It had all worked with perfect precision, and the whole station staff was taken completely by surprise when they first saw the uniformed men. It was only when their own African mess-boys turned on them that they fully understood what was going on, and by that time it was too late. After a brief struggle they were rounded up and locked in some store buildings near the one in which Shaw and Geisler and the girl were shut up. Within ten minutes it was all over and the Africans were in complete control.
Hartog meanwhile had come out on to the veranda outside the offices, his face dark and tense, keyed-up. As the Inspector came running through the rain and up the steps Hartog asked, “All correct?”
The policeman nodded. “I came to report. It has gone very well. There was no trouble to speak of.”
Hartog said, “Good.” He seemed a little unsteady, and whisky was strong on his breath. “Keep it that way. I don’t want any killing, understand? That’s Edo’s orders too.”
“I understand. Shall I give the signal now?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
The policeman turned away and marched off to the gates. There he blew one long blast on a whistle. At once the night seemed to come alive with shadowy moving figures outside the gates. African tribesmen materialized from the thick, close jungle, converging on the perimeter of the station, carrying their age-old weapons and an assortment of rifles, rusty old pieces mainly; a vast body of men, their black skins and ceremonial adornments glittering with the rain in the glare of the floodlights. They moved in utter, uncanny silence; and then, after a few minutes, their ranks divided and, as a low chant began and rose to a kind of triumphant paean, a big Negro walked down the middle towards the gates.
The African constables swung the gates back to let him in, at once closed them again behind him. The shouts, the acclaim, echoed from all sides as Edo was seen walking quickly towards Hartog on the veranda, Hartog the white man who had rejected Western ideas and who was going to confound the West by disarming the big bird that flew so high… who was going to bring the big egg down in the sea, safely, so that the station would be rendered superfluous and would be taken away. They watched from the bush, hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, the excitement, the fever, swaying the close-packed bodies like a swift tide until they seemed to move backward and forward in unison, shouting and chanting. The men, the warriors representing the villages, summoned from their daily tasks by the drums that morning to don the ancient apparel of their fighting forbears, had all come together now, and they were ready for the final act.
None of those Africans realized that Edo’s scheme went far, far deeper than the mere disarming of Bluebolt, that within the next hour or so terrible devastation and death was planned to drop on their brothers somewhere in Africa.
Edo’s cruel, thick-lipped face was close to Hartog’s on the veranda. Hartog was smiling; that smile was a mere grimace, and yet there was a kind of triumph in it as well as a painful pretence. Flatly he asked, “All ready?”
“As soon as you are. I think we should waste no more time.”
“Right.” Hartog hitched at his trousers. “Bluebolt’s due in position in… fifty-nine minutes, dead on. That gives us plenty of time, but we might as well get lined up right away, I suppose.” There was a bitter grin on his face as he added, “By the way, I didn’t tell you… we’ve got guests.”
Wiley’s eyes narrowed. “Guests?”
“Shaw and the girl.”
The Negro stared at him, amazed, unbelieving. “It isn’t possible.”
“Possible or not — they’re here.”
“But the ants—”
“Don’t ask me how, but they escaped them. Ask Shaw how he did it. I’ve got them locked up with Geisler. I’d like Shaw to see the fun, if you’ve no objection. I gave him a nice little crack on the head, but he should be on his feet again by now. All right?”
Wiley looked at him, scowled; then the scowl became a peculiar smile. He said softly, “So Commander Shaw lives yet… well, my friend, provided they’re properly guarded by the armed police, I have no objection in the world to both him and the girl watching the grand finale!”
A little after that armed constables came for Shaw; together with Gillian Ross, he was escorted up the steps into the Bluebolt control-tower. The mast was revolving, its intricate antennae seeming to probe out into the darkness and the night sky and the rain, and a low throb and a hum came from inside the tower.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The atmosphere in the big, glass-domed control-tower was on a knife-edge. Looking up through that glass, Shaw could see clearly the antennae still revolving. For some reason or other, the floodlights from the gates were now turned on the beaming mast in addition to the light from the tower itself. From that mast, standing out starkly in the night, the radar impulses would go out to Bluebolt when Hartog pressed the transmission key. The place would have had almost a cathedral hush if it had not been for the continuing low hum of the dynamos and the electric motors and the flickers of coloured lights from the control panel before which Hartog was sitting, a pair of headphones clamped over his ears, and his sensitive fingers manipulating switches and dials.
He had checked everything now, in those first few minutes of the operation. Main beaming motivator… monitoring control… target-setting transmission…recall-control transmitter…check-signal receiving gear… they were all warmed through and ready now.
Shaw watched with Gillian Ross, standing motionless and tense in the middle of a group of the uniformed constables. Revolvers were pressed close into their spines and the hands holding those guns were itchy on the triggers — it was easy enough to sense that. Hartog, who was obviously well steeped in whisky but entirely in control of himself and his nerves, was silent and intent as he sat before the big spread of instruments and dials and gauges which reminded Shaw of the controls on the flight-deck of an airliner. Now and again Hartog glanced at the revolving, illuminated globe-rep-resentation with its small dot of brilliant green light moving across the world’s seas and continents, the green dot which was Bluebolt so far out in space and which seemed to move so slowly and inexorably on that ingenious flat ‘globe.’ Just now that dot was coming down from the Eastern Mediterranean, slanting towards Cape Town as Hartog began his preliminary transmission to the satellite.
Without turning he said, “I shan’t be ready to send the load away till that dot’s gone right round and is starting to travel south again. When she’s right over the Hazen Strait in the Parry Islands north-east of Alaska, I’ll make the launching signal. And that’ll be it, Wiley.”
Slowly, his face one triumphant, unspeakably evil grin, Edo nodded.
Shaw was sweating, feeling his palms damp and sticky, his mind whirling.
Those policemen were watching him and the girl closely; he simply wouldn’t have a hope of doing anything useful, could achieve nothing other than a bullet in the back now, and that wouldn’t help anybody at all. He would have taken that chance willingly if he could have seen any point in it. It was agony to have to stand there and do nothing; but he just had to sweat this thing out and watch wholesale murder being committed before his eyes. Somewhere in Africa— north, south, east, or west, it wouldn’t really make any difference except to the peoples where the load landed — a lot of innocent Africans were now under sentence of dreadful death. Men and women at this moment going about their humdrum evening tasks were never even going to know what hit them. With any luck, Bluebolt’s load might fall in some sparsely populated spot — but even so, the fall-out area would still be immense. And even that was nothing more than a hope. It could just as easily come down on some big settlement, a city — Freetown, Accra, Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi, Durban, Johannesburg… anywhere at all. There was no knowing.