"Please, let us not attempt to lay the blame at the door of a dead man." Benedict's tone was sanctimonious. "Let us rather try and rectify a grievous situation. When will Kingfisher be ready for sea?

"On the thirteenth of September."

"It had better be." Benedict dropped his eyes to his notes.

"Now, this man whom you have engaged to captain the vessel Sergio Caporetti - let us hear a little about him, please."

"Fifteen years" experience on offsh.o.r.e oil-drilling vessels in the Red Sea.

Three years as Captain of Atlantis Dia.

monds" offsh.o.r.e dredger operating off the West Coast. He's one of the best, no doubt about it."

"All right." Almost reluctantly Benedict accepted this, and consulted his notes. "Now, we have two sea-concession areas. Number 1 area off Cartridge Bay; number 2 some twenty miles north of that. judging by your prospecting results you will elect to work number 1 area first." Johnny nodded, waiting for the next attack to develop.

Benedict sat back in his chair.

"Atlantis Diamonds Ltd went broke working number 1 area. - what makes you think you can succeed where they failed!"

"We've been over this before,"Johnny snapped.

"I wasn't there, remember? Humour me, please. Go over it again.

Quickly Johnny explained that Atlantis Diamonds" costs had been inflated by their method of operation. Their dredgers were not self-propelled but had to be towed by tugs. The gravel they recovered had been stored, taken into Cartridge Bay in bulk, transhipped ash.o.r.e to be processed at a land-based plant. Kingfisher was a self-propelled and self-contained vessel. She would suck up the gravel, process it through the most sophisticated system of cyclone and X ray equipment and dump the waste overboard.

"Our costs will be one quarter those of Atlantis Diamonds," he finished.

"And our loan account is a mere two millions," Benedict murmured dryly. Then he looked towards Mike Shapiro at the bottom of the table.

"Mr. Secretary, please note the following motion - "That this Company proceed to sell the vessel Kingfisher presently building at Portsmouth.

That it then sells all diamond concessions at the most advantageous terms negotiable, and goes into voluntary liquidation forthwith." Have you got that?" It was a direct frontal attack. Clearly if the motion succeeded the Company was worthless. They could not recover the price of the Kingfisher on a forced sale. There would be a shortfall - and Johnny had signed the guarantee.

It was a straight test that Benedict was making. A setting of the lines of battle. Tracey held the balance between Johnny and Benedict.

He was forcing her to declare herself.

Benedict watched her while the motion was put to the vote. He leaned forward in the padded leather chair, a slightly amused smile on the full red lips. Beautifully groomed and tailored, with the grace that wealth and position give to a man and which cannot be counterfeited.

But the clean athletic lines of his body were fractionally blurred by indulgence, and there was a little too much flesh along the line of his jaw that gave him the petulant look of a spoilt child.

Tracey voted with Johnny Lance, not hesitating a second before lifting her hand. Returning Benedict's smile levelly, and watching her brother's smile alter subtly - become wolfish, for Benedict did not like to lose.

"Very well, my darling sister. Now we know how we stand at least." He turned easily to Johnny. "I presume you wish me to continue with my duties in London." For years now Benedict had handled the London sales of the Company's stones. It was an unexacting task, which the Old Man had judged within his capabilities.

"Thank you, Benedict," Johnny nodded. "Now, I have a proposal to put to the meeting - "That the Directors of this Company, as a gesture of solidarity, agree to waive their rights to Directors" fees until such time as the Company's financial position is on a more sound footing."" It was a puny counter-attack, but the best he could mount at the moment.

Take-off was in the first light from Youngsfield, and Johnny swung the twin-engined Beechcraft on to a northerly heading, leaving the blue ma.s.sif of Table Mountain on the left hand.

Tracey wore an anorak over her rose-coloured shirt, and the bottoms of her denim pants were tucked into soft leather boots, her dark hair caught at the nape of her neck with a leather thong.

She sat very still, looking ahead through the aircraft's windshield at the dawn-touched contours of the land ahead.

At the bleak lilac and purple mountains and the green lioncoloured plains spreading down to meet the mists that hung over the cold Atlantic.

In her stillness Johnny sensed her excitement and found it infectious.

The sun exploded over the horizon, washing golden and bright over the plains, and tipping the mountains with flame.

"Namaqualand."Johnny pointed ahead.

She laughed with excitement, like a child at Christmas, turning in the seat to face him.

"Do you remember-" She began, then stopped in confusion.

"Yes," said Johnny. "I remember." They landed before noon on a rough airstrip bulldozed out of the wilderness. There was a Land-Rover waiting to take them down to the beach to inspect the progress of the workings.

There was little remaining along the thirty-seven-mile Admiralty strip worth working. It was a clean-up and shutdown operation.

When the reigning "King Canute" handed over the parcel of diamonds that made up the month's recovery, he was apologetic.

"You took out all the plums, Johnny. It's not like the old days."

Johnny prodded the pathetic pile of small, low-grade stones with his forefinger.

"No, it's not," he agreed. "But every little bit helps." They climbed back into the Beechcraft and flew on northwards.

Now they pa.s.sed over areas where the desert had been scratched and torn over wide areas.

The tractors had left centipede tracks in the soft earth.

"Ours?" asked Tracey.

"I wish they were. We'd have no worries then. No, all this belongs to the big Company." Johnny checked his watch, automatically comparing the progress of the flight to his estimates. Then he lifted the microphone from the R/T set.

"Alexandra Bay Control. This is Zulu Sugar Peter Tango Baker." He knew that they had him on the radar plot, and were watching him - not because they were worried about his safety, but because he was now over the Proclaimed Diamond Area of South West Africa - that vast jealously guarded tract of nothingness.

The radio crackled back at him instantly, demanding his permit number, his flight plan, querying his intentions and his destination.

Having convinced Control of his innocence, and received their permission to continue his flight, he switched off his RIT set, and grimaced at Tracey.

He felt ruffled by this small brush with Olympus. He knew that most of it was professional jealousy. He smarted under the knowledge that he was working ground that the big Company would despise as not sufficiently lucrative to bother about.

Sometimes Johnny dreamed about discovering a fault in a land t.i.tle, or an error in a survey that had been casually performed seventy years previously before the value of this parched denuded earth had been realized. He imagined himself being able to claim the mineral rights to a few square miles plumb in the middle of the big Company's richest field. He shivered voluptuously at the thought, and Tracey looked at him enquiringly.

He shook his head, then his line of thought took him on to a further destination.

He banked the aircraft, crossing the coastline with its creamy lines of surf running in on the freezing white sands of the beach.

"What?" She was expectant, receptive to the new tone in his voice.

"Thunderbolt and Suicide," he said, and she made a small grimace of incomprehension.

"There." He pointed ahead, and through the light smoke of the sea mist she saw them show bare - white and shiny, like a pair of albino whales.

"Islands?"she asked. "What's so special about them?"

"Their shape," he answered. "See how they lie like the mouth of a funnel, with a small opening between them." She nodded. The two islands were almost identical twins, two narrow wedges of smooth granite, each about three miles long, lying in a chevron pattern to each other - but not quite meeting at the peak. The mighty Atlantic swells bore up from the south and ran into the mouth of the funnel. Finding themselves trapped in this granite corral, the swells reared up wildly and hurled themselves on the cliffs in ma.s.sive bomb-bursts of spray before streaming out in white foam through the narrow opening between the two islands.

"I can see how Thunderbolt gets its name." Tracey eyed the wild booming surf with awe. "But how about Suicide?"

"The old guano collectors must have called it that, after they tried landing on it."

"Guano,"Tracey nodded. "That accounts for the colour." Johnny put the Beechcraft into a shallow dive, hurtling in low over the green water.

Ahead of them the seabirds rose in alarm, streaming in a long black smear into the sky, the cormorants and gannets whose excreta through the ages had painted the rocks that glaring white.

As they flashed through the gap below the level of the cliffs, Tracey exclaimed, "There's some sort of tower there look! In the back of the island."

"Yes," Johnny agreed. "It's an old wooden gantry they used for loading the guano into the longboats."

" He pulled the Beechcraft up in a climbing turn, gaining height to look down on the two islands.

"Do you see where the surf comes through the gap? Now look beneath the surface, can you see the reefs under the water?" They lay like long dark shadows through the green water, at right angles to the drift of white foam.

"Well, you are looking at the most beautifully designed natural diamond trap in the world."

"Explain,"Tracey invited.

"Down there," he pointed south, "are the big rivers. Some of them dried up a million years ago, but not before they had spat the diamonds-they carried into the sea. The tide and the wind has been working them up towards the north for all these ages. Throwing some of them back on the beach but carrying others up this way." He levelled the Beechcraft out and resumed their interrupted flight northwards.

"Then suddenly they run up against Thunderbolt and Suicide. They are concentrated and squeezed through the gap, then they are confronted by a series of sharp reefs across their path. They cannot cross them they just settle down in the gullies and wait for someone to come and suck them out." He sighed like a man crossed in love.

"My G.o.d, Tracey. The smell of those diamonds reeks in my nostrils. I can almost see the shine of them through a hundred and sixty feet of water."

He shook himself as though waking from a dream.

"I've been in the game all my life, Tracey. I've got the "feel", the same as a water-diviner has. I tell you with absolute certainty there are millions of carats of diamonds lying in the crotch of Thunderbolt and Suicide."

"What's the snag?"Tracey asked.

"The concession was granted twenty years ago to the big Company."

"By whom?"

"The Government of South West Africa."

"Why aren't they mining it?"

"They will - sometime in the next twenty years. They aren't in any hurry." They lapsed into silence, staring ahead, though once Johnny clucked his tongue irritably and shook his head still thinking about Thunderbolt and Suicide.

To distract him Tracey asked, "Where do they come from in the first place - the diamonds?"

"Volcanic pipes," Johnny answered. "There are more than a hundred known pipes in Southern Africa. Not all yield stones, but then some do. New Rush, - Finsch, - Dutoitspan, Bulfontein, Premier - Mwadui. Great oval-shaped treasure chests, filled with the legendary "Blue Ground" the mother lode of the diamond."

"There are no pipes here - surely?" Tracey turned towards him in his seat.

"No," Johnny agreed. "We are after the alluvial stones.

Some of those ancient pipes exploded with the force of a hydrogen bomb, spraying diamonds over hundreds of square miles. Others were sub-marine pipes that discharged their treasure into the restless sea.

Others of the more pa.s.sive volcanic pipes were simply eroded away by wind and water and the diamonds were exposed."

"Then they were washed down to the sea?" she guessed.

Johnny nodded. "That's right. Over millions of years they were moved infinitely slowly by landslides, floods, rivers and rainwater.

Where all the other pebbles and stones were abraded and worn away to nothingness - the diamonds, four hundred times harder than any other natural substance on earth, were unmarked. So at last they reached the sea and mingled with the others from the sub-marine pipes, to be laid down by wave action on the beaches, or finally to come up against a place like Thunderbolt and Suicide." Tracey opened her mouth to ask another question, but Johnny interrupted.

"Here we are. There is Cartridge Bay." And he pushed the nose of the aircraft down slightly. It was more a lagoon than a bay.

Separated from the sea by a narrow sandspit, it spread away into the treeless waste, an enormous extent of quiet shallow water in tranquil contrast to the unchecked surf that burst on the sandspit. There was a deep water entrance through the sandspit, and a channel meandered across the lagoon to where a cl.u.s.ter of lonely whitewashed buildings sprang up on the edge of the desert.

Johnny banked steeply towards the buildings, and below them flocks of black and white pelicans and pink flamingoes rose in panic from the shallows.

Johnny landed and taxied across to the waiting Landrover with the white lightning insignia of Van Der Byl Diamonds painted on its side.

Lugging the coot box that contained their lunch, Johnny led Tracey to the vehicle and introduced her to his foreman.

Then they climbed in and went b.u.mping down to the buildings on the lagoon. Johnny received from his foreman a report on progress of the work. The buildings had been abandoned by the defunct Atlantis Diamond Company.

Johnny was renovating them to serve as a base for the Kingfisher; a rest and recreation centre for the crew, a radio centre, a refuelling depot and a workshop to handle running maintenance and repairs. In addition he was putting a jetty out into the lagoon for the converted seventy-foot pilchard trawler that would be Kingfisher's service boat acting as tender and ferry.

They ran an extensive inspection of the base. Johnny was pleased with the interest Tracey showed, and he enjoyed answering her questions for his own enthusiasm was high. It was nearly two o'clock before they had finished.

"How are the watchtowers coming?"Johnny asked.

"All up, ready and waiting." And suddenly Johnny had a two-edged inspiration.

"Might as well go and have a look." He made it casual.

"Okay, I'll fetch the Land-Rover," the foreman agreed.

"I know the way." Johnny put him off. "You go and get your lunch."

"It's no trouble-" the foreman began, caught Johnny's frown, cut himself short, then glanced at Tracey. "Yeah!

Sure! Fine! Okay - here are the keys." He handed Johnny the Land-Rover keys, and disappeared into his own quarters.