Illya crawled further along, so that he could see a greater distance inside the curving tunnel. Just around the first bend, the sandbags and slits of a redoubt broke the even surface of the wall. So the direct entry, as he had imagined, was out of the question…
Although the sun was nearing its zenith and the heat was becoming unbearable, he decided that he must prospect further without delay. In the absence of radio contact with Solo, the only thing he could do was push on on his own. He began to work his way back to the landing strip through the woods on the far side of the road. When he was perhaps halfway there, he pushed through a tangle of bushes and froze suddenly into silence. The ground opened beneath his feet—hidden in the undergrowth, the mouth of a concrete-walled shaft yawned before him.
He peered over the lip. In the shadowed depths of the shaft, the slim, tapering nose of a missile gleamed wickedly.
Kuryakin gave a low whistle of astonishment. It looked as though the confidence of the Nya Nyerere was well founded—and it looked, also, as if the destination of the stolen Uranium isotopes was inextricably bound up with the puzzling alliance of Thrush and a band of nationalist guerrillas…
During the next half hour, he found three more underground silos of the same pattern, each with its missile in place. Heaven knew what ramifications were to be found somewhere below his feet!
Before he got to the airstrip, his attention was diverted by a persistent, low roaring noise which had for some time been forcing its way into his consciousness. He glanced up. Over the trees away to his left a haze hung in the air, halfway between a mist and a thin smoke. It was too hot now, anyway, to venture out into the full glare of the sun by the runway. He decided to investigate.
The noise increased in volume as he approached. The undergrowth became denser and more luxuriant. The mist resolved itself into a cloud of fine spray hanging over a waterfall.
But the breadth and scale of the thing surprised Illya yet again. The river was wider than he would have expected, shallow and fast-moving. It flowed across a plain whose existence he had not suspected, divided around a number of small islands on the lip of the falls, and then twisted away down a narrow gorge—presumably to vanish underground and reappear in the valley in which Gabotomi was situated. The falls themselves were staggering: a semi-circle of separate cascades which poured over a fifty foot drop from between the islands, coalesced in a turbulent pool, and then leaped in a single dizzy drop over a sheer cliff fully a hundred and fifty feet high.
For some minutes Kuryakin remained fascinated by the grandeur of the scene, his senses battered into quiescence by the volume of sound. Then, as his mind automatically began accepting and rejecting, sifting the evidence offered to his eyes and ears, he noticed a discrepancy: the flow of water running away from the foot of the waterfall was appreciably—most markedly—less than that arriving at the top.
The more he looked, the more obvious it became. Perhaps this was one of the places mentioned by Rosa Harsch, where the greater part of the river vanished underground, to continue by a subterranean channel in the limestone. He scanned the falls, searching for some trace of the sink-hole. It must be somewhere in the seething pool between the cascades and the final, single fall over the cliff…Yes: there were signs of dark openings in the hollowed-out rock behind several of the initial falls. And there was something else, too: unmistakably, he could see patches of concrete among the glistening rock. Somewhere behind those deafening cascades, man had been improving on the works of nature.
Concealing the Hasselblad and his field glasses in a clump of bushes, he slung the waterproof gun-camera around his neck and scrambled down a narrow path zigzagging the steep bank towards the pool.
In two minutes he was drenched to the skin. But after the heat of the day, the dank, ferny atmosphere of the ravine and the moisture of the spray were as refreshing as a cool drink. Slipping and sliding on the wet moss covering the rocks, he reached the level of the basin. The water was boiling—shading from an absinthe green near the foaming impact of the falls to a deep violet in the center of the pool. And once he approached, he could see at once that his reasoning was correct. The water spilling over the lip and falling a hundred and fifty feet to the gorge below was nothing more than an overflow; by far the greater part swirled back from the bottom of the pool to go roaring down a series of conduits slanting into the rock behind the cascades.
As he had expected, the falls had hollowed out an overhang in the cliff and it was possible to walk along a rock shelf behind the curtain of falling water and the face. Treading with infinite care, he edged along the slimy rock behind the first cascade, slithered across an open space, and went in behind the second.
Here were two of the conduits—giant ferroconcrete tubes ducting the water into the bowels of the earth at an angle of sixty degrees. Crossing the deep channels leading the torrents from pool to conduit were small arched bridges with single guard rails.
Behind the third waterfall, Illya found three conduits, similarly linked by concrete bridges—only here the center one was larger: a vaulted tunnel with the water thundering down a course laid in its floor. At the far end of the passage, perhaps seventy feet below, he could see light, the curved corners of huge turbines, the bases of generators. He had obviously stumbled on a vast underground power station—the source, no doubt, of the electricity lighting the road tunnels he had seen.
Soaked as he was, he shivered in the chill, moist semidarkness behind the cascade. He never knew what it was that made him look up at that moment—certainly no sound could have penetrated his mind over the roar of the falls. But he did look up…up and out over the stretch of rock separating the third and fourth cascades.
They were further apart then the others, these two, and a guard rail snaked across the undulations of wet rock between them. Leaning nonchalantly against it, a soldier was in the act of raising his rifle to fire at the Russian from a distance of about thirty feet.
Almost in a reflex action, Kuryakin whipped the guncamera to his eye and pressed the release. The man’s dark face split open in an O of astonishment. The rifle dropped from his hands and slithered down the rock into the water. For a moment, he teetered against the rail…and then slowly slumped back over it and fell into the pool. His body sank at once, to reappear bobbing like a cork far out in the middle of the maelstrom. The agent expected it to be sucked towards the conduits, but after a while some undercurrent tugged it towards the side of the pool, where it caught momentarily on a branch, freed itself, spun slowly in an eddy, and then began to move—remorselessly and with increasing speed—towards the lip and the hundred and fifty foot drop beyond. For ten seconds, he lost sight of it again…but the dead man made a final horrifying appearance, rearing grotesquely up from the water on the very brink of the chasm before he plunged from sight.
It would be a long time before his body was discovered, but his absence could be noticed at any moment. Illya decided that it was time he went.
After he had recovered his camera and glasses, he resumed his route through the forest to the airstrip. It presented a different aspect now, he saw when he gained the fringe of the trees. While he had been out of earshot at the falls, a plane had landed: a twin-fuselage transport whose cargo a squad of soldiers were unloading into a convoy of trucks drawn up on the concrete.
With his wet clothes steaming in the sun, Illya lay beneath a bush and watched through his glasses. Most of the cargo was crated—and judging from the way in which it was handled, the machinery inside was delicate.
Half an hour later, the transshipment was completed and the aircraft trundled to the far end of the runway, turned, and took off. The convoy had formed up and was heading back towards the road and the tunnel before the drone of its twin engines had died away over the forest.