The Diamond Hunters

by Wilbur Smith

  “Hey, Johnny. Sorry, Johnny,” Sergio was mumbling.

  “First time I put ship on bank - ever! Idiot! So close - then wop! Sorry, hey, Johnny.” The motor launch left the jetty and came down the channel towards the sand bank on which Kingfisher lay stranded. The launch was crowded, and the whine of the outboard engine raised a storm of water fowl into a whirlwind of frightened wings.

  As it drew closer Johnny recognized some of the occupants. Mike

  Shapiro and with him Robin Sutherland, but there were also two uniformed policemen and another person in civilian clothes who stood up in the launch as it came within hail and cupped his hands about his mouth.

  “I am a police officer. I have a warrant for the arrest of

  Benedict-” Mike Shapiro touched the man’s arm, and spoke softly to him.

  The officer hesitated and glanced up at Johnny again, before nodding agreement and settling back on to his seat.

  “Robin, get up here as quick as you can,“Johnny shouted down at the launch, and when Robin came over the side Johnny hustled him towards the bridge, but Mike Shapiro hurried after them.

  “Johnny, I must talk to you.”

  “It can wait.”

  “No, it can’t.” Mike

  Shapiro turned to Tracey. “Won’t you take care of the doctor, please? I must speak to Johnny before the police do.” Mike led Johnny down the deck and offered him a cigarette, while the three policemen hovered at a discreet distance.

  “Johnny, I have some dreadful news. I want to break it to you myself.” Johnny visibly braced himself. “Yes?”

  “It’s about Ruby,” Johnny made his statement to the police inspector in Kingfisher’s guest cabin. It took two hours for him to relate the full story, and during that time one of the uniformed policemen discovered the crew locked in the paint store below decks. They were half poisoned with paint fumes but able to make their statements to the police.

  while he finished his interrogation of Johnny.

  The inspector kept them waiting in the next-door cabin

  “Two more questions for now, Mr. Lance. In your opinion was the collision between the two ships accidental or deliberate?” Johnny looked into the steel-grey eyes and lied for the first time.

  “It was unavoidable.” The inspector nodded and made a note on his pad.

  “Last question. The survivors from the trawler, what were their chances?”

  “In that storm they had none. There was no hope of effecting a rescue with Kingfisher almost disabled, and considering the condition of the surf in the passage between the islands.”

  “I understand.” The inspector nodded. “Thank you Mr. Lance. That is all for the present.”

  Johnny left the cabin and went quickly to the upper deck. Tracey and

  Robin were still working over Sergio’s bunk, but Robin looked up and came immediately to Johnny as he stood in the doorway.

  “How is he, Robin?”

  “He hasn’t a chance,“Robin replied, keeping his voice low.

  “One lung has collapsed, and there appear to be perforations of the bowel and intestine. I suspect a massive peritonitis. I can’t move him without risking a secondary haemorrhage.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  Robin shook his head. “He’s going fast. God knows how he has lasted this long.” Johnny moved across to the bunk and placed his arm about

  Tracey’s shoulders. She moved closer to him and they stood looking down at Sergio.

  His eyes were closed, and a dark pelt of new beard covered the lower part of his face. His breathing sawed and hissed loudly in the quiet cabin, and the fever lit bright spots of colour in his cheeks.

  “You magnificent old rogue.” Johnny spoke softly, and Sergio’s eyes blinked open.

  Quickly Johnny stooped to him.

  “Sergio. Your crew - your boys are safe.” Sergio smiled. He closed those dark gazelle eyes, then opened them again and whispered painfully, “Johnny, you give me job when I come out of prison?”

  “They won’t have you in prison - you’d lower the tone of the place.” Sergio tried to laugh. He managed one strangled chuckle, then he came up on his elbows in the bunk with his eyes bulging, his mouth gaping for breath. He coughed once, a harsh tearing Sound, and the blood burst from his lips in thick black clots and a bright red spray of droplets.

  He fell back on the pillows, and was dead before Robin reached his side.

  Tracey was asleep in the bedroom next door. Robin had sedated her heavily enough to keep her that way for the next twelve hours.

  Johnny lay naked on the narrow bunk in the second guest room of the Cartridge Bay depot, and when he switched on the beside lamp his wrist watch showed the time as 2.46 in the morning.

  He looked down at his own body. The bruises were dark purple and hot angry red across his ribs and flanks from where the mud had battered him against rough steel plating.

  He wished now that he had accepted the sleeping pills Robin had offered him, for the ache of his body and the whirl of his thoughts had kept him from sleep all that night.

  His mind was trapped on a nightmare roundabout, revolving endlessly the two deaths which Benedict van der Byl must answer for in the dark places to which he had surely gone.

  Ruby and Sergio. Ruby and Sergio. One he had seen die, the other he could imagine in all its gruesome detail.

  Johnny sat up and lit a cigarette, seeing a istraction from the tortured images with which his overexcited brain bombarded him.

  He tried to concentrate on reviewing the practical steps that would be necessary to clear up the aftermath of these last disastrous days.

  He had spoken that evening by radio to Larsen, and received from him a promise of complete financial support during the time it would take to clear the mud from Kingfisher’s hull and recover the diamonds in the conveyor tunnel, and to tide over the period of salvage and repair before the dredger was ready to begin once more harvesting the rich fields of Thunderbolt and Suicide.

  A salvage team would fly in tomorrow to begin the work on

  Kingfisher. He had cabled IBM requesting engineers to check out the computer for water damage.

  Six weeks, Johnny estimated, before Kingfisher was ready for sea.

  Then his unruly imagination leapt suddenly ahead to Ruby’s funeral. It was set for Tuesday next week. Johnny rolled restlessly on his bunk, trying to shut his mind against the thoughts that assaulted it - but they crowded forward in a dark host.

  Ruby, Benedict, Sergio, the big blue diamond.

  He sat up again, stubbed out his cigarette and reached across to switch out the bedside lamp.

  He froze like that, as a new thought pressed in on him.

  He heard Sergio’s voice in his memory.

  “Such a diamond as you will never see again.” Now he felt the idea come ghosting along his spine so that the hair at the nape of his neck and on his forearms prickled with excitement.

  “The Red Gods!” he exclaimed, almost shouting the name. And again

  Sergio’s voice spoke.

  “In his coat. He put it in his coat pocket.” Jo swung his legs off the bunk, and reached for his clothes. He felt the pounding of his heart beneath his fingers as he buttoned his shirt. He pulled on slacks and sweater, tied the laces of his shoes and snatched up a sheepskin jacket as he ran from the room.

  He was shrugging on the jacket as he entered the deserted radio room and switched on the lights. He crossed quickly to the chart table and pored over it.

  He found the name on the map, and repeated it aloud.

  “The Red Gods.” North of Cartridge Bay the coast ran straight and featureless for thirty miles, then abruptly the line of it was broken by the out-thrust of red rock, poking into the sea like an accuser’s finger.

  Johnny knew it well. It was his job to find and examine any such natural feature that might act as a barrier to the prevailing inshore currents. At such a place diamonds and other seaborne objects would be thrown ashore.

 
He remembered the red rock cliffs carved by wind and sea into the grotesque natural statues which gave the place its name, but more important he remembered the litter of ocean debris on the beaches beneath the cliff. Driftwood, waterlogged planking, empty bottles, plastic containers, scraps of nylon fishing-net and corks - all of it cast overboard and carried up by the current to be deposited on this promontory.

  He ran his finger down the chart and held it on the dots of

  Thunderbolt and Suicide. He read the laconic notation over the tiny arrows that flew from the islands towards the stark outline of the Red

  Gods.

  “Current sets South South-West. 5 knots.” Above the chart table the depot keys hung on their little cuphooks, each labelled and numbered.

  Johnny selected the two of them marked “GArage” and LAND-ROVER”.

  The moon was full and high. The night was still and without a trace of wind. Johnny swung the double doors of the garage open and switched on the parking lights of the Land-Rover. By their glow he checked out the vehicle; petrol tank full, the spare five-gallon cans in their brackets full, the can of drinking-water full. He dipped his finger into the neck of the water container and tasted it. It was clean and sweet. He lifted the passenger seat and checked the compartment beneath it. Jack and tyre spanner, first aid kit, flashlight, signal rockets and smoke flares, water bottle, canvas ground sheet, two cans of survival rations, towrope, tool kit, knapsack, knife and compass. The Land-Rover was equipped to meet any of the emergencies of desert travel.

  Johnny climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.

  He drove quietly and slowly past the depot buildings, not wanting to awaken those sleeping inside, but when he hit the firm sand at the edge of the lagoon he switched on the headlights and gunned the engine.

  He cut across the sand dunes at the entrance to the bay, and swung northwards on to the beach. The headlights threw solid white beams into the sea mist, and startled seabirds rose on flapping ghost wings before the rush of the Land-Rover.

  The tide was out and the exposed beach was hard and shiny wet, smooth as a tarmac road. He drove fast, and the white beach crabs were blinded by the headlights and crunched crisply beneath the tyres.

  The dawn came early, silhouetting the mystic shapes of the dunes against the red sky.

  Once he startled a strand wolf, one of the brown hyenas which scavenged this bleak littoral. It galloped, hunchshouldered, in hideous panic for the safety of the dunes.

  Even in his urgency Johnny felt a stir of revulsion for the loathsome creature.

  The cold damp rush of the wind into his face refreshed Johnny. It cooled the gritty feeling of his eyes, and eased the throb of sleeplessness in his temples.

  The sun burst over the horizon, and lit the Red Gods five miles ahead with all the drama of stage lighting. They glowed golden red in the dawn, a procession of huge halfhuman shapes that marched into the sea.

  As Johnny drove towards them the light and shadow played over the cliffs and he saw a hundred-foot tall figure of Neptune stooping to dip his flowing red beard into the sea, while a monstrous hunchback with the head of a wolf pranced beside him. Ranks of Vestal Virgins in long robes of red rock jostled with the throng of weird and fantastic shapes. It was eerie and disquieting. Johnny curbed his fancy and turned his attention to the beaches at the foot of the cliffs.

  What he saw started his skin tingling again, and he pressed the accelerator flat against the floorboards, racing across the wet sand to where a white cloud of seabirds circled and dived and hopped about something that lay at the water’s edge.

  As he drove towards them a gull flew across the front of the

  Land-Rover. A long ribbon of something wet and fleshy dangled from its beak, and the gull gulped at it greedily in flight. Its crop was distended and engorged with food.

  The seabirds scattered raucously and indignantly as the Land-Rover approached, leaving a human body lying in the centre of an area of sand that was dappled by the prints of their webbed feet, and fouled with dropped feathers and excrete.

  Johnny braked the Land-Rover and jumped out. He took one long look at the body, then turned quickly away and braced himself against the side of the vehicle.

  His gorge rose in a hot flood of nausea, and he gagged it back.

  The body was nude but for a few sodden tatters of clothing and a sea boot still laced on to one foot. The birds had attacked every inch of exposed flesh - except for the scalp. The face was unrecognizable.

  The nose was gone, the eye sockets were empty black holes. There were no lips to cover the grinning teeth.

  Above this ruined face the shock of colourless albino hair looked like a wig placed there as an obscene and tasteless joke.

  Hugo Kramer had made the long voyage from Thunderbolt and Suicide to the Red Gods.

  Johnny took the canvas ground sheet from under the passenger seat of the Land-Rover. Averting his eyes from the task, he wrapped the corpse carefully, tied the whole bundle with lengths of rope cut from the tow line, then laboriously dragged it up the beach well above the highwater mark.

  The thick canvas would keep off the birds, but to make doubly certain Johnny collected the driftwood and planking that was scattered thickly along the highwater line and piled it over the corpse.

  Some of the planking was freshly broken and the paint on it was still bright and new. Johnny guessed this was part of the wreckage of

  Wild Goose.

  He went back to the Land-Rover, and drove on towards the Red Gods which lay only a mile ahead.

  The sun was well up by now, and already its heat was uncomfortable. As he drove he struggled out of the sheepskin jacket without interrupting his search of the beach ahead.

  He was looking for another gathering of seagulls, but instead he saw a large black object stranded in the angle formed by the red stone cliffs.

  He was fifty yards from it before he realized what it was.

  He felt his stomach jar violently and then clench at the shock.

  It was a black rubber inflatable life raft - and it had been dragged up the beach above the highwater line.

  As he climbed out of the Land-Rover Johnny felt his legs trembling beneath him, as though he had just climbed a mountain. The hard knotted sensation in his chest shortened his breathing.

  He went slowly towards the raft, and there was a story to read in the soft sand.

  The smooth drag mark of the raft, and the two sets of footprints.

  One set made by bare feet; broad, stubby-toed and with flattened arches, the prints of a man who habitually went barefooted.

  These tracks had been made by one of the coloured crew of Wild

  Goose, Johnny decided, dismissed them and turned his whole attention to the other set of footprints.

  Shod feet, long and narrow, smooth leather soles; the imprints were sharp-edged suggesting new shoes little worn, the length of the stride and the depth of prints were those of a tall heavily built man.

  Johnny realized with mild surprise that his hands were shaking now, and even his lips quivered. He was like a man in high fever; light-headed, weak and shaking. It was Benedict van der Byl. He knew it with complete and utter certainty. Benedict had survived the maelstrom of Thunderbolt and Suicide.

  Johnny balled his fists, squeezing hard and he thrust out his jaw, tightening his lips. Still the hatred washed over his mind in dark hot waves.

  “Thank God,“he whispered. “Thank God. Now I can kill him myself.” The footprints had churned the sand all about the raft.

  Beside them lay a thick piece of planking which had been used as a lever to rip the emergency water container and the food locker from the floorboards of the raft.

  The food locker had been ransacked and abandoned.

  They would be carrying the packets of iron rations in their pockets to save weight, but the water container was gone.

  The two sets of prints struck out straight for the dunes.

  Johnny followed them at a run and los
t them immediately in the shifting wind-blown sands of the first dune.

  Johnny was undismayed. The dunes persisted for only a thousand yards or so, then gave way inland to the plains and salt flats of the interior.

  He ran back to the Land-Rover. He had his emotions under control again. His hatred was reduced to a hard indigestible lump below his ribs, and he contemplated for a few seconds lifting the microphone of the Land-Rover’s RIT set and calling Cartridge Bay.

  Inspector Stander had the police helicopter parked on the landing-strip behind the depot buildings. He could be here in thirty minutes. An hour later they would have Benedict van der Byl.

  Johnny dismissed the idea. Officially Benedict was dead, drowned.

  No one would look for him in a shallow grave in the wastes of the

  Namib desert.

  The crewman with him would be a complication; but he could be bribed and frightened or threatened. Nothing must stand in the path of his vengeance. Nothing.

  Johnny opened the Land-Rover’s locker and found the knife. He went to the raft and stabbed the blade through the thick material at a dozen places. The air hissed from the holes, and the raft collapsed slowly.

  Johnny bundled it into the back of the Land-Rover. He would bury it in the desert; there must be no evidence that Benedict had come ashore.

  He started the engine, engaged the four-wheel drive, and followed the spoor to the foot of the dunes.

  He picked his way through the valleys and across the knife-backed ridges of sand.

  As he descended the last slope of the dunes he felt the oppressive silence and immensity of the land enfold him.

  Here, only a mile from the sea, the moderating influence of the cold Benguela current did not reach.

  The heat was appalling. Johnny felt the sweat prickling from the pores of his skin and drying instantly in the lethal desiccating air.

  He swung the Land-Rover parallel to the line of the dunes and crawled along at walking speed, hanging over the side of the vehicle and searching the ground. The bright specks of mica in the sand bounced the heat of the sun into his face.

  He cut the spoor again where it came down off the dunes and went away on it, headed arrow straight at the far line of mountains which were already receding into the blue haze as the heat built up towards noon.