The Black Tide (46 page)

He took me through the heavy light-proof curtains at the back. ‘Mind the step.’ It was dark after the day-bright Lookout, the only light the faint glow from a computer console and the three radar screens. It was the left hand screen that was linked to the Dungeness scanner and the circling sweep showed two very distinct, very bright, elongated blips to the south and east of Dungeness. ‘What’s the course and speed now?’ Evans asked.

‘Just a minute, sir. They’ve just altered to clear the Varne.’ The watch officer leaned over, fed in three bearings on the central monitoring screen and at the touch of a button the computer came up with the answer: ‘O-six-O degrees now, sir. Speed unchanged at just over eighteen.’

‘Looks like the Sandettié light vessel and the deepwater channel.’ Evans was speaking to himself rather than to me. ‘Outside the French twelve-mile limit all the way.’ He looked round at me. ‘Should be able to see them any minute now.’ And he added, ‘That friend of yours, Saltley – he’ll be arriving at Dover airport in about an hour. Apparently he’s chartered a small Spanish plane.’ He turned quickly and went out through the curtains. ‘Try calling them on Channel 16,’ he told the woman auxiliary manning the radio. ‘By name.’

‘Which one, sir. The
Ghazan Khan
or the—’

‘No, not the Iraqi names. Try and call up Captain Hals on the
Aurora B
. See what happens.’

It was while she was trying unsuccessfully to do this that the watch officer in the Lookout reported one of the tankers
was visible. The Secretary of State came back from lunching with the Governor of Dover Castle and those not working in the Lookout were hustled out.

Another squall swept in and for a while rain obliterated the Straits so that all we could see was the blurred outline of the harbour. Saltley arrived in the middle of it. I was on the upper deck then, looking down through the glass panels, and I could see him standing by the state-of-readiness boards in front of the big map, talking urgently to the Minister and Basildon-Smith, his arms beginning to wave about. He was there about ten minutes, then the three of them moved out of sight into the Radar Room. Shortly afterwards he came hurrying up to the gallery, gave me a quick nod of greeting and asked the auxiliary to get him the Admiralty. ‘If the DoT won’t do anything, maybe the Navy will.’ He looked tired and strained, the bulging eyes red-rimmed, his hair still wet and ruffled by the wind. He wanted the tankers arrested or at least stopped and searched to discover the identity of the people running them and whether they had prisoners on board.

The squall passed and suddenly there they were, plainly visible to the naked eye, with the frigate in close attendance. They were almost due south of us, about seven miles away, their black hulls merged with the rain clouds over the French coast, but the two superstructures showing like distant cliffs in a stormy shaft of sunlight.

Saltley failed to get Admiral Fitzowen and after a long talk with somebody else at the Admiralty, he put in a call to Stewart. ‘I’ve a damned good mind to contact the Prime Minister myself,’ he said as he joined me by the window. ‘Two pirated ships sailing under false names with a naval escort and we do nothing. It’s bloody silly.’ I don’t know whether it was anger or tiredness, but there was a slight hesitancy in his speech that I had never noticed before. In all the time I had been with him in the close confines of the
Prospero
I had never seen him so upset. ‘There’s thirty or forty million involved in the hulls alone, more on the cargoes. I told the Minister and all he says is that underwriting is a risk business and nobody but a fool becomes a Member of
Lloyd’s without he’s prepared to lose his shirt. But this isn’t any ordinary risk. A bunch of terrorists – you can’t counter claim against them in the courts, there’s no legal redress. The bloody man should act – on his own responsibility. That’s what we have Ministers for. Instead, he’s like a little boy on the pier watching some pretty ships go by.’

The bearing of the tankers was very slowly changing. Both VHF and R/T channels were filling the air with irate comments from ships finding themselves heading straight for a bows-on collision, the CNIS watch officer continually issuing warnings for westbound traffic to keep to the inshore side of the land and maintain a sharp radar watch in the rainstorms.

They were all in the Lookout now, the Minister, Basildon-Smith and Captain Evans, with Saltley hovering in the background and everybody watching to see whether the tankers would hold on for the Sandettié light vessel and the deepwater channel or turn north. A journalist beside me muttered something to the effect that if they ran amok in Ekofisk or any of the bigger North Sea oilfields there could be catastrophic pollution.

It was at this point that I was suddenly called to the Lookout and as I entered the big semicircular glassed-in room I heard the Minister ask what the state of readiness of the Pollution Control Unit was. His voice was sharp and tense, and when Evans replied that he’d spoken to Admiral Denleigh just before lunch and the whole MPCU organization was alerted, but no dispersant stock piles had yet been moved, he said, ‘Yes, yes, of course. You already told me. No point in starting to shift vast quantities of chemical sprays until we have a better idea of where they’ll be needed.’

‘They may not be needed at all, sir,’ Evans said.

The Minister nodded, but his expression, as he turned away, indicated that he hadn’t much hope of that. ‘I should have been speaking at a big party rally in Aberdeen this afternoon.’ His voice was high and petulant. ‘On oil and the environment.’ He was glaring at the Head of his Marine Division as though he were to blame for bringing him south, maybe losing precious votes. But then he saw me. ‘Ah, Mr
Rodin – this man Hals. He’s not answering. We’ve tried repeatedly, VHF and R/T. Somebody’s got to get through to him.’ His eyes were fixed on mine. ‘You’ve met him. You’ve talked to him. I’m sending you out there. See if you can get through to him.’

‘But—’ I was thinking of the dhow, the way I’d left the ship. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How do you mean – get through to him?’

‘Tigris
is sending a helicopter for you. It’s already been flown off so it should be here any minute. Now about this story of somebody flashing a light from one of the tankers. Saltley here says you and a young man on this yacht both thought it was some sort of signal. Morse code. Is that right?’

‘I didn’t see it myself,’ I said, and started to tell him about the circumstances. But he brushed that aside. ‘The letter M, that’s what Saltley here has just told me. Is that right?’

‘Several quick flashes, then two longs,’ I said. ‘We were in the tanker’s wake then—’

‘Two longs, that’s M in Morse, is it?’

‘Or two Ts. But we were being flung about—’

‘You think it could have been part of a name.’ He turned to Saltley again. ‘One of the crew held prisoner on board signalling with a torch or a light switch, trying to give you the destination.’ He moved forward so that he was standing by the radar monitor, his eyes fastening on me again. ‘What do you say, Rodin? You stated quite categorically that in the case of the
Aurora B
, members of the crew were being held prisoner. Was this an attempt, do you think, to communicate and give you the target these terrorists are aiming at?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ I said.

‘No more than a possibility?’ He nodded slowly. ‘And the only one to see it was this boy. In a panic, was he? You’d nearly been run down.’

‘Excited,’ I told him. ‘We all were, but nothing wrong with his ability to observe accurately.’

He smiled thinly. ‘Then it’s a pity he wasn’t able to decipher more of the message – if it was a message. There’s an M in several of our estuary names, the Thames, the Humber—’

‘And the Maas,’ Evans said sharply. Torts like Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, and Rotterdam, there’s two Ts there.’ He pointed to the plot marked up on the large scale chart laid out on the flat surround below the Lookout windows. ‘If it’s our coast they’re headed for, they’ll have to turn soon or they’ll be blocked by the Fairy and North Hinder banks.’

‘Suppose the target were the North Sea oilfields?’

Evans shook his head. ‘Those tankers are already loaded. They’d have no excuse.’

The chop-chop-chop of a helicopter came faintly through the glass windows. I turned to Saltley. ‘Is this your idea?’ I was remembering Pamela’s warning that evening in Funchal. ‘Did you put it into his head?’ I could see myself being lowered by winch on to the deck of the
Aurora B
. ‘Well, I’m not going,’ I said, watching, appalled, as the helicopter emerged out of the rain, sidling towards us across the wind.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said. ‘All we want is for them to see you, on the bridge of the
Tigris
. A loud hailer. It’s more personal than a voice on the air.’

I think the Minister must have sensed my reluctance, for he came over and took me by the arm. ‘Nothing to be worried about. All we want is for you to talk to him, make him see reason. And if you can’t do that, then try and get the destination out of him. In any terrorist situation, it’s getting through, making contact – that’s the important thing.’

‘Hals isn’t a terrorist,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘So I gather. You and he – you talk the same language. You’re both concerned about pollution. He won’t talk to us here, but he may to you, when he sees you right alongside him. Commander Fellowes has his instructions. Make contact with him, that’s all I ask. Find out what the target is.’ He nodded to the naval liaison officer, who took hold of my other arm and before I could do anything about it I was being hurried down the stairs and out to the car park. The noise of the helicopter was very loud. It came low over the top of the Lookout and I watched, feeling as though I was on the brink of another world, as it settled like a large mosquito in a gap between the gorse bushes. The pilot
signalled to us and we ducked under the rotor blades. The door slid open and I was barely inside before it took off, not bothering to climb, but making straight out over the Dover cliffs, heading for the
Tigris
.

Five minutes later we landed on the pad at the frigate’s stern and I was taken straight to the bridge where the captain was waiting for me. ‘Fellowes,’ he said, shaking me by the hand. ‘We’re going close alongside now. Hope you can get some sense out of them. They’re an odd-looking crowd.’

The bridge was built on a curve, not unlike the Lookout, but the changed view from the windows was quite dramatic. From the shore-based Operations Centre the tankers had been no more than distant silhouettes low down on the horizon. Now, suddenly, I was seeing them in close-up, huge hunks of steel-plating low in the water, the
Aurora B
looming larger and larger as the relatively tiny frigate closed her at almost 30 knots. ‘We’ll come down to their speed when we’re abreast of the superstructure, then the idea is for you to go out on to the open deck and talk direct.’ He handed me a loud hailer. ‘Just press the trigger when you want to speak. Don’t shout or you’ll deafen yourself. It’s a pretty loud one, that.’ He turned his head, listening as the ship’s name was called on VHF. It was the Dover Coastguards wanting to know whether contact had yet been made with the
Aurora B
. He reached for a mike and answered direct:
‘Tigris
to Coastguard. Helicopter and passenger have just arrived. We’re all set here. Am closing now. Over.’

We were coming in from the west at an oblique angle, the bulk of the
Aurora B
gradually blotting out the shape of the other tanker, which was about a mile to the east. The Dover cliffs showed as a dirty white smudge on our port side and there were several ships in the westbound lane, foam at their bows as the waves broke over them. Closer at hand, two small drifters danced on the skyline, and almost dead ahead of us, I could see the ungainly lanterned shape of a light vessel.

‘The Sandettié,’ Cdr Fellowes said. ‘We’ll be in the deepwater channel in ten to fifteen minutes.’ Behind him the
radio suddenly poured out a torrent of French. It was the fishery protection vessel now shadowing the tankers from the eastbound lane. We could just see it past the
Aurora B
’s stern steaming north-east ahead of a large ore carrier. ‘Ready?’ Fellowes asked me, and I nodded, though I didn’t feel at all ready. What the hell was I going to say to Hals?

I was still thinking about that, the loud hailer gripped in my hand, as he led me out on to the starb’d side deck below the tall square needle of the radar mast. The
Tigris
was turning now, her speed slowing as we ranged alongside the tanker’s superstructure. I could see the length of its deck, all the pipes and inspection hatches that I had stumbled over in the night, the long line of the catwalk. And right above me now the wheelhouse with faces I recognized framed in its big windows. Sadeq was there and the Canadian, Rod Selkirk, and two men I didn’t know, both of them dark and bearded. And then Hals appeared, his pale hair and beard framed in the glass of the bridge wing door. I raised the loud hailer to my lips.
Captain Hals
. I had my finger locked tight round the trigger and even my breathing came out in great audible puffs.
This is Rodin. Trevor Rodin. I was with you in the Gulf, that
khawr –
remember? It’s Rodin
, I repeated.
Please come out on to the bridge wing. I want to talk to you
.

I thought he was going to. I saw the uncertainty on his face, could almost read his intention in the expression of his eyes. We were that close, it seemed.
I must speak to you, Pieter. About pollution
. He moved then. I’m certain of it, reaching out to slide open the door. But then Sadeq was beside him, and one of the others. A moment later they were gone, all three of them, the glass panel empty.

‘Ask for his destination,’ Fellowes said. ‘That’s what
CINCHAN
wants and he’s got the SoS breathing down his neck. Try again.’

But it was no use. I kept on calling over the loud hailer, but there was no response. And no faces at the window, the bridge appearing blind now as the tanker ploughed on. ‘Well, that’s that, I guess.’ Fellowes turned away, walking quickly back to his wheelhouse. I remained there, the wind on my face, sensing the heel of the ship as the
Tigris
pulled
away from the tanker, dropping back until the light vessel became visible beyond the blunt rounded stern. It was so close now that the name SANDETTIE stood out very clear on its hull. We were in the deepwater channel.