The Black Tide

She left me with the bill for her coffee and a feeling of sadness that such a nice girl, so absolutely loyal, should have such a man as her father. Nothing she had said had made the slightest difference, his guilt so obvious that I thought she was probably convinced of it, too, as I went out to the waiting taxi. Varsac was already there with the door open. I handed my bags to the driver, saw to it that he put them both in the boot and then, as I was bending down to get in, the girl’s voice behind me called out, ‘Monsieur. Un moment.’ I turned to find her standing by the bonnet of the taxi with one of those flat little miniature

cameras to her eye and at that moment the shutter blinked. It blinked again before I had time to move. ‘Why did you do that?’ I was reaching out for the camera, but she put it behind her, standing stiff and defiant. ‘You touch me and I’ll scream,’ she said. ‘You can’t take my camera.’

‘But why?’ I said again.

She laughed, a snorting sound. ‘So that my children will know what the murderer of their grandfather looked like. The police, too. Anything happens to my father and I’ll give these pictures to the police.’ She took a step back, the camera to her eye again as she took another snap. Then she turned, darting across the pavement into the hotel.

‘Depeche-toi. Depeche-toi. Nous allons louper I’avion? Varsac’s voice sounded agitated.

I hesitated, but there was nothing I could do, so I got into the taxi and we drove out of Nantes across the Loire to the airport. And all the way there I was thinking about the photographs, her reason for taking them — ‘When you meet my father—’ Those were her words. ‘Dubai,’ she had said. ‘You’re going to Dubai.’ So now I knew, Choffel was in Dubai. He would be waiting for me there, an engineer in the same ship.

Two hours later we were in Paris, at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, waiting for the flight to Dubai. In the end we didn’t board until 20.30, and even then we were lucky in that there had been several cancellations, for this was the Thursday morning flight, delayed now by over thirty hours and every seat taken.

PART FOUR

THE DHOW

CHAPTER ONE

It was a six and a half hour flight from Paris to Dubai and nothing to do but sit there, thinking about my meeting with Choffel, what I was going to do. Up till then I hadn’t given much thought to the practicalities. I had never owned a gun, never even fired one. I had no weapon with me of any sort, and though I had seen death out in the Hindu Kush when I was a kid, it was death through cold or disease or lack of food. Once, in Basra, I had watched from a hotel balcony as an armoured car and some riot police gunned down a handful of youths. That was before the Iraqi-Iranian war, a protest by Shia sect students and again I was only a spectator. I’d never killed anyone myself. Even the little Baluchi boy, whose doll-like features haunted me, had been thrown into the Creek by the others. I had taken no part in it.

Now, as the big jet whispered through the sky at 37,000 feet, my mind was on Dubai, and the thought that tomorrow, or the next day, or when we boarded

the tanker, I could be confronted with Choffel caused my skin to prickle and perspiration to break out all over my body. I pictured his face when we met, how he would react, and the excitement of it shook me. So vivid was the picture my imagination produced that, sitting there, with the seat at full recline and a blanket round my waist, the lights dimmed and all the rest of the passengers fast asleep, the blood drummed in my ears, fantasies of killing flickering through my brain so that suddenly I had an overwhelming orgasmic sense of power. A knife. It would have to be a knife. One of those big silver-hiked, curved-bladed kanjar knives the Bedu wore tucked into the belts of their flowing robes. Getting hold of a knife like that wouldn’t be difficult, not in Dubai, where Axab merchants along the waterfront sold anything from gold and opium to slave girls, and a pistol would be equally available. Still, a knife would be better. But then what did I do? And where would I find him? At one of the hotels in Dubai or holed up in some desert hideout? He could be in one of the neighbouring sheikdoms — Abu Dhabi or Sharjah, or at some Bedu house in the El Ain oasis. And the tanker, where would that be berthed? The only place Baldwick had mentioned was Dubai. If it was in Port Rashid at the entrance to the Creek, then Choffel could already be on board. I pictured myself going up the gangway, being taken to my cabin, then joining the other officers in the messroom and Henri Choffel standing there, his hand held out in greeting, not knowing who I was. What did I do then — wait until the end of the voyage? A full shipload of Gulf