I didn’t like it and I said so. I was certain our metal mast would show up as a clear blip on their radar screen. After a while we turned south-west towards Selvagem Pequena, reducing sail until we were moving at little more than three knots. We heard the swell breaking on the rocks before we could see the island, and then suddenly there was our tanker lying just to the south of Fora.
We turned then, heading north, back towards Selvagem Grande. ‘I think she’s seen us.’ Mark was watching through the glasses. ‘She’s under way and heading towards us.’
We hoisted the genoa again and seemed to hold our own for a while, then she came up on us very fast, steaming at full ahead and pushing a mountain of water ahead of her broad deep-laden bows. We altered course to starb’d as though making for the landing place on Selvagem Grande. The tanker also altered course, so that the bows were less than a cable’s length away as she steamed up abreast of us. A searchlight stabbed the night from high up on her superstructure, Doding the water round us until it picked up the e of our sails and fixed on us, blindingly, as be long black hull went thumping past. The stink of diesel fumes enveloped us seconds before we were picked up by the massive bow wave and flung sideways nto the suck and break of such a massive bulk being driven through the water at about fifteen knots.
For a moment all hell seemed to break loose. Toni
Bartello was flung against me so that I ended up half-bent over one of the sheet winches with a sharp pain in the lower part of my rib cage. Pamela was on her knees clinging to the guardrail and down below the crash of crockery and other loose objects flying about the saloon was almost as loud as the slatting of sails and boom. And all the time the searchlight remained fixed on us.
Then suddenly we were out of the wash, everything preternaturally quiet. Blackness closed over us as the searchlight went out. It took a little while for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Somebody said, ‘She had her nav lights on.’ I could see the broad back of her now, the stern light showing white and the Iraqi flag picked out by the steaming light on her after-mast. Moonlight gradually revealed the surface of the sea. Was this her final departure? Had the Aurora B arrived in the darkness? We searched the horizon, but no sign of another tanker, and shortly after 03.00 we lost sight of the Shah Mohammed behind the dark outline of Selvagem Grande.
When dawn broke the sea was empty and no vessel in sight.
We were north of the island ourselves then, all of us very tired and arguing wearily about what we should do. In the end, we turned downwind with the intention of checking that the tanker hadn’t returned to her old position south of Fora. Shortly after noon I heard Toni Bartello wake Saltley to tell him he had sighted the smaller islands and a tanker lying to the south of them.
We were all up then, putting about and changing sail so that we lay hove-to with the tanker just in sight like a sheer rock on the edge of visibility. We kept it in sight all afternoon, lying drowsily on deck, stripped to the waist and warm in the sun.
Towards evening the wind began to back, the air thickening till we could no longer see the tanker. A small boat came out from under the lee of Pequena, its bows lifted and moving fast. It was an inflatable with three men in it. We could hear the sound of its outboard clear and strident above the growing rumble of the reef surf as it made straight towards us. Only when it was a few yards off did the man at the wheel cut the engine and swing it broadside to us. One of the three stood up, clasping the top of the windshield to steady himself. ‘Who is Captain here?’ His face was narrow with a high-bridged nose and a little black moustache, and his accent was similar to Sadeq’s.
Saltley stepped into the cockpit, leaning forward and gripping hold of the guardrail. ‘I’m the captain,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
‘What you do here please?’ the man enquired.
‘Are you Portuguese?’
The man hesitated, then shook his head.
‘You’re from that tanker?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Shah Mohammed?’
Again the hesitation. ‘I ask you what you do here?’ he repeated. ‘Why you wait in these islands?’
‘We’re waiting for another yacht to join us. And you — why are you waiting here?’
‘How long before the yacht arrive?’
‘A day, two days — I don’t know.’
‘And when it arrive, where you go then?’
‘The Cape Verde Islands, then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Are you the captain of the Shah Mohammed!’
‘No.’
‘Well, tell your captain he came too close last night. I shall, of course, make a report. You tell him.’
‘Please? I don’t understand.’ But obviously he did, for he said something to the man at the wheel and the engine burst into raucous life.
‘What are you waiting here for?’ Saltley yelled to him.
The man waved a hand to the driver and the engine quietened to a murmur. ‘We wait here for instructions. We have new owners. They have re-sold our cargo so we wait to know where we go.’ He leaned his weight on the inflated side of the boat. ‘You in Selvagen Islands before this?’ And when Saltley shook his head, the man added, ‘Very bad place for small ships, Por-toogese fishermen no good. Understand? They come aboard in the night, kill people and throw them to the sharks. Okay?’
‘Do you mean they’re pirates?’ Saltley smiled at him. ‘You understand the word piracy?’
The man nodded. ‘Yes, pirates. That is right. These very perilous islands. You go now. Meet friends at Cape Verde. Okay?’ Without waiting for a reply he tapped the driver on the shoulder. The motor roared, the bows lifted and they did a skid turn, heading back towards Pequena.
‘What did he mean by pirates?’
Saltley looked round at Mark. ‘A warning probably. Depends whether I satisfied him we were going transatlantic’
That night, just in case, we had two of us on watch all the time. The wind continued to back until it was sou’westerly with a thin cloud layer. Towards dawn the clouds thickened and it began to drizzle. Visibility was down to little more than a mile and no sign of the tanker. After feeling our way cautiously south and west for nearly two hours we suddenly saw broken water creaming round the base of a single rock. This proved to be Ilheus do Norte, the northernmost of the chain of rocks running up from Fora. We turned due south, picked up Selvagem Pequena, skirting the island to the east in thickening visibility.
We wasted more than two hours searching to the south’ard before turning north-east and heading for Selvagem Grande. We were running then in heavy rain and we were tired, so that when we did sight the vague outline of a ship on our starb’d quarter it took us a little time to realize it wasn’t the Shah Mohammed. It was coming up on us quite slowly and at an oblique angle, its shape lost for a moment in a downpour, then reappearing, closer and much clearer. Its hull was black, the superstructure a pale green and the white funnel had a red band and two stars; the same colours as the Shah Mohammed, but there was a difference in the layout, the stern deck longer, the davits further aft and the derricks were a different shape. I recognized her then. ‘It’s the Aurora B.’ I said, and Saltley nodded, standing in the hatch with the GODCO photographs in his hand.
She was called the Ghazan Khan now, the name painted white on the bow and standing out very clearly against the black of the hull. She passed us quite close, steaming at about eight knots, the grating platform at the top of the lifted gangway plainly visible, the memory of Sadeq standing there firing down at us suddenly vivid in my mind. We altered course to cross her wake and again the name Ghazan Khan was painted on her stern and the port of registry was Basra.