The Black Tide

‘No?’ He smiled. ‘Eminently practical, I should say. Ja. But not political. A pity that. Her death achieved nothing. She should have threatened, made terms, forced them to do something. A law of the sea to control pollution. Powers of arrest, and the death penalty, if necessary — with naval vessels and aircraft constantly on patrol in restricted waters with power to take immediate action, against any ship, of any nationality. Only that way will we stop the destruction of our marine environment. You agree?’

I nodded. It was what we had so often talked about.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ He was frowning. ‘You’re not one of my boys. You’re Len Baldwick’s lot.’

‘Does that make a difference?’

The blue eyes seemed to look right through me. ‘You don’t know, do you? So, why are you here?’

‘Is Choffel one of your boys?’ I asked him.

‘Choffel?’

‘The man who calls himself Price. David Price.’

‘The chief engineer.’

‘Somebody sent a dhow to pick him up from a French ship in the Straits.’

‘Baldwick sent it.’ He stood there, frowning. ‘Choffel? Ah!’ His hand slammed down on the wooden capping of the bulwarks. ‘So that’s it. That’s who he is.’ He seized hold of my arm, staring at me. ‘Choffel! The Petros Jupiter. He was the engineer, ja?’ He nodded, his lips under the pale beard spreading to the ghost of a smile. ‘Goed! Zeer goed!’ And suddenly he was laughing. ‘Different nationalities, different motives — it will bekom an interesting voyage, I think.’ He was still laughing, a wild look in those pale blue eyes. I thought of him then as he had appeared in the press, holding the whole world at bay, a bomb in his hand and a loaded tanker under his feet. He was moving away from me, crossing the deck and climbing slowly up the steps to the poop that looked high enough and old enough to have Bligh himself pacing its deck. He seemed lost in his thoughts again, and I stood rooted to the spot, wondering just how mad or unpredictable he would prove to be. The captain of a tanker, whose whereabouts I still didn’t know, officered by men of different nationalities, different motivations. An interesting voyage, he had said, laughing, and the cold pale eyes looking wild.

It was a long day, sailing on a close reach, the shamal virtually a westerly, deflected by the red volcanic mountains. A great dish of rice and goat meat was cooked in the waist over a charcoal fire and we

ate it squatting on the poop with the wooden pulpit-like thunderbox on the windward side, the mountains falling away and deep indents appearing in the coastline, so that the heat-hazed outline of its jagged cliffs had the-‘ fluted look of a red-hot organ. I had never been this close to the upthrust finger of the peninsula that was the southern side of the Straits of Hormuz. It looked hellish country, which doubtless explained the nature of the people who inhabited it. The Shihuh had a bad reputation.

And then, just as the sun was slanting so low that the whole dragons’-toothed line of jagged cliffs turned a bright blood-red, we turned and headed in towards them. The great sail was dipped for’ard of the mast and brought round on to the port side, the wind on the starboard quarter and the dhow piling through a sea so red it was like molten lava. It was a fantastic sight, the sun going down and the world catching fire, red rocks toppling in pinnacles above us and all of us staring unbelievingly as we ran suddenly into black shadow, the narrow gut opening out into a great basin ringed with sheer rock cliffs, and the whole wild, impossible place as red as the gates of hell, sculpted into incredible, fluted shapes.

At the far end, clamped against the red cliffs, red itself like a huge rock slab, a shape emerged that took on the appearance of a ship, a long flat tank of a ship with the superstructure at the far end of it painted the same colour as the cliffs, so that the one blended into the other, an optical illusion that gradually became a reality as we furled our sails and motored towards it

in the fading light, the sound of our diesel echoing back from the darkening cliffs. It was hot as hell and a red flag with a hammer and sickle fluttered above the dim reddish outline of the tanker’s funnel.

CHAPTER TWO