Free The Strode Venturer by Hammond Innes Page B

any message you’d like sent?”
    “No, no message.” But I thought he’d send one all the same and I wondered what Strode would make of the information that I was inquiring about him. But the thing that really puzzled me was the reason for his visit to Addu Atoll. Why would a man who had been offered a large cash sum for his share in the family business suddenly go rushing off to a coral atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean? I was thinking about this all the way out to Changi, the R.A.F. base. But thinking about it produced no obvious answer. That he’d been forced to use his own name because it was the name on his passport didn’t alter the fact that there was an element of secrecy about his movements. In fact, everything about the man had a curious twist to it, as though he were impelled by some strange inner urge. But at least I’d traced him and since I was still officially a serving officer I had access to a means of transportation which would enable me to catch up with him.
    At Changi I saw the Senior Movements Officer. “Gan? Well, yes, I expect it could be arranged … We usually keep a certain number of seats open for men getting on there. But I’ll have to contact the C.O. at Gan. How long do you want to stay?”
    “Two days, that’s all.”
    “And then home to the U.K.?”
    “If that’s possible.”
    He nodded. “It’ll be an indulgence passage, of course, and on a space available basis. I’ll give you a buzz to-morrow morning. Okay?”
    I gave him the Symingtons’ telephone number and drove back to their house for lunch. There was the business then of clearing up my personal affairs. The bank, lawyers, Naval H.Q.—it wasn’t until after dinner that I could settle down to the most important job of the lot—explaining it all to the children. Those two letters were just about the most difficult I had ever had to write and it was almost midnight beforeI had finished. Alec gave me a drink then. He also gave me my first briefing on Addu Atoll. I had never been there. All I knew of it was a description given me by one of the Britannia pilots—“Like a huge aircraft carrier stranded on a coral reef.” But that was just the island of Gan, not the whole atoll. Alec, on the other hand, had been on a destroyer that had refuelled there during the war when it was known as Port “T.” “It’s the finest natural harbour I’ve ever seen—a hundred square miles of water entirely protected by reefs and only four navigable channels between them.” He hadn’t been there since, but without my asking he had borrowed from a destroyer the Admiralty Pilot for the West Coast of India which includes the Maldives. He had also borrowed charts 2898 and 2067—the first a general chart of the whole 500-mile chain of islands, the second a large-scale chart of Addu Atoll itself.
    These I took up to bed with me and since it might be the last opportunity I had of studying them I worked at them for almost an hour. The charts were like no charts I had ever seen before, for the Maldives are not islands in the normal sense, but groups of coral growth forming lace-like fringes around shallow seas dotted with islets. There were altogether nineteen groups extending from Addu Atoll, which was almost on the equator, 470 miles north to a position west of Ceylon. Some of these groups were over a hundred miles in circumference. It was a great barrier reef with only a few deep-water channels through it—the Equatorial Channel, the One and a Half Degree Channel, the Eight Degree Channel.
    But neither the charts nor the Pilot, which as usual went into considerable detail about the topography and inhabitants of the islands, gave me the slightest clue to Peter Strode’s interest in the area. The Adduans were described as “great navigators and traders,” but the only things they exported were dried fish and cowrie shells, their existence dependent on what they harvested from the sea and from the soil of pitifully small islands