The trucks passed quite close to Illya’s hiding place. There were eight of them, but so far as he could see only the first three carried guards standing on the footboards at each side of the driver’s cabin. On an impulse, he rose to his feet and ran through the long grass to intercept them. He reached the road just as the last truck slowed to make the turn from the landing strip, paused until it was past him, and then emerged on to the macadam. In three quick strides he was level with the tailgate. As the truck accelerated away, he grasped the hinged panel, pushed aside the canvas flap and hauled himself up and over into the interior.
Two big crates filled most of the space inside—stoutly built containers of one-inch planking with reinforcing battens on all sides. There were no contents specifications or delivery instructions stenciled on the wood.
He was relieved to see that, apart from the crates, the back of the truck was empty—nor was there any window between it and the driver’s cabin. Panting a little after his exertion, he settled down to wait. He had no fixed idea of what he was going to do when the truck stopped, but he was tired of inactivity and it seemed one way of getting past the guards at the tunnel mouth. It was unlikely that they would search their own vehicles after so short a journey; he would just have to hope that he would have an opportunity to slip out unnoticed before the cargo was unloaded.
They had been going for perhaps a minute and a half when he heard voices shouting on the road outside. Cautiously, he peered through the crack between the flap and the body of the truck. They were passing a file of soldiers marching in the same direction, and the driver and his truckmate were exchanging pleasantries with the men on foot.
In the middle of the file, Illya saw, two soldiers marched about ten feet apart carrying between them a long pole which was balanced on their shoulders.
And slung under it like a sloth, with the pole passing between his bound wrists and ankles, was the unconscious figure of Napoleon Solo…
A moment later the truck began to sink below ground level as the road dipped between the stone walls leading to the tunnel mouth. Kuryakin drew back behind one of the crates. There was nothing he could do for Napoleon at this moment. He could not see whether the marching men were following the convoy into the tunnel or going on somewhere else—perhaps to Gabotomi. In any event, he could best help by getting inside the Thrush fortress undetected and working from there.
They appeared to have driven straight past the guards. For some minutes the truck continued to descend in a series of tight curves, then the road flattened out and they went straight ahead for what seemed about a quarter of a mile. Finally, the vehicle made a tight right turn, stopped, reversed, came forward on right-hand lock and stopped again.
The first impression Illya had when the engine was switched off was of echo: the boots of the soldiers as they climbed down from the trucks, a distant hammering, the pervasive hum of machinery, a confusion of voices calling—all these blurred and repeated themselves in a great swell of noise. He inched forward and put his eye to the crack between tailboard and flap again. They were drawn up with the other seven trucks in a bay off an immense cavern in the rock. Both the roof and the further reaches of the huge chamber were lost in shadows. Nearer at hand, arc lights blazed on an army of workmen erecting some complicated apparatus from a scaffold. Beyond a stack of crates similar to those in the truck, an arch in the natural limestone led to another cavern even bigger. In the brief light shining through, he could see dreamlike figures in asbestos suits and protective helmets with perspex eyepieces busy about the spirals of great cooling tubes. To one side, a section of a gigantic silver sphere that could only be an atomic reactor bulged into view. He need look no further for the destination of the stolen Uranium 235…
The convoy drivers, their truckmates and the escorting guards were all grouped around an officer issuing instructions some way off, with their backs towards the bay. Now was his chance. Lifting the flap as little as possible, he dropped to the ground and slid around to the front of the truck. Crouched between the radiator and the rock wall, out of sight of the soldiers, he looked around him for a place to hide.
A little way to his left, hidden from the men in the cavern by another truck, a doorway opened into the wall. He edged along to it, listened, turned the handle, and slipped through.
He found himself in a long passage with closed doors on either side. Electric bulbs glowed in the roof. At the far end, an opening led to the dark reaches of another cave. The humming noise was louder now: he must be approaching the generating station he had seen from behind the cascades.
Kuryakin flitted silently along the corridor and into the cave. It was empty and unlit—but through it was yet another chamber, in whose dim lighting he could make out the squat shapes of transformers.
He hesitated. Should he conceal himself in this empty cavern, or should he return to the scene of activity and try to hide somewhere there? Perhaps the latter—then he could emerge and investigate further when work had stopped for the day.
He turned. In the lighted entrance to the passage, General Mazzari was standing, a heavy Walther automatic in his hand.
“Not many white rhino down here,” he said mildly. “I think you and I had better have a little talk, old chap…”
Chapter 13
Inside the Underground Fortress
>GANGS OF MEN armed with pneumatic picks were trying to drill off the top of Napoleon Solo’s head before it exploded. They were too late: the world spun away in fragments, leaving a swirling red haze through which the face of the foreman peered at him apologetically.
“… necessary to hit you quite so hard,” the foreman was saying, “but in any case the journey here would probably have caused you more hardship than the blow and its after-effects.”
Solo’s eyes were half open. The foreman’s face sharpened in focus and a room gradually assembled itself behind him. Surely the face was very dark? And for some reason he appeared to be wearing an army uniform of sorts. The room, too, was…unexpected: it seemed to be upside down.
“Who are you?” Napoleon croaked.
“Colonel Ononu, Area Commandant of the Nya Nyerere,” the foreman said. “More to the point, my friend: who are you? And why? And from where? And sent by whom, man?”
Of course, Solo thought. The room wasn’t upside-down at all; he was lying on his back. And yet there was no sense of anything hard, no sign of any floor beneath him. His wrists and ankles hurt like hell. And as the thought formed in his mind, he was astonished to see them in front of him, apparently sticking straight up in the air. He tried to bring them down, failed, saw the pole running between the thongs binding them—and all at once remembered: the deserted glade, the officer with the revolver, the empty Uranium 235 canister, the homing device that had been discovered and used to decoy him into an ambush…
“I said who are you?” the chunky officer repeated.
“I might feel more inclined to reply in a less disadvantageous position,” Solo suggested.
“You are in as happy a position as spies ever are,” the colonel said. “Who are you?”
“I am not a spy. My name is Napoleon Solo. I am engaged on mineralogical research for…a certain government.”
“You are an Arab spy,” the officer said levelly.