“Check to see if the rumor of a sunken treasure is true and find it for yourselves.”

Sloane touched the tip of her nose. “Bingo. I was the person who first pieced together the story behind the treasure so I was given the lead on this trip. Tony’s ostensibly my assistant but he’s absolutely worthless. This is a big deal for me and my career. If I could find the stones I would probably be named VP.”

“Where did the diamonds come from?” Juan asked, interested in what she had to say despite himself.

“Fascinating story there. They were originally mined in Kimberley by members of a tribe called the Herero. The Herero king knew there was a battle coming with the German occupiers of his homeland and thought if he had the diamonds he could use them to buy English protection. For a decade or so his men worked in Kimberley and snuck stones back to Hereroland when their contracts ended. From what I was able to learn, workers would cut themselves in the arm or leg a couple of months before starting their contracts. When they arrived at Kimberley charts of their bodies were made noting all the old scars they had. Once they were in the workers’ compound a tribesman who had been there for a while and had already pilfered a suitable stone from the pit would reopen the wound and slip it inside. When it came time to leave a year later, the guards at the workers compound would check the chart made when the Herero first showed up. They would often surgically reopen fresh scars to check for hidden stones, a popular smuggling system after the more obvious down-the-throat technique, which was literally voided with laxatives. But the old scar was on their chart and wouldn’t be checked.”

“Damned clever,” Juan remarked.

“According to what I was able to discover they had sacks and sacks of only the largest and clearest stones when the tribe was robbed.”

“Robbed?”

“By five Englishmen, one just a teen whose parents were missionaries in Hereroland. I was able to put the story together from the father’s journal because after the robbery he went to track his son. His journal reads like a torturer’s checklist of things he wanted to do once he caught the boy.

“I won’t bore you with the details, but the teenager, Peter Smythe, hooked up with an adventurer of the old school named H. A. Ryder as well as three other men. As part of their plan they cabled Cape Town to have a steamship, the HMS Rove, wait for them off the coast of what was then called German South West Africa. They planned to cross the Kalahari and Namib deserts on horseback and meet up with the ship.”

“And I take it the Rove was never heard from again?”