Ring.
He packed the binoculars carefully into their leather case, and hung them behind the chartroom door. Then he clambered swiftly down the steel ladder to deck level, moving with catlike grace despite the heavy rubber hip boots he wore.
“I’ll take her here for a while,” he told the man at the winch controls. He spoke in Afrikaans, but his accent was shaded with the German of South West Africa.
Wide-shouldered under the blue fisherman’s jersey, he worked with smooth economic movements. His hands on the winch control were rough and reddened by wind and sun, for his skin was too fair to weather.
The skin of his face was also red, and half-boiled, peeling so there were pinky raw places on his cheeks and black scabs on his lips.
The hair that hung out under his cap was white as bleached sisal, and his eyelashes were thick and colourless, giving him a mild near-sighted look. His eyes were the palest of cornflower blue, yet without being weak and watery as those of most albinos; they were slitted now, as he judged the roll and dip of the boat - engaging the clutch to meet the movement, or pulling on the drum brake.
“Skipper!” A shout from the bridge above him.
“Ja.” Hugo did not allow his attention to waver as he replied, “What is it?”
“Gale warning! There is a northerly buster building up.”
And Hugo grinned, pulled on the brake and shut the throttle.
“All right, clean up. Cut the purse rope, let the fish go free.”
He turned and swarmed up the ladder to the bridge, and went to his chart table.
“It will take us three hours to get in position,” he muttered aloud, leaning over the chart, then he barged out on to the wing of the bridge again to chase up his crew.
They had cut the purse rope on the net, allowing the net to fall open like a woman’s skirt, and the fish were pouring out, a dark spreading stain through the gap. Two men had the pressure hose on, washing loose fish from the deck into the sea, others were slamming the hatch-covers closed.
Within forty minutes Wild Goose was running south under full throttle to take up her waiting station.
The diamond coast of South West Africa lies in the belt of the Trades. The prevailing wind is the southeaster, but periodically the wind system is completely reversed and a gale comes out of the north, off the land.
It is a Scirocco-type wind like the “Khamsin” of the Libyan desert, or the “Simoom’of Tripoli.
It was the same searing dry wind out of the desert, filling the sky with brooding dust and sand clouds, smothering everything beneath a hellish pall like the smoke from a great battlefield.
The dust clouds were part of the design, the Ring had taken account of them when they planned the system - for the north wind lifted into the sky Such a quantity of mica dust that the radar screens of the diamond security police were cluttered and confused, throwing up phantom echoes and making it impossible to pick up the presence of a small airborne object.
Turn Back Point was three miles inland, and sixty miles north of the Orange River. The name was given by the first travellers, and expressed their views on continuing a journey northwards. Those old travellers had not known that they + stood in the centre of an elevated marine terrace, an ancient beach now lifted above the level of the sea, and that it was the richest prospect of an area so diamond-rich that it was to be ring-fenced, patrolled by jeep and dog and aircraft, guarded by gun and radar, a laager so secure that a man leaving it would have to submit to X-ray, and take nothing out with him but the clothes he wore.
At Turn Back Point was one of the four big separation plants where all the gravel from the big Company’s workings from miles around was processed. The settlement was comparatively large, with plant, workshops and stores, and accommodation for five hundred men and their families.
Yet not all the Company’s efforts to make it attractive and liveable could alter the fact that Turn Back Point was a hell-hole in a savage and forbidding desert.
Now with the north wind blowing, what had been unpleasant before was almost unbearable. The buildings were tightly sealed, even the joints around the windows and doors were plugged with cloth or paper -
and yet the red dust seeped in to powder the furniture, the desks, the bed linen, even the interior of the refrigerators, with a thin gritty film. It settled in the hair, was sugary between the teeth, clogged the nostrils - and with it came that searing heat that seemed to dry the moisture from the eyeballs.
Outside the dust was a red glittering fog which reduced visibility to a dozen yards. Men who were forced out into that choking dry soup wore dust goggles to protect their eyes, and the mica dust covered their clothing with a shiny coating that glittered even in that dun light.
Beyond the settlement a man moved now through the fog, carrying a small cylindrical object. He leaned forward into the wind, moving slowly away into the desert. He reached a shallow depression and went down into it.
Setting his burden on the sand, he rested a moment. Then he knelt over the cylinder. He appeared monstrous under his leather jacket and cap, his face covered by goggles and a scarf.
The fibre-glass cylinder was painted with yellow fluorescent paint. At one end was a transparent plastic bubble which housed an electric globe, at the other end was a folded envelope of rubberized nylon material attached to the cylinder by a stainless steel coupling, and linked to the coupling was a small steel bottle of hydrogen gas.
The whole assembly was eighteen inches long, and three inches in diameter. It weighed a few ounces more than fifteen pounds.
Within the cylinder were two separate compartments.
The larger contained a highly sophisticated piece of transistorized electronic equipment which would transmit a homing signal, light or extinguish its lamp on long-distance radio signal command, and also at command it would control the inflow of hydrogen gas into the nylon balloon through the connecting coupling.
The smaller compartment held simply a sealed plastic container into which were packed twenty-seven diamonds.
The smallest of these stones weighed fourteen carats, the largest a formidable fifty-six carats. Each of these stones had been selected by experts for colour, brilliance, and perfection. These were all first-water diamonds, and once they were cut they would fetch in the open market between seven hundred thousand and a million pounds - depending on the skill of the cutting.
There were four members of the Ring at Turn Back Point. Two of them were long service and trusted diamond sorters employed behind the guarded walls of the processing plant. They worked together, to check each other, for the Company operated a system of employee double check which was completely useless when there was collusion.
These men selected the finest stones and got them out of the plant.
The third member of the Ring was a diesel mechanic in the Company workshops. It was his job to receive ant] assemble the equipment which arrived concealed in a marked drum of tractor grease. He also packed the stones into the cylinder and passed it on to the man who was now kneeling out in the desert, preparing to launch the cylinder into the swirling dust fog.
His final check completed, the man stood up and went to the lip of the depression and peered out into the dust storm. At last he seemed satisfied, and hurried back to the yellow cylinder. With an incisive twist of the bevelled release ring he opened the valve on the bottle of hydrogen gas. There was a snakelike hiss, and the nylon balloon began to inflate. The folds of material crackled as they filled. The balloon lifted, eager to be gone, but the man restrained it with difficulty until the balloon was smooth and tight. He let go, and the balloon with its dangling cylinder leapt into the sky, and almost instantly was gone into the dust clouds.
The man stood with his face lifted to the dark furnacered sky. His goggles glinted blindly, but his attitude was one of triumph, and when he turned away he walked lightly with the step of a man freshly released from danger.
“One more package” he promised himself. “Just one more, and I’ll pull out. Buy that farm on the Olifants River, do a bit of fishing, take a shooting trip every year-” He was still dreaming when he reached the parked Landrover and climbed into the driver’s seat. He started the engine, switched on the headlights, and drove slowly down the track towards the settlement.
The sign on the rear of the departing Land-Rover was in white paint so that it showed clearly through the haze of red dust.
