"Brave words, Captain Peace — or is it Lieutenant-Commander? I can never be quite sure in a situation like this," he sneered. He sighed theatrically. "You force me to use cards I don't want to. Macfadden," he said harshly, anticipating a move by Mac, "I swear before God that I will kill you on the slightest pretext."
Mac saw that he meant it, too.
"Now, Captain Peace," he went on. "To get back to this very fine ship. Could it be that this fast, well-found ship is a diamond smuggler? I don't think so."
"Thanks for damn all," I said sarcastically.
"The point is, looking at this ship, that the man who bought her must have made his money before, not after. If you can afford a ship like this, you don't need to smuggle diamonds, do you, Captain?"
I felt the sweat trickling down my shirt. The swine was playing with me.
"I don't know the purpose of this ship yet," he said quietly. "But I intend to find out."
So he hadn't heard of Curva dos Dunas. I'd see that he never did — or never came back to tell about it.
"I became very interested in Lieutenant-Commander Peace," he went on, "and so I asked an acquaintance in Cape Town if he could find out something more about this famous submarine commander. I discovered, in fact, that he was drowned at sea eventually — after the court martial."
The cold fear tingled across my heart.
Stein put the Luger back in his pocket. It was a gesture of victory.
"Lieutenant-Commander Peace took an old merchant ship to sea in — when was it? April, '45. You remember the old Phylira, Captain? Fancy Georgiadou calling an old wreck like that after an ocean nymph! But then the Greeks, even old Georgiadou, are a sentimental lot, are they not?"
Automatically I poured myself another drink. So the Phylira was calling from her grave — and the twenty-seven men of the crew with her! Icy fear gripped me. So Stein knew about the Phylira, and had found out that I was her captain. By all the rules I was dead — the Phylira sailed from Cape Town for Tangier and was never heard of again.
"The old Phylira's engines were as bad as they come, weren't they Macfadden?" taunted this evil incarnation of a past which I thought I had buried alongside NP I on the sand-bars of Curva dos Dunas.
Stein laughed.
"A brilliant submarine commander as the skipper of a rotten old merchantman, and a brilliant engineer to keep her old engines going — just as long as they needed to be kept going, eh?"
There was pure murder in Mac's eyes. Stein knew he had us. He didn't even bother about the Luger any more.
"What did you do with her, Captain Peace? How can a man make away with a whole ship and twenty-seven men without a trace? And how did he disappear himself without a trace, to come back with a small fortune? Georgiadou would be terribly interested to know. No one could have been more heart-broken than that unsentimental shipowner about the loss of an old ship, for which he got more than her value in insurance, anyway. If he hadn't been so cut up about the loss of the Phylira, I'd have sworn he'd paid an enterprising, ruthless captain like yourself to get rid of her. But he still mourns the loss of the Phylira, Captain Peace. I'm sure he'd be only too keen to renew acquaintance with his erstwhile captain and the Scottish engineer. Tangier, too. What was her cargo?"
"If you know all this, I'm sure you've seen Phylira's manifests," I rapped out harshly.
"Of course I have," he said smoothly. "Canned fruit, brandy, wool — nothing in the least exceptional. But why Tangier? I ask myself. And in '45 when anyone and anything shady could be bought in Tangier."
I'd often wondered how Georgiadou took the loss of his packet of uncut stones, all £200,000 of them. From what I heard later, Georgiadou, under his respectable merchant trading cloak in Adderley Street, was the biggest rogue south of the Congo in organising the smuggling of uncut diamonds from South West Africa, Sierra Leone and West Africa through Tangier mainly to Iron Curtain countries. I can still see the look on the Greek's face when he handed me over a tiny parcel, carelessly done up in a small cardboard carton with the King's Ransom "round-the-world "label still on it.
"You will deliver these to Louis Monet in the ' Straits' bar in the Rue Marrakesh," he said incisively. "There are over £200,000 worth of uncut diamonds in that parcel. Many a man has had his throat cut for a tenth of that amount, Captain, so don't get any ideas about private enterprise, see?"
It was Georgiadou's own remark which sowed the seed.
Far to the south of Curva dos Dunas, off the mouth of the Orange River, the old Phylira wheezed along. It was a close night and my cabin was hot and stuffy from the dry wind coming off the land. Somewhere beyond the night out to starboard across the water the searchlights would be playing back and forth across the barbed wire which guards the Forbidden Area of the Diamond Coast. As I glanced out through the porthole, I could almost imagine I could see their reflection against the night sky. In that barren wilderness the policemen sent to patrol the desert go mad; they never see a woman in two years' shift of duty; they don't worry about the seaward side which the devilish sandbars make so safe.
Except for Curva dos Dunas, I thought grimly. That thought triggered the whole idea off. What in God's name was I doing skippering a floating wreck and relegating myself to the status of a pariah when I held sole title to the only harbour, except Walvis Bay, from Cape Town to Tiger Bay? I and I alone knew of the existence — and more particularly, the navigational hazards — of a harbour which either Rhodesia or South Africa would give millions of pounds to own. Curva dos Dunas was mine, but no government would even listen to a sailor's tale without proof. Proof! I could picture myself in the cool arched corridors of the Union 'Buildings in Pretoria being shifted — ever more impatiently — from one civil servant to another, fobbed off with evasive, ever-less polite answers to a man they would consider a crackpot — unless. Unless I had a ship of my own. A ship! I would have to go back and chart the place in case the tides and currents had closed or altered it since I sank NP I. I must have a ship. My own ship.
Perhaps in that lonely, stuffy cabin the ghost of old Simon Peace came to insinuate the idea into my mind. Above all, his challenge. Curva dos Dunas had cast its spell over him, and I likewise had been bewitched. Without formulating my ideas, or even putting them into rational form, I knew it was the lure, the challenge to me as a sailor and a man, as much as the other thoughts of a key harbour to which I alone held the secret, which drove me on.
I stared out of the porthole. Curva dos Dunas! The Achilles heel of the whole Skeleton Coast! What a magnificent hidy-hole to smuggle out diamonds!
The thought hit me with such force that I smacked my palm down on the table. Why not smuggle them in, not out? Georgiadou's precious parcel! Private enterprise! Two hundred thousand pounds would get me the sort of ship I wanted — fast, eminently seaworthy, handy. My thoughts tumbled over one another as it all fell into place. A fast trawler, putting up a front of fishing. I could operate out of Walvis legitimately, and no one would suspect my operations on the side at Curva dos Dunas.
Private enterprise!
The first thought that rushed into my racing brain was to run the old Phylira ashore at Curva dos Dunas and slip ashore. I thrust it aside. I couldn't leave Mac and twenty-seven innocent men to die a hideous death, not for all the diamonds in South West Africa. Automatically I went over and tapped the scuffed old Kew pattern barometer hanging on the bulkhead. It was almost a reflex action, for the weather would be a vital factor in my plans. I didn't like the sultry night. The long swell under the old freighter portended a stiff blow from the west-south-west if — but then one never can tell on the Skeleton Coast. It might remain fine with a heavy sea for days, or, in line with the subtle alchemy of cold South Atlantic currents and hot desert air, to say nothing of the fickle and unpredictable elements which a land breeze might throw into the weather's chemistry, a raging south-westerly gale might descend out of a clear blue sky and whip up the sea in the opposite direction, throwing up a barrage of wind 'and water which would nullify any plans I might have of getting ashore. Olafsen, the mate, in his drunken state would not know how even to keep the old wreck afloat under conditions like that.