compressed air.
At this hour of the morning the shipyard was deserted, and wisps and tendrils of sea mist drifted about Kingfisher’s bulk.
Standing fifty feet above the dry dock, still wolfing cold spaghetti, Sergio urinated over the rail - deriving a simple honest pleasure from the long arching stream and the tinkle of liquid striking the concrete far below.
He clumped back into his cabin, and looked down fondly on his two sleeping Valkyries while he finished the last of the spaghetti. Then he wiped his fingers carefully on his chest hair and called to them gently.
“Come, my kittens, my little doves, the time for play she has passed - the time for work she commences.” With Latin gallantry he bundled them into a taxi at the dockyard gates, pressing on to each of them a lusty kiss, a banknote, a bottle of Chianti, protestations of deep affection, and the promise of another party next Friday night.
He picked his way back through the dockyard jungle of machinery and buildings, lighting a long black cigar and inhaling smoke pleasurably until he came in sight of Kingfisher and halted with surprise and annoyance. There was a big honey-coloured Bentley parked near the gangway that led up to Kingfisher’s deck. He resented visits from the Company bosses, especially this one, and especially at this ridiculous hour on a Monday morning.
The hose spiralled down into greenness, and they followed it down holding hands. Tracey was still a little nervous. This was not like the Mediterranean, a warm blue friendly embrace of waters to welcome the diver - it was the wild Atlantic, coldly menacing, green and untamed. It frightened her, and Johnny’s hand gave her comfort.
Their Draeger demand valves repeated their breathing in a singing metallic wheeze, and icy leaks and rivulets kept finding their way into the cuffs and neck of Tracey’s rubber suit.
Sixty feet below the surface Johnny paused, and peered into the glass window of her mask. He grinned at her, his mouth distorted by the bulky mouthpiece, and she gave him a thumbs-up sign. They both looked upwards. The surface was silvered like an imperfect mirror, and the black cigar shape of the boat was lapped in strange light. The hose and anchor chain pierced the silver ceiling and hung down into the shady green depths.
Johnny pointed downwards, and she nodded. They put their heads down, pointed their flippers to the surface, and still hand in hand they paddled steadily towards the sea bed.
Tracey was aware of a crackling hissing sound now, and from out of the greeny blackness below them scudded clouds of silver bubbles twisting and writhing towards the surface.
She strained her eyes downwards, following the line of the hose, and slowly out of the murk materialized the black rubber-clad forms of the two men working at the end of the hose; they appeared weird and mystical like black priests performing a satanical mass.
She and Johnny reached the sea bed and hung just above it, a little way off from the two men on the hose. Johnny indicated the depth gauge that he wore like a wrist watch.
It showed a depth of 120 feet. Then he turned and by a hand signal showed her the direction of the reefs.
They were in a valley between these long peaked underwater ridges of black rocks, the same reefs that Tracey had seen from the air.
There was a distinct pull of water as the current drifted at right angles to the direction of the reefs.
Johnny squeezed her hand, and then pulled her down.
They lay on their bellies on the floor of the sea, and Johnny scooped a handful of the white sand, washed it quickly so that the smaller particles were carried away in a cloud on the current, then he showed her the coarse gravel which remained. Again he grinned, and she returned his smile.
Still leading her by the hand, he swam slowly towards the two men working on the hose, and stopped to watch them.
Attached to the end of the hose was a rigid steel pipe two inches in diameter, and twenty feet long - although now only half of its length was visible above the sand bottom. The two divers were forcing it down through sand and gravel to reach bedrock. The hose itself was attached to a compressor on the deck of the boat which was generating a vacuum in the hose and sucking up the sand and gravel as the steel pipe was forced downwards.
They were prospecting the Thunderbolt and Suicide field. Taking these two-inch samples at 500-foot intervals to ascertain the depth of water, the thickness of the overburden, and the content of the gravel beds. They were also mapping and plotting the reefs, so that by the time Kingfisher arrived they would have a fairly clear picture of the topography and aspect of the field. They would know where to begin dredging, and roughly what to expect when they did.
So far the results had endorsed Johnny’s most optimistic expectations. There was a good thick catchment of gravel in the gullies between the reefs. As he had expected, the heavier gravels had been laid down in the gullies closest to the gap between Thunderbolt and Suicide, and the smaller and lighter gravels had been carried further. In some of the gullies the gravel beds were fifteen feet deep, and the types of stone present were all highly promising. He had isolated garnet, jasper, ironstone, beryl chips and titanium dust.
However, the conclusive and definite proof had also come up through that two-inch hose out of the depths.
They had already pulled the first diamonds from the Thunderbolt and Suicide fields. When you considered the odds against finding a stone in a two-inch sample at 500-foot centres and that payable gravel contained one part diamond in fifty million, it was exciting and encouraging that they had already recovered four diamonds. Small stones, to be sure, not one of them more than half a carat, but diamonds for all that, and some of them of excellent quality.
One of the men on the hose turned and gave Johnny a flathanded cut-out sign. The pipe was on bedrock. Johnny nodded and jerked a thumb upwards, and drawing Tracey with him, started for the surface.
They climbed the ladder over the survey boat’s counter, moving clumsily under the weight of the air bottles strapped to their backs, but there were willing hands to help them aboard and strip off the heavy equipment, and unzip the clinging rubber suits.
Tracey accepted a towel gratefully from one of the crew, and while she tilted her head to dry her sodden mane of hair, she looked across half a mile of green sea to the two white whale-backed islands with their attendant clouds of seabirds. The wave bursts on the cliffs sounded like distant artillery, or far thunder.
“God, this is a wild and exciting place.” Her voice bubbled with excitement as she scrubbed at her hair. “It makes one come alive,” Johnny understood her feelings, it was the forbidding restless sea and the harsh land that promised danger and adventure. He was about to reply, but the two hose men came aboard at that moment, the taller of them spitting out his mouthpiece and letting it fall to his chest.
“We’ll move up to the next point, if it’s okay by you, Mr. Lance?”
The man pulled off his mask and hood, exposing white-blond hair and a sun-broiled face.
“Fine, Hugo,“Johnny agreed, and watched approvingly as Hugo Kramer gave the orders to get the anchor and the hose up before taking Wild
Goose seawards to her next prospecting point. Johnny had been reluctant to charter Wild Goose as the prospecting vessel and as the service boat for Kingfisher. He did not know Hugo Kramer, and Benedict van der Byl’s insistence on the man had made him suspicious.
However, it was natural that they should use a skipper from the van der Byl fleet and Johnny was now prepared to admit he had been wrong. Kramer was an intelligent and willing worker, resourceful and trustworthy, a fine seaman who handled Wild Goose with all the skill it would need to bring her alongside Kingfisher in a heavy sea. His unfortunate physical appearance Johnny hardly noticed any more, although the original shock of that pink face, white hair and those blind-looking eyes had been considerable.
Tracey was not so charitable. The man made her uneasy.
There was a wild-animal ferocity about him, a barely controlled violence. The way he looked at her sometimes made her skin prickle.
He did it now; turning back from issuing his orders he ran his eyes over her body. In the black silk costume her good round breasts showed at their best, and Hugo Kramer looked at them with those white-fringed bland eyes. Instinctively she covered them with the towel, and it seemed as though his lips twitched with amusement as he turned to
Johnny.
“They tell me this dredger of yours is something special, Mr. Lance?”
“She is, Hugo. Not like the other half-baked barges and bastardized conversions that have been tried by other
