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 thought 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 &c 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 windtorn, 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. ‘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.’