The Black Tide (19 page)

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 très 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-tur-banned 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 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 yer. 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 Baldwick 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?’