Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

hydrofoil just leaving by the eastern entrance in a flurry of spray.

The road, signposted to St Margaret’s, climbed sharply up rough downland slopes round a hairpin bend, and in a moment we were turning through a narrow gateway into MoD property with tall radio masts looming above a hill-top to our left.

Langdon Battery proved to be a decaying gun emplacement of First World War vintage, the concrete redoubt just showing above a flat gravel area where a dozen or more cars were parked. But at the eastern end the emplacement was dominated by a strange, very modernistic building, a sort of Star Wars version of an airport control tower. We stopped alongside a white curved concrete section and an officer from the local police car opened the door for me. ‘What is this place?’ I asked him.

‘HM Coastguards,’ he said. ‘CMS — Channel Navigation Information Service. They monitor the traffic passing through the Straits.’

We went in through double glass doors. There was a desk and a receptionist drinking coffee out of a Government issue cup. My escort gave her my name and she picked up a microphone. ‘Captain Evans please… Mr Rodin has just arrived, sir.’ She nodded and smiled at me. ‘Captain Evans will be right down.’

Opposite reception was a semicircular enclave with display boards outlining the work of the Operations Centre — a map of the Straits showing the east-west traffic lanes and the limits of the radar surveillance, diagrams showing the volume of traffic and marked

drop in collisions resulting from traffic separation, radar surveillance and the reporting in by masters carrying noxious and dangerous cargoes, pictures of the Coastguards’ traffic patrol aircraft and of the Operations Room with its radar screens and computer console. ‘Mr Rodin?’

I turned to find a short, broad man with a lively face and a mane of greying hair. ‘David Evans,’ he said. ‘I’m the Regional Controller.’ And as he led me up the stairs to the left of the reception desk, he added, ‘The SoS should be here shortly — Secretary of State for Trade, that is. He’s flying down from Scotland.’ ‘The tankers have been sighted then?’ ‘Oh yes, there’s a Nimrod shadowing them.’ The first floor area was constructed like a control tower. ‘The Operations Room,’ he said. ‘That’s the Lookout facing seaward and the inner sanctum, that curtained-off area in the rear, is the Radar Room. We’ve three surveillance screens, there, also computer input VDUs — not only can we see what’s going on, we can get almost instant course and speed, and in the case of collision situations, the expected time to impact. The last position we had for those two tankers was bearing 205° from Beachy Head, distance fourteen miles. The Navy has sent Tigris, one of the Amazon class frigates, to intercept and escort them up-Channel.’

‘They’re past Spithead and the Solent then?’ He checked on the stairs leading up to the deck above. ‘You were thinking of Southampton, were you?’ I nodded.

‘You really thought they were going to damage one of the Channel ports?’

I didn’t say anything. He was a Welshman, with a Celtic quickness of mind, but I could see he hadn’t grasped the implications, was dubious about the whole thing.

‘They’re rogues, of course.’ He laughed. ‘That’s our term for ships that don’t obey the COLREGS. They didn’t report in to the French when they were off Ushant, nor to us, and now they’re on our side of the Channel, steaming east in the westbound lane. That makes them rogues several times over, but then they’re under the Iraqi flag, I gather.’ He said it as though it was some sort of flag-of-convenience. ‘Well, come on up and meet our boss, Gordon Basildon-Smith. He’s responsible for the Department of Trade’s Marine Division. We’ve got a sort of subsidiary Ops Room up here.’

It was a semicircular room, almost a gallery, for on one side glass panels gave a view down into the Lookout below. There were several chairs and a desk with a communications console manned by a young auxiliary coastguard woman. A group of men stood talking by a window that faced west with a view of the harbour and the solid mass of Dover Castle. One of them was the man who had addressed that meeting in Penzance the night Karen had destroyed the Petros Jupiter. ‘Good, you’re just in time,’ he said, as Captain Evans introduced me. He seemed to have no inkling that he was in any way connected with her death. ‘I want the whole story, everything that happened,

everything you saw in those islands. But make it short. My Minister will be here any minute now.’

He wanted to be sure they really were the missing tankers, listening intently and not interrupting until I told him about the pictures Saltley had taken and how the old name was still just visible on the stern of the Shah Mohammed. ‘Yes, yes, it was in the report we had from Admiral Blaize. Unfortunately we don’t have the pictures yet. But Captain Evans here has flown off his Coastguard patrol plane with instructions to go in close—’ He turned to the Regional Controller. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, David? He has taken off?’

Evans nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Took off—’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Three minutes ago.’

There was a sudden flurry of movement as a voice announced the arrival of the Secretary of State for Trade. In an instant I was almost alone and when I looked down through the glass panels I saw a tall, dark man with thinning hair and prominent ears being introduced to the watch officers and the auxiliaries. He said a few words to each, moving and smiling like an actor playing a part, then he was climbing the stairs to the upper deck and I heard him say in a clear, silvery voice, ‘The French have been alerted, of course?’ And Captain Evans replied, ‘We’re co-operating very closely with them, sir. In fact, it was PREMAR UN who originally alerted us — that was when they passed Ushant and failed to report in.’ He introduced us, but the Minister’s mind was on the problem he now faced. ‘What about other countries — the Belgians, the Dutch?’ Evans said he couldn’t answer that and a

Navy officer present asked if he should check with Flag Officer, Plymouth. ‘I’m sure it’s been done, sir. As C-in-C Channel he’s bound to have given his opposite number in all NATO countries the information Admiral Blaize passed to us from Funchal.’

‘Check, would you,’ the Minister said.

A woman’s voice announced over the PA system that the tankers had now been picked up on the Dungeness scanner. Course 042°. Speed 18.3 knots. ‘And the Germans,’ the Minister said. ‘Make certain the Germans have been notified. They have at least two Kurdish groups in custody.’ He turned to Basildon-Smith. ‘What do you think, Gordon — leave it as it is or inform the PM?’

Basildon-Smith hesitated. ‘If we bring the PM into it, then we need to be clear as to what advice we’re going to offer.’ And, in the pause that followed, Evans’s Welsh voice said quietly, ‘What about the journalists, sir? They’ve been pressing me all morning for a statement.’

‘Yes, Gordon told me.’ The Minister’s voice was sharper and he passed a hand over his eyes. ‘How many?’

‘There must be twenty or more now.’

He turned to me, his dark eyes hostile. ‘You should have kept your mouth shut. What was the idea?’ He stared at me, and I suddenly remembered he had been a barrister before going into politics. ‘Trying to pressure us, is that it? Or trying to divert attention from your own problems. You’re accused of killing a Frenchman. That right?’ And when I didn’t answer,

he smiled and nodded, turning to Evans. ‘Where are they?’

‘In the Conference Room, sir.’

‘Ah, that nice, circular, very expensive room of yours with the pretty view of the Straits.’ He moved to the desk and sat down, his eyes fastening on me again as he took a slip of paper from his pocket. ‘We’ll assume for the moment that your statement is correct in so far as those tankers are concerned. To that extent your story is confirmed by this marine solicitor—’ He glanced down at his aide-memoire. ‘Saltley. Any news of him?’ There was silence and he nodded. ‘We must take it then that he’s still stuck in Lisbon. Pity! A trained, logical, and unemotional—’ He was looking at me again — ‘witness would have been very helpful to me. However …’ He shrugged. And then, working from his single-sheet brief, he began to cross-examine me. Was I sure about the identity of the second tanker? What were conditions like when we had sighted it? ‘You must have been tired then. Are you sure it was the Aurora B?’ And then he was asking me about the night when the two of them had tried to run us down. ‘That’s what makes your story less than entirely convincing.’ And he added, ‘My difficulty, you see, is that there are three witnesses at sea and unobtainable, and this man Saltley still lost apparently somewhere between here and Lisbon.’