and his destination.
Having convinced Control of his innocence, and received their permission to continue his flight, he switched off his RIT set, and grimaced at Tracey.
He felt ruffled by this small brush with Olympus. He knew that most of it was professional jealousy. He smarted under the knowledge that he was working ground that the big Company would despise as not sufficiently lucrative to bother about.
Sometimes Johnny dreamed about discovering a fault in a land title, or an error in a survey that had been casually performed seventy years previously before the value of this parched denuded earth had been realized. He imagined himself being able to claim the mineral rights to a few square miles plumb in the middle of the big Company’s richest field. He shivered voluptuously at the thought, and Tracey looked at him enquiringly.
He shook his head, then his line of thought took him on to a further destination.
He banked the aircraft, crossing the coastline with its creamy lines of surf running in on the freezing white sands of the beach.
“What?” She was expectant, receptive to the new tone in his voice.
“Thunderbolt and Suicide,” he said, and she made a small grimace of incomprehension.
“There.” He pointed ahead, and through the light smoke of the sea mist she saw them show bare - white and shiny, like a pair of albino whales.
“Islands?“she asked. “What’s so special about them?”
“Their shape,” he answered. “See how they lie like the mouth of a funnel, with a small opening between them.” She nodded. The two islands were almost identical twins, two narrow wedges of smooth granite, each about three miles long, lying in a chevron pattern to each other - but not quite meeting at the peak. The mighty Atlantic swells bore up from the south and ran into the mouth of the funnel. Finding themselves trapped in this granite corral, the swells reared up wildly and hurled themselves on the cliffs in massive bomb-bursts of spray before streaming out in white foam through the narrow opening between the two islands.
“I can see how Thunderbolt gets its name.” Tracey eyed the wild booming surf with awe. “But how about Suicide?”
“The old guano collectors must have called it that, after they tried landing on it.”
“Guano,“Tracey nodded. “That accounts for the colour.” Johnny put the Beechcraft into a shallow dive, hurtling in low over the green water.
Ahead of them the seabirds rose in alarm, streaming in a long black smear into the sky, the cormorants and gannets whose excreta through the ages had painted the rocks that glaring white.
As they flashed through the gap below the level of the cliffs, Tracey exclaimed, “There’s some sort of tower there look! In the back of the island.”
“Yes,” Johnny agreed. “It’s an old wooden gantry they used for loading the guano into the longboats.”
“ He pulled the Beechcraft up in a climbing turn, gaining height to look down on the two islands.
“Do you see where the surf comes through the gap? Now look beneath the surface, can you see the reefs under the water?” They lay like long dark shadows through the green water, at right angles to the drift of white foam.
“Well, you are looking at the most beautifully designed natural diamond trap in the world.”
“Explain,“Tracey invited.
“Down there,” he pointed south, “are the big rivers. Some of them dried up a million years ago, but not before they had spat the diamonds-they carried into the sea. The tide and the wind has been working them up towards the north for all these ages. Throwing some of them back on the beach but carrying others up this way.” He levelled the Beechcraft out and resumed their interrupted flight northwards.
“Then suddenly they run up against Thunderbolt and Suicide. They are concentrated and squeezed through the gap, then they are confronted by a series of sharp reefs across their path. They cannot cross them - they just settle down in the gullies and wait for someone to come and suck them out.” He sighed like a man crossed in love.
“My God, Tracey. The smell of those diamonds reeks in my nostrils. I can almost see the shine of them through a hundred and sixty feet of water.”
He shook himself as though waking from a dream.
“I’ve been in the game all my life, Tracey. I’ve got the “feel”, the same as a water-diviner has. I tell you with absolute certainty there are millions of carats of diamonds lying in the crotch of Thunderbolt and Suicide.”
“What’s the snag?“Tracey asked.
“The concession was granted twenty years ago to the big Company.”
“By whom?”
“The Government of South West Africa.”
“Why aren’t they mining it?”
“They will - sometime in the next twenty years. They aren’t in any hurry.” They lapsed into silence, staring ahead, though once Johnny clucked his tongue irritably and shook his head still thinking about Thunderbolt and Suicide.
To distract him Tracey asked, “Where do they come from in the first place - the diamonds?”
“Volcanic pipes,” Johnny answered. “There are more than a hundred known pipes in Southern Africa. Not all yield stones, but then some do. New Rush, - Finsch, - Dutoitspan, Bulfontein, - Premier - Mwadui. Great oval- shaped treasure chests, filled with the legendary “Blue Ground” the mother lode of the diamond.”
“There are no pipes here - surely?” Tracey turned towards him in his seat.
“No,” Johnny agreed. “We are after the alluvial stones.
Some of those ancient pipes exploded with the force of a hydrogen bomb, spraying diamonds over hundreds of square miles. Others were submarine pipes that discharged their treasure into the restless sea.
Others of the more passive volcanic pipes were simply eroded away by wind and water and the diamonds were exposed.”
“Then they were washed down to the sea?” she guessed.
Johnny nodded. “That’s right. Over millions of years they were moved infinitely slowly by landslides, floods, rivers and rainwater.
Where all the other pebbles and stones were abraded and worn away to nothingness - the diamonds, four hundred times harder than any other natural substance on earth, were unmarked. So at last they reached the sea and mingled with the others from the submarine pipes, to be laid down by wave action on the beaches, or finally to come up against a place like Thunderbolt and Suicide.” Tracey opened her mouth to ask another question, but Johnny interrupted.
“Here we are. There is Cartridge Bay.” And he pushed the nose of the aircraft down slightly. It was more a lagoon than a bay.
Separated from the sea by a narrow sandspit, it spread away into the treeless waste, an enormous extent of quiet shallow water in tranquil contrast to the unchecked surf that burst on the sandspit. There was a deep water entrance through the sandspit, and a channel meandered across the lagoon to where a cluster of lonely whitewashed buildings sprang up on the edge of the desert.
Johnny banked steeply towards the buildings, and below them flocks of black and white pelicans and pink flamingoes rose in panic from the shallows.
Johnny landed and taxied across to the waiting Landrover with the white lightning insignia of Van Der Byl Diamonds painted on its side.
Lugging the coot box that contained their lunch, Johnny led Tracey to the vehicle and introduced her to his foreman.
Then they climbed in and went bumping down to the buildings on the lagoon. Johnny received from his foreman a report on progress of the work. The buildings had been abandoned by the defunct Atlantis Diamond Company.
Johnny was renovating them to serve as a base for the Kingfisher; a rest and recreation centre for the crew, a radio centre, a refuelling depot and a workshop to handle running maintenance and repairs. In addition he was putting a jetty out into the lagoon for the converted seventy-foot pilchard trawler that would be Kingfisher’s service boat - acting as tender and ferry.
They ran an extensive inspection of the base. Johnny was pleased with the interest Tracey showed, and he
