A Twist of Sand

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  "Look," I said to Anne, handing her my glasses, "you can still see the emergency floats lashed to her decks."

  "I can see a locomotive — and a tank," she exclaimed with a note of excitement in her voice. Until now it had been level and controlled in her conversations with me. "Can't we go in closer?"

  John looked dubious as I slowed still further and altered course to take Etosha nearer the famous wreck. Anne's suppressed mood gave a holiday air to the bridge.

  "I can see more tanks and guns and look at the huge pile of tyres — I think it's tyres — on the beach."

  Stein said heavily: "She was carrying tanks and guns to the British in the Middle East, as well as tyres for the Eighth Army. Her loss must have hit them pretty hard at that time, I guess."

  Anne gave him a long, considered look. It almost seemed as if she thought as little of him as I did. I could see him mentally rubbing his hands. His gloating satisfaction rather sickened me. Somehow the thought that she wasn't on Stein's side pleased me. One way and another, Onymacris must be quite a beetle.

  Etosha came closer in and we could see the pitiful abandon of a ship left to the waves and the birds.

  "It was a stroke of luck, her hitting a submerged object like that — for the Germans, I mean," went on Stein in his mincing voice. "The court of inquiry thought she smacked on to an outlying spur of the Clan Alpine Reef. You'd think the British captain would have kept away from a coast like this instead of coming in so close. Not unless Captain Peace was in command. He must have known he was taking a big risk."

  "If you'd really like to know," I said quietly, "the Dunedin Star was sunk by a German torpedo."

  "Rubbish," snapped Stein. "It was a reef. Slipshod. If he'd been a German captain we'd have shot him. The Dunedin Star was off course. There was never any mention of an explosion."

  Etosha circled her dead friend of the sea. Stein knew a lot about the Dunedin Star. I wondered to myself how much he was concerned in knowing her movements — in time of war.

  "Did you ever hear of the Type XXXI U-boat torpedo?" I asked.

  I had Anne's and John's full attention now.

  "No? Well, Blohm and Voss developed it. Acoustic, of course. The torpedo that sank the Dunedin Star was fired from a secret type of German submarine. I'll reconstruct it for you. What went through the U-boat commander's mind when he saw the Dunedin Star, laden with weapons of war, in his sights? He didn't press the button and send her to the bottom. Sooner of later — probably sooner — there would have been a hunting force up here looking for him. So he just tagged along behind the Dunedin Star while he drew the main charges from his Type XXXI's because he knew that at fifty knots — and they did every bit of fifty knots — a close salvo would tear right through any liner's plating like butter. There'd only be a dull thump. Four little beauties and a hole like a house, and a deadweight cargo that would take her to the bottom like a load of lead. The U-boat skipper went even one better. He waited until Dunedin Star was among the worst foul ground in the world Then he fired. The whole world believed that the Dunedin Star struck a hidden reef and tore her bottom out. I would have liked to have met that U-boat man."

  Stein gazed at me like a man entranced.

  "By God!" he said. "It would take a German to do that."

  Anne's dry interruption gave me the measure of her thoughts about Stein. In words at least, it aligned her on my side.

  "You forget, the solution has been worked out by a British submarine captain." She looked levelly from him to me. "Very ingenious, Captain Peace. No wonder they loaded you up with decorations." She must have sensed something of the drift of my thoughts, and the barb followed with all the flickering speed of the Bushmen's arrows out there in the desert behind the wreck. "But I'd really like to know something about your last fling that didn't come off."

  I thought our truce was peace, but I was wrong.

  "Course three-one-oh," I snapped savagely at the Kroo boy. I rang the telegraphs.

  "Half ahead."

  "I'll take over," I went on to John, quite unreasonably. "You get some rest, unless you really want to tag along here. I'm going outside the Clan Alpine. The chart says sixty fathoms, but I'd swear it's nearer six at fifteen miles offshore. There's a lot of discoloured water and breakers between the shoal and the coast. I don't want to risk it — particularly as it will be dark quite soon."

  Stein left.

  "You said I could stay…" Anne began.

  "Yes," I retorted curtly and I saw, to my surprise, the hurt in her eyes. "I repeat, you can stay. But don't get in the way of anybody. And any fortuitous comment will be out of place."

  She went over to where she could see the coastline — for what it was worth — and leaned out across the starboard wing of the bridge. For an hour or more Etosha, her port bow towards the lowering sun, shook herself free of the grim tentacles of the Skeleton Coast — the innumerable, shifting shoals of sand, the uncharted, hidden rocks and the sailor's nightmare which is put down on charts in the classic understatement of "foul ground, discoloured water." The laic afternoon was clear but cold — even in midsummer, let alone midwinter, the mercury falls owing to the peculiar juxtaposition of desert and Antarctic air which comes on the wings of the perpetual south-westerly gale. The afternoon's winteriness and the morning's fog arise from the warmer, moist air which sweeps in in June and July from the humid, tropical seas to the north, creating a fog similar to that of the Grand Banks of America.

  Anne stood alone without looking round for that whole hour. The coastline was clearer than at any time during the morning and in the far distance I could see the ragged tumble of blue which marked the mountains of the interior, anything up to a hundred miles from Etosha.

  I jammed myself on the opposite side of the helmsman away from the girl. It needed all the cold, fresh sea air to dampen my anger against her. What damnable nerve! I brooded to myself. I was angry at her unconcealed opinion of me and at the same time puzzled when I thought of the other side of her I had seen for a moment when she believed I could do something about the Dunedin Star. Then the holiday mood on the bridge — which was real, the cool, self-poise, or the holiday mood? She seemed to have an ability, a kind of psychological homeopathic flair, for bringing pain. I thought the old wound was healed. Why should I put up with her anyway? I asked myself savagely. I thrust myself back on the smooth surface of the stool and almost slipped over backwards. How she'd laugh if I did, I told myself with unnecessary heat. Why should I find myself snarling; what the hell did it matter what she did or didn't think? I glanced overtly at the slim back and line of her buttocks beneath her corduroy slacks. I couldn't tell myself she was just one of Stein's minions — she'd made it perfectly clear she'd come on the expedition with her eyes open — wide open — to both Stein and myself. And yet I couldn't reconcile her devoted scientific attitude, her "keep-off-the-grass" line to me, with those moments looking at the old wreck. She'd come out in my defence over the sinking of the Dunedin Star — if that meant anything after what followed. I'd handed Stein the black spot, and that meant her too, I brooded, taking my eyes from her back. It was a fair fight between Stein and myself but Anne was so obviously in a neutral corner… The wide expanse of sea seemed weary with the day's care. The strange light did nothing to alleviate my mood. Too much sea and too much Skeleton Coast!

  I got up suddenly and joined her at the rail. She said nothing. She seemed scarcely aware of me. She continued to stare out towards the coast.

  I fumbled for something to say.

  "It gets cold towards evening. You'll want something more than that thin sweater," I said lamely.

  She barely glanced towards me. An opening gambit like that deserves it, I told myself in a moment of introspection.

  I was wrong. She gestured towards the dimming coastline. I felt as lost among her vagaries of mood as I once did among the shoals of Curva dos Dunas.

  "It tends to get a hold on one, doesn't it?"

  She turned without straightening
so that she looked up from the level of my chest into my eyes. The movement caught a wisp of hair and blew it across her forehead. The underside was more red than gold.

  She followed the movement of my eyes.

  "I'll shave it off, and that will shake you when you pick us up again," she said. The sun, at its sinking angle, cast the left side of her face into faint shadow. It showed me, for the first time, the lovely disproportion of the two sides.

  I wasn't going to lay myself open again. I started to say something about sending my razor ashore with her, but it died on my lips and I turned shorewards under the scrutiny of her calm gaze.

  She leaned her elbows on the rail. There wasn't a landmark or a hill worth mentioning to break the conversational impasse.

  She surprised me by doing so.

  "That was a lovely old pair of dividers you had in there," she said. "I'd like to have a closer look at them."

  My surprise must have shown on my face.

  "I'll do it on an exchange basis," she smiled, and it flashed across my mind how wonderfully it lit up the muscles which seemed to be more in the power of pedantry or self-defence when in repose. She dug a hand into the pocket of her slacks. She took something out and held it behind her back. It was almost the teasing attitude of a small girl. I would have fallen for it right there, had I not been forewarned. "I'll show you what's in my hand if you'll go and get the dividers."

  "Of course," I replied guardedly. "Stay here, and I'll slip below and get them."

  "I couldn't run very far, could I?" she responded lightly.

  I took my time about going down the bridge ladder. She seemed such a mass of contradictions. I returned with the dividers.

  She took the instrument from me and held it by the mother-of-pearl tip. She ran a finger down the ivory and stopped in surprise at the bottom.

  "Why," she said, "they're so old that they haven't even got steel points. What is it?"

  "Porcupine quill," I replied.

  She opened her own hand. There was a tiny Chinese figure of a water-carrier, done in ivory. It was yellow and discoloured. The water-jug was gone.

  "Just as you carry your lucky hand, so I carry this round," she said. I couldn't fathom this unburdening. "See, the water-jug got broken. It was in a fire when the soldiers first burned down our home. We were always on the run after that for years."

  With a deft movement she put the dividers in the empty socket of the little water-carrier and swung them round and round.

  She eyed me.

  "Measurement, calculation, plot… " she murmured. "I suppose there comes a time when measurement becomes all-important, becomes an end in itself. The same with calculation."

  I tried to laugh it down. I remembered the "keep-off-the-grass "sign.

  "I'll bet the old John Company captain never thought his dividers would become part of a moral tale. Particularly in the abstract."

  She didn't laugh.

  "Calculation is important in your life, isn't it?" she said.

  "If it weren't, you might be swimming for it now," I replied flippantly.

  Her next remark came out of the blue.

  "Have you killed many men, Captain Peace?"

  "Thanks for the memory," I said bitterly. The grey light, the mica dust-blinded evening, made it all grey. I needed a drink.

  The wind flickered a wisp of hair across her face. The crumple of her eyelid was accentuated. Etosha creaked against the night swell.

  "You can feed any sort of information into a calculating machine," she went on. She seemed to be weighing something almost judicially in her mind. "I remember seeing a ' Zebra.' computator, one of those electronic brain affairs, which could work out things to sixty-four decimal places. It also worked out how much a worker did or didn't do in a lifetime's employment. Equally, it gave the exact radius blast of a hydrogen bomb. It had all the answers, and it didn't matter to it whether it was people dying or people living. It didn't hear them scream. When you live close to a thing like that you begin to see things the way it does, only as a matter of computation, no other issues." She swivelled round on me.

  "You've lived a long time with the Skeleton Coast, Captain Peace."

  "Yes," I said, "a long time." My anger wouldn't ignite.

  "Listen," I said, "I'll show you tomorrow. You ask about killing men. You'll see the corpses. Seventy-five in one beautiful steel coffin and twenty-seven in another."

  "You — were responsible?"

  "The first lot," I said harshly, "I would do it again for the same reasons — and the same consequences. Those seventy-five men had to die if thousands more wanted to live. That's fair enough. They took their chance, like I did. I won."

  "But, from what I hear, the Royal Navy didn't seem to think so."

  "No," I said shortly.

  "But you had a defence?" she probed.

  "For God's sake, yes," I burst out and I caught a glimpse of the helmsman's eyes flickering sideways at me. "I had a defence all right. It… it lies out there."

  I gestured to the north-east, to Curva dos Dunas.

  She missed nothing.

  "But you took the rap? And that's where we're going — going ashore?"

  I nodded.

  "What does it matter?" I snapped, for she had brought pain from what I thought was a dead wound. "After all, what does an ultimate weapon matter now? The dead men are history. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Peace is history. Or maybe he's dead, too, in a sense."

  She eyed me for a long time.

  "Down in the Antarctic," she said, "on those little gale-lashed islands like Heard and Marion, the ordinary housefly has so adapted himself to conditions that he has shed his wings, so the continual gales can't blow him away. It's an entomological fact. You've become so part of the Skeleton Coast that you-are just pure computation, nothing else."

  "A sort of living computing machine," I sneered. "Only I can't work out sixty-four decimal places."

  "No," she answered steadily. "But whatever fact is fed to you, you digest it… purely for plot and counter-plot, measurement and counter-measurement. What I like to think is that, like those flies, you once had wings."

  I was shaken.

  "If you have a cigarette," I said, "I'll break my non-smoking rule and have one."

  She passed the carton of Peter Stuyvesant without a word. She lit mine, and one for herself.

  "If the first was a fair fight, I gather you think in your own mind, the second — the twenty-seven — wasn't?"

  "It was an old Greek freighter," I said quietly. "If there'd been anyone left to put an obituary notice in The Times, you could have looked me up. Presumed lost at sea. She didn't stand a chance… "

  Anne was looking at me calculatingly.

  "Look," I went on rather desperately, "I wasn't responsible, or only indirectly. Even if I'd been on the bridge that night I couldn't have saved them."

  "But you weren't on the bridge, and so indirectly you were responsible," she said.

  "You don't know the facts," I hurried on.

  "I don't suppose anyone ever will, if what I hear about you is true," she countered. "I suppose it was all illegal?"

  I shrugged and turned away. "Like this little jaunt, it was well outside the law. Only one man would be interested now and he would deal with me — outside the law — if he knew. Stein promised to tell him."

  She looked at me and her voice was tired.

  "I thought it would be something like that. I didn't know the details. It simply confirms my ideas about Stein."

  "And about me, too," I followed up.

  She evaded it.

  "I am sure you can find some neat analogy from the great world of nature," I said sarcastically.

  "Yes," she replied. "Yes, I can. It was in my mind even before you spoke. Out in those dunes there lives a blind beetle. It once had eyes like any other beetle. It always lived on the shadowed side of the dunes, digging down deep out of the sun. It has now completely adapted itself to its environment. But it's quite bl
ind as a result." She stared at me. "Quite blind, do you understand? It can't even see its fellows, but all its other senses are doubly developed. It lives by its senses. But it will never see again."

  "Why do you tell me all this?" I asked.

  It may only have been a last dart of light from the sun that caught her eyes.

  "Purely in the interests of science," she said.

  I looked squarely at her, but the face was withdrawn, full of a sadness as weary as the eternal vigil of the shoals and the desert of the Kaokoveld.

  "And so Stein doesn't come back either?"

  I reached out and touched her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but I gripped it and I felt the crescent of her collar-bone under the wool. I turned her gently round until she faced me. I knew what I had to do, then.

  "You weren't meant to either," I said softly.

  XII

  Madness of the Sands

  Stein saw the white death in front of him and blenched. His face turned a sickly green and he pulled out the Luger.

  "Get back!" he screamed. "Astern, astern!"

  He groped madly for the telegraph, pitching John, who was at the wheel, on to the plating of the bridge. Anne retreated, her white face accentuated by her scarlet polo-necked sweater and matching lipstick, to the head of the bridge ladder.

  I wasn't afraid of Stein, but I was scared to death of the sand-bars of Curva dos Dunas.

  "You bloody fool!" I shouted, making a grab at the spinning spokes as Etosha yawed twenty degrees off course. As I spun the wheel back I hit Stein across the face with the back of my left hand and he went reeling to his knees. Anne picked up his gun uncertainly.

  Well, if that's the way he wants it, he'll get it, I thought grimly. "Full astern" I rang on the telegraph. Etosha slowed to a halt, like a horse about to take a jump, and then reined back almost in mid-flight.

  It was Etosha's sudden emergence from the fog which threw Stein off balance. I wasn't surprised, although my stomach was turning over. It was the morning after my talk with Anne and Etosha had torn north-westwards through the night to be in position off Curva dos Dunas by mid-morning. She was only doing six knots when she broke through the encumbering gloom into bright sunlight maybe five miles offshore, sunlight reflecting more whitely by contrast as it came off the creaming surf. Back in the fog I had watched the soundings plummet from sixty-five to forty-seven fathoms, and I knew exactly where I was. Off Curva dos Dunas. I'd played the Benguela current off all night against a small local stream, narrow but powerful, which forces its way from the mouth of the Cunene River through the wild welter of broken, discoloured death traps southwards to the Clan Alpine shoal. The great Benguela current is cold, majestic; it has made its way past a thousand obstacles from South Georgia and Tristan; it is broad, life-giving with its countless myriad's of living plankton for the fish; the narrow but powerful down-coast current from the Cunene, which I called the "Trout," bounces and races south and south-west at fully five knots and scrapes along the landward edge of the kingly Benguela, but it is wicked, diabolonian, fickle, and turns the entrance to Curva dos Dunas into a sailor's idea of hell. When I took Trout in against NP I I hadn't known it existed, but all the time since I had patiently spent charting its vagaries in Etosha made me sweat at the thought of my ignorance at that time. I'd brought Etosha to Curva dos Dunas with the Benguela under her stern and the Trout under her bow, and I was not a little pleased when the 65–47 soundings came up, familiar as Table Mountain.