Authors: Hammond Innes
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.
‘And the Englishman who recruited you – Baldwick. Didn’t he know anything about the objective?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Tell me about your conversation with the captain then.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘Pieter Hals. Dutch, I take it.’
It was the better part of an hour of hard talking before he was finally convinced I could tell him nothing that would indicate the purpose for which the tankers had been seized. At one point, tired of going over it all again, I said, ‘Why don’t you board them then? As soon as you know where they are—’
‘We’ve no authority to board.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I didn’t care whether he was a Sea Lord or what, I was too damned tired of it. ‘Two pirated ships and the Navy can’t board them. I don’t believe it. Who’s responsible for what goes on in the Channel?’
‘Flag Officer, Plymouth. But I’m afraid
CINCHAN’S
powers are very limited. He certainly hasn’t any powers of arrest. Unlike the French.’ He gave a shrug, smiling wryly as he
went on, ‘Remember the
Amoco Cadiz
and what the spillage from that wreck did to the Brittany coast? After that they instituted traffic lanes off Ushant. Later they insisted on all tankers and ships with dangerous cargoes reporting in and staying in a third lane at least twenty-four miles off the coast until they’re in their correct eastbound lane, which is on the French side as they move up-Channel. And they have ships to enforce their regulations. Very typically the British operate a voluntary system – MAREP, Marine Reporting.’ And he added, the wry smile breaking out again, ‘I’m told it works – but not, of course, for the sort of situation you and Saltley are envisaging.’
I brought up the question of boarding again, right at the end of our meeting, and the Admiral said, ‘Even the French don’t claim the right of arrest beyond the twelve-mile limit. If those tankers came up the English side, there’s nothing the French can do about it.’
‘But if they’re on the English side,’ I said, ‘they’d be steaming east in the westbound lane. Surely then—’
He shook his head. ‘All we can do then is fly off the Coastguard plane, take photographs and in due course report their behaviour to their country of registry and press for action.’
I was sitting back, feeling drained and oddly appalled at the Navy’s apparent helplessness. All the years when I had grown up thinking of the Navy as an all-powerful presence and now, right on Britain’s own doorstep, to be told they were powerless to act. ‘There must be somebody,’ I murmured. ‘Some minister who can order their arrest.’
‘Both Saltley and yourself have confirmed they’re registered at Basra and flying the Iraqi flag. Not even the Foreign Secretary could order those ships to be boarded.’
‘The Prime Minister then,’ I said uneasily. ‘Surely the Prime Minister—’
‘The PM would need absolute proof.’ He shrugged and got to his feet. ‘I’m afraid what you’ve told me, and what Saltley has said to me on the phone, isn’t proof.’
‘So you’ll just sit back and wait until they’ve half wrecked some European port.’
‘If they do come up-Channel, then we’ll monitor their movements and alert other countries as necessary.’ The door had opened behind me and he nodded. ‘In which case, we’ll doubtless see each other again.’ He didn’t shake hands. Just that curt, dismissive nod and he had turned away towards the window.
Back along the echoing corridors then to find Shut-face still waiting. A room had been booked for me at a hotel in the Strand and when he left me there with my bags he warned me not to try disappearing again. ‘We’ll have our eye on you this time.’
In the morning, when I went out of the hotel, I found this was literally true. A plain clothes man fell into step beside me. ‘Will you be going far, sir?’ And when I said I thought I’d walk as far as Charing Cross and buy a paper, he said, ‘I’d rather you stayed in the hotel, sir. You can get a paper there.’
I had never been under surveillance before. I suppose very few people have. I found it an unnerving experience. Slightly eerie in a way, a man you’ve never met before watching your every movement – as though you’ve been judged guilty and condemned without trial. I bought several papers and searched right through them – nothing. I could find no mention of anything I had told those two journalists at Gatwick, no reference anywhere to the possibility of pirated tankers steaming up the English Channel.
It could simply mean they had filed their stories too late, but these were London editions and it was barely ten o’clock when I had spoken to them. Hadn’t they believed me? I had a sudden picture of them going off to one of the airport bars, laughing about it over a drink. Was that what had happened? And yet their questions had been specific, their manner interested, and they had made notes, all of which seemed to indicate they took it seriously.
I didn’t know what to think. I just sat there in the foyer, feeling depressed and a little lost. There was nothing I could do now, nothing at all, except wait upon others. If they didn’t believe me, then sooner or later the Director of Public Prosecutions would make up his mind and maybe a warrant
would be issued for my arrest. Meanwhile … meanwhile it seemed as though I was some sort of non-person, a dead soul waiting where the souls of the dead wait upon the future.
And then suddenly the Special Branch man was at my elbow. There was a car at the door and I was to leave for Dover immediately. I though for a moment I was being deported, but he said it was nothing to do with the police. ‘Department of Trade – the Minister himself I believe, and you’re to be rushed there as quickly as possible.’ He hustled me out to a police car drawn up at the kerb with its blue light flashing and two uniformed officers in front. ‘And don’t try slipping across to the other side.’ He smiled at me, a human touch as he tossed my bags in after me. ‘You’ll be met at the other end.’ He slammed the door and the car swung quickly out into the traffic, turning right against the lights into the Waterloo Bridge approach.
It had all happened so quickly that I had had no time to question him further. I had presumed he was coming with me. Instead, I was alone in the back, looking at the short-haired necks and caps of the men in front as we shot round the Elephant & Castle and into the Old Kent Road. There was a break in the traffic then and I asked why I was being taken to Dover. But they didn’t know. Their instructions were to get me to Langdon Battery as quickly as possible. They didn’t know why, and when I asked what Langdon Battery was, the man sitting beside the driver turned to me and held up a slip of paper. ‘CNIS Operations Centre, Langdon Battery. That’s all it says, sir. And a Dover patrol car will meet us at the last roundabout before the docks. Okay?’
The siren was switched on and we blazed our way through the traffic by New Cross Station. In moments, it seemed, we were crossing Blackheath, heading through the Bexley area to the M2. The morning was grey and wind torn, distant glimpses of Medway towns against the wide skies of the Thames estuary and my spirits lifting, a mood almost of elation. But all the men in front could tell me was that their instructions had come from the office of the Under Secretary, Marine Division, at the Department of Trade in High Holborn.
They knew nothing about any tankers. I leaned back, watching the forestry on either side flash by, certain that the ships must have been sighted. Why else this sudden call for my presence at an operations centre near Dover?
Half an hour later we were past Canterbury and at 11.22 we slowed at a second roundabout just outside Dover with the A2 dipping sharply between gorse scrub hills to the harbour. A local police car was waiting where the A258 to Deal branched off to the left and we followed it as it swung into the roundabout, turning right on to a narrow road leading directly to the square stone bulk of Dover Castle. To the left I had fleeting glimpses of the Straits, the sea grey-green and flecked with white, ships steaming steadily westward. A shaft of sunlight picked out the coast of France, while to the east a rainstorm blackened the seascape. Just short of the Castle we swung left, doubling back and dipping sharply to a narrow bridge over the A2 and a view of the docks with a 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. ‘CNIS – 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.’