloading cardboard cartons of tinned goods from a trolley, carrying them across a narrow gang plank and passing them down into the hold. Khalid was there already, beckoning me to join him on the wharf. I clambered up and he grabbed hold of my hand and drew me back into the shadowed entrance to the warehouse. ‘Sahib say you look, then you know what ship is and who is on her.’

It was a two-masted vessel with an exhaust pipe sticking up for’ard of the poop and a little group squatting in a tight huddle round a huqqah, or water pipe, whose stem they passed from one to the other. Khalid pointed the naukhada out to me, a big man with a bushy beard and wild eyes peering out of an untidy mass of black hair. ‘Mohammed bin Suleiman,’ he whispered. ‘Is not Dubai. Is from Ras al Khaimah.’

I stood there a while, taking in the details of the dhow, memorizing the faces squatting round the bubbling water pipe. Then Khalid was tugging at my arm, pulling me further back into the warehouse. The man in the kepi cap was coming along the wharf. I could see him clearly now, the sunlight providing his burly figure with a black shadow and glinting on the fair skin and the blond sun-bleached beard. He came abreast of the little group on the dhow’s poop and stopped. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was in English with a strong accent and he indicated the warehouse. Then he was coming towards us and we shrank back into the dim interior, slipping behind a pile of mealie bags.

He stopped in the entrance, pushing his cap back and mopping his brow as he shouted for a man called Salima Aznat who was apparently in charge of the warehouse. He wore locally-made sandals with curved-up toe guards, dark blue trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt with sweat stains under the arms. ‘Waar is het?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Waar hebben zy het verstopt?’ It sounded like Swedish, or Dutch maybe. He turned, beckoning to the Arabs loading the dhow, then began moving slowly into the warehouse, peering at the labels on the larger wooden crates, checking the stencilling on the sides.

‘Who is he?’ I whispered as he was joined by the warehouseman and the two of them disappeared into the cavernous recesses of the building. But Khalid didn’t know. ‘Is at your hotel,’ he said.

‘One of Baldwick’s people?’

He nodded. The sound of voices echoed from the far end and a moment later there was the slam of a crate and the rumble of a trolley being dragged towards us. The little group was coming back now, two or three cases on the trolley. They reached the entrance and paused, so that I saw the man very clearly, the bleached hair, the pale eyes, his bare arms like freckled gold in the sunlight. He was talking quickly, radiating a ponderous sense of nervous energy. A round, Dutch-looking face. Hals! I was remembering what Baldwick had said at Balkaer when he’d talked about pollution. It had to be Pieter Hals. And as the little group stood there for a moment in the sun I could see the letters stencilled on the wooden sides of the nearest case, radio equipment — fragile — handle with care. The word fragile was stencilled in red.

Back at the hotel I found that Pieter Hals had checked in that morning. I also enquired about Price, but nobody of that name had stayed in the hotel for the past month at any rate. I was convinced then that the dhow had taken him straight to the ship and that he was there on board. I didn’t see Hals again that day, and though I met up with several people I had known before and had a word with Perrin on the phone, none of them could tell me anything about Baldwick’s tanker people or where the vessel lay. I even took a taxi at considerable expense to Port Rashid, but every ship in the harbour was owned by old-established companies.

That evening, strolling along the waterfront just as dusk was falling, I saw bin Suleiman’s dhow haul out into the crowded waterway and watched her crew hoist the lateen mainsail as she motored with a soft tonk-tonk round the down-town bend towards the open sea. From this I concluded that Baldwick’s employers must have their tanker loading at Mina Zayed in the neighbouring sheikdom of Abu Dhabi, a supposition that was to prove hopelessly wrong.

That night I had dinner at the hotel, in the roof garden restaurant where Varsac and our two other ship’s officers had got themselves a corner table with the sort of view over the dog-legged waterway that a sheikh’s peregrine would have, poised high in the air before a stoop. The Creek was an ink-black smudge curving between dimly-lit buildings. The only brilliance seemed to be the flood-lit tracery of some sort of palace and Port Rashid with its cranes and ships and and an oil rig lying to its reflection, all brightly illuminated in the loading lights. Varsac hailed me as soon as I entered the room and when I paused at their table I found myself confronted by a ferrety little Glaswegian engineer with ginger hair and a grating accent. A cigarette burned unheeded on the plate beside him and in the middle of the table was an ashtray full of stubs.

‘Ah’m Colin Fraser,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘What’s yur nem?’

‘Trevor Rodin.’

‘And yur job on boord?’

‘Second mate.’

‘Aye, weel, Ah’m an engineer mesel’, so we’ll not be seeing very much of each other now. Sit down, man, and have a drink.’

The other man, a big Canadian, pulled out a chair for me, smiling, but not saying anything. I sat down. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Fraser turned out to be a casualty of the Iraqi-Iranian war. He had been in one of the cargo vessels stranded in the Shatt al Arab. It was Greek-owned and had been badly shelled. The end of it was her owners had abandoned her and he had been thrown on to the beach, an engineer with shrapnel wounds in the shoulder, no ship, no money, not even a fare-paid passage home. ‘Bankrupt the bastards were.’ The world was still in recession, the beach a cold place to be. ‘Och, the stories Ah could tell yen Ah bin on rigs, ferry boats, aye, on dhows, too, an’ if it hadna bin for our mootual friend Len B…’

He was drinking whisky and was half cut already, his voice rambling on about the despicable nature of employers and how it was they who had kept him out of a job, a black against his name and the word passed from owner to owner, even out to this godforsaken end-of-the-earth dump. ‘Ah couldna get a job oot here if I was to promise the effing agent a whole year’s salary. It’s me politics, see.’ As far as I could gather he was well to the left of the Militant Tendency and back home in Glasgow had been a union troublemaker. “Colin Fraser. Ye remember surely? It was all in the papers. I took three cargo ships doon the Clyde and anchored them roond the Polaris base so the nuclear subs couldna move in or oot.’

He also claimed to have been a member of the IRA for a short time. Stranded in Belfast when his ship couldn’t unload because of a dock strike, he had been given a Kalashnikov and had gone gunning for the RUC in the Falls Road district with a bunch of teenagers. ‘Made bombs for them, too, in a hoose doon in Crossmaglen. But they didna pay me. Risking me life Ah was…’ It was an aggrieved voice that went on and on, the Glasgow accent getting harder, the ferrety face more vicious. In the end I ignored him and talked to the Canadian who had been recruited by Hals as first mate. His name was Rod Selkirk. He had been a trapper and a sealer, had then met Farley Mowat, whose book Never Cry Wolf had affected him deeply, and after that meeting he had stopped killing animals for a living and had switched to coasters, trading into the ports of the Maritimes and the Gulf of St Lawrence. ‘Guess I’m okay on navigation, but when it comes to figures…’ He shrugged, his body as massive and solid as you would expect of a man who had spent most of his life in the hard North of Canada. His round, moonlike face broke into a smile, causing the puffed lids of the mongoloid eyes to crease into fat-crinkled almond slits. ‘I’m an inshore navigator really, so reck’n I’ll never make it any higher. I’d never pass the exams, not for my Master’s ticket.’

‘Where did you meet Pieter Hals?’ I asked him.

“Shatt al Arab, same as Colin here. I was tramping, and they just about blew us out of the water. The Iranians. They couldn’t reach the Iraqi shore, not to hit anything worthwhile, so they took it out on us. Just for the hell of it, I guess — a bit of target practice. Infidels don’t count anyway, know what I mean?’ The smile spread into a grin. He was a very likeable giant and he hardly drank at all, his voice very soft, very restful.

‘What’s Hals’s job?’ I asked.

‘Captain.’

Hals had only been first mate when he’d hit the headlines and been sacked for the bomb threats he had made in the Niger. ‘Is that why he’s joined this Bald-wick outfit?’ I thought he might see it as his only chance for promotion after what he’d done, but the Canadian said No, it was pollution. ‘He’s got something in mind,’ he murmured hesitantly. But when I questioned him about it, he said he didn’t know. ‘You ask Pieter. Mebbe he’ll tell you, once we get aboard. Right now, he doesn’t talk about it.’ He was watching me uncertainly out of those slit eyes. ‘Marine pollution mean anything to you?’

He hadn’t read the papers, didn’t know about Karen, and when I told him she’d blown a stranded tanker up to save the coast from pollution, he smiled and said, ‘Then you and Pieter should get on. He blames it all on the industrial nations, says they’ll pollute the world to keep their bloody machines going. You feel like that?’

‘The transport of oil presents problems,’ I said cautiously.

‘That’s for sure.’ He nodded, expressing surprise that it was Baldwick who had recruited me, not Pieter Hals. ‘I never met Baldwick,’ he said, ‘but from what I hear…’ He gave an expressive shrug and left it at that.

‘Qu’est que c’est?’ Varsac was suddenly leaning forward. ‘What ees it you ‘ear?’

‘Ah’ll tell yu,’ Fraser cut in, laughing maliciously. ‘Ah’ll tell yu what he hears aboot Len Baldwick, that he’s a fat eunuch who’s made a pile pimping for oil-rich Arabs. That’s the worrd from the lads Ah was talking to last night. They say his fat fingers are poked up the arse of anybody who’s got dirty business going in the Gulf, an’ if yu think this little caper’s got anything to do with saving the worrld from pollution yu’re nuts. There’s fraud in it somewhere, and I wouldna be surprised to find meself fixing bombs to the hull of this tanker somewhere off the coast of Africa.’

Varsac stared at him, his face longer and paler than ever. ‘Monsieur Baldwick m’a dit—‘

‘Och, the hell wi’ it.’ Fraser was laughing again, prodding Varsac with a nicotine-stained finger. ‘Yu’d hardly expect him to dite yu wha’ it’s all aboot. He gets his cut, tha’s all he cares. An’ he’s no sailing wi’ the ship.’

The Frenchman’s Adam’s apple jerked convulsively. ‘Not sailing? You know this? Ees true — certain?’ He shook his head doubtfully. ‘I don’t believe. I don’t believe you know anything about it. Or about him.’

‘Not know aboot him!’ Fraser was almost bouncing up and down in his seat. ‘Sure Ah know aboot ‘im. Ah worked for the man, didn’t Ah? Ran a dhow for him. That’s how Ah know aboot Len. Cold-hearted bastard! The Baluchi lassies, now. We’d pick ‘em off a bench near Pasni. Virgins by the look of them. All bleedin’ virgins. We’d take ‘em across the Gulf and land them in the sand doons north-east of Sharjah. A Pakistani was behind it, some woman who gave their families a wee bit o’ money and said they would be trained as nurses. Nurses, my arse! They were being sold as whoores, and it was the Pak woman and Len Baldwick made a killing in the trade, not me, Ah just ran the bleedin’ dhow for them.’ He called for a waiter, but nobody took any notice. ‘Yu got any cigarettes?’ He cocked his head at me, fiddling with an empty packet. ‘It’s clean oot, Ah am.’

Rumours of Baldwick’s involvement in the trade had been circulating when I was last in the Gulf, but I had never before met anybody directly implicated. I sat there, staring at him, disgusted and appalled. This vicious little Glaswegian, and right beside him, the big friendly Canadian, looking as though he’d seen a devil peeping out from under a stone… They were like oil and water. They didn’t mix. They didn’t fit. And yet they’d been recruited for the same purpose. They’d be together, on the same ship, and so would I — some of us recruited by Baldwick, some by Hals.

I got to my feet. Fraser had found a waiter now and was ordering cigarettes and more drinks. I excused myself, took the lift down to the street and walked quickly through the alleyway to the Creek. The air was pleasantly cool, the stars bright overhead, and I sat there by the water for a long time watching the traffic and wondering what it was going to be like isolated from the rest of the world and cooped up on board a ship with a man like Fraser. And Choffel. I wished to God I knew about Choffel, whether he was on the ship or not.

Next morning Baldwick had arrived. He was in the lobby when I went down, looking large and rumpled in a pale blue tropical suit. He had another Frenchman with him, an engineer he had picked up in Marseilles, and Mustafa was flapping around with the drivers of two Land Rovers drawn up outside the hotel. ‘You get ready please,’ he said to me. ‘We leave in twenty minutes.’

‘Where for?’

But he turned away.

‘Where’s the ship?’ I demanded, grabbing hold of him.

He hesitated. ‘Ask LB. He knows. Not me.’

I turned to Baldwick then, but he had heard my question and was staring at me, his eyes red-rimmed and angry. ‘Just get your things.’

I hesitated. But the man was tired after the flight. He’d been drinking and I’d know soon enough. ‘No, wait,’ he said as I was moving away. And he asked me what the hell I’d been up to at the GODCO offices. *And you went to see Gault. Why?’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Think I wouldn’t have somebody keep an eye on you.’ He came lumbering towards me. ‘You been talking?’ His tone was menacing.

‘I like to know what ship I’m sailing on, where it’s berthed.’

‘You been asking questions?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Adrian Gault I’ve known on and off for years. Perrin, too. With time to kill I looked them up. Why not? And of course I asked them.’

‘I told you to keep yer mouth shut.’ He was glaring at me, and suddenly I couldn’t help it, I had to know.

‘Choffel,’ I said. ‘Will he be on the same ship as me?’

‘Choffel?’ He seemed surprised, repeating the name slowly, his voice reluctant, his eyes sharp. ‘No.’ He was frowning angrily, groping for the right reply. ‘The only engineer on board at the moment is the Chief.’ And to settle the matter he added quickly, ‘His name’s Price if you want to know.’

So I was right. That picture with Baldwick on the edge of it, at Sennen, when the crew came ashore. He had recruited him then, made all the arrangements for getting him to the Gulf. And now he was on board. He was there, waiting for me. I suppose I must have been staring open-mouthed. ‘You don’t concern yourself with Price. Understand?’ He was glaring at me, conscious that the name had meant something to me, but not certain what. ‘You’re not an engineer. You’ve never met him before.’ He was still glaring at me doubtfully and it was Varsac who came to my rescue. He had been talking very fast in French to the new arrival. Now they were both of them looking at Baldwick — the same question.

‘Le tankair. Ou ca?’

Baldwick turned his head slowly, like a bull wearily finding himself baited from another direction. ‘We’re keeping it as a surprise for you,’ he growled. ‘Where the hell d’you think it is? In the bloody water, of course.’ His small eyes shifted to me, a quick glance, then he went off to get a shower.

We all had breakfast together, coffee and boiled eggs, with Baldwick’s beady little eyes watching me as though I was some dangerous beast he had to keep an eye on. Afterwards, when I had packed and was coming away from reception after handing in my room key, Khalid suddenly appeared at my side. ‘For you, Said.’ He slipped me a blue envelope. ‘Sahib say it arrive last night.’ He was gone in a flash, scuttling out into the street, and I was left with an English air mail letter card in my hand. The writing was unfamiliar, a round, flowing hand, and the sender’s name and address on the back came as a surprise. It was from Pamela Stewart.

I was thinking back to that lunch at Lloyd’s, the Nelson Exhibition room. It was all so remote. And to have reached me now she must have sent the letter off the instant Gault had reported my arrival in Dubai. The Land Rovers had started up, Baldwick shouting to me, and I slipped it into my pocket, wondering why she should have written, why the urgency.

It was just after ten as we pulled away from the hotel, Baldwick with the engineer officers in the first Land Rover, Mustafa with myself and the other deck officers in the second. There was no sign of Pieter Hals. I slit open the air mail letter and began reading it as we threaded our way through Dubai’s crowded streets. It appeared to have been written in a hurry, the writing very difficult to read in places. Dear Trevor Rodin, it began. Daddy doesn’t know I’m writing, but I thought somebody should tell you how much we appreciate what you are doing and that our thoughts are with you. It went on like that for almost half a page, then suddenly she abandoned the rather formal language, her mood changing. I was a fool, leaving you like that. We should have gone on to a club and got drunk, or gone for a walk together, done whatever people do when the heart’s too full for sensible words. Instead, I made a silly excuse and left you standing there under the Nelson picture. Please forgive me. I was upset. And my mind’s been in a turmoil ever since. I stopped there, staring down at the round, orderly writing on the blue paper, aware suddenly that this wasn’t an ordinary letter. ‘God Almighty!’ I breathed. The Canadian was saying something. His hand gripped my arm. ‘It’s not Mina Zayed. Abu Dhabi is west of Dubai. We’ve turned east.’

I slipped the letter back into my pocket and looked out at the chaos of construction work through which we were driving. This was the outskirts of Dubai and he was right. We were on the coast road headed east towards Sharjah, and the shamal was starting to blow little streamers of sand across the tarmac road.

‘Is it Mina Khalid, you reck’n?’ I shook my head. I didn’t think it was deep enough. ‘Mebbe an SMB.’ He turned to Mustafa. ‘They got one of the big single mooring buoys for tanker loading along the coast here?’ he asked.

The Libyan stared at him blankly. ‘Well, where the hell are we going?’ But all Mustafa said was, ‘You see. Very good accommodation. Sea view very fine.’

I was staring out of the sand-blown side window, memories of childhood flooding back. Nothing had changed, only the road and a few modern buildings. The country either side was just the same — a vast vista of sky and sand. We passed the remains of the little tin-roofed hospital where my mother had been a nurse. 1 could remember playing in the dunes there, pretending to be Sayid bin Maktun, the old sheikh of Dubai who had surprised a big raiding force from Abu Dhabi and slaughtered sixty of them at their camp in the desert. We played at pirates, too, using an old dugout canoe we had found washed up on a sand spit in the silted Sharjah estuary, and the little Baluch boy was our slave.

I sat there, staring out as the low dunescape dropped away to the gleaming mud flats of the subqat that stretched out to a distant glint of the sea. The wind was stronger here, blowing out of the north-west, and I could have cried for the memory of that little Baluch boy, so thin, so scared, so dead these many years. We skirted Sharjah, the subqat giving way to low coastal dunes, sand blowing again in long streamers from the wheels of the leading Land Rover. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the sea, a dark blue-green shot through with the white of breaking wavetops, and the cloudless sky pearl-coloured with the glare of the sun. A glimpse of the fort that had been a radio communications centre in the early days and we were driving fast along the coast towards Ras al Khaimah, the interior of the Land Rover hot and full of sand, the dunes shimmering.

We stopped only once, just beyond Umm al Qaiwain, for sandwiches and coffee served on the tailboard of the leading Land Rover. We didn’t stay long, for though we were under the lee of a small dune sparsely covered with brittle dried-up furze, the wind blowing straight off the sea filled the air with a gritty dusting of fine sand. Less than an hour later we pulled into Ras al Khaimah, where the Jebel cliffs begin to form a red background. Here we were given quarters in a little fly-screened motel with cracked walls and temperamental plumbing. The skeletal ribs of a half-constructed dhow thrust pale wooden frame-ends against the blue sky.

What the hell were we doing at Ras al Khaimah? Mustafa and the Land Rovers had left as soon as our luggage had been off-loaded. And since Baldwick wouldn’t talk about it, speculation was rife, particularly among the deck officers. Accustomed to think in terms of navigation, our guess was that the ship was across the other side of the Gulf in Iranian waters, or perhaps loading at one of the island tanker terminals, Abu Masa or Tumbs. The engineers didn’t care so much. Fraser had got hold of a bottle of Scotch and the man from Marseilles, Jean Lebois, had brought some cognac with him. Baldwick and Varsac joined them and the four settled down to drink and play poker. I went for a walk.

The motel was set in what looked like a piece of waste ground left over from the construction boom, bits of plastic, broken bottles, rusting iron scattered everywhere, half buried in the sand, and all that was left of the attempt to improve the surroundings were the remains of bushes dead of heat and neglect. But where the sand was untouched, stretching in a long yellow vista into the sun, there was solitude and a strange beauty. The wind had dropped, the sea making little flopping sounds and long white lines as the wavelets fell upon the dark glint of wet sand. And inland, beyond the radio tower, red-brown slopes rose endlessly to the distant heights of the Jebel al Harim. I sat in the sand, watching the sun go down and reading Pamela Stewart’s letter again.

The round, rather careful writing, the conventional phrasing — I could picture her face, the simple straightforward plainness of the features, the directness of the gaze from those quiet eyes, the mobility of the over-large mouth. It was the only sexy thing about her, that large mouth. So why did I remember her so clearly? I don’t know where, or in what circumstances, you will read this, or even if it will reach you, but I wish I were able to do what you are doing. We should be able to find out the truth for ourselves, not ask somebody else to do it for us. There is that, which is a natural feeling I think, but there is also something else, something I’m not sure I understand, which is perhaps why I left you so abruptly with such a silly excuse.

The sun was low now, the sky paling overhead, and the sails of a dhow stood black in silhouette against the pink of cloud shapes hanging over the Iranian shore. The energy packed into that strongly-shaped body, the sense of vitality, quiet and controlled — that, too, I remembered. I’ve never faced this problem before… That was how the letter ended — I’ve never faced this problem before, so bear with me. I will be thinking of you, and praying that all goes well. Nothing else, except her signature — Pamela.

I sat there for a long time with the letter in my hand, thinking about it as the sun’s rim touched the sea and the whole desert shore blazed with fire, wondering if she had any idea what her words meant to me — that somebody, somewhere in the world, was thinking of me and believed, however temporarily, that she cared.

And then the sun was down, the cliffs behind me darkening and the dhow was feeling its way into the creek. I walked quickly back along the sands, hearing the tonk-tonk of its diesel in the fast-gathering dusk, and when I was back, at the point where the creek widened out into a large flat sheet of water, I found it lying at anchor right off the motel. I knew then that it was bin Suleiman’s dhow, but nobody came ashore from it, so that I wasn’t sure Pieter Hals was on board until we embarked the following morning.

The shamal was blowing again then and even in the shelter of the creek it took time to embark the six of us, the dhow’s only tender being a small wooden boat. Baldwick came with us and there was a quantity of locally-grown produce to load. It took altogether six trips, so that it was almost eleven before the anchor was up and we were motoring seaward. The sky was a clear, bright blue and the sun shone warm on the red cliffs, the waters of the Gulf foaming white at their base. It was a wonderful day for a sail, but where would we end up? Rod Selkirk and I were standing together on the leeward side of the high poop, both of us watching the bearded figure of bin Suleiman motionless beside the helmsman, a loose end of his turban flying in the wind. The low sand spit slid away to port and the dhow thrust its curved beak into deeper water. Would he hold his course and head for Iran, or turn along the coast?

‘I don’t get it,’ Selkirk said. ‘Why all the secrecy?’ He had spoken to Hals when he came forward, but had got nothing out of him.

We were plugging almost dead to windward, no sails set, the dhow beginning to slam as the bows thrust into the steepening waves. ‘Sure looks like Iran,’ he said, and at that moment bin Suleiman nodded to the helmsman. The long wooden arm of the tiller was thrust over and the dhow came slowly round on to a north-easterly heading. Shouts and the deck erupting into violent activity as the big lateen sail was hoisted up the mainmast. Soon both sails were set, the engine Hopped, and we were creaming along, rolling heavily with the spray flying silver in the sun and a long vista of ochre-red cliffs opening up to starboard, the Straits of Hormuz not fifty miles away.

Pieter Hals came up from below. I think he had been checking the stores loaded at Dubai. He stood for a moment in the waist of the dhow staring out at the coast, towards the little port of Mina Saqr nestled right against the mountains. I had been there once, in the dhow that had taken me to Baluchistan. I moved across the deck to join Hals. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

‘One of the khawrs.’ His voice sounded vague, his mind on something else.

The khawrs were rocky inlets. There were a lot of them cutting deep into the Musandam Peninsula on the south side of the Straits, none on the Iranian side. ‘So our ship is not in Iran?’ ‘No.’

‘Why is it anchored in one of the khawrs?’ He didn’t answer, still staring at the coast. And when I repeated the question, he turned his head slowly, staring down at me vacantly, his mind still far away. His eyes were a light blue, crease-lines in the skin at the corners, and there were freckles under the sun-bleached beard. ‘You’re Rodin, are you?’

I nodded.

‘Your wife,’ he said. ‘I read about that.’ He held out his hand. ‘Ja. She is an example to us all.’ He stared at me. ‘Tell me, did you know?’

‘Know what?’ But something in his eyes gave me the answer.

He waited.

‘I was at a meeting,’ I said. ‘She did it on the spur of the moment. When she heard the result.’

‘When she heard they weren’t going to do anything to prevent the next oil spill.’

I nodded, wishing I hadn’t spoken to him now, wanting to get away. ‘She didn’t realize the whole ship would be blown up,’ I muttered quickly. ‘She was not a very practical person.’

‘No?’ He smiled. ‘Eminently practical, I should say. Ja. But not political. A pity that. Her death achieved nothing. She should have threatened, made terms, forced them to do something. A law of the sea to control pollution. Powers of arrest, and the death penalty, if necessary — with naval vessels and aircraft constantly on patrol in restricted waters with power to take immediate action, against any ship, of any nationality. Only that way will we stop the destruction of our marine environment. You agree?’

I nodded. It was what we had so often talked about.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ He was frowning. ‘You’re not one of my boys. You’re Len Baldwick’s lot.’

‘Does that make a difference?’

The blue eyes seemed to look right through me. ‘You don’t know, do you? So, why are you here?’

‘Is Choffel one of your boys?’ I asked him.

‘Choffel?’

‘The man who calls himself Price. David Price.’

‘The chief engineer.’

‘Somebody sent a dhow to pick him up from a French ship in the Straits.’

‘Baldwick sent it.’ He stood there, frowning. ‘Choffel? Ah!’ His hand slammed down on the wooden capping of the bulwarks. ‘So that’s it. That’s who he is.’ He seized hold of my arm, staring at me. ‘Choffel! The Petros Jupiter. He was the engineer, ja?’ He nodded, his lips under the pale beard spreading to the ghost of a smile. ‘Goed! Zeer goed!’ And suddenly he was laughing. ‘Different nationalities, different motives — it will bekom an interesting voyage, I think.’ He was still laughing, a wild look in those pale blue eyes. I thought of him then as he had appeared in the press, holding the whole world at bay, a bomb in his hand and a loaded tanker under his feet. He was moving away from me, crossing the deck and climbing slowly up the steps to the poop that looked high enough and old enough to have Bligh himself pacing its deck. He seemed lost in his thoughts again, and I stood rooted to the spot, wondering just how mad or unpredictable he would prove to be. The captain of a tanker, whose whereabouts I still didn’t know, officered by men of different nationalities, different motivations. An interesting voyage, he had said, laughing, and the cold pale eyes looking wild.

It was a long day, sailing on a close reach, the shamal virtually a westerly, deflected by the red volcanic mountains. A great dish of rice and goat meat was cooked in the waist over a charcoal fire and we ate it squatting on the poop with the wooden pulpit-like thunderbox on the windward side, the mountains falling away and deep indents appearing in the coastline, so that the heat-hazed outline of its jagged cliffs had the-‘ fluted look of a red-hot organ. I had never been this close to the upthrust finger of the peninsula that was the southern side of the Straits of Hormuz. It looked hellish country, which doubtless explained the nature of the people who inhabited it. The Shihuh had a bad reputation.

And then, just as the sun was slanting so low that the whole dragons’-toothed line of jagged cliffs turned a bright blood-red, we turned and headed in towards them. The great sail was dipped for’ard of the mast and brought round on to the port side, the wind on the starboard quarter and the dhow piling through a sea so red it was like molten lava. It was a fantastic sight, the sun going down and the world catching fire, red rocks toppling in pinnacles above us and all of us staring unbelievingly as we ran suddenly into black shadow, the narrow gut opening out into a great basin ringed with sheer rock cliffs, and the whole wild, impossible place as red as the gates of hell, sculpted into incredible, fluted shapes.

At the far end, clamped against the red cliffs, red itself like a huge rock slab, a shape emerged that took on the appearance of a ship, a long flat tank of a ship with the superstructure at the far end of it painted the same colour as the cliffs, so that the one blended into the other, an optical illusion that gradually became a reality as we furled our sails and motored towards it in the fading light, the sound of our diesel echoing back from the darkening cliffs. It was hot as hell and a red flag with a hammer and sickle fluttered above the dim reddish outline of the tanker’s funnel.

CHAPTER TWO

We had known, of course, the instant we turned into the khaivr that this was where the ship lay; what came as a surprise was to find her jammed hard against the side of the inlet instead of anchored out in the open. The light was going fast, the shape of her merging into the towering background of rock, no colour now, the red darkening to black, and the gloom of the heat-stored cliffs hanging over us. She was a VLCC, about 100,000 tons by the look of her, the side-windows and portholes of her superstructure painted out so that she looked blind and derelict, like a ship that had been stranded there a long time. I think all of us felt a sense of eeriness as we bumped alongside, the hot reek of metal, the stink of oil and effluent that scummed the water round her, the silence disintegrating into a jabber of voices as we gave vocal expression to our feelings at this strange embarkation. But it wasn’t just the circumstances of the vessel. There was something else. At least there was as far as

I was concerned. I was conscious of it as soon as I had climbed aboard, so that I stood there, shocked into immobility till the heat of the deck coming up through the soles of my shoes forced me to move.

I have always been sensitive to atmosphere. I remember, when I was about ten, I went with a camel train to Buraimi and burst into tears at the sight of an abandoned village with the well full of stones. I had no idea at the time why it upset me so, but long afterwards I discovered that Wahabi raiders had thrown all the males of that village down the well before blocking it up. And it didn’t have to be the destruction of a village, or of whole armies, as in the Khyber where that dreadful little triangle of flat land in the depths of the pass shrieks aloud of the thousands trapped and slaughtered. Standing on the deck of that tanker, with the cliffs leaning over me and the stars brightening, I could accept the fact of her extraordinary position, tucked in against the rock face, the mooring lines looped over natural pinnacles. The flag, too. Given that this was some sort of fraud, then the painting of the hull to match the ochre-red of the rock, the blanking out of all the windows, these became sensible, practical precautions, and the flag no more than a justification for the ship’s concealment should the crew of an overflying aircraft be sharp enough to spot her. Everything, in fact, however strange, had a perfectly rational explanation — except the atmosphere.

An Arab was coming towards us along the flat steel promenade of the deck. He had a gaunt, pock-

marked face and a nose like the beak of a ship. There was a suggestion of effeminacy in his voice as he greeted bin Suleiman, but beneath the old sports jacket

I glimpsed the brass-bound leather of crossed braces and belt, the gleam of cartridge cases against the white of his flowing robes. This was a Bedu and equipped for fighting. ‘Gom,’ he said, in soft, guttural English, and he took us back along the deck to the steel ladder that reared up on the port side of the superstructure.

I could hear the faint hum of a generator deep in the bowels of the ship as we climbed to the level of B deck, where he opened the door for us, standing back and motioning us to enter.

One moment I was standing on the grating, dark-Bess closing in from the east, and to the west, behind the first outcrops of the Jebel al Harim, the last of the sunset glow still lingering in the sky, the next I had stepped inside, into the blacked-out accommodation area, everything darkened and the lights glowing dimly. Rod Selkirk’s quarters were, as usual in this type of tanker, on the starboard side, mine the next cabin inboard, so that both mates were immediately below the captain’s quarters on C deck. I had a wash and was stowing my gear when Rod poked his head round the door. ‘Officers’ saloon is just down the alley from me, and they got beer in the cold box — coming?’

‘Pour one for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right with you.’

‘Sure. Be seeing you then.’

He closed the door and I stood there for a moment, looking vaguely round for the best place to stow my empty bags, conscious that his sudden need of company reflected my own mood, the sense of being alone and on the brink of a voyage whose end I didn’t want to think about. The cabin was hot and airless, the two windows looking for’ard obscured by an ochre-coloured wash, the lights dim. I scratched at the window glass with my thumb nail, but the wash was on the outside. It annoyed me that I couldn’t see out, the place seeming claustrophobic like a prison cell. I changed into my clean white shirt, combed my hair back, my face pale and ghostly in the damp-spotted mirror, then turned to the door, thinking of that beer. It was then, when I was already out of the cabin and had switched off the light, that the windows were momentarily illuminated from the outside, a baleful glow that revealed a tiny diamond-gleam of white where a brush stroke had lifted clear of the glass. It was in the bottom right-hand corner of the further window, but it was gone before I could reach it, and when I crouched down, searching with my eye close to the glass, I had difficulty in locating it. Then suddenly there was light again and I was looking down on to the deck of the tanker, every detail of it picked out in the beam of a powerful torch directed for’ard at two figures standing in the bows. I saw them for an instant, then they were gone, the torch switched off, and it took a moment for my eye to adjust to the shadowy outline of the deck barely visible in the starlight. A man, carrying something that looked like a short-barrelled gun, came into my line of vision, walking quickly with a limp towards the fo’c’sle, and when he reached it the torch shone out again, directed downwards now, three figures, dark in silhouette, leaning forward, their heads bent as they peered into what was presumably a storage space or else the chain locker.

They were there for a moment, then there was again no light but the stars and I couldn’t see them any more, only the dim shape of the fo’c’sle with the two anchor windlasses and the mooring line winch. Several minutes passed, my eye glued to the little peephole of clear glass, but the figures did not reappear, the steel of the deck an empty platform with the black silhouette of the cliffs hanging over it. Once I thought I saw the glow of a light from a hatchway, but my vision was becoming blurred and I couldn’t be sure.

I straightened up, blinking my eyes in the dark of the cabin. It was an odd feeling to be an officer on a ship and not know who was on board or what they were up to. Those shadowy figures, and the man with the gun limping towards them — probably they were just checking the mooring lines, or inspecting the lie of the anchor chain, making certain that the ship was ready to haul off and get under way, but the sense of something sinister was very strong.

I went out then and shut the cabin door, standing uncertain in the dim-lit passage. There was a small baggage room opposite my door, an oil-skin store next to it, then the officers’ washroom and the alleyway leading down the starboard side to the mess-room. I could hear the sound of voices. But still I hesitated, thinking about the men Baldwick had shipped in by from Baluchistan. Had they brought the ship into the khawr and moored it against the cliffs, or had there been a different crew then? The crew’s quarters would be on the deck below. I had only to go down there to learn if they were Pakistanis. I glanced at my watch. It was just after six-thirty. They’d probably be having their evening meal, in which case this was the moment to take a look round the ship. There’d be nobody in the wheelhouse now, or in the chart room, the radio shack too — somewhere up there on the navigating bridge there would be some indication of the ship’s background, where she was from. And on the deck below, on the port side of C deck — the opposite side to the captain’s quarters — would be the chief engineer’s accommodation…

Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d gone up to the bridge then. But I thought it could wait, that just for a moment a beer was more important. And so I turned right, past the washroom, down the alleyway to the mess-room door, and there, sitting talking to Rod Selkirk and the others, was Choffel.

Behind him a single long table with its white cloth stood out in sharp contrast against the soft, almost dove-grey pastel shade of the walls. The chairs, upholstered in bright orange, gave the room an appearance of brightness, even though the lights were ahnost as dim as in my cabin. Nevertheless, I recognized him instantly, despite the dim lighting and the fact that his chin was now thickly stubbled, the beginnings of a beard. He was wearing navy blue trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt with chief engineer’s tabs on the shoulders. He looked older, the face more drawn than in the photographs I had seen, and he was talking with a sort of nervous intensity, his voice quick and lilting, no trace of a French accent.

He stopped at the sight of me and got to his feet, asking me if I would like a beer. They were all of them drinkng beer, except Fraser, who had got hold of a bottle of whisky. For a moment I just stood there, staring at him. He looked so ordinary and I didn’t know what to say. In the end I simply told him my name, watching his face to see the reaction, thinking that would be enough. But all he said was, ‘David Price, Chief Engineer.’ And he held out his hand so that I had to take it. ‘Welcome aboard.’ He turned then and emptied the remains of a can of beer into a glass, handing it to me and pulling up a chair, his dark eyes giving me no more than a casual glance.

My name meant nothing to him. Either he hadn’t taken it in, or else he didn’t realize what had happened to the Petros Jupiter. ‘You’re Welsh, are you?’ I asked. “Somebody told me the Chief was a Greek.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Who? Who told you that, man?’ And when I shrugged and said I couldn’t remember, he gave a quick little laugh. ‘With a name like Price, of course I’m Welsh.’

I nodded. ‘My wife was Welsh,’ I said and sat down, knocking back half the beer he had given me, very conscious of his proximity, the dark eyes and the black wavy hair streaked with grey, the stubble thick on his jaw and throat.

‘Your wife, where was she from then?’ His voice displayed no more than polite interest and I knew he hadn’t a clue who I was or why I was here, didn’t even I know how she had died.

‘From Swansea,’ I said. And I told him her maiden name had been Davies. ‘Karen Davies.’ I remembered the way she had looked, leaning against her bicycle and speaking her name to me for the first time. ‘Karen,’ I said again and his only comment was that it didn’t sound very Welsh.

‘Well, what about your own name?’ I said. ‘Price doesn’t sound exactly Welsh.’

‘No?’ He laughed. ‘Well, let me tell you then. Price is a bastardized form of ap-Rhys or Rees. Ap meant son of, you see. Like ap-Richard — Pritchard.’

I asked him then if he’d been born in Wales and he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Where?’

‘I was born near Caio,’ he said, ‘In an old stone cottage about a mile from Ogofau, where my father worked.’ And he added, ‘That’s hill-farming country, the real heart of Plaid Cymru where the old shires of Cardigan and Carmarthen met before they re-named them Dyfed. After me, you know.’ And he smiled, a humorous little smile that creased the corners of his mouth and tucked a small hollow into each cheek. ‘My father was a miner, you see. Started in the anthracite pits down in the valleys beyond Merthyr. It was there he got the silicosis that finally killed him.’

He got up and went over to the cold box, coming back with a fresh beer for each of us. And then he was talking about the Ogofau gold mine, how it was an open-cast mine in the days of the Romans, who had built a guard post at Pumpsaint and seven miles of sluices. He said there were historians who believed it was because of Ogofau that the Romans invaded Britain. ‘All through the occupation they were exporting something like 400 tons of gold a year to Rome. That’s what my father said.’

Sitting there, staring at that Welsh face, listening to that Welsh voice telling about his childhood and about going down into the mine with his father after it had closed in the thirties — it wasn’t a bit as I had expected, this meeting between myself and the Petros Jupiter’s engineer. He was describing what his father had told him about working underground in a mine that had been producing gold for more than two thousand years — the rock face caving in as they struck one of the old shafts, the roar of the dammed-up water engulfing them, rising chest-high as they fled and stinking of two millennia of stagnation. And then one of the crew came in, a Pakistani who said something to him about the tiller flat, and he nodded. ‘All right then,’ he said, gulping down the rest of his beer and excusing himself. ‘You Mates, you come off watch and that’s that, but a Chief Engineer now…’ And he smiled at us as he hurried out.

I stared after him unbelievingly. God knows how many ships he’d sent to the bottom, how many men he’d drowned, and he was so ordinary, so very Welsh, so pleasant even. I could see his daughter, standing there in that extraordinary house built into the cliffs above the Loire, her voice rising in anger as she defended him — such a kindly, generous, loving father. God Almighty!

Behind me I heard Varsac saying, ‘I don’t think he know anyzing. If he do, why don’t he tell us.’ And Lebois insisting that an officer who had been on board over a week must have learned something. ‘But all he talks about is the Pays de Galles.’

The French, with their customary realism, had already accepted that it was either a scuttling job or a cargo fraud, Varsac insisting that we weren’t loaded with oil at all, but ballasted down with sea water. ‘You check, eh?’ he told Rod. ‘You’re the Mate. You examine the tanks, then we know.’ He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, leaning forward and smiling crookedly. ‘If it is sea water, not oil, then we demand more pay, eh?’

Fraser suddenly erupted into the discussion: ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, man. Yu du that an’ yu’ll find yursel’ left behind to fry on the rocks here.’ He reached for the whisky bottle. ‘Yu seen the guard they got patrolling the deck. Start pokin’ yur nose into those tanks an’ yu’ll get a bullet in yur guts.’ And he added as he refilled his glass, ‘Yu ask me, we’re sitting on a tanker-load of high explosives — bombs, shells, guns.’ He stared at Varsac morosely. ‘There’s enough wars fur God’s sake.’

I left them arguing over the nature of the voyage and went back to my cabin to peer through the tiny chink of clear glass at the deck below. I could see no movement at all, though the stars were brighter than ever and the deck clearly visible with the masts of the dhow like two slender sticks lifted above the port rail. I thought I could make out a figure standing in the shadow of the nearby derrick, but I couldn’t be sure. Then a match flared, the glow of a cigarette, and shortly afterwards two Arabs came over the rail at the point where the dhow was moored alongside. The guard stepped out of the derrick’s shadow, the three of them in a huddle for a moment, and then they were moving down the deck towards the bridge-housing all dressed in white robes and talking together so that I knew the guard was also an Arab.

I watched until they passed out of sight below, then I straightened up, wondering who set the guards, who was really in charge? Not Baldwick, he’d only just arrived. Not Hals either.

But Hals was the most likely source of information and I went along the alleyway to the lift. It wasn’t working and when I tried to reach the exterior bridge ladder I found the door to it locked. It took a little searching to find the interior stairs. They were in a central well entered by a sliding fire door that was almost opposite my cabin.

The upper deck was very quiet. There was nobody about, the alleyway empty, the doors to the offices and day rooms of both captain and chief engineer closed. I tried the lift, but it wasn’t working on this deck either. I don’t think it was out of order. I think the current had been switched off. At any rate, the door leading to the deck and the external ladder was locked, the intention clearly to restrict the movement of officers and crew.

The lift being on the port side it was right next to the radio officer’s quarters. I knocked, but there was no answer and the door was locked. He would be the key man if it were fraud and I wondered who he was. A door opposite opened on to stairs leading up to the navigating bridge. I hesitated, the companionway dark and no sound from the deck above. At the back of the wheelhouse there’d be the chart table, all the pilot books, the log, too, if I could find it. And there was the radio shack. Somewhere amongst the books, papers and charts I should be able to discover the identity of the ship and where she had come from.

I listened for a moment, then started up the stairs, treading cautiously. But nobody challenged me, and when I reached the top, I felt a breath of air on my face. I turned left into the wheelhouse. The sliding door to the port bridge wing was open and the windows were unobscured so that I could see the stars.

There was no other light, the chart table and the control console only dimly visible. But just to be there, in the wheelhouse, the night sky brilliant through the clear windows and the ship stretched out below me in the shadow of the cliffs — I stood there for a moment, feeling a wonderful sense of relief.

It was only then that I realized how tensed up I had become in the last few days. And now I felt suddenly at home, here with the ship’s controls all about me. The two years at Balkaer slipped away. This was where I belonged, on the bridge of a ship, and even though she looked as if she’d been stranded against towering rocks, I was seeing her in my mind as she’d be when we were under way, the wide blunt bows ploughing through the waves, the deck moving underfoot, all the world at my command.

There were no lights here and it took a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to the starlit gloom. The long chart table unit formed the back of the wheel-house, just behind the steering wheel and the gyro compass. There was a chart on it, but even in that dim light I could see that it was the plans of the Persian Gulf, which included large scale details of the Mus-andam Peninsula, and no indication of where the ship had come from. This was the only chart on the table, and the one ready to hand in the top drawer, the big Bay of Bengal chart, was no help either. It was the log book I needed, but when I went to switch on the chart table light to search the shelves, I found the bulb had been removed. I think all the bulbs in the wheelhouse had been removed.

However, the books were the usual collection to be found on the bridge of any ocean-going ship, most of them immediately recognizable by their shape — the Admiralty sailing directions, light lists, tidal and ocean current charts, nautical almanacs, and the lists of radio signals and navigational aid stations and beacons.

I turned my attention to the radio room then. This was on the starboard side, and groping my way to it I stumbled against a large crate. It was one of three, all of them stencil-marked radio equipment. They had been dumped outside the entrance to the radio room which, even in the da’rkness, showed as a ragged gap boarded up with a plywood panel. Jagged strips of metal curling outwards indicated an explosion and the walls and deck were blackened by fire.

The sight of it came as a shock, my mind suddenly racing. Radio shacks didn’t explode of their own accord. Somebody had caused it, somebody who had been determined to stop the ship from communicating with the outside world. The crates were obviously the ones Hals had loaded on to the dhow from the warehouse at Dubai. The larger one would be the single-sideband radio and the other two would contain the other replacements for instruments damaged in the explosion. Was that why I hadn’t seen any sign of a radio officer? Had he been killed in the blast? I was remembering Gault’s warning then, feeling suddenly exposed, the others all in the mess-room drinking, only myself up here on the bridge trying to find out where the ship had come from, what had happened to her.

The need to be out of the wheelhouse and in the open air, away from those grim marks of violence, made me turn away towards the door on the starboard side, sliding it open and stepping out into the night. The starboard bridge wing was so close to the cliffs I could almost touch them with my hand, the air stifling with the day’s heat trapped in the rocks. The masts of the dhow lying just ahead of the port-side gangway were two black sticks against the dull gleam of the khawr, which stretched away, a broad curve like the blade of a khanjar knife in the starlight. Deep down below I could just hear the muffled hum of the generator. It was the only sound in the stillness of that starlit night, the ship like a ghostly sea monster stranded in the shadow of the cliffs, and that atmosphere — so strong now that it almost shrieked aloud to me.

Standing there on the extreme edge of the bridge wing, I suddenly realized I was exposed to the view of any hawk-eyed Arab standing guard on the deck below. I turned back to the shelter of the wheelhouse. No point in searching for that log book now. With the radio room blasted by some sort of explosive device, the log would either be destroyed or in safe keeping. Hals might have it, but more likely it was in the hands of the people who had hired him. In any case, it didn’t really matter now. The destruction of the ship’s means of communication could only mean one thing — piracy. She had been seized from her owners, either whilst on passage or else in some Middle Eastern port where the harbour authorities were in such a state of chaos that they were in no position to prevent the seizure of a 100,000-ton ship.

I had another look at the blackened fabric of the radio room. There was absolutely no doubt, it had been blasted by an explosion and that had been followed by fire. I wondered what had happened to the poor wretched Sparks. Had he been there when the explosion occurred? I didn’t attempt to break into the room, but at least there was no odour of putrefaction, only the faint smell of burnt rubber and paint. I checked the crates again, wondering why they needed to replace the radio equipment. For purposes of entering a port to sell cargo or for delivering the ship a small VHF set would be quite adequate.

Other questions flooded my mind. Why hadn’t they organized the replacement crew in advance, instead of harbouring the ship against the cliffs here? Why the delay, running the risk of her being sighted by an Omani reconnaissance plane monitoring movements through the Straits or picked out from some routine surveillance satellite photograph? Surely speed in an operation like this was essential. I moved across to the port side to see if the radar room had also been damaged.

It was then that a shadow moved by the door to the port bridge wing. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, heard the click of metal slotting home as I spun round, and a voice, with a strong accent, said, ‘Who are you?’

He was standing in silhouette against the stars. The deck guard presumably, for I could see the robes and the gun. ‘Second mate,’ I said. ‘Just checking the bridge. No need for you to worry.’ My voice sounded a little hoarse, the gun pointed at my stomach. It was some sort of machine pistol.

‘Below plees. Nobody come here.’

‘Whose orders?’ I asked.

‘Below. Below. You go below — quick!’ His voice was high and nervous, the gun in his hand jerking, the white of his eyes staring.

‘What’s your name?’

He shook his head angrily. ‘Go quick.’

‘Who gave you orders to keep the ship’s officers off the bridge?’

‘You go — quick,’ he repeated, and he jabbed the muzzle of his machine pistol hard into my ribs.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, it was in shadow, but I could sense his nervousness. ‘Is Captain Hals allowed on the bridge?’ I asked. I don’t know whether he understood the question, but he didn’t answer, jabbing the gun into me again, indicating that I should get moving.

I never saw what he looked like, for he didn’t come down with me into the lower part of the ship, simply standing at the top of the bridge companion and motioning me below with the barrel of his pistol.

Back on C deck I went straight to the captain’s office. The door was just past the central well of the stairs. There was no answer to my knock so I tried the handle. To my surprise it opened and the light was on inside. There was a desk with a typewriter on it, some papers, steel filing cabinets against the inboard bulkhead, two or three chairs. The papers proved to be invoices, and there was a radio instruction manual. The inner door leading to the day cabin was ajar and, though the light was on, there was nobody there. The decor was the same as in the officers’ mess-room, the walls grey, the furnishings and curtains orange. It looked bright and cheerful, no indication at all of any violence.

The bedroom door, outboard on the far side, was not only shut but bolted from the inside. I called out and after a moment a sleepy voice answered. ‘Ja. Who is it?’ And when I told him, he asked, ‘Is it already time for the night food?’

I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s almost twenty past seven,’ I told him.

‘Ja. It is almost time.’

I heard movement, then the door was unbolted and he emerged completely naked, his eyes barely open and his blond hair standing up in a tousled mop, so that if he’d had a straw in his mouth, he would have made a very good caricature of a stage yokel. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked, standing there with his mouth open in a yawn and scratching himself.

‘The name of the ship,’ I said. ‘I want to know what’s happened to her and why.’

He stopped scratching then, his mouth suddenly a tight line, his eyes watching me. ‘So. You want to ask questions — now, before the voyage is begun. Why?’ And when I told him I’d just come from the wheel-house he smiled, nodding his head. ‘Sit down.’ He waved me to the settle and dived back into the bedroom. ‘So you have seen our bombed-out radio room and come to the obvious conclusion, that there is an attempt at piracy and they make a balls of it, eh? But take my advice, Mr Rodin, do not leap to the conclusion that they are stupid people and incompetent. They learn their lesson very well.’

‘What happened to the radio officer?’ I asked.

‘Dead, I think.’

‘And the other officers, the crew?’

‘One, per’aps two, killed, also several wounded.’ There was the sound of water running and then he said, ‘Better you don’t ask about that.’ And after a moment he emerged in white shorts and shirt, running a comb through his damp hair. ‘You want to stay alive, you keep your mouth shut. These people are very tough.’

‘Who?’

‘You will see in good time, my friend. There are five of them and they mean business. So, if you don’t like it, better you don’t do anything quick, without proper thought. Understand?’

I nodded, conscious that his choice of words distanced himself from them. ‘Where do you come into it?’ I asked him.

He didn’t even answer that, slipping the comb into the breast pocket of his shirt, watching me all the time out of those very blue eyes. Finally he said, ‘Per’aps when we know each other better, then maybe we could talk freely. For the present, you are the second officer and I am your captain. That is all between us. Right?’

I got to my feet then. I couldn’t force him to talk. But at least I knew he wasn’t part of what had already happened. ‘On the dhow,’ I said, ‘when we were coming up from Ras al Khaimah—‘ I hesitated, wondering how to put it. Since I didn’t know what the operation was I couldn’t be sure he was opposed to it. But I wanted him to know that, if there was any question of pollution, and he was opposing it, he could count on me. ‘When you knew who I was, you talked about my wife. You said Karen should have been more political, that she should have threatened the authorities, demanded a law of the sea to control pollution. Those were your words. You meant them, didn’t you?’

‘Ja. Of course. But the Petros Jupiter, that was only a ten thousand ton spillage.’

‘But is that the reason you’re here, on this ship?’

‘What reason?’

‘Pollution,’ I said. ‘The same reason you risked your life in that tanker on the Niger.’

‘Ah, you know about that.’ He sat down and waved me back to my seat. ‘I risked my job, too. After that nobody want to employ me, not even as an ordinary seaman.’ He laughed. ‘Then I got this job.’

‘Through Baldwick?’

He shook his head. ‘I was in Dubai and I hear’ some talk…’ He reached into a locker beside the table. ‘You like a whisky?’ He poured it neat, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You know, the first bad slick I ever see, the first real pollution? It was in South Africa. I had just taken my mate’s certificate and was on leave…’ His mother was apparently from Cape Town and he had been staying with relatives, some people called Waterman, who were English South African, not Afrikaner, and very involved in the environment. ‘Victor was a marine biologist. Connie, too, but she had a baby to look after. You remember the Wafra?’

I shook my head.

‘And before that the Kazintah?’

He drank some of his whisky and sat, looking down at the glass in his hand, his mind back in the past. It was the Wafra he talked about first. That was in 1969, he said, and he had been between ships, enjoying himself, wanting to see as much as he could of the country. He had arrived there in November, just two days before the Kazimah got herself impaled on the Robben rocks. ‘Robben is an island out in Table Bay about seven miles from Cape Town.’ He paused, still looking down at his glass, and when I asked him the cause of the stranding, he shrugged and said, ‘The engine. Ja, it is always the engine. Almost every tanker gets into difficulties—‘ And then he was talking about the organization for the conservation of coastal birds that had been formed the previous year and how he had spent the best part of a month helping his cousin, Connie, who was a member of the organization, collect oil-soaked penguins and take them to the cleansing centre. There had been a lot of people working desperately hard at penguin recovery, but even so her husband reckoned around 10,000 died.

And, earlier that same year, the whole penguin population of Dyer Island, over to the west near Cape Agulhas, had been wiped out by another oil slick. ‘Everything, every bloody tanker, all the oil for Europe and the West goes round the Cape. And I come back from two months wandering through the Kalahari, and over to the Skeleton Coast and Namibia, to find Connie Waterman exhausted with the effort of dealing with the Wafra disaster. It was the breeding season and they were literally evacuating the birds from Dyer Island to prevent them being hit again.’ He paused then, lifting his head and looking directly at me. ‘That is how I have become involved in environment.’ And he added, a little smile moving the hairs- of his beard, ‘Per’aps it is true what my mother says, that I am half in love with Connie.’ She had been only a few years older and he’d been tramping, no fixed abode, no attachment, seeing the world, taking life as it came. It was working with her, he said, handling the poor pitiful wrecks of birds, and all the time the terrible sense of inadequacy felt by Connie and the other men and women working so hard to save what they could, knowing that whatever they did, nothing would alter the fact that tomorrow or the next day, or the next, there would be another tanker in trouble, another oil slick, more pollution, more birds to treat — on and on and on till ‘the bloody bastards who own and run the sheeps are made to realize what it means when oil is vented, either intentionally or accidentally. And—‘ He was very tense now, very worked up, the words spilling out of him with great force — ‘it is not only the Cape. It is the coasts of Europe. My own country — the Nederlands, that is very vulnerable, also the UK, France, the whole of the English Channel…’

He stopped there, wiping his face with his handkerchief. ‘But the politicians, the bureaucrats, they don’t care. Nothing will be done, nothing at all until the industrial nations that demand all this oil are themselves threatened with pollution on a massive scale.’ He was looking straight at me, his eyes wide and staring, his whole body radiating an extraordinary intensity. ‘Then maybe they get tough, so the bastards can be arrested on the high seas. And if,’ he went on, his teeth showing white through his beard, ‘when the captain is arrested, he is thrown into the sea to float in his own filthy oil until he is half dead — like the birds, eh? — like the keel-haul updated — then, I tell you, man — then there will be no more oil slicks, no more venting at sea. But not till then. You understand?’ He leaned forward, tapping my knee. ‘You worry about the Petros Jupiter. What about the Amoco Cadiz} And the Metula down in the Magellan Straits — fifty thousand tons in an area where the cold makes biological breakdown of the tarry mousse much slower. Tanker after tanker. And the venting and the leaks — they go on all the time. How much oil do you think is spilled into the sea from bilges, engine-rooms and illicit tank cleaning operations? You will not believe me, but I tell you, it is one and a half million tons of oil. Ja.’ He nodded, cracking his knuckles, an angry brightness in his eyes. ‘There must be a stop put to it.’ His mouth opened to emit a harsh barking laugh. ‘Drown them in it. That is good justice. Do you agree?’ He was deadly serious, his eyes very wide, almost staring, and fixed on mine as though conveying some unspoken message. ‘So. We have another talk some time. But when we are at sea,’ he added, glancing at his watch. ‘Now we will go to eat.’

He got to his feet, padding barefoot back into the bedroom to put on some shoes, while I sat finishing my whisky and thinking about it. Almost everybody involved in the cleaning of oiled birds had probably wished at some time it was the men responsible for the slick they were trying to clean. Rough justice, but if those responsible for a spillage were forced to swim for it in their own filth… it was politically impossible, of course. Karen had talked about it. So had others at the Cornish cleansing station, the women mainly. But how many nations would agree to pass and enforce such a Draconian law?

It started me thinking about the ship again and Hals saying that nothing would be done until the industrial nations were faced with the threat of massive oil pollution. Was that his plan? An interesting voyage, he had said — different nationalities, different motives. ‘What’s our destination?’ I asked him.

‘You will be told soon.’

‘Do you know it?’ He didn’t answer that, his foot on the chair, bending to tie the laces of a new pair of canvas deck shoes. ‘What about the name of the ship?’ I asked.

‘They don’t have a name for it yet.’

‘But the original name?’

‘It has been painted out.’

‘Yes, but what was it?’

‘You ask too many questions.’ He came back into the day cabin, and at that moment the door of the office was swung open and a voice behind me said, ‘Captain. I told you, no one is to go on the bridge.’ It was a soft, sibilant voice, the English quite fluent. ‘Is this the man?’

I swung round to see a slight, dark figure standing in the doorway. He was bearded, with thick, curly black hair, dressed in very pale khaki trousers and tunic, a chequered scarf at his throat and a pistol holstered in his leather belt. But it was the face, the dark eyes, the birthmark just visible beneath the beard… I jumped to my feet. ‘Qasim!’ The name was out before I could stop myself, before I had time to think what his presence meant.

I saw the sudden wariness in his eyes, the hesitation as he considered his reply. ‘We have met before?’ He sounded uncertain, his hand going, almost automatically it seemed, to the pistol in its holster.

‘The Shaft al Arab,’ I said, recovering myself. ‘Remember? You were brought on board by the Shah’s police and we took you to Kuwait.’

He thought back, frowning. ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ He nodded, his hand coming slowly away from the gun. ‘I remember now.’ He was smiling then, some of the tension going out of him. ‘You were very good to me, all of you, on board that ship. And I had had a bad time of it, you know.’

‘You made a good recovery I see.’

‘Yes, I am fully recovered, thank you. But my name is Sadeq now. Abol Sadeq.’ He came forward into the day cabin holding out his hand. ‘I am sorry. I remember your face, of course. You were the second mate, I think. But I forget your name. Excuse me.’ I told him my name and he nodded and shook my hand. ‘Of course.’ He was looking at me curiously. ‘You have lost your wife. Mr Baldwick told me. I am sorry.’ The dark eyes stared at me a moment. ‘Are you the man who is in the wheelhouse just now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not, if I’m second mate?’

He laughed then. ‘Of course. Why not. But why don’t you stay with the others? You don’t like to drink?

Or is it that you’re curious?’ He seemed to be trying to make up his mind about something. ‘You don’t answer.’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve never been on a ship where the bridge was barred to the mates.’

‘Well, now you are on such a ship. Until we sail.’ He turned to Hals. ‘Didn’t you warn them?’

Hals shook his head. ‘I left that to Baldwick.’

‘But you are the captain and I told you…’ He stopped there and gave a little shrug. ‘It does not matter now. I have just been in the mess and I told them myself.’ He turned back to me. ‘There is a guard on the deck. He is an Arab, one of the Shihuh who inhabit this part. You could have been shot.’ He nodded curtly, a gesture that seemed to dismiss the subject for he was suddenly smiling, his expression transformed into one of friendliness. ‘I did not expect somebody on board to whom…” He hesitated. ‘I think perhaps I owe you my life.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ I said.

He shook his head, still with that friendly smile. ‘If not my life, then my good health. I remember you sat by my bed. You gave me courage to stand the pain and now I must consider how to repay you.’ He was frowning again as though faced with a sudden intractable problem, and he turned abruptly, walking quickly out through the office.

I waited till he was gone, then shut the door and faced Hals. ‘You know who he is?’ I asked.

‘Ja. He is the boss. He directs this expedition.’

‘But you don’t know his background?’

‘No. Only that he gives the orders. He has the money and the others do what he tells them.’

‘Are they Iranians, too?’

‘Ja, I think so.’

‘Terrorists?’

‘Per’aps.’

‘Do you know what his politics are?’

‘No. But when you meet him before, you talk with him then. You must know what he is.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. And I told him the circumstances in which we had met. ‘All I know is what the Shah’s police said, that he was a terrorist. That means he was either a Communist or a supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini.’

‘Don’t he tell you which, when you are sitting beside his bed in the sick bay on board your ship?’

‘I didn’t ask him. The man was in desperate pain. I wasn’t even sure he’d live till we reached Kuwait and got him to a doctor. You don’t cross-examine a man when he is close to death and slipping in and out of a coma.’

‘Okay, so you don’t know any more about him than I do.’ He gave a shrug, turning towards the door. ‘We go and feed now.’

‘There’s something else,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘This ship. You really mean you don’t know its name?’

‘Is that important?’

‘It’s the Aurora B,’ I said.

CHAPTER THREE

By the time Hals and I entered the officers’ messroom the big table at the after end had been laid and there was a steward in attendance dressed in white trousers and tunic. The chief engineer was back, sitting beside Rod Selkirk with a beer in front of him, but not talking now. Sadeq wasn’t there, nor was Bald-wick. The steward began sounding a gong as the captain went straight to his place at the head of the table. The others followed, and when we were all seated, the steward brought in plates piled with vegetables in a dark sauce. It was a Pakistani dish, the vegetables cold, the sauce curry-powder hot. ‘Jesus! We got ter put oop wi’ this rubbish!’ Fraser’s voice expressed the instinctive disgust of those unaccustomed to Eastern food.

I ate almost automatically, not talking, my mind still stunned by the knowledge that this was the Aurora B. Saltley wouldn’t believe it. Not that I had any means of contacting him, but if I had, I knew I’d find it difficult to convince him — not only that the tanker was still afloat, but that within a few days of our meeting I was actually dining on board the Aurora B. It didn’t seem possible. And opposite me, only one place further down the table, was the little Welshman who had sunk the Petros Jupiter and was now being employed… I glanced across at him, wondering — employed to do what?

A terrorist in charge of the voyage and an engineer who was an expert in sabotage! And what was I to do about it? Knowing what I did… I was still looking at the chief engineer as he turned his head. Our eyes met for an instant and it was as though some spark of telepathy passed between us. But then he had turned away, to the man on his left. It was Lebois and he was speaking to him in French.

He was like a chameleon, French one moment, Welsh the next, and his name was Price. Even Baldwick called him that, though he knew damn well his name had been Choffel for years now. ‘Price!’ he called as he came in with some letters in his hand. Presumably they had come up with us from Dubai in the dhow. ‘A letter for you,’ he said and handed it to him.

The curried vegetables were followed by a steak and some ugly-looking potatoes. The steak was deep frozen and tough, and for those who refused to face up to the potatoes there was sliced white bread that was already staling in the heat. The only thing that seemed to have maintained its freshness was the array of bottled sauces in the centre of the table. I hoped the dhow had loaded some provisions in Dubai, something more interesting than those shipped at Ras al Khaimah, otherwise I could see tempers getting very frayed. Varsac pushed his plate away, Lebois too. Clearly the French were not going to take to Pakistani cooking.

Somebody — Hals, I think — wondered jokingly how long scurvy took to develop. We were discussing this, and the length of time hunger-strikers had taken to die of starvation, when I was suddenly conscious of the Welshman staring at me, his steak untouched, the letter open in front of him and a small white square of pasteboard in his hand. It was a photograph. He glanced down at it quickly, then looked across at me again, his eyes wide, the shock of recognition dawning. I knew then that the letter must be from his daughter and the photograph in his hand one of those she had taken in Nantes as I was leaving for the airport. His mouth opened as though to say something, and in that moment he seemed to disintegrate, a nerve twitching at his face, his hand trembling so violently the photograph fell into his plate.

With a visible effort, he pulled himself together, but his face looked very white as he grabbed up the photo, still staring at me with an expression almost of horror, his hands fluttering as he tried to fold the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he got suddenly to his feet, muttering ‘Excuse me’ as he hurried out of the room.

‘Malade?’ Lebois asked. Varsac muttered something in reply, reaching across and scooping up the meat from the abandoned plate. A hand fell on my shoulder. I looked up to find Baldwick standing over me. ‘Come outside a moment.’ I followed him to the door. ‘What did you say to him?’ he demanded, his little eyes popping with anger.

‘Nothing. It was the letter.’

‘Well, leave him alone. Understand? He’s chief engineer and they need him.’ He leaned down, his heavy-jowled face close to mine. ‘You can’t blame him for wot your wife done to herself. That wot you had in mind?’ And when I didn’t say anything, he went on, speaking slowly as though to a child, ‘Well, if it is, cut it out, d’you understand — or you’ll get hurt.’ And he added, still leaning over me, his face so close I could smell the whisky on his breath, ‘This isn’t any sort of a kindergarten outfit. You just remember that. Price is nothing to do with you.’

‘His name’s Choffel,’ I said.

‘Not on board here it isn’t. He’s David Price. That’s wot you call him. Got it? And another thing—‘ He straightened up, jabbing his forefinger at my chest. ‘Don’t go letting on to the others wot he done to the Petros Jupiter. They got enough to think about without they start chewing that over in the long night watches.’

‘And what’s he going to do to this ship?’ I asked him.

He tried to turn it into a joke then. ‘Think you’re going to have to swim for it?’ He laughed and patted my shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right.’

‘How do you know? You’re going back in the dhow, aren’t you?’ And I added, ‘What happened to the first crew?’

The question took him by surprise. ‘The first crew?’

‘The Aurora B was last heard of in the Arabian Sea, just a few hours after she cleared the Hormuz Straits.’

I thought he was going to hit me then. ‘How do you know what ship this is?’

‘Sadeq,’ I said.

‘Yes, he told me you had met before. Asked me why the hell I’d recruited you. But what’s that got to do with the Aurora BV

‘He was on the Aurora B.’ And I told him about the crew pictures Perrin had showed me. ‘So what happened to the crew?’

‘I should’ve dumped you,’ he muttered. ‘Soon as I knew you’d been talking to Perrin and Gault, I should have got rid of you.’

‘Hals thinks there’s probably one dead and two or three injured. What about the others?’

‘None of my business,’ he growled. ‘And none of yours, see. You ask questions like that—‘ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Go on, get back to your meal and forget about it.’ And he pushed me away from him, turning quickly and going through the fire doors into the alleyway beyond. I was alone then, very conscious of the fact that Baldwick himself was beginning to get scared. He didn’t want to know about the crew of the Aurora B. He didn’t dare think about it, because if somebody had been killed, it wasn’t just piracy he was mixed up in; it was murder, too.

I went back to my place at the table, but by then the others had almost finished their meal and I wasn’t hungry. The questions they asked me made it clear they were under tension, all except Hals, who seemed relaxed and not in the least concerned about the nature of the voyage or where we were bound. I remember afterwards, when I was sitting with a whisky in my hand and a growing feeling of exhaustion, Rod Selkirk asked him how long the ship had been in the khawr and what sort of crew she had, and he said he didn’t know, that, like ourselves, this was the first time he had been on board. And he added, glancing quickly at me, ‘The crew is mainly Pakistani, but there are others also on board.’ And he took the opportunity to warn us not to leave the area of our quarters. ‘Which means, of course, we are confined to this deck and the one above — decks B and C. That is, until we sail.’ And he added, ‘There are guards to see that this order is obeyed, and they are armed. So you stay in your quarters please, all of you.’

They wanted to know the reason, of course, but all he said was, ‘I don’t know the reason no more than you. I don’t know anything about this voyage, except that we are all being well paid for it. I will try and do something about the food, but it is not important. We are signed on for a single voyage, that is all.’

‘Weel, here’s to the end o’ it then.’ Fraser raised his glass, then saw mine was empty, sloshed some more whisky into it and went round the others, moving carefully as he topped up their glasses, whistling softly through his teeth. ‘If we had a piano noo—‘ The tune he was whistling was Loch Lomond, and when he’d finished the round, he stood swaying in front of us and began to sing:

‘Aboot a lassie Ah’ll sing a song, Sing Rickety-tickety-tin; Aboot a lassie Ah’ll sing a song, Who didna have her family long — Not only did she du them wrong, She did every one o’ them in — them in, She did every one o’ them in…’

By the time she’d set her sister’s hair on fire and danced around the funeral pyre— ‘Playing a violin — olin’, we were all of us laughing. The Ball of Kirriemuir followed and then he had switched to Eskimo Nell, verse after verse— ‘Roond and roond went th’ bluidy great wheel, In and oot…’ The sweat was shining on his face, dark patches under his arms, and when I got up to go to my cabin he was suddenly between me and the door. ‘Where yu think yu’re goin’? Is it tha’ yu don’t like ma singin’, or is it the song?’ He was almost dancing with sudden rage. ‘Yu a prude or somethin’?’ ‘I’m just tired,’ I said, pushing past him. I must have done it clumsily for he lost his balance and came bouncing back at me, his arms flailing, mouthing obscenities. Somebody hauled him back, but I barely noticed. I wanted to be on my own and think things out. The fire doors closed behind me, their voices fading as I went along the alleyway to my cabin. Inside it was desperately hot, the air conditioner not working and no fans. I stripped off and had a cold shower.

There was no fresh water, only sea water, which was tepid and left me feeling hotter than ever and sticky with salt. I lay on my bunk, just a towel over my stomach, listening to the sounds of the ship — the deep-buried hum of the generator, the occasional footstep in the alleyway as somebody went to the heads opposite.

It must have been about half an hour later and I was still there on the bed, when there was a knock on the door. ‘Mind if I come in?’

I sat up, suddenly very wide awake, for the door was opening and I could see his head in silhouette against the light outside, the stubble growth on his cheek shading the line of the jaw. ‘What is it? What do you want?’

‘A word with you. That’s all.’ He stood there, hesitating. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you see. I have to talk to you.’

I switched on the light and Choffel’s face leapt into view. He came in and shut the door. ‘I didn’t know, you see… about your wife, I mean.’ His face was pale, his hands clasping and unclasping. ‘Only just now — my daughter wrote to me…’ He shrugged. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry, yes, but it’s nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.’ He moved closer, coming into the cabin, his voice urgent. ‘You must understand that.’

I stared at him, wondering at the nerve of the man. I didn’t say anything. What the hell did one say? Here he was, the man who had put the Petros Jupiter on the rocks — and by doing so he had been as much the cause of Karen’s death as if he’d taken her out there and killed her with a blow torch. But what could I do — leap from my bed and throttle him with my bare hands?

‘May I sit down please? It’s a long story.’ He pulled up a chair and a moment later he was sitting there, leaning forward, his dark eyes fixed on mine, and I thought, My God, this isn’t at all how it should be, the little bastard sitting there and me still on my bunk. ‘Get out!’ I said hoarsely. ‘Get out, d’you hear?’

But he shook his head. ‘I have to tell you—‘ He held his hand up as though to restrain me. ‘Gwyn has got it into her head you’re planning to kill me, you see. She is being over dramatic, of course. But it is what she says in her letter, so I thought it best to have a word with you. If it is true, and you think I had something to do with what happened to the Petros Jupiter, then I understand how you must feel.’ His hands finally clasped themselves together, locked so tight the knuckles showed white. ‘First, I must explain that the Petros Jupiter was not at all a good ship. Not my choice, you understand. The skipper was all right, but a man who did everything by the book, no imagination at all. The deck officers were much the same, but I only saw them at meals. It was the chief engineer — he was the real trouble. He was an alcoholic. Whisky mostly, about a bottle and a half a day — never drunk, you understand, but always slightly fuddled, so that nothing ever got done and I was expected to cover for him all the time. I didn’t know about that until we were the better part of a week out from Kuwait. He was a Greek and a cousin by marriage of the skipper.

I knew then why I had got the job. Nobody who knew the ship would touch it, and I’d been on the beach, you know, for a long time…’

He looked at me as though seeking sympathy, then gave a shrug. ‘But even when I knew about him, it never occurred to me there would have been a whole voyage, more than one probably, when the oil filters hadn’t been properly cleaned, almost no maintenance at all. You leave the oil filters dirty, you get lack of lubrication, you see — on the gears, both the primary and the secondary. The primary are double helical gears and the debris from them settles to the bottom and finishes up under the secondary reduction gear. In a seaway, rolling like we were that night, broadside-on to the waves, pieces of metal must have got sloshed up into the gears. We were all working flat out, you see, on the evaporator pipes. It had been like that all the voyage, the tubes just about worn out and always having to be patched up, so I didn’t think about the gears. I didn’t have time, the Chief mostly in his cabin, drinking, you know, and then, when we got steaming again…’ He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t put anything in the gears. It was the debris did it, the debris of bad maintenance. You understand? We were only a few miles off Land’s End when the noise started. It was the secondary reduction gear, the one that drives the shaft. A hell of a noise. The teeth were being ripped off and they were going through the mesh of the gears. Nothing I could do. Nothing anybody could do. And it wasn’t deliberate. Just negligence.’

He had been talking very fast, but he paused there, watching to see how I would react. ‘That was how it happened.’ He passed his tongue round his lips. ‘My only fault was that I didn’t check. I should have gone over everything in that engine-room. But I never had time. There was never any time, man — always something more urgent.’

He was lying, of course. It was all part of the game. ‘What did they pay you?’ I asked him.

‘Pay me?’ He was frowning, his eyes wide.

‘For doing the job, then slipping away like that so that no one else could be blamed, only Speridion.’ A professional scuttler, he would only have done it for a straight fee. A big one, too, for there was the skipper of the Breton fishing boat to pay and then the cost of flying out to Bahrain and fixing passage on the Corsaire.

He shook his head, his dark eyes staring at me and his hands clasping and unclasping. ‘How can I convince you? I know how it must appear, but my only fault was I didn’t check. I thought we’d make it. After we got through Biscay I thought that junk yard of machinery would see me through to the end of the voyage.’ Again the little helpless shrug. ‘I did think of going to the captain and insisting we put in for complete refit, but it was a Greek company, and you know what Greek shipowners are like when you suggest anything that cuts into their profits, and after the Cape… Well, there was nowhere after that, so I let it go.’ And he added, his hands clasped very tight, ‘Only once in my life—‘ But then he checked himself, shaking his head slowly from side to side, his eyes staring at me as though hypnotized. ‘Can’t you understand? When you’ve been without a job for a long time—‘ He paused, licking his lips again, then went on in a rush of words: ‘You’ll take anything then, any job that comes along. You don’t ask questions. You just take it.’

‘Under an assumed name.’

His mouth opened, then closed abruptly, and I could see him trying to think of an answer. ‘There were reasons,’ he murmured. ‘Personal reasons.’

‘So you called yourself Speridion. Aristides Speridion.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you had a passport — Speridion’s passport.’

He knew what I was driving at. I could see it in his face. He didn’t answer, his mouth tight shut.

‘What happened to the real Speridion?’

He half shook his head, sitting there unable to say a word. ‘My God!’ I said, swinging my legs off the bunk. ‘You come here, telling me I don’t understand, but it’s not only my wife you’ve killed—‘

‘No!’ He had leapt to his feet. ‘I took his papers, yes. But the ship was sinking and he was dead already, floating face down in the oily water that was flooding the engine-room.’ And he said again, urgently, ‘He was already dead, I tell you. He’d no use for the papers any more.’

‘And Choffel?’ I asked. ‘Henri Choffel, who fell into the harbour at Cayenne just when you needed a job.’ I, too, was on my feet then, tucking the towel around my waist. I pushed him back into the chair, standing over him as I said, ‘That was 1958, wasn’t it? Just after you’d sunk the French ship Lavandou.’

He was staring up at me, his mouth fallen open, a stunned look on his face. ‘How do you know?’ He seemed on the verge of tears, his voice almost pathetic as he said hoarsely, ‘I was going to tell you — everything. About the Lavandou as well. I was just twenty-two, a very junior engineer and I needed money. My mother…’ His voice seemed to break at the recollection. ‘It all started from that. I said it was a long story, you remember. I didn’t think you knew. It was so long ago, and ever since—‘ He unclasped his hands, reaching out and clutching hold of me. ‘You’re like all the rest. You’re trying to damn me without a hearing. But I will be heard. I must be.’ He was tugging at my arm. ‘I’ve done nothing, nothing to be ashamed of — nothing to cause you any hurt. It’s all in your imagination.’

Imagination! I was suddenly shaking with anger. How dare the murderous little swine try and pretend he was misunderstood and all he had ever done was the fault of other people. ‘Get out of here!’ My voice was trembling, anger taking hold, uncontrollable. ‘Get out before I kill you.’

I shall always remember the look on his face at that moment. So sad, so pained, and the way he hung his head like a whipped cur as he pushed the chair away, stepping back and moving slowly away from me. And all the time his eyes on mine, a pleading look that seemed desperately trying to bridge the gap between us. As the door closed behind him I had the distinct impression that he was like a drowning man calling for help.

Mad, I thought. A psychiatric case. He must be. How else could he try and plead his innocence when the facts stared him in the face? It was a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Only a schizophrenic, temporarily throwing off the evil side of his nature and assuming the mantle of his innocent self, could so blatantly ignore the truth when confronted by it.

God, what a mess! I lay back on the bunk again, anger draining away, the sweat cold on my body. I switched off the light, feeling exhausted and rubbing myself with the towel. Time stood still, the darkness closed around me. It had the impenetrable blackness of a tomb. Maybe I dozed. I was very tired, a mental numbness. So much had happened. So much to think about, and my nerves taut. I remember a murmur of voices, the sound of drunken laughter outside the door, and Rod Selkirk’s voice, a little slurred, singing an old voyageur song I had heard a long time ago when I shared a cabin with an ex-Hudson’s Bay apprentice. A door slammed, cutting the sound abruptly off, and after that there was silence again, a stillness that seemed to stretch the nerves, holding sleep at bay.

Thinking about the Aurora B and what would happen to us all on board during the next few weeks, I had a dream and woke from it with the impression that Choffel had uttered a fearful muffled scream as he fell to his death down the shaft of an old mine. Had he been pushed — by me? I was drenched in sweat, the stagnant water closing over his head only dimly seen, a fading memory. The time was 01.25 and the faint murmur of the generator had grown to the steady hum of something more powerful — the auxiliary perhaps. I could feel it vibrating under me and some loose change I had put with my wallet on the dressing table was rattling spasmodically. I got up and put my eye to the little pinpoint of clear glass. There were men in the bows, dark shadows in the starlight, and there were others coming up through a hatchway to join them with their hands on top of their heads.

The crew! It was the crew, of course — the crew of the Aurora B. That’s why nobody had been allowed on the bridge, why there was a guard on the deck. They had been imprisoned in the chain locker, and now they were bringing them up and hustling them across to the starb’d rail at gunpoint. But why? For exercise? For air? They were at the rail now, a dozen or more, still with their hands on their heads, and above them the cliffs towered black against the stars.

I stood back from the peephole, resting my eyes and thinking about that chain locker, what it would be like down there in day time with the sun blazing on the deck above, the stifling heat of it, and nowhere to lie but on the coiled, salt-damp rusty links of the anchor chain. A hell hole, and nothing I could do about it, not for the moment at any rate.

The ship shuddered slightly, the beat of an auxiliary growing, a faint clanking sound. I put my eye to the peephole again. Everything was the same, the prisoners against the rail, their guards, three of them, standing watchful with automatics in their hands, the bows, lit by the flicker of torches, like a stage set with the cliffs a towering backdrop. There were two men by the anchor winch now, bending over it, and another with a hose playing a jet of water on the open vent of the hawse hole. The beat of the auxiliary slowed, it was labouring and I saw the cliffs moving.

And then it happened and the sweat froze on my body as one of the crew turned suddenly, another with him, their hands coming away from their heads, both of them reaching for the rail. Another instant and they would have been over, for the attention of the guards had been momentarily distracted by the winch and its turning and the anchor chain coming in. The first was half over the rail when a guard fired from the hip. The clatter of the automatic came to me faint as a toy, a distant sound like the ripping of calico, and in the same instant the man straddling the rail became an animated doll, his body jerking this way and that until suddenly it toppled over, falling into the widening gap between the ship and the cliff.

A thin cry reached me, like the scream of a far-off seabird, and the other man had gone, too. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen him leap. He must have been a young man, for he had been quicker, just the one hand on the rail and vaulting over, and all three guards rushing to the ship’s side, searching and pointing. More firing, and one of them running to the point of the bows, clambering up and standing there, braced against the flag post.

There was silence then, except for the clank of the anchor chain, the rest of the prisoners standing as though petrified, their hands still on their heads. For a moment nobody moved. Then the man in the bows raised his automatic to his shoulder and began firing single shots. He fired half a dozen, then stopped.

I stood back, resting my eye again. Had the second prisoner got away? I wondered who he was, whether he had found any place to land. When I looked again the bows were well clear of the cliffs and I could see the dark shape of the heights above us climbing in jagged pinnacles towards the Jebel al Harim. I could imagine what it would be like climbing those bare rock hills in the heat of the day, no water and the sun burning the skin off his back, the oven heat of the rocks blistering his feet. I didn’t think he had a hope in hell, and the only people he would meet up there would be the Shihuh who were supposed to be distinctly hostile to Christians trespassing in their barren fortress.

The time was now 01.34 and low down by the entrance to the khawr the stars were being blotted out one by one. It took them just on twenty minutes to inch the ship away from the cliffs so that she was lying to her anchor bows-on to the entrance. By then the whole sky was clouded over and it was almost impossible for me to see anything except when the figures in the bows were illuminated by the flickering light of hand torches as they secured the anchor chain.

I had another shower, towelled myself down and put on my clothes. By then the ship had fallen silent again, the engine noise reduced once more to the faint murmur of the generator, and no sign of anybody on the deck below. I couldn’t see the bows now and no torches flickered there. A wind had got up, a line of white beginning to show where waves were breaking against the base of the cliffs. The sbamal — that was why they had decided to haul off in the middle of the night. The holding here was probably not all that good. The anchor might well drag if they tried to haul off in the teeth of a gale, and if they had stayed put, they might be held pinned against the cliffs for several days. Now we could leave at first light.

It was past two now. Four hours to go before the first glimpse of dawn. I opened the door of my cabin and peered out into the alleyway. There was nobody there, the lights glimmering dully, the ship very still now and quite silent except for the faint background sound of the generator. I had no idea what I was going to do, I hadn’t even thought about it. I just felt I had to do something. I couldn’t just lie there, knowing what ship it was and that the crew were held in the chain locker.

My first thought was to contact one of the Pakistani seamen. It was information I needed. How many guards on duty, for instance, where were they posted, above all, how long before we left and what was our destination? I closed the door of my cabin and stood listening for a moment, alert for those tiny sounds that occur on a ship at anchor so that I could identify them and isolate them from any other sounds I might hear as I moved about the ship. Somewhere a slight hissing sound was just audible beneath the low-toned persistent generator hum. It came from the heads where the urinal flush seemed to be constantly running, and now that I was outside Rod Selkirk’s cabin, I could hear the sound of his snoring, a regular snort followed by a whistle. Occasionally a pipe hammered softly. An airlock, probably. And sometimes I thought I could hear the soft thud of the waves slapping against the ship’s sides.

Those were the only sounds I could identify. A torch; I’d need my torch. The quick flash of it in a man’s face could save me if I suddenly ran into one of the guards. I went back into my cabin, and after getting the torch from the locker beside my bunk, I had a last quick look through the peephole. The line of white marking the base of the cliffs was further off now. The wind must be coming straight into the khawr, the tanker lying wind-rode, stern-on to the cliffs. The deck below was a long dark blur, only discernible as a blank in the sea of broken water that glimmered white around it. I could see no movement.

Back in the alleyway outside my cabin, I pushed through the fire doors and started down the stairs to A deck. It was a double flight and I paused on the landing. The deck below was lit by the same low wattage emergency lighting as the officers’ deck. Nothing stirred. And there were no unusual sounds, the hum of the generator a little louder, that was all. I continued on down, through the sliding fire doors to the alley that ran transversely across the ship. I hesitated then, seeing the closed doors and trying to remember visits I had made in various ports to tankers of a similar size. This would be the boat deck and usually there were offices facing for’ard at this level.

I tried one of the doors. It was locked. They were all locked, except one, which, as soon as I opened it, I knew was occupied. I cupped my hand over my torch, moving softly past a desk littered with papers to an annexe where the body of a man lay huddled in a blanket, breathing softly, a regular sighing sound.

He didn’t look like a Pakistani and the papers on the desk, accounts for food mainly, indicated that this was the chief steward’s office. As on the upper deck, the lift was switched off. Bolder now, I walked quickly down the port and starb’d alleyways. Most of the doors were shut, but the few that had been left latched open showed them as cabins occupied by sleeping bodies.

I went back to the stairs then, down the final flight to the crew’s sleeping quarters. There was a smell about this deck, a mixture of stale food and human bodies overlaid with the pungent scent of spices and the background stink of hot engine oil. It was a strange feeling, wandering those empty alleyways, knowing that all around me men were sleeping. Here and there I could hear the sound of their snores, muted behind closed doors, louder where the doors were open. There was one man with an extraordinary repertoire, the tone of his snores bass on the intake, almost treble when breathing out. I was at the for’ard end of the starb’d alleyway then and I could hear him quite clearly the whole length of the passage. I shone my torch on him, but he didn’t stir, and though I was certain he was one of the Pakistani seamen, I didn’t wake him. The ship was so quiet, everything so peaceful at this level, that I thought it worth trying to have a look outside the superstructure before taking the irrevocable step of making contact with one of the crew.

There were doors to the deck at each end of the transverse alleyway, but they were locked. I went back up the stairs, moving quickly now. At A deck again I paused. I had already tried the doors leading direct on to the external ladders at the after end of the port and starb’d alleyways, also those by the lift. All had been locked and it was only on the offchance that I tried the starb’d doors leading out on to the boat deck. To my surprise these were not locked. Presumably the cox’n, or whoever had been in charge of the foredeck anchor party, had left them open for the convenience of the crew if the wind increased during the night and there was a sudden emergency. I stepped out into the night, the air suddenly fresh and smelling of salt. Straight in front of me was the starb’d lifeboat, the wind thrumming at its canvas covers.

After the sleeping stillness of the crew’s quarters the noise on the boat deck seemed shattering, the night full of the sound of breaking waves, the scream of the wind in the superstructure, and astern the continual uproar of seas foaming against the base of the cliff. It was very dark and not a light anywhere. I felt my way to the rail, standing there between the after davit and a life raft in the full force of the wind, waiting for my eyes to adjust themselves. The time was 02.19.

Gradually the vague outline of the ship emerged. With my head thrown back I could just make out the dark, shadowy shape of the funnel, and a little for’ard of it the mast poking its top above the side of the bridge housing. Looking aft everything was black, the cliffs and the mountains above blotting out any vestige of light filtering through the cloud. For’ard I could just see the gangway hoist and beyond it the shadowy outline of the hull stretched dark against the broken white of water far below. I thought for a moment I could see the outline of one of the jib crane masts and the manifold, but beyond that the ship disappeared into a void of darkness.

I waited there for a good five minutes, but I could see no movement. Finally, I faced into the wind, feeling my way along the side of the lifeboat to the rail at the for’ard end of the boat deck, following it as it turned across the ship until I found the gap where the midships ladder led down to the central catwalk. I went down it, and down another, shorter ladder to the vast open stretch of the upper deck, not daring to expose myself on the catwalk.

I had never been alone on the deck of a tanker before, always in company, and always either in daylight or in the blaze of the ship’s deck lights. Now, in the wind and in complete darkness, with the sound of broken water all round me, it was like advancing into a primeval void, and even though the tanker was quite a modest one by modern standards, the night made it seem huge.

I was pulled up almost immediately by the sudden emergence of a crouched shape. It turned out to be one of the mooring winches and the figure beyond it one of the ‘dead men’, its head the wheel that guided the hawser from fairlead to winch.

I stood for a moment looking about me, checking for some movement, but it was darker now and I couldn’t see a thing. Already the dim shadow of the superstructure had disappeared, nothing visible anywhere except the nebulous outline of pipes running ahead of me and disappearing into the blackness. I felt very alone then, very naked and unarmed, the steel deck under my feet, the bulk of the winch and those pipes, nothing else visible and the knowledge that the deck went on and on until it reached the raised fo’c’sle where the captive crew had been brought up out of the chain locker and those two poor devils had gone over the side.

I moved on, walking slowly, feeling my way with each step. Even so, I found myself tripping over the small tank washing pipes called lavomatics that were stretched across the deck at regular intervals. There were inspection hatches for each tank and purge pipes to clear the gases, and at one point I barged into a slender, screw-capped sounding pipe that was about knee-high. The deck, in fact, was littered with obstacles for a man moving warily in complete darkness, and now there was a new sound. I thought for a moment it was somebody whistling and stopped abruptly, my heart in my mouth, but it was only the wind. A little further on the sound of it changed. It was like somebody moaning. All about me the wind sighed and moaned and the sea made rushing, slapping noises, and at each new sound I paused until I had identified it, convinced that somewhere along this endless dark expanse of steel plating an armed guard lurked, my eyes searching ahead along the line of the raised catwalk for the tell-tale glow of a cigarette.

A shape emerged, grew suddenly tall and I stopped again. I was in the centre of the ship, following the line of the pipes. The shape was away to the right, very straight and tall, motionless by the starb’d rail. I crouched down, moving slowly forward in the shadow of the pipes. There was another shape to my left now. I hesitated, my heart pounding, feeling suddenly boxed in.

I stayed like that for maybe a minute, the figures on either side of me frozen motionless like myself. Gradually it dawned on me that they were further away than I had imagined and much taller than any man could possibly be. The derricks — the jib cranes for handling pipe! I got slowly to my feet, trembling slightly and feeling a fool as I ducked under the manifold with its mass of pipes running transversely across the ship, big valves showing like crouched figures in the gloom as I negotiated the breaker that stops waves running the length of the deck. After that there were no more pipes, only the catwalk running fore and aft.

I must have veered left for I was suddenly confronted with a new sound, an intermittent thumping noise, as though somebody were regularly striking at the steel hull with a heavy wooden maul. The noise of the sea was louder here. I was almost at the port rail and my eyes, following the line of it aft, fastened on the dark outline of a thin shaft standing straight up like a spear against the pale blur of waves breaking in the khawr beyond. For a moment I stood there, not moving and wondering what it was. Then I remembered the dhow moored amidships with its two masts just showing above deck level. I went to the rail then and looked down, the dark shape of the Arab vessel just visible as it rose and fell, its wooden hull banging regularly at the ship’s side.

A man coughed and I spun round. Nothing there, but then the cough was repeated, strident now and more like a squawk. A sudden flurry and I ducked as a vague shape took wing and disappeared into the night. I went on then, moving quickly, my hand on the rail, determined not to be scared of any more shadows. More roosting seabirds rose into the air and I jabbed my toe against a set of fairleads. There were inspection hatches at intervals, each hatch, and particularly the vents, appearing first as some lurking watcher. Then at last I was at the rise of the fo’c’sle deck with the foremast a slender shaft spearing the darkness above me.

A faint glimmer of light filtered through the cloud layer. I found the ladder to the fo’c’sle deck and felt my way through the litter of anchor and mooring machinery to the bows. Here for the first time I felt safe. I had traversed the whole length of the tanker from the bridge housing to the fo’c’sle unchallenged, and now, standing with my back to the bows, all the details of the ship stretching aft to the superstructure invisible in the darkness, I felt relaxed and secure.

This was nearly my undoing, for I started back along the catwalk. There were shelters at regular intervals, two between the fo’c’sle and the manifold, and four foam monitor platforms like gunhousings with ladders down to the deck. I was using my torch to peer inside the second of these firefighting platforms when a figure emerged coming towards me along the catwalk. I just had time to reach the deck and was crouched under the platform when he passed, hurrying to the fo’c’sle with something that looked like a toolbox in his hand.

He didn’t re-emerge, though I stayed there several minutes watching the point where his figure had disappeared. Cautiously I moved to the ship’s rail, not daring to go back on to the catwalk. I could see the derrick now and by keeping close to the rail I was able to bypass both the breaker and the manifold. I was moving quite quickly, all the sounds of the ship, even the quite different sounds of the dhow scraping against its side, identified and familiar. A seabird squawked and napped past me like an owl. I could see the dhow’s mainmast, and had just passed the portside derrick winch, when I heard the clink of metal against metal. It came from further aft, somewhere near the deeper darkness that must be the superstructure emerging out of the gloom.

I hesitated, but the sound was not repeated.

I moved away from the rail then, making diagonally across the deck towards the line of pipes running fore and aft down the centre of the ship. Moving carefully, my eyes searching ahead in the darkness, I stubbed my toe against what seemed to be some sort of a gauge. There was a sounding pipe near it and another of those access hatches to the tanks below. I could see the pipes now, and at that moment a figure seemed to rise up, a looming shadow barring my way. I dropped instantly to the deck, lying sprawled against the steel edge of the access hatch, my eyes wide, probing the darkness.

There was something there. The shape of one of the foam monitor platforms perhaps, or was it a small derrick? Something vertical. But nothing moved, no sound I didn’t know. I rose slowly to my feet, and at that same moment the shape moved, growing larger.

No good dropping to the deck again. He must have seen me. I backed away, moving carefully, step by step, hoping to God I wouldn’t stumble over another hatch. If I could back away far enough to merge into the darkness behind me… The clink of metal on metal again, very close now, very clear, and the figure still seeming to move towards me.

I felt the sweat breaking out on my body, the wind cooling it instantly so that I was suddenly shivering with cold. That metallic sound — it could only be some weapon, a machine pistol like the guard in the wheelhouse had jabbed in my stomach. I wanted to run then, take the chance of bullets spraying in the hope of escaping into the darkness. But if I did that I’d be cornered, pinned up for’ard with no hope of making it back to my cabin.

My heel touched an obstruction. I felt behind me with my hand, not turning my head for fear of losing sight of the shape edging towards me. The winch — I was back at the derrick. I dropped slowly to the deck, crawling behind one of the winch drums and holding my breath.

Nothing moved, the figure motionless now, merging into the darkness. Had I been mistaken? Crouched there, I felt completely trapped. He had only to shine his torch…

‘Who’s there?’

The voice was barely audible, lost in the wind. The dhow thumped the side of the ship. A seabird flew screaming across the deck. Silence now, only the noise of the wind howling through pipes and derricks, making weird groans and whines against the background rushing of waves in the khawr, and the dhow going thump — thump.

Surely I must have imagined it?

I lifted my head above the big steel drum, staring towards the central line of pipes, seeing nothing but the vague shadow of the bridge-like outline of the firefighting platform, the foam gun like a giant’s pistol. Above my head the derrick pointed a long thick finger at the clouds.

‘Is there anybody there now?’

That voice again, in a lull and much clearer this time. So clear I thought I recognized it. But why would he be out here on the deck? And if it were Choffel, then he’d have a torch with him. He wouldn’t go standing stock still on the deck asking plaintively if anyone was there.

I thought I saw him, not coming towards me, but moving away to the right, towards the rail. He must have been standing exactly between me and the fire monitor platform, otherwise I must have seen him for he wasn’t more than ten paces away.

Then why hadn’t he shone a torch? If he were armed… But perhaps I’d been mistaken. Perhaps he wasn’t armed. Perhaps he thought I was one of the guards and then, when he’d got no reply and had seen no further sign of movement, he’d put it down to his own imagination. And the fact that he hadn’t used his torch, that could be explained by a standing order not to show a light at night except in extreme emergency.

What was he doing here anyway?

Without thinking I moved forward, certain now that it must be Choffel. Curiosity, hate, determination to see what he was up to — God knows what it was that drew me after him, but I moved as though drawn by a magnet. The outline of the rail showed clear, and suddenly beyond it the dhow’s mast. The figure had drifted away, lost from sight. I blinked my eyes, quickening my step, half cursed as my foot caught against another of the tank inspection hatches. A gap in the rail, and a few yards further aft the outline of a davit. I had reached the head of the gangway.

No sign of Choffel. I stepped on to the grating at the top. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel the movement of somebody descending. The dark shape of the dhow was for’ard of the gangway so that it was obvious there must be a boat for communication between dhow and tanker.

What a moment to take him! A push, a quick push — nothing else. I could dimly see the water rushing past, small whitecaps hissing and breaking as the wind hit the sheer side of the tanker, flurries gusting down into the sea. Quickly, my hand on the rail, I began to descend. The gangway swayed, clinking against the side. I heard his voice hailing the dhow. An Arab answered and a figure appeared on the dhow’s high poop, a hurricane lamp lighting his face as he held it high, and below, in the water, I saw a small wooden boat bobbing on a rope at the dhow’s stern. ‘O-ai, O-ai!’ The sound of a human voice hurled on the wind, the words unidentifiable. More voices, the cries louder, then the light of another lamp swaying up from below.

I squatted down, sure he must see me now, crouching low and pressing my body against one of the gangway stanchions, desperately willing myself to be unseen, my guts involuntarily contracting. When he had shone that torch, screening it beneath his jacket, I had seen the thin jutting pencil line of what I was certain had been the barrel of a gun.

There was a lot of activity on the dhow now, men gathered in the waist and the boat being slowly hauled along the ship’s side in the teeth of the wind and the breaking waves. Crouched there I had a crane’s-eye view as one of the Arabs tucked his robes up round his waist and jumped into the boat. Then they floated it down, paying out rope steadily, till it reached the staging where Choffel stood at the bottom of the gangway.

Spray flew over him as he reached down to steady the boat. Now! Now, I thought, while his mind was on the boat, and I rose to my feet, and in that instant a beam stabbed the darkness from above, groping along the side of the ship till its light fell on the boat with the Arab kneeling in it, gripping tight to the last stanchion, and Choffel just about to step into it. They remained like that for an instant, frozen into immobility, as though caught by the flash of a camera, while from aft, from the wing of the bridge came a distant cry lost in the wind.

The men on the dhow began shouting — something, I don’t know what. It was unintelligible. But they were beckoning and heaving on the rope. The man in the boat let go of the stanchion. Suddenly there was a gap opening up between the boat and the gangway and I saw Choffel’s face in the light of the torch, very pale and twisted in the expression of some strong emotion, his mouth open.

Then he had turned and was pounding up the gangway towards me.

I had no time to get out of his way. He came straight at me, and when he saw me he didn’t stop, merely flashed his torch on my face. ‘You!’ He clawed past me, and a moment, later I saw him standing precariously balanced on the rail capping, watching for the sway of the dhow as it thumped the side. And then he jumped, a shadowy outline flying in the darkness, to finish up clasping his arms round the swaying mast and sliding down into the folds of the great furled sail.

No shouts from the bridge now, and everything dark again, the only light a hurricane lamp in the waist of the dhow. I felt rooted to the spot, standing there on the gangway peering down at the figures gathered on the dhow’s deck, their big-nosed, Semitic faces staring upwards. Then suddenly he was among them, standing with his gun in his hand, his cap cocked rakishly on the side of his head — I remember that distinctly, the fact that he was wearing a cap, and at an angle — and his torch stabbing here and there as he issued orders to the dim-seen, long-robed figures gathered around him.

One of them disappeared below. The engineer, I guessed, and Choffel followed him. I started down the gangway, my mind in a whirl, descending it quickly, wondering whether he would make it out to sea, what he would do with the crew, where he would head for.

I was halfway down when the dhow’s engine coughed behind me, then spluttered into life. And at that instant a torch flashed out from the deck above. Somebody shouted. I waved acknowledgment, pretending I understood and was trying to prevent the dhow’s escape. I was at the bottom of the gangway now, standing helpless, wondering whether I could swim for it, knowing I’d be swept away, and remembering the look of panic on the man’s face, the way his mouth had opened — ‘You!’ he had exclaimed, hurling himself past me. Only a man driven by fear and desperation would have made that incredible jump for the mast.

And now — now there was no way I could stop him. I should have reacted quicker. I should have taken him on the gangway, the moment he recognized me, when he was off-balance, held there for a second by the shock of seeing me.

A shot sounded, but not from above. It came from the dhow, the stern of it growing bigger. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Instead of swinging out from the side of the tanker, it was falling back towards me. It cleared the gangway by inches, then the big hull closed in, grinding along the grating, slowly crushing it. Arab faces, pallid and jabbering with anger, peered down at me. Somewhere for’ard along the dhow’s deck a voice screamed — ‘Go! Go now!’ There was the sound of a shot, very loud, the crack of a bullet and the beam of a torch stabbing the gloom.

The waist was abreast of me, and without thinking I seized hold of a rope, pulled myself up and over the bulwarks, and as I dropped to the deck, the Arab crew were clawing their way over the side, tumbling down on to the gangway grating to lie there in a heap, bin Suleiman among them, his eyes rolling in the light of a powerful spotlight directed from high up on the bridge wing as bullets sang through the rigging, ploughing into the woodwork, sending splinters flying.

‘Insh’Albh!’ I think it was the naukhada’s voice, but whether it was his ship or his own life he was committing into the hands of God I don’t know, for Chottel was coming aft, running through the spatter of bullets. He had let go the for’ard mooring line and the dhow was sliding back, its hull grating against the gangway and along the ship’s side. Then it was brought up short, still held on the stern mooring line so that it hung there for a moment, illumined by the spotlight, while the Arabs went scrambling up the gangway on to the tanker’s deck. There was no sign of Choffel. Crouched there by the bulwarks, I had a vague impression of his having leapt for the steps leading up to the poop.

Slowly we began to swing away from the ship’s side. The dhow was turning in the wind, swinging on the stern warp, and then in a rush we closed the tanker again, the wooden timbers on the far side crashing against the steel plates with a jar that went right through me. The deck lights were switched on, everything suddenly sharp-etched, the shattered remains of the dhow’s boat drifting past and faces peering down from the rail high above. Sadeq was there. He had brushed the Arabs aside and was standing at the head of the gangway, his bearded face clear in the lights as he seized hold of a guard’s machine pistol, rammed in another clip, and then, holding the gun close at his waist, swung it towards me, his movements deliberate, his expression coldly professional. There was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go, the muzzle pointing straight down at me, his hand on the trigger. Then he seemed to freeze into immobility, his eyes narrowing as he saw who it was he was about to kill. It must have been that, for after a moment’s hesitation, he lifted the barrel of the gun, lifted it deliberately away from me, aiming at the dhow’s poop, his finger contracting, the muzzle jerking to the spit of bullets, and the staccato chatter of it echoed by the sound of them slamming into wood, splinters flying and a man screaming.

I thought Choffel fired back, but it was just a single shot followed by a sharp twanging sound as the stern line parted. Then we were bumping along the tanker’s side, the hull moving past us faster and faster, and the high wooden bulk of the poop between me and the shots being fired. I heard the engine note change, suddenly deepening, felt the throb of the screw as it gripped the water and I got to my feet.

We were clear of the tanker’s stern now and turning into the wind, no longer falling back towards the cliffs, but slowly turning into the seas, and the whole vast bulk of the brightly lit tanker stretched out high above us on the starb’d quarter. We turned till the superstructure was astern of us, and it was only then that I heard a voice calling my name. It came like a gull crying in the night, a voice of pain and fear and exasperation — ‘Ro-o-d-in! Ro-o-d-in!’ Then — ‘Quick — hu-rry!’

I felt my way in the blackness over piles of rope to the outline of the high poop deck, found the wooden steps leading up to it and came out on to the top of the dhow’s great after castle to see the dim outline of a figure sprawled across the helm. ‘Take her, man! The entrance. There’s a launch, you see — inflatable — take time to launch it though.’ His voice came slowly, full of coughs and gurgles, so that I knew there was blood in his throat.

‘You’re hit,’ I said. It was a bloody stupid remark.

‘Take the helm,’ he gurgled, slipping away from me in the dark and sliding to the deck.

The dhow yawed, the swept-up curve of the bow swinging away to port, the wind lifting the furled sail so that it flapped with a loud cracking noise. I looked up from the dark shape sprawled at my feet to see the lit tanker with the frowning cliffs behind it swinging across our stern. The movement quickened, the wind catching the bows, and I dived for the helm, throwing my weight against the long timber arm of it, forcing it over to port. I felt the pressure of the water on the rudder and slowly the bows steadied and began to swing back into the wind.

I waited until the tanker was directly astern of us, then I centred the helm, holding the dhow into the wind, hoping I was steering for the entrance. There was no chance of doing anything for Choffel or even finding out how badly he was injured. The dhow wasn’t easy to steer. Like most straight-keeled vessels I had to anticipate her movements, countering each attempt of the head to pay off with a slight correction to the helm. She waddled and yawed like an old woman and once the wind got hold of her she was hard to control, very slow to respond and the engine labouring.

Ahead, I couldn’t seem to see anything beyond the ship’s stem, the lights of the tanker producing just enough of a glow to illumine the waist with its muddle of ropes, pulleys, sleeping mats and cooking gear and the mast with the great roll of sail strapped to the curved wing of the spar. These were all very clearly picked out, the upswing of the prow, too. But beyond that there was nothing, just a stygian blackness.

I could hear Choffel groaning. Once I thought he cried out. But the dhow required all my concentration and when I did glance down I couldn’t see him. That was when I remembered he was armed, but the dhow was paying off, the wind catching hold of the rolled-up sail and the bows falling off. Part of the sail had come loose, a fold of it billowing out in a dark bubble of canvas so that I thought I’d never get the bows back into the wind.

Away to port I could hear the sound of breaking waves, could just make out a line of white. Dark cliffs loomed, the line of white nearer, the sound of the waves louder. We were being set down on to the south shore of the khawr — or was it the land closing in as we neared the entrance? With the helm hard over, the bows slowly swung through the wind. I could feel it on my left side now, my eyes searching the darkness to starb’d, ears strained for the sound of breakers. I should have looked at that chart more closely, up there on the tanker’s bridge when I had the chance. There was a box fixed to the poop deck just for’ard of the helm, a big wooden box with an old-fashioned brass-knobbed binnacle in it. But I didn’t want to use my torch, and anyway I’d no idea where exactly the tanker had been moored in relation to the entrance, what the bearing would be. All I could remember was that the entrance was narrow and dog-legged, the bend being leftward going out.

The line of white was very close now, the cliffs visible as a darker darkness in the night. I put the helm over and the bows swung easily to starb’d. I glanced astern at the lights of the tanker. They were swinging across our starb’d quarter and already she looked quite small, the reddish glow of the cliffs behind her fading. I was being forced off course, but the line of broken water to port was still closing in and nothing visible to starb’d. I heard a cry and saw a figure standing clutching at the ornamental rail near the thunderbox on the port side, his arm pointing for’ard. I checked the helm, peering beyond the vague flapping bundle of the sail. A dark line showed high above the bows, the shape of low hills, and in that instant I heard waves breaking and dragged the helm across to starb’d.

There was no response.

The wind had strengthened. It was blowing half a gale and I knew we were nearing the entrance. But there was nothing I could do, the long arm of the helm right over and the dhow not responding, her head held in the grip of the wind and the engine labouring. I watched appalled as the looming outline of the land ahead grew darker and higher, the sound of the surf louder.

And then the engine note changed, a sudden surge of power and the bows were coming round. I caught a glimpse of a figure crouched, or more likely collapsed, over some sort of a control rod set into the deck. But it was only a glimpse, for we were turning to port and in the entrance now, the blackness of land on either side, the wind howling and waves breaking all round us.

It was like that for five, perhaps ten minutes. It seemed an age. Then suddenly the wind died away, the sea took on a regular pattern with only the occasional break of a wave. We were out of the khawr. We were out into the Persian Gulf and the dhow was bashing her way through the waves, rolling wildly, the engine racing and everything rattling and shaking as we steamed into the night with no land visible any more, just an empty void of darkness all around us.