Here the road ran parallel to the deep rocky bed of a dry river before looping down through the deep cutting that Lothar had excavated to cross the riverbed and climb out the far side through another cutting.
He dismounted and walked out along the edge of the high bank to study it carefully. They could trap the diamond truck in the gut of the cutting, and block it with rocks rolled down from the top of the bank. There was certain to be water under the sand in the riverbed for the horses while they waited for the truck to show up; they would need to keep in condition for the long hard journey ahead. The river-bed would hide them.
Then again this was the remotest stretch of the road, it would take days for the police officers to be alerted and then to reach the ambush spot. He could certainly expect to establish an early and convincing lead, even if they chose the risky alternative of following him into the hard unrelenting wilderness across which he would retreat.
This is where we will do it,he told Swart Hendrick.
They set up their primitive camp in the sheer bank of the river-bed at the point where the telegraph line took the short cut across the loop in the road. The copper wires were strung over the river-bed from a pole on the near bank that was out of sight of the road.
Lothar climbed the pole and clipped on his taps to the main telegraph line, then led his wires down the pole, tacking them to the timber to avoid casual discovery, and then to his listening post in the dug-out that Swart Hendrick had burrowed into the bank of the river.
The waiting was monotonous, and Lothar chafed at being tied to the earphones of the telegraph tap but he could not afford to miss the vital message when it was flashed from the H'ani Mine, the message which would give him the exact departure time of the diamond truck. So during the dreary hot hours of daylight he had to listen to all the mundane traffic of the mine's daily business, and the distant operator's skills on the keyboard were such that they taxed his ability to follow and translate the rapid fire of dots and dashes that echoed in his earphones. He scribbled them into his notebook and afterwards translated the groups and jotted in the words between the lines. This was a private telegraph line and therefore no effort had been made to encode the transmission, the traffic was in the clear.
During the day he was alone in the dugout. Swart Hendrick took Manfred and the horses out into the desert, ostensibly to hunt, but really to school and harden both the boy and the animals for the journey that lay ahead and to keep them out of sight of any traffic on the road.
For Lothar the long monotonous days were full of doubts and foreboding. There was so much that could go wrong, so many details that had to mesh perfectly to ensure success.
There were weak links, and Gerhard Fourie was the weakest of these. The whole plan hinged on the man, and he was a coward, a man easily distracted and discouraged.
Waiting is always the worst time, Lothar thought, and he remembered the fears that had assailed him on the eve of other battles and desperate endeavours. If you could just do it and have done with it, instead of having to sit out these dragging days. Suddenly the buzz of the call sign echoed in his earphones and he reached quickly for his notebook. The operator at the H'ani Mine began to transmit and Lothar's pencil danced across the pages as he kept up with him. There was a curt double tap of acknowledgement from the Windhoek station as the message ended, and Lothar let the earphones drop around his neck as he translated the groups: For Pettifogger Prepare Juno's private coach for inclusion in the Sunday night express mail-train to Cape Town Stop Juno arriving your end noon Sunday Ends Vingt Pettifogger was Abraham Abrahams. Centaine must have selected the code name when she was annoyed with him, while Vingt was a pun on TWentyman-jones name; the French connotation suggested Centaine's influence again, but Lothar wondered who had selected Juno as Centaine Courtney's code name and grimaced at how appropriate it was.
So Centaine was leaving for Cape Town in her private coach. Somehow he felt guilty relief that she would not be close at hand when it happened, as though distance might lessen the shock for her. To reach Windhoek comfortably by noon on Sunday, Centaine must leave the H'ani Mine early on Friday, he calculated quickly; that would bring her to the cutting here on the riverbank on Saturday afternoon. Then he deducted a few hours from his estimate; she drove that Daimler like a demon.
He sat in the hot, stuffy little dugout and suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to see her again, to have just a glimpse of her as she passed. We can use it as a rehearsal for the diamond truck, he justified himself.
The Daimler came out of the shimmering distances like one of the whirling dust devils of the hot desert noons.
Lothar saw the dust column from ten miles or more and signalled Manfred and Swart Hendrick into their positions at the top of the cutting.
They had dug shallow trenches at the key points, scattering the disturbed earth and letting the dry breeze smooth and blend it with the surroundings. Then they had screened the positions with branches of thorn scrub until Lothar was satisfied that they were undetectable from further than a few paces.
The rocks with which they would block both ends of the cutting had been gathered laboriously from the river-bed and poised on the edge of the bank. Lothar had taken great care to make them seem natural, and yet a single slash with a knife across the rope that held the prop under the rock pile would send them tumbling down onto the narrow track at the bottom of the cutting.
This was a rehearsal, so none of them were wearing masks.
Lothar made one last hard scrutiny of the arrangements and then turned back to watch the swiftly approaching column of dust. It was already close enough for him to make out the tiny shape of the vehicle beneath it and hear the faint beat of its engine.
She shouldn't drive like that, he thought angrily. She'll kill herself. He broke off and shook his head ruefully. I'm acting like a doting husband, he realized. Let her break her damned neck, if that is what she wants. Yet the idea of her death gave him a painful pang, and he crossed his fingers to turn the chance away. Then he crouched down in his trench and watched her through the screen of thorn branches.
The stately vehicle rocked and bounced over the tracks as it swung onto the loop of the road. The engine beat strengthened as Centaine changed down and then accelerated out of the turn, using power to pull out of the incipient skid as the floury dust clutched at the front wheels. it was done with elan, he thought grudgingly, as she hit the gears again and bore down on the head of the cutting at speed.
Merciful God, is she going to take it at full bore? he wondered.
But at the last moment she cut the throttle and used the gearbox and the drag of the clinging dust to pull up at the top end of the cutting.
As she opened the door and stepped out onto the running-board with dust billowing around her, she was only twenty paces from where he lay, and he felt his heart banging against the earth. Can she still do this to me? he wondered at himself. I should hate her. She has cheated and humiliated me and she has spurned my son and denied him a mother's love, and yet, and yet, He would not let the words form, and he tried deliberately to harden himself against her.
She's not beautiful, he told himself, as he studied her face; but she was much more. She was vital and vibrant, and there was an aura about her. Juno, he recalled the code name the goddess. Powerful and dangerous, mercurial and unpredictable, but endlessly fascinating and infinitely desirable. She looked directly towards him for a moment and he felt the strength and resolve flow out of him at the touch of those dark eyes, but she had not seen him and she turned away.