A Twist Of Sand

He shrugged expressively at the fog.

"Cape Frio, by dead reckoning. But the operative word here is dead."

Suddenly the fog blew back westwards, like a curtain-shift at a slick American musical. The whole scene was laid bare to our eyes at the flick of an invisible curtain-hand.

There was the steamer, a liner, with her bows pointing south and east. Beyond was a flat beach, beaten punch drunk to an off-white by the surf, backed by low dun-coloured sand-hills, trailed here and there with a wispy tonsure of grey-green naras plant. I could even see its yellow fruit, something like a melon, rotting away in the sun.

I was astonished to find the girl at my side, tugging at my arm.

"Do something!" she cried. "Only you can save her, Captain Peace! Tell her how to get off the rocks! She'll be ashore in a minute!" She brushed round to be in front of me and in doing so I felt her breast against my forearm. She looked beseechingly up at me. "I don't want to see any more pain and death, do you understand? I've seen enough in my lifetime. Do this one thing and it doesn't matter… the past…"

I led her across to the side of the bridge and said gently: "She's been ashore for years. That's the Dunedin Star."

She gave a little sigh.

"Thank God for that!" she exclaimed. This time her lips smiled too.

Stein joined us.

"They beached her after she struck a sunken object at sea. Everyone had great fun and games getting the passengers off that beach. The South Africans seemed simply to throw away tugs and planes and lorries to reach them."

The ill-fated liner, her smoke-stack still gamely erect, held grimly on to her never-never course.

"Look," I said to Anne, handing her my glasses, "you can still see the emergency floats lashed to her decks."

"I can see a locomotive — and a tank," she exclaimed with a note of excitement in her voice. Until now it had been level and controlled in her conversations with me. "Can't we go in closer?"

John looked dubious as I slowed still further and altered course to take Etosha nearer the famous wreck. Anne's suppressed mood gave a holiday air to the bridge.

"I can see more tanks and guns and look at the huge pile of tyres — I think it's tyres — on the beach."

Stein said heavily: "She was carrying tanks and guns to the British in the Middle East, as well as tyres for the Eighth Army. Her loss must have hit them pretty hard at that time, I guess."

Anne gave him a long, considered look. It almost seemed as if she thought as little of him as I did. I could see him mentally rubbing his hands. His gloating satisfaction rather sickened me. Somehow the thought that she wasn't on Stein's side pleased me. One way and another, Onymacris must be quite a beetle.

Etosha came closer in and we could see the pitiful abandon of a ship left to the waves and the birds.

"It was a stroke of luck, her hitting a submerged object like that — for the Germans, I mean," went on Stein in his mincing voice. "The court of inquiry thought she smacked on to an outlying spur of the Clan Alpine Reef. You'd think the British captain would have kept away from a coast like this instead of coming in so close. Not unless Captain Peace was in command. He must have known he was taking a big risk."

"If you'd really like to know," I said quietly, "the Dunedin Star was sunk by a German torpedo."

"Rubbish," snapped Stein. "It was a reef. Slipshod. If he'd been a German captain we'd have shot him. The Dunedin Star was off course. There was never any mention of an explosion."

Etosha circled her dead friend of the sea. Stein knew a lot about the Dunedin Star. I wondered to myself how much he was concerned in knowing her movements — in time of war.

"Did you ever hear of the Type XXXI U-boat torpedo?" I asked.

I had Anne's and John's full attention now.

"No? Well, Blohm and Voss developed it. Acoustic, of course. The torpedo that sank the Dunedin Star was fired from a secret type of German submarine. I'll reconstruct it for you. What went through the U-boat commander's mind when he saw the Dunedin Star, laden with weapons of war, in his sights? He didn't press the button and send her to the bottom. Sooner of later — probably sooner — there would have been a hunting force up here looking for him. So he just tagged along behind the Dunedin Star while he drew the main charges from his Type XXXI's because he knew that at fifty knots — and they did every bit of fifty knots — a close salvo would tear right through any liner's plating like butter. There'd only be a dull thump. Four little beauties and a hole like a house, and a deadweight cargo that would take her to the bottom like a load of lead. The U-boat skipper went even one better. He waited until Dunedin Star was among the worst foul ground in the world Then he fired. The whole world believed that the Dunedin Star struck a hidden reef and tore her bottom out. I would have liked to have met that U-boat man."

Stein gazed at me like a man entranced.

"By God!" he said. "It would take a German to do that."