“Don’t be ridiculous. How can I be an Arab?”
Ononu slapped his face dispassionately. Pain flamed through the agent’s body as the blow jarred his head.
“How can you not be an Arab?” the soldier sneered.
“I tell you I am a European—”
“Ridiculous. With those hands and fingers? With those teeth?”
“It was a disguise. They can be brought back to normal—”
“And you have even shaved off your beard—see, there’s the outline where the skin is paler.”
Solo was silent. He must have acquired a deeper tan while he was with the caravan, and the removal of the false beard had showed it up. His disguise had been too clever—now it was backfiring on him. “Who…what is the Nya Nyerere?” he asked at last.
“The liberation army of southwest Sudan.”
“Well, it’ll hardly recommend itself to you for its original purpose, but at least it will serve to identify me: there is a laissez-passer in the breast pocket of my shirt, vouching for my bona fides and signed by a high government official.”
Fingers snatched the document from Solo’s pocket.
From his cramped position he took in what he could of the room while it was being read. It seemed to be some sort of office: there were filing cabinets, a desk, charts and maps on the wall. Through a window he could see a steep, tree covered cliff and the corner of a red brick building. From somewhere outside, shouted words of command drifted in. The pole under which he was slung was resting between two banks of steel cabinets.
“This piece of paper is worthless,” a second voice, which Solo had not heard before, said crisply behind him. A man in dark robes walked into his view. It was the stranger he had seen talking to Ahmed at Wadi Elmira and encountered again when he had made his abortive attempt to rejoin the caravan the next day.
“I have myself met Mr. Solo,” the man said contemptuously. “He is a Russian, fair haired, and more slimly built than this man. Did you imagine for one moment, my poor fool,” he continued, gazing down at Solo, “that Thrush would be so naive as to let your clumsy attempts at espionage go undetected? We have been on to you ever since you joined the caravan—only the precise identification of which man was the spy remained. And this you kindly supplied yourself when you tried to join up again after we left Wadi Elmira.”
“And the Uranium 235?” Solo asked, playing for time.
“Was never with this caravan at all. When it was taken away from the first camel train between Casablanca and Alexandria, it was flown straight here by helicopter. Did you think we would be so foolish as to continue with the same system once we knew it had been discovered? Did you think your radio messages from the caravan went unnoticed? We merely let you play your little game so that you could be lured to a place more suitable for your…interrogation. You were meant to discover the canister and follow it.”
The agent said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“And now we come back to the question,” the dark man said. “Who are you and who is employing you?”
Again, Solo remained silent.
“Very well,” the dark man said at length. “As I had feared, we shall have to resort to less polite methods. Colonel?”
Ononu moved back into Solo’s field of vision. He picked up a telephone from the desk and barked a few words into it in a dialect the agent could not identify. Then, dropping the receiver back into its cradle, he walked over and stood looking down at the helpless man.
“Man, you got yourself into some trouble,” he said. “Neither you nor your bosses, whoever they are, can do us any harm now; we’re all set to go…But there’s a Council member arriving today, and he’ll want all the ends tidied up before he comes. So we have to find out all about you, just for the record. We like to know who we’ve beaten, man. You’ll talk, too, sooner or later. Everybody talks. But in your case it has to be sooner, see? Now, why not save us a lot of trouble—and yourself, too—by telling us what we want to know?”
“I have already told you who I am,” Solo said.
The colonel shook his head. He flung out his arms and dropped them to his side again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know, man.”
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” the dark man called.
Footsteps crossed the floor behind Solo’s head. “This spy will not say anything,” Colonel Ononu said. “There’s a Council member arriving at six. I want to know before then who he is—who he really is, man—and who sent him, and what’s he doin’ here anyway? Right?…You’d better take him away into the mountain.”
There was a short pause, and then, “It will be a pleasure,” two voices said simultaneously, one in French and one in Arabic. Two large men moved across and took up the ends of the pole under which Solo was slung. One was Ahmed; the other was the half-caste with the broken nose whom the agent had beaten in the fight in the alleyway at Casablanca.
“It would be much easier for everybody, old chap, if you’d just tell me all about it,” General Mazzari said to Illya. They were sitting in a small office off the corridor leading to the cavern where the reactor was. Between them, a flat-topped desk was covered in papers. The walls were hung with what looked like production charts and graphs, and there was a plaster relief map of the Sudan and surrounding countries to one side of the door. Mazzari’s Walther PPK, with its dull black barrel and brown grips, lay heavily among the papers by his hand.
“There’s not much to tell, really,” Kuryakin said. “I am afraid I must plead guilty to being inquisitive. I was trying to find my colleague Waverly—I told one of your colonels who stopped me about him—and I came across an airstrip and then a road…Well, you can imagine how curious I was, finding a road and a runway in the middle of an unexplored forest.”
“Go on.”
“Yes. Well, the next thing I discovered was a silo with a missile in it. Not that I was prying, but I almost fell into it. It seems to me quite reasonable for anyone finding things like this to look around a bit.”
“But I found you in here, old chap. In here. The place is closely guarded, you know. Very closely guarded.”
“That was unintentional. I did not mean to come in here. Indeed, I did not know of the existence of the place.”
“Unintentional?”
“I was tired. A convoy of trucks passed me and I—well, I stole a lift; I swung aboard the back when the last one passed me.”
“As it passed you. I see. But you had a vehicle of your own.”
“I had to leave it. There was a bridge down and I came on on foot.”
“And what did you find inside this truck?”
“An unmarked crate—two crates, rather.”
“Yes?”
“When the truck stopped, I waited for a minute and then I got out. I could see at once that I was in some place I had no business to be—so I thought I had better go. I was trying to find a way out when you…captured me.”
Mazzari picked up the gun and examined it. “You have indeed stumbled upon something that does not concern you,” he said at last. “But we are ready to strike within the next few days; in a week we shall be masters of the whole Sudan. Probably of the whole of Africa, old chap. Perhaps your unwelcome arrival does not matter so much—but I have a feeling…There is a highly placed official of the organization helping us who is due to arrive shortly. The decision must be his. I fear he may think you have learned more than is good for you. And even if your life should be spared, you will have to stay here as our…guest, shall we say?…until after we have acted.”
“It sounds very intriguing.”
“Intriguing! If only you knew, old chap! Do you realize how much work, how much planning has gone into this scheme?”