The Black Tide (18 page)

The only reason I could give him was the crew pictures, but when I asked to see them, he said, ‘I sent a full set of the pictures to our London office. That was three days ago. You could have seen them there.’

‘I had to go to France.’

‘France?’ The fact that I hadn’t come straight out from London seemed to make a difference. He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I’ve no doubt you have your own lines of enquiry to follow.’ He reached behind him to a bookcase where a potted plant stood like a rubbery green sentinel, picked up two files and passed them across the desk to me. I opened the one labelled
Aurora B
. There were copies of design drawings for the ship’s hull and engines, detailed specifications, and, in an envelope marked
PERSONNEL
, a crew list, together with a full-face close-up of each individual. This was the only item of real interest and while he was telling me how the Indian airforce had mounted a search in the sea area west of Sri Lanka and the oil company’s representatives had appealed through the local press and media for anybody who might have picked up a radio signal or voice message, I went slowly through the pictures. I had met so many odd characters in cargo runs around the Gulf that there was always a chance.

‘Also we have checked the background of every officer –
wives, girl friends, 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 cafés 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 A.l. 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.

We discussed it for a while, then I left, promising to look in the following day. After the cool interior of the oil building it seemed much hotter outside on the crowded waterfront. Noisier, too, and smellier. I crossed the Creek in a crowded launch to one of the older buildings just upstream of the warehouses. Gault’s office was on the first floor. There was no air-conditioning and the windows were wide open to the sounds and smells of the wharfs with a view over the rafted dhows to the mosque behind the financial buildings on the other side. Gault was at the door to greet me, a thin, stooped man in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt of virulent colour. He had a wide smile in a freckled, sun-wrinkled face, and his arms were freckled, too. ‘Heard you’d arrived safely.’

‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ I asked him.

‘Well, you never know, do you?’ He stared at me, still smiling. ‘Salt telexed yesterday. Last time we met you were mate of the old
Dragonera
. Then you left the Gulf.’ He took me over to the window. ‘There you are, nothing changed. The Gulf still the navel of the world and Dubai the little wrinkled belly-button that handles all the traffic. Well, why is he employing you?’

‘He seems to think my knowledge of the Gulf—’

‘There are at least two ships’ captains on Forthright’s staff who have a bloody sight more experience of the Gulf than you, so that’s the first thing I want to know. Two tankers go missing down by Sri Lanka and you come out here, to Dubai – why?’

I began talking about Karachi then, but he cut me short. ‘I read the papers. You’re after Choffel and you’re on to something. Something I don’t know about.’ He was staring at me, his eyes no longer smiling and his hand gripping my arm. ‘Those tankers sailed from Mina Zayed loaded with Abu Dhabi crude. But still you come to Dubai. Why?’

‘Baldwick,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ He let go my arm and waved me to a leather pouf with an old mat thrown over it. ‘Coffee or tea?’

‘Tea,’ I said and he clapped his hands. A small boy with a rag of a turban appeared at the door. He told him to bring tea for both of us and squatted cross-legged on the Persian carpet. ‘That boy’s the son of one of our best
naukhadas
. He’s
here to learn the business. His father doesn’t want him to grow up to be nothing but the skipper of a dhow. He thinks the dhows will all be gone by then. You agree?’ I said I thought it likely, but I don’t think he heard me. ‘What’s Baldwick got to do with those missing tankers?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘But he knows where Choffel is hiding up, is that it?’

I nodded.

‘You’d better tell me about it then.’

By the time I had given him an account of my dealings with Baldwick the tea had arrived, hot, sweet and very refreshing in that noisy, shadowy room.

‘Where’s the tanker you’re supposed to join?’ he asked.

‘I thought you might know.’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘No idea.’ And he had no information to give me on Baldwick’s present activities. ‘There’s rumours of Russian ships skulking in the Straits of Hormuz. But it’s just bazaar talk.’ As a youngster he had served in India and he still referred to the
suk
as a bazaar. ‘You know how it is. Since the Red Army moved into Afghanistan, the dhow Arabs see Russian ships in every hidey-hole in the Gulf. And the
khawrs
to the south of the Straits are a natural. You could lose a whole fleet in some of those inlets, except that it would be like putting them in a furnace. Hot as hell.’ He laughed. ‘But even if the Russians are playing hide and seek, that’s not Len Baldwick’s scene at all. Too risky. I’ve known the bastard on and off now for more than a dozen years – slave girls, boys, drugs, gold, bogus oil bonds, anything where he takes the rake-off and others the rap. Who owns this tanker of yours, do you know?’

I shook my head.

‘So you’re going into it blind.’ He finished his tea and sat there for a moment thinking about it. ‘Tell me, would you be taking that sort of a chance if it wasn’t for the thought that Choffel might be on the same ship with you?’

‘No.’

He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Well, that’s your business. Meanwhile, this came for you this morning.’ He reached across his desk and handed me a telex. ‘Pritchard.’

It was the answer to my request for background information on Welsh national servicemen in the engine-room of
HMS Formidable
in 1952. There had been two of them. Forthright’s had then checked four sinkings in suspicious circumstances in 1959, also two in late ’58. There followed details of the sinking in October 1958 of the French cargo vessel
Lavandou
, an ex-liberty ship, off the Caribbean island of Martinique. She had been abandoned in deep water, but the edge of a hurricane had drifted her into the shallows north-east of the island so that divers had been able to get down to her. They had found extensive damage to the sea water inlets to the condensers. Second engineer David Price, accused of sabotage by both captain and chief engineer, had by then disappeared, having taken passage on a vessel sailing for Dutch Guiana, which is now Surinam. The enquiry into the loss of the
Lavandou
found Price to blame.
Final clincher for us
, the telex concluded,
is that he was signed on to the Lavandou as engineer at the port of Cayenne in French Guiana in place of Henri Alexandre Choffel who fell into harbour and drowned after a night on the town. Company owning Lavandou registered in Cayenne. A David Morgan Price served HMS Formidable 1952. Thank you. Pritchard
.

That settled it. No good his daughter, or anybody else, trying to tell me he was innocent. Not now. Price, Choffel, Speridion – I wondered what he was calling himself now. None of the names, not even Price, was on the hotel guest list. I asked Gault about the dhow that had met up with the
Corsaire
in the Straits of Hormuz, but he knew nothing about it and wasn’t really interested. ‘Dhows gravitate to Dubai like wasps to a honey-pot. If you think he was brought in here, then you’d better try the carpet dealers, they know all the gossip. As far as I’m concerned, the
Petros Jupiter
is a UK problem. Choffel’s no concern of mine …’ He sat staring down at his coffee. ‘Who do you think would employ a man like Baldwick to recruit ships’ officers?’ Another pause. ‘And why?’ he added, looking straight at me.

‘I hoped you could tell me that,’ I said.

‘Well, I can’t.’ He hesitated, then leaned towards me and said, ‘What are you going to do when you meet up with this man Price, or Choffel, or whatever he’s calling himself now?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to find him first,’ I muttered.

‘So you’re letting Baldwick recruit you.’

‘Yes.’

‘A ship you know nothing about. God, man! You don’t know where she is, who owns her, what the purpose of the voyage is. You’re going into it absolutely blind. But you could be right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘About Choffel, I mean. A man like that – it makes sense. There has to be something wrong about the set-up or they wouldn’t be offering double rates and a bonus, and Baldwick wouldn’t be mixed up in it. When’s he get in to Dubai, do you know?’

‘Mustafa said tomorrow.’

‘Have you got his address here?’

I remembered then. ‘A telephone number, that’s all.’

He went to his desk and made a note of it. ‘I’ll have somebody keep an eye on him then. And on this Libyan travel agent. Also, I’ll make enquiries about the tanker you’re joining. But that may not be easy, particularly if she’s over the other side of the Gulf in an Iranian port. Well, that’s it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nothing much else I can do, except tell you to be careful. There’s a lot of money washing around this port, a lot of peculiar people. It’s much worse than it was when you were last here. So watch it.’ He walked with me to the stairs. ‘That boy who brought the tea. His name is Khalid. If my people pick up anything useful I’ll send him to you.’

‘You don’t want me to come here?’

‘No. From what you told me it could be dangerous. And if it’s politics, not money, you’ve got yourself mixed up in, then my advice is take the next flight home. Your background makes you very vulnerable.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘
Salaam alykoum
.’

I walked back to the hotel, changed into a pair of swimming trunks and had a light meal at a table by the pool. The courtyard, airless in the shadow of piled-up balconies, echoed to the murmur of voices, the occasional splash of a body diving. Afterwards I lay in a chair sipping an ice-cold sherbet and thinking about the
Aurora B
, what it would have been like on the bridge, on watch, when spontaneous combustion,
or whatever it was, sent her to the bottom. The people I had contacted in the insurance world – underwriters, Lloyd’s agents, marine solicitors, everyone – they had all emphasized that marine fraud was on the increase. Like ordinary crime, it was tax free, and as the stakes got bigger … I was thinking of Sadeq then, suddenly remembering the name the Shah’s police had given him, a name he had confirmed to us as he lay in the
Dragonera
’s sick bay. It had been Qasim. So what was Qasim, a man they had claimed was a terrorist, doing on board the
Aurora B
under another name? Terrorists were trained in the handling of explosives, and instantly I was seeing the fireball holocaust that was so indelibly printed on my mind, knowing that if a bomb had been cleverly placed there was no way the radio operator would be able to put out a call for help.