Текст книги "The Radioactive Camel Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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“That is ridiculous, old chap.”

“Are you a missile expert, General?”

“No. But…”

“Then how can you explain the fact that the weapons are not short range missiles such as would be suitable for such a task, but intermediate range rockets capable of delivering atomic warheads all over Europe?”

“How can you know that? You are a photographer—”

“I must plead guilty to a little deception there, General. I am not at liberty to tell you for whom I work, but I am a missile expert—and what I tell you is the truth.” The Russian’s even voice carried conviction, and for the first time Mazzari hesitated. “Moreover,” the quiet voice continued, “if they were really going to help you conquer the Arabs of the north, would there really be such a highly placed Khartoum official working for them?”

“A Khartoum official?”

“Hassan Hamid. Do you mean you didn’t know? He’s the head of—”

“I don’t believe it,” Mazzari said blankly. “It cannot be true.

“I can prove it to you. Now.”

“I challenge you to do so, old chap.”

Kuryakin unbuttoned his shirt and reached for the money belt around his waist. From one of the pouches at the back he produced the miniature tape recorder and a pack of photographs. “These pictures show him in his official reception office in Khartoum; he said. “You can see the arms, the crest, the flag flanking the wall map…”

While Mazzari stared in disbelief at the prints, the Russian started the tiny recorder. Faintly but distinctly Hamid’s voice spoke:

“…There are one or two cutthroat bands of renegade blacks…We Muslims of the north are continually being misrepresented by the backward Negroes of the south…go tonight to the police station at this address…the necessary documents will be waiting for you…There are various charges payable to the departments…

Illya switched the machine off. “It could be faked, of course,” he said. “And so could the photos. But, taking it together with the strange confusion that appears to exist about some document signed by Hamid, I think you must agree that my warning should at least be carefully considered.”

Mazzari was still sitting thunderstruck at his desk when the door burst open and Ononu returned with Hassan Hamid. The Arab’s face was dark with anger, and Ononu looked perplexed. “The man’s gone—he has apparently escaped!” he exclaimed, snatching off his beret and slashing his thigh with it. “I don’t understand how it can have happened.”

A telephone was ringing on the desk. Mazzari picked it up and listened for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We are all here.”

He looked up as he replaced the receiver. “The Council member is on his way in,” he announced. “Perhaps he will be able to answer a few questions that badly need a reply.”

The door opened again and the three of them stood stiffly and bowed to the young man who came in.

It was Rodney Marshel.

Chapter 14

A Lady to the Rescue!

“Marshel!” Illya was on his feet, his mouth open in astonishment. “But it can’t be…surely you are not…”

“Yes, Kuryakin—I am a member of the Council of Thrush,” the young man snapped, very different now from the languid, diffident person they had seen in Khartoum. “Waverly and your poor organization don’t have a chance: we have agents everywhere; we were on to you from the moment you landed in Casablanca.”

“It seems to have taken you quite a time to catch up with us, in that case,” Illya said mildly. “Now I understand why there was no helicopter when I arrived in Stanleyville. You didn’t pass on any of the messages.”

“Of course not,” Marshel said contemptuously. “Neither yours nor any of the ones Solo so laboriously transmitted from the caravan. So far as Waverly is concerned, the last he heard from you was in Alexandria.”

“And of course you knew we were coming because Waverly had tipped you off?”

“Quite. The only remotely clever thing you did, actually, was to conceal from me the fact that you were seeing this fool Hamid when you went out from the hotel. And when I had found out, the fact that you had switched roles, as it were, caused us a certain amount of trouble…As for you, you bungling oaf,” he continued, turning to glare coldly at Hamid himself, “your duplicity might have imperiled the whole operation.”

The man had gone a sickly gray color. “I…I don’t know what you mean,” he stammered. “My instructions were that there would be a spy traveling with the caravan…that I was to try and identify him, but that he was to be permitted to find and follow the decoy canister. I carried them out. It was not my fault that—”

“I’m not talking about the caravan. Was it part of your instructions to receive the spy in your own house and issue him with a laissez-passer so that you could line your own dirty pocket?”

“But I didn’t!” Hamid cried. “I keep telling everybody—this is the man who came to see me. He is a Russian government mineralogist. I saw no connection with the caravan; it was part of my normal cover activity—”

“You saw,” Marshel grated. “You saw only the chance to feather your own nest—and you took it without any heed of the consequences!”

“I swear, I—”

“How many times do I have to say it? Thrush requires absolute and complete loyalty from its members at all times. At all times. The interests of Thrush must come before everything else, always. You have transgressed against this law; now you will have to pay.”

Hassan Hamid was on his knees, the fine bones of his swarthy face outlined in a dew of sweat. “No!” he cried. “No, no. I beg of you…”

Marshel had drawn a small Beretta automatic from his pocket. Coolly, he sighted the barrel at the pleading figure and squeezed the trigger. As the little gun spat flame, Hassan Hamid jerked back onto his heels, staring in disbelief at the blood spurting between fingers which had flown instinctively to cover his chest. Marshel fired again and Hamid crashed over onto his back. He tried to sit up, groaned and sank to the floor again.

The man from Thrush pumped six more shots into the body twitching under the scarlet-stained robes. When at last the convulsive movements had stopped, he drew another clip of ammunition from his pocket and calmly reloaded the gun. “Now—are there any questions?” he asked.

Mazzari, Ononu and Illya were still staring at the murdered man.

“All right,” Marshel continued. “Now you, Kuryakin. Although I naturally know a lot about U.N.C.L.E., there must be a lot more that such highly placed Enforcement Agents as Solo and yourself can tell me. Before you die, you will tell me these things—that is why you have been encouraged to find your way here, where we can question you at leisure. The deaths will be slow, too, for you have caused us much trouble.”

“Just a minute, old. chap.” Mazzari was on his feet, a frown creasing his brow. “Am I to understand then, that this man”—he gestured at the body on the floor—“was really a Khartoum official after all?”

“Of course he was. How do you think caravans composed mainly of Arab mercenaries were able time and time again to pass through the country unquestioned? And who do you imagine provided the escorts which brought them as far as the edge of the forest?”

“But in view of the Plan, old chap, surely it would have been—”

“The Plan! Are you really naive enough to imagine that an organization such as ours would really go to all this trouble just to help a handful of self-seeking guerrillas? Be your age, General. Your use is at an end now that our own plans are virtually completed…And don’t call me Old Chap.”

Faced with the ruin of his hopes in a single sentence, Mazzari behaved with grave dignity. Compressing his lips, he exchanged a glance with Ononu and sat quietly down again.

“I do not see how the information you say we can give you will help,” Illya said, playing for time.

“As I was saying before this jumped-up boy interrupted me,” Marshel replied, “the info I want from you—”

“I say! Hardly the way for a jolly old Englishman to talk, what!”

Astoundingly, the voice—with its exaggerated mimicry of Marshel’s accent—was Solo’s. It seemed to come from the air. The four men in the room swung around in astonishment. No other person had come in. For once, Marshel was at a loss.

“What—what—? Solo! What’s that? Where are you?” he babbled.

“I said that’s hardly the way for an Englishman to talk” Solo’s normal voice repeated.

Marshel’s eyes glinted. “I’m not an Englishman,” he snapped in spite of himself. “I was born and raised right here in Africa.”

“Ah, that accounts for it, then. I thought all that frightfully frightful and doocidly top-hole stuff was laid on a bit too thick.”

“The grating!” Ononu cried suddenly in a reflex, realizing where the voice came from. In the same instant Marshel, his face black with fury, loosed off a burst of fire at the grille set high in the wall.

Simultaneously, they all realized the danger. As the bullets spanged off the metal cover and ricocheted with shrill screams around the room, they hurled themselves to the floor.

Illya was the first to recover. His cameras and field glasses were on Mazzari’s desk, where the general had put them when they had come in, and he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Snatching up the binoculars by the strap, he scythed the heavy case across the desk top and swept the Walther to the ground as he retrieved the gun-camera in his other hand. Marshel was already aiming the Beretta at him as he pressed the release, still holding the device at his waist.

It was a lucky shot. Before Marshel could fire, the tiny nickel-jacketed bullet struck the automatic half-way along the barrel and spun it from his hand. Marshel snatched his hand back as though it had been scalded, shaking the fingers to ease the pain. Mazzari, in the meantime, had placidly regained his seat. He made no move to pick up the Walther…nor to aid Ononu, who had apparently been hit by a ricochet and was now sitting on the floor clutching one shoulder.

But the Thrush man could move fast too. Before Illya had recovered from the success of his snap shot, he was through the door and pounding away down the corridor towards the caverns.

“General,” the Russian said urgently, “are you on our side?”

“I am afraid I seem to have no side left to be on, old chap,” Mazzari said sadly. ‘From now on you had better regard us as neutral…”

“All right, then,” Kuryakin said. “Napoleon? Can you find your way to the big cave where the reactor is?”

“Yes—or at least I have a guide who can,” Solo s voice replied through the grating.

“Good. Make your way there and we’ll join forces. I have five shots left in the gun-camera. Marshel’s Beretta is buckled and useless. But there’s”—he paused and looked inquiringly at Mazzari, who stared impassively back at him—”there’s the Walther,” Kuryakin continued, scooping the heavy gun up from the floor. “And I’ll see if Hamid was armed…No, he wasn’t. Well, we’ll have to win what we can from the other side. See you there.”

“Okay,” Solo called. “We’re on our way!”

As Illya left the office, Mazzari was pressing down a switch and starting to speak into a desk microphone in front of him.

“This is Mazzari,” he heard the voice boom from speakers all over the redoubt as he hurried towards the door leading to the caverns. “This is a message to all Nya Nyerere personnel. There are two groups of Europeans at large in the fortress—our so-called allies and another. There may be fighting between them. You are not—repeat, not—to take any part whatever in this conflict. Stop all work immediately and proceed to Gabotomi. Retain your arms but take no part in the fighting. Do not use them unless anyone tries to requisition them. If they do, you may defend yourselves…I repeat: Stop all work immediately and proceed to Gabotomi”

Illya opened the steel door cautiously and peered around it at floor level. Marshel must know he would follow and might be waiting to pick him off with a colleague’s gun as he came through. But no burst of fire greeted the opening door, and he slipped quietly into the cavern and surveyed the scene from behind the line of parked trucks.

African workmen were already streaming from the cave containing the partially completed atomic plant and heading for a pair of double doors set in the far rock face. Among them were several groups of soldiers with their rifles slung. The sounds of hammering had stopped, the trucks were silent, and the only noise to be heard over the shuffle of feet was the descending whine of the generators as they spun to a standstill.

When two-thirds of the labor force had vanished through the double doors, Marshel and about a dozen Europeans appeared on a steel gallery outside a glass-fronted control office hallway up the cavern wall.

“Stop!” Marshel shouted. “Get back to your work, damn you! Go back at once to the machines where you belong!”

The file of Africans below looked up impassively and continued to stream through the doors.

“Get back, I say,” Marshel screamed, “or we shall start shooting to show who’s master here.”

The soldiers and workers went on walking quietly out. “All right then—you’ve asked for it!” the man from Thrush called. A ragged burst of fire crackled from the miscellany of pistols and automatics wielded by the men on the gallery. The crowd beneath surged and wavered. There were figures lying on the ground. But as the majority pressed forwards towards the doors, the soldiers among them wheeled smartly out, unslung their rifles and sank to their knees in the firing position. Their first volley crashed out as Marshel’s men were firing for the second time.

The Europeans abruptly withdrew from the gallery, leaving three men slumped over the steel rail. The soldiers waited a moment, and then shepherded the rest of the workers out, dragging the dead and wounded with them. In a few moments, the place was deserted.

Kuryakin hesitated. During the firing, he had slipped out from behind the trucks and made his way into the center of the vast floor. Now he was sheltering behind an abandoned fork-lift. But his problem—and Solo’s when he appeared—was different from Marshel’s: to the Thrush man, it was simply a matter of rounding up two interlopers and then trying to get on good terms with the workers again, whereas to them, with their limited amount of fire power, it was a question of tactics of getting the opposition to show itself and eliminating it member by member…

A low murmur of voices which had been coming from the control room now grew louder as Marshel and the Thrush technicians came out and climbed down the stairs from the gallery to the ground. “Remember,” he was saying as they fanned out over the floor, “there are only two of them. They don’t know the layout of the place and I don’t think they’ve got together yet. One of them is armed; the other isn’t. Shoot to kill—but if you can bag ’em alive, so much the better.”

“Any special order we should search in, sir?” one of the men asked.

“Yes. You, Manson and Trottman take the passage and the power station. I’ll take Ahmed and Fawzi and search the reactor cavern, and the other three can look around in here…And if those minstrel characters in uniform show their noses out of their office, shoot them too.”

Kuryakin shifted silently around to keep the truck between himself and the searchers as they separated. Marshel, Ahmed and Fawzi—whom he recognized as the broken-nosed man they had fought in Casablanca—disappeared through the opening towards the reactor, while three other men went through the door leading to Mazzari’s office and the hydroelectric plant. The agent was just wondering how best to deal with the trio left in his own section when his eye caught a blur of movement on the far side of the cave.

Napoleon Solo was dropping from an opening in the rock onto one of the searchers.

He landed on the man’s shoulders and sent him sprawling, twisting the gun from his grasp as he fell. Before they were up, the other two had spun around, pistols raised. Illya dropped one with the Walther, but the other fired simultaneously with the roar of Solo’s borrowed gun. Both shots found targets: the Thrush gunman slumped to the floor—and the slug meant for Solo slammed into the back of the man he had jumped on, just as he was rising to grapple with the agent.

“Three down and six to go!” Solo yelled. “Nice to see you, Illya! Stay there and cover me while I try and get the guns from the dead ones up in the gallery.”

Footsteps clattered towards them from the other cavern as Solo sprinted for the stairs. The Walther PPK boomed deafeningly as Illya fired in support. Marshel, Ahmed and Fawzi withdrew hurriedly around the corner of the archway.

“Any luck?” the Russian called. Solo’s head appeared over the balcony railing. It shook slowly from side to side. “They’d already thought of it and lifted them,” he said. “Look out! Behind you!”

Kuryakin whirled and flung himself flat behind the fork-lift truck as a fusillade of shots erupted from among the line of parked trucks. The three men returned from the power station.

He emptied the Walther and began firing the camera-gun, although the range was really too great for the tiny weapon. Two of the men were already sprawled on the ground between the heavy wheels, but bullets from the third were striking sparks from the steel frame of the fork-lift uncomfortably close to Illya’s head. He couldn’t see where the man was hidden—and then suddenly a final shot from Solo’s gun, which had been firing sporadically in his support, flushed him out. He careened sideways from the cab of one of the army trucks, scrabbled futilely at the starred windscreen, and plunged to the rock flooring.

Illya rose to his feet and looked back at Solo. The agent held up his gun and gestured to show that his ammunition was exhausted. At this moment the sudden silence was shivered by a woman’s screams, shrill and terrified. It came from somewhere behind Solo, through the control room. He turned and dashed past the banks of meters, gauges and dials to find himself in a long corridor. Ahmed—who had obviously been sent to outflank him—was standing over Yemanja. The girl was lying in a tumble of robes on the floor, with blood trickling from a corner of her mouth.

“You dirty little tramp!” the big man shouted. “I’ll teach you to meddle in affairs that don’t concern you and help spies to escape!” He hauled the girl to her feet and chopped at her face viciously with the back of his hand.

Solo landed on his back like a tiger, his right arm grappling for a judo lock under the man’s chin. Ahmed twisted and dropped to the floor, dragging the agent with him. Locked together, pummeling and gouging, they rolled down the passage and into the control room again. Solo managed to free one arm and caught the camel-master with two uppercuts to the jaw, but the blows hardly seemed to shake him. He rose up onto his knees and closed his great hands inexorably around Solo’s windpipe. The agent thrashed and writhed on the floor, his hands tearing at the sinewy wrists, his feet and knees seeking leverage to thrust the man away. But the thumbs pressing into his throat would not relax their iron grip and the thundering in Solo’s ears threatened to engulf the world.

There was a whining of hydraulic rams, and Illya Kuryakin rose slowly into view over the rail of the gallery, seated on the fork-lift of the buck. The viewfinder of the small camera held to his eye spat once, and the pressure on Solo’s throat relaxed. Ahmed gave a strange coughing groan and collapsed, a dead weight across his body.

Kuryakin strode through and helped the sobbing girl to her feet, rolled the body of the camel-master off Solo, and said crisply, “That was my last shot, Napoleon. We haven’t a round left between us. What do we do now?”

“I should say that was an academic question,” the voice of Rodney Marshel said levelly behind them. “Get down those stairs, the three of you—and move!”

He was standing with Fawzi at the gallery entrance to the control room. With a gesture of resignation, Solo led the way past the two steadily held automatics and began to descend the staircase. Yemanja and Illya followed.

They had gone down three or four steps when two shots so close that they sounded like a single explosion thundered in the cavern. Fawzi and Marshel were flung forward and hurled on top of the others, so that all five of them tumbled down the remainder of the staircase in a tangled heap.

Illya was the first on his feet. Far across the floor of the cavern, booted and gleaming at the foot of the ramp leading to the entrance tunnels and the open air, he saw the figure of Rosa Harsch, wreathed in the smoke which still curled from the barrel of the automatic rifle in her hands.

“You know what you have to do, Illya?” Napoleon Solo asked hoarsely, massaging his bruised throat with one hand.

The Russian nodded. “I shall need a great deal of wire and an alarm clock,” he said. “Detonators I can probably raise from one of the many stores here.”

“Okay. Off you go, then. We1l see you later…General, I’m sorry, but I hope you understand why we have to do this.”

Mazzari retained his dignity in defeat. Still supporting a gray-faced Ononu—who had lost a lot of blood through the ricochet which had torn his shoulder—he nodded in turn. “I suppose so, old chap,” he said wearily. “To be honest, we couldn’t use any of them on our own, anyway.”

“It’s probably just as well. I’m afraid we cannot offer to help you in any way in the furtherance of your—er—private war. Now tell me, apart from your own troops, are there any refugees in the forest in this area?”

“None. We have rigorously excluded them from an area twenty miles in radius, of which this of course is the center.”

“Fine. I will give you three hours to clear every man, woman and child of your own people—plus such equipment as you consider necessary—from the same area. I regret very much the destruction of Gabotomi, but it cannot be avoided. I suggest you take one of the trucks. Oh—and I believe this is yours.” He picked up the empty Walther and handed it to Mazzari.

The soldier was almost in tears. He took the gun, slammed it into its holster, snapped his cane under his arm, saluted, and helped Ononu away towards the line of trucks.

“What time shall I set this for?” Kuryakin asked later, looking up from an old-fashioned alarm clock in a nest of terminals, wires and junctions. The truck which was to take them away was waiting with its engine running, and the four of them were gathered in the control room.

“Make it three hours from now,” Solo said. “And I hope you can find your way back to that Landrover in the dark!”

“I’m not worried about that,” the Russian said. “What I cannot understand is Miss Harsch’s part in all this.”

Rosa Harsch smiled. “I work for the German government at Bonn,” she said huskily. “We are naturally somewhat sensitive about others obtaining nuclear weapons—and we like to keep a close eye on anybody who may seem to be doing so illegally…But I thought you were not quite what you seemed either, my friend. Maybe each of us recognizes his own kind.”

She raised a blonde eyebrow and held his gaze with a meaningful look.