Hammond Innes - The Black Tide

and as I came through the door I heard Fellowes’ voice calling: ‘Tigris to Coastguard. Something odd going on. The Aurora B is shifting course. She’s turning to starb’d. Also she’s on fire. There’s smoke pouring out of the wheelhouse area. Looks as though she intends to close the other tanker. Over.’

‘Any change of speed?’ It was Evans’s voice.

‘Yes, she’s increased at least a knot. Her bows are pointing diagonally across the channel now. And she’s still turning …’

‘Aurora B. Aurora B.’ It was Evans again, his voice a little higher. ‘You’re standing into danger. Ghazan Khan. This is Dover Coastguard. We have you on our radar. You are approaching collision course. I repeat — collision course. You are standing into danger.’

Silence then. A deathly hush on the frigate’s bridge and the tanker still turning. And just below the clouds, circling ponderously, was the Nimrod, the pilot quietly confirming that from where he was, right above the tankers, collision appeared inevitable. Then, suddenly, a new voice: ‘Tigris. This is the Secretary of State for Trade. I want you to stop that tanker, put a shot across the bows. Acknowledge.’

‘I can’t, sir,’ Fellowes replied. ‘Not at the moment. She’s stern-on to us and the other ship’s right ahead of her in the line of fire.’ And almost in the same breath he was dictating a signal to CINCHAN and ordering gun crews closed up. The loudspeaker crackled into life again, a different voice calmly reporting: ‘On collision course now.’ It was the watch officer on surveillance duty in the Radar Room fourteen miles away. ‘Two minutes forty-seven seconds to impact.’

‘My God!’ It was the Minister again. ‘Tigris.’ His voice was suddenly firm and decisive. ‘That rogue tanker. Open fire immediately. On the stern. Take the rudder off, the propeller too.’

‘Is that an order, sir?’ And as the Minister said, ‘Yes, yes, an order,’ a voice I recognized as Saltley’s said, ‘If that Navy ship opens fire, I have to tell you it could be argued later that you were responsible for the subsequent collision.’

There was a short silence. Fellowes was handed a signal, gun crews were reporting and the frigate was gathering speed, turning to starb’d. I could see the bows of the Aurora B, now barely half a mile from the long low shape of the ship she was going to ram, and in that moment I had a clear mental picture of the wheelhouse and Hals standing there in the smoke and flame steering his ship to total destruction. It was deliberate. It had to be. Like Karen — immolation, death, it didn’t matter, the object a disaster that would shake Europe into action. And in the silence the Minister’s voice shouting, ‘Open fire, man. Hurry! There’s barely a minute to go.’

I heard Fellowes give the order, and in that same moment a new voice erupted on the air: ‘Rodin! Are you there? Can you hear me?’ It was Pieter Hals. ‘It’s fixed now. Nothing they can do.’ There was a crash, a spurt of flame from the for’ard gun turret and instantaneously a matching eruption from the tanker’s stern. It was low down on the waterline, a single shot,

and the whole blunt end of the Aurora B instantly disintegrated into a tangle of steel, like a sardine can ripped open at one end. The ship staggered at the impact, smoke and flames and the debris of torn-out steering gear and bollards splashing the sea. But it made no difference. The gaping hole, and the sea rushing in — it didn’t alter her course, it didn’t stop her progress through the water. With her steering entrails hanging out of her stern she went ploughing on, and in the sudden silence Hals screaming, ‘It’s fixed, I tell you. Nothing you can do about it. Seconds now…’ There was a noise like ripping calico, the sound of a great gasp of air — ‘Go-o-d!’

I heard it, but somehow I didn’t take it in, the moment of Pieter Hals’s death. My gaze, my whole consciousness was fixed on the Aurora B’s bows. They were turning now, turning back to her original course — but too slowly. Steadily, relentlessly they were closing the gap that separated them from the other tanker. There was no further order to fire, nothing Tigris could do, the oil-filled bulk of the tanker ploughing on and everybody holding their breath waiting for the moment of impact.

It came, strangely, without any sound, a crumpling of the bows, a curling up and ripping open of steel plates below the Howdo Stranger’s superstructure, all in slow time. And it went on and on, for the collision was at an oblique angle and the Aurora B went slicing up the whole long side of the other tanker, ripping her open from end to end, and the sound of that

disembowelment came to us as a low grinding and crunching that went on and on, endlessly.

It stopped in the end, after what seemed a great while, the two black-hulled leviathans finally coming to rest with barely two or three cables of open water between them, water that became dark and filthy, almost black, with the crude oil bubbling out of them, the waves all flattened by the weight of it. No fire. No smoke. Just the oil bubbling up from under the sea like a volcano erupting.

The Nimrod made a slow pass over the scene, the pilot reporting — ‘From where I’m sitting it looks as though both tankers are aground on the Sandettie. One has her port side completely shattered. She was going astern at the moment of collision so she really got herself carved up. She still has her engines at full astern. I can see the prop churning up the seabed, a lot of brown mud and sand mixing with the oil pouring out of her tanks. The other tanker — the rogue — she’s got her bows stove in, of course, and it looks as though she’s holed on the starb’d side right back as far as the pipe derricks. A lot of oil coming out of her, too …’

And Pieter Hals dead. I was quite certain he was dead. That sound had been the chatter of automatics. ‘Looks like the Kent coast is going to get the brunt of it,’ Fellowes said quietly. The forecast was for the westerly winds to back south-easterly and increase to gale force in the southern North Sea. And since oil slicks move at roughly one-thirtieth of the wind speed he reckoned the first of the oil would come ashore

right below the Langdon Battery Operations Centre at about noon the next day.

It was two days later, after dark, that I finally arrived back at Balkaer, stumbling down the cliff path in the starlight, the squat shape of the cottage showing black against the pale glimmer of the sea. There’d be a fire to welcome me, Jean had said when I’d phoned her from London, and now I could see the smoke of it drifting lazily up. I could hear the beat of the waves in the cove, the sound of them surging along the cliffs. Suddenly I felt as though I had never been away, everything so familiar. I would lift the latch and Karen would come running…

The key was there in the door and it wasn’t locked. I lifted the latch and pushed it open. The bright glow of the fire lit the interior, shadows flickering on the walls, and I was thinking of her as I closed the door, shutting out the sound of the sea in the cove. And then I turned, and my heart stood still.

She was sitting in the chair. In her own chair. Sitting there by the fire, her hands in her lap, her head turned towards me and her face in shadow. She was watching me. I could feel her eyes on me and my knees were like water.

‘Karen!’,

I heard myself breathe her name, and the figure rose from the chair, her firelit shadow climbing from wall to ceiling, so big it filled the room.

She spoke then, and it wasn’t Karen, it wasa’l

voice.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I startled y The voice was liquid, a soft lilt that was Welsh like Karen’s, but a different intonation. ‘Jean Kerrison—* she pronounced it Jarne. ‘They’re out this evening, at St Ives. So she gave me the key, said I could wait for you here.’