The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 31

It was a lucky shot. Before Marshel could fire, the tiny nickel-jacketed bullet struck the automatic half-way along the barrel and spun it from his hand. Marshel snatched his hand back as though it had been scalded, shaking the fingers to ease the pain. Mazzari, in the meantime, had placidly regained his seat. He made no move to pick up the Walther…nor to aid Ononu, who had apparently been hit by a ricochet and was now sitting on the floor clutching one shoulder.

But the Thrush man could move fast too. Before Illya had recovered from the success of his snap shot, he was through the door and pounding away down the corridor towards the caverns.

“General,” the Russian said urgently, “are you on our side?”

“I am afraid I seem to have no side left to be on, old chap,” Mazzari said sadly. ‘From now on you had better regard us as neutral…”

“All right, then,” Kuryakin said. “Napoleon? Can you find your way to the big cave where the reactor is?”

“Yes—or at least I have a guide who can,” Solo s voice replied through the grating.

“Good. Make your way there and we’ll join forces. I have five shots left in the gun-camera. Marshel’s Beretta is buckled and useless. But there’s”—he paused and looked inquiringly at Mazzari, who stared impassively back at him—”there’s the Walther,” Kuryakin continued, scooping the heavy gun up from the floor. “And I’ll see if Hamid was armed…No, he wasn’t. Well, we’ll have to win what we can from the other side. See you there.”

“Okay,” Solo called. “We’re on our way!”

As Illya left the office, Mazzari was pressing down a switch and starting to speak into a desk microphone in front of him.

“This is Mazzari,” he heard the voice boom from speakers all over the redoubt as he hurried towards the door leading to the caverns. “This is a message to all Nya Nyerere personnel. There are two groups of Europeans at large in the fortress—our so-called allies and another. There may be fighting between them. You are not—repeat, not—to take any part whatever in this conflict. Stop all work immediately and proceed to Gabotomi. Retain your arms but take no part in the fighting. Do not use them unless anyone tries to requisition them. If they do, you may defend yourselves…I repeat: Stop all work immediately and proceed to Gabotomi”

Illya opened the steel door cautiously and peered around it at floor level. Marshel must know he would follow and might be waiting to pick him off with a colleague’s gun as he came through. But no burst of fire greeted the opening door, and he slipped quietly into the cavern and surveyed the scene from behind the line of parked trucks.

African workmen were already streaming from the cave containing the partially completed atomic plant and heading for a pair of double doors set in the far rock face. Among them were several groups of soldiers with their rifles slung. The sounds of hammering had stopped, the trucks were silent, and the only noise to be heard over the shuffle of feet was the descending whine of the generators as they spun to a standstill.

When two-thirds of the labor force had vanished through the double doors, Marshel and about a dozen Europeans appeared on a steel gallery outside a glass-fronted control office hallway up the cavern wall.

“Stop!” Marshel shouted. “Get back to your work, damn you! Go back at once to the machines where you belong!”

The file of Africans below looked up impassively and continued to stream through the doors.

“Get back, I say,” Marshel screamed, “or we shall start shooting to show who’s master here.”

The soldiers and workers went on walking quietly out. “All right then—you’ve asked for it!” the man from Thrush called. A ragged burst of fire crackled from the miscellany of pistols and automatics wielded by the men on the gallery. The crowd beneath surged and wavered. There were figures lying on the ground. But as the majority pressed forwards towards the doors, the soldiers among them wheeled smartly out, unslung their rifles and sank to their knees in the firing position. Their first volley crashed out as Marshel’s men were firing for the second time.

The Europeans abruptly withdrew from the gallery, leaving three men slumped over the steel rail. The soldiers waited a moment, and then shepherded the rest of the workers out, dragging the dead and wounded with them. In a few moments, the place was deserted.

Kuryakin hesitated. During the firing, he had slipped out from behind the trucks and made his way into the center of the vast floor. Now he was sheltering behind an abandoned fork-lift. But his problem—and Solo’s when he appeared—was different from Marshel’s: to the Thrush man, it was simply a matter of rounding up two interlopers and then trying to get on good terms with the workers again, whereas to them, with their limited amount of fire power, it was a question of tactics of getting the opposition to show itself and eliminating it member by member…

A low murmur of voices which had been coming from the control room now grew louder as Marshel and the Thrush technicians came out and climbed down the stairs from the gallery to the ground. “Remember,” he was saying as they fanned out over the floor, “there are only two of them. They don’t know the layout of the place and I don’t think they’ve got together yet. One of them is armed; the other isn’t. Shoot to kill—but if you can bag ’em alive, so much the better.”

“Any special order we should search in, sir?” one of the men asked.

“Yes. You, Manson and Trottman take the passage and the power station. I’ll take Ahmed and Fawzi and search the reactor cavern, and the other three can look around in here…And if those minstrel characters in uniform show their noses out of their office, shoot them too.”

Kuryakin shifted silently around to keep the truck between himself and the searchers as they separated. Marshel, Ahmed and Fawzi—whom he recognized as the broken-nosed man they had fought in Casablanca—disappeared through the opening towards the reactor, while three other men went through the door leading to Mazzari’s office and the hydroelectric plant. The agent was just wondering how best to deal with the trio left in his own section when his eye caught a blur of movement on the far side of the cave.

Napoleon Solo was dropping from an opening in the rock onto one of the searchers.

He landed on the man’s shoulders and sent him sprawling, twisting the gun from his grasp as he fell. Before they were up, the other two had spun around, pistols raised. Illya dropped one with the Walther, but the other fired simultaneously with the roar of Solo’s borrowed gun. Both shots found targets: the Thrush gunman slumped to the floor—and the slug meant for Solo slammed into the back of the man he had jumped on, just as he was rising to grapple with the agent.

“Three down and six to go!” Solo yelled. “Nice to see you, Illya! Stay there and cover me while I try and get the guns from the dead ones up in the gallery.”

Footsteps clattered towards them from the other cavern as Solo sprinted for the stairs. The Walther PPK boomed deafeningly as Illya fired in support. Marshel, Ahmed and Fawzi withdrew hurriedly around the corner of the archway.

“Any luck?” the Russian called. Solo’s head appeared over the balcony railing. It shook slowly from side to side. “They’d already thought of it and lifted them,” he said. “Look out! Behind you!”

Kuryakin whirled and flung himself flat behind the fork-lift truck as a fusillade of shots erupted from among the line of parked trucks. The three men returned from the power station.

He emptied the Walther and began firing the camera-gun, although the range was really too great for the tiny weapon. Two of the men were already sprawled on the ground between the heavy wheels, but bullets from the third were striking sparks from the steel frame of the fork-lift uncomfortably close to Illya’s head. He couldn’t see where the man was hidden—and then suddenly a final shot from Solo’s gun, which had been firing sporadically in his support, flushed him out. He careened sideways from the cab of one of the army trucks, scrabbled futilely at the starred windscreen, and plunged to the rock flooring.