LITMIR.BIZ

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there were hills and jungle, but here, over twenty square miles, there was flat rocky ground which was almost desert and amongst the tropical scrub only this one thorn bush, perhaps because there was water deep beneath its roots, had grown to the height of a house and could be picked out from many miles away.

      The bush grew more or less at the junction of three African states. It was in French Guinea but only about ten miles north of the northernmost tip of Liberia and five miles east of the frontier of Sierra Leone. Across this frontier are the great diamond mines around Sefadu. These are the property of Sierra International, which is part of the powerful mining empire of Afric International, which in turn is a rich capital asset of the British Commonwealth.

      An hour earlier in its hole among the roots of the great thorn bush the scorpion had been alerted by two sets of vibrations. First there had been the tiny scraping of the beetle’s movements, and these belonged to the vibrations which the scorpion immediately recognized and diagnosed. Then there had been a series of incomprehensible thuds round the bush followed by a final heavy quake which had caved in part of the scorpion’s hole. These were followed by a soft rhythmic trembling of the ground which was so regular that it soon became a background vibration of no urgency. After a pause the tiny scraping of the beetle had continued, and it was greed for the beetle that, after a day of sheltering from its deadliest enemy, the sun, finally got the upper hand against the scorpion’s memory of the other noises and impelled it out of its lair into the filtering moonlight.

      And now, as it slowly sucked the morsels of beetle-flesh off its feeding pincers, the signal for the scorpion’s own death sounded from far away on the eastern horizon, audible to a human, but made up of vibrations which were far outside the range of the scorpion’s sensory system.

      And, a few feet away, a heavy, blunt hand, with bitten finger nails, softly raised a jagged piece of rock.

      There was no noise, but the scorpion felt a tiny movement in the air above it. At once its fighting claws were up and groping and its sting was erect in the rigid tail, its near-sighted eyes staring up for a sight of the enemy.

      The heavy stone came down.

      ‘Black bastard.’

      The man watched as the broken insect whipped in its death agony.

      The man yawned. He got to his knees in the sandy depression against the trunk of the bush where he had been sitting for nearly two hours and, his arms bent protectingly over his head, scrambled out into the open.

      The noise of the engine which the man had been waiting for, and which had signed the scorpion’s death warrant, was louder.

      As the man stood and stared up the path of the moon, he could just see a clumsy black shape coming fast towards him out of the East and for a moment the moonlight glinted on whirling rotor blades.

      The man rubbed his hands down the sides of his dirty khaki shorts and moved quickly round the bush to where the rear wheel of a battered motor-cycle protruded from its hiding place. Below the pillion, on either side, there were leather toolboxes. From one of these he extracted a small heavy package which he stowed inside his open shirt against the skin. From the other he took four cheap electric torches and went off with them to where, fifty yards from the big thorn bush, there was a clear patch of flat ground about the size of a tennis court. At three corners of the landing ground he screwed the butt end of a torch into the ground and switched it on. Then, the last torch alight in his hand, he took up his position at the fourth corner and waited.

      The helicopter was moving slowly towards him, not more than a hundred feet from the ground, the big rotor blades idling. It looked like a huge, badly-constructed insect. To the man on the ground it seemed, as usual, to be making too much noise.

      The helicopter paused, pitching slightly, directly over his head. An arm came out of the cockpit and a torch flashed at him. It flashed dot-dash, the Morse for A.

      The man on the ground flashed back a B and a C. He stuck the fourth torch into the ground and moved away, shielding his eyes against the coming whirl of dust. Above him the pitch of the rotor blades flattened imperceptibly and the helicopter settled smoothly into the space between the four torches. The clatter of the engine stopped with a final cough, the tail rotor spun briefly in neutral, and the main rotor blades completed a few awkward revolutions and then drooped to a halt.

      In the echoing silence, a cricket started to zing in the thorn bush, and somewhere near at hand there was the anxious chirrup of a nightbird.

      After a pause to let the dust settle, the pilot banged open the door of the cockpit, pushed out a small aluminium ladder and climbed stiffly to the ground. He waited beside his machine while the other man walked round the four corners of the landing ground picking up and dowsing the torches. The pilot was half an hour late at the rendezvous and he was bored at the prospect of listening to the other man’s inevitable complaint. He despised all Afrikaners. This one in particular. To a Reichsdeutscher and to a Luftwaffe pilot who had fought under Galland in defence of the Reich they were a bastard race, sly, stupid and ill-bred. Of course this brute had a tricky job, but it was nothing to navigating a helicopter five hundred miles over the jungle in the middle of the night, and then taking it back again.

      As the other man came up, the pilot half raised his hand in greeting. ‘Everything all right?’

      ‘I hope so. But you’re late again. I shall only just make it through the frontier by first light.’

      ‘Magneto trouble. We all have our worries. Thank God there are only thirteen full moons a year. Well, if you’ve got the stuff let’s have it and we’ll tank her up and I’ll be off.’

      Without speaking, the man from the diamond mines reached into his shirt and handed over the neat, heavy packet.

      The pilot took it. It was damp with the sweat from the smuggler’s ribs. The pilot dropped it into a side pocket of his trim bush-shirt. He put his hand behind him and wiped his fingers on the seat of his shorts.

      ‘Good,’ he said. He turned towards his machine.

      ‘Just a moment,’ said the diamond smuggler. There was a sullen note in his voice.

      The pilot turned back and faced him. He thought: it’s the voice of a servant who has screwed himself up to complain about his food. ‘Ja. What is it?’

      ‘Things are getting too hot. At the mines. I don’t like it at all. There’s been a big intelligence man down from London. You’ve read about him. This man Sillitoe. They say he’s been hired by the Diamond Corporation. There’ve been a lot of new regulations and all punishments have been doubled. It’s frightened out some of my smaller men. I had to be ruthless and, well, one of them somehow fell into the crusher. That tightened things up a bit. But I’ve had to pay more. An extra ten per cent. And they’re still not satisfied. One of these days those security people are going to get one of my middlemen. And you know these black swine. They can’t stand a real beating.’ He looked swiftly into the pilot’s eyes and then away again. ‘For the matter of that I doubt if anyone could stand the sjambok. Not even me.’

      ‘So?’ said the pilot. He paused. ‘Do you want me to pass this threat back to A B C?’

      ‘I’m not threatening anyone,’ said the other man hastily. ‘I just want them to know that it’s getting tough. They must know it themselves. They must know about this man Sillitoe. And look what the Chairman said in our annual report. He said that our mines were losing more than two million pounds a year through smuggling and I.D.B. and that it was up to the government to stop it. And what does that mean? It means “stop me”!’

      ‘And me,’ said the pilot mildly. ‘So what do you want? More money?’

      ‘Yes,’ said the other man stubbornly. ‘I want a bigger cut. Twenty per cent more or I’ll have to quit.’ He tried to read some sympathy in the pilot’s face.

      ‘All right,’ said the pilot indifferently. ‘I’ll pass the message on to Dakar, and if they’re interested I expect they’ll send it on to London. But it’s nothing to do with me, and if I were you,’ the pilot unbent for

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