Authors: Hammond Innes
‘They may not be bound for the Channel.’
‘Where do you think they’re headed for – the States?’ He gave me a lop-sided smile and shrugged. ‘The Americans would have them boxed in and boarded before they were within miles of the eastern seaboard, and they know it. They’ll be in the Channel tomorrow night, I’m certain they will.’
We went to our rooms shortly afterwards and in the morning he was gone. The moment of reality had arrived. I was on my own again, and though I was prepared for it, it still came as a shock after living for several weeks in the close company of others. But then the coach arrived and for a while my thoughts were diverted by the long coastal drive to Santa Cruz and the airport with its views of the Desertas and the lighthouse standing white and lonely on the eastern tip of Madeira.
We were flying against the sun so that it was dark by the time we were over the Channel. The man next to me was sleeping peacefully to the background hum of the engines, everybody in the plane very quiet, even the stewardesses no longer rushing about. All during the flight I had been thinking over what Saltley had said the previous night, and now, over the English Channel, with a strange feeling in my guts
that those tankers were somewhere down below me, I found my mind made up. If they were going to detain me at the airport – and I was certain Saltley knew something that he hadn’t passed on to me – then I had nothing to lose. I tore a page out of the inflight magazine
Highlife
and scribbled on a blank space:
Please request press or other media representatives Gatwick to meet Trevor Rodin on arrival – 2 Iraqi tankers
, Shah Mohammed
and
Ghazan Khan,
expected English Channel imminent. Terrorists on board. Target not yet known. URGENT URGENT URGENT. Rodin
. I reached up and rang for the stewardess.
She was tall and slightly flushed, her hair beginning to become adrift and a faint smell of perspiration as she leaned over the recumbent figure next to me and asked whether she could get me anything. I handed her the slip of paper and when she had read it, she continued to stare at it, her hands trembling slightly. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m quite sane.’
Her eyes darted me a quick look, then she hurried away and I saw her conferring with the senior stewardess beside the pantry, both of them staring in my direction. After a moment the older girl nodded and slipped through the door to the flight deck. I sat back then, feeling suddenly relaxed. It was done now. I had committed myself, and even if the captain didn’t radio ahead, the girls would almost certainly talk.
After a few minutes the head stewardess came down the aisle to me. ‘Mr Rodin?’ I nodded. ‘Would you come with me, sir. The Captain would like a word with you.’
He met me in the pantry area, a tall, thin, worried-looking man with stress lines running down from the nose and greying hair. The door to the flight deck was firmly closed. ‘I read something about you, some weeks back. Right?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I cannot, I’m afraid, communicate with the media. That’s a matter for the airport authority. If they see fit, they’ll contact them.’
‘But you’ll tell them about the tankers, won’t you?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell them, yes. But it will be for you to convince them after we’ve landed. Okay?’ He half turned towards the door
to the flight deck, then checked. ‘You mean what you’ve written here, do you?’ He held the torn scrap from
Highlife
under my nose. ‘Terrorists. Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said.
‘You escaped in a dhow. I remember now.’ Grey, worried eyes stared at me for a moment. ‘But that was in the Gulf. How do you know these tankers will be in the Channel now?’
I told him how we had sailed out to the Selvagen Islands, had seen them rendezvous there and then been nearly run down in a deliberate attempt to obliterate us. ‘The way you say it—’ He was watching me very closely. ‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘Why are you on your own? What happened to the marine solicitor?’ And when I told him Saltley had taken the early flight via Lisbon, there was a sudden wariness in his eyes and I was conscious of a tenseness building in him. He glanced at the stewardess. ‘Get Dick, will you. He’s my navigator,’ he said and began talking about air speed, winds and our ETA at Gatwick, his voice suddenly matter-of-fact.
The navigator was a big man and as soon as he had shut the flight deck door, the captain turned to me and in a quiet, slightly strained voice said, ‘Mind if we check you over?’
‘For weapons, do you mean?’
‘Just in case.’ He nodded to the navigator and the two of them pressed forward, forcing me to the back of the pantry, where the captain ran his hands under my arms and between my legs, the muscles of his neck corded into tense knots and the navigator standing off, his fists clenched ready.
‘Is that necessary?’ I asked as he straightened up, letting out his breath, his body relaxing.
‘We have to be careful.’ His eyes still had that wary look. ‘You know about the controllers’ strike at Lisbon, I suppose?’
I stared at him, a feeling of shock running through me. ‘Strike? I don’t know anything about a strike.’ I was thinking of Saltley marooned in Lisbon and myself alone with nobody to confirm my story.
‘You could have heard about it at the airport. The staff were full of it.’
‘I heard nothing. I didn’t ask.’
His mouth was shut in a tight line, the jaw muscles visible as he watched me. ‘No – well, probably you didn’t know then. They walked out during the morning, a manning schedule we were told. But we’ll be landing soon. I’ve no time to check with Lisbon. They could take an hour or more to make sure whether your man is stranded there or not.’
‘So you’ll do nothing?’ I suppose my own fears, the strain in my voice, something communicated itself to him, for the wary look was back in his eyes.
‘I’ll report to Gatwick, of course. I’ve said that already.’
‘And the media?’
He hesitated. ‘I’ll have a word with the PR man, if he’s still there. He likes to know when there’s a—’ He checked himself. I thought perhaps he had been going to say “when there’s a nut on board’. ‘When anything unusual is happening. That satisfy you?’
I didn’t know whether he believed me or not, but I knew it was the best I could hope from him. I nodded and he let me out of the pantry then, requesting me in a neutral, official voice to return to my seat. I was conscious of the two of them and the chief stewardess watching me as I pushed past the queue for the toilets and went back down the aisle. By the time I was in my seat again the officers had disappeared, the door to the flight deck was closed and the stewardesses were seeing to last minute requests as they had a final clear up. The man next to me was still sleeping, the engines whispering very quietly now as we lost height. Everything was normal again.
The only thing that wasn’t normal was my state of mind. I could think of nothing but the fact that Saltley wouldn’t be around when we landed in England. I would be on my own, the only person available to the authorities who had seen those tankers rendezvous in the Selvagens. Would they believe me without Saltley’s physical presence to confirm it? A voice on the telephone from Lisbon wasn’t the same at all. Would they believe anything I said? I was thinking of the captain, the wariness, the tenseness, the way he had summoned the heaviest of his crew, the search for arms. Would
Forthright’s help, or Lloyd’s – would their Intelligence Services have discovered anything to corroborate my story?
The seat belt sign came on, the flaps slid out from the wings and I heard the rumble of the undercarriage going down. I felt suddenly sick, a void in my stomach and my skin breaking out in a sweat. It was nerves, the tension of waiting, wondering what was going to happen. And then we were down with the runway lights flashing by and I braced myself, breathing deeply, telling myself I had nothing to be afraid of, that the truth was the truth, something I couldn’t be shaken on, so that eventually they must believe me.
The plane came to a halt and a chill wind blew in as the fuselage door was thrown back. We filed out past the chief stewardess, who said her usual piece, hoping I’d had a good flight, and I saw her eyes widen in confusion as she realized who it was. And when I boarded the bus one of the airport staff got in with me and kept his eyes on me all the way to the arrivals area.
The time was just after 19.30 GMT when I joined the queue at the UK passports desk. It moved quickly so that in a moment I was handing my temporary papers to the immigration officer. He glanced at them and then at me, his glasses reflecting the glint of the lights, his eyes faintly curious. ‘What happened to your passport, sir?’
‘I lost it.’
‘Where?’
‘I left it on board a tanker in the Persian Gulf.’
He looked down at some papers on the desk beside him. ‘And this is your correct name – Trevor McAlistair Rodin?’ He turned and nodded to a man over by the wall. ‘This gentleman will look after you now.’ The man came quickly forward, positioning himself at my elbow. He took my papers and said, ‘This way please.’
He led me through into the Customs hall, where he arranged for my baggage to be cleared and brought to me. ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked, not sure whether he was airport police or CID.
‘Just a few questions, that’s all at this stage.’ We went upstairs and into one of the airport offices, and when he had
sat me down at the desk facing him, I asked to see his credentials. He was a detective-inspector of the Surrey police force. I started to tell him about the tankers then, but he stopped me almost immediately. ‘I’m afraid that’s nothing to do with me. I’m told the information you gave the captain of your aircraft about tankers and terrorists has already been passed to the proper authority. My concern is a much earlier statement you made, about how you escaped in some native craft in the Persian Gulf with a French engineer named Choffel. I’d be glad if you’d now go through that again, so that I can prepare a statement for you to sign.’
I tried to argue with him, but he was insistent, and he gave me the usual caution about the possibility of evidence being used against me. And when I told him about the statement I had already made in London a month ago, he said, ‘That’s the Metropolitan area, Special Branch by the sound of it.’ He was an ordinary-looking man, quite human. ‘I have my orders, that’s all.’
‘Who from?’
‘The Chief Constable.’
‘But not because of what I said about those tankers. It’s because Choffel’s daughter has accused me of killing her father, isn’t it?’
‘She made a statement, yes.’
‘But there’s no warrant for my arrest.’
He smiled then. ‘Nobody has told me to do anything more than get a statement from you, all right?’
‘And it’ll go to the Chief Constable?’
He nodded. ‘He’ll then pass it on to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions or not as he thinks fit. That’s why I had to caution you.’ He pulled his chair into the desk and got his pen out. ‘Now, shall we get started? I don’t imagine you want to be all night over it any more than I do.’
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 eight-thirty 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 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 wanting 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 first-hand 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.