The Black Tide

Ridiculous, of course! Just a part of that accident of birth that had plagued me all my life, drawn to the Middle East yet not a part of it, neither a Christian nor a Moslem, just a lone, lost individual with no real roots. I was thinking of Karen then, my one real lifeline — apart from my poor mother. If only Karen were alive still. If only none of it had happened and we were still together, at Balkaer. In the darkness I could see the fire and her sitting in that old chair, the picture superimposed on and obliterating the lit saloon below. But her face … I couldn’t see her face, the features blurred and indistinct, memory fading.

And it was then, with my mind far away, that I

heard a sound above the hiss of the waves and the surge of the bows, a low murmur like an approaching squall.

The sound came from astern and I looked over my shoulder. There was a lot of wind in the sails and it was raining again, but the sound coming to me on a sudden gust was a deep pulsing murmur. A ship’s engines. I yelled to Saltley and the others. ‘On deck!’ I yelled, for in a sudden panic of intuition I knew what it meant. ‘For your lives!’ And as they came tumbling up I saw it in the darkness, a shadow coming up astern of us, and I reached forward, pressing the self-starter and slamming the engine into gear. And as I yelled to them to get the boom off the genoa, I felt the first lift of the mass of water being driven towards us.

Everything happened in a rush then. Saltley seized the wheel, and as the boom came off the genoa, he did something I would never have done — he put the yacht about, screaming at me to tag on the genoa sheet. Mark and Toni were back in the cockpit, the winch squealing as the big foresail was sheeted home, the yacht heeling right over and gathering speed as she powered to windward, riding on the tanker’s bow wave, spray flying in solid sheets as the black hull thundered past our stern, smothering us with the surge of her passage. We were driving down the side of the tanker’s hull then, back-winded and trying to claw our way clear, trie tip of our mast almost touching the black plates as we yawed. And then we were into the wake, everything in sudden appalling turmoil, the boat swamped with water. It swept clean across us.

Somebody slammed the hatch, trying to close the doghouse doors as he was flung into the guardrails with a cry of pain. I grabbed him, then lost him as I was swept aft, my feet half over the stern before I could seize hold of anything.

I was like that for a moment and then we were clear, Saltley still gripping the wheel like a drowned limpet, the rest of us distributed all over the cockpit area. ‘Did you see a light?’ Mark shouted in my ears. ‘Somebody flashing a light — up by the stern. I swear it was.’ His hair was plastered to his skull, his face dripping water. ‘Looked like Morse. A lot of flashes, then daa-daa… That’s M isn’t it?’ Pamela’s voice called up from below that there was a foot of water in the saloon. ‘Or T. It could be a T repeated.’ I lost the rest, listening to something else.

Saltley heard it, too, the deep rumble of an engine borne on the wind and dead ahead of us. ‘Ease sheets!’ he screamed and spun the wheel as the bows of the second tanker emerged like a half-tide rock out of the darkness ahead. The yacht turned away to starb’d, but too slowly, the wall of water taking us on the port bow, slamming us over, then lifting us and sweeping us from end to end. We took it green, a sea breaking over my chest and flinging me against Saltley. Somebody was gripping hold of my ankles as I was swept to starb’d, and then the rumbling giant was sliding past our starb’d quarter and the sails were drawing, pulling us away from that sliding wall of steel. The wake hit us as the tanker passed, but not as badly as before. Suddenly all was quiet and we were free to

pick ourselves up, the boat slipping smoothly through the water and the sound of those engines fading into the night like a bad dream.

We were lucky. None of us had been wearing safety harness, and though we were all suffering from bruises and cuts and were in a state of shock, nobody had been washed overboard and no bones had been broken.

It was only after we were back on course, everything sorted out on deck and beginning to clear up below, that I remembered the light Mark had seen flashing from the stern of that first tanker. But he couldn’t tell whether it had been the flash of a torch or a cabin light being switched on and off, the flashes seen through the circle of a porthole. It could even have been somebody accidentally triggering off the safety light on a lifebuoy.

One thing we were in no doubt about, the two ships coming up on us like that had been deliberate, an attempt to run us down. It couldn’t be anything else, for they had been steaming west of north and on that course there was nothing after Madeira anywhere in the north Atlantic until they reached Greenland.