The Black Tide (20 page)

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. Où ça?’

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 I’m 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. I 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 60 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
.