The Black Tide

‘You. The future.’ The small grey eyes were watching me, the whites as clear as if he’d never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. ‘You’ll be thinking of a ship now?’

‘Will I?’

He ducked his head, pushing his way in. ‘Saw you on the telly.’ He unzipped the sheepskin jacket, pushing the fur cap to the back of his head. ‘Peat fire, eh? You always were a bit simple-like. I told you, way back, didn’t I — being honest and licking the arses of the owners don’t pay. Now look where it’s got you. You lost your wife. She’s gone and you’re on your own. You got nothing, laddie, nothing at all.’

‘What the hell do you want?’ Any ordinary man I’d have thrown out. But he was well over six foot, massive as a rock. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To offer you a job.’ And he went on to explain that he was headhunting for a consortium going into the tanker business. ‘Oil money,’ he explained, drooping an eyelid. ‘You know how it is. Bubbles out of the arse of any Muslim in the Gulf. These people are starting their own fleet, see, an’ while crew’s no problem, it’s not so easy to find officers. The right sort,

that is.’ He was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. ‘The money’s good. Double British rates.’ He hesitated. ‘And a bonus at the end.’

‘End of what?’ I asked. ‘What’s the bonus for?’

He shrugged. ‘For getting the ship there. End of voyage bonus.’ He was standing with his legs apart, staring at me. ‘Air passage out, of course. Everything provided.’

The two years since I’d come to England fell away. I was back in the Gulf, back in a world where promises are seldom met, nothing is what it seems and men like Baldwick scavenge the hotels and clubs fomenting bar talk that is the never-never land of salesmen’s dreams. Nothing would have induced me to accept an offer from him, but I didn’t tell him that. I excused myself on the grounds that I had written a book and would be seeing the publishers shortly.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed and burst out laughing. ‘I come here offering you the job of first officer on a hundred thousand tonner, and you talk about a bloody book. You out of your mind?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a question of values. I know what I want to do with my life.’

‘Pollution. On the telly you was talking about pollution and crooked tanker owners, the need for government to introduce new laws.’ He hesitated, eyeing me speculatively. ‘Maybe these people can help.’ He said it tentatively and I nearly burst out laughing it was so damned silly. Baldwick of all people on the side of the angels! Quick as a flash he sensed my reaction. ‘So you won’t even discuss it?’

I shook my head.

‘I come all the way from Bristol to make you an offer most men would jump at—’

‘Then why haven’t they? Why come to me?’

‘I told you. I saw you on the telly.’ And he added, ‘These people, they understand about pollution. They can afford to run their ships so there won’t be any. The idea is to improve the tanker image, and they’ll put pressure on any government that doesn’t behave sensibly.’

‘What pressure?’ I asked.

‘How the hell do I know? Political pressure, I imagine. Anyway, Pieter Hals is one of the skippers. He wouldn’t have signed on if he hadn’t believed they were serious about it.’

Hals was the man who had stood on the deck of a flag-of-convenience tanker in the Niger River with a bomb in his hand threatening to blow it up, and himself with it, if the effects of a collision weren’t remedied before he sailed. She was scored along one side and leaking oil. The account I had read had commented that he was wilder than the Greenpeace movement or the union leader in Brest who’d called his men out to stop a Greek cargo vessel sailing with an oil leak in the stern gland. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked.

He shook his head, laughing and telling me he wasn’t here to gossip about the consortium, just to offer me a job and if I didn’t want it, what the hell did it matter to me who the owners were. ‘They operate in the Gulf, of course, and they want ships’ officers, deck

as well as engineers.’ He stood there for a moment, feet apart, with his back to the fire watching me out of his bright little button eyes. ‘Tonight I’ll be in Falmouth,’ he said. ‘I’ll be talking to the captain of the Petros Jupiter. He’ll be looking for another job I wouldn’t wonder.’ He waited, and when I didn’t say anything, he nodded. ‘Okay, suit yourself.’ He pulled a business card from his wallet, took out what looked like a real gold pen, and after copying some entries from a leather diary on to the back of the card, he handed it to me. ‘If you change your mind, those are my immediate movements.’ The card described him as Consultant. On the back he had written down dates and telephone numbers for Liverpool, Nantes, Marseilles, Dubai.