The Strode Venturer (12 page)

Shortly after that I asked Easton to show me my room. It was in the centre of a long verandahed block only a short distance from the Mess and my bags were there waiting for me. I stripped, washed and flung myself naked on the bed. The big ceiling fan stirred the air, but the room was hot and I was tired, exhausted as much by lack of food as by long hours of travelling. I turned out the light and lay listening to the whirring of the fan, the croak of the frogs outside in the grass that wasn’t grass but some exotic creeping vegetation clipped to the semblance of a lawn.

A chance to build something, he’d said. And the way he’d said it, as though it were a challenge, his voice vibrant, his eyes over-bright. Did he think he could fight George and Henry Strode on their own ground? I tried to picture him in a City suit instead of a sarong seated at the board-room
table in Strode House with his tanned face and that little French beard, but the picture didn’t fit. He’d no experience of the City. Three years in Guthrie’s didn’t mean he could hold his own in that jungle. They’d cut him to pieces.

At least, that’s what I thought as I drifted off to sleep, still wondering what he hoped to achieve by stopping a month or so on Addu Atoll.

At six-thirty my room boy produced a cup of thick sweet tea. “What time’s breakfast?” I asked him, but he shook his head, smiling shyly. His face was long and pointed with large ears and straight black hair. He might almost have been an Arab. “Do you understand English?”

“Me speaking little bit, sah.” The brown eyes stared at me, serious and gentle, almost dog-like. His name was Hassan and he was from the island of Midu, which he pronounced Maydoo. I sent him off to clean my shoes and had a cold shower whilst the public address system played soft music interspersed with time checks. I was back in my room dressing when there was a knock at the door and Easton came in. “The C.O. would like a word with you.”

“What about?”

But all he said was, “When you’re ready I’ll take you over. He’s in his house.”

Outside the sunlight was very bright, the air already hot. A slight breeze rustled the palms and along the shore-line of the lagoon the sails of dhonis moved in stately procession against the clear blue of the sky. Work on the station began at seven and the dhonis were bringing in men from the neighbouring islands of Fedu and Maradu. It was a bus service, but the effect was incredibly theatrical. Like the Adduans themselves, the dhonis were part of the magic of the place. It was only when we reached the C.O’.s house, which stood facing the Mess, that I could see the jetty and the ugly landing-craft and barges clustered round the
Strode Venturer.

The C.O. was waiting for me in the shade of the verandah dressed in khaki drill shirt and shorts. He had the police lieutenant with him. “About your visit to the
Strode Venturer
last night. Goodwin tells me there’s a white man amongst the crew—a fellow named Strode. Was it Strode you went to see?”

“Yes.” There was no point in denying it, but I didn’t like the way Goodwin was treating it as a police matter. “Did you go out to the ship again after I’d gone to bed?” I asked him.

“On my instructions,” Canning said quickly.

Goodwin nodded. “I got the crew list from the Chinese purser fellow. He couldn’t produce Strode for me and when I saw the captain he refused to let me talk to him. Told me to go to hell. He was drunk, of course.”

“Come inside a minute.” Canning obviously felt he wasn’t going to get anywhere unless we were alone. He took me through into his sitting-room and closed the door. “Now then, what’s this man Strode doing here—do you know?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

He stared at me hard, but it was so dark after the glare outside that even without my sun glasses I couldn’t see the expression of his eyes. “I met a Peter Strode once on the Trucial coast,” he said. “I was at Sharjah for a time and he came in on an Arab dhow and joined a caravan bound for Buraimi. The political boys got very upset about it.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes that lay on a table beside the model of a vedi complete with sails. There were models of dhonis too, all in the same satin-pale wood and shells that gleamed a high gloss orange. He held the packet out to me. “That boat’s going to Aden and God knows there’s trouble enough brewing there. If he thinks he’s going to slip across into the Yemen …” He tossed the packet back on to the table. “Do you think that’s what he’s planning? Because if so, I’ll have to warn our people.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think he’s planning to go into the Yemen.”

“Then where is he going?”

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I see.” He lit his cigarette and put the match down
carefully in the ash tray. “Have you any reason to regard him as a political risk?”

I started to explain again that my interest in him was a purely personal matter, but he brushed that aside. Like his police officer, he seemed convinced that my visit had some special significance. “I don’t want any repetition here of the trouble we had at Sharjah,” he said, thrusting his jaw out at me. “By the time we’d finished we had a file on him an inch thick. The Buraimi crisis was still on the boil and he took off with that Bedou caravan and just disappeared into the blue. God knows where he got to. We had search planes out, the works.”

“He finished up in the Hadhramaut.”

“I don’t care where he finished up. He caused one hell of a flap. And the situation here is almost as tricky. As you know, the Maldivian Government had the question of Addu Atoll raised in the United Nations. Contrary to what they claim, we did nothing to encourage the Adduans to form a break-away republic. One may sympathize with them privately, but officially it’s been a damned nuisance.”

He went over to the window and stood staring out, drawing on his cigarette, lost in thought. “No man ships as crew with a bunch of Chinese just for the pleasure of their company,” he murmured. “Or does he?” he turned then and began questioning me about Strode again; he guessed, of course, that he was connected in some way with the owners of the
Strode Venturer.
“Makes it all the more odd, doesn’t it? Even if he is, as you say, just a rolling stone, a sort of black sheep of the family …” He hesitated, standing there, legs slightly apart, his right hand joggling some keys in the pocket of his shorts. Finally he said, “Well, there’s no record of his having stirred up trouble anywhere, as far as I know.” And he added, “I’m an Air Force man, not a politician. But Whitehall expects me to handle this situation—and if anything goes wrong I carry the can. Kindly remember that.” He reached for his cap then and we went out to where his staff car stood in the blazing sun. “I’ve laid on the helicopter for you. Beardmoor does a daily
flip round the islands—just to show the R.A.F. is watching over them. He’ll meet you in the Mess at nine-thirty.” He smiled at me, a touch of his natural charm returning. “We’ll have a drink together before lunch. I’ll be in a better frame of mind then—with that ship gone.” He drove off then with Goodwin beside him and the R.A.F. pennant streaming from the bonnet, and I went into the Mess for breakfast.

I hadn’t asked for that helicopter flight, but as the machine lifted me up over the hangars, crabbing sideways towards the reefs, my interest quickened with the thought that somewhere along the fringes of that huge lagoon there must exist some indication of the purpose of Peter Strode’s visit.

“Anything you particularly want to see?” Beardmoor’s voice crackled in my helmet.

“The vedis,” I said.

“Vedis? Oh, you mean the old trading vessels. Can’t show you much of them—all battened down, you know. The dhonis now …” I lost the rest and realized he had switched channels and was talking to the tower. We had already crossed the Gan Channel and were over Wilingili. “That’s where the bad boys go.” It was used as a sort of penal settlement and all along the shore the undergrowth was beaten flat, discoloured by salt. Apparently the southern shores of Addu Atoll had been swept by a tidal wave some six months before. “They say the runway was a foot deep in water. It just about ruined the golf course.” We were swinging back now towards the bare flat bull-dozed expanse of Gan and as we crossed the runway end I saw some wag of a matelot had painted in enormous white letters—
YOU ARE NOW UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE ROYAL NAVY.

He took me low along the lagoon shore and hung poised in the bright air to show me dhonis laid up in palm-thatched boat-houses just back of the beach the way the vedis had been on Midu. “Now that most of the men work on Gan about half the dhonis are surplus to requirements,” he said. “They’ve dealt with the vedis the same way. Only the battelis—the fishing boats—are in constant use.”

“Are all the vedis laid up?”

“Yes. Or at least they were. If they haven’t hauled it out again I’ll be able to show you one in the water.” I asked him when they had launched it and he said, “Yesterday morning, I imagine. When I came over about this time Monday they were stripping the palm thatch off her and had started work on recaulking the seams.”

And Monday was the day the
Strode Venturer
had arrived. “Are they preparing for a voyage, d’you think?”

We had passed now from the jungle green of Fedu to the jungle green of Maradu. “No. I should imagine it’s just a question of maintenance.” He held the machine stationary to show me a mosque built of coral with white flags hung out for the dead so that it looked like washing day. There were children flying a kite and white teeth flashed in their dark little upturned faces as they laughed and waved. “But that vedi was quite a sight. There must have been at least fifty men working on her.”

We slashed our way over the treetops to look down on a broad street of coral chips that ran ruler-straight almost the length of Maradu. The houses, each with their well for washing and another for drinking, were neat and ordered, the street immaculate. The whole impression was of a highly civilized, highly organized community, and I wondered that they had been content with a life so near to subsistence. Maybe it was the climate. The islands were as near to paradise as you could get on earth. And yet they were obviously not an enervated people for the evidence of their energy and vitality lay below me.

Maradu, Abuhera, the flat bare area of the transmitting station on the southern tip of Hittadu, and then we were hovering over a long thatched roof. “There you are, sir, that’s one of them.” Alone or in groups there were nearly a dozen vedis cocooned on the beach at Hittadu and the water of the lagoon was a livid green, slashed with the white of the deep-water channel they had cleared through the reefs. “Where’s the one that’s in the water?” I asked him.

“On Midu.”

Inevitably, I thought, and fretted whilst he showed me the Government building, the house of the man who had styled himself President of the Adduan People’s Republic, the neat ordered streets of the capital; and then we were whirring low over the reefs, heading east. There was a batteli fishing in the Kudu Kanda Channel, the curve of its white sail like the wing of a bird, and shoals of big fish—bonito—just beyond Bushy Island; and on the far side of the Man Kanda Channel he came down low to follow four big rays winging their way with slow beats across reef shallows that were shot with all the hues of coral growth.

“There she is, sir. And by God they’ve got the masts in. That’s quick work.”

The vedi lay in the little coral harbour at the end of Midu’s main street, her two masts and her topsides mirrored in the pool’s still surface. There were dhonis alongside and men working on her deck. “Looks as though she is preparing to put to sea.” Beardmoor sounded excited. “I wonder if she’s going to try and run the blockade.”

It was absolute confirmation—the ships and that Adduan navigator, Don Mansoor, were what had brought Peter Strode back to the islands. But why? What reason had he given them to get one of their ships ready? “Take me as close as you can,” I told the pilot.

“Okay.” His mind, his whole body, was concentrated on the vibrating control column as the helicopter descended to hover just clear of the masts, the wind of the rotors beating at the flat surface of the water, shattering the ship’s reflection. She wasn’t particularly beautiful—a trading vessel, broad-beamed like a barge with a short bowsprit and a high square stern. Yet she had a certain grace and the unpainted hull and decks had the dull, silver-grey sheen of wood that has been aged and bleached in the sun. The men working on her had all stopped to stare up at us. I counted twenty of them. Some were caulking the decks, others working on the topsides, and stores were being got aboard from one of the dhonis.

Beardmoor angled the machine round the stern so that
we could see the dhoni on the far side. There were another dozen men there getting the sails on board and I could have sworn that one of them was Peter Strode. He looked up for a moment and then turned away, bending over the great fabric mass of the mainsail.

“They’re going to sea all right,” Beardmoor said. And he added, “I’ll have to report this to the C.O.” The helicopter lifted and slipped sideways towards the beach. The whole village seemed to be gathered there, a gaily-coloured mass of women and children who laughed and waved to us as they crowded the coral sand or stood in the shadows by the palm-thatched houses of vedis still laid up. “Seen all you want, sir?” And without waiting for my reply he lifted the machine vertically and headed back towards Gan, ten miles across the lagoon. “You were expecting that, weren’t you?” he asked.

“Something like that—yes.” I heard the click as he switched to the transmitting channel and then he was talking to Control, reporting what he’d seen, and I wondered what Canning would do when he heard.

I hadn’t long to wait. As we approached the rusting hulk of the
Wave Victor
I saw the big high-speed launch ploughing towards us. It was doing about forty knots and headed out towards Midu, the R.A.F. ensign streaming taut and a great arrow of churned-up water spreading out astern. “They were quick off the mark,” I said.

“A little too quick,” Beardmoor answered. “They must have had their orders before I got through to Control.” And he added, “Our local President’s no fool. He has his own intelligence network and he’s not looking for trouble. A head-on clash with the Malé Government is the last thing he wants.”