The Black Tide

with pain, his mind confused. He said something about salvage, at least that’s what I thought he said. It didn’t make sense unless he was harking back to the first ship he destroyed, the Lavandou, which was supposed to have sunk in deep water but drifted on to a reef instead.’

‘Salvage.’ Saltley repeated the word, staring past me into space. ‘No, I agree. It doesn’t make sense. Do you think he knew what the destination was?’

But I couldn’t answer that, and though he kept on at me, probing in that soft voice, the blue eyes fixed on mine in that disconcerting stare, it wasn’t any good. ‘Oh well,’ he said finally, ‘we’ll just have to accept that he hadn’t been told the ship’s destination.’ He relaxed then, that crooked mouth of his breaking into a smile that made him suddenly human. ‘Sorry. I’ve been pressing you rather hard.’ He took his hands from the file and opened it, but without looking down, his mind elsewhere. Finally he said almost briskly, ‘If we accept your story as correct, then there are certain assumptions that can be made. First, the Aurora B is afloat with a full cargo of oil. Second, since the Omani air search has failed to sight her, she has sailed from the inlet where she has been hiding and is at sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The Pakistan airforce also flew a search. Did you know that?’

I shook my head and he tapped the file. ‘A report came in yesterday. Search abandoned, no sighting. Now we come to the main assumption.’ He hesitated. ‘Not so much an assumption as a pure guess, I’m afraid. The Aurora B, you think, is headed for a European port, which means she will pass south of the Cape and head up the Atlantic coast of Africa. We will say, for the purpose of our assumptions, that the Howdo Stranger is well ahead of her — has, in fact, passed the Cape into the Atlantic. Is that your reading of the situation?’

‘It could be anywhere,’ I said guardedly. The man was a lawyer and I wasn’t going to commit myself.

He smiled. ‘The first hi-jack was bungled. That’s your theory, isn’t it? The evidence being the damaged radio room and the crew imprisoned in the chain locker. Incidentally, there’s no report of that man who jumped overboard being found, so we’ll have to presume that he’s dead. They then hi-jacked a second tanker and the operation is successful. They now have two tankers. One is despatched on its mission. The other is to follow when it is crewed-up with what one might call Baldwick’s mercenaries. And since the second one has now sailed it seems obvious that the plan is for a joint operation. That means a rendezvous. You agree?’

I nodded. ‘That’s what I was trying to get out of Choffel.’

‘You said it was the destination you were trying to get out of him — the target in other words.’

‘That and where the two ships were going to meet.’

‘And he said something about salvage.’

‘I think that’s what he said. But he was confused and in pain. I can’t be certain. I was very tired,’

‘Of course.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he said, ‘That’s it then. They’ll meet up somewhere and

then they’ll act in concert, the two of them together.’ He leaned back and stretched his arms, yawning to relieve the tension of the half hour he had spent taking me step-by-step through my story. ‘We don’t know where they’ll meet. We don’t know the target or what the motive is. And unless the ships are sighted, or alternatively that man is found alive on the Musandam Peninsula, there’s absolutely nothing to substantiate your quite extraordinary story — and I use the word there in its original and exact meaning.’ He took a slip of paper from the open file and handed it to me. ‘That was posted in the Room at Lloyd’s yesterday. The Times and the Telegraph both carried it this morning on their foreign news pages.’

The slip was a copy of a Reuters report from Muscat referring to rumours emanating from Pakistan that a Russian tanker was concealed on the Omani coast south of the Hormuz Straits. It stated that the airforce, having carried out a thorough search of the coast and of the Arabian Sea adjacent to Oman, had proved the rumours to be quite unfounded.

‘And this came in this morning.’ He handed me another Reuters message datelined Karachi. This referred to me by name as the source of the rumour — a shipwrecked Englishman Trevor Rodin has been repatriated, his story of a tanker concealed in an inlet on the Omani side of the Gulf having been proved incorrect. It is considered possible that Rodin may have had political motives and that his story was intended to damage the friendly relations existing between Pakistan and Oman, and also other countries.

‘I think you may find yourself the focus of a certain amount of official attention,’ he added as I handed it back to him. ‘The whole area is very sensitive.’