Текст книги "The Radioactive Camel Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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The ferrety little man who was their contact in Alexandria glanced quickly around the cafe, then walked to Napoleon and lllya’s table.

“Mr. Mahmoud?” Solo asked politely.

“No names, please. And the information will cost you a lot. They’ve taken the—consignment—away from the caravan by helicopter. It will be flown to Khartoum and will be concealed on another caravan leaving for—”

Suddenly they heard a shot, and Mahmoud was hurled backwards from his chair, crashing against the wall. He slid to the floor with blood blooming like an exotic flower from his chest.

THE RADIOACTIVE CAMEL AFFAIR

NAPOLEON Solo shielded his eyes against the blazing sun. Under the folds of his burnoose, the heavy Mauser automatic had worn a sore place on his hip, and he shifted the belt supporting its makeshift holster. Beneath his aching thighs, the dromedary lurched and swayed, picking its way over the shale which slanted up to a massive limestone bluff a thousand feet above them. The caravan was a big one—a long line of camels, horses, men and women, some mounted and some on foot, snaking its way for almost a mile across the desolate plateau. It had been nearly five hours since they had struggled up the steep valley from the last village—five hours of torment for Solo as the sun had risen inexorably in the sky and the caravan had climbed towards the southwest, through barren foothills pockmarked with patches of thin scrub, along a ridge of rock and sand where nothing but thorn bushes broke the monotony of the scorched terrain, and now across this bleak upland slope beyond which—he fervently hoped—their path would at last tilt downwards again.

Solo eased the belt once more, scanning the plateau with aching eyes. Below and behind them, the dead land dropped away in parallel ridges of ocher and gamboge. Above, some geological unconformity had placed a thin vein of richer rock between the weathered shale and the limestone above it, and here a streak of brownish vegetation daubed the foot of the bluff. A few hundred yards further on, the line of stunted bushes followed the strata as they dipped towards a fault gashing the rock face—and it was in the direction of the wedge of cobalt sky marking this defile that the head of the caravan was now moving.

Once between the towering walls of the cleft, the relief from the sun's assault was immediate. It was still stiflingly hot in the shadowed gorge, but in contrast to the hammering of the direct rays the respite seemed as refreshing as a cool shower. Solo moistened his lips with lukewarm water from a padded bottle slung over his shoulder and reflected wryly that it was less than a week since he had sipped scotch-on-the-rocks under a striped awning sheltering the balcony of his hotel room in Khartoum. It was like a dream from another age. In the interim he had stained his skin, bribed a policeman, been secretly taken to the caravan rendezvous forty miles south of the city, and ridden painfully across half the Sudan. They had skirted the blistering Nubian Desert, crossed the White Nile, traversed the southern fringe of the Sahara, and were now laboriously making their way across the gaunt massif separating the province of Kordofan from Southwest Sudan. The following day, they were due at Wadi Elmira.

After the open wastes of the plateau, the rock walls of the pass had the effect of amplifying the noises of the caravan: the beasts’ stony footfalls, the creaking and jingling of pack stays and harness, an occasional guttural murmur of conversation in front or behind—all these sounded suddenly and unnaturally loud to Solo as they wound slowly through the defile. For the fortieth time he wondered if his disguise, his reasons for being there, his knowledge of nomad customs and of Arabic would again pass muster when they made camp for the night.

The caravan was mixed. There were ivory merchants and dealers in ostrich feathers, traders leading pack camels loaded with bales of merchandise destined for Bahr el Ghazal and the Central African Republic, and the usual supernumeraries—individual travelers and nomads who had tagged on for the ride. For this was dangerous country: the Africans of the south were in open revolt against the Arabs who ruled them from the north, and small isolated groups could easily fall victim either to one of the guerrilla bands or to over-zealous Arab troops on a policing operation. The largest single group was a collection of pilgrims on their way to some obscure shrine in Equatoria, and it was as one of these that Solo maintained his precarious position in the caravan. The pilgrims, however, were leaving the main body and heading south as soon as they left Wadi Elmira—and it was vital to Solo that he acquire certain information before this happened.

As he rode out of the gorge into the full glare of the sun, he saw with relief that the trail now led downwards across a stretch of broken country dotted with huge limestone boulders. The sun was beginning to subside in the brassy bowl of the sky; the furnace-like quality of the early afternoon was now tempered with an occasional puff of hot, dry wind blowing from the southwestern side of the massif.

Two hours later they halted for the night.

The caravan boasted entertainers. As the western sky drained through vermilion to a limpid green above the rim of the wadi on whose dried up riverbed they were camped, the plaintive quarter-tones of Arab strings and pipes rose into the rapidly cooling air. Sitting, like most of the pilgrims, in the outer rank of squatting figures around the fires, Solo dipped his fingers into the aromatic mess filling the bowl on his lap and watched tumblers and acrobats silently as he ate. Soon, however, it was the turn of the girl—and as he had feared, as had happened on the two previous nights, she sought him out again and performed the greater part of her act apparently for his exclusive benefit.

She was a belly dancer. Not a very good one, possibly—but the brown body with its eloquent hips spoke as if she had tossed a card with her telephone number on it into Solo’s lap. Her name was Yemanja—and she was probably of mixed Arab and Negro parentage, Solo thought. Certainly the name was of Yoruba origin, and while she had the nubile figure and high bridged nose of Mohammedan women, the full-lipped mouth and smoldering eyes were pure African. What was more to the point, she was the property of Ahmed, the camel-master in charge of the caravan—a sullen and muscular man from the Nile Delta whose glowering regard had already been drawn far too often for his liking towards Solo. All I need, Solo thought grimly, is to get involved in a fight with a jealous boyfriend!

Desperate as he was to avoid attention of any kind, he let out his breath in a long sigh of relief when at last the dance was over and Yemanja, with a final flash of eyes, was gone. The girl seemed to have taken a fancy to him, was making a nightly attempt to entice him…He shrugged mentally and determined to keep well clear of her as a group dance started on the far side of the firelit circle.

Solo watched for a while. Then, as the music and the dancing grew wilder and the fires burned lower, he slipped unobtrusively away and erected his bivouac near where his beast was tethered. Here and there on the perimeter of the camp isolated groups of figures were similarly engaged.

The night was cold. They had come down a long way since the pass, but the valley was still more than six thousand feet above sea level. He rolled himself in his striped blanket and eased himself into the low tent. Ten minutes later he was crouched under the coverings with his lips against the grille piercing one side of a flat Bakelite box about the size of a cigarette pack. He thumbed a button on top of the instrument; a faint, barely discernible whine quivered on the cool air. Solo turned a knurled wheel set flush with the back of the box. The whining noise increased slightly. He spun the wheel the other way—and the whine faded, vanished momentarily, and then swelled again. Patiently, he experimented until he had located the null-point, the setting where the noise was completely tuned out. Then he spoke very softly into the grille.

“Solo calling Station K,” he said softly. “Solo calling Station K. If you receive me do not—repeat do not—answer. Give me the signal specified in Schedule T.”

He paused. After a moment, the tiny transmitter-receiver emitted three very faint pips in rapid succession.

Solo spoke again. “Fine,” he said. “Now listen carefully. I don’t dare repeat anything and I can only talk for a moment. Transmit this message in Code Three to U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York, top priority. Message begins. Attention Waverly. Stop. Have located post office. Stop. Hope to identify package and consignee’s address tomorrow before distribution of mail. Stop. Advise Kuryakin—repeat, Kuryakin. Stop. Signed Solo. Message ends…Please acknowledge on Schedule T.”

The receiver emitted a single prolonged bleep.

“Okay,” Solo whispered. “Please listen again tomorrow between twenty-one hundred hours and twenty-two thirty. Over and out.”

He stowed the instrument in a pouch under his burnoose and rolled himself in his blanket again. The Mauser lay conveniently within reach, just underneath the roll of clothes and extra bedding that served him as a pillow.

In a large tent with a fly-sheet on the far side of the circle of dying fires, a tall man in dark robes leaned back from an open suitcase full of complicated electronic equipment. His aquiline features were creased into a scowl that was at once petulant and menacing.

“Somebody in this caravan is using a radio transmitter,” he said quietly. “It’s on quite a different wavelength from ours—but there’s no doubt about it.” He glanced down at the tuners and dials in the suitcase as though for confirmation.”

“Can you get a—fix, is it?—on the transmitter with this machine?” his companion asked.

The tall man looked at him for a second. Although he was dressed in Arab robes also, the other man was unmistakably an African. “No, colonel,” the tall man said evenly, “unfortunately we cannot. We have the means to establish its existence—but there’s nothing here that could locate it. Nevertheless, it seems that there may be spies about. They must he identified and…taken care of. Perhaps you would be good enough to send Ahmed to me. In the meantime, we shall see if we can pick up anything more definite.”

He turned back to the suitcase as the Nubian left the tent, and began experimentally turning the milled control wheels.

But this time there was no response. Napoleon Solo was asleep. He had a hard day’s work before him tomorrow. Somewhere in the caravan, concealed somewhere among the bales of merchandise, traders’ samples, rolls of bedding or folded tents, there was a small but extremely heavy canister of solid lead. And nestling in the cavity within it was a quantity of Uranium 235.

Before they reached Wadi Elmira and the caravan split into two parts, Solo had to locate that canister and find out who was carrying it.

Chapter 1

Mr. Waverly Sets the Scene

“URANIUM 235!” Napoleon Solo had said in New York two weeks previously. “But that’s incredible…I mean, uranium 235 on a camel…!”

The tall, lean man gazing out of the room’s solitary window at the United Nations building spoke without turning around. “It may sound so at first,” he said. “But can you think of a better way, a more inconspicuous way, of taking it to the heart of Africa?”

“Well, no. I guess not. But who needs Uranium 235 in the middle of Africa, Mr. Waverly?”

Alexander Waverly swung around and faced his Chief Enforcement Officer. His lined face was very grave.

“Somebody does, Mr. Solo,” he said soberly. “Somebody does. And, given that fact, for what reason could they possibly want this particularly fissile isotope of Uranium—in Africa or anywhere else?”

“Other than for research, the only positive use for Uranium 235 that I know is as part of an H-bomb.”

“Precisely. It’s an indispensable ingredient of a thermonuclear device,” Waverly said pedantically.

“But in Africa…? What part of Africa?”

“That we do not know. But we must find out—at once.”

“Okay. But I still don’t see…I mean, there are no nuclear powers in Africa. The U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France—we’re the only countries that have the bomb. India, Italy and one or two others are coming along. But they haven’t got it yet. And none of them are in Africa.”

“Granted.”

“Then what country could possibly—?”

“I didn’t say it was a country,” Waverly interrupted.

Solo whistled softly. “You mean Thrush is attempting to become the sixth nuclear power—somewhere in Africa?”

“It’s a possibility we have to take very seriously indeed.”

“What exactly do we know?”

Waverly crossed to the enormous teak desk that filled the center of the large room. “You’d better come down to Communications, and I’ll fill you in on what we have,” he said. “Is Mr. Kuryakin here yet?”

“Should be arriving any moment,” Solo said, glancing at his wrist watch.

“Good. Then we can wait for him there.” He pressed a button on a raised platen projecting from the surface of the desk and moved towards the door.

A number of floors below, Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin paid his cab and went into Del Floria’s tailor shop. He was in a hurry, his thin blond hair blown forward over his high forehead, for Waverly’s summons—had been unexpected and he had been sleeping late in his small bachelor apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

“Mr. Kuryakin!” Del Floria exclaimed, bustling forward from behind the steam of his pressing machine. “Always in a rush! Maybe you’ll let me at least press that jacket for you today? Truly, you don’t look so elegant in those clothes…” He gazed critically at Illya’s black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers and crumpled tweed jacket.

“Sorry, Del,” Kuryakin smiled. “Urgent today. Mr. Waverly is waiting for me. Next time, perhaps.” He strode through and entered the third fitting cubicle at the rear of the shop.

“Rush, rush, rush. Always in a hurry,” the old man grumbled. “This modem world…I don’t know.” He shook his head, sighed, shrugged resignedly, and pressed a button at the side of his machine. Inside the booth, Kuryakin drew the curtain, twisted the coat-hook on the back wall, and pushed. The cubicle wall swung soundlessly outwards and he walked through into a well-appointed foyer.

This was Admissions—the central point to which elevators and passages from all four entrances to U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters led. The girl on duty was a former West Indian beauty queen. She had watched Kuryakin’s entrance through Del Floria’s shop on one of the four closed-circuit television monitors set above her desk. Now, as he came through the door and crossed the foyer towards her desk, she looked at him approvingly through enormous, slumberous eyes.

“Good morning, Mr. Kuryakin,” she said in her deep voice. “I think Mr. Waverly’s expecting you. Would you please join him and Mr. Solo in Communications?”

Although he now worked for an international organization, Illya had been born in Russia, and he still retained much of his Slav imperturbability. For all the expression that showed on his smooth, bland face, the girl’s curvaceous figure, pliant waist and the tempting curve of her mouth might have been carved from stone. “Good morning, Viola,” he said politely. “I am afraid I may be a few minutes late. If you would kindly pin on my badge, I’ll go straight up.”

The girl sighed. Like many of the female personnel at the Command’s headquarters, she found Kuryakin’s serene detachment a constant challenge to her femininity. She was sure that if only those sensitive features could be persuaded to relax a little, to warm up…suppressing another sigh, she reached into the top right hand drawer of her desk, took out a small white badge and lingeringly pinned it on his lapel. (The badges were another aspect of security. A red one admitted the wearer only to the ground floor, where day-to-day routine operations were completed. A yellow badge permitted entry to the ground and second floors, where the organization’s communications center was located. And a white one was reserved for those who rated admission to the Policy and Operations Sections on the third. A chemical on the receptionist’s fingertips activated the badge as it was pinned in place—and anyone mounting to a floor higher than his badge allowed automatically tripped a complex alarm system which flashed red lights on every desk in the building and slid steel doors across the passages to trap the intruder.)

Illya found Waverly and Solo in a small room on the second floor lined with gray filing cabinets. A projector and screen were set up in one corner. Pilot lights gleamed from a complicated tape deck housed in a recess beside the door. And there was a single buff cardboard folder on the table in the middle of the room.

A lock of crisp, dark hair had fallen forward over Solo’s alert face, and there was a troubled look in his eyes.

“Ah, Mr. Kuryakin.” Waverly nodded in greeting. “There is work to be done. I think it will save questions afterwards if I take this thing right from the beginning.” He crossed to a door set between two banks of steel cabinets—and threw it open. “If you would be so kind as to join us, gentlemen…”

A plump army officer with a bald head and a hooked nose came into the room, followed by a tall, thin, crewcut man with rimless glasses.

“General Powers from the Pentagon; Mr. Forster from the Central Intelligence Agency.” Waverly made the introductions with a wave of his hand. “Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin are our two top Enforcement Officers.”

They sat down around the table and Waverly dragged a sandblasted briar pipe from the pocket of his baggy jacket. Perhaps you’d like to acquaint these gentlemen with your side of the affair, Mr. Forster,” he said, ramming tobacco into the bowl from an oilskin pouch.

The CIA man cleared his throat. “Certainly. Not much to tell, really—just that there’s been a gradual series of thefts of Uranium 235.”

“Gradual?”

“Over the past three years. We hadn’t paid all that much attention until one of our computers came up with a rundown a couple of months back. We realized then that the method of operation in each case was identical.”

“I should think even one theft of 235 merited a great deal of attention,” Waverly put in dryly.

“Oh, sure. Every one was a big deal. On file, top priority, kept very secret—and all hell breaking loose to try and get the stuff back, identify the thieves.”

“Then…?”

“What I mean is, we—the CIA—hadn’t paid much attention until we realized the thing followed an international pattern.”

“International?” Illya echoed.

“Sure. They lifted the stuff from Hanford, from Clinton, from Calder Hall in England and Dounreay in Scotland; from Chatillion, near Paris, France; and from Magnitogorsk—”

“From Russia!” Solo exclaimed. “If it is a Thrush job, that was certainly a mistake!”

“You mean tipping us off that it wasn’t the other side? Could always have been the Chinese. Or even the Soviets raiding their own places as a blind.”

“Yes, I suppose so. What kind of amounts were involved?”

“Individually, pretty small. But if you add it all together it amounts to quite a bit That’s why we called in your boys when we figured it was a planned series by persons unknown.”

“You’re sure it’s not the Soviets?” Illya asked.

“Absolutely. Why would they bother? They make more than we do.”

“True. And none of it has been recovered?”

“Not an ounce. They were clever operations, all right. Every one an inside job…not a man connected with the thefts identified.”

“With the security setup surrounding nuclear physics, I should have thought that was impossible.”

The CIA man shrugged. “Nothing’s impossible. It happened. The point is—who took it, and why?”

“Perhaps General Powers could enlighten us at least on the latter point,” Waverly intervened. “He’s the thermonuclear expert.”

Powers twitched podgy shoulders to resettle his immaculately cut olive-drab jacket. In contrast to the clipped Bostonian of Forster and Solo’s mid-Atlantic accent, his voice was harsh and twangy with the intonation of the Middle West. “Yeah. Well, I guess you gentlemen have gotten used to the fact that whoever took this U-235 took it for one purpose and one purpose only: to use in the manufacture of thermonuclear bombs.”

Waverly had for some minutes been tamping the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe with the forefinger of his right hand. Now he laid the pipe down on the table and leaned forward. “That was the obvious conclusion,” he said. “And since nations are very touchy on matters of their own defense—and since, furthermore, there were international ramifications to this affair—our friends at the CIA thought it best to hand the baby over to us, since we are ourselves an international organization. If, on the other hand, it is not some power-hungry nation at work, but Thrush up to its tricks again—then again we know more about their modus operandi than anyone else.”

“Quite. Well, the first thing we have to consider,” General Powers resumed, “is how this stolen material can be used. First of all, we can rule out the crude atom bomb: that’s kid stuff now. Second of all, I figure we can forget the cobalt bomb. Most everybody’s too goddamned scared to touch it. And that leaves us with the conventional thermonuclear fusion bomb…Now, I guess you gentlemen are familiar with the principle of this device?” He looked around the circle of attentive faces and continued before anyone had time to speak: “As you are probably aware, there are three separate explosions involved here—or more properly four, if you count the original detonator. The detonator sets off a charge of conventional explosive which hurls together two quantities of fissile material together adding up to more than that substance’s critical mass. This initiates a chain reaction producing a fission explosion—and it is only in the immense heat generated by this that the fusion process involving the bomb’s main constituents can take place.”

“You mean an H-bomb has to be triggered off by a small A-bomb explosion inside it?” Solo asked.

“Er—yes. If you want to put it like that. Now, the odd thing is,” Powers continued, “that the light elements required for the fusion process—that is, the main explosive substance is an, er, H-bomb—can be acquired by any country or organization with resources. What stops every country in the world going nuclear is the difficulty and expense of obtaining the fissile material involved in the initial atom-bomb blast.”

“And that is—Uranium 235?”

“Or Plutonium 239. Precisely.”

“So that whoever has this stolen Uranium 235—provided they can command reasonable resources—could be setting up a plant and manufacturing H-bombs in some secret place…say somewhere in Africa?”

“Certainly. Mind you, ‘reasonable’ resources are pretty astronomic by ordinary standards. But if they had the means, and a sufficiently isolated place, and the labor, and some way of getting equipment and material there; if they had all these things—and they’re big enough ‘ifs’ at that, gentlemen—then I guess it could be done.”

“They couldn’t make it without the Uranium 235, though?”

“Definitely not. Not unless funds were virtually unlimited and they’d been working on it for years. You see, first of all you have to get your Uranium ores. Then you have to extract and refine pure Uranium. Then the 235 isotope has to be separated from the natural Uranium in a nuclear reactor—and the yield is minimal: only seven-tenths of one percent. When you add to this the cost of the raw material, the cost of the plant, the time, the cost of the immensely thick shielding needed—”

“Quite, quite,” Waverly interrupted. “I think you’ve made your point, General.”

“I mean, sure, they could get their deuterium, their heavy hydrogen, their cadmium and their graphite moderators easy enough; they could build themselves a reactor—”

“Why Uranium 235, though?” Illya put in, coming to the rescue. “I thought Plutonium was preferred nowadays.

“Why bother when you’re stealing it anyway?” Forster said laconically. “I guess maybe security’s even tougher on Plutonium—or perhaps the guy masterminding the deal has some reason for preferring the other isotope.”

“Yes, well, the point is, it’s 235 that’s been stolen and accumulated,” Waverly said hurriedly. “And what we have to do is track it down and find out where it’s going—and why.” He had pulled another pipe from his pocket, a short-stemmed cherrywood, and was absentmindedly filling it. The briar lay unsmoked on the table. He rose abruptly to his feet and moved to the projector.

“If I may hold the floor for a moment, gentlemen,” he said, “I will tell you the little we have been able to find out so far…”