The Diamond Hunters

by Wilbur Smith

  Wynberg Hill. She stood up.

  “Darling.” She crossed to him. “I’m going home now. I want to pack his clothes and get rid of them. I want to wipe out every memory of him. From now on it’s you and I together.” She stretched up to kiss him, but Benedict turned his face away.

  “Oh! So you’re going, are you?” His expression was petulant, his lips pouting spitefully.

  “We’re both tired, darling. Let us both rest a while - and I’ll come back later this evening.”

  “So now you’re giving the orders, are you?” He laughed nastily.

  “Darling-“

  “And cut out all the darlings. We pulled a deal and it didn’t work out. You were meant to be a club to break his skull - and do you know something? He didn’t give a damn.

  I was watching him, he was pleased - yes! He was bloody well delighted to get rid of you.”

  “Benedict,” She stepped back.

  “Listen.” He stepped close to her, and pushed his face towards hers. “If you’re so bloody anxious to go, why don’t you bloody well go - and keep going. If he doesn’t want you then I sure as hell don’t want you either.”

  “Benedict,” she whispered. The colour faded from her face, leaving it washed white as beach sand. She stared at him in horror, as her dreams began to fall into ruins around her. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I don’t? Is that so?” He threw back his head and laughed again. “Listen, you got some nice diamonds and a mink coat.

  You got a big house in Bishopscourt - now, that’s pretty good pay for a whore.”

  “Benedict-” She gasped at the insult, but he wasn’t listening.

  “I proved I could have you, didn’t I?” I proved I could take you away from him - and that’s what it was all about. Now, why don’t you go on home like a good girl.”

  “The machine. I know about that thing in

  Kingfisher.” It was a mistake. Until then she still had a chance. His face changed shape and the blood flooded into it. His voice when he spoke was unsteady, thick with rage for his lips seemed to have swollen.

  “Try it,” he whispered back at her. “Go on, try it. They’ll give you fifteen years in a woman’s prison, my beauty. And think about this also-” He showed her his hand, holding it like a blade before her eyes.

  “I’ll kill you. I swear before God, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.

  You know I’ll do it you know enough about me now.” She backed away from him, and he followed her still holding his hand at her throat.

  “You’ve been paid. Now get out.” A few seconds longer she stood before him, and he was not too far gone in rage to see the fear in her eyes mingle with something else that made her eyes slit and drew her lips back to show the little white teeth.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go.” And she walked from the room, stepping daintily, the long yellow hair swinging against her shoulders.

  Ruby drove slowly for her vision was blurred with her tears. Twice other drivers hooted at her but she kept both hands clenched on the wheel and stared ahead, following the De Wool Drive around the lower slopes of the mountain. Before she reached the University she swung off the road and drove up through the pine forests until she reached the car park behind the Cecil Rhodes Memorial. She left the car and walked down on to the wide paved terrace below the Greek columns and stone steps where the mounted statue eternally searched the horizon with one hand lifted to shade his eyes.

  She went to the parapet and looked across to the far blue mountains of the Helderherg. She hugged herself about the shoulders for the wind through her silk summer dress was as cold as her misery.

  Now the tears broke over her lids and slid down her cheeks to fall unheeded on to the silken front of her dress.

  They were tears of self-pity, but also the tears of an anger as searing cold as dry ice.

  “The swine she whispered through lips that trembled.

  Near her two young students sitting on the parapet, kicking their legs over the drop beneath them and hugging each other in the abandon of first love, turned to glance at her.

  The boy whispered to the girl, and she giggled in unthinking cruelty - but looked away as Ruby directed a long venomous glare at her. Then in embarrassment the couple scrambled off the parapet and moved away, leaving her alone.

  Never for one moment did she consider standing aside.

  Benedict’s threats meant nothing - her only concern was to take the action which would injure him most severely. The consequences to herself were not part of her calculations.

  She wanted only to select the swiftest and most terrible vehicle of retribution. As the dark clouds that fogged her reason slowly cleared, the means came to her readily.

  Johnny was staying at the Tulbagh Hotel.

  She turned and ran back to her car, the long yellow W banner of her hair floating behind her like the pennant at the tip of a cavalry lance. She drove fast until she hit the downtown rush-hour crowds.

  The tears dried on her face as she crawled, fuming with impatience, along the slow river of traffic.

  It was after five when she parked in a loading zone outside the entrance to the Tulbagh and ran into the lobby.

  “What room is Mr. Lance in?” she demanded of the girl at the desk.

  “Mr. Lance checked out an hour ago.” Curiously the girl examined

  Ruby’s ruined make-up.

  “Did he say where he was going?” Ruby snapped at her, feeling the sickening slide of disappointment within her.

  “No, Madam.” The girl shook her head. “But he was in a hurry.”

  “Damn! Damn!” Ruby swore bitterly. She turned from the desk undecided where next to look. Perhaps Johnny had gone back to the office.

  Across the lobby the elevator doors slid open and Tracey Hartford stepped out. Even in her impatience Ruby recognized in the glow that seemed to emanate from her that Tracey was a girl freshly risen from the bed of the man she loved. There was not a vestige of doubt in

  Ruby’s mind as to the identity of that man.

  The shock of it paralysed her for a moment. Then she felt the urge to cross the floor and claw that smug smile from Tracey’s face.

  She fought it down, and instead she stepped into her path as Tracey started for the glass outer doors.

  “Where is Johnny?” she demanded, and Tracey came up short. Her little gasp of guilt confirmed Ruby’s suspicion.

  “Where is he, damn you!” Ruby’s voice was pitched low but brittle with emotion.

  “He’s not here.” Tracey recovered herself, quickly masking her expression.

  “Where has he gone? I must see him.”

  “He’s flown up to Cartridge

  Bay.”

  “When did he leave? It’s important - terribly important.”

  “An hour ago. He’ll be airborne already.”

  “Can you get a message to him?”

  In her impatience Ruby caught Tracey’s wrist, holding her in a grip that marked the skin.

  “I can radio him,-” Tracey pulled her hand free.

  “No,” Ruby cut in quickly. She could not have her message shouted across the ether for all to hear. “Can you follow him - charter plane?” Tracey shook her head. “They won’t fly to an unscheduled airfield after dark.”

  “Then you must follow him - by car. You must drive up there.”

  “Why?” Tracey stared at her, puzzled by this strange insistence, noticing the dried tears and the wild look in Ruby’s eyes.

  “It’s an eight-hour drive.”

  “I’ll tell you. Can we use Johnny’s room?”

  Tracey hesitated, remembering the unmade bed. Then the hotel manager came into the lobby and Tracey turned to him with relief. The Beechcraft bucked suddenly and dropped a wing, instinctively Johnny corrected the lunge with stick Al and rudder then glanced quickly at his instrument panel for an explanation. There was none to be found there, so he looked over the wing and for the first time noticed the dust on the great plain
s below him; it was moving low against the earth in long streamers like mist, and the setting sun turned it to motive and old gold. With a prickle of alarm he scanned the horizon ahead, and saw it coming down from the north like a great moving range of blue mountains.

  Even as he watched it, it rolled across the low sun, turning it into a sullen red orb. The light in the cockpit changed to a weird glow as though the door to a furnace had been thrown open.

  Again the Beechcraft crabbed awkwardly as another gust of high wind hit her, and at the same moment the radio crackled and came alive.

  “Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker this is Alexandra Bay Control, come in please.” The voice of the controller was almost unintelligible with storm static. Johnny reached for the transmit switch of the radio, then stopped his hand. He thought quickly. He could guess they were trying to reach him to cancel his flight approval. That was a big northern boiling down out of the desert. They would abort his flight, and divert him out of the path of the storm.

  He checked his wrist watch. Twenty minutes” flying time to

  Cartridge Bay. No - he was flying full into the eye of the wind, say twenty-five or thirty minutes. Quickly he searched the coast on his port side and saw the long white lines of surf stretched ahead into the thickening purple gloom. The coast was still clear, it might stay that way for another thirty minutes.

  “Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker this is Alexandra Bay. I say again - come in. Come in. Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker.” The agitation in the controller’s voice came through over the static.

  There was a fair chance of getting in to Cartridge Bay, racing the storm and winning. He could edge out to the westward and come in from the sea, pick up Kingfisher’s riding lights as a beacon and sneak in under the leading edge of the dust clouds. If he missed he could turn and run with the wind for home. The radio was hissing and crackling angrily now, the controller’s voice sometimes lost in the interference, sometimes coming through strongly.

  Cancelled. I say again: your flight approval is cancelled. Do you read me, Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker.

  Come in, please. - Beaufort force seven. - visibility in the storm area - I say again, there is nil visibility. ” The norther would roar for days now and with it would blow away his last chance of working the gap at Thunderbolt and Suicide.

  Johnny switched off the radio, cut off contact with Control and immediately it was strangely quiet in the cockpit. He settled himself down into the bucket seat, and eased open the throttles, watching the needles creep up around the dials of the rev counters.

  Now he was down to an altitude of three hundred feet and the

  Beechcraft was leaping about like a hooked marlin.

  He was flying her on instruments for outside the cockpit it was completely dark. He could not see his own wingtips, but above him the stars still showed. He was riding the vanguard of the storm, and the dust clouds were ahead, racing to meet him and blanket the flare path at Cartridge Bay.

  Every few seconds he darted a quick glance ahead, hoping to pick up the lights, then his eyes flew back to the instrument panel.

  “Now,” he thought grimly. “It should be now. I should be over the grounds. Thirty seconds more and I’ll know I’ve missed her.” He looked up again, and there was Kingfisher dead ahead.

  All her lights were ablaze, a burning beacon of hope in the darkness. She appeared to be riding easily, for the wind had not yet had time to thrash the sea into a frenzy.

  He flashed over her, seeming to graze her superstructure in passing, and now he was searching anxiously for the glow of the flare path on the land beyond.

  It came up as a path of lesser darkness in the absolute blackness of the night. He steadied on course towards it, watching it change to a long double line of oil-burning flares that smoked and fluttered in the wind.

  He flew her in fast, high above the stall and the shock of touchdown threatened to tear the undercarriage off her.

  Then he was jolting and trundling down the earthen runway with the flares flashing past his wingtips.

  “Lance, old man,” he murmured thankfully, “that was a very shaky do!”

  The wind hum against the body of the car, and the snarl of rubber on tarmac as the Mercedes snaked through the bends of the twisting mountain road were sounds to match the racing of Tracey’s blood and the hammer of her heart.

  She drove with an inspired abandon, watching the bends leap out at her out of the darkness, sensing the massive crags and cliffs that hung over the road and blotted out half the night sky.

  The silver sheet of Clanwilliam Lake reflected the stars, and then was left behind. Down from the mountains she went an dover the

  Olifants River to make a brief fuel stop at Vanrynsdorp and scan the road map anxiously in the light of the gasoline pumps. She read with a sinking feeling the mileage figures printed along the little red ribbon of the road, and knew that for her each mile would be multiplied by her own urgency.

  Then once more behind the wheel she faced the vast emptiness of

  Namaqualand - and sent the Mercedes flying across it.

  There is some type of machine, I don’t know how it works, but it filters out the diamonds. Benedict had it installed at Las Palmas-“

  The headlights were puny little white shafts, and the road a long blue smear that went on endlessly. Tracey lit a cigarette with one hand, hearing Ruby’s voice again in her ears.

  “ - There is one diamond amongst them. He called it

  “The Big

  Blue”. Benedict says it’s worth a million,-” Tracey was not sure she believed it. It was the enormity of the treachery and deceit that she could not accept.

  “- The Italian, the Captain, be careful of him. He works for

  Benedict. The other one also - Hugo - they are all in it.

  Warn Johnny.” Benedict! Weak, spoiled Benedict, the playboy, the spendthrift. Could he have planned and carried this through?

  A gust of wind hit the car from the side, taking her unawares, pushing the Mercedes off the tar on to the gravel.

  Tracey fought to hold the skid. Dust and gravel roared out in a cloud from under the wheels. Then she was back on the road, hurtling northwards.

  “Warn Johnny! Warn Johnny!” Benedict van der Byl sat in his father’s chair, in his father’s house, and he was alone. His loneliness ate deep into the fibres of his whole being. Before him on the stinkwood desk stood a crystal glass and a decanter.

  The brandy was no comfort, its warmth in his throat and belly seemed only to accentuate the icy cold of his loneliness. His fantasy showed him as a hollow man. He thought of himself as a husk, filled only with the cold of melancholia.

  He looked about the room with its dark panelled woodwork and he smelled the musty dead smell. He wondered how many times his father had sat in this chair alone and lonely. Lonely and afraid as the cancer ate him alive.

  He stood up and moved listlessly about the room, touching the furniture as if he were trying to communicate with the man who had lived and died here. He moved across and stood in front of the curtained windows. The rug was new. It replaced the other that they had been unable to clean.

  “The Old Man had the right idea.” He spoke aloud, his voice sounding strange in his own ears.

  Then on an impulse he crossed quickly to the cupboard that flanked the massive stone fireplace, and tried the door.

  It was locked.

  Without passion he stood back and kicked in the panel.

  The wood splintered and he kicked again, smashing the door from its hinges.

  The oblong leather case was on the top shelf, and he took it down and carried it to the desk. He sprang the catches and laid back the lid.

  He lifted out the blue metalled double barrels of the Purdy Royal, and the gun oil was greasy on his hands.

  “Jacobus Isaac van der Byu He read aloud the name in gold inlay set into the steel among the engraved pheasants and gundogs.

  He smiled then.

  “The old devil.” He sh
ook his head smiling as though at some private joke, and began slowly to assemble the shotgun. He weighed it in his hands, feeling the sweet pure balance of the weapon.

  “The old bastard made his own decisions.” And still smiling he carried the gun across to the new carpet. He placed it butt down between his feet with the barrels pointed at the ceiling and leaning slowly forward he opened his mouth and placed the muzzles between his lips, then reaching farther down he placed a thumb on each trigger and pushed them simultaneously.

  Click! Click!

  The firing pins fell on the empty chambers, and Benedict straightened up and wiped the taste of gun oil from his lips.

  He grinned again.

  “That’s the way he did it. Both barrels in the back of the throat. What a cure for tonsilitis!” he chuckled, and glanced across at the shattered cupboard door. The square packets of cartridges were on the second shelf.

  He tucked the gun under his arm and went to the cupboard again, moving more purposefully now. He snatched down a packet of SSG and broke it open. Suddenly his hands were shaking and the fat red cartridges spilled on to the floor. He stooped and picked up two of them.

  With mounting excitement and dread he broke open the shotgun and slipped the cartridges into the blank eyes of the breeches. They slid home against the seating with a solid double thunk, and he hurried back to the spot in front of the window.

  His eyes were bright and his breathing quick as he pushed the safety catch on to “Fire” and placed the butt between his feet once more.

  He took the muzzles in his mouth again, in an obscene Soul kiss and reached down for the triggers. They were cold and oily. He caressed them lightly, feeling the fine grooving in the curves Of metal, thrilling to the touch and feel of them as he had never thrilled to the feel of a woman’s body.

  Then abruptly he stood up again. He was gasping for breath.

  Unsteadily he carried the weapon back to the desk and laid it on the dark polished wood.

  As he poured brandy into the crystal glass his eyes were fastened with perverse fascination on the beautiful glistening weapon.

  The steam had fogged the mirrored walls of the bathroom, so her image was dewed and misty. Ruby Lance dried herself slowly with one of the thick fluffy towels. She was in no hurry; she wanted Tracey to have a start of at least four hours on her journey to Cartridge Bay.