The River of Diamonds Read online

  Johaar was a jump ahead of me. 'I get the two diamonds in the magnetite?'

  'Magnetite! Was that magnetite?'

  He grinned. 'I am two years at Oranjemund, driving rotary bucket excavator. Lots of diamonds — too many, a few are meant for Johaar. But they are bladdy slim and clever at Oranjemund. They find my diamonds with an X-ray security check.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'Now I work for Koeltas. The pay is not so good, but it is more fun, eh?'

  'What do you know about magnetite?'

  'My English good,' he grinned. 'Magnetite inclusions, that is what the boss called it. Every Saturday night we get drunk and play the racehorse game with magnetite. Like a magnet. Little iron horses on the table and you pull the magnetite underneath and make the horses run. Fun!'

  Shelborne had played a deep, subtle game to destroy me. Magnetite! In other words, he had put a piece of lodestone, which is a common matrix for diamonds, into the compass housing when he went to look at the barometer. It was a brilliant piece of opportunism, using the storm and wrong sailing directions. No wonder we had fetched up on a reef. No wonder, too, that he had been thoughtful when he had asked on Mercury whether I was the key figure in determining where the Mary Zed would operate. He was planning then to eliminate the kingpin. Shelborne! — I found myself using Koeltas's own savage oaths.

  'Yes, Johaar,' I said slowly. And then, if Shelborne could afford to throw away two fair-sized diamonds in a chunk of magnetite, he knew where he could get plenty more. I recalled the Borchardt's magazine also. 'Yes, you can have the two diamonds when we go back.'

  He turned to Kim. 'Maybe two, three carat. Aaaaaah! I get so drunk!'

  'Johaar,' said Kim. 'Give me five quid. I need a woman bad.'

  Koeltas laughed. 'You mean, a bad woman, you bastard you! You see what honest money does, mister? It makes us bad.'

  I was tired and I didn't want the unpredictable little skipper changing his mind while I was asleep. The diamonds in the Knight's Cross hung round my neck were enough to make them cut my throat.

  'What are you going to do with your share of the diamonds, Koeltas?' I asked.

  He paused, as if trying to remember something. What he said was by rote from the catalogue: 'A ship, schooner-rigged, ninety feet long, twenty feet beam, ten feet of hold. Bows like a knife. Planking, American elm and teak. Sail plan…'

  I said to myself, in English. 'And a star to steer her by!'

  Kim crackled. 'Bugger me!' he said.

  Johaar grinned. 'If we hadn't been there when we pulled him off the reef, I'd say he was walking two rows of brandy tracks!'

  'Ag, this white lightning — it makes a man do anything,' added Koeltas" 'Pick up your backsides, you lot of Sperrgebiet gamats and get the sails in!'

  The Malgas lay in the long swell.

  Koeltas said, 'We go in the night, eh?'

  He probably knew his way round the bay better by night than by day anyhow. And I needed sleep during that day.

  'Good,' I replied. 'Get my clothes dry for me while I sleep, will you? Are you taking the Malgas out to sea until we make the bay?'

  Koeltas shrugged. 'We lie up today.'

  'Where?'

  'There are places. Shelborne won't find us.'

  Kim led me below to a stuffy little cubby-hole to take off my sodden, torn clothes. He gave me a doggy blanket and I threw myself down on the hard bunk. I was too exhausted to sleep. There was no doubt that Shelborne had tried to do away with me. Yet there was a curious element of reluctance, of compassion, in his attitude towards me which would not let me write him off as a cold-blooded killer. He himself had hinted that he was on the trail of something. What? Had he killed Caldwell for it. If it were a pocket of diamonds in the Glory Hole there was no need for his elaborate play about a lifetime's search. He could wash enough stones to keep him well-off for life. If it wasn't big, there was no point in trying to do away with me and thus thwart or prevent the arrival of the Mazy Zed. If Shelborne had come along with a strike, Rhennin would have welcomed him liberally; moreover, he might have swayed the court in his favour had he made any attempt to show that he had prospected as his concession entitled him to. He had, by contrast, played down his efforts. Why his concern and thanks about Mary Caldwell — was it reparation for what he had done to her father? Then there was the curious side issue of the U-boat's Knight's Cross. Who was the Rhennin who had been at Mercury in the war? I had to get back to Angras Juntas to equip myself for a new thrust into Shelborne's territory; I would find out from Felix Rhennin then. Last of all, what were the dreaded Bells of St Mary's and why did Mercury shake?

  I slept.

  It was dark when Kim's rough hand shook me awake. 'Dry togs. I hang them in the rigging all day. Damn' fine pants.'

  They didn't look so fine to me — creased, torn and stained with sea water and mud. I judged the schooner to be under full sail, the way she lay over.

  'Where are we?'

  'Off Saddle Hill. Come on deck and see.'

  The night was clear towards the land, but seawards the great black bank of nightly fog blocked the horizon. The landmark, Saddle Hill, stood out. A jagged fissure cut across its gaunt 1000-foot height, like a tooth kicked out in a street brawl. Northwards to Sudhuk ran eleven miles of threatening cliffs. We were so close inshore that I could see white water. Koeltas was picking his way through the maze of foul ground with consummate seamanship: I would not have dared to take a ship under power where he did under sail.

  Koeltas said, without greeting, 'Lots of fog off Sudhuk.'

  'You're not going in again through the southern channel — in the dark, under sail?'

  He laughed his thin, harsh laugh. 'No one sees the Malgas because I hide behind Sudhuk — just like a big spook.'

  Johaar was there with the laughs. 'And you look like a spook with your knife and your Standard Police Issue revolver.'

  Kim chipped in: 'Man, that silencer!'

  I had not noticed the heavy.38 calibre Smith and Wesson police revolver, undoubtedly stolen, in Koeltas's belt. It had attached an ancient bulbous Maxim silencer. He was naive enough to think a revolver can be silenced; in fact only a hand-loaded, locked-breech weapon can. I, too, laughed — for my own reasons.

  Koeltas joined in. 'You goddamned gamat!'

  'Ag, Gawd, we've got to have our fun,' roared Johaar.

  Koeltas drew the weapon. 'Softy, softly, if Shelborne is on the reef.'

  'I also got something to show you,' Johaar told me. He slipped below and came back carrying a NATO-type FN Rifle.

  He grinned proudly. 'This is good. Automatic.'

  'I know,' I answered grimly, taking it from him. 'Where did you steal this?'

  He was amused. 'My brother is a fisherman at Walvis Bay… Soldiers are there… you know…'

  'I don't. What else have you hidden away below?'

  'Not much.' They grinned at my concern. 'You like a pistol for tonight or a knife — special knife?'

  'A knife.'

  Special it was — a long sealing-knife, tapered and razor-sharp.

  Two hours later we were off Sudhuk, very close in. Koeltas seemed unafraid of the swell bursting heavily against the towering cliff. The water was deep and we had not yet got the protection of Dolphin Head, Sudhuk's northern extremity. The fog was closing but not as quickly as Koeltas would have liked. He stood listening, tense, head forward. I knew that if the Bells he dreaded were sounding it would be hopeless to expect him to enter the bay and inspect the wreck.

  Conversation had fallen away to whispers — out of deference, it seemed, to Mercury.

  'What about a leadsman?' I asked Koeltas anxiously. The shoreline was death: he seemed overconfident.

  'Nine fathoms for two cables out to sea here,' he replied curtly.

  I saw the light then.

  It was burning at the seaward side of the cliff near where I had calibrated the.Hydrodist. That seemed a long time ago, somehow. I took Koeltas's arm and gestured silently.

  'Shelborne!' he mutter
ed under his breath. 'Shelborne — he clears out from Mercury when he makes the Bells so that they don't kill him along with us. Now he camps on Sudhuk, waiting.'

  Kim and Johaar stared balefully at the flickering light.

  Kim said under his breath, 'He'll see us and start the Bells.'.

  Koeltas's nerves were iron. Take the ship in — close! I want to feel the breakers.'

  Johaar slid forward and ropes ran silently through their well-greased sheaves. The schooner creaked as she turned shorewards. I caught my breath, she drove in so far. The water was already white before she resumed her previous course.

  Kim doused the binnacle light. He steered by the soles of his feet and the wind on his neck. 'Fog thick behind Sudhuk,' he consoled me. 'Here, the wind blows it away.'

  Furtively, noiselessly, every nerve on edge, we inched past Dolphin Head under Shelborne's fire. To see us, he would have had to lean right over the edge. Then Kim put the helm down until we were moving almost due east, following the cliffs beyond the point. The fog thickened, as he had predicted, and we turned north again, presumably into the channel. It was not the moisture of fog I felt when my hand clenched the mizzen shrouds — it was the sweat of cold fear and of colder anger and delayed shock at Shelborne's callous murder of the fifteen men of my crew with whom I had worked and lived. At that moment, I could not think of anything else.

  We stole across the bay.

  A lighter patch may have been the loom of Mercury. We stole past it, making for a point known only to Koeltas's instinct. As stealthily, Koeltas brought the Malgas to anchor off the Hottentots' Reef — I do not know how he found it. Then the sails were off her, the anchor down, and she hung shrouded in the fog, as invisible as her namesake, the mad goose, over a shoal of pilchards.

  Johaar and Kim were first at the wrecked bridge of the Praying Mantis after a quick pull in the dinghy from the Malgas.

  'Look!' exclaimed Johaar, grinning and shining his torch cautiously. 'Shelborne not come.'

  The diamonds gleamed balefully in their black matrix in the compass housing.

  Kim sighed. 'Plenty of women now. Bad women.'

  Johaar held the lodestone. 'This plays racehorse games with the compass.' The needles followed it as he moved it around. 'See?'

  Koeltas nodded at the diamonds. 'It cost him plenty, that little trick.'

  'It still is going to cost him plenty — plenty,' I replied savagely. 'Have you been inside the Glory Hole?'

  'It is a bastard,' Koeltas summed up. 'No. Much better caves on the shore.' That is what Shelborne had said, too. The fleas in them make you scratch like a mongrel. But good hiding-places.'

  He didn't elaborate.

  'Let's take a look at the rest,' I said. I did not care for the business of stripping my own ship for the benefit of these professional wreckers, but that was the bargain. Koeltas had already prised off some of the bridge instruments with a jemmy. The afterhold was a shambles, but three Scuba suits and their air bottles were intact. There was no sign of the Hydrodist. My cabin was half-flooded, but I managed to extract a shirt or two and another pair of trousers. My drawing instruments and parchment chart blanks were under six feet of water. Johaar unearthed a case of whisky and some clothes. We could not penetrate the flooded engine-room, but a submerged arm in a white overall like Sven used to wear told its own tale.

  As I stood staring at it, Koeltas said, 'If I don't kill Shelborne, then you do, eh?'

  I wondered whether it was as simple as that. Then Koeltas froze. Like the tail-end of a muttered curse, the strange reverberation came across the water from Mercury, not loud as before, but soft, sinister. Maybe it was the sight of the dead arm or the dead ship, or maybe I, too, had become infected by fear of the Bells, but I was in the dinghy as soon as the others. We set all sail for Angras Juntas.

  Angras Juntas — the bay of the meeting of the captains! After a day's beat down the Sperrgebiet from Mercury, the dune-backed bay named by the first Portuguese navigators was in sight. Malgas tacked between two guano islands, one of which, Kim pointed out with relish, was called Black Sophie Rock in honour of a dead-and-gone Cape Town whore. The sea was dead calm.

  'Jesus!' Koeltas was not exclaiming at the scenery, — he was seeing the Mazy Zed for the first time. The floating diamond mine — cumbersome, unshiplike, like a Showboat stage prop of a Mississippi sidepaddler — lay in a welter of foam from her own pumps. Forrad — or aft, it was hard to tell which — a massive derrick cradled what looked like a tanker's oiling hose. This was to link the ship to the sea-bed like an umbilical cord. Around it, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, clustered a collection of steel masts, crudely red-leaded platforms and thick pipes; crowning all was a curious object like a hopper bin. This conglomeration took up half the vessel's length; flat-like living quarters, broken by high ventilators, occupied the rest. Along the superstructure was painted, in garish six-foot letters, Mazy Zed.

  The thud of powerful pumps and the splash of water came across the bay. The Mazy Zed looked like an elephant giving itself a shower-bath with its trunk.

  Koeltas ran his eye over the Malgas's slim lines. It was not so much pride as reassurance. 'In a wind — look, six anchor cables out!'

  'She'll need them all in a blow,' I said. 'The water is supposed to break right over her — that's the theory, anyway.'

  Kim said, 'She sucks up the diamonds just like a bloody calf sucking milk!'

  'You gamat, always sucking on the hind tit!' jeered Johaar.

  It had been a long, tough beat from Mercury to Angras Juntas, hard inshore, dodging blinders and sandbars as Koeltas conned the Malgas from the bowsprit, which he had straddled like some strange figurehead in his yellow oilskin. His way of navigating had enabled me to see every feature of the Sperrgebiet: the desert wilderness, yellow-grey as smoke seen through a periscope; the iron-bound coast, indented, vicious; the glaring white mirror of a saltpan; a valley where the sand moved uncannily northwards in a broad, slow stream, almost as if of its own will. Koeltas had sailed almost under a great 170-foot high natural arch of rock known as Bogenfels, a gigantic crocodile's mouth held agape by an equally gigantic rock resembling a half-open flick-knife. Next to it was an angled patch of smooth white sand, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter broad. This crescent-shaped storm beach helped to create the legend of sudden, untold riches in South-west Africa; from it came diamonds worth a royal exchequer in a couple of months.

  Later, my heart had been in my mouth when Koeltas took the Malgas among an awe-inspiring nightmare of rocks known as Die Doodenstadt — The Town of the Dead. Doodenstadt has never been inhabited; there are houses, streets and churches, but they are solid inside, solid rock; they have been fashioned as if by humans by a curious, macabre trick of the south-west wind. Among the dead rocks lay a dead ship, the British City of Baroda, a U-boat torpedo in her side.

  'Polisie!'

  Koeltas's astonishment turned to a snarl. He pointed. Astern, from behind a cluster of broken reefs, raced two motor-boats. On reaching open water, they rose up on what looked like water-skis on each side of the hull, and, keel clear of the sea, they arrowed forward. Hydrofoils! They broke company and made to circle the schooner, like two lions spreading for the kill

  'We've got nothing to worry about,' I assured Koeltas. Maybe Duvenhage had sea patrols as well as his smart security land force at Oranjemund. 'Rhennin will vouch for me.'

  Koeltas replied laconically. 'For you, yes, but not for me, or this ship.'

  The schooner had to tack to clear Black Sophie Rock. Our innocuous change of course brought instant reaction. Like one, the two craft rose higher in the water; throttles were rammed wide open. One on either beam, they screamed past the Malgas.

  'Look!' I exclaimed.

  Tarpaulins were whipped off forward mountings. Heavy quick-firing guns followed us round. I realized then that they were not police craft but Rhennin's watchdogs, the fast patrol boats he had spoken of in court. My eye went to the top of Sinclair Island and th
ere was the complementary half of the Mazy Zed's defence — a radar post. What looked like an enlarged version of the Hydrodist's cathode ray dish was tracking the schooner.

  One of the boats throttled back and eased alongside the Malgas. The loudhailer snapped on. The voice was very English.

  'Who are you and what do you want?'

  I took Koeltas's hand megaphone. 'Tregard here. John Tregard. Tell Rhennin, the Praying Mantis, repeat Praying Mantis, has been lost off Mercury Island. No survivors except myself. This schooner is under my charter. She's okay.'

  'She'd better be,' the voice replied. 'Keep away until I have presented your credentials. Especially, keep clear of the Mazy Zed. Today's the day,'

  'You look bloody warlike.' I called.

  'Have to be, old boy.' It was pure Royal Navy. 'Guarding the Bogenfels Approaches and all that, don't you know. You're the surveyor chappie, aren't you?'

  'Was,' I corrected.

  'Is the old whaler sunk?'

  'That's what I said. Most of the equipment too.' I heard his whistle of surprise. 'You should have taken us along to keep your pants dry. Dirty work at the crossroads?'

  'Plenty,' I replied grimly. 'It's a long story — later.'

  'Good-oh! Anything to relieve the monotony, I say. Thanks for making our day with tales of pirates and deep water. Your clapped-out sailer is the first to try and run my blockade.'

  'Others may.'

  The voice became more cheerful. 'Greetings then to the bearer of joyful tidings. Now get those sails stowed, or what ever you do aboard the ancient mariner.'

  We dropped anchor half a mile north of the low island. Angras Juntas was a replica of what we had seen all day: a rock-bound coast flanked by steep cliffs, inland, notched ridges and stark chains of naked hills, running north-south, and backing on to a drear, sand-shot infinitude of awe-inspiring desolation.

  Inside ten minutes the patrol boat was back. 'Rhennin wants you aboard the Mazy Zed right away,' called the Royal Navy voice.

  The sleek craft edged close. Hands grabbed me as I landed on the immaculate deck. The Royal Navy man eyed me quizzically. My trousers were shrunk to half-calf length and most of my shirt buttons were missing. My last shave had been aboard the Praying Mantis.