The Black Tide

I nodded, wondering how I could get rid of him, wanting nothing except to get my head down now and sleep while I had the chance. It was more important to me even than food. He moved to the phone, which was on a table between the two beds. ‘Mind if I ring the office?’ He gave the switchboard a number and I went into the bathroom, where the plumbing was uncertain and the dark cement floor wet with water from a leaking pipe. When I had finished I found the unshaven Hussain established on a chair in the little entrance hall and Brown was standing by the window. ‘I think I should warn you, a lot of people are going to find this story of yours a pretty tall one. You realize we’ve no record of a tanker ever having been hi-jacked. Certainly no VLCC has been hi-jacked before. That’s straight, old-fashioned piracy. And you’re saying it’s not one, but two — two tankers boarded and taken without even a peep of any sort on the radio. It’s almost inconceivable.’

‘So you don’t believe me?’

He shook his head, pacing up and down the

tattered piece of carpeting. ‘I didn’t say that. I just think it’s something people will find difficult to accept. One, perhaps, but two—’

‘The first one went wrong.’

‘So you said. And you think a bomb was thrown into the radio room, a grenade, something like that?’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said, sitting on the bed, wishing he would go away as I pulled off my shoes. ‘I’ve told you what I saw, the radio shack blackened by fire and a hole ripped in the wall. I presume they met with resistance on the bridge, discovered the radio operator was going to send a Mayday and dealt with the situation the only way they knew.’

‘And this happened, not in the Indian Ocean, but when the Aurora B was still in the Gulf?’

‘Yes. When she was in the Straits probably.’

‘So the radio contact with the owners, made when the ship was supposed to be somewhere off the coast of Kutch, was entirely spurious. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? — that it never happened, or rather it was made from a quite different locality and was not the captain reporting to the owners, but the hi-j ackers conning them.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Ingenious, and it’s been done before. But usually with non-existent ships or cargoes, and not on this scale, not with oil involved and big tankers. Fraudulent insurance claims, we know a lot about those now, I’ve had instances myself. But always general cargo ships. Small ones, usually old and in poor condition. Four at least I can remember, all single-vessel owners, two of them had

only just changed hands. They were all cargo frauds based on forged documents.’ He began describing the intricacies of the frauds, bills of lading, packing lists, manufacturers’ certificates in two cases, even EEC certificate of origin in one case, all forged.

‘I’m tired,’ I said irritably.

He didn’t seem to hear me, going on to tell me a complicated story of trans-shipment of car engines from a small freighter at the height of the port’s congestion when there were as many as eighty ships anchored off Karachi awaiting quay space. But then he stopped quite suddenly. ‘Of course, yes, I was forgetting — you’re tired.’ He said it a little huffily. ‘I was simply trying to show you that what you’ve been telling us is really very difficult to believe. These are not small ships and GODCO is certainly not a single-vessel owner. They are, both of them, VLCCs, well-maintained and part of a very efficiently operated fleet.’ He was gazing out of the window at the darkening shadows. ‘Maybe they picked on them for that reason.’ He was talking to himself, not me. ‘Being GODCO vessels, maybe they thought their disappearance would be accepted — something similar to the disappearance of those two big Scandinavians. They were in ballast and cleaning tanks with welders on board or something. An explosive situation. That’s what I heard, anyway.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘This is quite different.’

‘Yes, indeed. Quite different. And it doesn’t sound

like fraud.’ He had turned from the window and was staring at me. ‘What do you reckon the purpose is?’

‘How the hell do I know? I was only on board the ship a few hours.’

‘And the cost of it,’ he muttered. ‘They’d need to have very substantial backers, particularly to escalate the operation to a second tanker at short notice.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You want to rest and it’s time I was getting back to the office. There’ll be people at Lloyd’s who’ll be greatly cheered to know the Aurora B at any rate is still afloat. I’ll telex them right away.’

‘You’ll be contacting Forthright’s, will you?’