The Black Tide

Half an hour later we were past Canterbury and at 11.22 we slowed at a second roundabout just outside Dover with the A2 dipping sharply between gorse scrub hills to the harbour. A local police car was waiting where the A258 to Deal branched off to the left and we followed it as it swung into the roundabout, turning right on to a narrow road leading directly to the square stone bulk of Dover Castle. To the left I had fleeting glimpses of the Straits, the sea grey-green and flecked with white, ships steaming steadily westward. A shaft of sunlight picked out the coast of France, while to the east a rainstorm blackened the seascape. Just short of the Castle we swung left, doubling back and dipping sharply to a narrow bridge over the A2 and a view of the docks with a

hydrofoil just leaving by the eastern entrance in a flurry of spray.

The road, signposted to St Margaret’s, climbed sharply up rough downland slopes round a hairpin bend, and in a moment we were turning through a narrow gateway into MoD property with tall radio masts looming above a hill-top to our left.

Langdon Battery proved to be a decaying gun emplacement of First World War vintage, the concrete redoubt just showing above a flat gravel area where a dozen or more cars were parked. But at the eastern end the emplacement was dominated by a strange, very modernistic building, a sort of Star Wars version of an airport control tower. We stopped alongside a white curved concrete section and an officer from the local police car opened the door for me. ‘What is this place?’ I asked him.

‘HM Coastguards,’ he said. ‘CMS — Channel Navigation Information Service. They monitor the traffic passing through the Straits.’

We went in through double glass doors. There was a desk and a receptionist drinking coffee out of a Government issue cup. My escort gave her my name and she picked up a microphone. ‘Captain Evans please… Mr Rodin has just arrived, sir.’ She nodded and smiled at me. ‘Captain Evans will be right down.’

Opposite reception was a semicircular enclave with display boards outlining the work of the Operations Centre — a map of the Straits showing the east-west traffic lanes and the limits of the radar surveillance, diagrams showing the volume of traffic and marked

drop in collisions resulting from traffic separation, radar surveillance and the reporting in by masters carrying noxious and dangerous cargoes, pictures of the Coastguards’ traffic patrol aircraft and of the Operations Room with its radar screens and computer console. ‘Mr Rodin?’

I turned to find a short, broad man with a lively face and a mane of greying hair. ‘David Evans,’ he said. ‘I’m the Regional Controller.’ And as he led me up the stairs to the left of the reception desk, he added, ‘The SoS should be here shortly — Secretary of State for Trade, that is. He’s flying down from Scotland.’ ‘The tankers have been sighted then?’ ‘Oh yes, there’s a Nimrod shadowing them.’ The first floor area was constructed like a control tower. ‘The Operations Room,’ he said. ‘That’s the Lookout facing seaward and the inner sanctum, that curtained-off area in the rear, is the Radar Room. We’ve three surveillance screens, there, also computer input VDUs — not only can we see what’s going on, we can get almost instant course and speed, and in the case of collision situations, the expected time to impact. The last position we had for those two tankers was bearing 205° from Beachy Head, distance fourteen miles. The Navy has sent Tigris, one of the Amazon class frigates, to intercept and escort them up-Channel.’

‘They’re past Spithead and the Solent then?’ He checked on the stairs leading up to the deck above. ‘You were thinking of Southampton, were you?’ I nodded.

‘You really thought they were going to damage one of the Channel ports?’

I didn’t say anything. He was a Welshman, with a Celtic quickness of mind, but I could see he hadn’t grasped the implications, was dubious about the whole thing.

‘They’re rogues, of course.’ He laughed. ‘That’s our term for ships that don’t obey the COLREGS. They didn’t report in to the French when they were off Ushant, nor to us, and now they’re on our side of the Channel, steaming east in the westbound lane. That makes them rogues several times over, but then they’re under the Iraqi flag, I gather.’ He said it as though it was some sort of flag-of-convenience. ‘Well, come on up and meet our boss, Gordon Basildon-Smith. He’s responsible for the Department of Trade’s Marine Division. We’ve got a sort of subsidiary Ops Room up here.’