The Black Tide

He took me through the heavy light-proof curtains at the back. ‘Mind the step.’ It was dark after the day-bright Lookout, the only light the faint glow from a computer console and the three radar screens. It was the left hand screen that was linked to the Dungeness scanner and the circling sweep showed two very distinct, very bright, elongated blips to the south and east of Dungeness. ‘What’s the course and speed now?’ Evans asked.

‘Just a minute, sir. They’ve just altered to clear the Varne.’ The watch officer leaned over, fed in three bearings on the central monitoring screen and at the touch of a button the computer came up with the answer: ‘O-six-O degrees now, sir. Speed unchanged at just over eighteen.’

‘Looks like the Sandettie light vessel and the deepwater channel.’ Evans was speaking to himself rather than to me. ‘Outside the French twelve-mile limit all the way.’ He looked round at me. ‘Should be able to see them any minute now.’ And he added, ‘That friend of yours, Saltley — he’ll be arriving at Dover airport in about an hour. Apparently he’s chartered a small Spanish plane.’ He turned quickly and went out through the curtains. ‘Try calling them on Channel 16,’ he told the woman auxiliary manning the radio. ‘By name.’

‘Which one, sir? The Ghazan Khan or the—’

‘No, not the Iraqi names. Try and call up Captain Hals on the Aurora B. See what happens.’

It was while she was trying unsuccessfully to do this that the watch officer in the Lookout reported one of the tankers was visible. The Secretary of State came back from lunching with the Governor of Dover Castle and those not working in the Lookout were hustled out.

Another squall swept in and for a while rain obliterated the Straits so that all we could see was the blurred outline of the harbour. Saltley arrived in the middle of it. I was on the upper deck then, looking down through the glass panels, and I could see him standing by the state-of-readiness boards in front of the big map, talking urgently to the Minister and Basildon-Smith, his arms beginning to wave about. He was there about ten minutes, then the three of them moved out of sight into the Radar Room. Shortly afterwards he came hurrying up to the gallery, gave me a quick nod of greeting and asked the auxiliary to get him the Admiralty. ‘If the DoT won’t do anything, maybe the Navy will.’ He looked tired and strained, the bulging eyes red-rimmed, his hair still wet and ruffled by the wind. He wanted the tankers arrested or at least stopped and searched to discover the identity of the people running them and whether they had prisoners on board.

The squall passed and suddenly there they were, plainly visible to the naked eye, with the frigate in close attendance. They were almost due south of us, about seven miles away, their black hulls merged with the rain clouds over the French coast, but the two

superstructures showing like distant cliffs in a stormy shaft of sunlight.

Saltley failed to get Admiral Fitzowen and after a long talk with somebody else at the Admiralty, he put in a call to Stewart. ‘I’ve a damned good mind to contact the Prime Minister myself,’ he said as he joined me by the window. ‘Two pirated ships sailing under false names with a naval escort and we do nothing. It’s bloody silly.’ I don’t know whether it was anger or tiredness, but there was a slight hesitancy in his speech that I had never noticed before. In all the time I had been with him in the close confines of the Prospero I had never seen him so upset. ‘There’s thirty or forty million involved in the hulls alone, more on the cargoes. I told the Minister and all he says is that underwriting is a risk business and nobody but a fool becomes a Member of Lloyd’s without being prepared to lose his shirt. But this isn’t any ordinary risk. A bunch of terrorists — you can’t counter claim against them in the courts, there’s no legal redress. The bloody man should act — on his own responsibility. That’s what we have Ministers for. Instead, he’s like a little boy on the pier watching some pretty ships go by.’

The bearing of the tankers was very slowly changing. Both VHF and R/T channels were filling the air with irate comments from ships finding themselves heading straight for a bows-on collision, the CMS watch officer continually issuing warnings for westbound traffic to keep to the inshore side of the land and maintain a sharp radar watch in the rainstorms.

They were all in the Lookout now, the Minister, Basildon-Smith and Captain Evans, with Saltley hovering in the background and everybody watching to see whether the tankers would hold on for the Sandettie light vessel and the deepwater channel or turn north. A journalist beside me muttered something to the effect that if they ran amok in Ekofisk or any of the bigger North Sea oilfields there could be catastrophic pollution.