The Black Tide

My heel touched an obstruction. I felt behind me with my hand, not turning my head for fear of losing sight of the shape edging towards me. The winch — I was back at the derrick. I dropped slowly to the deck, crawling behind one of the winch drums and holding my breath.

Nothing moved, the figure motionless now, merging into the darkness. Had I been mistaken? Crouched there, I felt completely trapped. He had only to shine his torch …

‘Who’s there?’

The voice was barely audible, lost in the wind. The dhow thumped the side of the ship. A seabird flew screaming across the deck. Silence now, only the noise of the wind howling through pipes and derricks, making weird groans and whines against the background rushing of waves in the khawr, and the dhow going thump — thump.

Surely I must have imagined it?

I lifted my head above the big steel drum, staring towards the central line of pipes, seeing nothing but the vague shadow of the bridge-like outline of the firefighting platform, the foam gun like a giant’s pistol. Above my head the derrick pointed a long thick finger at the clouds.

‘Is there anybody there now?’

That voice again, in a lull and much clearer this time. So clear I thought I recognized it. But why would he be out here on the deck? And if it were Choffel, then he’d have a torch with him. He wouldn’t go

standing stock still on the deck asking plaintively if anyone was there.

I thought I saw him, not coming towards me, but moving away to the right, towards the rail. He must have been standing exactly between me and the fire monitor platform, otherwise I must have seen him for he wasn’t more than ten paces away.

Then why hadn’t he shone a torch? If he were armed… But perhaps I’d been mistaken. Perhaps he wasn’t armed. Perhaps he thought I was one of the guards and then, when he’d got no reply and had seen no further sign of movement, he’d put it down to his own imagination. And the fact that he hadn’t used his torch, that could be explained by a standing order not to show a light at night except in extreme emergency.

What was he doing here anyway?

Without thinking I moved forward, certain now that it must be Choffel. Curiosity, hate, determination to see what he was up to — God knows what it was that drew me after him, but I moved as though drawn by a magnet. The outline of the rail showed clear, and suddenly beyond it the dhow’s mast. The figure had drifted away, lost from sight. I blinked my eyes, quickening my step, half cursed as my foot caught against another of the tank inspection hatches. A gap in the rail, and a few yards further aft the outline of a davit. I had reached the head of the gangway.

No sign of Choffel. I stepped on to the grating at the top. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel the movement of somebody descending. The dark shape of the

dhow was for’ard of the gangway so that it was obvious there must be a boat for communication between dhow and tanker.

What a moment to take him! A push, a quick push — nothing else. I could dimly see the water rushing past, small whitecaps hissing and breaking as the wind hit the sheer side of the tanker, flurries gusting down into the sea. Quickly, my hand on the rail, I began to descend. The gangway swayed, clinking against the side. I heard his voice hailing the dhow. An Arab answered and a figure appeared on the dhow’s high poop, a hurricane lamp lighting his face as he held it high, and below, in the water, I saw a small wooden boat bobbing on a rope at the dhow’s stern. ‘O-ai, O-ai!’ The sound of a human voice hurled on the wind, the words unidentifiable. More voices, the cries louder, then the light of another lamp swaying up from below.

I squatted down, sure he must see me now, crouching low and pressing my body against one of the gangway stanchions, desperately willing myself to be unseen, my guts involuntarily contracting. When he had shone that torch, screening it beneath his jacket, I had seen the thin jutting pencil line of what I was certain had been the barrel of a gun.

There was a lot of activity on the dhow now, men gathered in the waist and the boat being slowly hauled along the ship’s side in the teeth of the wind and the breaking waves. Crouched there I had a crane’s-eye view as one of the Arabs tucked his robes up round his waist and jumped into the boat. Then they floated it down, paying out rope steadily, till it reached the

staging where Choffel stood at the bottom of the gangway.

Spray flew over him as he reached down to steady the boat. Now! Now, I thought, while his mind was on the boat, and I rose to my feet, and in that instant a beam stabbed the darkness from above, groping along the side of the ship till its light fell on the boat with the Arab kneeling in it, gripping tight to the last stanchion, and Choffel just about to step into it. They remained like that for an instant, frozen into immobility, as though caught by the flash of a camera, while from aft, from the wing of the bridge came a distant cry lost in the wind.