The Black Tide (23 page)

The need to be out of the wheelhouse and in the open air, away from those grim marks of violence, made me turn away towards the door on the starboard side, sliding it open and stepping out into the night. The starboard bridge wing was so close to the cliffs I could almost touch them with my hand, the air stifling with the day’s heat trapped in the rocks. The masts of the dhow lying just ahead of the port-side gangway were two black sticks against the dull gleam of the
khawr
, which stretched away, a broad curve like the blade of a
khanjar
knife in the starlight. Deep down below I could just hear the muffled hum of the generator. It was the only sound in the stillness of that starlit night, the ship like a ghostly sea monster stranded in the shadow of the cliffs, and that atmosphere – so strong now that it almost shrieked aloud to me.

Standing there on the extreme edge of the bridge wing, I suddenly realized I was exposed to the view of any hawk-eyed Arab standing guard on the deck below. I turned back to the shelter of the wheelhouse. No point in searching for that log book now. With the radio room blasted by some sort of explosive device, the log would either be destroyed or in safe keeping. Hals might have it, but more likely it was in the hands of the people who had hired him. In any case, it didn’t really matter now. The destruction of the ship’s means of communication could only mean one thing – piracy. She had been seized from her owners, either whilst on passage or else in some Middle Eastern port where the harbour authorities were in such a state of chaos that they were in no position to prevent the seizure of a 100,000-ton ship.

I had another look at the blackened fabric of the radio room. There was absolutely no doubt, it had been blasted by an explosion and that had been followed by fire. I wondered what had happened to the poor wretched Sparks. Had he been there when the explosion occurred? I didn’t attempt to break into the room, but at least there was no odour of putrefaction, only the faint smell of burnt rubber and paint. I checked the crates again, wondering why they needed to replace the radio equipment. For purposes of entering a port to sell cargo or for delivering the ship a small VHF set would be quite adequate.

Other questions flooded my mind. Why hadn’t they organized the replacement crew in advance, instead of harbouring the ship against the cliffs here? Why the delay, running the risk of her being sighted by an Omani reconnaissance plane monitoring movements through the Straits or picked out from some routine surveillance satellite photograph? Surely speed in an operation like this was essential. I moved across to the port side to see if the radar room had also been damaged.

It was then that a shadow moved by the door to the port bridge wing. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, heard the click of metal slotting home as I spun round, and a voice, with a strong accent, said, ‘Who are you?’

He was standing in silhouette against the stars. The deck
guard presumably, for I could see the robes and the gun. ‘Second mate,’ I said. ‘Just checking the bridge. No need for you to worry.’ My voice sounded a little hoarse, the gun pointed at my stomach. It was some sort of machine pistol.

‘Below plis. Nobody come here.’

‘Whose orders?’ I asked.

‘Below. Below. You go below – quick!’ His voice was high and nervous, the gun in his hand jerking, the white of his eyes staring.

‘What’s your name?’

He shook his head angrily. ‘Go quick.’

‘Who gave you orders to keep the ship’s officers off the bridge?’

‘You go – quick,’ he repeated, and he jabbed the muzzle of his machine pistol hard into my ribs.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, it was in shadow, but I could sense his nervousness. ‘Is Captain Hals allowed on the bridge?’ I asked. I don’t know whether he understood the question, but he didn’t answer, jabbing the gun into me again, indicating that I should get moving.

I never saw what he looked like, for he didn’t come down with me into the lower part of the ship, simply standing at the top of the bridge companion and motioning me below with the barrel of his pistol.

Back on C deck I went straight to the captain’s office. The door was just past the central well of the stairs. There was no answer to my knock so I tried the handle. To my surprise it opened and the light was on inside. There was a desk with a typewriter on it, some papers, steel filing cabinets against the inboard bulkhead, two or three chairs. The papers proved to be invoices, and there was a radio instruction manual. The inner door leading to the day cabin was ajar and, though the light was on, there was nobody there. The decor was the same as in the officers’ mess-room, the walls grey, the furnishings and curtains orange. It looked bright and cheerful, no indication at all of any violence.

The bedroom door, outboard on the far side, was not only shut but bolted from the inside. I called out and after a moment a sleepy voice answered. ‘Ja. Who is it?’ And when I told him, he asked, ‘Is it already time for the night food?’

I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s almost twenty past seven,’ I told him.

‘Ja. It is almost time.’

I heard movement, then the door was unbolted and he emerged completely naked, his eyes barely open and his blond hair standing up in a tousled mop, so that if he’d had a straw in his mouth, he would have made a very good caricature of a stage yokel. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked, standing there with his mouth open in a yawn and scratching himself.

‘The name of the ship,’ I said. ‘I want to know what’s happened to her and why.’

He stopped scratching then, his mouth suddenly a tight line, his eyes watching me. ‘So. You want to ask questions – now, before the voyage is begun. Why?’ And when I told him I’d just come from the wheelhouse he smiled, nodding his head. ‘Sit down.’ He waved me to the settle and dived back into the bedroom. ‘So you have seen our bombed-out radio room and come to the obvious conclusion, that there is an attempt at piracy and they make a balls of it, eh? But take my advice, Mr Rodin, do not leap to the conclusion that they are stupid people and incompetent. They learn their lesson very well.’

‘What happened to the radio officer?’ I asked.

‘Dead, I think.’

‘And the other officers, the crew?’

‘One, per’aps two, killed, also several wounded.’ There was the sound of water running and then he said, ‘Better you don’t ask about that.’ And after a moment he emerged in white shorts and shirt, running a comb through his damp hair. ‘You want to stay alive, you keep your mouth shut. These people are very tough.’

‘Who?’

‘You will see in good time, my friend. There are five of them and they mean business. So, if you don’t like it, better you don’t do anything quick, without proper thought. Understand?’

I nodded, conscious that his choice of words distanced himself from them. ‘Where do you come into it?’ I asked him.

He didn’t even answer that, slipping the comb into the breast pocket of his shirt, watching me all the time out of those very blue eyes. Finally he said, ‘Per’aps when we know each other better, then maybe we could talk freely. For the present, you are the second officer and I am your captain. That is all between us. Right?’

I got to my feet then. I couldn’t force him to talk. But at least I knew he wasn’t part of what had already happened. ‘On the dhow,’ I said, ‘when we were coming up from Ras al Khaimah—’ I hesitated, wondering how to put it. Since I didn’t know what the operation was I couldn’t be sure he was opposed to it. But I wanted him to know that, if there was any question of pollution, and he was opposing it, he could count on me. ‘When you knew who I was, you talked about my wife. You said Karen should have been more political, that she should have threatened the authorities, demanded a law of the sea to control pollution. Those were your words. You meant them, didn’t you?’

‘Ja. Of course. But the
Petros Jupiter
, that was only a ten thousand ton spillage.’

‘But is that the reason you’re here, on this ship?’

‘What reason?’

‘Pollution,’ I said. ‘The same reason you risked your life in that tanker on the Niger.’

‘Ah, you know about that.’ He sat down and waved me back to my seat. ‘I risked my job, too. After that nobody want to employ me, not even as an ordinary seaman.’ He laughed. ‘Then I got this job.’

‘Through Baldwick?’

He shook his head. ‘I was in Dubai and I hear some talk …’ He reached into a locker beside the table. ‘You like a whisky?’ He poured it neat, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You know, the first bad slick I ever see, the first real pollution? It was in South Africa. I had just taken my mate’s certificate and was on leave …’ His mother was apparently from Cape Town and he had been staying with relatives, some people called Waterman, who were English South African, not Afrikaaner, and very involved in the environment. ‘Victor was a marine biologist. Connie, too, but she had a baby to look after. You remember the
Wafra?
’

I shook my head.

‘And before that the
Kazimah
?’

He drank some of his whisky and sat, looking down at the glass in his hand, his mind back in the past. It was the
Wafra
he talked about first. That was in 1969, he said, and he had been between ships, enjoying himself, wanting to see as much as he could of the country. He had arrived there in November, just two days before the
Kazimah
got herself impaled on the Robben rocks. ‘Robben is an island out in Table Bay about seven miles from Cape Town.’ He paused, still looking down at his glass, and when I asked him the cause of the stranding, he shrugged and said, ‘The engine. Ja, it is always the engine. Almost every tanker gets into difficulties—’ And then he was talking about the organization for the conservation of coastal birds that had been formed the previous year and how he had spent the best part of a month helping his cousin, Connie, who was a member of the organization, collect oil-soaked penguins and take them to the cleansing centre. There had been a lot of people working desperately hard at penguin recovery, but even so her husband reckoned around 10,000 died.

And, earlier that same year, the whole penguin population of Dyer Island, over to the west near Cape Agulhas, had been wiped out by another oil slick. ‘Everything, every bloody tanker, all the oil for Europe and the West goes round the Cape. And I come back from two months wandering through the Kalahari, and over to the Skeleton Coast and Namibia, to find Connie Waterman exhausted with the effort of dealing with the
Wafra
disaster. It was the breeding season and they were literally evacuating the birds from Dyer Island to prevent them being hit again.’ He paused then, lifting his head and looking directly at me. ‘That is how I have become involved in environment.’ And he added, a little smile moving the hairs of his beard, ‘Per’aps it is true what my mother says, that I am half in love with Connie.’ She had been only a few years older and he’d been tramping, no fixed abode, no attachment, seeing the world, taking life as it came. It was working with her, he said, handling the poor pitiful wrecks of birds, and all the time the terrible sense of inadequacy felt by Connie and the other men and women
working so hard to save what they could, knowing that whatever they did, nothing would alter the fact that tomorrow or the next day, or the next, there would be another tanker in trouble, another oil slick, more pollution, more birds to treat – on and on and on till ‘the bloody bastards who own and run the sheeps are made to realize what it means when oil is vented, either intentionally or accidentally. And—’ He was very tense now, very worked up, the words spilling out of him with great force – ‘it is not only the Cape. It is the coasts of Europe. My own country – the Nederlands, that is very vulnerable, also the UK, France, the whole of the English Channel …’

He stopped there, wiping his face with his handkerchief. ‘But the politicians, the bureaucrats, they don’t care. Nothing will be done, nothing at all until the industrial nations that demand all this oil are themselves threatened with pollution on a massive scale.’ He was looking straight at me, his eyes wide and staring, his whole body radiating an extraordinary intensity. ‘Then maybe they get tough, so the bastards can be arrested on the high seas. And if,’ he went on, his teeth showing white through his beard, ‘when the captain is arrested, he is thrown into the sea to float in his own filthy oil until he is half dead – like the birds, eh? – like the keel-haul updated – then, I tell you, man, – then there will be no more oil slicks, no more venting at sea. But not till then. You understand?’ He leaned forward, tapping my knee. ‘You worry about the
Petros Jupiter
. What about the
Amoco Cadiz?
And the
Metula
down in the Magellan Straits – fifty thousand tons in an area where the cold makes biological breakdown of the tarry mousse much slower. Tanker after tanker. And the venting and the leaks – they go on all the time. How much oil do you think is spilled into the sea from bilges, engine-rooms and illicit tank cleaning operations? You will not believe me, but I tell you, it is one and a half million tons of oil. Ja.’ He nodded, cracking his knuckles, an angry brightness in his eyes. ‘There must be a stop put to it.’ His mouth opened to emit a harsh barking laugh. ‘Drown them in it. That is good justice. Do you agree?’ He was deadly serious, his eyes very wide, almost staring, and
fixed on mine as though conveying some unspoken message. ‘So. We have another talk some time. But when we are at sea,’ he added, glancing at his watch. ‘Now we will go to eat.’

He got to his feet, padding barefoot back into the bedroom to put on some shoes, while I sat finishing my whisky and thinking about it. Almost everybody involved in the cleaning of oiled birds had probably wished at some time it was the men responsible for the slick they were trying to clean. Rough justice, but if those responsible for a spillage were forced to swim for it in their own filth … it was politically impossible, of course. Karen had talked about it. So had others at the Cornish cleansing station, the women mainly. But how many nations would agree to pass and enforce such a Draconian law?

It started me thinking about the ship again and Hals saying that nothing would be done until the industrial nations were faced with the threat of massive oil pollution. Was that his plan? An interesting voyage, he had said – different nationalities, different motives. ‘What’s our destination?’ I asked him.