“He’s a boss,” the helmsman grunted. “No boss is any good.”
“Hey, you! I am also a boss,” Sergio challenged him.
“Like I said.” The helmsman suppressed a grin.
“I kiss your mother,” Sergio insulted him with dignity, then changed the subject. “I go below now, take over.” Sergio opened the door to the control room with the duplicate key. He closed the door behind him, seated himself at the console and took from his pocket a sheet of paper headed: KAMINIKOTO SECONDARY RECOVERY PROGRAMME.
Ten minutes later he came out of the control room and locked the door.
“Kammy, I love you,” he chuckled as he closed off the watertight doors that isolated this deck from the one above.
He wound the locking bars into position to ensure that he was not interrupted by one of his own crew.
From the tool cupboard on the bulkhead he selected a pair of set spanners and went through into the conveyor room It took him twenty minutes to unscrew the heavy, deeply threaded bolts that secured the hatch. It had been designed to resist easy entry - a deterrent to casual investigation, but at last Sergio could lift the steel plate off its seating.
He eyed the small square opening with distaste, and reflexively sucked in his pendulous belly. The hatch had not been designed to afford passage to a man of his dimensions.
He took off his cap and jacket and hung them on the cock of one of the pipes, then he ground out his cheroot under his heel and brushed back the hair from his forehead with both hands, checked that his flashlight was in his pocket, and committed himself to the hatch.
He wriggled and kicked, and grunted and built up a heavy sweat for five minutes before he had squeezed through into the conveyor belt tunnel. He squatted on his haunches, panting heavily and flashed his torch along the tunnel.
Above his head the conveyor belt carrying the gravel ran smoothly, but the residual heat from the driers made it unbearably hot. He began to crawl rapidly to the end of the tunnel.
From the inside it was impossible to tell, without measuring, that the conveyor belt tunnel was shorter by twelve feet than the external length.
The end of the tunnel was false, and beyond it was a secret cubicle only just large enough to house Kaminikoto’s equipment through which all the gravel passed on its journey to the X-ray room.
The Japanese genius for miniaturization was demonstrated by the equipment in this secret cubicle. It was an almost exact copy of the sorting equipment in the main x-ray compartment - except that it had been scaled down to one tenth of the size without affecting its efficiency; in addition, this miniature plant could discriminate in the diamonds it selected. It would not allow a stone over four carats to pass through, and it screened out fixed percentages of the smaller stones - allowing only a proportion of the smaller and less valuable diamonds to proceed through into the main X-ray room.
It was an amazing piece of electronic engineering, but Sergio was unimpressed as he lay on his side in the cramped hot tunnel and began laboriously to unscrew another smaller plate in the false bulkhead.
At last it was open, and he reached through the opening; after a few seconds of fiddling and groping and heavy breathing he brought out a stainless steel cup with a capacity of about two pints. There were clamps on the cup to hold it in position below the chute under
Kaminikoto’s machine.
The metal cup was heavy, and Sergio placed it carefully on the deck beside him before propping himself on an elbow and shining the flashlight into the cup and took something out of it, stared at it a moment then dropped it back.
“By the blood of all the martyrs!” he gasped with shock, and then immediately contrite for his blasphemy he crossed himself awkwardly with the hand holding the flashlight.
Then again he shone the torch into the cup, and shook his head in disbelief. Quickly he pulled a canvas drawstring bag from his pocket, and lying on his side he carefully poured the contents of the cup into the bag, drew the string tight and stuffed it back into his pocket where it made a big hard bulge on his hip like a paper sack of rock-candy. He clamped the stainless steel cup back into position, screwed the coverplate over the opening, and backed away down the tunnel on hands and knees.
He very badly needed a cheroot.
Four hours later Hugo Kramer shinned up the ladder on to
Kingfisher’s deck while his helmsman took the trawler down to leeward to wait for him.
Sergio shouted down from the bridge.
“Johnny he has gone?” “Ja!” Hugo shouted back. “He should almost be in Cape Town by now. That Beechcraft is a fast plane.”
“Good.”
“How did it go with you?” Hugo countered.
“Come up - I’ll show you.” Sergio led him into his cabin behind the bridge and locked the door carefully. Then he went to each of the portholes and drew the curtains across them, before crossing to his desk and switching on the reading lamp.
“Sit down.” Sergio indicated the chair opposite the desk.
“You want a drink, or something?”
“Come on,” Hugo grated impatiently. “Stop mucking around, let’s have a look.”
“Ah!” Sergio looked at him sadly. “You Germans, you are always too much hurry. You cannot rest, enjoy life-“
“Cut the crap!” Hugo’s pate eyes were on his face, and Sergio was suddenly aware that this man was dangerous, like a tiger-shark. Coldly dangerous, without malice or passion. Sergio was surprised he had not noticed it before. I must be careful with this one, he thought, and he unlocked the drawer of his desk and took out the canvas bag.
He loosened the drawstring and poured the diamonds on to the blotter. The smallest was the size of a match head - perhaps point one of a carat, and the poorest quality was black and granular-looking, ugly little industrial stones, for Kammy had been careful not to take out only the best and so distort the Kingfisher’s recovery as to arouse suspicion. There were hundreds of these tiny crystals and chips which would fetch a few pounds in the industrial market; but there were other stones in the full range of quality and shapes and sizes - as big as green peas, or as marbles, and a few bigger than that. Some of them were perfect octahedron crystals, others water- worn, chipped or amorphous in shape.
They formed a dully glittering pile in the centre of the blotter, in all perhaps five hundred diamonds, yet all of these were dwarfed by one single stone that lay in the centre of the pile, rising out of it the way Mount Everest rises from her foothills.
There are freak diamonds so large or unusual that they become legend. Diamonds who have their own names and whose histories are recorded and invested with romance.
The great “paragons” - stones of the first water whose cut and finished weight exceed one hundred metric carats.
Africa has produced many of them: the Jonker Diamond, a 726-carat rough cut to a brilliant of 125 carats that hangs about the throat of the Queen of Nepal; The Jubilee Diamond, a superb 245-carat cushion of unearthly fire fashioned out of 650-carat rough - then the biggest of them all, a monstrous rough stone of 3,106 carats, the Cullinan which yielded not one, but two paragons. The Great Star of Africa at 530
carats and The Cullinan II at 317 carats. Both these stones grace the
Crown jewels of England.
Now on Sergio Caporetti’s desk lay a rough stone which would add yet another paragon to the list.
“Have you weighed it?” asked Hugo, and Sergio nodded.
“How much?”
“Three hundred and twenty carats,” Sergio said softly.
“Jesus!” whispered Hugo, and Sergio crossed himself quickly to dissociate from the use of names.
Reverently Hugo Kramer leaned forward and picked up the big diarriond. It filled the palm of his hand, the cleavage lane that formed its base was smooth and clean as an axestroke. There were bigger diamonds in history, but this diamond had a special feature which would set it in a niche of its own and endow it with peculiar
