The Black Tide (31 page)

We were making, I suppose, about three knots and as the afternoon wore on the Iranian coast vanished from my sight. And since visibility was still good I thought it probable I was opposite Gwatar Bay which is on the frontier between Pakistan and Iran. It is a deep bay with salt flats and the bed of a river coming in from Baluchistan. Visualizing the chart I had so often had spread out before me on the chart table, I reckoned we were less than 40 miles from Gwadar. No shipping now to point the way, the sea empty to the horizon, except once when a sperm whale blew about half a mile away and shortly afterwards shot vertically out of the water like some huge submarine missile, leaping so high I could just see the flukes of its tail before it toppled with a gigantic splash back into the sea. At sunset I thought I could make out a line of cliffs low on the port bow. They were of a brilliant
whiteness, wind-carved into fantastic towers and minarets so that it was like a mirage-distorted view of some incredible crystal city. Was that the Makran coast of Baluchistan?

Night came and I was still at the helm, the wind backing and getting stronger, the dhow thundering along at six knots or more. Suddenly it was dark. I had to start thinking then, about what I was going to do, how I was going to make it from dhow to shore. I had only a rough idea how far I had come, but at this rate, with the wind still backing and freshening, and the dhow empty of cargo, it looked as though I could be off Gwadar about one or two in the morning – presuming, of course, that the disappearance of the coast in the late afternoon really had been the bay and river flats that marked the frontier. I wondered how far off I would be able to see Gwadar at night. In daylight it was visible for miles, a great 500-ft high mass of hard rock sticking up out of the sea like an island. It was, in fact, a peninsula, shaped like a hammer-headed shark with its nose pointing south, the body of it a narrow sandspit with the port of Gwadar facing both ways, east and west, so that there was safe anchorage in either monsoon – always provided a vessel could weather the rock and cliffs of the peninsula’s broad head.

My years at sea told me that the prudent thing to do would be to lower the great lateen sail and let the dhow drift through the night, hoisting again at dawn when I could see where I was. But what if the wind went on increasing? What if I couldn’t hoist the bloody thing? Seeing it there, bellied against the stars, I knew it needed several men on the tackle to be sure of taming the power of that sail. And I was tired. God! I was tired.

Prudence can’t compete with the lethargic urge to leave things as they are, and so I went plunging on into the night, relying on being able to pick up the automatic light on top of the headland, ignoring the nagging doubt in my mind that said it was probably out of order. If I hadn’t been so tired; if I hadn’t had the urgent need to contact the authorities and get a message out to the world about the
Aurora B
; if the wind had only died – at least, not backed so much into the south where it shouldn’t have been at this time of the year; if the
light had been working or I had taken into consideration that with the wind south of west there might be an onshore set to the current … If – if – if! Disasters are full of ifs, and I was a trained deck officer with a master’s certificate – I should have known, even if I wasn’t a sailing man. The sea never forgives an error of judgment, and this was an error due to tiredness. I was so goddam weary, and that brute of a sail, bellied out to port like a black bat’s wing against the stars.

It came at me when I was half asleep, the roar of breaking waves and a darkness looming over the bows, blotting out the stars. In an instant I was wide awake, my heart in my mouth and the adrenalin flowing as I hauled on the tiller rope, dragging the heavy steering bar over to port. Slowly, very slowly the dhow turned its high bow into the wind. I thought she’d never make it, that she’d fall off and go plunging away down-wind and into the cliffs, but she came up into the wind at last, and there she hung. She wouldn’t go through it on to the other tack. And if she had, then I realized the lateen rig required the whole spar to be tipped up vertically and man-handled round the mast. An impossible task for one man with the wind blowing 5 or 6.

I didn’t move fast enough. I can see that now. I should have secured the helm and hauled in on the sheet until the sail was set flat and as tight in as it would go. But even then I don’t know that she’d have completed the tack. Not with just the one sail, and anyway I couldn’t be in two places at once. The wind, close inshore, was so strong it was all I could do to manage the tiller, and when she wouldn’t go through the wind, I just stayed there, my mind a blank, the sail flogging in giant whipcracks, the sea and the waves all contributing to the confusion of noise, and the dhow taken virtually aback, driving astern towards the surf breaking in a phosphorescent lather of light.

And while I crouched there, hauling on the tiller which was already hard over, I watched appalled as the bows fell away to port, the lateen filling with a clap like thunder and the dhow lying over, driving virtually sideways into a maelstrom of broken water, and the cliffs above me looming taller and taller, half the stars in the sky blotted out and the movement of the deck under me suddenly very wild.

We struck at 02.27. I know that because I checked my watch, an action that was entirely automatic, as though I were in the wheelhouse of a proper ship with instruments to check and the log to fill in. We had hit a rock, not the cliffs. The cliffs I could vaguely see, a black mass looming above white waters. There was a thud and the rending sound of timbers breaking, and we hung there in a welter of broken waves with spray blowing over us and the dhow pounding and tearing itself to bits.

I had no idea where I was, whether it was the Gwadar Peninsula we had hit, or some other part of the coast. And there was nothing I could do. I was completely helpless, watching, dazed, as the prow swung away to port, everything happening in slow motion and with a terrible inevitability, timbers splintering amidships, a gap in the deck opening up and steadily widening as the vessel was literally torn apart. Years of neglect and blazing heat had rendered the planks and frames of her hull too brittle to stand the pounding and she gave up without any pretence of a struggle, the mainmast crashing down, the great sail like a winged banner streaming away to drown in the boiling seas. Then the for’ard half of the dhow broke entirely away. One moment it was there, a part of the ship, the next it was being swept into oblivion like a piece of driftwood. For a moment I could see it still, a dark shape against the white of broken water, and then suddenly it was gone.

I heard a cry and looking down from the poop I saw Choffel’s body, flushed out from the lazarette by the wash of a wave and floundering in what little of the waist remained. I had my torch on and in the beam of it I saw his face white with his mouth open in some inarticulate cry, his hair plastered over his forehead and his arm raised as a wave engulfed him. I remember thinking then that the sea was doing my work for me, the next wave breaking over him and sweeping him away, and the same wave lifting the broken stern, tilting it forward and myself with it. There was a crash as we hit the rock, and a scraping sound, the mizzen falling close beside me and the remains of the dhow, with myself clinging to the wooden balustrade at the for’ard end of the poop, swept clear and into the backwash of broken water close under the cliff.

There was no sign of Choffel then. He was gone. And I was waist-deep in water, the deck gyrating wildly as it sank under me, weighed down by the engine, and then a wave broke over me, right over my head, and my mouth was suddenly full of water, darkness closing in. For a moment I didn’t struggle. A sort of fatalism took charge, an
insh’Allah
mood that it was the will of God. Choffel had gone and that was that. I had done what I was intended to do and I didn’t struggle. But then suddenly it came to me that that wasn’t the end of it at all, and as I sank into the surge of the waves and quiet suffocation, Karen seemed to be calling to me. Not a siren song, but crying for all the life that would be destroyed by Sadeq or the twisted mind of Hals when those two tankers released their oil on the shores of Europe. I struggled then. I started fighting, threshing at the engulfing sea, forcing myself back to the buffeting, seething white of the surface, gulping air and trying desperately to swim.

The sun was burning holes in my head, my eyelids coloured blood and I was retching dribbles of salt water. I could hear the soft thump and suck of waves. I rolled over, my mouth open and drooling water, my throat aching with the salt of it, my fingers digging into sand. A small voice was calling, a high piping voice calling to me in Urdu –
Wake up, sahib. You wake up plees
. And there were hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently.

I opened my eyes. There were two of them, two small boys, half naked and dripping water, clutching at their sodden loin-cloths, their eyes round with the shock of finding me, their bodies burnt brown by the sun and the salt. Behind them was a boat drawn up on the sand, a small open boat, the wood bleached by the sun to a faded grey, the hull black with bitumen. Slowly I pushed myself up, my eyes slitted against the sand-glare. The wind had gone, the sea calm and blue with sparkling wavelets falling lazily on the sloping shore. Away to the left, beyond the boat, a very white building sprawled hull-down among some dunes. Behind the dunes I could see the brown tops of mud brick houses and in the far distance the vague outline of a headland. Two mules were grazing on the sparse grass of the dunes behind me. ‘What’s the name of that village?’ I asked.

The dark little faces stared at me uncomprehendingly. I pointed towards the white building and the roofs beyond. ‘Name? You tell me name of village.’ They laughed, embarrassed. I switched to Urdu then, speaking slowly since these were Baluchi and I knew my accent would be strange to them.

‘Coastguards,’ they said, speaking almost in unison. ‘Gwadar Coastguards.’

Gwadar! I sat with my head in my hands, feeling drained.
So I had made it. And now there was a new battle to fight. I had to explain myself – on the telephone to Karachi – talk to officials, to the Lloyd’s agent, to all the people who had to be alerted. And I was tired, so deadly tired. It wasn’t just my body that was exhausted – it was my brain, my mind, my will. Vaguely I remembered swimming clear of the wreck, hanging on to a piece of the dhow’s broken timbering and the seas breaking over me, rocking me into the oblivion of total exhaustion. A piece of timber, part of a mast by the look of it, lay half-submerged a little way along the dark sands, rolling gently back and forth in the wash of the small waves breaking.

A man appeared, a bearded, wrinkled face under a rag of a turban peering down at me. He was talking to the boys, a quick high voice, but words I could not follow and they were answering him, excitedly gesturing at the sea. Finally they ran off and the old man said, ‘I send them for the Havildar.’

He knew there had been a dhow wrecked during the night because bits of it had come ashore. He asked me whose it was, where it had come from, how many others had been on board – all the questions I knew would be repeated again and again. I shook my head, pretending I didn’t understand. If I said I was alone they wouldn’t believe me. And if I told them about Choffel … I thought of how it would be, trying to explain to a village headman, or even some dumb soldier of a coastguard, about the
Aurora B
, how we had taken the dhow, cutting it free in a hail of bullets … How could they possibly accept a story like that? They’d think I was mad.

I must have passed out then, or else gone to sleep, for the next thing I knew the wheel of a Land Rover was close beside my head and there were voices. The sun was hot and my clothes, dry now, were stiff with salt. They lifted me up and put me in the back, a soldier sitting with his arm round me so that I didn’t fall off the seat as we jolted along the foreshore to the headquarters building, which was a square white tower overlooking the sea. I was given a cup of sweet black coffee in the adjutant’s office, surrounded by three or four officers, all staring at me curiously. It was the adjutant who did most of the questioning, and when I had explained the
circumstances to the increasingly sceptical huddle of dark-skinned faces, I was taken in to see the colonel, a big, impressive man with a neat little moustache and an explosive voice. Through the open square of the window I found myself looking out on the brown cliffs of the Gwadar Peninsula. I was given another cup of coffee and had to repeat the whole story for his benefit.

I don’t know whether he believed me or not. In spite of the coffee I was half asleep, not caring very much either way. I was telling them the truth. It would have been too much trouble to tell them anything else. But I didn’t say much about Choffel, only that he’d been shot while we were trying to get away in the dhow. Nobody seemed to be concerned about him. His body hadn’t been found and without a body they weren’t interested.

The colonel asked me a number of questions, mostly about the nationality of the men on the tanker and where I thought they were taking it. Finally he picked up his hat and his swagger stick and called for his car. ‘Follow me please,’ he said and led me out into the neatly white-washed forecourt. ‘I now have to take you to the Assistant Commissioner who will find it a difficult problem since you are landed on his lap, you see, with no passport, no identification, and the most unusual story. It is the lack of identity he will find most difficult. You say you have been ship’s officer in Karachi. Do you know somebody in Karachi? Somebody to say who you are?’