DIAMOND RAIDERS
by Bob Curby

Chapter 1 ---- UNDER RE-WRITE --- DON'T CRITIQUE AT THE MOMENT ---- watch this space. June 5th 2008

Africa, in an early morning mist is a beautiful sight. The sun rises rapidly and the dawn takes less than 15 minutes. First, the blackness of the night begins to soften into grey, and then a pink glow spreads rapidly, changing to a pale orange just before the golden ball suddenly pops up above the horizon. There is usually a chill in the air, heavy with the smoke of the night-burning charcoal makers, but this does not prevent the birds from bringing in the new day with a cacophony of raucous noise.

Today was such a day. The chill of night was rapidly dispersing in the advancing golden fingers of the rising sun. Three men and two women each in turn rolled over in their sleeping bags, blinked, rubbed their eyes and yawned. Analise Van Rensberg was the first to sit up; a 25-year-old brunette with piercing black eyes and a golden brown skin her European cousins would die for. She was South African, but her mother was Russian and her father was of the Voortrekker stock, originally from the Netherlands.

Although the youngest of the group, she was the one in charge, she gave the orders. It never took anyone long to work out her leadership qualities. An astute business manager in a large departmental store, Analise was a quick thinker with an eye for detail. Many men had tried to get through her steely exterior and had failed. She wasn't an 'iron maiden' nor a virgin, but she was in control, she decided when and who with. There had been men in her life and she had enjoyed many good times, as her diary would show. One such man was Kurt Hoeliche, a South African of German parents, who also sat up in his sleeping bag, stretched and yawned loudly.

He came into Analise's life when his company, the network contractors to the store, sent him into her office to install new wiring for an updated network system in the building. It hadn't been love at first sight; in fact Analise had not even noticed his presence at first. It was just one of those relationships that developed. Kurt had needed to work around her desk and she had moved to another to work, a little irritated at the re-wiring being arranged just when she was at her busiest. She had to return to her desk several times to pick up papers she needed along with other essentials. He always seemed to be right in the way every time she did so, and she lost no time in giving him a verbal beating. He had been polite, but firm, when replying to her and apologising for getting in the way.

He had tried to chat her up and made the same mistake many others before him had made - misjudging her intelligence.
"How about a bit of lunch?" he had suggested with a smile that, he thought, would melt her heart.
"We don't provide lunch for contractors, you can get a sandwich down the road at the bakery in the High Street."
Her reply was deliberate, a sweeping "in your dreams" kind of response.
"I..I was, well just..." Kurt was mumbling and looking for the right words as he watched her departing back.
She was grinning to herself, she found it a little amusing that some men just crumbled when given one of her withering looks. Strangely, there was something about him, she felt somehow that he was worthy of a second look. She walked back and stood almost on top of him as he tried to fit a network socket in the wall.
"Stand up, please," she ordered
Kurt stood up and turned towards her, twiddling a screwdriver in between his thumb and forefinger.
“How much longer to you expect to be?”
“About 40 minutes, then I’ll be out of your way. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”
“I don’t mean just here at my desk; I mean in the building itself.”
She knew exactly where she was going with the conversation, but Kurt had no inkling whatsoever. He couldn’t imagine what the plans were that Analise had, so he just answered the question.
“Oh, we’ll be here a couple of days I reckon; we’ll be out of the building by Friday.”
“OK that’s fine, we appreciate that the work has to be done, and we need the new network system up and running by the weekend. What’s your name?”
“Kurt, ma’am.”
“You may call me Analise, that’s like Anna with Lisa on the end. Kurt, I would like you to meet me here at 5:30 this evening, I think you have earned at least a decent dinner.”

She turned away and walked smartly down the office without even a glance back, leaving a bemused Kurt staring at her departing and very sexy back. Thus started their relationship together. I had been short but steamy and neither had any regrets. Now they were just good friends and business partners. It was her business venture that had brought them out into the dunes and rough scrub of the Namib Desert, and now Kurt was sitting up quite awake. He looked across at Analise as she stretched and yawned.
“Sleep well?”
“Hardly, I hate this. I have never been one for camping.”
Kurt laughed as he dragged himself out of the sleeping bag. He looked over at two other lumps that were just stirring and then back to the smaller lump alongside Analise. Suddenly a black face appeared in the slit at the top and within a blink of an eye the young Zulu woman, Margie was up and standing beside Analise’s sleeping bag. She stretched, moved her head in a circular motion, rotated her shoulders and then, with her feet wide apart, rotated her hips.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that Margie….”
“Oh, why is that Kurt?” she laughed, knowing that it was a trigger to his testosterone.
“You know why, you sexy little beast!”
“Well I have to limber up, sorry if it gets you all hot under the collar – go find a bucket of cold water then!”
“Yeah to chuck on you!” he turned back to the other lumps, “Rafi, Tom – you guys awake yet?”
“Ja” came a sleepy reply, somewhat muffled by the sleeping bag.
Rafi Henderson Villiers, a native of St Helena, stood up, his huge frame almost casting a shadow on the others. His very dark skin glistened in the morning glow of the rising sun. He looked more like a Zulu warrior. Almost as if the support that thought, he did a little dance and made vigorous arm movements before sitting down on a large rock.

Tom Botha, the eldest of the group at 31, was, as usual, the last to stand up. He moaned, held his head and sat down on another rock near Kurt.
“Ooh! I shouldn’t have had that last lager before bed, my head, oh my head!”
His demise seemed to break to chill of the early morning and they all laughed together.
Analise was looking across the desert towards the western horizon. She had planned this all with Kurt down to the last detail. Just beyond her vision, over the dunes ahead, was the largest storage facility for uncut diamonds in the world, Swakopmund.

The Namib Desert provided no cover for anyone approaching from the land and approach by sea was almost impossible without early detection, not to mention the shallowness of the water. A continental shelf ran out as far as 12 miles in places, and the sea was less than 3 metres deep in many places, often as far out as 5 or even 6 miles. Diamonds lay on the desert sand, sparkling in the sunlight and on the seabed in gravel layers under the oyster shells. Swakopmund Mining Corporation had staked a claim alongside the De Beers operation with its huge facility and a veritable army to protect it. This operation was much smaller but equally secure and although not having an army, had trained guards fully equipped to protect their underground storage facility.

The coast had earned the name “Skeleton Coast” because the number of carcasses of wrecked ships found there, some even a mile inland, indicating how the sands and the sea have shifted about over time. Diamonds were everywhere, in the sand, under it and out at sea.

The plan was to get some of these diamonds, flee to St Helena, where, after the share-out, they would disperse to the countries of their choice. Once they’d been there a while they would one day be strolling along a lonely beach and lo and behold, they would ‘find’ an ‘A’ quality uncut ‘blue-white’ diamond around 5 carats. They'd then sell it to the diamond trade for the market price, which currently was in the region of $4,800. These little ‘finds’ would keep them in luxury until the day they died. Well that was the original theory of the plan it had metamorphosed a lot since the day the two of them hatched it. There were a lot of very large hurdles to get over before they could walk away with even a small handful of these precious gems.

The Swakopmund Mining Corporation, which everyone called the ‘SMC’, was very efficient in prevention of theft of even one diamond from their area. The one and only road through the region, the C34 is watched all the time and carries warning signs every 50 metres or so bearing the words –
“WARNING! DO NOT STOP ON THIS ROAD. IN THE EVENT OF BREAKDOWN, DO NOT GET OUT OF YOUR VEHICLE. ASSISTANCE WILL BE PROVIDED. IF YOU GET OUT OF YOUR VEHICLE THE SWAKOPMUND MINING CORPORATION RESERVES THE RIGHT TO TAKE WHATEVER ACTION IT FEELS NECESSARY TO RECOVER DIAMONDS FROM YOU OR YOUR VEHICLE.”
Any vehicle that stops is watched closely all the time from strategically placed lookout towers and patrolling helicopters. Should the driver or one of the passengers get out of the vehicle one of the helicopters will be beside them within 2 minutes. The occupants of the vehicle will be immediately arrested and taken to the SMC headquarters for a thorough search.

Meanwhile, the vehicle will be put to the torch for its part in the proceedings. Then the ash would be sifted and every item found within it taken to be cleaned and examined using a jeweller’s lens. If no diamonds were found the travellers would be released with an apology and a cheque to compensate for the value of their vehicle. If just one diamond was found anywhere in their possession, the only result would be prison, an action supported by the S.African and NAmibia governments alike. The fact that the uncut stones lie on or very close to the surface of the sand makes it ‘easy picking’ for the traveller. All the facilities get the same jittery feeling when they see a vehicle stop and maybe one or two people get out. On a clear day, someone travelling along the road could easily see ships out at sea, although they may be several miles away, so pure was the air. It would follow then that the sparkling stones would also be seen.

Nevertheless it isn’t the desert that provides the best quality diamonds for the industry. It is, rather, the SEA that has given up the best prizes in the past. Any person who tries to enter the area on foot or in a small boat from the unprotected area will be stopped before they get too far into the zone. If found inside the zone, a person would be searched and if clean, would be able to go on their way unheeded, but with a warning not to stop and get out. If the person was obviously intent on stealing diamonds, then they would be shot, and the body flown to Johannesburg for a public cremation after which the ashes would be sifted and every object removed from the person would be numbered and carefully examined. The SMC employees didn’t think very much of anyone that was caught attempting a robbery and they would join in the hunt, tracking the person down.

Because of the shallow water, SMC uses a specially built dredger to suck up the diamonds off the seabed, automatically checking its position by means of satellite mapping and sonar, making adjustments itself to correct any anomalies. When a diamond field is found, the sea anchor is deployed and the precise location is recorded and locked into the guidance system. A 2 metre wide suction pipe drops out of a watertight hatch in the hull, travelling down as deep as 40 metres to the seabed. In practise it appears that the pipe seldom descends more than 3 metres because the shelf is that close to the bottom of the boat. A powerful vacuum unit sucks everything but the bedrock up into an enormous pressure vessel - sea weed, fish, stones, sand, and DIAMONDS. Once the vessel is full, it is discharged through the picking chute; a framed tunnel set at an angle of 30 degrees off horizontal. Starting with a screen of steel bars set 8 cm apart; each frame contains a screen of smaller and smaller gaps until the final one is a fine mesh. The water is discharged through this tunnel and cascades back into the sea. Everything that is captured by the vacuum unit is trapped by the screens from seaweed and fish at the first stage, to fine sand at the last.

Sorters stand alongside the chute, picking off items and placing them into buckets beside their feet. Naturally, the fish end up in the kitchen, seaweed onto a drying deck, whilst all stones are in buckets according to their size. No-one dares assume that a stone is worthless until one of the two gemologists on board say it is. Even the sand at the last mesh screen is examined as it often contains small particles of gemstones such as diamond, emerald, ruby, feldspar and garnet. Many of these can be used in industrial abrasives and often provide a modest income from fruitless searches for diamonds.

This was determined to be the weak spot in the defences of SMC; observations of the dredger at work had given Kurt and Analise the idea that they could attack it when it was 2 – 3 kilometres off shore. Add a sea mist in an off-shore wind and SMC would not see the dredger at all, even radar would struggle. Analise had studied the way the dredger operated and she knew that they could hit it at its most vulnerable stage, whilst anchored and sucking. Kurt had asked Tom to design a Global Positioning Satellite device that would override the signals from the satellites and give the wrong location to the dredger so that her crew in turn would relay the wrong co-ordinates to SMC base.

Appearing to be 10 kilometres from its actual location would add to the confusion at SMC base when the team attacked. Tom was an expert in radio technology and also designed a transponder that would prevent any helicopters from approaching the position. Margie’s part in the plan was significant, she was an expert in the grading and cutting of diamonds. When it came down to selecting the diamonds to carry off, she’d be able to tell them which were the best of the haul. Rafi and Tom were both high level graded in martial arts, a necessary part of silently taking over the dredger.

Analise had calculated that a precision operation such as the one hatched by Kurt and herself would take no more than ten minutes to execute. She reckoned it would take SMC base half an hour to realise that things were not right with the dredger. By that time they would be well away from the area in a fast motorboat.

Kurt looked across at Rafi as he stood in the bright shafts of sunlight from the rising sun.
“Get some wood Rafi, I’ll start a fire and get breakfast under way.”
“I’m on it.”
Analise opened the small case beside her sleeping bag and took out some sheets of paper, notes from the few days of observation. She read through a page or two and then looked up at Margie who was now standing over near Tom and in some sort of discussion. Waiting a few minutes until there appeared to a lull in their conversation she then called out to Margie.
“Margie, come here and give me a lesson on uncut diamonds please.”
“Sure Annie.”

Margie patted Tom’s arm and walked back to Analise who looked past her at Tom standing looking like a glass of whiskey at a temperance convention. She smiled at his demeanour, he was used to being so active and in control, this was alien to him.
“Tom, I know you’re deep in thought with so much to work out, but, could you help Rafi find enough wood for Kurt’s fire please.”
“Sure thing Annie.”
No-one called her Analise, except her mother. Kurt looked up at that moment and held up a flask.
“Lisa – “ he was the only one who called her Lisa, “ want a quick swig before you get down to that lesson with Margie?” He tapped the side of the flask with his forefinger.
“No thanks Kurt, but don’t let me stop you – ready Margie?”
“Yes Annie, I’ve got a couple here with me.”
Margie produced two glass-like stones from a small pouch in her bag.

“Good, sit down here and tell me what you have and how you know what they are.”
Margie took one of the stones in between her thumb and forefinger.
“This is a Cape Yellow Sunburst from DeBeers. To the inexperienced it looks at worst like a piece of dirty glass such as you might find after a fire, at best it resembles a piece of quartz.”
“So, convince me it’s a diamond.”
“Before I tell you, do you have any thoughts on it yourself?”
“Well, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, so nothing will scratch or break it – I know that much – hit it with a hammer and it’ll skid away from you.”
“Good, yes, very good, you’re on the right track – here, take it in your hand.” She passed the stone over to Analise who took it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Now look hard at it, into it, and tell me what you see.”
“At first it looks like a piece of glass, but now I see deep inside, a fire, a glow, sparkling and flashing.”
“Yes, and you’d only get that from fine cut crystal, but that isn’t diamond, so, now, put it to your lips, go on, and tell me what you feel.”

Analise brought the stone up to her mouth and touched it to her upper lip.
“It’s remarkably cold, I’m really surprised.”
“Another good test, even quartz or white sapphire warms up in the hand, the density of diamond is such that it takes much longer for them to warm up. Why do you think they are called ‘ICE’?”
“I thought that was just underworld slang because they look like pieces of ice.”
“Well there may be some truth in that, but nevertheless a diamond will always feel cold when touched to the lips. Now, draw it gently across your teeth, tell me your reaction.”
“Huh! It’s like sandpaper!”
“The finest, and most expensive, ‘sand’ paper is in fact a brown coarse grain paper coated with thousands of industrial quality diamond chips so small and fine they are barely discernable.”
“OK got that, so is that all I need to know then?”
“Oh no, there is more – here is a piece of gem quality quartz and a piece of ordinary tin plate. Run the piece of quartz down the tinplate in a straight line.”
Analise took the piece of tine and the quartz and ran the stone down the tinplate.
“There, a nice straight line.”
“Good, now use the diamond.”
“Wow, this is a deep and more pronounced line than the one produced by the quartz!”
“Right now the crunch – take the diamond in your right hand and take the quartz in your left, now draw a line down the flat side of the quartz.”
“Oh yes, there is a definite groove in the quartz, and I bet if I try it the other way round, the quartz will not even mark the diamond at all.”
“Spot on – the diamond will mark anything, but NOTHING will mark a diamond except another diamond.”
“Fantastic – so if I see a ‘piece of glass’ in the sand here, pick it up, I should then know whether it’s a diamond or not – thanks Margie.”
“You’re welcome Annie, ten years of working with them gets you pretty used to them.”
“That’s why you were asked to join this team.”

At that moment Tom and Rafi returned with armfuls of dry wood, sticks and twigs, and dumped them down beside the large rock Rafi had been sitting on earlier.
Kurt dragged two smaller rocks together and flattened the sand between them before placing a pile of tiny twigs and some small pieces of paper between them. He struck a match and as the twigs began to burn, added more larger sticks until there was a substantial fire burning.
“That’s a good fire. A breakfast fire” grinned Kurt.
“Let me cook, please.”
“Well, I was going to Rafi, but if you really want to.”
“I do, really.”
Rafi took a large frying pan and pressed it down into the fire, and soon he was dishing up a fine breakfast of sausages, eggs and bacon. No-one needed a second invitation to eat, they all go stuck into it right away.
“OK everyone, bring your plates with you over here, sit down around this map.” Analise spread out on the ground a large map of the Namibia desert coastal region, pinning it down with stones on each corner.

“This is a naval map of the coastline, it shows the water depths and features.” She picked out a long stick from the pile and stood between Kurt and Rafi with it pointing towards the map.
“Now, this is Steigersbaai, the long stretch of beach that runs past SMC base. This stretch of coast is called the Skeleton Coast and is one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the Atlantic Ocean. This is an advantage to us because SMC relies on its protection and so doesn’t put a lot of resource into security off shore.”
“How’s that an advantage to us Lisa my love?”
“Kurt! I’d like a little respect here please, while we’re on this job we’re business partners ok? Now, to answer that question, SMC knows that only boats with very shallow draughts, like small boats, flat bottom boats and glass bottomed sight-seeing boats can come over the shallow water. This is made doubly dangerous by the fact that the depth varies from 3 metres to 50 metres with no indication as to which is which or where. Even if the charts show these different depths, the sea bed keeps changing as the shifting dunes of the desert encroach upon the sea bed.

Look here, here is the wreck of the tanker “Abi Marina Su” which ran aground in 1951 – the wreck is 3 kilometres INLAND. However, there are other wrecks that were on the shoreline and are now half a kilometre out to sea. See all these dots across the map, they are the wrecks, the ones that didn’t make it. The dredger has a shallow draught, she doesn’t even draw two metres in spite of the huge globe on the deck that contains the pressure vessel. She can travel from the edge of the shelf into the base dock without running aground. SMC is confident that no boat capable of making an attack on the base can get within one mile of shore."
“But Annie, we are not going to get to the shore, are we?”
“Rafi, you are correct, no we are not going to get to shore. But, we have to consider that the dredger may be less than a mile from shore and in the very shallowest of the waters.”

Kurt kicked a small scorpion onto the fire and watched it writhe, wither and die with a pop before turning into a scorpion shaped piece of glowing ash. He turned back towards the map and posed the question that was on all their lips.
“Lisa, Just what are the geometrics of the heist?”


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