Текст книги "The Radioactive Camel Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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The convoy drivers, their truckmates and the escorting guards were all grouped around an officer issuing instructions some way off, with their backs towards the bay. Now was his chance. Lifting the flap as little as possible, he dropped to the ground and slid around to the front of the truck. Crouched between the radiator and the rock wall, out of sight of the soldiers, he looked around him for a place to hide.

A little way to his left, hidden from the men in the cavern by another truck, a doorway opened into the wall. He edged along to it, listened, turned the handle, and slipped through.

He found himself in a long passage with closed doors on either side. Electric bulbs glowed in the roof. At the far end, an opening led to the dark reaches of another cave. The humming noise was louder now: he must be approaching the generating station he had seen from behind the cascades.

Kuryakin flitted silently along the corridor and into the cave. It was empty and unlit—but through it was yet another chamber, in whose dim lighting he could make out the squat shapes of transformers.

He hesitated. Should he conceal himself in this empty cavern, or should he return to the scene of activity and try to hide somewhere there? Perhaps the latter—then he could emerge and investigate further when work had stopped for the day.

He turned. In the lighted entrance to the passage, General Mazzari was standing, a heavy Walther automatic in his hand.

“Not many white rhino down here,” he said mildly. “I think you and I had better have a little talk, old chap…”

Chapter 13

Inside the Underground Fortress

>GANGS OF MEN armed with pneumatic picks were trying to drill off the top of Napoleon Solo’s head before it exploded. They were too late: the world spun away in fragments, leaving a swirling red haze through which the face of the foreman peered at him apologetically.

“… necessary to hit you quite so hard,” the foreman was saying, “but in any case the journey here would probably have caused you more hardship than the blow and its after-effects.”

Solo’s eyes were half open. The foreman’s face sharpened in focus and a room gradually assembled itself behind him. Surely the face was very dark? And for some reason he appeared to be wearing an army uniform of sorts. The room, too, was…unexpected: it seemed to be upside down.

“Who are you?” Napoleon croaked.

“Colonel Ononu, Area Commandant of the Nya Nyerere,” the foreman said. “More to the point, my friend: who are you? And why? And from where? And sent by whom, man?”

Of course, Solo thought. The room wasn’t upside-down at all; he was lying on his back. And yet there was no sense of anything hard, no sign of any floor beneath him. His wrists and ankles hurt like hell. And as the thought formed in his mind, he was astonished to see them in front of him, apparently sticking straight up in the air. He tried to bring them down, failed, saw the pole running between the thongs binding them—and all at once remembered: the deserted glade, the officer with the revolver, the empty Uranium 235 canister, the homing device that had been discovered and used to decoy him into an ambush…

“I said who are you?” the chunky officer repeated.

“I might feel more inclined to reply in a less disadvantageous position,” Solo suggested.

“You are in as happy a position as spies ever are,” the colonel said. “Who are you?”

“I am not a spy. My name is Napoleon Solo. I am engaged on mineralogical research for…a certain government.”

“You are an Arab spy,” the officer said levelly.

“Don’t be ridiculous. How can I be an Arab?”

Ononu slapped his face dispassionately. Pain flamed through the agent’s body as the blow jarred his head.

“How can you not be an Arab?” the soldier sneered.

“I tell you I am a European—”

“Ridiculous. With those hands and fingers? With those teeth?”

“It was a disguise. They can be brought back to normal—”

“And you have even shaved off your beard—see, there’s the outline where the skin is paler.”

Solo was silent. He must have acquired a deeper tan while he was with the caravan, and the removal of the false beard had showed it up. His disguise had been too clever—now it was backfiring on him. “Who…what is the Nya Nyerere?” he asked at last.

“The liberation army of southwest Sudan.”

“Well, it’ll hardly recommend itself to you for its original purpose, but at least it will serve to identify me: there is a laissez-passer in the breast pocket of my shirt, vouching for my bona fides and signed by a high government official.”

Fingers snatched the document from Solo’s pocket.

From his cramped position he took in what he could of the room while it was being read. It seemed to be some sort of office: there were filing cabinets, a desk, charts and maps on the wall. Through a window he could see a steep, tree covered cliff and the corner of a red brick building. From somewhere outside, shouted words of command drifted in. The pole under which he was slung was resting between two banks of steel cabinets.

“This piece of paper is worthless,” a second voice, which Solo had not heard before, said crisply behind him. A man in dark robes walked into his view. It was the stranger he had seen talking to Ahmed at Wadi Elmira and encountered again when he had made his abortive attempt to rejoin the caravan the next day.

“I have myself met Mr. Solo,” the man said contemptuously. “He is a Russian, fair haired, and more slimly built than this man. Did you imagine for one moment, my poor fool,” he continued, gazing down at Solo, “that Thrush would be so naive as to let your clumsy attempts at espionage go undetected? We have been on to you ever since you joined the caravan—only the precise identification of which man was the spy remained. And this you kindly supplied yourself when you tried to join up again after we left Wadi Elmira.”

“And the Uranium 235?” Solo asked, playing for time.

“Was never with this caravan at all. When it was taken away from the first camel train between Casablanca and Alexandria, it was flown straight here by helicopter. Did you think we would be so foolish as to continue with the same system once we knew it had been discovered? Did you think your radio messages from the caravan went unnoticed? We merely let you play your little game so that you could be lured to a place more suitable for your…interrogation. You were meant to discover the canister and follow it.”

The agent said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“And now we come back to the question,” the dark man said. “Who are you and who is employing you?”

Again, Solo remained silent.

“Very well,” the dark man said at length. “As I had feared, we shall have to resort to less polite methods. Colonel?”

Ononu moved back into Solo’s field of vision. He picked up a telephone from the desk and barked a few words into it in a dialect the agent could not identify. Then, dropping the receiver back into its cradle, he walked over and stood looking down at the helpless man.

“Man, you got yourself into some trouble,” he said. “Neither you nor your bosses, whoever they are, can do us any harm now; we’re all set to go…But there’s a Council member arriving today, and he’ll want all the ends tidied up before he comes. So we have to find out all about you, just for the record. We like to know who we’ve beaten, man. You’ll talk, too, sooner or later. Everybody talks. But in your case it has to be sooner, see? Now, why not save us a lot of trouble—and yourself, too—by telling us what we want to know?”

“I have already told you who I am,” Solo said.

The colonel shook his head. He flung out his arms and dropped them to his side again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know, man.”

There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” the dark man called.

Footsteps crossed the floor behind Solo’s head. “This spy will not say anything,” Colonel Ononu said. “There’s a Council member arriving at six. I want to know before then who he is—who he really is, man—and who sent him, and what’s he doin’ here anyway? Right?…You’d better take him away into the mountain.”

There was a short pause, and then, “It will be a pleasure,” two voices said simultaneously, one in French and one in Arabic. Two large men moved across and took up the ends of the pole under which Solo was slung. One was Ahmed; the other was the half-caste with the broken nose whom the agent had beaten in the fight in the alleyway at Casablanca.

“It would be much easier for everybody, old chap, if you’d just tell me all about it,” General Mazzari said to Illya. They were sitting in a small office off the corridor leading to the cavern where the reactor was. Between them, a flat-topped desk was covered in papers. The walls were hung with what looked like production charts and graphs, and there was a plaster relief map of the Sudan and surrounding countries to one side of the door. Mazzari’s Walther PPK, with its dull black barrel and brown grips, lay heavily among the papers by his hand.

“There’s not much to tell, really,” Kuryakin said. “I am afraid I must plead guilty to being inquisitive. I was trying to find my colleague Waverly—I told one of your colonels who stopped me about him—and I came across an airstrip and then a road…Well, you can imagine how curious I was, finding a road and a runway in the middle of an unexplored forest.”

“Go on.”

“Yes. Well, the next thing I discovered was a silo with a missile in it. Not that I was prying, but I almost fell into it. It seems to me quite reasonable for anyone finding things like this to look around a bit.”

“But I found you in here, old chap. In here. The place is closely guarded, you know. Very closely guarded.”

“That was unintentional. I did not mean to come in here. Indeed, I did not know of the existence of the place.”

“Unintentional?”

“I was tired. A convoy of trucks passed me and I—well, I stole a lift; I swung aboard the back when the last one passed me.”

“As it passed you. I see. But you had a vehicle of your own.”

“I had to leave it. There was a bridge down and I came on on foot.”

“And what did you find inside this truck?”

“An unmarked crate—two crates, rather.”

“Yes?”

“When the truck stopped, I waited for a minute and then I got out. I could see at once that I was in some place I had no business to be—so I thought I had better go. I was trying to find a way out when you…captured me.”

Mazzari picked up the gun and examined it. “You have indeed stumbled upon something that does not concern you,” he said at last. “But we are ready to strike within the next few days; in a week we shall be masters of the whole Sudan. Probably of the whole of Africa, old chap. Perhaps your unwelcome arrival does not matter so much—but I have a feeling…There is a highly placed official of the organization helping us who is due to arrive shortly. The decision must be his. I fear he may think you have learned more than is good for you. And even if your life should be spared, you will have to stay here as our…guest, shall we say?…until after we have acted.”

“It sounds very intriguing.”

“Intriguing! If only you knew, old chap! Do you realize how much work, how much planning has gone into this scheme?”

“To build a redoubt like this must in itself have presented enormous difficulties,” Illya encouraged.

“But of course. There were the natural caverns to start with—we had the advantage of knowing about these. But our friends had to fly in vast quantities of materials undetected, instruct the labor force we provided and supervise the construction…it was a fantastic task. For three years we have been slaving underground here. Three years. Because the place had to be invisible from the air, you see. The Arabs have reconnaissance planes which frequently pass over Halakaz.”

“There is certainly no sign of construction work on the surface—but what about the airstrip?”

“You would think it could be seen for miles, wouldn’t you?” Mazzari was as boastful as a child with a new toy. “Undetectable. Not a sign. From the ground it looks like any runway, but we had the greatest camouflage expert in Europe…Because there are no buildings, you see, skillful variations of tone and texture in the asphalt can blend it in perfectly with the surroundings.”

“You have been very clever, General.”

“Clever? That is only the beginning! We have a cyclotron—you probably saw the spiral tubes—and we are building a synchrotron which will have an energy level of ten thousand million electron volts! That has to wait until we can enlarge the caverns still further, because the ring of tubing must be a hundred meters in diameter. In a year, we shall have completed a Fast Reactor using tamed Plutonium and liquid Sodium—and then we shall be able to dispense with the old-fashioned hydroelectric plant, which always runs the risk of being detected by people exploring the falls. Then too, we shall be our own masters at every stage of our weapons program: at the moment, we have to rely on—er—outside sources for certain isotopes.”

“You mentioned a strike in the near future. If all this is to help you vanquish your enemies in Khartoum, the organization helping you must be altruistic. What can it profit them?”

“The organization—it is called Thrush—is an international body of scientists and economists. It is not composed of altruists, but it is always prepared to consider helping the underdog—if he has a good cause. Our cause is good, so they helped us. And of course, as you say, it is a two-way deal. In return we provide the labor and the place—the one place in the world where Thrush scientists can continue with their valuable research undisturbed by the prying eyes of jealous rivals and unknown to the world’s espionage corps.”

Kuryakin began to say something, thought better of it, and sighed. If this somehow likable patriot had not yet realized that his poor little six-thousand strong army, and his labor force of refugees from the destroyed villages, were merely dupes in Thrush’s insatiable plan for world domination, his awakening would come soon enough. For the missiles whose sleek shapes he had seen in their silos were no local pieces of atomic artillery designed to obliterate Khartoum: they were IRBM’s—intermediate range ballistic missiles, capable of destroying Rome, Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna!

“Your own men are in charge of the dispatch of the missiles I saw?” he asked.

“Well, no, old chap. At the moment Thrush technicians look after them. We haven’t yet acquired the know-how to man the computer room and the control dugouts. But we are training, we are training. A branch of my forces is on a special course at Gabotomi, on the further side of this plateau. And there are supplementary courses at various places round about, you know. An elementary course had a narrow escape yesterday when the accursed Arabs sacked a village not far from here—purely by coincidence, I hope.”

“General,” Illya began, “there is something I ought to tell you…”

A telephone on Mazzari’s desk shrilled him into silence. “Forgive me,” the soldier said when he had listened for a few moments, made a comment in his native language, and replaced the instrument. “The Council member of whom I spoke has arrived. I must leave you for a while. There are, as you see, no windows, no other doors, no means of exit from this room. The door through which I leave is solid and will be double-locked. Also, there will be two armed men on duty outside it. My advice to you, old chap, is to make yourself comfortable and sit tight until I return.”

He went out and Illya heard the solid clunk of metal as the tumblers of the lock fell home. A moment later, boots scraped on the floor of the corridor as the guards took up position outside.

Napoleon Solo was strapped to a ten-foot plank. His ankles were bound and attached to a ring at one end, and his arms, stretched above his head, were tied at the wrist and fastened to the other. The ends of the plank rested on a table top and a chair, so that his head was lower than his feet.

Helpless on his back in this position, he had endured the age-old water torture. It was quite simple and very effective. They had plugged his nostrils with cotton wool and wedged an iron ring into his mouth so that it was jammed open. Broken-nose had then draped a long strip of thin muslin over Solo’s face and carefully, lovingly poured water—gallons and gallons of water—into the open mouth through the cloth. With his head unable to turn because of his own arms on either side, the victim can only get rid of the water by trying to swallow it—but before each mouthful is swallowed it has always been replaced by another. And in the meantime the victim has to breathe; the tortured lungs heave and try to drag in air, but the attempt only draws in water…and with the water comes the muslin, which is remorselessly sucked into the windpipe. In a very short time the victim, gagging and retching, is half drowned with the water in his lungs, and half choked with the cloth.

The only trouble was that Solo’s iron will was sufficiently strong to allow himself to be choked into unconsciousness before the spasms became violent enough to cue the torturers to remove the muslin and start again.

After this had happened three times, Ahmed—whose dirty-nailed fingers had been occupying themselves pinching and prodding and squeezing here and there to punctuate the water treatment—straightened up from the agent’s body and growled, “This is no good, my friend. We shall never get anywhere this way. The salaud will just go on choking himself unconscious. And the colonel said he wanted results quickly. We must make him talk some other way.”

Broken-nose put down the fuel drum and attached radiator hose he had been using to supply the water. “Very well,” he said. “Let us see how he reacts to electricity, eh?”

“You must have been someone’s star pupil,” Solo gasped.

Broken-nose snarled, “We learned a few lessons in Algeria about water and electricity—and the boys upstairs learned some things by keeping their ears and eyes open when the French exploded their atom bomb in the Sahara in 1960.”

“Of course,” Solo muttered to himself. “W equals mc²—I thought it was familiar...”

“What is he gabbling about?” Ahmed asked.

“A sum I saw on a blackboard. That’s the French way of expressing the atomic equation. We—others, that is—express it as E equals mc². But don’t worry yourself about it—it’s far too intelligent for you.”

The camel-master plunged his fist into Solo’s unprotected midriff. Once again the world dissolved into a red mist.

When the agent came to, the two men were attaching lengths of wire to various prominences about his person with miniature bulldog clips. “This will make your beautiful eyes open wider,” Broken-nose grinned, feeling Solo stir. “We have a fine truck magneto handy—when we hitch up the wires and spin the armature, you’ll have your own built-in central heating system! And we can make it as hot as you like, according to how fast we spin. Sure you wouldn’t like to change your mind and tell us all about it?”

Solo remained silent and they went out, presumably to get the magneto.

The room appeared to be carved from the solid rock. It had been quite a long walk from the settlement where he had seen Ononu, first between army-style huts, then along a narrow gorge, and finally through a cave to a succession of passages hollowed out of the mountain. By the time the torturers had laid down the pole with its helpless burden, they had been gasping with effort.

It was very cold. Solo shuddered uncontrollably, listening to the hoarse noise of his own breathing and the small sounds made by the wires festooning him as they shivered in turn. The clips bit painfully into the tender areas of his flesh—though he knew this was nothing to compare with the bolts of agony which would shortly be searing through him at the direction of his torturers. He hoped he would be able to stand it long enough for unconsciousness to save him again...

Fingers were busy now about the cords binding his wrists. He closed his eyes, tensing his muscles for the assault of pain. But there was something wrong—the fingers were soft, gentle. A cloying, exotic perfume washed over him.

“You are very appealing when you look so helpless,” a voice hissed in his ear, “but I could admire you better in another place at another time. Come—do you wish to stay here until they return?”

Solo’s arms were free. He brought them down to his sides and turned his head. Yemanja was crouched beside the plank, her eyes glittering at him over an Arab veil.

“Yemanja!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

“Talk later,” the girl said urgently, busy with the bonds around his ankles. “Unclip the wires. I saw you being carried through Gabotomi on a pole and guessed they would be bringing you here.”

Painfully, his limbs suffering agonies as the blood coursed back into the veins, Solo sat up and swung his feet to the ground. He took two steps, and almost fell. There was a thundering behind his eyes and his head was spinning. “Quick!” the girl whispered, climbing onto a desk against one wall. “They will be back any minute.”

In a daze, the agent watched as she reached over her head and pushed at a grating set high up in the rock. The grille swung away with a metallic scrape. A moment later the girl had pitched clothes and belt into the dark opening beyond and hauled herself up after them.

Solo climbed stiffly onto the desk and grasped the hands held out to aid him from the darkness. He made the climb with difficulty and lay gasping while Yemanja lowered the grating back into place. They were in a tunnel hollowed out of the rock. It was about three feet high and there was a moist breeze blowing.

“Air conditioning—very modern,” the girl said. “Follow me.

Solo crawled after her along the damp, rough floor. After a while, the passage joined another, wider, tunnel and they were able to move along this at a crouch. Judging by the draughts that he felt from time to time about his legs, there were a number of subsidiary passages joining the main one. Distantly, from somewhere behind, he heard the muffled sound of voices raised in argument or protest. Presumably his absence had been discovered.

Presently he could detect a faint radiance ahead, and soon they were standing upright in a cave dimly lit by reflected light from a series of galleries radiating from it.

“Now we stop for a minute and talk,” Yemanja said. “But quietly, for sound carries far in the rock.”

“All right,” Solo whispered. “For a start, answer me some questions, will you? What is this place? How did you get here—and how do you know all about these passages?”

“Is the mountain headquarters of the Nya Nyerere. The caves and the passages have been secret retreat of my people for many hundreds of years—but now their friends from Europe have built much new things inside the mountain. Factories and bombs and places to make electricity. Aeroplanes come and bring many things, for the building—but although my people help with the new things, they keep some secrets for themselves. The Europeans know nothing of these old passages which bring air to the rooms, for example.”

“Yes, Yemanja—but how do you know all about them?”

“I was born in Gabotomi,” the girl said. “My father was Assyrian, but my mother was Gabotomi woman. I lived here as a child—before it stopped being town and became military camp—and we had to come into the mountain sometimes to escape the Arabs.”

“What are you doing here now?”

“Ahmed bring me to entertain troops and workers with some other girls. But I know more than others. See—I show you all the factory parts…”

She took Solo by the hand and led him along one of the passages leading off the cave. As they went further down the tunnel, the light grew brighter and a confusion of noises manifested itself. Solo could distinguish the humming of generators, voices, a truck engine revving, and a whole series of tappings and hammerings. Soon they were passing a row of grilles set low down in the rock, from which the light was coming. Through the metal gratings, he caught glimpses of offices, lecture rooms and stores with men in uniform busied about their tasks below.

“But surely Thrush—the Europeans—must know about the grilles! Don’t they know how the air comes to their offices?” Solo asked.

“Of course. They know about the tunnels. But they do not know they are big enough for people to walk in. Many of our own people, even, do not know this.”

“Can all the gratings be moved like the one we escaped from?”

“No. Only that one. The others are cemented in place—but we left that one in case any of our own men were tortured and we wished to escape them…Look! Now you can see…”

They had come to a wider embrasure, set chest high in the limestone wall. The girl pushed Solo towards it and he peered down through the iron bars. The noise was deafening now, and as he saw the sources of the sounds, he uttered a low whistle of astonishment. Fifty feet below him was the floor of the huge cavern Illya Kuryakin had seen. Solo’s trained eye took in at a glance the cyclotron, the hundred-foot steel sphere of the atom furnace with the swarm of men still working on it, the partially completed cooling tubes, the banks of dials with their winking red lights, and, far above, the movable cranes running on rails set in the roof of the cave. Fork-lift trucks were whining here and there among the army of workmen, and in the background he could see the sinister, fish-like shape of a rocket on a low loader. Behind it, double doors admitted to a further chamber each one carrying in red lettering the legend in Arabic, French and English:

DANGER! RADIATION HAZARD BEYOND THIS POINT!

ENTRY FORBIDDEN TO PERSONNEL

NOT WEARING PROTECTIVE CLOTHING.

Yemanja was pulling at his arm. “Come,” she whispered. “There is more to see.”

She led the way through a maze of passages which continually branched and divided again, rising and falling in the rock. After about a quarter of a mile, Solo noticed that the limestone showing through the gloom was glistening with moisture and the air was appreciably colder. A faint roaring noise vibrated all around them. A few minutes later they were looking over the edge of a gallery in the rock at the giant turbines and generators of the power station.

“Yemanja,” Solo called over the thunder of the conduits, “why do you think these people are offering to help the Nya Nyerere? What is all this great factory for?”

“They say it is to vanquish the Arab government in Khartoum,” the girl replied, her lips close to the agent’s ear. “But they speak with lying voices, I think.”

“You are right. These are evil men. Your people are being made the dupes for a much larger conspiracy. As soon as the work is finished, the Europeans will have no further use for them. They will all be killed. The secret work of which I spoke is to try and foil this plan. Will you help me, Yemanja?”

“Am I not helping you already?” the girl said simply. “You are no longer in the interrogation room. That is why I show you all this.”

“I’m sorry. I’m very grateful: I owe you much…But tell me one thing more. Will Ahmed and the other not guess that we escaped through the hinged grating and follow us? If they locked the door when they went out, there is no other way we could have gone.”

The girl shrugged. “Perhaps. You were securely tied and they probably left the door unlocked. Even if not, if they did open the grating they could never find their way through the passages, for Ahmed is not of our people and the other is a nothing. Now I will show you the rooms where the important ones, the chiefs of the organization, talk.”

And once again she led Solo down a narrow tunnel in the rock.

Some time after Illya Kuryakin had been left alone in Mazzari’s office, the general returned with two men: a short, squat army officer in uniform and a tall man in dark robes. The former was Colonel Ononu; the latter, the Russian saw to his intense surprise, was Hassan Hamid.

“Ah, Mr. Kuryakin!” the soldier said. “I did warn you of the consequences of a too inquisitive lens, did I not?”

“The Council member will be with us in a few minutes,” Mazzari said. “Until then the precise consequences of Mr. Kuryakin’s transgression cannot be arrived at.”

“What name did you say?” Hassan Hamid exclaimed. “But this is Solo—the man to whom those documents rightfully belong!”

“I have never seen this man before in my life,” Kuryakin said, looking him straight in the eye.

“What kind of joke is this? Why, you came to see me in my villa at Khartoum. I gave you the authorization myself…”

Illya shook his head slowly, his eyes wide with innocence.

“I hardly think, Excellence,” Ononu said awkwardly, “that it can be the same man. I myself saw this one, almost three days ago, in the desert of thorns—heading north in a Landrover.”

“And I had seen him cross the southern border a day before that,” Mazzari put in with a puzzled frown.

“But that is impossible. Absolutely impossible. He traveled here from Khartoum in the caravan with the decoy canister…or at least almost here. Colonel—you were with the caravan for the first two or three days: was there or was there not this spy among its members?”

“There was a spy—or so you told me,” Ononu said slowly. “But the only evidence I saw was of the radio transmissions. By the time he was caught, I had already left the caravan two days. Whereas I do know that this man was three hundred and fifty miles to the southwest when the spy tried to rejoin the train after Wadi Elmira. Also, I myself caught the man following the homing device; you yourself saw him earlier today.”

“But the papers that man had were given—”

“The photograph on them was of the other man.”

“I told you they must have been altered, forged, you fool,” Hamid said furiously. “Where is the man, the other one, now?”

“He is being interrogated, as you know.”

“Come, then—we will soon get to the bottom of this foolishness.” Hassan Hamid grasped Ononu roughly by the arm and stormed him from the room.

Illya smiled deprecatingly at Mazzari. “I was attempting to tell you, General,” he said quietly, “that I fear you and your well-trained little army are being made into dupes. The organization Thrush is making use of you to help build this arsenal—and when it is finished, you will be dispensed with. I assure you they have no intention of using these weapons to help you take Khartoum or any other city in the Sudan.”