“To build a redoubt like this must in itself have presented enormous difficulties,” Illya encouraged.
“But of course. There were the natural caverns to start with—we had the advantage of knowing about these. But our friends had to fly in vast quantities of materials undetected, instruct the labor force we provided and supervise the construction…it was a fantastic task. For three years we have been slaving underground here. Three years. Because the place had to be invisible from the air, you see. The Arabs have reconnaissance planes which frequently pass over Halakaz.”
“There is certainly no sign of construction work on the surface—but what about the airstrip?”
“You would think it could be seen for miles, wouldn’t you?” Mazzari was as boastful as a child with a new toy. “Undetectable. Not a sign. From the ground it looks like any runway, but we had the greatest camouflage expert in Europe…Because there are no buildings, you see, skillful variations of tone and texture in the asphalt can blend it in perfectly with the surroundings.”
“You have been very clever, General.”
“Clever? That is only the beginning! We have a cyclotron—you probably saw the spiral tubes—and we are building a synchrotron which will have an energy level of ten thousand million electron volts! That has to wait until we can enlarge the caverns still further, because the ring of tubing must be a hundred meters in diameter. In a year, we shall have completed a Fast Reactor using tamed Plutonium and liquid Sodium—and then we shall be able to dispense with the old-fashioned hydroelectric plant, which always runs the risk of being detected by people exploring the falls. Then too, we shall be our own masters at every stage of our weapons program: at the moment, we have to rely on—er—outside sources for certain isotopes.”
“You mentioned a strike in the near future. If all this is to help you vanquish your enemies in Khartoum, the organization helping you must be altruistic. What can it profit them?”
“The organization—it is called Thrush—is an international body of scientists and economists. It is not composed of altruists, but it is always prepared to consider helping the underdog—if he has a good cause. Our cause is good, so they helped us. And of course, as you say, it is a two-way deal. In return we provide the labor and the place—the one place in the world where Thrush scientists can continue with their valuable research undisturbed by the prying eyes of jealous rivals and unknown to the world’s espionage corps.”
Kuryakin began to say something, thought better of it, and sighed. If this somehow likable patriot had not yet realized that his poor little six-thousand strong army, and his labor force of refugees from the destroyed villages, were merely dupes in Thrush’s insatiable plan for world domination, his awakening would come soon enough. For the missiles whose sleek shapes he had seen in their silos were no local pieces of atomic artillery designed to obliterate Khartoum: they were IRBM’s—intermediate range ballistic missiles, capable of destroying Rome, Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna!
“Your own men are in charge of the dispatch of the missiles I saw?” he asked.
“Well, no, old chap. At the moment Thrush technicians look after them. We haven’t yet acquired the know-how to man the computer room and the control dugouts. But we are training, we are training. A branch of my forces is on a special course at Gabotomi, on the further side of this plateau. And there are supplementary courses at various places round about, you know. An elementary course had a narrow escape yesterday when the accursed Arabs sacked a village not far from here—purely by coincidence, I hope.”
“General,” Illya began, “there is something I ought to tell you…”
A telephone on Mazzari’s desk shrilled him into silence. “Forgive me,” the soldier said when he had listened for a few moments, made a comment in his native language, and replaced the instrument. “The Council member of whom I spoke has arrived. I must leave you for a while. There are, as you see, no windows, no other doors, no means of exit from this room. The door through which I leave is solid and will be double-locked. Also, there will be two armed men on duty outside it. My advice to you, old chap, is to make yourself comfortable and sit tight until I return.”
He went out and Illya heard the solid clunk of metal as the tumblers of the lock fell home. A moment later, boots scraped on the floor of the corridor as the guards took up position outside.
Napoleon Solo was strapped to a ten-foot plank. His ankles were bound and attached to a ring at one end, and his arms, stretched above his head, were tied at the wrist and fastened to the other. The ends of the plank rested on a table top and a chair, so that his head was lower than his feet.
Helpless on his back in this position, he had endured the age-old water torture. It was quite simple and very effective. They had plugged his nostrils with cotton wool and wedged an iron ring into his mouth so that it was jammed open. Broken-nose had then draped a long strip of thin muslin over Solo’s face and carefully, lovingly poured water—gallons and gallons of water—into the open mouth through the cloth. With his head unable to turn because of his own arms on either side, the victim can only get rid of the water by trying to swallow it—but before each mouthful is swallowed it has always been replaced by another. And in the meantime the victim has to breathe; the tortured lungs heave and try to drag in air, but the attempt only draws in water…and with the water comes the muslin, which is remorselessly sucked into the windpipe. In a very short time the victim, gagging and retching, is half drowned with the water in his lungs, and half choked with the cloth.
The only trouble was that Solo’s iron will was sufficiently strong to allow himself to be choked into unconsciousness before the spasms became violent enough to cue the torturers to remove the muslin and start again.
After this had happened three times, Ahmed—whose dirty-nailed fingers had been occupying themselves pinching and prodding and squeezing here and there to punctuate the water treatment—straightened up from the agent’s body and growled, “This is no good, my friend. We shall never get anywhere this way. The salaud will just go on choking himself unconscious. And the colonel said he wanted results quickly. We must make him talk some other way.”
Broken-nose put down the fuel drum and attached radiator hose he had been using to supply the water. “Very well,” he said. “Let us see how he reacts to electricity, eh?”
“You must have been someone’s star pupil,” Solo gasped.
Broken-nose snarled, “We learned a few lessons in Algeria about water and electricity—and the boys upstairs learned some things by keeping their ears and eyes open when the French exploded their atom bomb in the Sahara in 1960.”
“Of course,” Solo muttered to himself. “W equals mc2—I thought it was familiar...”
“What is he gabbling about?” Ahmed asked.
“A sum I saw on a blackboard. That’s the French way of expressing the atomic equation. We—others, that is—express it as E equals mc2. But don’t worry yourself about it—it’s far too intelligent for you.”
The camel-master plunged his fist into Solo’s unprotected midriff. Once again the world dissolved into a red mist.
When the agent came to, the two men were attaching lengths of wire to various prominences about his person with miniature bulldog clips. “This will make your beautiful eyes open wider,” Broken-nose grinned, feeling Solo stir. “We have a fine truck magneto handy—when we hitch up the wires and spin the armature, you’ll have your own built-in central heating system! And we can make it as hot as you like, according to how fast we spin. Sure you wouldn’t like to change your mind and tell us all about it?”