The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 1

The ferrety little man who was their contact in Alexandria glanced quickly around the cafe, then walked to Napoleon and lllya’s table.

“Mr. Mahmoud?” Solo asked politely.

“No names, please. And the information will cost you a lot. They’ve taken the—consignment—away from the caravan by helicopter. It will be flown to Khartoum and will be concealed on another caravan leaving for—”

Suddenly they heard a shot, and Mahmoud was hurled backwards from his chair, crashing against the wall. He slid to the floor with blood blooming like an exotic flower from his chest.

THE RADIOACTIVE CAMEL AFFAIR

NAPOLEON Solo shielded his eyes against the blazing sun. Under the folds of his burnoose, the heavy Mauser automatic had worn a sore place on his hip, and he shifted the belt supporting its makeshift holster. Beneath his aching thighs, the dromedary lurched and swayed, picking its way over the shale which slanted up to a massive limestone bluff a thousand feet above them. The caravan was a big one—a long line of camels, horses, men and women, some mounted and some on foot, snaking its way for almost a mile across the desolate plateau. It had been nearly five hours since they had struggled up the steep valley from the last village—five hours of torment for Solo as the sun had risen inexorably in the sky and the caravan had climbed towards the southwest, through barren foothills pockmarked with patches of thin scrub, along a ridge of rock and sand where nothing but thorn bushes broke the monotony of the scorched terrain, and now across this bleak upland slope beyond which—he fervently hoped—their path would at last tilt downwards again.

Solo eased the belt once more, scanning the plateau with aching eyes. Below and behind them, the dead land dropped away in parallel ridges of ocher and gamboge. Above, some geological unconformity had placed a thin vein of richer rock between the weathered shale and the limestone above it, and here a streak of brownish vegetation daubed the foot of the bluff. A few hundred yards further on, the line of stunted bushes followed the strata as they dipped towards a fault gashing the rock face—and it was in the direction of the wedge of cobalt sky marking this defile that the head of the caravan was now moving.

Once between the towering walls of the cleft, the relief from the sun's assault was immediate. It was still stiflingly hot in the shadowed gorge, but in contrast to the hammering of the direct rays the respite seemed as refreshing as a cool shower. Solo moistened his lips with lukewarm water from a padded bottle slung over his shoulder and reflected wryly that it was less than a week since he had sipped scotch-on-the-rocks under a striped awning sheltering the balcony of his hotel room in Khartoum. It was like a dream from another age. In the interim he had stained his skin, bribed a policeman, been secretly taken to the caravan rendezvous forty miles south of the city, and ridden painfully across half the Sudan. They had skirted the blistering Nubian Desert, crossed the White Nile, traversed the southern fringe of the Sahara, and were now laboriously making their way across the gaunt massif separating the province of Kordofan from Southwest Sudan. The following day, they were due at Wadi Elmira.

After the open wastes of the plateau, the rock walls of the pass had the effect of amplifying the noises of the caravan: the beasts’ stony footfalls, the creaking and jingling of pack stays and harness, an occasional guttural murmur of conversation in front or behind—all these sounded suddenly and unnaturally loud to Solo as they wound slowly through the defile. For the fortieth time he wondered if his disguise, his reasons for being there, his knowledge of nomad customs and of Arabic would again pass muster when they made camp for the night.

The caravan was mixed. There were ivory merchants and dealers in ostrich feathers, traders leading pack camels loaded with bales of merchandise destined for Bahr el Ghazal and the Central African Republic, and the usual supernumeraries—individual travelers and nomads who had tagged on for the ride. For this was dangerous country: the Africans of the south were in open revolt against the Arabs who ruled them from the north, and small isolated groups could easily fall victim either to one of the guerrilla bands or to over-zealous Arab troops on a policing operation. The largest single group was a collection of pilgrims on their way to some obscure shrine in Equatoria, and it was as one of these that Solo maintained his precarious position in the caravan. The pilgrims, however, were leaving the main body and heading south as soon as they left Wadi Elmira—and it was vital to Solo that he acquire certain information before this happened.

As he rode out of the gorge into the full glare of the sun, he saw with relief that the trail now led downwards across a stretch of broken country dotted with huge limestone boulders. The sun was beginning to subside in the brassy bowl of the sky; the furnace-like quality of the early afternoon was now tempered with an occasional puff of hot, dry wind blowing from the southwestern side of the massif.

Two hours later they halted for the night.

The caravan boasted entertainers. As the western sky drained through vermilion to a limpid green above the rim of the wadi on whose dried up riverbed they were camped, the plaintive quarter-tones of Arab strings and pipes rose into the rapidly cooling air. Sitting, like most of the pilgrims, in the outer rank of squatting figures around the fires, Solo dipped his fingers into the aromatic mess filling the bowl on his lap and watched tumblers and acrobats silently as he ate. Soon, however, it was the turn of the girl—and as he had feared, as had happened on the two previous nights, she sought him out again and performed the greater part of her act apparently for his exclusive benefit.

She was a belly dancer. Not a very good one, possibly—but the brown body with its eloquent hips spoke as if she had tossed a card with her telephone number on it into Solo’s lap. Her name was Yemanja—and she was probably of mixed Arab and Negro parentage, Solo thought. Certainly the name was of Yoruba origin, and while she had the nubile figure and high bridged nose of Mohammedan women, the full-lipped mouth and smoldering eyes were pure African. What was more to the point, she was the property of Ahmed, the camel-master in charge of the caravan—a sullen and muscular man from the Nile Delta whose glowering regard had already been drawn far too often for his liking towards Solo. All I need, Solo thought grimly, is to get involved in a fight with a jealous boyfriend!

Desperate as he was to avoid attention of any kind, he let out his breath in a long sigh of relief when at last the dance was over and Yemanja, with a final flash of eyes, was gone. The girl seemed to have taken a fancy to him, was making a nightly attempt to entice him…He shrugged mentally and determined to keep well clear of her as a group dance started on the far side of the firelit circle.

Solo watched for a while. Then, as the music and the dancing grew wilder and the fires burned lower, he slipped unobtrusively away and erected his bivouac near where his beast was tethered. Here and there on the perimeter of the camp isolated groups of figures were similarly engaged.