A Twist of Sand Read online

  A Twist of Sand

  Geoffrey Jenkins

  The South West of Africa has the most dangerous and desolate coastal region in the world. It is also, potentially, the richest. It is known, with reason, as The Skeleton Coast.

  Fate gave one key to this forbidden place to Lieutenant-Commander Peace, R.N. He had been briefed, in conditions of absolute secrecy, for a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a new U-boat so far in advance of its time that the German High Command themselves distrusted it. It was this mission which brought Peace to the Skeleton Coast for the first time and it was then that the coast got into his blood. But it was only after the war when this obsession had drawn Peace back to the Skeleton Coast, that the possession of the same precious piece of knowledge forced him to undertake a perilous expedition over the most hazardous route in the world.

  Geoffrey Jenkins has used the fascinating and unique setting of the Skeleton Coast as a background to a story which combines all the tension and suspense of submarine warfare with an adventure story of such imagination and power as will hold the reader spellbound.

  Geoffrey Jenkins

  A Twist of Sand

  All the characters in this book are imaginary and have no reference to any person, living or dead

  AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

  It is a fact that the German U-boat High Command tested experimental U-boats in Cape waters in 1941. Captain Johann Linbach, master of the German freighter Hastedt, was reported by The Star, Johannesburg, on 6th September, 1957: "During 1941, when Germany was testing a new model of submarine engine, six U-boats so equipped were sent to Cape waters…. only one returned."

  The phenomenon of the "double sun" was recorded by meteorologists of the Pretoria Weather Bureau at Swakopmund, South West Africa, on 11th December, 1957.

  Adiabatic warming of winter winds is an authentic meteorological occurrence in South West Africa. The colouring of the sea by the autumn bloom on plankton is also vouched for. It occurs in conjunction with gymnodinium, a deadly poison.

  I have taken a liberty with the actual date on which the Dunedin Star was lost.

  Pretoria, 1959

  I

  Skeleton Coast

  Twenty-one and a half feet. I shivered.

  The movement shook loose from the edge of my duffle-coat a bead of icy moisture which skidded down my cheek and splashed in a tiny bright spangle on the chart under the concentrated glare of the angled light. I shivered again, half in fear, half in discomfort. The fog was condensing everywhere, and I could feel its sharp tingle in my throat. Dawn in fog is the time for any skipper's fears; dawn in fog off the Skeleton Coast is the time of nightmares.

  The drop of moisture made a north-westerly digression over the fold of the chart as Etosha rolled uneasily. Lying on it, the grey photostat page of the old log, with its neat, Victorian script, looked a little weary, despite its shiny rejuvenation at the magic wand of the camera which had plucked it from forgotten oblivion in a fusty London shipping office.

  I slid the photostat of the ship's log under the 18-degree line of the chart as if, by placing it in the exact position where she had struck, I might gain some vital information from its meagre sentences.

  "British steam vessel Clan Alpine. 13th January, 1890. Bound Tilbury to Cape Town. 5 a.m. Ship, drawing 2iœ feet, struck unknown object, thought to be a shoal, 18' 2" S, 11' 47" E. Position 326 degrees distant about 26 miles from Cape Frio. Doubtful. Making water in Number One hold but proceeding at reduced speed…" The one page of the Clan Alpine's log told all; it told enough; there was nothing later for my purposes.

  Twenty-one and a half feet! Hell, that was little enough, and here I was with fully sixteen on Etosha's marks and in the same deadly shoal water. Three hundred and twenty-six degrees — that would put the shoal about three to five miles offshore. If that was right — I shook my head unconsciously — and another droplet splashed down in the fug of the chart-room, warm by comparison with the bone-chilling air of the bridge, where only a canvas dodger stood between me and the naked elements.

  The old Clan Alpine log by itself would never do. I'd snap Etosha's back on the same shoal before I knew where I was if I stuck to it alone. The other logs — would they break open the Chinese puzzle? I reached for three other photostats lying on the top right-hand corner of the chart. The heading was uncovered. " Africa — South West Coast" said the writing. " Bahia dos Tigres to Walvis Bay." Who, I wondered vaguely, gave Tiger Bay that sonorous and Miltonic name? Some old Portuguese navigator? Christ! I thought, I'm just the same as one of those old seamen feeling his way down the same unmapped, uncharted coast ot South West Africa south of Angola, the only difference being that I'm using an echo-sounder in this year of grace 1959 instead of a lead-line, as in the year of Our Lord 1486. And mighty thankful I am to have a magnificent modern trawler under me with powerful engines instead of a caravel, unhandy and ungainly, under sail. A sailing ship would be tossing with sails slatting; at least I was holding Etosha under the barest steerage way as I probed into the unknown.

  I spread the three other photostats out fanwise on the chart below the old Clan Alpine's log. Pratt at the Admiralty had really done a good job with the old logs. It was purely for old time's sake in the Navy, I knew. that. I certainly had no right to them, under my peculiar circumstances.

  "H.M.S. Alecto, 1889," was written in Pratt's copperplate. I grinned to myself. It brought back memories of his meticulous attention to detail at Gib. during the war. " H.M.S. Mutine, 1911 " said the second photostat log heading. " H.M.S. Swallow, 1879," the third was titled. I knew their contents by heart — a five fathom shoal four miles off the coast, reported Alecto; a rock with breakers two and a half miles offshore, reported Mutine; eight fathoms, with breakers, three miles from the coast, reported Swallow. Swallow had added one bit of information. " sand and mud bottom." I grinned wryly. There was something to be said for using a lo-pound lead-line armed with a tallow bottom eighty years ago. It added one tiny little piece to the jigsaw.

  I looked at the litter on the chart. By themselves, the inaccurate old logs were enough of a riddle, but the blasted German log threw the whole picture haywire. I wished now I had never dug around in the German archives in Winkhoek and never clapped eyes on or heard the name of the German warship Hyane. But I had, and here lay the salt-marked log just to prove that all my theories about the location of the shoal were wrong. I didn't have to consult it as it, too, lay on the chart…" Breakers during a moderate SSW gale and a high sea, in a position 282 degrees, distant 2 miles from high pointed hill." Two miles! I couldn't credit it. At that distance from the shore the Kaiser's old battle-wagon would have been a dead duck on the iron-hard sand of the shoal. And probably a rock or two through her armour-plating as well. The bearing, 282 degrees, was just about the craziest I had ever encountered.

  I straightened up from the chart table. I was being mocked by the ghosts of ships which had long since gone to their graves. Their tall old-fashioned stacks and yardarmed masts seemed to cluster out of the fog round the modern, sharp lines of Etosha like a cerement ushering her to doom. All dead ships — and a shoal of death right under me now.

  I shivered again. The dawn made it more morbid still. I looked down at the untidy chart table and cursed them all heartily. I needed fresh air. I cursed the bright light over the chart also: if it had been my old submarine, it would have been red, and I could have gone up on to the bridge without being blind for ten minutes before my eyes accustomed themselves to the blackness aloft.

  It was just beginning to get light. The blackness was turning only slightly grey, but it was sufficient to catch a faint glimpse of sea. Jim, the Kroo boy, was at the wheel. The fog was so thick I could not see the top of the signal halliards, and the great bead
s of moisture, like sweat urged from a man in a fever, dripped thickly from the lower spokes of the wheel. It fretted in runnels uneasily down the canvas dodger. I glanced at the compass.

  "Steer five-oh," I ordered, making a minute correction to the north-east.

  Etosha was doing perhaps three knots: I must solve the riddle of the shoal this dawn, or I might not ever get the chance again. John Garland wouldn't always be asleep below as he was now and, as one of the finest navigators in the Royal Navy once, he'd smell a rat before long.

  With that extra sense that comes when danger is near, I felt rather than heard the man in the chartroom.

  I clattered down the companionway.

  John stood examining the photostats and my own chart, with its countless annotations and figures.

  We stood looking at one another across the baleful light of the angled lamp. He ran his eyes slowly over the photostats. His voice was hard, but laced with professional admiration when he spoke after a long scrutiny.

  "That's a very fine chart, Geoffrey," he said. "For a coast which has never been mapped, or never been surveyed, I'd say, in fact, it was a masterpiece." He leaned over my soundings to the south-west of the Clan Alpine shoal. "A masterpiece," he repeated slowly, staring hard at me.

  "Where are we now?" he went on in the same voice.

  I jabbed a pencil at the five and three-quarter fathom mark. "About there. For what it is worth. It could be nine, or three fathoms."

  He blenched. Off the Skeleton Coast a ship's position is every skipper's nightmare. It haunts his mind, waking and sleeping; drunk in a ditch ashore, it is his first waking question.

  I had known in my heart of hearts that the showdown with John must come. I would have preferred to have chosen the moment. An icy dawn is not the best time for presenting a case, a shaky case at that, to someone who believes in you.

  I made up my mind suddenly.

  "John," I said briefly. I drew a line on the chart with the ruler. "I intend to go inside this line. Two things may happen. You may find yourself drowning in the next ten minutes. Or you may find yourself facing a fine of £1,000 or five years in gaol."

  "Go on," he said tersely.

  "What I'm trying to say is simply this, that this ship is now off the diamond area of the Skeleton Coast. For months I have mapped and charted this coast coming home from the fishing grounds, in your watch below. I bought her for that. Trawling is purely a secondary consideration. It also is good cover. Remember how I insisted that I should take the midnight-dawn trick? " He nodded. " Well, I've faked the ordinary chart, but plotted everything in minute detail on my own special chart, the first accurate one ever of the Skeleton Coast.

  John looked puzzled. " You may have hoodwinked me, but what of it? That's not a crime. It's no crime to chart a coast."

  I laughed harshly. " It's quite clear you haven't read the Diamond Control Act. I'd say it was the finest combination of threats and penalties I've ever seen. This is the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, John. Out there — " I gestured beyond the porthole out to starboard "are the richest unworked diamond fields in the world. It would mean a fine of £1,000 or five years' gaol, or both, for you and me. That's just for being here. There are plenty of other smaller items in the Act, each costing about £500 a time and a couple of years, which you undoubtedly would find on the charge sheet also."

  "So what? " said John. " This ship is on the high seas. We're not ashore pinching anyone's diamonds."

  "Ever hear of the three-mile territorial limit?" I laughed without humour. "And if that wasn't enough, there was that judgement the other day in the Appeal Court governing the rights to prospect and mine diamonds: high water marks, low water marks, territorial limits, etcetera, etcetera."

  John sniffed: "No bloody South African Navy ship would find you anyway." He grinned for the first time.

  "You're the most cunning submariner who ever outfoxed a destroyer, and I'd say your hand has lost none of its cunning. Look at this set-up now — thick fog, a coast where only you know where you are, funk holes everywhere… "

  "Thanks for the compliments, John," I retorted. "But you're a little behind the times. Ever hear of this new border patrol the South African Air Force flies at unannounced times? Long-range Shackletons. I've seen their photographs of the mouth of the Cunene, the first ever taken from the air. They're good. They've got a coat of arms of a bloody great pelican standing on a globe rising out of the sea. I don't want to be snapped up in the beak of that pelican. There's nothing that would stop me afloat, but a Shackleton would take a photograph and — presto, an exact fix. Inside the three-mile limit. Five years inside for you and me. Irrefutable."

  "What are you doing all this for, Geoffrey?" asked John quietly.

  "I got kicked out of the Royal Navy — remember?" I said harshly. "I wouldn't say where I was — remember? Well, I've got a particular interest in this part of the world. It might have been just an overwhelming compulsion motive in the ordinary course of things, something to justify myself to myself, but since it ties up with the Skeleton Coast, it becomes highly dangerous and highly illegal at the same time. I'm charting this unknown coast rock by rock and shoal by shoal. The compulsion springs from something very deep in my sailor's make-up, and has also something to do with an old man I saw die. In some ways I'm finishing the job he set out to do. But it goes farther than that also, because I have an interest which I may tell you about some time. The immediate point at issue is, though, do you come in on this? You must make up your own mind."

  John fobbed off the question by picking up the Hyane's photostat log.

  "H'mmm" he mused, casting a glance over the others as well. "Got a problem in navigation on your hands?"

  "Here's the shoal where the old Clan Alpine is reported to have struck," I said. If John intended to sidestep the issue for the moment, so would I. " These old logs — Pratt got photostats for me at the Admiralty, though God help him if he was found out giving material like this to a cashiered submarine commander — all place this shoal differently. It is the most important shoal on the coast, because it is the southern gateway to this vital piece of water here to the north. If one could penetrate the Clan Alpine shoal on the inshore side, it would give a safe passage — although in shallow water — away from a six-knot downcoast current which 'I reckon ricochets off here, just about the sixteenth fathom mark on the south-westerly corner of the shoal. It is almost impossible to take a ship in close to the coast at all because of that bouncing current. It races southwards through this mass of shoals, rocks and broken ground between here and the Cunene mouth, but I am convinced it doesn't get too close to the shore… "

  "My God! Geoffrey," exclaimed John. "This is magnificent!" He studied the annotated chart. His eyes gleamed. He grabbed the dividers and parallel-rules. Then he snatched up the Hyane's log.

  "I've been over it all," I said coldly. "It's no go."

  He straightened up.

  "Two hundred and eighty-two degrees," he exclaimed in triumph.

  "That bearing's balderdash," I retorted.

  "I agree," he went on quickly. "But what if you forgot the first number?"

  I saw in a flash what he meant. "You mean — eighty-two degrees? Why, that would have put the Kaiser's old warship…"

  "Just here!" rapped out John. "Inside the channel. Two miles offshore. Dead right. The old Hyane found the way, all right, although she didn't know it. Some stupid clot must have altered the bearing from 82 to 282 which would have been quite reasonable since she then would have been safe at sea, even if a little close in. Come on, let's get going!"

  "Not so fast," I said. " You haven't given me your answer yet."

  "That's my answer, blast you!" he grinned. "You'll need another nautical man for company for your five years in quod…"

  He stopped short. I felt it too.

  The stern was giving a queer shaking motion.

  "She's — she's — wagging her tail," he burst out incredulously.

  The expl
osion felt like a huge empty drum dropped on Etosha's stern.

  We both covered the distance to the bridge in a couple of bounds.

  "Port fifteen," I snapped at the Kroo boy at the wheel.

  John stood by me, trying to pierce the veil, which cloyed like cerements round our eyes. A heavy bead of moisture ran off his short brown beard and the condensation on his forehead gave him the appearance of a man literally sweating over something. His anxious tone did not belie it. The drops glistened on his cap and oilskinned shoulders.

  "Where are we? " he asked.

  I gestured to starboard. "Gomatom bearing about ninety degrees, six miles."

  "What the hell's Gomatom? " he rasped.

  "It's the native name I gave a high pointed mountain ashore. The name appealed. Sounded like the surf breaking in a south-westerly gale."

  The Kroo boy's eyes were standing out of their sockets.

  "Where did the explosion come from?" I rapped out.

  The native shook his head hopelessly.

  "Port beam, do you think, John?"

  "More on the quarter," he replied quietly. "I've never heard anything like that before," he went on, craning his head slowly in a small semi-circle, like a searching radar aerial.

  "Nor have I," I said, for it was unlike any explosion, mine, torpedo or gunfire, I had ever heard. Yet it was an explosion.

  Something heavy and wet hit the deck forward of the main hatch. Near the foremast, I thought, peering into the fog.

  "Squid," said the helmsman.

  "Keep your eyes on that bloody compass," snarled John. "Cut the cackle."

  "Look-out! " I shouted through cupped hands. "What hit us forrard?"

  The voice came back faintly, as if the man had turned away as he called back. It had a curious hysterical quality, but then fog does peculiar things to sound, even a hundred feet away. Almost simultaneously came another explosion as if a giant steel drum had been dropped. It was farther away, but clearly on the port beam.