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 Twenty-man-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! Twenty-man-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 be 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 foot-pad 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 Twenty-man-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 river-bed 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 river-bed at the point where the telegraph line took the short cut across the loop in the road. The copper wires were strung over the river-bed 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 mail-train 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.
