The Black Tide (17 page)

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 Shi’ah 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-hilted,
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 Arab 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
défense 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
kayffiah
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 êtes 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 there 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 façade 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 cafés 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 staging 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 entrepôt 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. Prior to 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.
Irish’ 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 Co-ordination, 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?’