The Black Tide

‘Also we have checked the background of every officer — wives, girlfriends, sexual eccentricities, everything.’ He had a flat, rather monotonous voice and my mind kept drifting away, wondering vaguely whether the Lloyd’s agent would have heard from Pritchard yet. My contact was Adrian Gault. I had met him once, a little shrivelled man who was said to have his ear to the ground and spies in every merchant house on the waterfront. An old Gulf hand like that, surely to God he would know by now what dhow had picked Choffel up, where it had taken him. It was four or five days since the man had left the Corsaire, time enough for news to filter through, for rumour to get its tongue round the story and spread it through the cafes and among the Gulf Arabs cooking over fires on the decks of dhows.

‘.. no wreckage, only the dumped remains of ships’ garbage and one oil slick that was traced to a Liberian cargo vessel.’ He said it in an aggrieved tone, resentful of the trick fate had played on him. ‘I always run a tight ship here at GODCO, maintenance, damage control, everything Al. Our record speaks for itself. Since I took over this office we’ve had a long run…’

‘Of course. I understand.’ I found myself embarrassed at his need of self-justification, concentrating on the pictures then, while he began talking about the absence of any radio signal. Not a single ham operator had responded to their appeal, and in the case of the Howdo Stranger, with the very latest in tank cleansing equipment…

I wasn’t listening. There, suddenly, staring up at me, was a dark Semitic face I had seen before — in Khorramshahr, on a stretcher. The same birthmark like a burn blurring the full lips, the same look of intense hostility in the dark eyes, the womanish mouth set in a nervous smile. But it was the birthmark — not even the dark little beard he had grown could hide that. Abol Hassan Sadeq, born Teheran, age 31, electrical engineer.

I turned the picture round so that Captain Perrin could see it. ‘Know anything about him?’

He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. ‘You recognize him, do you?’

‘Yes, but not the name. It wasn’t Sadeq.’ I couldn’t recall the name they had given us. It had been six years ago. Summer, and so hot you couldn’t touch the metal anywhere on the ship, the Shatt al Arab flat as a shield, the air like a steam bath. Students had rioted in Teheran, and in Abadan there had been an attempt to blow up two of the oil storage tanks. We should have sailed at dawn, but we were ordered to wait. And then the Shah’s police had brought him on board, shortly after noon. We sent him straight down to the sick bay and sailed for Kuwait, where we handed him over to the authorities. His kidneys had been damaged,

he had three ribs broken, multiple internal bruising and his front teeth badly broken.

‘Interrogation?’ Perrin asked.

‘I suppose so.’

‘He wasn’t one of the students then.’

I shrugged. ‘They said he was a terrorist.’

‘A terrorist.’ He said the word slowly as though testing out the sound of it. ‘And that’s the same man, on the Aurora B. Does that make any sense to you?’

‘Only that a bomb would account for her total disappearance. But there’d still have to be a motive.’ I searched through the file, found the man’s dossier and flipped it across the desk to him. It simply listed the ships he had served on.

‘We’ll check them all, of course,’ Perrin said. ‘And the security people in Abu Dhabi, they may know something.’ But he sounded doubtful. ‘To blow up a tanker the size of the Aurora B …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s got to be a hell of a big explosion to leave nothing behind, and no time for the radio operator to get off a Mayday — a suicidal explosion, in fact, for he’d have to be resigned to his own death. And it doesn’t explain the loss of the other tanker.’

I was working through the pictures again, particularly those of the Howdo Stranger crew. There was nobody else I recognized. I hadn’t expected there would be. It was only the purest chance that I had ever set eyes on Sadeq before. And if it hadn’t been for the GODCO practice of taking crew pictures for each voyage … I was still trying to remember the name the Shah’s police had given us when they had

rolled him screaming off the stretcher on to the hot deck plates. It certainly hadn’t been Sadeq.