The Skeleton Coast Contract, page 11
I was hunched beside the fire, drinking South African brandy, when Janga returned. She was still exhilarated by the bioscope and told me the plot in detail. The feature turned out to have been High Noon. Stripping out of her dress and petticoats, she gave me a graphic imitation of how Gary Cooper had hitched up his guns and stalked down Main Street.
She was, perhaps, miscast as Cooper, but before long I did well as the bad guy. Trouble was, Cooper kept giggling.
Chapter Twenty
Two nights later Janga and her sister drove me down to Rehoboth in a ramshackle truck. The sister was not as handsome as Janga but equally lissome and inclined to mirth. The two of them stacked crates around me in the back of the ancient vehicle, and we went lurching off to the south. Rehoboth had been chosen because I could catch a predawn train there to Johannesburg.
When we stopped outside Rehoboth, I dropped off the tail gate and asked Janga if she and her sister, Lily, would like to live in Luanda. The Portuguese racial policy in Angola is more relaxed, and mixed marriages or liaisons cause little comment there.
“Yankee baby,” said Janga laughing, “if I could get to Luanda, I’d be a queen the rest of my days. My pretty tail would be worth a fortune up there!” And she and sister Lily whooped with glee. I agreed that it was a valuable appendage, and said that before long she and Lily would get, through Dr. Botha, passports, exit visas, and enough money to live for a year. Until they got their tails warmed up. They both kissed me soundly, got back in the truck, and I waved at their scarlet turbans as the asthmatic truck turned around and headed back toward Windhoek.
I went as close to the outskirts of the darkened little town as I dared, then crouched behind a screen of thorn bushes. Hugging my cheap suitcase with the new passport in it. When the train came hooting down from the north on its narrow-gauge rails, I walked through echoing streets to the little station with its one light over the ticket window. A sleepy agent sold me a ticket to Johannesburg, and I boarded a second-class compartment and watched the empty plateau of South-West Africa go sliding by outside. After dawn I went swaying down to the toilet compartment and had a glimpse of the natives sprawled on the bare board seats of the Kaffir-class in the next car.
It was early afternoon when we pulled into the cavernous, echoing station in Johannesburg. The second-class compartments had filled up at the intervening stops, sleepy Boers and their sulking, flaxen-haired children, and I picked out a certain man in the next compartment. He was drably but punctiliously dressed, in a high collar and a dark suit, and seemed to be a man of substance. Reading his Africaans newspaper with little regard for the activity around him.
When we halted in the Johannesburg station, I was in the corridor next to the platform door. Steam hissed, the porters flung the doors open, and two men in square-toed shoes entered the car before anyone was allowed off. I reversed to the compartment where the solid citizen was sitting and propositioned him swiftly. The currency in my hand got his attention, and I said he could have it by just calling a telephone number and telling whoever answered that a man from Windhoek had a problem.
He looked me over, glanced at the money again, and put it in his vest pocket. Went back to reading his paper. I turned back down the corridor whistling, swinging my suitcase, and was stopped and arrested by the two meaty blokes from Special Branch. They were polite and flanked me out of the huge station to an unmarked sedan. At a monolithic-looking building I was led through several halls to a basement office, fingerprinted, and escorted to a solitary confinement cell. No charge was placed.
Chapter Twenty-One
I was held incommunicado in the windowless cell for thirty-six hours. Several times I asked the dour turnkey to see if he couldn’t help me contact the U.S. Consul-General’s office, but all he gave me was grunts. When no one showed up, I had to assume that the oaf on the train had swung with my money, neglecting the phone call. I was not interrogated but was under constant surveillance through narrow apertures set behind overhead lights that were never turned off.
Late in the afternoon of my second day in jail, I was removed from the cell and escorted back to the charge desk. Without comment the uniformed officer behind the grill gave me a large manila envelope that held my wallet and other valuables. I checked them and signed a receipt, watching the other man. This one was big, in plainclothes, and he was where the power resided.
“No charge has been lodged against you,” said the uniformed cop briskly, “but your presence in this country is considered undesirable. Therefore, you will remove yourself from the Republic of South Africa within forty-eight hours.”
I lighted a little cigar. “That’s impossible. You have not returned my passport.”
The big man in plainclothes tossed three dark green U.S. passports onto the polished table. That was a trifle embarrassing because they were all mine. Two of them I had brought ashore from the Elbe in a waterproof wrapping. They were exactly alike except that one had a forged entry permit to South Africa. The third had been sent to me through Dr. Botha in Windhoek; it had been on me when I was arrested and bore a different name from the other two. Same picture, though.
Bad news. Botha had probably been tipped to the Special Force political police, and the other two passports being in Johannesburg made it worse. They had been taken from me in the desert, when the Magon Bushmen turned enemy. Someone had been in hot pursuit. I stared at the three passports, the wall clock ticked, and the two South African policemen watched me.
“Take one of them, Mr. Gall,” suggested the plain-clothesman. “No matter which. It will get you out of the country if you use it fast enough. If you don’t, I promise a long prison term.”
I chose the one with the forged entry permit, tucked it into my inside jacket pocket. “Anything else?” I asked, and when neither of them answered, I walked down the echoing hallway to the street entrance. It was raining outside, and I turned my coat collar up and joined the crowds leaving the business district.
Sitting at the counter of a coffee bar, cradling the cup to warm my hands, I reflected that I was becoming everybody’s stalking horse. First, my own agency had fed me the big con and crossed me up, and now these Boer cops were turning me out. I finished my coffee and tried to check into a hotel. No dice. Then another and another. All classes, including boarding houses. The polite clerks glanced at my passport and regretted.
I walked in the rain for three hours while the great city emptied. Johannesburg is a desolate metropolis after dark, and its sidewalks seem to shake under your feet. This may be only psychological, because of the enormous honeycomb of shafts and galleries you know are under those streets. By midnight I had doubled and crisscrossed every way I knew and was sure that any pursuit had been thrown off.
Heartened by this knowledge, I lengthened stride around a corner and was surrounded and buffeted by a group of people on the sidewalk. When I had recoiled, ready to run, I saw that they were all women. Milling round the garishly lighted entrance to a basement nightclub. Another look convinced me that they were well-dressed, upper-class women carrying placards and banners on which rain had obliterated the message…
Puzzled, I leaned into a doorway. A rampant Parent-Teacher’s Association protest, at this time of night, before the sleazy club? Then I noticed two other things almost simultaneously. Parked beyond the opposite corner was a plain sedan with its four male occupants watching the silent group of women. The occupants of the car had to be members of the Special Branch police. And the orderly women all wore Black Sashes.
They were members of the mother’s and housewife’s group that had for thirteen years been protesting the injustice of South Africa’s apartheid policies. They keep turning up everywhere, without warning, to make their silent protests while wearing the mourning sash. I turned back around the corner, away from the Special Branch car, wishing I could flip the ladies a parade-ground salute. But I was drenched, hungry, and tired of trying to find a hole to hide in.
Twenty minutes later I broke into a closed patrol station through a back window. Inside, kneeling behind the cash register, I found the night telephone number of the U.S. Consul-General in the directory, and dialed it. The duty officer came on with a yawn, and I gave him the code name and said I had a May-Day. When he had checked my code name out, the duty officer was considerably more alert.
“My God, don’t come here!” he whispered. “There’s a cordon of fuzz around the building now. You’re the hottest thing since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.”
“Unhunh. Now I want somebody to pick me up here and I mean right away.” I gave him the address of the station, and he said he would try. That it was late, etc.… Might take some time…
“Listen, you stupid horse’s ass, I’ve been walking in the rain all night. I’m wet and tired. If you don’t have somebody here in half an hour, I’m going to the home of the editor of The Argus Press and dump this whole operation. Do you understand what that will mean?”
“Be somebody there immediately. Black Volkswagen,” burbled the Ivy League type at the other end. “Right away…”
When the Volkswagen stopped at the corner twenty minutes later, I walked out of the shadows and got in it. The driver shifted gears, and we went rolling away in a tinny clatter. I stretched out as much as I could and rubbed at the back of my neck with both hands.
“Do you have someplace to take me?” I asked, and the driver nodded. He was in his late twenties and drove expertly. Also, he had been drinking; I had probably mined a party for him. That seems to be my mission in life.
“How far to the meet?” I asked.
“About eleven miles. Here, got a note for you.”
He handed me a sealed envelope and got a flashlight from the glove compartment. The note was brief and unsigned; it stated that Durnburg, Consolidated’s huge diamond-mining barge, was missing from her mooring below Lüderitz. The vessel did not respond to her call signals, and the radio-telephone connections between Lüderitz and Capetown had been jammed with emergency messages for several hours. Units of the South African Navy were heading north at flank speed, and aircraft were searching the sea between Lüderitz and the Orange River. The weather in the area had not been severe at the time of Durnburg’s disappearance.
I flicked the flashlight off, put the message in the ashtray, and burned it.
“I want a message delivered verbatim to the agency man in your office. You’ve had a drop or two. Can you remember it?”
The driver nodded emphatically. “Indeed I can, Uncle. I also improvise sonnets and furnish kindling by the small sack.”
I shook my head and grinned, beginning to relax for the first time. He was wafting out fumes of raw brandy and solemnly putting me on.
“Okay, Nephew. The goods we have misplaced can leave the Skeleton Coast only by sea, if they haven’t already gone that route. We need some elements of the Atlantic Fleet off that coast as soon as possible. The Dutch tug Elbe, under charter to us, can receive coded messages…”
When I paused, he rattled the message back to me intact. I nodded, and we hummed on toward the outskirts of Johannesburg. Soon we entered open country. The driver seemed to have a detailed knowledge of all the possible routes, because three times we whipped off the main road to bypass inspection stations. I asked if the police stopped cars with whites in them, and he said sometimes. You could never be sure.
We turned off the highway a few minutes later and slowed down a tree-shaded lane. A large, darkened house loomed at the end of the lane, but we turned off into a moonlit pasture. The field had recently been mowed; I could smell the cut grass. The Volkswagen went bouncing over its sward and around a paddock and barn. A lightplane was waiting, and the driver stopped the little car and let me out.
“Give me ten minutes to get clear, Uncle?” he requested, and I nodded.
“You’ll deliver the message?”
“Verbatim,” he said. “And luck.”
I slammed the Volkswagen door and watched him drive back out of the field and go humming toward the highway. I hoped his girl was still receptive when he got back to the party, because some of those South African lasses are smashers. A big, balding man had moved out of the bam and was standing by the near wing-tip of the lightplane. He said good evening, that I had a friend waiting in the cabin.
I walked around the tail section and opened the flimsy door. Alan Blanchard was sprawling in the small back seat. He said, “Howdy, howdy. How is the fearless old sport, now reclaimed from the Kalahari wastes?”
“Don’t speak to me, you miserable bastard,” I replied without rancor, and inched into the seat beside the pilot. He started the engine and, when the prop was idling, leaned over me to check the door. He was wearing tailor-cut, expensive country clothes, and eased the throttle forward. The little plane rolled across the dark pasture and he hauled it off skillfully, skimming over the treetops along the lane.
Blanchard handed a bottle over my shoulder, and I had a belt of it. Jack Daniel’s. The affluent-looking pilot refused a drink and, when he was at 4,000 feet, began to trim the plane.
Alan said that the bloke at the wheel was Claes Schmidt, that they had flunked out of Princeton together, long ago. It seemed possible. Something else clicked into place. Claes Schmidt was not only a ranking government official in the Republic of South Africa, but the agency’s station chief in Johannesburg. We hummed on to the northwest.
As we flew along, without lights, Blanchard explained that he had had no choice in double-crossing me. Even though I had recruited him for the operation. He had flown to New York, en route to joining the Dutch tug Elbe in The Havre. Three high agency officials had knocked on the door of his Plaza Hotel suite a few hours before he was to catch a cab to the airport, and had instructed him. When he protested, they had ordered him to do it their way or return to the ranch. So he had gone along.
The panic scene on the beach had been staged by the agency for my benefit. After I had gone ashore with Levesque and van der Groot, Blanchard had followed with a party of ten Dutch seamen. The Ovambo tribesmen with me had been in on the joke all the time; they had handed over the tins of diamonds to Alan and his Dutch friends while we were watching the commotion on the beach, and an exact duplicate load of weighted tins had been put in the Land Rover.
The automotive units on the beach, the vans and the cars, had all been rented, and the Consolidated Mines insignia put on them with temporary decals. The offshore cruiser had been Elbe’s own. After seizing the diamond tins, Alan and his Dutchmen had opened each one, removed several pounds of gemstones, and replaced them with small transmitters that had a battery-powered life of nearly four hundred hours.
The implanted transmitters singly had a limited signal strength, but with seventeen of them grouped, a distance potential of over a thousand miles. All were sending on the same frequency. When the tins were resealed, Blanchard and his crew had buried them in the sand dunes not far from our landing point. Then he and his Dutchies had gone back aboard Elbe, leaving three local agents to stand distant vigil on the cache.
Yesterday, again under cover of heavy fog, Blanchard and the Dutchmen had landed on the beach and found the diamond treasure gone. The native lookout had not seen the tins removed. No suspicious shipping had entered that coastal area, or any road traffic from the land side.
“What I think, sport,” said Alan, winding up his report, “is that there is a wild card amongst all them spades. A black fellah boy who speaks English real good…”
I wanted to tell him how right he was, but didn’t. “No matter, we’ve got what we wanted. Whoever engineered the steal has the diamonds back again and they have to get clear with them. But the diamonds are broadcasting. They are, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Blanchard. “We could probably have picked their signal up from the tug, but I wasn’t about to give that Dutch skipper the frequency until you, or somebody, told me to.”
I nodded, and behind me he sighed and had another belt of the sour-mash whiskey. He was right, but the delay in monitoring might mean the diamonds were out of our reach. At dawn we landed and refueled at a strip outside Davignab, in South-West Africa. I was nervous on the ground because I knew if we got arrested in the Protectorate, I was going to prison for a long time. We took off again, climbing to get over some mountains 6,000 feet high, and let down again over the narrow coastal area.
Refueling again at Garub, we flew on until nearly noon. Then our country-gentleman pilot went down on the deck and landed below Swakopmund like a feather. Claes Schmidt seemed to be a man who could hold his own in any company. We got out on the beach, unloaded several carbines, light machine guns, and the electronic equipment. I thanked Schmidt, and he waggled a careless thumb at us and took off again, banking back to the southeast.
He had made the whole flight seem like a piece of cake, but it hadn’t been. Alan began calling Elbe on the transceiver, but it was twenty minutes before the tug replied. Then their powerful transmitter boomed in so loud that the Texan’s face flinched and he held the transceiver away from his ear.
He was ordered to keep his transmit button on so Elbe could home on it. He did, and in an hour the big tug came over the horizon and sent a boat in to pick us up.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When we were aboard the tug, I went up to the wheelhouse and thanked Captain Brinker. He was bluff and cordial as always, and when I asked if his Sparks could monitor a certain frequency, he nodded and led the way to the radio shack. The one-legged Dutch operator wheeled around on his stool, after I had given him the frequency, and dialed swiftly. He picked up a pounding signal, went past it, and came back. Switched to fine tuning and his little room crammed with banks of lighted dials was filled with a strong, pulsing signal.
Leaning forward, he lifted his earphones and spoke over his shoulder. “An automatic transmission. Unless it comes from a very high-powered station, within a hundred miles of here. I think it is local and seaborne.”
