The Black Tide (22 page)

They were there for a moment, then there was again no light but the stars and I couldn’t see them any more, only the dim shape of the fo’c’sle with the two anchor windlasses and the mooring line winch. Several minutes passed, my eye glued to the little peephole of clear glass, but the figures did
not reappear, the steel of the deck an empty platform with the black silhouette of the cliffs hanging over it. Once I thought I saw the glow of a light from a hatchway, but my vision was becoming blurred and I couldn’t be sure.

I straightened up, blinking my eyes in the dark of the cabin. It was an odd feeling to be an officer on a ship and not know who was on board or what they were up to. Those shadowy figures, and the man with the gun limping towards them – probably they were just checking the mooring lines, or inspecting the lie of the anchor chain, making certain that the ship was ready to haul off and get under way, but the sense of something sinister was very strong.

I went out then and shut the cabin door, standing uncertain in the dim-lit passage. There was a small baggage room opposite my door, an oil-skin store next to it, then the officers’ washroom and the alleyway leading down the starboard side to the mess-room. I could hear the sound of voices. But still I hesitated, thinking about the men Baldwick had shipped in by dhow from Baluchistan. Had they brought the ship into the
khawr
and moored it against the cliffs, or had there been a different crew then? The crew’s quarters would be on the deck below. I had only to go down there to learn if they were Pakistanis. I glanced at my watch. It was just after six-thirty. They’d probably be having their evening meal, in which case this was the moment to take a look round the ship. There’d be nobody in the wheelhouse now, or in the chart room, the radio shack too – somewhere up there on the navigating bridge there would be some indication of the ship’s background, where she was from. And on the deck below, on the port side of C deck – the opposite side to the captain’s quarters – would be the chief engineer’s accommodation …

Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d gone up to the bridge then. But I thought it could wait, that just for a moment a beer was more important. And so I turned right, past the washroom, down the alleyway to the mess-room door, and there, sitting talking to Rod Selkirk and the others, was Choffel.

Behind him a single long table with its white cloth stood
out in sharp contrast against the soft, almost dove-grey pastel shade of the walls. The chairs, upholstered in bright orange, gave the room an appearance of brightness, even though the lights were almost as dim as in my cabin. Nevertheless, I recognized him instantly, despite the dim lighting and the fact that his chin was now thickly stubbled, the beginnings of a beard. He was wearing navy blue trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt with chief engineer’s tabs on the shoulders. He looked older, the face more drawn than in the photographs I had seen, and he was talking with a sort of nervous intensity, his voice quick and lilting, no trace of a French accent.

He stopped at the sight of me and got to his feet, asking me if I would like a beer. They were all of them drinking beer, except Fraser, who had got hold of a bottle of whisky. For a moment I just stood there, staring at him. He looked so ordinary and I didn’t know what to say. In the end I simply told him my name, watching his face to see the reaction, thinking that would be enough. But all he said was, ‘David Price, Chief Engineer.’ And he held out his hand so that I had to take it. ‘Welcome aboard.’ He turned then and emptied the remains of a can of beer into a glass, handing it to me and pulling up a chair, his dark eyes giving me no more than a casual glance.

My name meant nothing to him. Either he hadn’t taken it in, or else he didn’t realize what had happened to the
Petros Jupiter
. ‘You’re Welsh, are you?’ I asked. ‘Somebody told me the Chief was a Greek.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Who? Who told you that, man?’ And when I shrugged and said I couldn’t remember, he gave a quick little laugh. ‘With a name like Price, of course I’m Welsh.’

I nodded. ‘My wife was Welsh,’ I said and sat down, knocking back half the beer he had given me, very conscious of his proximity, the dark eyes and the black wavy hair streaked with grey, the stubble thick on jaw and throat.

‘Your wife, where was she from then?’ His voice displayed no more than polite interest and I knew he hadn’t a clue who I was or why I was here, didn’t even know how she had died.

‘From Swansea,’ I said. And I told him her maiden name had been Davies. ‘Karen Davies.’ I remembered the way she had looked, leaning against her bicycle and speaking her name to me for the first time. ‘Karen,’ I said again and his only comment was that it didn’t sound very Welsh.

‘Well, what about your own name?’ I said. ‘Price doesn’t sound exactly Welsh.’

‘No?’ He laughed. ‘Well, let me tell you then. Price is a bastardized form of ap-Rhys or Rees. Ap meant son of, you see. Like ap-Richard – Pritchard.’

I asked him then if he’d been born in Wales and he said, ‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘I was born near Caio,’ he said, ‘In an old stone cottage about a mile from Ogofau, where my father worked.’ And he added, ‘That’s hill-farming country, the real heart of Plaid Cymru where the old shires of Cardigan and Carmarthen met before they re-named them Dyfed. After me, you know.’ And he smiled, a humorous little smile that creased the corners of his mouth and tucked a small hollow into each cheek. ‘My father was a miner, you see. Started in the anthracite pits down in the valleys beyond Merthyr. It was there he got the silicosis that finally killed him.’

He got up and went over to the cold box, coming back with a fresh beer for each of us. And then he was talking about the Ogofau gold mine, how it was an open-cast mine in the days of the Romans, who had built a guard post at Pumpsaint and seven miles of sluices. He said there were historians who believed it was because of Ogofau that the Romans invaded Britain. ‘All through the occupation they were exporting something like 400 tons of gold a year to Rome. That’s what my father said.’

Sitting there, staring at that Welsh face, listening to that Welsh voice telling about his childhood and about going down into the mine with his father after it had closed in the thirties – it wasn’t a bit as I had expected, this meeting between myself and the
Petros Jupiter
’s engineer. He was describing what his father had told him about working underground in a mine that had been producing gold for
more than two thousand years – the rock face caving in as they struck one of the old shafts, the roar of the dammed-up water engulfing them, rising chest-high as they fled and stinking of two millennia of stagnation. And then one of the crew came in, a Pakistani who said something to him about the tiller flat, and he nodded. ‘All right then,’ he said, gulping down the rest of his beer and excusing himself. ‘You Mates, you come off watch and that’s that, but a Chief Engineer now …’ And he smiled at us as he hurried out.

I stared after him unbelievingly. God knows how many ships he’d sent to the bottom, how many men he’d drowned, and he was so ordinary, so very Welsh, so pleasant even. I could see his daughter, standing there in that extraordinary house built into the cliffs above the Loire, her voice rising in anger as she defended him – such a kindly, generous, loving father. God Almighty!

Behind me I heard Varsac saying, ‘I don’t think he know anyzing. If he do, why don’t he tell us.’ And Lebois insisting that an officer who had been on board over a week must have learned something. ‘But all he talks about is the Pays de Galles.’

The French, with their customary realism, had already accepted that it was either a scuttling job or a cargo fraud, Varsac insisting that we weren’t loaded with oil at all, but ballasted down with sea water. ‘You check, eh?’ he told Rod. ‘You’re the Mate. You examine the tanks, then we know.’ He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, leaning forward and smiling crookedly. ‘If it is sea water, not oil, then we demand more pay, eh?’

Fraser suddenly erupted into the discussion: ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, man. Yu du that an’ yu’ll find yursel’ left behind to fry on the rocks here.’ He reached for the whisky bottle. ‘Yu seen the guard they got patrolling the deck. Start pokin’ yur nose into those tanks an’ yu’ll get a bullet in yur guts.’ And he added as he refilled his glass, ‘Yu ask me, we’re sitting on a tanker-load of high explosives – bombs, shells, guns.’ He stared at Varsac morosely. ‘There’s enough wars fur God’s sake.’

I left them arguing over the nature of the voyage and went
back to my cabin to peer through the tiny chink of clear glass at the deck below. I could see no movement at all, though the stars were brighter than ever and the deck clearly visible with the masts of the dhow like two slender sticks lifted above the port rail. I thought I could make out a figure standing in the shadow of the nearby derrick, but I couldn’t be sure. Then a match flared, the glow of a cigarette, and shortly afterwards two Arabs came over the rail at the point where the dhow was moored alongside. The guard stepped out of the derrick’s shadow, the three of them in a huddle for a moment, and then they were moving down the deck towards the bridge-housing all dressed in white robes and talking together so that I knew the guard was also an Arab.

I watched until they passed out of sight below, then I straightened up, wondering who set the guards, who was really in charge? Not Baldwick, he’d only just arrived. Not Hals either.

But Hals was the most likely source of information and I went along the alleyway to the lift. It wasn’t working and when I tried to reach the exterior bridge ladder I found the door to it locked. It took a little searching to find the interior stairs. They were in a central well entered by a sliding fire door that was almost opposite my cabin.

The upper deck was very quiet. There was nobody about, the alleyway empty, the doors to the offices and day rooms of both captain and chief engineer closed. I tried the lift, but it wasn’t working on this deck either. I don’t think it was out of order. I think the current had been switched off. At any rate, the door leading to the deck and the external ladder was locked, the intention clearly to restrict the movement of officers and crew.

The lift being on the port side it was right next to the radio officer’s quarters. I knocked, but there was no answer and the door was locked. He would be the key man if it were fraud and I wondered who he was. A door opposite opened on to stairs leading up to the navigating bridge. I hesitated, the companionway dark and no sound from the deck above. At the back of the wheelhouse there’d be the chart table, all the pilot books, the log, too, if I could find it. And there was the
radio shack. Somewhere amongst the books, papers and charts I should be able to discover the identity of the ship and where she had come from.

I listened for a moment, then started up the stairs, treading cautiously. But nobody challenged me, and when I reached the top, I felt a breath of air on my face. I turned left into the wheelhouse. The sliding door to the port bridge wing was open and the windows were unobscured so that I could see the stars.

There was no other light, the chart table and the control console only dimly visible. But just to be there, in the wheel-house, the night sky brilliant through the clear windows and the ship stretched out below me in the shadow of the cliffs – I stood there for a moment, feeling a wonderful sense of relief.

It was only then that I realized how tensed up I had become in the last few days. And now I felt suddenly at home, here with the ship’s controls all about me. The two years at Balkaer slipped away. This was where I belonged, on the bridge of a ship, and even though she looked as if she’d been stranded against towering rocks, I was seeing her in my mind as she’d be when we were under way, the wide blunt bows ploughing through the waves, the deck moving underfoot, all the world at my command.

There were no lights here and it took a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to the starlit gloom. The long chart table unit formed the back of the wheelhouse, just behind the steering wheel and the gyro compass. There was a chart on it, but even in that dim light I could see that it was the Plans of the Persian Gulf, which included large scale details of the Musandam Peninsula, and no indication of where the ship had come from. This was the only chart on the table, and the one ready to hand in the top drawer, the big Bay of Bengal chart, was no help either. It was the log book I needed, but when I went to switch on the chart table light to search the shelves, I found the bulb had been removed. I think all the bulbs in the wheelhouse had been removed.

However, the books were the usual collection to be found on the bridge of any ocean-going ship, most of them immediately recognizable by their shape – the Admiralty sailing
directions, light lists, tidal and ocean current charts, nautical almanacs, and the lists of radio signals and navigational aid stations and beacons.

I turned my attention to the radio room then. This was on the starboard side, and groping my way to it I stumbled against a large crate. It was one of three, all of them stencil-marked
RADIO EQUIPMENT
. They had been dumped outside the entrance to the radio room which, even in the darkness, showed as a ragged gap boarded up with a plywood panel. Jagged strips of metal curling outwards indicated an explosion and the walls and deck were blackened by fire.

The sight of it came as a shock, my mind suddenly racing. Radio shacks didn’t explode of their own accord. Somebody had caused it, somebody who had been determined to stop the ship from communicating with the outside world. The crates were obviously the ones Hals had loaded on to the dhow from the warehouse at Dubai. The larger one would be the single-sideband radio and the other two would contain the other replacements for instruments damaged in the explosion. Was that why I hadn’t seen any sign of a radio officer? Had he been killed in the blast? I was remembering Gault’s warning then, feeling suddenly exposed, the others all in the mess-room drinking, only myself up here on the bridge trying to find out where the ship had come from, what had happened to her.