Solo remained silent and they went out, presumably to get the magneto.
The room appeared to be carved from the solid rock. It had been quite a long walk from the settlement where he had seen Ononu, first between army-style huts, then along a narrow gorge, and finally through a cave to a succession of passages hollowed out of the mountain. By the time the torturers had laid down the pole with its helpless burden, they had been gasping with effort.
It was very cold. Solo shuddered uncontrollably, listening to the hoarse noise of his own breathing and the small sounds made by the wires festooning him as they shivered in turn. The clips bit painfully into the tender areas of his flesh—though he knew this was nothing to compare with the bolts of agony which would shortly be searing through him at the direction of his torturers. He hoped he would be able to stand it long enough for unconsciousness to save him again...
Fingers were busy now about the cords binding his wrists. He closed his eyes, tensing his muscles for the assault of pain. But there was something wrong—the fingers were soft, gentle. A cloying, exotic perfume washed over him.
“You are very appealing when you look so helpless,” a voice hissed in his ear, “but I could admire you better in another place at another time. Come—do you wish to stay here until they return?”
Solo’s arms were free. He brought them down to his sides and turned his head. Yemanja was crouched beside the plank, her eyes glittering at him over an Arab veil.
“Yemanja!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“Talk later,” the girl said urgently, busy with the bonds around his ankles. “Unclip the wires. I saw you being carried through Gabotomi on a pole and guessed they would be bringing you here.”
Painfully, his limbs suffering agonies as the blood coursed back into the veins, Solo sat up and swung his feet to the ground. He took two steps, and almost fell. There was a thundering behind his eyes and his head was spinning. “Quick!” the girl whispered, climbing onto a desk against one wall. “They will be back any minute.”
In a daze, the agent watched as she reached over her head and pushed at a grating set high up in the rock. The grille swung away with a metallic scrape. A moment later the girl had pitched clothes and belt into the dark opening beyond and hauled herself up after them.
Solo climbed stiffly onto the desk and grasped the hands held out to aid him from the darkness. He made the climb with difficulty and lay gasping while Yemanja lowered the grating back into place. They were in a tunnel hollowed out of the rock. It was about three feet high and there was a moist breeze blowing.
“Air conditioning—very modern,” the girl said. “Follow me.
Solo crawled after her along the damp, rough floor. After a while, the passage joined another, wider, tunnel and they were able to move along this at a crouch. Judging by the draughts that he felt from time to time about his legs, there were a number of subsidiary passages joining the main one. Distantly, from somewhere behind, he heard the muffled sound of voices raised in argument or protest. Presumably his absence had been discovered.
Presently he could detect a faint radiance ahead, and soon they were standing upright in a cave dimly lit by reflected light from a series of galleries radiating from it.
“Now we stop for a minute and talk,” Yemanja said. “But quietly, for sound carries far in the rock.”
“All right,” Solo whispered. “For a start, answer me some questions, will you? What is this place? How did you get here—and how do you know all about these passages?”
“Is the mountain headquarters of the Nya Nyerere. The caves and the passages have been secret retreat of my people for many hundreds of years—but now their friends from Europe have built much new things inside the mountain. Factories and bombs and places to make electricity. Aeroplanes come and bring many things, for the building—but although my people help with the new things, they keep some secrets for themselves. The Europeans know nothing of these old passages which bring air to the rooms, for example.”
“Yes, Yemanja—but how do you know all about them?”
“I was born in Gabotomi,” the girl said. “My father was Assyrian, but my mother was Gabotomi woman. I lived here as a child—before it stopped being town and became military camp—and we had to come into the mountain sometimes to escape the Arabs.”
“What are you doing here now?”
“Ahmed bring me to entertain troops and workers with some other girls. But I know more than others. See—I show you all the factory parts…”
She took Solo by the hand and led him along one of the passages leading off the cave. As they went further down the tunnel, the light grew brighter and a confusion of noises manifested itself. Solo could distinguish the humming of generators, voices, a truck engine revving, and a whole series of tappings and hammerings. Soon they were passing a row of grilles set low down in the rock, from which the light was coming. Through the metal gratings, he caught glimpses of offices, lecture rooms and stores with men in uniform busied about their tasks below.
“But surely Thrush—the Europeans—must know about the grilles! Don’t they know how the air comes to their offices?” Solo asked.
“Of course. They know about the tunnels. But they do not know they are big enough for people to walk in. Many of our own people, even, do not know this.”
“Can all the gratings be moved like the one we escaped from?”
“No. Only that one. The others are cemented in place—but we left that one in case any of our own men were tortured and we wished to escape them…Look! Now you can see…”
They had come to a wider embrasure, set chest high in the limestone wall. The girl pushed Solo towards it and he peered down through the iron bars. The noise was deafening now, and as he saw the sources of the sounds, he uttered a low whistle of astonishment. Fifty feet below him was the floor of the huge cavern Illya Kuryakin had seen. Solo’s trained eye took in at a glance the cyclotron, the hundred-foot steel sphere of the atom furnace with the swarm of men still working on it, the partially completed cooling tubes, the banks of dials with their winking red lights, and, far above, the movable cranes running on rails set in the roof of the cave. Fork-lift trucks were whining here and there among the army of workmen, and in the background he could see the sinister, fish-like shape of a rocket on a low loader. Behind it, double doors admitted to a further chamber each one carrying in red lettering the legend in Arabic, French and English:
DANGER! RADIATION HAZARD BEYOND THIS POINT!
ENTRY FORBIDDEN TO PERSONNEL
NOT WEARING PROTECTIVE CLOTHING.
Yemanja was pulling at his arm. “Come,” she whispered. “There is more to see.”
She led the way through a maze of passages which continually branched and divided again, rising and falling in the rock. After about a quarter of a mile, Solo noticed that the limestone showing through the gloom was glistening with moisture and the air was appreciably colder. A faint roaring noise vibrated all around them. A few minutes later they were looking over the edge of a gallery in the rock at the giant turbines and generators of the power station.
“Yemanja,” Solo called over the thunder of the conduits, “why do you think these people are offering to help the Nya Nyerere? What is all this great factory for?”
“They say it is to vanquish the Arab government in Khartoum,” the girl replied, her lips close to the agent’s ear. “But they speak with lying voices, I think.”
“You are right. These are evil men. Your people are being made the dupes for a much larger conspiracy. As soon as the work is finished, the Europeans will have no further use for them. They will all be killed. The secret work of which I spoke is to try and foil this plan. Will you help me, Yemanja?”