Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

There was nothing for it then but to go over the whole story from the beginning, and it took time, for he was summarizing it as we went along and writing it all out in longhand. By 08.30 I had only got as far as my arrival on the tanker and the discovery that it was the Aurora B. He rang down to somebody for sandwiches and coffee to be sent up from the cafeteria, and it was while we were eating them, and I was describing how Sadeq had stood at the top of the gangway firing down on to the deck of the dhow, that the door opened and I turned to find myself looking up at the shut face and hard eyes of the man who had visited me in my Stepney basement.

He handed a piece of paper to the detective. ‘Orders from on high.’ ‘Whose?’

‘Dunno. I’m to deliver him to the Min of Def — Navy.’ He turned to me. ‘You slipped out of the country without informing us. Why?’ I started to explain, but then I thought what the hell — I had been

talking for an hour and a half and I had had enough. ‘If you haven’t bothered to find out why I’m back here in England, then there’s no point in my wasting your time or mine.’

He didn’t like that. But there wasn’t much he could do about it, his orders being simply to escort me, and the local inspector waiting to get his statement completed. It took another half hour of concentrated work to get it into a form acceptable to me so that it was almost ten before I had signed it. By then two journalists had tracked me down, and though the Special Branch man tried to hustle me out of the terminal, I had time to give them the gist of the story. We reached the police car, the reporters still asking questions as I was bundled in and the door slammed. Shut-face got in beside me, and as we drove out of the airport, he said, ‘Christ! You got a fertile imagination. Last time it was a tanker hiding up in the Gulf and an Iranian revolutionary firing a machine pistol, now it’s two tankers and a whole bunch of terrorists, and they’re steaming into the Channel to commit mayhem somewhere in Europe.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

He looked at me, his face deadpan, not a flicker of reaction in his eyes. ‘I don’t know enough about you, do I?’ He was staring at me for a moment, then suddenly he smiled and I caught a glimpse of the face his wife and children knew. ‘Cheer up. Presumably somebody does or our branch wouldn’t have been asked to pick you up.’ The smile vanished, his face closed up again, and I thought perhaps he didn’t have

a family. ‘Lucky the local CID were taking an interest in you or you might have gone to ground in another East End basement.’ And he added, his voice harder, more official, ‘You can rest assured we’ll keep tabs on you from now on until we know whether those tankers are real or you’re just a bloody little liar with an outsized capacity for invention.’

There wasn’t much to be said after that and I closed my eyes, my mind wandering sleepily in the warmth of the car. Somebody at the Admiralty wanted a firsthand account of our meeting with those tankers. The Second Sea Lord — a friend of yours, the admiral at Funchal had said to Saltley — and Saltley wasn’t here. Was it the Second Sea Lord who wanted to see me? Whoever it was, I’d have to go over it all again, and tomorrow that statement I had signed would be on the Chief Constable’s desk, and he’d pass it on. Any official would. It was such a very strange story. He’d leave it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. And if those tankers blew themselves up… There’d be nobody then to prove I hadn’t killed Choffel. They’d all be dead and no eye-witness to what Sadeq had done.

That feeling of emptiness returned, sweat on my skin and the certainty that this shut-faced man’s reaction would then be the reaction of all officialdom — myself branded a liar and a killer. How many years would that mean? ‘Why the hell!’ I whispered to myself. Why the hell had I ever agreed to return to England? In Tangier it would have been so easy to disappear — new papers, another name. Even from

Funchal. I needn’t have caught that charter flight. I could have waited and caught the next flight to Lisbon. No. The controllers were on strike there. I was thinking of Saltley again, wondering where he was now, and would he back me, could I rely on him as a witness for the defence if those tankers were totally destroyed?

It was past eleven when we reached Whitehall, turning right opposite Downing Street. ‘The main doors are closed after eight-thirty in the evening,’ my escort said as we stopped at the Richmond Terrace entrance of the Ministry of Defence building. Inside he motioned me to wait while he went to the desk to find out who wanted me. The Custody Guard picked up the phone immediately and after a brief conversation nodded to me and said, ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir. 2LS’s Naval Assistant is coming right down.’

My escort insisted on waiting, but the knowledge that two such senior men had returned to their offices in order to see me gave me a sudden surge of confidence. That it was the Second Sea Lord himself who was waiting for me was confirmed when a very slim, slightly stooped man with sharp, quite penetrating grey eyes arrived, and after introducing himself as Lt Cdr Wright, said, ‘This way, sir. Admiral Fitzowen’s waiting to see you.’ The sir helped a lot and I seemed to be walking on air as I followed him quickly down the echoing corridors.

The Admiral was a big, round-faced man in a grey suit which seemed to match the walls of his office. He

jumped up from behind his desk to greet me. ‘Saltley told me you could give me all the details. I was talking to him on the phone to Lisbon this morning.’

‘He’s still there, is he?’ I asked.

But he didn’t think so. ‘Told me he’d get a train or something into Spain and fly on from there. Should be here some time tomorrow. Now about those tankers.’ He waved me to a seat.

‘Are they in the Channel?’

‘Don’t know yet, not for sure. PREMAR UN — that’s the French admiral at Cherbourg — his office has informed us that two tankers were picked up on their radar surveillance at Ushant some forty miles offshore steaming north. They had altered course to the eastward just before moving out of range of the Ushant scanner. It was dark by the time we got their report and the weather’s not good, but by now there should be a Nimrod over the search area and the French have one of their Navy ships out looking for them.’ He began asking me questions then, mostly about the shape and layout of the vessels. He had pictures of the GODCO tankers on his desk. ‘So Saltley’s right, these are the missing tankers.’

I told him about the O of Howdo Stranger still showing faintly in the gap between Shah and Mohammed. ‘Salt made the same point. Says his photographs will prove it.’ He leaned towards me. ‘So what’s their intention?’ And when I told him I didn’t know, he said, ‘What’s your supposition? You must have thought about it. Some time in the early hours we’re going to have their exact position. If they are in

the Channel I must know what their most likely course of action will be. You were on the Aurora B. That’s what it says here—’ He waved a foolscap sheet at me. ‘When you were in England, before Saltley got you away in that yacht, you made what sounded at the time like some very wild allegations. All right…’ He raised his hand as I started to interrupt him. ‘I’ll accept them all for the moment as being true. But if you were on the Aurora B, then you must have picked up something, some indication of their intentions.’

‘I had a talk with the captain,’ I said.

‘And this man Sadeq.’

‘Very briefly, about our previous meeting.’ I gave him the gist of it and I could see he was disappointed.