The Black Tide

by Hammond Innes

  ‘Of course. I understand.’ I found myself embarrassed at his need of self-justification, concentrating on the pictures then, while he began talking about the absence of any radio signal. Not a single ham operator had responded to their appeal, and in the case of the Howdo Stranger, with the very latest in tank cleansing equipment …

  I wasn’t listening. There, suddenly, staring up at me, was a dark Semitic face I had seen before – in Khorramshahr, on a stretcher. The same birthmark like a burn blurring the full lips, the same look of intense hostility in the dark eyes, the womanish mouth set in a nervous smile. But it was the birthmark – not even the dark little beard he had grown could hide that. Abol Hassan Sadeq, born Teheran, age 31, electrical engineer.

  I turned the picture round so that Captain Perrin could see it. ‘Know anything about him?’

  He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. ‘You recognize him, do you?’

  ‘Yes, but not the name. It wasn’t Sadeq.’ I couldn’t recall the name they had given us. It had been six years ago. Summer, and so hot you couldn’t touch the metal anywhere on the ship, the Shatt al Arab flat as a shield, the air like a steam bath. Students had rioted in Teheran, and in Abadan there had been an attempt to blow up two of the oil storage tanks. We should have sailed at dawn, but we were ordered to wait. And then the Shah’s police had brought him on board, shortly after noon. We sent him straight down to the sick bay and sailed for Kuwait, where we handed him over to the authorities. His kidneys had been damaged, he had three ribs broken, multiple internal bruising and his front teeth badly broken.

  ‘Interrogation?’ Perrin asked.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘He wasn’t one of the students then.’

  I shrugged. ‘They said he was a terrorist.’

  ‘A terrorist.’ He said the word slowly as though testing out the sound of it. ‘And that’s the same man, on the Aurora B. Does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Only that a bomb would account for her total disappearance. But there’d still have to be a motive.’ I searched through the file, found the man’s dossier and flipped it across the desk to him. It simply listed the ships he had served on.

  ‘We’ll check them all, of course,’ Perrin said. ‘And the security people in Abu Dhabi, they may know something.’ But he sounded doubtful. ‘To blow up a tanker the size of the Aurora B …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s got to be a hell of a big explosion to leave nothing behind, and no time for the radio operator to get off a Mayday – a suicidal explosion, in fact, for he’d have to be resigned to his own death. And it doesn’t explain the loss of the other tanker.’

  I was working through the pictures again, particularly those of the Howdo Stranger crew. There was nobody else I recognized. I hadn’t expected there would be. It was only the purest chance that I had ever set eyes on Sadeq before. And if it hadn’t been for the GODCO practice of taking crew pictures for each voyage … I was still trying to remember the name the Shah’s police had given us when they had rolled him screaming off the stretcher on to the hot deck plates. It certainly hadn’t been Sadeq.

  We discussed it for a while, then I left, promising to look in the following day. After the cool interior of the oil building it seemed much hotter outside on the crowded waterfront. Noisier, too, and smellier. I crossed the Creek in a crowded launch to one of the older buildings just upstream of the warehouses. Gault’s office was on the first floor. There was no air-conditioning and the windows were wide open to the sounds and smells of the wharfs with a view over the rafted dhows to the mosque behind the financial buildings on the other side. Gault was at the door to greet me, a thin, stooped man in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt of virulent colour. He had a wide smile in a freckled, sun-wrinkled face, and his arms were freckled, too. ‘Heard you’d arrived safely.’

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, you never know, do you?’ He stared at me, still smiling. ‘Salt telexed yesterday. Last time we met you were mate of the old Dragonera. Then you left the Gulf.’ He took me over to the window. ‘There you are, nothing changed. The Gulf still the navel of the world and Dubai the little wrinkled belly-button that handles all the traffic. Well, why is he employing you?’

  ‘He seems to think my knowledge of the Gulf—’

  ‘There are at least two ships’ captains on Forthright’s staff who have a bloody sight more experience of the Gulf than you, so that’s the first thing I want to know. Two tankers go missing down by Sri Lanka and you come out here, to Dubai – why?’

  I began talking about Karachi then, but he cut me short. ‘I read the papers. You’re after Choffel and you’re on to something. Something I don’t know about.’ He was staring at me, his eyes no longer smiling and his hand gripping my arm. ‘Those tankers sailed from Mina Zayed loaded with Abu Dhabi crude. But still you come to Dubai. Why?’

  ‘Baldwick,’ I said.

  ‘Ah!’ He let go my arm and waved me to a leather pouf with an old mat thrown over it. ‘Coffee or tea?’

  ‘Tea,’ I said and he clapped his hands. A small boy with a rag of a turban appeared at the door. He told him to bring tea for both of us and squatted cross-legged on the Persian carpet. ‘That boy’s the son of one of our best naukhadas. He’s here to learn the business. His father doesn’t want him to grow up to be nothing but the skipper of a dhow. He thinks the dhows will all be gone by then. You agree?’ I said I thought it likely, but I don’t think he heard me. ‘What’s Baldwick got to do with those missing tankers?’

  ‘Nothing as far as I know.’

  ‘But he knows where Choffel is hiding up, is that it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’d better tell me about it then.’

  By the time I had given him an account of my dealings with Baldwick the tea had arrived, hot, sweet and very refreshing in that noisy, shadowy room.

  ‘Where’s the tanker you’re supposed to join?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought you might know.’

  He laughed and shook his head. ‘No idea.’ And he had no information to give me on Baldwick’s present activities. ‘There’s rumours of Russian ships skulking in the Straits of Hormuz. But it’s just bazaar talk.’ As a youngster he had served in India and he still referred to the suk as a bazaar. ‘You know how it is. Since the Red Army moved into Afghanistan, the dhow Arabs see Russian ships in every hidey-hole in the Gulf. And the khawrs to the south of the Straits are a natural. You could lose a whole fleet in some of those inlets, except that it would be like putting them in a furnace. Hot as hell.’ He laughed. ‘But even if the Russians are playing hide and seek, that’s not Len Baldwick’s scene at all. Too risky. I’ve known the bastard on and off now for more than a dozen years – slave girls, boys, drugs, gold, bogus oil bonds, anything where he takes the rake-off and others the rap. Who owns this tanker of yours, do you know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So you’re going into it blind.’ He finished his tea and sat there for a moment thinking about it. ‘Tell me, would you be taking that sort of a chance if it wasn’t for the thought that Choffel might be on the same ship with you?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Well, that’s your business. Meanwhile, this came for you this morning.’ He reached across his desk and handed me a telex. ‘Pritchard.’

  It was the answer to my request for background information on Welsh national servicemen in the engine-room of HMS Formidable in 1952. There had been two of them. Forthright’s had then checked four sinkings in suspicious circumstances in 1959, also two in late ’58. There followed details of the sinking in October 1958 of the French cargo vessel Lavandou, an ex-liberty ship, off the Caribbean island of Martinique. She had been abandoned in deep water, but the edge of a hurricane had drifted her into the shallows north-east of the island so that divers had been able to get down to her. They had found extensive damage to the sea water inlets to the condensers. Second engineer David Price, accused of sabo
tage by both captain and chief engineer, had by then disappeared, having taken passage on a vessel sailing for Dutch Guiana, which is now Surinam. The enquiry into the loss of the Lavandou found Price to blame. Final clincher for us, the telex concluded, is that he was signed on to the Lavandou as engineer at the port of Cayenne in French Guiana in place of Henri Alexandre Choffel who fell into harbour and drowned after a night on the town. Company owning Lavandou registered in Cayenne. A David Morgan Price served HMS Formidable 1952. Thank you. Pritchard.

  That settled it. No good his daughter, or anybody else, trying to tell me he was innocent. Not now. Price, Choffel, Speridion – I wondered what he was calling himself now. None of the names, not even Price, was on the hotel guest list. I asked Gault about the dhow that had met up with the Corsaire in the Straits of Hormuz, but he knew nothing about it and wasn’t really interested. ‘Dhows gravitate to Dubai like wasps to a honey-pot. If you think he was brought in here, then you’d better try the carpet dealers, they know all the gossip. As far as I’m concerned, the Petros Jupiter is a UK problem. Choffel’s no concern of mine …’ He sat staring down at his coffee. ‘Who do you think would employ a man like Baldwick to recruit ships’ officers?’ Another pause. ‘And why?’ he added, looking straight at me.

  ‘I hoped you could tell me that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I can’t.’ He hesitated, then leaned towards me and said, ‘What are you going to do when you meet up with this man Price, or Choffel, or whatever he’s calling himself now?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to find him first,’ I muttered.

  ‘So you’re letting Baldwick recruit you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A ship you know nothing about. God, man! You don’t know where she is, who owns her, what the purpose of the voyage is. You’re going into it absolutely blind. But you could be right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘About Choffel, I mean. A man like that – it makes sense. There has to be something wrong about the set-up or they wouldn’t be offering double rates and a bonus, and Baldwick wouldn’t be mixed up in it. When’s he get in to Dubai, do you know?’

  ‘Mustafa said tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you got his address here?’

  I remembered then. ‘A telephone number, that’s all.’

  He went to his desk and made a note of it. ‘I’ll have somebody keep an eye on him then. And on this Libyan travel agent. Also, I’ll make enquiries about the tanker you’re joining. But that may not be easy, particularly if she’s over the other side of the Gulf in an Iranian port. Well, that’s it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nothing much else I can do, except tell you to be careful. There’s a lot of money washing around this port, a lot of peculiar people. It’s much worse than it was when you were last here. So watch it.’ He walked with me to the stairs. ‘That boy who brought the tea. His name is Khalid. If my people pick up anything useful I’ll send him to you.’

  ‘You don’t want me to come here?’

  ‘No. From what you told me it could be dangerous. And if it’s politics, not money, you’ve got yourself mixed up in, then my advice is take the next flight home. Your background makes you very vulnerable.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Salaam alykoum.’

  I walked back to the hotel, changed into a pair of swimming trunks and had a light meal at a table by the pool. The courtyard, airless in the shadow of piled-up balconies, echoed to the murmur of voices, the occasional splash of a body diving. Afterwards I lay in a chair sipping an ice-cold sherbet and thinking about the Aurora B, what it would have been like on the bridge, on watch, when spontaneous combustion, or whatever it was, sent her to the bottom. The people I had contacted in the insurance world – underwriters, Lloyd’s agents, marine solicitors, everyone – they had all emphasized that marine fraud was on the increase. Like ordinary crime, it was tax free, and as the stakes got bigger … I was thinking of Sadeq then, suddenly remembering the name the Shah’s police had given him, a name he had confirmed to us as he lay in the Dragonera’s sick bay. It had been Qasim. So what was Qasim, a man they had claimed was a terrorist, doing on board the Aurora B under another name? Terrorists were trained in the handling of explosives, and instantly I was seeing the fireball holocaust that was so indelibly printed on my mind, knowing that if a bomb had been cleverly placed there was no way the radio operator would be able to put out a call for help.

  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 wa
terfront 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.’