The Black Tide

I heard a cry and looking down from the poop I saw Choffel’s body, flushed out from the lazarette by the wash of a wave and floundering in what little of the waist remained. I had my torch on and in the beam of it I saw his face white with his mouth open in some inarticulate cry, his hair plastered over his forehead and his arm raised as a wave engulfed him. I remember thinking then that the sea was doing my work for me, the next wave breaking over him and sweeping him away, and the same wave lifting the broken stern, tilting it forward and myself with it. There was a crash as we hit the rock, and a scraping sound, the mizzen falling close beside me and the remains of the dhow, with myself clinging to the wooden balustrade at the for’ard end of the poop, swept clear and into the backwash of broken water close under the cliff.

There was no sign of Choffel then. He was gone. And I was waist-deep in water, the deck gyrating wildly as it sank under me, weighed down by the engine, and then a wave broke over me, right over my head, and my mouth was suddenly full of water, darkness closing in. For a moment I didn’t struggle. A sort of fatalism took charge, an insh’Allah mood that it was the will of God. Choffel had gone and that was that. I had done what I had intended to do and I didn’t

struggle. But then suddenly it came to me that that wasn’t the end of it at all, and as I sank into the surge of the waves and quiet suffocation, Karen seemed to be calling to me. Not a siren song, but crying for all the life that would be destroyed by Sadeq or the twisted mind of Hals when those two tankers released their oil on the shores of Europe. I struggled then. I started fighting, threshing at the engulfing sea, forcing myself back to the buffeting, seething white of the surface, gulping air and trying desperately to swim.

CHAPTER TWO

The sun was burning holes in my head, my eyelids coloured blood and I was retching dribbles of salt water. I could hear the soft thump and. suck of waves. I rolled over, my mouth open and drooling water, my throat aching with the salt of it, my fingers digging into sand. A small voice was calling, a high piping voice calling to me in Urdu — Wake up, sahib. You wake up plees. And there were hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently.

I opened my eyes. There were two of them, two small boys, half naked and dripping water, clutching at their sodden loin-cloths, their eyes round with the shock of finding me, their bodies burnt brown by the sun and the salt. Behind them was a boat drawn up on the sand, a small open boat, the wood bleached by the sun to a faded grey, the hull black with bitumen. Slowly I pushed myself up, my eyes slitted against the sand-glare. The wind had gone, the sea calm and blue with sparkling wavelets falling lazily on the sloping

shore. Away to the left, beyond the boat, a very white building sprawled hull-down among some dunes. Behind the dunes I could see the brown tops of mud brick houses and in the far distance the vague outline of a headland. Two mules were grazing on the sparse grass of the dunes behind me. ‘What’s the name of that village?’ I asked.

The dark little faces stared at me uncompre-hendingly. I pointed towards the white building and the roofs beyond. ‘Name? You tell me name of village.’ They laughed, embarrassed. I switched to Urdu then, speaking slowly since these were Baluchi and I knew my accent would be strange to them.

‘Coastguards,’ they said, speaking almost in unison. ‘Gwadar Coastguards.’

Gwadar! I sat with my head in my hands, feeling drained. So I had made it. And now there was a new battle to fight. I had to explain myself — on the telephone to Karachi — talk to officials, to the Lloyd’s agent, to all the people who had to be alerted. And I was tired, so deadly tired. It wasn’t just my body that was exhausted — it was my brain, my mind, my will. Vaguely I remembered swimming clear of the wreck, hanging on to a piece of the dhow’s broken timbering and the seas breaking over me, rocking me into the oblivion of total exhaustion. A piece of timber, part of a mast by the look of it, lay half-submerged a little way along the dark sands, rolling gently back and forth in the wash of the small waves breaking.

A man appeared, a bearded, wrinkled face under a rag of a turban peering down at me. He was talking

to the boys, a quick high voice, but words I could not follow and they were answering him, excitedly gesturing at the sea. Finally they ran off and the old man said, ‘I send them for the Havildar.’