He had hurried me aboard his luxury yacht Bellatrix-another surprise for me-and persuaded me that the place for the discussion with unspecified persons over the NACCAM installation was the Seychelles. We had sailed from Mauritius within a few hours on the fourday trip. Apart from his tenseness, the first indication I had of the impending shadow over Peace was a diversion to a remote island group 250 miles north-north-east of Mauritius known as St Brandon, or Cargados Carajos. St Brandon is nothing more than a hellish group of islets and coral rocks 10 with one tiny port on Raphael Island. Peace's excuse was that his ancestor, Sir John Peace, had used St Brandon in the reign of Charles II as a base for piratical forays against shipping in the Indian Ocean. Peace made much of the fact that Sir John had been the first Englishman to chart the group. To my astonishment, he had insisted on spending days in an island boat charting the risky seaward passages of St Brandon's great 25-mile coral barrier reef. When I protested, and pointed out that I had joined him to discuss a big business proposition, he became withdrawn and angry. I got no more out of him until we reached the Seychelles, where, instead of going ashore at Port Victoria to discuss what I had irritably ceased to regard as a deal, he decided to go spear-fishing. When Peace announced that he intended to take Bellatrix to a cluster of islets centering on Frigate Island, 25 miles east of Mahe, I exploded. If he wanted me, I told him angrily, he would find me ashore at the hotel-if I hadn't left on the next plane for South Africa. MacFadden, the tough Scots engineer who had been with us on the Skeleton Coast of South-West Africa in earlier years, had gone on a bender ashore immediately we arrived. I sympathized with him. I had no wish to go wandering aimlessly about the islands under the pretext of a business deal in the offing.

My irritation with the whole affair increased when I found that I would have to stage back to, Johannesburg via East