The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 2

The night was cold. They had come down a long way since the pass, but the valley was still more than six thousand feet above sea level. He rolled himself in his striped blanket and eased himself into the low tent. Ten minutes later he was crouched under the coverings with his lips against the grille piercing one side of a flat Bakelite box about the size of a cigarette pack. He thumbed a button on top of the instrument; a faint, barely discernible whine quivered on the cool air. Solo turned a knurled wheel set flush with the back of the box. The whining noise increased slightly. He spun the wheel the other way—and the whine faded, vanished momentarily, and then swelled again. Patiently, he experimented until he had located the null-point, the setting where the noise was completely tuned out. Then he spoke very softly into the grille.

“Solo calling Station K,” he said softly. “Solo calling Station K. If you receive me do not—repeat do not—answer. Give me the signal specified in Schedule T.”

He paused. After a moment, the tiny transmitter-receiver emitted three very faint pips in rapid succession.

Solo spoke again. “Fine,” he said. “Now listen carefully. I don’t dare repeat anything and I can only talk for a moment. Transmit this message in Code Three to U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York, top priority. Message begins. Attention Waverly. Stop. Have located post office. Stop. Hope to identify package and consignee’s address tomorrow before distribution of mail. Stop. Advise Kuryakin—repeat, Kuryakin. Stop. Signed Solo. Message ends…Please acknowledge on Schedule T.”

The receiver emitted a single prolonged bleep.

“Okay,” Solo whispered. “Please listen again tomorrow between twenty-one hundred hours and twenty-two thirty. Over and out.”

He stowed the instrument in a pouch under his burnoose and rolled himself in his blanket again. The Mauser lay conveniently within reach, just underneath the roll of clothes and extra bedding that served him as a pillow.

In a large tent with a fly-sheet on the far side of the circle of dying fires, a tall man in dark robes leaned back from an open suitcase full of complicated electronic equipment. His aquiline features were creased into a scowl that was at once petulant and menacing.

“Somebody in this caravan is using a radio transmitter,” he said quietly. “It’s on quite a different wavelength from ours—but there’s no doubt about it.” He glanced down at the tuners and dials in the suitcase as though for confirmation.”

“Can you get a—fix, is it?—on the transmitter with this machine?” his companion asked.

The tall man looked at him for a second. Although he was dressed in Arab robes also, the other man was unmistakably an African. “No, colonel,” the tall man said evenly, “unfortunately we cannot. We have the means to establish its existence—but there’s nothing here that could locate it. Nevertheless, it seems that there may be spies about. They must he identified and…taken care of. Perhaps you would be good enough to send Ahmed to me. In the meantime, we shall see if we can pick up anything more definite.”

He turned back to the suitcase as the Nubian left the tent, and began experimentally turning the milled control wheels.

But this time there was no response. Napoleon Solo was asleep. He had a hard day’s work before him tomorrow. Somewhere in the caravan, concealed somewhere among the bales of merchandise, traders’ samples, rolls of bedding or folded tents, there was a small but extremely heavy canister of solid lead. And nestling in the cavity within it was a quantity of Uranium 235.

Before they reached Wadi Elmira and the caravan split into two parts, Solo had to locate that canister and find out who was carrying it.

Chapter 1

Mr. Waverly Sets the Scene

“URANIUM 235!” Napoleon Solo had said in New York two weeks previously. “But that’s incredible…I mean, uranium 235 on a camel…!”

The tall, lean man gazing out of the room’s solitary window at the United Nations building spoke without turning around. “It may sound so at first,” he said. “But can you think of a better way, a more inconspicuous way, of taking it to the heart of Africa?”

“Well, no. I guess not. But who needs Uranium 235 in the middle of Africa, Mr. Waverly?”

Alexander Waverly swung around and faced his Chief Enforcement Officer. His lined face was very grave.

“Somebody does, Mr. Solo,” he said soberly. “Somebody does. And, given that fact, for what reason could they possibly want this particularly fissile isotope of Uranium—in Africa or anywhere else?”

“Other than for research, the only positive use for Uranium 235 that I know is as part of an H-bomb.”

“Precisely. It’s an indispensable ingredient of a thermonuclear device,” Waverly said pedantically.

“But in Africa…? What part of Africa?”

“That we do not know. But we must find out—at once.”

“Okay. But I still don’t see…I mean, there are no nuclear powers in Africa. The U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France—we’re the only countries that have the bomb. India, Italy and one or two others are coming along. But they haven’t got it yet. And none of them are in Africa.”

“Granted.”

“Then what country could possibly—?”

“I didn’t say it was a country,” Waverly interrupted.

Solo whistled softly. “You mean Thrush is attempting to become the sixth nuclear power—somewhere in Africa?”

“It’s a possibility we have to take very seriously indeed.”

“What exactly do we know?”

Waverly crossed to the enormous teak desk that filled the center of the large room. “You’d better come down to Communications, and I’ll fill you in on what we have,” he said. “Is Mr. Kuryakin here yet?”

“Should be arriving any moment,” Solo said, glancing at his wrist watch.

“Good. Then we can wait for him there.” He pressed a button on a raised platen projecting from the surface of the desk and moved towards the door.

A number of floors below, Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin paid his cab and went into Del Floria’s tailor shop. He was in a hurry, his thin blond hair blown forward over his high forehead, for Waverly’s summons—had been unexpected and he had been sleeping late in his small bachelor apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

“Mr. Kuryakin!” Del Floria exclaimed, bustling forward from behind the steam of his pressing machine. “Always in a rush! Maybe you’ll let me at least press that jacket for you today? Truly, you don’t look so elegant in those clothes…” He gazed critically at Illya’s black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers and crumpled tweed jacket.

“Sorry, Del,” Kuryakin smiled. “Urgent today. Mr. Waverly is waiting for me. Next time, perhaps.” He strode through and entered the third fitting cubicle at the rear of the shop.

“Rush, rush, rush. Always in a hurry,” the old man grumbled. “This modem world…I don’t know.” He shook his head, sighed, shrugged resignedly, and pressed a button at the side of his machine. Inside the booth, Kuryakin drew the curtain, twisted the coat-hook on the back wall, and pushed. The cubicle wall swung soundlessly outwards and he walked through into a well-appointed foyer.

This was Admissions—the central point to which elevators and passages from all four entrances to U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters led. The girl on duty was a former West Indian beauty queen. She had watched Kuryakin’s entrance through Del Floria’s shop on one of the four closed-circuit television monitors set above her desk. Now, as he came through the door and crossed the foyer towards her desk, she looked at him approvingly through enormous, slumberous eyes.

“Good morning, Mr. Kuryakin,” she said in her deep voice. “I think Mr. Waverly’s expecting you. Would you please join him and Mr. Solo in Communications?”