‘Jump!’ Jamie yelled.
He dived over the side of the raft, and a giant wave picked him up and shot him towards the beach at the speed of a catapult. He was caught in the grip of an element that was powerful beyond belief. He had no control over what was happening. He was a part of the wave. It was over him and under him and inside him. His body was twisting and turning and his lungs were bursting. Lights began to explode in his head. Jamie thought, I’m drowning. And his body was thrown up onto the sandy shore. Jamie lay there gasping, fighting for breath, filling his lungs with the cool, fresh sea air. His chest and legs were scraped raw from the sand, and his clothes were in shreds. Slowly, he sat up and looked around for Banda. He was crouching ten yards away, vomiting seawater. Jamie got to his feet and staggered over to him.
‘You all right?’
Banda nodded. He took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up at Jamie. ‘I can’t swim.’
Jamie helped him to his feet. The two men turned to look at the reef. There was not a sign of their raft. It had been torn to pieces in the wild ocean. They had gotten into the diamond field.
There was no way to get out.
Behind them was the raging ocean. Ahead was unbroken desert from the sea to the foothills of the distant, rugged, purple mountains of the Richterveld escarpment, a world of kloofs and canyons and twisted peaks, lit by the pale moon. At the foot of the mountains was the Hexenkessel Valley – ‘the witch’s cauldron’ – a bleak wind trap. It was a primeval, desolate landscape that went back to the beginning of time itself. The only clue that man had ever set foot in this place was a crudely printed sign pounded into the sand. By the light of the moon, they read:
VERBODE GEBIED SPERRGEBIET
Forbidden.
There was no escape towards the sea. The only direction left open to them was the Namib Desert.
‘We’ll have to try to cross it and take our chances,’ Jamie said.
Banda shook his head. ‘The guards will shoot us on sight or hang us. Even if we were lucky enough to slip by the guards and dogs, there’s no way to get by the land mines. We’re dead men.’ There was no fear in him, only a resigned acceptance of his fate.
Jamie looked at Banda and felt a sense of deep regret. He had brought the black man into this, and not once had Banda complained. Even now, knowing there was no escape for them, he did not utter one word of reproach.
Jamie turned to look at the wall of angry waves smashing at the shore, and he thought it was a miracle that they had gotten as far as they had. It was two a.m., four hours before dawn and discovery, and they were both still in one piece. I’ll be damned if I’m ready to give up, Jamie thought.
‘Let’s go to work, Banda.’
Banda blinked. ‘Doing what?’
‘We came here to get diamonds, didn’t we? Let’s get them.’
Banda stared at the wild-eyed man with his white hair plastered to his skull and his sopping trousers hanging in shreds around his legs. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You said they’re going to kill us on sight, right? Well, they might as well kill us rich as poor. A miracle got us in here. Maybe a miracle will get us out. And if we do get out, I damned well don’t plan to leave empty-handed.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Banda said softly.
‘Or we wouldn’t be here,’ Jamie reminded him.
Banda shrugged. ‘What the hell. I have nothing else to do until they find us.’
Jamie stripped off his tattered shirt, and Banda understood and did the same.
‘Now. Where are all these big diamonds that you’ve been talking about?’
‘They’re everywhere,’ Banda promised. And he added, ‘Like the guards and the dogs.’
‘We’ll worry about them later. When do they come down to the beach?’
‘When it gets light.’
Jamie thought for a moment. ‘Is there a part of the beach where they don’t come? Someplace we could hide?’
‘There’s no part of this beach they don’t come to, and there’s no place you could hide a fly.’
Jamie slapped Banda on the shoulder. ‘Right, then. Let’s go.’
Jamie watched as Banda got down on his hands and knees and began slowly crawling along the beach, his fingers sifting sand as he moved. In less than two minutes, he stopped and held up a stone, ‘I found one!’
Jamie lowered himself to the sand and began moving. The first two stones he found were small. The third must have weighed over fifteen carats. He sat there looking at it for a long moment. It was incredible to him that such a fortune could be picked up so easily. And it all belonged to Salomon van der Merwe and his partners. Jamie kept moving.
In the next three hours, the two men collected more than forty diamonds ranging from two carats to thirty carats. The sky in the east was beginning to lighten. It was the time Jamie had planned to leave, to jump back on the raft, sail over the reefs and make their escape. It was useless to think about that now.
‘It will be dawn soon,’ Jamie said. ‘Let’s see how many more diamonds we can find.’
‘We’re not going to live to spend any of this. You want to die very rich, don’t you?’
‘I don’t want to die at all.’
They resumed their search, mindlessly scooping up diamond after diamond, and it was as though a madness had taken possession of them. Their piles of diamonds increased, until sixty diamonds worth a king’s ransom lay in their torn shirts.
‘Do you want me to carry these?’ Banda asked.
‘No. We can both –’ And then Jamie realized what was on Banda’s mind. The one caught in actual possession of the diamonds would die more slowly and painfully.
‘I’ll take them,’ Jamie said. He dumped the diamonds into the rag that was left of his shirt, and carefully tied it in a knot. The horizon was light grey now, and the east was becoming stained with the colours of the rising sun.
What next? That was the question! What was the answer? They could stand there and die, or they could move inland towards the desert and die.
‘Let’s move.’
Jamie and Banda slowly began walking away from the sea, side by side.
‘Where do the land mines start?’
‘About a hundred yards up ahead.’ In the far distance, they heard a dog bark. ‘I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about the land mines. The dogs are heading this way. The morning shift is coming to work.’
‘How soon before they reach us?’
‘Fifteen minutes. Maybe ten.’
It was almost full dawn now. What had been vague, shimmering patterns turned into small sand dunes and distant mountains. There was no place to hide.
‘How many guards are on a shift?’
Banda thought for a moment. ‘About ten.’
‘Ten guards aren’t many for a beach this big.’
‘One guard is plenty. They’ve got guns and dogs. The guards aren’t blind, and we’re not invisible.’
The sound of the barking