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 and 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.”