“Isn’t there quite a strong underground movement—the Anya Nya, I believe?” Illya said, at a loss for a suitable comment.
“The Anya Nya? Lazzaro is a skilled guerrilla leader—but he has one bazooka and a handful of rifles among a few thousand irregulars, over there to the east in the Dongotona Mountains. What can such groups do against the fifteen thousand heavily armed Arabs in the region? Could they prevent the Juba massacre in the summer of 1965, when fourteen hundred people were killed in a single night? They fight in bowler hats and shorts!” The general was contemptuous.
“And here…?”
“Here in the southwest, we order things better. A little better, old chap. The Nya Nyerere—the force I command—is six thousand strong…but armed, disciplined and efficient.”
“I can see that,” Kuryakin said, glancing at Mazzari’s Sandhurst-style turnout.
“But today numbers are nothing. Efficiency is next to nothing. It is weapons that count—and the men who know how to use them. Soon, very soon, the Nya Nyerere will be as sixty thousand men—as six million. And then the Arab politician’s in Khartoum will bewail their fate. We shall grind the oppressors into the dust and become masters of the whole Sudan.” For a moment, Oxford University went out the window and in its place pure mission school showed.
“You are planning a coup, General?” Illya strove not to betray his interest.
“Ah, it’s early days, early days, old chap,” General Mazzari said, conscious that he had revealed perhaps a little too much. “Just keep your eyes on the headlines in a few weeks’ time, that’s all. In the meantime, we are still an underground army: I must be off.”
“I have your permission to proceed?”
“So far as I am concerned, you may go ahead and take your animal pictures. But I can offer no guarantee for your safety. You would be wise to stay the minimum amount of time—and keep your eyes wide open. Caveat, old chap. Caveat!”
He snapped his cane back under his arm, saluted, and strode smartly from the hut.
The guards raised the pole; Illya climbed wearily back into the Landrover and drove on. For fifteen or twenty miles, the rolling grassland continued. Then the clumps of trees grew further and further apart, the herds of antelope vanished, the grasses thinned—and soon the trail was twisting up into the desolate foothills of a range of mountains that had shown as a blue smudge on the horizon at the border. Three times he passed burned-out shells of African villages, only rings of scorched earth and a few crumbling mud walls remaining. The only sign of cultivation was a ragged line of corn by the roadside that had gone to seed. The route grew steeper, dipping every now and then into a rubble of stones and rocks in a dried-up riverbed, and then mounting again towards the saddle which pierced the limestone cliffs topping the ridge.
Once through the pass, Illya found himself descending to an upland plain—a featureless wilderness of thorny scrub broken at intervals by tangles of huge boulders. He would have to make camp for the night soon: the heat had already gone from the air and the sun was dropping out of sight behind the crest of the mountains. He pulled up and switched off the Landrover’s engine. After the continual whining of low gear and the boom of the exhaust, it was suddenly very quiet. Wind rattled the spikes of the thorn trees beside the road.
He spread out a map. Two hundred miles further on, the road led to Wau, in Bahr-el-Ghazal province. Ninety miles before that, there was a fork, where he was to take the right-hand trail for Halakaz—and after that he would be on his own, for there were no roads to Gabatomi, nor was it marked on the map.
The Russian shivered and restarted the motor. He couldn’t face the idea of spending the night in this Godforsaken place. But when night fell with tropical suddenness an hour later, he was still driving through the interminable scrub. To drive with headlights would make him visible for fifty miles. Reluctantly, he turned off the road and parked the vehicle out of sight behind a pile of flat rocks.
He opened one of the baggage rolls in the back and ate. Then, wrapping himself in blankets, he settled down as comfortably as he could in the offside passenger seat and tried to sleep. Beside him, in the Landrover’s central seat, lay a heavy caliber automatic—the nucleus of the special U.N.C.L.E. gun developed at a cost of one thousand dollars each. Onto it could be screwed four attachments: a shoulder stock, a rifled barrel, an extension to the butt, and a telescopic sight—the completed device producing a spidery-looking weapon of great fire power and versatility.
For a long time he huddled there in wakefulness, listening to a family of baboons coughing and chattering uneasily somewhere in the rocks above him and the occasional scuttling noise made by a prowling jerboa—the desert rat which somehow eked out an existence in the wilderness. He would have liked to call Solo on the radio—but Napoleon had asked him to keep radio silence until he himself called: the bleep of the receiver might attract attention in the caravan. His progress report, and the problem of the inexplicable absence of news from Waverly, would have to wait. At last he fell into a fitful sleep—to awake what seemed an age later, shivering with cold. He pulled another blanket from the roll and looked at the illuminated face of his watch: it was still only a quarter past ten.
By midnight he was asleep again. But he awoke finally before dawn and waited in a fury of impatience for the sun to rise. It was still extremely cold. Moisture had penetrated the perspex side-screens, beading the dashboard instruments and controls and chilling him to the marrow.
He flung off the blankets, clambered stiffly to the ground, and stamped up and down on the barren earth in an attempt to restore his circulation and bring some warmth back into his body. The baboons chattered with anger and swung away over the top of the rocks. The sky was becoming visible at last—a dirty gray expanse tinged with saffron above the scrub to the east. Slowly the mountains he had crossed the previous evening assembled themselves in undulations of purple and ultramarine. By the time the sun eventually jerked into sight above a charcoal-colored cloudbank, Illya was already in the driving seat with the ignition key inserted.
But the Landrover was reluctant to start. The extremes of heat and cold had made the engine temperamental. Fearing that he might exhaust the battery, he got out again and swung it with the handle.
At his fifth attempt, the motor caught. He scrambled back inside and revved the accelerator for a few minutes to warm up the engine compartment and chase the moisture from contacts and leads. Then, bumping over the stony ground, he steered slowly around the rocks and back onto the road.
Strung out across it in two lines, barring his progress in either direction, were a score of African soldiers armed with Belgian FN automatic rifles.
Chapter 8
A Question of Identity
WADI ELMIRA WAS a jumble of flat-roofed, mud-walled buildings spilling down the side of a valley gashed at the bottom by a stony ravine. At the foot of the ravine a trickle of brown water, later to become a tributary of the Bahr-el-Ghaza river, slid among the rocks. The caravan reached the place at nightfall, passing through the arched gate in the walls and turning aside soon afterwards to halt in a wide, open space before a domed mosque.