Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Are you referring to the entire package?’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Including the industrials and boart still in the strong room?’

  ‘Yes, sir, how much, sir?’

  ‘Well, if De Beers accepts them at the same prices as our last package they will fetch considerably in excess of a million pounds sterling,’ he replied sadly.

  ‘A million pounds,’ Shasa repeated, but Centaine saw in his expression that such a figure was incomprehensible to him, like the astronomical distances between stars that must be expressed in light years. He will learn, she thought, I will teach him.

  ‘Remember, Shasa, that is not all profit. From that sum we will have to pay all the expenses of the mine over the past months before we can figure a profit. And even from that we have to give the tax collectors their pound of bleeding flesh.’

  She stood up behind the desk and then held out her hand to prevent Twentyman-Jones leaving the room as an idea struck her.

  ‘As you know Shasa and I are going in to Windhoek this coming Friday. Shasa has to return to school at the end of next week. I will take the diamonds into the bank with me in the Daimler—’

  ‘Mrs Courtney!’ Twentyman-Jones was horrified. ‘I couldn’t allow that. A million pounds’ worth, good Lord alive. It would be criminally irresponsible of me to agree.’ He broke off as he saw her expression alter; her mouth settled into that familiar stubborn shape and the lights of battle glinted in her eyes. He knew her so well, like his own daughter, and loved her as much, he realized that he had made the grievous error of challenging and forbidding her. He knew what her reaction must be and he sought desperately to head her off.

  ‘I was thinking only of you, Mrs Courtney. A million pounds of diamonds would attract every scavenger and predator, every robber and footpad for a thousand miles around.’

  ‘It was not my intention to bruit it abroad. I will not broadcast it a thousand miles around,’ she said coldly.

  ‘The insurance,’ inspiration came to him at last, ‘the insurance will not cover losses if the package is not sent in by armed convoy. Can you truly afford to take that chance – a loss of a million pounds of revenue against a few days saved?’

  He had hit upon the one argument that might stop her. He saw her thinking about it carefully, a chance of losing a million pounds against a minimal loss of face, and he sighed silently with relief when she shrugged.

  ‘Oh, very well then, Dr Twentyman-Jones, have it your own way.’

  Lothar had carved the road to H’ani Mine through the desert with his own hands and sprinkled every mile of it with the sweat of his brow. But that had been twelve years before, and now his memory of it had grown hazy. Still he remembered half a dozen points along the road which might serve his purpose.

  From the stage camp where he had intercepted Gerhard Fourie’s convoy they followed the rutted tracks south and west in the direction of Windhoek, travelling at night to save them from discovery by unexpected traffic on the road.

  On the second morning, just as the sun was rising, Lothar reached one of the points he remembered and found it ideal. Here the road ran parallel to the deep rocky bed of a dry river before looping down through the deep cutting that Lothar had excavated to cross the riverbed and climb out the far side through another cutting.

  He dismounted and walked out along the edge of the high bank to study it carefully. They could trap the diamond truck in the gut of the cutting, and block it with rocks rolled down from the top of the bank. There was certain to be water under the sand in the riverbed for the horses while they waited for the truck to show up; they would need to keep in condition for the long hard journey ahead. The riverbed would hide them.

  Then again this was the remotest stretch of the road, it would take days for the police officers to be alerted and then to reach the ambush spot. He could certainly expect to establish an early and convincing lead, even if they chose the risky alternative of following him into the hard unrelenting wilderness across which he would retreat.

  ‘This is where we will do it,’ he told Swart Hendrick.

  They set up their primitive camp in the sheer bank of the riverbed at the point where the telegraph line took the short cut across the loop in the road. The copper wires were strung over the riverbed from a pole on the near bank that was out of sight of the road.

  Lothar climbed the pole and clipped on his taps to the main telegraph line, then led his wires down the pole, tacking them to the timber to avoid casual discovery, and then to his listening post in the dug-out that Swart Hendrick had burrowed into the bank of the river.

  The waiting was monotonous, and Lothar chafed at being tied to the earphones of the telegraph tap but he could not afford to miss the vital message when it was flashed from the H’ani Mine, the message which would give him the exact departure time of the diamond truck. So during the dreary hot hours of daylight he had to listen to all the mundane traffic of the mine’s daily business, and the distant operator’s skills on the keyboard were such that they taxed his ability to follow and translate the rapid fire of dots and dashes that echoed in his earphones. He scribbled them into his notebook and afterwards translated the groups and jotted in the words between the lines. This was a private telegraph line and therefore no effort had been made to encode the transmission, the traffic was in the clear.

  During the day he was alone in the dugout. Swart Hendrick took Manfred and the horses out into the desert, ostensibly to hunt, but really to school and harden both the boy and the animals for the journey that lay ahead and to keep them out of sight of any traffic on the road.

  For Lothar the long monotonous days were full of doubts and foreboding. There was so much that could go wrong, so many details that had to mesh perfectly to ensure success. There were weak links, and Gerhard Fourie was the weakest of these. The whole plan hinged on the man, and he was a coward, a man easily distracted and discouraged.

  ‘Waiting is always the worst time,’ Lothar thought, and he remembered the fears that had assailed him on the eve of other battles and desperate endeavours. ‘If you could just do it and have done with it, instead of having to sit out these dragging days.’

  Suddenly the buzz of the call sign echoed in his earphones and he reached quickly for his notebook. The operator at the H’ani Mine began to transmit and Lothar’s pencil danced across the pages as he kept up with him. There was a curt double tap of acknowledgement from the Windhoek station as the message ended, and Lothar let the earphones drop around his neck as he translated the groups:

  For Pettifogger Prepare Juno’s private coach for inclusion in the Sunday night express mailtrain to Cape Town Stop Juno arriving your end noon Sunday Ends Vingt

  Pettifogger was Abraham Abrahams. Centaine must have selected the code name when she was annoyed with him, while Vingt was a pun on Twentyman-Jones’ name; the French connotation suggested Centaine’s influence again, but Lothar wondered who had selected Juno as Centaine Courtney’s code name and grimaced at how appropriate it was.

  So Centaine was leaving for Cape Town in her private coach. Somehow he felt guilty relief that she would not be close at hand when it happened, as though distance might lessen the shock for her. To reach Windhoek comfortably by noon on Sunday, Centaine must leave the H’ani Mine early on Friday, he calculated quickly; that would bring her to the cutting here on the riverbank on Saturday afternoon. Then he deducted a few hours from his estimate; she drove that Daimler like a demon.

  He sat in the hot, stuffy little dugout and suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to see her again, to have just a glimpse of her as she passed. ‘We can use it as a rehearsal for the diamond truck,’ he justified himself.

  The Daimler came out of the shimmering distances like one of the whirling dust devils of the hot desert noons. Lothar saw the dust column from ten miles or more and signalled Manfred and Swart Hendrick into their positions at the top of the cutting.

  They had dug shallow trenches at the key points, scattering the disturbed earth and le
tting the dry breeze smooth and blend it with the surroundings. Then they had screened the positions with branches of thorn scrub until Lothar was satisfied that they were undetectable from further than a few paces.

  The rocks with which they would block both ends of the cutting had been gathered laboriously from the riverbed and poised on the edge of the bank. Lothar had taken great care to make them seem natural, and yet a single slash with a knife across the rope that held the prop under the rock pile would send them tumbling down onto the narrow track at the bottom of the cutting.

  This was a rehearsal, so none of them were wearing masks.

  Lothar made one last hard scrutiny of the arrangements and then turned back to watch the swiftly approaching column of dust. It was already close enough for him to make out the tiny shape of the vehicle beneath it and hear the faint beat of its engine.

  ‘She shouldn’t drive like that,’ he thought angrily. ‘She’ll kill herself.’ He broke off and shook his head ruefully. ‘I’m acting like a doting husband,’ he realized. ‘Let her break her damned neck, if that is what she wants.’ Yet the idea of her death gave him a painful pang, and he crossed his fingers to turn the chance away. Then he crouched down in his trench and watched her through the screen of thorn branches.

  The stately vehicle rocked and bounced over the tracks as it swung onto the loop of the road. The engine beat strengthened as Centaine changed down and then accelerated out of the turn, using power to pull out of the incipient skid as the floury dust clutched at the front wheels. It was done with élan, he thought grudgingly, as she hit the gears again and bore down on the head of the cutting at speed.

  ‘Merciful God, is she going to take it at full bore?’ he wondered. But at the last moment she cut the throttle and used the gearbox and the drag of the clinging dust to pull up at the top end of the cutting.

  As she opened the door and stepped out onto the running-board with dust billowing around her, she was only twenty paces from where he lay, and he felt his heart banging against the earth. ‘Can she still do this to me?’ he wondered at himself. ‘I should hate her. She has cheated and humiliated me and she has spurned my son and denied him a mother’s love, and yet, and yet—’ He would not let the words form, and he tried deliberately to harden himself against her.

  ‘She’s not beautiful,’ he told himself, as he studied her face; but she was much more. She was vital and vibrant, and there was an aura about her. ‘Juno,’ he recalled the code name, ‘the goddess. Powerful and dangerous, mercurial and unpredictable, but endlessly fascinating and infinitely desirable.’

  She looked directly towards him for a moment and he felt the strength and resolve flow out of him at the touch of those dark eyes, but she had not seen him and she turned away.

  ‘We will walk down, chéri,’ she called to the young man who stepped out of the opposite side of the Daimler, ‘to see if the crossing is safe.’

  Shasa seemed to have grown inches in the short time since Lothar had last seen him. They left the vehicle and went side by side down the track below where Lothar lay.

  Manfred was in his trench at the bottom end of the cutting. He also watched the pair come down the track. The woman meant nothing to him. She was his mother but he did not know that and there was no instinctive response within him. She had never given him suck or even held him in her arms. She was a stranger, and he glanced at her without any emotion, then turned all his attention to the youth at her side.

  Shasa’s good looks offended him. ‘He’s pretty as a girl,’ he thought, trying to scorn him, but he saw the new breadth to his rival’s shoulders and fine muscle in his brown arms where he had rolled his sleeves high.

  ‘I would like another bout with you, my friend.’ The almost forgotten sting and humiliation of Shasa’s left fist hurt again like a fresh wound, and he touched his own face with his fingertips, scowling at the memory. ‘Next time I won’t let you do your little dance.’ And he thought about how hard it had been to touch that pretty face, the way it had swayed and dipped just beyond his reach and he felt the frustration anew.

  The couple reached the foot of the cutting below where Manfred lay and stood talking quietly for a while, then Shasa trudged out into the wide riverbed. The roadway through the sand had been corduroyed with branches of acacia, but the wheels of heavy trucks had broken them up. Shasa rearranged them, stamping the jagged ends into the sand.

  While he worked Centaine turned back to the Daimler. There was a canvas water bag hanging on the bracket of the spare wheel and she unhooked it, raised it to her lips and took a mouthful. She gargled softly and then spat it into the dust. Then she slipped off the long white dust jacket that protected her clothing and unbuttoned her blouse. She soaked the yellow scarf and wiped the damp cloth down her throat and over her bosom, gasping with pleasure at the coolness on her skin.

  Lothar wanted to turn his head away, but he could not; instead he stared at her. She wore nothing under the pale blue cotton blouse. The skin of her bosom was untouched by the sun, pale smooth and pearly as fine bone china. Her breasts were small, without any puckering and sagging, the tips pointed and still clear rose-coloured as those of a girl, not of a woman who had borne two sons. They bounced elastically as she drew the wet scarf over them and she looked down at them as she bathed the gleam of perspiration from them. Lothar moaned softly in his throat at the need of her that rose freshly and strongly from deep within him.

  ‘All set, Mater,’ Shasa called as he started back up the track, and quickly Centaine rebuttoned the front of her blouse.

  ‘We’ve wasted enough time,’ she agreed and slipped back behind the wheel of the Daimler. As Shasa slammed his door she gunned the big motor down the track, kicking up sand and splinters of acacia in a spray from the back wheels as she crossed the riverbed and flew up the far bank. The rumble of the engine dwindled into the desert silence and Lothar found he was trembling.

  None of them moved for many minutes. It was Swart Hendrick who rose to his feet first. He opened his mouth to speak and then saw the expression on Lothar’s face and remained silent. He scrambled down the bank and set off back towards the camp.

  Lothar climbed down to the spot where the Daimler had stopped. He stood looking down at the damp earth where she had spat that mouthful of water. Her footprints were narrow and neat in the dust, and he felt a strong urge to stoop and touch them but suddenly Manfred spoke close behind him.

  ‘He is a boxer,’ he said, and it took Lothar a moment to realize that he was talking about Shasa. ‘He looks a real sissy, but he can fight. You can’t hit him.’ He put up his fists and shadow-boxed, shuffling and dancing in the dust, imitating Shasa.

  ‘Let’s get back to the camp, out of sight,’ Lothar said, and Manfred dropped his guard and thrust his hands into his pockets. Neither of them spoke again until they reached the dugout.

  ‘Can you box, Pa?’ Manfred asked. ‘Can you teach me to box?’

  Lothar smiled and shook his head. ‘I always found it easier to kick a man between his legs,’ he said. ‘And then hit him with a bottle or a gun butt.’

  ‘I would like to learn to box,’ Manfred said. ‘Someday I will learn.’

  Perhaps the idea had been germinating there all along but suddenly it was a firm declaration. His father smiled indulgently and clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Get out the flour bag,’ he said. ‘And I will teach you to bake soda bread instead.’

  ‘Oh, Abe, you know how much I detest these soirées,’ Centaine exclaimed irritably. ‘Crowded rooms filled with tobacco smoke, exchanging inanities with strangers.’

  ‘This man could be very valuable to know, Centaine. I will go further than that, he could be the most valuable friend you’ll ever make in this territory.’

  Centaine pulled a face. Abe was right, of course. The administrator was in fact the governor of the territory with wide executive powers. He was appointed by the Government of the Union of South Africa under the powers of mandate conferred on it by
the Treaty of Versailles.

  ‘I expect he is another pompous old bore, just like his predecessor was.’

  ‘I haven’t met him,’ Abe admitted. ‘He only arrived in Windhoek to take up his appointment within the last few days and will not be sworn in until the first of next month, but our new concessions in the Tsumeb area are on his desk at this moment, awaiting his signature.’

  He saw her eyes shift and he pressed the advantage. ‘Two thousand square miles of exclusive prospecting rights – worth a few hours of boredom?’

  But she wouldn’t give in that easily, and she counterattacked. ‘We are due to hook onto the express that leaves this evening. Shasa must be back at Bishops on Wednesday morning.’ Centaine stood up and paced the saloon of her coach, stopping to rearrange the roses in the vase above her desk so she did not have to look at him as he deflected her thrust.

  ‘The next express leaves Tuesday evening. I have made arrangements for your coach to hook on. Master Shasa can leave on this evening’s express, I have booked a coupé for him. Sir Garry and his wife are still at Weltevreden, they would meet him at Cape Town station. It needs only a telegraph to arrange it.’ Abraham smiled across the saloon at Shasa. ‘I’m sure, young man, you can make the journey without anyone to hold your hand?’

  Abe was a cunning little devil, Centaine conceded, as Shasa rushed indignantly to take up the challenge.

  ‘Of course I can, Mater. You stay here. It’s important to meet the new administrator. I can get home on my own. Anna will help me pack for school.’

  Centaine threw up her hands. ‘If I die of boredom, Abe, let it be on your conscience for as long as you live!’

  She had at first planned to wear her full suite of diamonds, but decided against it at the last moment. ‘After all, it’s only a little provincial reception, with fat farmers’ wives and petty civil servants. Besides, I don’t want to blind the poor old dear.’