07-The Radioactive Camel Affair Page 10

  The woman walked into her tent and reappeared with a peeled switch. “This man was discovered helping himself to more than his share of the liquor ration,” she said unemotionally. “Six strokes.”

  She approached the table, measured her distance, and raised her arm. The switch hissed down and raised a livid weal. Illya watched in astonishment as the following five strokes fell in metronomic precision. Apart from a sharp intake of breath at each blow, the pinioned man uttered no sound. Nor was there any comment from the rest of the party, who watched in a grave-faced circle around the fire. As soon as the last stroke had fallen, Rosa Harsch turned her back and the Nubians rapidly released the victim, who limped back to his tent. A minute later they led a thin, bearded white man of about twenty-six to the table.

  “This man, by his carelessness in his duties as clerk, caused us to lose a rucksack containing notebooks filled with irreplaceable data,” Rosa Harsch said. “Ten strokes.” And the process was repeated exactly as before.

  When it was over, the members of the party dispersed to their various sleeping quarters and the woman returned to Illya by the fire. The flickering light smoothed out the network of fine wrinkles around her eyes and softened the contours of her face. From a certain rigidity about the waist and the twin bulges of flesh at each side of her back just below the arms, he guessed that she was wearing a laced corset beneath the shirt. But for all that she was still remarkably attractive.

  “I see you have no color bar in your expedition,” he said lightly as she unbuckled the Sam Browne and dropped to the ground beside him.

  “No,” she said seriously. “No color bar. Everyone is treated the same. It is best. In places as remote and as dangerous as this, it is unfortunately necessary to impose strict discipline. Without it, they take advantage—all of them. And that impairs efficiency. Without complete efficiency, an expedition of this sort is doomed from the start.”

  “They all seem to take it for granted. Nobody resents such…discipline…being administered by a woman?”

  “But of course not. I am the leader of the expedition.”

  She offered Kuryakin a cigarette, and lit one herself. “And now,” she said, leaning towards him in the glow of the embers, “it is time to relax. Tell me about yourself; you could interest me, young man…”

  Chapter 11

  School is Dismissed.

  WHILE ILLYA HAD been filling his radiator from the trickle of water in the wadi, Napoleon Solo, more than a hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, was guiding his horse between the stones of a moraine sloping down to a plain. Somewhere ahead of him, the caravan with the camel carrying the container of Uranium 235 was winding its way among the tall grasses and scrub oak that had supplanted the ubiquitous thorn trees.

  He rode slowly, the homing device open on the saddle in front of him. At first, turning the pointer to ensure that he was taking the direction in which the bleeps were loudest was almost a formality: the trail was well marked and there was no other route the caravan could have taken. Later in the afternoon, when he was climbing another of the interminable series of limestone ridges with which the country was barred, he had cause to be glad of his foresight—for the track itself petered out among a wilderness of rock outcrops, and he was constantly having to check and recheck his route. Such food as he had had been abandoned with the camel and he was ravenously hungry. He was worried about the horse, too, for the animal had taken neither food nor water since he had escaped from Ahmed and the soldiers. He had ripped a length of cloth from his burnoose to improvise a headdress against the scorching rays of the sun. The remainder of his robes he had discarded and buried with the “pilgrim’s” papers. Now—thankful that he had been wearing his bush shirt and shorts underneath them—he was again beardless and normal of nose, in the guise of Napoleon Solo: mineralogist of Russian extraction, equipped with a laissez-passer countersigned by His Excellency Hassan Hamid…

  Several times he attempted to contact Illya but the radio remained obstinately silent.

  From the top of the ridge, he swept the country beyond with his glasses. It was becoming less barren, definitely: there were squares of cultivation here and there, and vegetation covered the rolling contours more thickly. Far off towards a range of tree-covered hills which reared, blue-hazed, against the horizon, a long line of dust marked the position of the caravan. He slid the binoculars back into their case and rode on down.

  Twice he had to skirt villages—no longer the mudwalled Arab variety, but circles of huts in the African manner—but he saw nobody. Once, though, he thought he heard the sound of distant rifle fire.

  He was within a mile of the wooded hills when he saw a column of smoke rising above the trees off to the right. A moment later, hooves thundered on hard ground and he trotted the horse out of sight behind a maize hedge just before a squadron of Arab cavalry thundered past in a cloud of dust. There were about thirty of them, shouting and laughing and waving their rifles above their heads as they rode. Two of them carried the bound figures of African women across their saddles; a third dragged behind his horse on a length of rope the lacerated body of a man.

  Solo waited in his place of concealment until the dust had settled. He switched on the homer again: the pips were still sounding loud and clear. He could afford the time to investigate.

  Walking the horse warily between the trees, he advanced towards the column of smoke.

  When he was about two hundred yards away, he found a patch of grass where the horse could graze. Tethering the animal to a sapling, he drew the Mauser and went forward on foot.

  The village was completely concealed in a shallow depression. As he trod down the slope, Solo’s nostrils were assailed by the bitter stench of burning and death. Most of the inhabitants must have fled, but there were a dozen bodies sprawled in the dusty space enclosed by the ring of gutted huts.

  The flames had died down, but half a dozen of the burned huts still spiraled smoke into the air. The only thing standing was the stone-built end wall of a building rather larger than the others.

  Solo walked around the corner of the wall—and stopped in astonishment. The rest of the building had been made of wood, and all that remained of it was a tangle of charred embers from which wisps of smoke still rose. But it had obviously been some kind of school. Hardwood desks with iron frames had escaped the conflagration and still stood upright among the debris—and what was oddest of all was the size of the desks: with their attached seats, they were big enough for full-grown adults!

  The agent turned to look at the end wall. A scorched teacher’s desk had fallen forward among the blackened timbers of a dais. Behind it, a blackboard was still attached to the plaster. Glancing idly at the chalked figures, he drew in his breath with a gasp of surprise. The top line read: Réaction de châine: fission de l’Uranium. And beneath this was the diagram:

  At the foot of the board was written:

  W (energie de la transmutation) = mc2

  (c = vit. de la lumière d’apres l’equivalence de la masse et de l’energie)

  L’Uranium…

  “My God!” Solo exclaimed aloud. “Atomic physics being taught here. They must be running a school for future warmongers…It seems I’m getting warm after all.”

  Hurrying back to the horse, he saw a scrap of white paper lying under the trees. It was a sheet from a loose-leaf notebook. On it was written:

  “Well, at least some of the class seems to have got away,” Solo muttered as he remounted and rode on along the trail.

  It looked as though, wherever Thrush was conveying the Uranium 235, they must be organizing courses of instruction in its use among the dissident Africans.

  Whether the sack of the village by the Arabs had anything to do with this, or whether it was merely a coincidence, he had at present no means of knowing. In any case, it seemed reasonable that the destination of the lead canister might be near at hand.

  A few miles further on among the wooded hills, he reined in the horse on a crest a
nd took out his glasses. Three ridges away he could clearly spot the caravan traversing an open space among the trees. The powerful Zeiss lenses showed him the striped blanket still in position on the camel he was following.

  He rode on down the track—now clearly marked and in greater use than much of the route over which he had traveled.

  He was within sight of the open space where he had seen the caravan when he suddenly noticed that the bleeps on the homer were growing fainter. Puzzled, he stopped. He knew the train had come this way because he had watched it; and he knew, furthermore, that the camel had still been with it then. They couldn’t possibly have accelerated and got so far ahead that they were out of range. Why should the signal have lost strength if he was—as he knew—on the right track? He rode on further—and the bleeps grew fainter still.

  Had the beast carrying the canister broken away from the main body, then? He halted again and swung the homer questioningly around. There was no sign of the signal strengthening in any direction tangential to the trail. It was only when he wheeled completely about that he realized.

  The bleeps increased in volume when he was facing back the way he had come.

  Although the camel was still with the caravan, the canister—or at least the homing device he had placed with it—had been left somewhere along the route. Solo cantered back along the track, his pulses quickening with the thought of action at last.

  It was a simple matter to follow the signals. They grew stronger and stronger as he went along. It looked as though the canister was now stationary.

  The homer finally led him off the track and in among the woods. When the signals were registering their maximum, he dismounted, drew the Mauser, and tiptoed cautiously through the undergrowth as the device directed him. There was a puzzled frown on his face: he must be almost there, yet there were no signs of buildings or installations such as he had expected. At length he came to a small clearing with a sandy pit in the middle.

  In the center of the pit was the lead canister. It was open, Solo saw with a momentary surge of alarm…but the narrow core in the heart of the lead shield was empty.

  Except for the homer placed neatly in the middle of it.

  “You had better drop the pistol,” a voice said quietly in Arabic. “There are automatic rifles covering you from all around.”

  Solo whirled. Among the tree trunks enclosing the glade, a ring of soldiers with rifles at the hip stood in the shadows. He pitched the Mauser away from him and stood waiting.

  A squat, powerfully built African wearing a French paratroop beret and the insignia of a colonel on the shoulder-straps of his bush shirt stepped forward and picked the gun up.

  “We thought you would turn up to collect your little toy,” he said affably. “What kept you so long?—We have been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 12

  A Surprise for Illya

  ILLYA KURYAKIN MARCHED the whole of the next day with Rosa Harsch and her retinue. He was in an awkward predicament, for the woman herself continued to be deliberately evasive about her destination, and he could not decide at what point he should break away and head off on his own. Since, for the moment, the expedition appeared to be following the route he would himself have chosen, he stayed with them.

  The forest grew denser and steamier. The hills became higher. And when again they stopped to make camp for the night, he estimated that they must be on a level with Halakaz but about twenty miles to the east.

  While the enigmatic Miss Harsch was issuing instructions to Mustapha on the siting of tents, the young, bearded man who had been beaten the previous evening maneuvered himself close to Kuryakin. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but if you are trying to make your way to Gabotomi, it lies no more than ten or twelve miles due northeast of here.”

  “I don’t know who you are,” the Russian replied, “but thank you. The information will be of great use to me. Do you know the place yourself?”

  ‘“We have been…near there. We have looked down upon it. But it is necessary to proceed with extreme caution: the town—it was originally only a settlement—is tucked away at the bottom of a steep gorge. It is impossible to descend the cliffs at either side and behind it. The only entrance is along a steep valley leading directly to the gate—and that is too well guarded to force. The place is the headquarters of the Nya Nyerere. There are hundreds of their soldiers there, and there seems to be assault courses, training grounds, lecture theaters—the full equipment of a military academy.”

  “I don’t know why you should tell me all this—”

  “It is necessary to make a stand against autocracy at times,” the young man said vaguely. He had a thick central European accent.

  “Ah. The punishments? I confess that I was surprised to find you made no protests.”

  “Orders. Besides, it was part of the deal when we signed on; it was made clear that infringements would be punished and we agreed to accept those punishments if they were merited—all of us. Also, the money is very good…Nevertheless, one’s self-respect demands a gesture from time to time…I must go: it would not do for me to be seen talking to you for too long.” And he glided unobtrusively away.

  Illya took his leave as soon as they struck camp the following morning, telling Rosa Harsch that he expected to find his partner some way east or southeast of their present position. She took his hand in a firm grip as they said their farewells—and seemed reluctant to let it go. “I wish you luck, my friend” she said huskily. “And I ask you to take care. If you have need of help, come back to us; we shall be taking readings for several days about twenty miles north of here. Anyway, I have a feeling that we shall meet again, you and I.” She stared full into his eyes for a moment and then, abruptly releasing his hand, turned and creaked off down the trail after her bearers, the switch of blonde hair with its black bow bouncing up and down on her muscular shoulders.

  Kuryakin made his way due east for about half a mile along a side trail, in case he was being watched, and then plunged into the forest in the direction indicated by the young man with the beard. Half an hour’s hard going brought him to another narrow track running roughly the right way, and for the next two hours he made good time. By noon he was wedged into a tree fork, binoculars to his eyes, looking down on the roof-tops of Gabotomi from a ridge above and behind the ravine in which the place was built.

  It certainly did look like an army camp. Between the geometrically arranged buildings—constructed, astonishingly, of red brick in the European style—there was a constant coming and going of squads of men, most of them Negroes and all of them in uniform. He could distinguish a parade ground with platoons drilling, a carefully laid out battle course, and several groups seated cross-legged on the ground listening to open-air lectures complete with blackboards and lantern slides. From far below, the crackle of rifle fire drifted up from a line of butts just outside the settlement.

  If—as seemed probable from the hints dropped by Mazzari and Ononu—the Nya Nyerere was in some way being aided by Thrush, this was obviously the place where it was being done. But why? What was in it for Thrush? How could the overthrow of the Sudanese government in the north aid the evil organization’s plans for world conquest?

  Illya’s biggest surprise was still to come, however. And it was not until he turned his back on Gabotomi that he received it. He had maneuvered himself around in the tree fork and was sweeping the scores of miles of wooded hills to the east with his glasses when suddenly he gave an exclamation of amazement. For a moment he had thought…Yes! There it was again! In the magnified circle of terrain revealed by the lenses, a section of modem, metaled highway ran…

  He lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. The road was still there; now that he knew where to look, he could see it with the naked eye: a broad carriageway running along an open crest a couple of miles away to link up with an undulating concrete swathe that could only be a landing strip!

  As he watched, a vehicle came into sight. It was traveling
quite fast—a squarish blue utility car, probably a Renault 4L, he thought. He followed its course along the road until it disappeared from sight behind a belt of trees. Idly estimating its speed, he traced its invisible path behind the wood and waited for it to emerge on the far side. Promptly, as he had anticipated, the 4L reappeared and continued along the macadam at the same velocity.

  Only now it was red.

  For the second time, the Russian rubbed his eyes. What kind of conjuring trick was this? A blue car, traveling at about forty miles per hour, disappeared momentarily behind a line of trees—to re-emerge at exactly the same speed, at exactly the right time, in a different color! There was no other traffic on the road; the wood wasn’t long enough for there to have been any question of substitution—and in any case there wouldn’t be room for a second car to get up that speed before it was clear of the trees…It reminded him irresistibly of a relay race where a baton is handed from one runner to the next. Only in this case there had been neither the room nor the time for such a takeover. He must find out the secret of the car that changed color at once!

  He slid to the ground and set off as quickly as he could in the direction of the roadway. It took him over an hour and a half to traverse the two intervening valleys: the undergrowth was dense, and he had to be especially careful since there was what appeared to be a fully manned garrison in the neighborhood. Despite the proximity of Gabotomi, however, he saw nobody on the way and finally emerged from a thicket to find himself at the edge of the road.

  The carriageway had been laid about six months, he judged: a twenty-foot strip of blacktop running from an airstrip in the middle of uncharted, unexplored country to…where? The runway was innocent of buildings: there was not so much as a hut in sight. Beyond it, the forest closed in again—and to the other side, the road curved out of sight towards the belt of trees where the metamorphosis of the 4L had occurred. Keeping well hidden by the bushes fringing the road, he walked cautiously towards the wood. And, like most conjuring tricks, the explanation was simple once you knew how it was done.