Smokescreen by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis [Francis, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780425210253
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 1972-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

'Oh thanks.'

'And I'll telephone again on… say… Thursday evening. I'll be down in the Kruger Park by then. Would Thursday be OK for you?'

'Yes,' she said soberly, the fun vanishing like mist. 'I'll go over to Nerissa's before then, and see what I can find out.'

You can't keep a good Dakota down.

There were two of them waiting at the small Rand Airport near Germiston racecourse, sitting on their tail wheels and pointing their dolphin snouts hopefully to the sky.

We onloaded one of them at eight on Monday morning, along with several other passengers and a sizeable amount of freight. Day and time were unkind to Roderick, making it dearer than ever that letting go of a semblance of youth was long overdue. The mature man, I reflected, was in danger of wasting altogether the period when he could look most impressive: if Roderick were not careful he would slip straight from ageing youth to obvious old age, a mistake more often found in show business than journalism.

He was wearing a brown long-sleeved suede jacket with fringes hanging from every possible edge. Under that, an open necked shirt in an orange-tan colour, trousers which were cut to prove masculinity, and the latest thing in desert boots.

Van Huren, at the other end of the scale in dark city suit, arrived last, took control easily, and shunted us all aboard. The Dakota trip took an hour, and landed one hundred and sixty miles south, at an isolated mining town which had Welkom on the mat and on practically everything else.

The van Huren mine was on the far side from the airport, and a small bus had come to fetch us. The town was neat, modern, geometrical, with straight bright rows of little square houses and acres of glass-walled supermarkets. A town of hygienic packaging, with its life blood deep underground.

Our destination looked at first sight to be a collection of huge whitish grey tips, one with its railway track climbing to the top. Closer acquaintance revealed the wheel-in-scaffolding at the top of the shaft, masses of administration buildings and miners' hostels, and dozens of decorative date palms. The short frondy trees, their sunlit leaf-branches chattering gently in the light breeze, did a fair job at beating the starkness, like gift-wrapping on a shovel.

Van Huren apologized with a smile for not being able to go down the mine with us himself: he had meetings all morning which could not be switched.

'But we'll meet for lunch,' he promised, 'and for that drink which you will all need!'

The guide, someone a couple of rungs down the hierarchy, had detailed to show us round, was a grumpy young Afrikaaner who announced that he was Pieter Losenwoldt and a mining engineer, and more or less explicitly added that his present task was a nuisance, an interruption of his work, and beneath his dignity.

He showed us into a changing room where we were to sink all differences in white overalls, heavy boots, and high-domed helmets.

'Don't take anything of your own down the mine except your underpants and a handkerchief,' he said dogmatically.

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