Free The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter by Desmond Bagley

it galled him that the despised Walker was the better seaman.
    Now we were in Tangier, he had recovered his form and was a bit more inclined to throw his weight around. I could see that I’d have to step on him again before long.
    Walker looked about the yacht basin. ‘Not many sailing boats here,’ he commented.
    That was true. There were a few ungainly-looking fishing boats and a smart ketch, probably bound for the Caribbean. But there were at least twenty big power craft, fast-looking boats, low on the water. I knew what they were.
    This was the smuggling fleet. Cigarettes to Spain, cigarette lighters to France, antibiotics to where they could make a profit (although that trade had fallen off), narcotics to everywhere. I wondered if there was much arms smuggling to Algeria.
    At last the officials came and went, leaving gouges in my planking from their hob-nailed boots. I escorted them totheir launch, and as soon as they had left, Walker touched my arm.
    ‘We’ve got another visitor,’ he said.
    I turned and saw a boat being sculled across the harbour. Walker said, ‘He was looking at us through glasses from that boat across there.’ He pointed to one of the motor craft. ‘Then he started to come here.’
    I watched the approaching dinghy. A European was rowing and I couldn’t see his face, but as he dexterously backed water and swung round to the side of Sanford he looked up and I saw that it was Metcalfe.
    Metcalfe is one of that international band of scallywags of whom there are about a hundred in the world. They are soldiers of fortune and they flock to the trouble spots, ignoring the danger and going for the money. I was not really surprised to see Metcalfe in Tangier; it had been a pirates’ stronghold from time immemorial and would be one of Metcalfe’s natural hang-outs.
    I had known him briefly in South Africa but I didn’t know what he was at the time. All that I knew was that he was a damned good sailor who won a lot of dinghy races at Cape Town and who came close to winning the South African dinghy championship. He bought one of my Falcons and had spent a lot of time at the yard tuning it.
    I had liked him and had crewed for him a couple of times. We had had many a drink together in the yacht club bar and he had spent a week-end at Kirstenbosche with Jean and myself. It was in the way of being a firmly ripening friendship between us when he had left South Africa a hop, skip and a jump ahead of the police, who wanted to nail him on a charge of I.D.B. Since then I had not seen him, but I had heard passing mentions and had occasionally seen his name in the papers, usually quoted as being in trouble in some exotic hot-spot.
    Now he was climbing on to the deck of Sanford.
    ‘I thought it was you,’ he said. ‘So I got the glasses to make sure. What are you doing here?’
    ‘Just idly cruising,’ I said. ‘Combining business with pleasure. I thought I might see what the prospects in the Med. are like.’
    He grinned. ‘Brother, they’re good. But that’s not in your line, is it?’
    I shook my head, and said, ‘Last I heard of you, you were in Cuba.’
    ‘I was in Havana for a bit,’ he said. ‘But that was no place for me. It was an honest revolution, or at least it was until the Commies moved in. I couldn’t compete with them, so I quit.’
    ‘What are you doing now?’
    He smiled and looked at Walker. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
    I said, ‘This is Walker and this is Coertze.’ There was handshaking all round and Metcalfe said, ‘It’s good to hear a South African accent again. You’d have a good country there if the police weren’t so efficient.’
    He turned to me. ‘Where’s Jean?’
    ‘She’s dead,’ I said. ‘She was killed in a motor smash.’
    ‘How did it happen?’
    So I told him of Chapman’s Peak and the drunken driver and the three-hundred-foot fall to the sea. As I spoke his face hardened, and when I had finished, he said, ‘So the bastard only got five years,