The Black Tide

speaking very quietly. ‘I know she admires you, thinks you’re quite a guy, in fact. And you’re not exactly — well, disinterested. I don’t mind myself, your eyeing her I mean. But if I’ve noticed it, then Salt will have, too, and he is … well, in love with her, I suppose. It’s generally recognized — in the family, I mean — that she’ll marry him in the end. You see, he’s been after her ever since she left finishing school — oh, before that… since ever almost — hanging round her like a bee round a honeypot.’ He finished his cocoa and got up very abruptly. ‘You don’t mind my mentioning it, I hope, but if you could just keep your mind concentrated on the job in hand …’

He dived down the companionway then, leaving me alone at the wheel. The boy was embarrassed and I knew why. Saltley might be an older man with a lopsided face, but he’d been to the right schools, belonged to the right clubs. He had the right background, and above all, he was the man their father turned to when there was underwriting trouble. Also, and perhaps this rankled more than anything, they knew my own family background.

I didn’t sleep much that night and in the morning Saltley asked me to take a noon sight myself and work out our position. It made me think he had put Mark up to it. But we were under spinnaker now, sailing on a broad reach at just over six knots, and with only another day to go before we raised the Selvagens it was obviously sensible to make use of my professional capabilities and get a check on his last fix.

I took the sights, and when I had finally got a

position, there was only a mile or two in it, Selvagem Grande bearing 234°, distant 83 miles. It was now twenty-six days since the Aurora B had sailed. Only two or three more days to go. It depended how much of a lift the strong Agulhas current had given her, what speed she was making. She could be a little faster than we reckoned, or slower. It was just conceivable the rendezvous had already taken place. But Saltley didn’t think so. ‘Things always take a little longer than people reckon.’ But he was convinced the first tanker would be in position at least two days ahead of schedule, just in case, ‘That means we could find the tanker already there. I don’t think it will be, but it’s just possible.’ He gave me that lopsided smile. ‘We’ll know tomorrow.’ And he added. ‘Wind’s falling light. We may have to run the engine later.’

It was only now, as we neared our objective, that we began to face up to the fact that if we were right, then we were the only people who could alert the countries bordering the English Channel and the southern North Sea to the possibility of a major marine disaster. In putting it like that I am being a little unfair to Saltley. The thought would have been constantly in his mind, as it was in mine. But we hadn’t talked about it. We hadn’t brought it out into the open as something that could make the difference between life and death to a lot of people, perhaps destroy whole areas of vital marine habitat.

And that evening, sitting in the cockpit drinking our wine with the last of the sun’s warmth slipping down to the horizon, I began to realize how far from

the reality of this voyage the three younger members of the crew were. Pam and Mark, they both knew it could affect them financially, but at their age that was something they took in their stride. Sailing off like this to some unknown islands had been fun, a sort of treasure hunt, a game of hide-and-seek, something you did for kicks, and adventure. I had to spell it out to them. Even then I think they saw it in terms of something remote, like death and destruction on the television screen. Only when I described the scene in the khawr as the dhow slid away from the tanker, with Sadeq standing at the top of the gangway, a machine pistol at his hip spraying bullets down on to us, only then, when I told them about Choffel and the stinking wound in his guts, and how bloody vulnerable we could be out there alone by the Selvagens facing two big tankers that were in the hands of a bunch of terrorists, did they begin to think of it as a dangerous exercise that could end all our lives.

That night it was very quiet. We had changed from spinnaker to a lightweight genoa at dusk and the boat was ghosting along at about four knots in a flat calm sea. I handed over to Mark at midnight and my bunk was like a cradle rocking gently to the long Atlantic swell. I woke sometime in the small hours, a sliver of a moon appearing and disappearing in the doghouse windows, the murmur of voices from the cockpit.

I was in the starb’d pilot berth, everything very quiet and something about the acoustics of the hull made their voices carry into the saloon. I didn’t mean to listen, but then I heard my name mentioned and

Mark saying, ‘I hope to God he’s right.’ And Pam’s voice answered him. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘He could be lying,’ the boy said.

‘Trevor isn’t a liar.’

‘Look, suppose he did kill that French engineer …’