The Land God Made in Anger
A heart-stopping adventure … A chilling Nazi legacy in today’s Southern Africa.A month after the end of World War II, a U-boat with a mysterious cargo founders off South West Africa’s treacherous Skeleton Coast. Two German Officers reach the surface and battle their way to the shore, but the bloody struggle that follows leaves one man murdered and the other facing a perilous journey across the terrible, burning sands…Forty years later, trawler captain James McQuade stumbles across the story, and the thought of a submarine full of Nazi war gold sets his pulse racing. Soon he uncovers startling evidence that the escaping German, a top Nazi, survived the desert crossing and is now a leading member of the South African neo-fascist group, the AWB. A simple salvage operation rapidly escalates into an international manhunt, with much more than sunken treasure at stake…
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JOHN GORDON DAVIS
The Land God Made
in Anger
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1990
Copyright © John Gordon Davis 1990
John Gordon Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The extract from The Encyclopaedia of the Third Reich by L. L. Snyder is reproduced by kind permission of Robert Hale Ltd. The extract from Who’s Who in Nazi Germany by Robert Wistrich is reproduced by kind permission of Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The Extract from The History of the Gestapo by Jacques Delarue is reproduced by kind permission of Macdonald & Co Ltd.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007574421
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780008119324
Version: 2014-12-16
To my dear sister, Jill Gordon-Davis Roomans
Contents
Southern Africa is real. The characters, with obvious exceptions, are fictitious.
On these harsh shores it hardly ever rains. The sun beats down onto the desert coast, blinding white and yellow and brown and apricot and pink on the sand dunes that stretch on and on to the east. To the west the cold Atlantic seethes and crashes, stretching for thousands of miles to the Americas; this land is called the Skeleton Coast, for so many ships have wrecked themselves on its treacherous expanse, and so many shipwrecked men have perished. If they survived the savage sea, they died of thirst and starvation after they came crawling ashore. Here nobody lives. The only people who sometimes pass through this land are the strandlopers, hardy people from the hot hard hinterland of Namibia, who journey out of the vast desert to catch seals and shellfish.
This blinding day in June, 1945, two Damara strandlopers sat on the hot shore, resting. Before them, the vast Atlantic ocean was empty. Suddenly, something extraordinary happened.
Less than a thousand metres away, a man came out of the sea, like a demon. One moment there was nothing but the seething sea; the next there was a man, his arms thrashing. He started swimming frantically towards them. The two Damaras stared; then, to their further astonishment, another man erupted out. The two Damaras scrambled up and ran over the sand dune. They peered over the top.
The two demons were rearing up in the swells, disappearing in the white crashing thunder of the breakers. The man in front was the slower. He looked frantically behind him. He came labouring and gasping closer, then suddenly his feet found the bottom. He staggered upright and then collapsed as another wave hit him. He staggered up again, then came stumbling up onto the beach, the waves crashing about his exhausted legs. He looked back, his chest heaving, clutching a small package to his chest. Then he pulled a pistol out of his pocket. He pointed it wildly at the other man, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He turned and staggered off down the beach, trying to run, his legs buckling.
