A Twist of Sand

"Lieutenant-Commander Peace took an old merchant ship to sea in -- when was it? April, '45. You remember the old Phylira, Captain? Fancy Georgiadou calling an old wreck like that after an ocean nymph! But then the Greeks, even old Georgiadou, are a sentimental lot, are they not?"

Automatically I poured myself another drink. So the Phylira was calling from her grave -- and the twenty-seven men of the crew with her! Icy fear gripped me. So Stein knew about the Phylira, and had found out that I was her captain. By all the rules I was dead -- the Phylira sailed from Cape Town for Tangier and was never heard of again.

"The old Phylira's engines were as bad as they come, weren't they Macfadden?" taunted this evil incarnation of a past which I thought I had buried alongside NP I on the sand-bars of Curva dos Dunas.

Stein laughed.

"A brilliant submarine commander as the skipper of a rotten old merchantman, and a brilliant engineer to keep her old engines going -- -just as long as they needed to be kept going, eh ?"

There was pure murder in Mac's eyes. Stein knew he had us. He didn't even bother about the Luger any more.

"What did you do with her, Captain Peace? How can a man make away with a whole ship and twenty-seven men without a trace ? And how did he disappear himself without a trace, to come back with a small fortune? Georgiadou would be terribly interested to know. No one could have been more heart-broken than that unsentimental shipowner about the loss of an old ship, for which he got more than her value in insurance, anyway. If he hadn't been so cut up about the loss of the Phylira, I'd have sworn he'd paid an enterprising, ruthless captain like yourself to get rid of her. But he still mourns the loss of the Phylira, Captain Peace. I'm sure he'd be only too keen to renew acquaintance with his erstwhile captain and the Scottish engineer. Tangier, too. What was her cargo ?"

"If you know all this, I'm sure you've seen Phylira's manifests," I rapped out harshly.

"Of course I have," he said smoothly. "Canned fruit, brandy, wool -- nothing in the least exceptional. But why Tangier? I ask myself. And in '45 when anyone and anything shady could be bought in Tangier."

I'd often wondered how Georgiadou took the loss of his packet of uncut stones, all £200,000 of them. From what I heard later, Georgiadou, under his respectable merchant trading cloak in Adderley Street, was the biggest rogue south of the Congo in organising the smuggling of uncut diamonds from South West Africa, Sierra Leone and West Africa through Tangier mainly to Iron Curtain countries. I can still see the look on the Greek's face when he handed me over a tiny parcel, carelessly done up in a small cardboard carton with the King's Ransom "round-the-world "label still on it.

"You will deliver these to Louis Monet in the ' Straits' bar in the Rue Marrakesh," he said incisively. "There are over £200,000 worth of uncut diamonds in that parcel. Many a man has had his throat cut for a tenth of that amount, Captain, so don't get any ideas about private enterprise, see?"

It was Georgiadou's own remark which sowed the seed.

Far to the south of Curva dos Dunas, off the mouth of the Orange River, the old Phylira wheezed along. It was a close night and my cabin was hot and stuffy from the dry wind coming off the land. Somewhere beyond the night out to starboard across the water the searchlights would be playing back and forth across the barbed wire which guards the Forbidden Area of the Diamond Coast. As I glanced out through the porthole, I could almost imagine I could see their reflection against the night sky. In that barren wilderness the policemen sent to patrol the desert go mad; they never see a woman in two years' shift of duty; they don't worry about the seaward side which the devilish sandbars make so safe.

Except for Curva dos Dunas, I thought grimly. That thought triggered the whole idea off. What in God's name was I doing skippering a floating wreck and relegating myself to the status of a pariah when I held sole title to the only harbour, except Walvis Bay, from Cape Town to Tiger Bay? I and I alone knew of the existence -- and more particularly, the navigational hazards -- of a harbour which either Rhodesia or South Africa would give millions of pounds to own. Curva dos Dunas was mine, but no government would even listen to a sailor's tale without proof. Proof! I could picture myself in the cool arched corridors of the Union 'Buildings in Pretoria being shifted -- ever more impatiently -- from one civil servant to another, fobbed off with evasive, ever-less polite answers to a man they would consider a crackpot -- unless. Unless I had a ship of my own. A ship! I would have to go back and chart the place in case the tides and currents had closed or altered it since I sank NP I. I must have a ship. My own ship.