The River of Diamonds

I slept.

It was dark when Kim's rough hand shook me awake. 'Dry togs. I hang them in the rigging all day. Damn' fine pants.'

They didn't look so fine to me — creased, torn and stained with sea water and mud. I judged the schooner to be under full sail, the way she lay over.

'Where are we?'

'Off Saddle Hill. Come on deck and see.'

The night was clear towards the land, but seawards the great black bank of nightly fog blocked the horizon. The landmark, Saddle Hill, stood out. A jagged fissure cut across its gaunt 1000-foot height, like a tooth kicked out in a street brawl. Northwards to Sudhuk ran eleven miles of threatening cliffs. We were so close inshore that I could see white water. Koeltas was picking his way through the maze of foul ground with consummate seamanship: I would not have dared to take a ship under power where he did under sail.

Koeltas said, without greeting, 'Lots of fog off Sudhuk.'

'You're not going in again through the southern channel — in the dark, under sail?'

He laughed his thin, harsh laugh. 'No one sees the Malgas because I hide behind Sudhuk — just like a big spook.'

Johaar was there with the laughs. 'And you look like a spook with your knife and your Standard Police Issue revolver.'

Kim chipped in: 'Man, that silencer!'

I had not noticed the heavy.38 calibre Smith and Wesson police revolver, undoubtedly stolen, in Koeltas's belt. It had attached an ancient bulbous Maxim silencer. He was naive enough to think a revolver can be silenced; in fact only a hand-loaded, locked-breech weapon can. I, too, laughed — for my own reasons.

Koeltas joined in. 'You goddamned gamat!'

'Ag, Gawd, we've got to have our fun,' roared Johaar.

Koeltas drew the weapon. 'Softy, softly, if Shelborne is on the reef.'

'I also got something to show you,' Johaar told me. He slipped below and came back carrying a NATO-type FN Rifle.

He grinned proudly. 'This is good. Automatic.'

'I know,' I answered grimly, taking it from him. 'Where did you steal this?'

He was amused. 'My brother is a fisherman at Walvis Bay… Soldiers are there… you know…'

'I don't. What else have you hidden away below?'

'Not much.' They grinned at my concern. 'You like a pistol for tonight or a knife — special knife?'

'A knife.'

Special it was — a long sealing-knife, tapered and razor-sharp.

Two hours later we were off Sudhuk, very close in. Koeltas seemed unafraid of the swell bursting heavily against the towering cliff. The water was deep and we had not yet got the protection of Dolphin Head, Sudhuk's northern extremity. The fog was closing but not as quickly as Koeltas would have liked. He stood listening, tense, head forward. I knew that if the Bells he dreaded were sounding it would be hopeless to expect him to enter the bay and inspect the wreck.

Conversation had fallen away to whispers — out of deference, it seemed, to Mercury.

'What about a leadsman?' I asked Koeltas anxiously. The shoreline was death: he seemed overconfident.

'Nine fathoms for two cables out to sea here,' he replied curtly.

I saw the light then.

It was burning at the seaward side of the cliff near where I had calibrated the.Hydrodist. That seemed a long time ago, somehow. I took Koeltas's arm and gestured silently.

'Shelborne!' he muttered under his breath. 'Shelborne — he clears out from Mercury when he makes the Bells so that they don't kill him along with us. Now he camps on Sudhuk, waiting.'

Kim and Johaar stared balefully at the flickering light.

Kim said under his breath, 'He'll see us and start the Bells.'.

Koeltas's nerves were iron. Take the ship in — close! I want to feel the breakers.'

Johaar slid forward and ropes ran silently through their well-greased sheaves. The schooner creaked as she turned shorewards. I caught my breath, she drove in so far. The water was already white before she resumed her previous course.

Kim doused the binnacle light. He steered by the soles of his feet and the wind on his neck. 'Fog thick behind Sudhuk,' he consoled me. 'Here, the wind blows it away.'

Furtively, noiselessly, every nerve on edge, we inched past Dolphin Head under Shelborne's fire. To see us, he would have had to lean right over the edge. Then Kim put the helm down until we were moving almost due east, following the cliffs beyond the point. The fog thickened, as he had predicted, and we turned north again, presumably into the channel. It was not the moisture of fog I felt when my hand clenched the mizzen shrouds — it was the sweat of cold fear and of colder anger and delayed shock at Shelborne's callous murder of the fifteen men of my crew with whom I had worked and lived. At that moment, I could not think of anything else.

We stole across the bay.

A lighter patch may have been the loom of Mercury. We stole past it, making for a point known only to Koeltas's instinct. As stealthily, Koeltas brought the Malgas to anchor off the Hottentots' Reef — I do not know how he found it. Then the sails were off her, the anchor down, and she hung shrouded in the fog, as invisible as her namesake, the mad goose, over a shoal of pilchards.

Johaar and Kim were first at the wrecked bridge of the Praying Mantis after a quick pull in the dinghy from the Malgas.

'Look!' exclaimed Johaar, grinning and shining his torch cautiously. 'Shelborne not come.'

The diamonds gleamed balefully in their black matrix in the compass housing.

Kim sighed. 'Plenty of women now. Bad women.'

Johaar held the lodestone. 'This plays racehorse games with the compass.' The needles followed it as he moved it around. 'See?'

Koeltas nodded at the diamonds. 'It cost him plenty, that little trick.'

'It still is going to cost him plenty — plenty,' I replied savagely. 'Have you been inside the Glory Hole?'

'It is a bastard,' Koeltas summed up. 'No. Much better caves on the shore.' That is what Shelborne had said, too. The fleas in them make you scratch like a mongrel. But good hiding-places.'

He didn't elaborate.

'Let's take a look at the rest,' I said. I did not care for the business of stripping my own ship for the benefit of these professional wreckers, but that was the bargain. Koeltas had already prised off some of the bridge instruments with a jemmy. The afterhold was a shambles, but three Scuba suits and their air bottles were intact. There was no sign of the Hydrodist. My cabin was half-flooded, but I managed to extract a shirt or two and another pair of trousers. My drawing instruments and parchment chart blanks were under six feet of water. Johaar unearthed a case of whisky and some clothes. We could not penetrate the flooded engine-room, but a submerged arm in a white overall like Sven used to wear told its own tale.

As I stood staring at it, Koeltas said, 'If I don't kill Shelborne, then you do, eh?'

I wondered whether it was as simple as that. Then Koeltas froze. Like the tail-end of a muttered curse, the strange reverberation came across the water from Mercury, not loud as before, but soft, sinister. Maybe it was the sight of the dead arm or the dead ship, or maybe I, too, had become infected by fear of the Bells, but I was in the dinghy as soon as the others. We set all sail for Angras Juntas.

Angras Juntas — the bay of the meeting of the captains! After a day's beat down the Sperrgebiet from Mercury, the dune-backed bay named by the first Portuguese navigators was in sight. Malgas tacked between two guano islands, one of which, Kim pointed out with relish, was called Black Sophie Rock in honour of a dead-and-gone Cape Town whore. The sea was dead calm.

'Jesus!' Koeltas was not exclaiming at the scenery, — he was seeing the Mazy Zed for the first time. The floating diamond mine — cumbersome, unshiplike, like a Showboat stage prop of a Mississippi sidepaddler — lay in a welter of foam from her own pumps. Forrad — or aft, it was hard to tell which — a massive derrick cradled what looked like a tanker's oiling hose. This was to link the ship to the sea-bed like an umbilical cord. Around it, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, clustered a collection of steel masts, crudely red-leaded platforms and thick pipes; crowning all was a curious object like a hopper bin. This conglomeration took up half the vessel's length; flat-like living quarters, broken by high ventilators, occupied the rest. Along the superstructure was painted, in garish six-foot letters, Mazy Zed.