The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 32

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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?”

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