07-The Radioactive Camel Affair Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 15

  Invitation to the Dance

  “IT WAS FORTUNATE, Alexander Waverly said in his office some days later, “that this fellow Mazzari was sufficiently persuaded by your evidence to withdraw his men from the fray. Whichever side he has been on, it would have been extremely awkward for us: it’s not part of the Command’s duty to interfere in civil disputes in any country.”

  “Yes, I thought of that afterwards,” Illya Kuryakin said. “If he had thrown in with us, we could have been accused of working against the lawful government of the Sudan; and if he’d fought against us, those on the other side would have charged us with helping to suppress a minority!”

  “No repercussions on the—ah—end-product?” Napoleon Solo asked.

  Waverly tossed a morning paper across the huge desk towards him and felt in his pocket for a pipe. Halfway down the front page Solo read:

  EARTHQUAKE IN THE SOUTHERN SUDAN?

  Seisomographs as far apart as Santa Barbara, Tokyo and Edinburgh registered shock-waves the day before yesterday whose epicenter was placed in an unexplored region of the Southern Sudan. The shock, which was of short duration, is thought to have been an earthquake, although certain characteristics showed points in common with large man-made explosions, experts said. The Sudan government last night accused rebel factions in the southwest of having caused the explosion. A communique issued by the so-called “Nya Nyerere” laid the blame squarely on “government elements” however…There have been no reports of casualties in the area…

  “Yes,” Solo said reflectively, laying the paper down. “It’s best to leave it at that, I suppose.”

  “You gentlemen are lucky that the human character is so fallible,” Waverly continued, reaching for his tobacco pouch. “If Hassan Hamid had not been greedy enough to want to line his own pocket—and if Marshel hadn’t been such an egomaniac that he thought he could decoy you to his headquarters and wrest our secrets from you—you might well have been murdered with the man Mahmoud in Alexandria.”

  “What about Marshel’s own secrets?” Illya asked. “Do we have those?”

  “Oh, yes. The Eros newsagency was a Thrush satrap, as you suspected. Our people found complete lists of the scientists and technicians responsible for stealing the Uranium 235 in Marshel’s office safe. We’ve passed the information on to the proper authorities in the countries where the thefts occurred…Good heavens! I seem to have run out of tobacco!” He stared unbelievingly at the empty pouch.

  For an instant it trembled on Solo’s lips to point out that there must have been several ounces deployed around the room in the selection of unsmoked pipes littering ashtrays, desk and occasional tables. Then he thought better of it and said quietly, “I’ll see that some is sent in to you, sir, on my way out.” It was, after all, a good thing that human nature was so fallible…

  “To be sure, to be sure,” Waverly was saying. “You gentlemen are due for a few days’ leave, are you not? Just how do you propose to spend it?”

  “So far as I am concerned,” Kuryakin said with a rare smile, “I must first search my mind for a really good reason to refuse a pressing invitation to visit Bonn.”

  Solo grinned. “I’m staying home,” he said. “There are a lot of attractions I’ve missed in New York lately. Tonight, for example, I’ve got a ticket for a first-night at El Morocco—they tell me the new middle-eastern belly dancer there is sensational!”

  Table of Contents

  THE RADIOACTIVE CAMEL AFFAIR

  Chapter 1 Mr. Waverly Sets the Scene

  Chapter 2 A Message from the Dead

  Chapt
er 3 Night in Casablanca

  Chapter 4 Contact with the Enemy

  Chapter 5 Exit Mr. Mahmoud

  Chapter 6 Marshel Aid

  Chapter 7 Caveat for the General

  Chapter 8 A Question of Identity

  Chapter 9 The Retreat of Napoleon

  Chapter 10 The City Which Was Off the Map

  Chapter 11 School is Dismissed.

  Chapter 12 A Surprise for Illya

  Chapter 13 Inside the Underground Fortress

  Chapter 14 A Lady to the Rescue!

  Chapter 15 Invitation to the Dance