“Then you must follow him - by car. You must drive up there.”
“Why?” Tracey stared at her, puzzled by this strange insistence, noticing the dried tears and the wild look in Ruby’s eyes.
“It’s an eight-hour drive.”
“I’ll tell you. Can we use Johnny’s room?”
Tracey hesitated, remembering the unmade bed. Then the hotel manager came into the lobby and Tracey turned to him with relief. The Beechcraft bucked suddenly and dropped a wing, instinctively Johnny corrected the lunge with stick Al and rudder then glanced quickly at his instrument panel for an explanation. There was none to be found there, so he looked over the wing and for the first time noticed the dust on the great plains below him; it was moving low against the earth in long streamers like mist, and the setting sun turned it to motive and old gold. With a prickle of alarm he scanned the horizon ahead, and saw it coming down from the north like a great moving range of blue mountains.
Even as he watched it, it rolled across the low sun, turning it into a sullen red orb. The light in the cockpit changed to a weird glow as though the door to a furnace had been thrown open.
Again the Beechcraft crabbed awkwardly as another gust of high wind hit her, and at the same moment the radio crackled and came alive.
“Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker this is Alexandra Bay Control, come in please.” The voice of the controller was almost unintelligible with storm static. Johnny reached for the transmit switch of the radio, then stopped his hand. He thought quickly. He could guess they were trying to reach him to cancel his flight approval. That was a big northern boiling down out of the desert. They would abort his flight, and divert him out of the path of the storm.
He checked his wrist watch. Twenty minutes” flying time to
Cartridge Bay. No - he was flying full into the eye of the wind, say twenty-five or thirty minutes. Quickly he searched the coast on his port side and saw the long white lines of surf stretched ahead into the thickening purple gloom. The coast was still clear, it might stay that way for another thirty minutes.
“Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker this is Alexandra Bay. I say again - come in. Come in. Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker.” The agitation in the controller’s voice came through over the static.
There was a fair chance of getting in to Cartridge Bay, racing the storm and winning. He could edge out to the westward and come in from the sea, pick up Kingfisher’s riding lights as a beacon and sneak in under the leading edge of the dust clouds. If he missed he could turn and run with the wind for home. The radio was hissing and crackling angrily now, the controller’s voice sometimes lost in the interference, sometimes coming through strongly.
Cancelled. I say again: your flight approval is cancelled. Do you read me, Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker.
Come in, please. - Beaufort force seven. - visibility in the storm area - I say again, there is nil visibility. ” The norther would roar for days now and with it would blow away his last chance of working the gap at Thunderbolt and Suicide.
Johnny switched off the radio, cut off contact with Control and immediately it was strangely quiet in the cockpit. He settled himself down into the bucket seat, and eased open the throttles, watching the needles creep up around the dials of the rev counters.
Now he was down to an altitude of three hundred feet and the
Beechcraft was leaping about like a hooked marlin.
He was flying her on instruments for outside the cockpit it was completely dark. He could not see his own wingtips, but above him the stars still showed. He was riding the vanguard of the storm, and the dust clouds were ahead, racing to meet him and blanket the flare path at Cartridge Bay.
Every few seconds he darted a quick glance ahead, hoping to pick up the lights, then his eyes flew back to the instrument panel.
“Now,” he thought grimly. “It should be now. I should be over the grounds. Thirty seconds more and I’ll know I’ve missed her.” He looked up again, and there was Kingfisher dead ahead.
All her lights were ablaze, a burning beacon of hope in the darkness. She appeared to be riding easily, for the wind had not yet had time to thrash the sea into a frenzy.
He flashed over her, seeming to graze her superstructure in passing, and now he was searching anxiously for the glow of the flare path on the land beyond.
It came up as a path of lesser darkness in the absolute blackness of the night. He steadied on course towards it, watching it change to a long double line of oil-burning flares that smoked and fluttered in the wind.
He flew her in fast, high above the stall and the shock of touchdown threatened to tear the undercarriage off her.
Then he was jolting and trundling down the earthen runway with the flares flashing past his wingtips.
“Lance, old man,” he murmured thankfully, “that was a very shaky do!”
The wind hum against the body of the car, and the snarl of rubber on tarmac as the Mercedes snaked through the bends of the twisting mountain road were sounds to match the racing of Tracey’s blood and the hammer of her heart.
She drove with an inspired abandon, watching the bends leap out at her out of the darkness, sensing the massive crags and cliffs that hung over the road and blotted out half the night sky.
The silver sheet of Clanwilliam Lake reflected the stars, and then was left behind. Down from the mountains she went an dover the
Olifants River to make a brief fuel stop at Vanrynsdorp and scan the road map anxiously in the light of the gasoline pumps. She read with a sinking feeling the mileage figures printed along the little red ribbon of the road, and knew that for her each mile would be multiplied by her own urgency.
Then once more behind the wheel she faced the vast emptiness of
Namaqualand - and sent the Mercedes flying across it.
There is some type of machine, I don’t know how it works, but it filters out the diamonds. Benedict had it installed at Las Palmas-“
The headlights were puny little white shafts, and the road a long blue smear that went on endlessly. Tracey lit a cigarette with one hand, hearing Ruby’s voice again in her ears.
“ - There is one diamond amongst them. He called it
“The Big
Blue”. Benedict says it’s worth a million,-” Tracey was not sure she believed it. It was the enormity of the treachery and deceit that she could not accept.
“- The Italian, the Captain, be careful of him. He works for
Benedict. The other one also - Hugo - they are all in it.
Warn Johnny.” Benedict! Weak, spoiled Benedict, the playboy, the spendthrift. Could he have planned and carried this through?
A gust of wind hit the car from the side, taking her unawares, pushing the Mercedes off the tar on to the gravel.
Tracey fought to hold the skid. Dust and gravel roared out in a cloud from under the wheels. Then she was back on the road, hurtling northwards.
“Warn Johnny! Warn Johnny!” Benedict van der Byl sat in his father’s chair, in his father’s house, and he was alone. His loneliness ate deep into the fibres of his whole being. Before him on the stinkwood desk stood a crystal glass and a decanter.
The brandy was no comfort, its warmth in his throat and belly seemed only to accentuate the icy cold of his loneliness. His fantasy showed him as a hollow man. He thought of himself as a husk, filled only with the cold of melancholia.
He looked about the room with its dark panelled woodwork and he smelled the musty dead smell. He wondered how many times his father had sat in this chair alone and lonely. Lonely and afraid as the cancer ate him alive.
He stood up and moved listlessly about the room, touching the furniture as if he were trying to communicate with the man who had lived and died here. He moved across and stood in front of the curtained windows. The rug was new. It replaced the other that they had been unable to clean.
“The Old Man had the right idea.” He spoke aloud, his voice sounding strange in his own ears.
