A Twist of Sand

"Why not?" she flashed. "Every moment of my life I've slept, eaten, talked beetles. What's so strange about it? My father taught me everything -- and more -- a university ever could. A doctor's degree is a necessary appendage, that's all. It couldn't have been easier. A piece of cake." She lit another cigarette. She came back at me remorselessly.

"Why are you so cagey about this whole landing affair? Why don't you think it's safe?"

"Listen," I rapped out, fast losing patience, for she was so damnably sure of herself and her precious beetle. "Everyone loves this blasted beetle so much, you'd think it was pure gold. You'd think each one of us was acting within the law, when we're just as far outside it as could be. I'm putting you ashore -- illegally -- at an illegal spot on the ú Skeleton Coast. You and Stein have absolutely no right to I be there. You yourself admit it isn't going to be easy. I say so too. I'm aiding and abetting a crime."

She looked at me cynically. "Stein will be paying you well enough."

I couldn't let it go.

"I'm doing this free, gratis and for nothing," I snapped. "I'm not getting a penny for this joyride."

"I don't believe a word of that," she retorted.

Her composure rattled me. What did a hint -- or more --  of the truth matter when it blackened Stein ?

"I've been blackmailed into this trip," I said curtly.

"Blackmailed?" she said incredulously.

So Stein hadn't told her.

"Yes," I retorted. "I'm the sort of man you can blackmail -- tough, self-centred, anything for personal gain. You said so yourself."

I had shaken her.  I rubbed it home.

"You're dealing with tough people. I quote you again. You must expect these things."

She shook her head.  "But . . ."

"There are no buts," I retorted. "If anyone gets word of this trip, you're in it as much as Stein or myself. If anyone is missing for a month from Walvis, or Windhoek -- it's a small place -- the police smell a rat, and they're very good at that. Or someone passes the word to Ohopoho that a white man -- and a white woman -- are in the Skeleton Coast."

"Where's Ohopoho?" she asked.

"It's a God-forsaken spot near the Ovambo border," I said. "It's the headquarters of the one official in the Skeleton Coast. There's an airstrip. He's got a radio-telephone. All he needs is a suspicious buzz and they'll send out a couple of jeeps and a truck to round you up without further ado."

She parried the thrust of my attack by switching her ground.

"I watched you up on the bridge," she said. "I would have said -- for a moment -- that you were almost happy."

I'd learned enough about her in a short while not to fall for that one.

"Thanks," I replied dryly. "A sharp problem in navigation is always prescribed for the patient in the Royal Navy."

The rapier-point flickered.

"Before or after cashiering?"

This woman with the red gold hair certainly knew how to cut across wounds with a scalpel.

She followed up the punch, but this time I was ready for it. Ready, like an old windjammer, under snug canvas for the squall.

"And you left her and followed the course of duty? And made yourself into a human chuck-out, a sort of maritime beachcomber."

"You've got your metaphors mixed," I stabbed back. "What interest is it to you how tough men spend their oil time? If you really want to know, I went to her flat to sleep with her before going on a suicide cruise -- for the last time but I wasn't in the mood. In fact, I never got there."

Stein broke it up. He bustled in carrying a cardboard cylinder. He looked suspiciously at us both, but said nothing. He took a map from the cylinder and spread it out.

Here is my plan," he said briefly.

It was a small map, much smaller than my Admiralty charts, and was headed "Ondangua, World Aeronautical Shark"

Maps have always fascinated me. "I've never seen this map before," I said. It covered an area roughly from the Haonib River (which is really the southern boundary of the Skeleton Coast) to Porto Alexandre in Angola.  It went as far eastwards as the great Etosha Pan, that inland lake where the elephant are counted in thousands and the antelopes thunder by your jeep like the charge' of the Light Brigade.   It showed the Cunene River, international boundary between South West Africa and Portuguese Angola, for hundreds of miles into the hinterland. Stein smirked.

"I'm glad there are some maps of the Skeleton Coast which you haven't seen, Captain Peace. As a matter of interest, you can get this one for five shillings from the Trigonometrical Survey Office in Pretoria."

He put a couple of ashtrays on the corners to hold it down.

He jabbed his finger at a light brown patch on the map below the Cunene.

"That is where I am going."

The map showed a great welter of mountains on the southern side of the great Cunene River marked "Baynes fountains." Some figures in a neat oblong read "7200 feet." Before one reaches the Baynes Mountains there is another huge range of unfriendly mountains marked Hartmannberge.