The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter (читать полные книги онлайн бесплатно .TXT) 📗

Illya slid the Landrover to a halt in a cloud of dust and climbed out onto the road. Something had gone wrong with the arrangements: there had been no helicopter at Stanleyville, nor any message from Waverly or anyone else in New York. U.N.C.L.E. had no representative in the town and there had been nobody he could trust enough to send a radio message. Solo was out of range of the miniature transmitter. Accordingly the Russian had played it by ear and hired his own vehicle—but the 450 mile drive had taken him three days, and now, when Solo was traversing the high ridge between the basins of the Nile and the Bahr el Ghaza and Illya himself should have been prospecting the environs of Gabotomi, here he was only just entering the country…

Perspiration clogged his fair hair and trickled between his shoulder blades as he tramped across the blazing forecourt to the guard hut. In three hours it would be dark, but it was still tremendously hot.

A tall African carrying the three stripes of a sergeant was deliberating over Kuryakin’s papers when he glanced over the Russian’s shoulder, stiffened and snapped out a parade-ground salute. Illya swung around. Although the face was so dark, his first impression of the man standing there was all brightness and light: the Sam Browne crossing his compact chest gleamed; the riding boots winked in the sun; the insignia of a Major-General shone from his shoulder tabs; and from under his arm the silver-knobbed head of a cane glistened. Brilliantly white teeth flashed between thick lips as the cane reached out to touch the papers on the trestle table.

“And what have we here, sergeant?” he asked. “A foreigner seeking entry?” The voice was deep and mellifluous, overlaid with a caricature of an Oxford accent.

“Yes, sir.”

The smile turned through sixty degrees and beamed on Illya. “Edmond Mazzari,” the voice continued. “Officer commanding troops rightfully in charge of this region. May one ask your reasons for wishing to enter the Sudan at this particular point?”

“Good afternoon, General,” Illya said. “The answer is simple: I am a photographer of animals. Certain of the beasts I wish to photograph can only be found in the area.”

“For example?”

“Certain types of white rhino; cave baboons; elephant; tiger; various members of the deer family.”

“But all these, my dear fellow, can be found in other parts of Africa—rhinoceros, elephant, tigers: we have no monopoly on them, you know.”

“In game preserves, yes. Shabby, half-tame creatures with threadbare hides. What I want is photographs of wild animals—and not the stereotyped pictures of a blurred rhino charging or a lion hanging its head by a water hole. I am prepared to wait. I have patience. What I seek are records of these animals behaving believably as animals, as creatures of family, as hunters, as beasts in fear—not just another series of myths from a child’s geography book.”

“It would be an approach long due,” the general said. “What camera are you proposing to use for these pictures, Mr…?”

“Kuryakin.” Illya snapped open the leather case at his side.

“Ah. A Hasselblad. With all the extras. Do you know, old chap, that the money that camera would bring could feed one of my villages in there for a month?” He stabbed the cane towards the rolling savanna across the frontier.

“I know that things in this region are—difficult,” Kuryakin said equivocally.

“Difficult! If I were to tell you…Do you realize, old chap, that the Arabs in the north are engaged in a war of extermination down here? They’re systematically killing my people off. Every day they descend on another village and—pouff!” He shouldered the cane as though it were a rifle and shot down an imaginary adversary.

“I did not know it was as bad as that. To be honest, I was surprised not to find Arab troops guarding this frontier post, though.”

“There were. Yesterday.” The General swung his stick towards a row of freshly turned mounds of soil behind one of the huts. “We show the flag occasionally—just to emphasize our rights, you know. These good fellows”—he pointed at the guard hut—“will stay here until another troop descends on them. There will be another little skirmish—and another row of graves on our African soil. Then we will take another post…”

“Forgive my ignorance, but what is the background to this?”

“Nothing but Arab rapacity. Basically, of course, it’s religious on their side. Our people here in the south are Christians or pagans; they are Musselmen—muscle men! That’s good, eh? —and so we have to go. We would have accepted some kind of federation if only we had been allowed a say in governing our own three provinces. But too many in Khartoum do nothing but line their own pockets—and mouth promises they have no intention of keeping. And anyway we shall accept nothing less than secession after what they have done now.”

“It’s very bad, is it?”

“Bad?” Mazzari had a trick of repeating the last word uttered by his vis-a-vis. “It is so bad as to be unbelievable. The Arab officers quartered here are in fear of their lives, so they lounge about in the towns and leave their troops to bum and loot and murder as they will. Do you realize, old chap, that they have destroyed—completely eradicated—one hundred and thirty-three villages here and in southern Sudan? They have murdered more than thirty thousand people, leaving the survivors to wander in the bush and starve. In the last two years, such murders, plus disease, starvation and a drain of refugees fleeing across the borders, have reduced our population by over a million. A million, Mr. Kuryakin. That is one third of our African population down here.”

“Isn’t there quite a strong underground movement—the Anya Nya, I believe?” Illya said, at a loss for a suitable comment.

“The Anya Nya? Lazzaro is a skilled guerrilla leader—but he has one bazooka and a handful of rifles among a few thousand irregulars, over there to the east in the Dongotona Mountains. What can such groups do against the fifteen thousand heavily armed Arabs in the region? Could they prevent the Juba massacre in the summer of 1965, when fourteen hundred people were killed in a single night? They fight in bowler hats and shorts!” The general was contemptuous.

“And here…?”

“Here in the southwest, we order things better. A little better, old chap. The Nya Nyerere—the force I command—is six thousand strong…but armed, disciplined and efficient.”

“I can see that,” Kuryakin said, glancing at Mazzari’s Sandhurst-style turnout.

“But today numbers are nothing. Efficiency is next to nothing. It is weapons that count—and the men who know how to use them. Soon, very soon, the Nya Nyerere will be as sixty thousand men—as six million. And then the Arab politician’s in Khartoum will bewail their fate. We shall grind the oppressors into the dust and become masters of the whole Sudan.” For a moment, Oxford University went out the window and in its place pure mission school showed.

“You are planning a coup, General?” Illya strove not to betray his interest.

“Ah, it’s early days, early days, old chap,” General Mazzari said, conscious that he had revealed perhaps a little too much. “Just keep your eyes on the headlines in a few weeks’ time, that’s all. In the meantime, we are still an underground army: I must be off.”

“I have your permission to proceed?”

“So far as I am concerned, you may go ahead and take your animal pictures. But I can offer no guarantee for your safety. You would be wise to stay the minimum amount of time—and keep your eyes wide open. Caveat, old chap. Caveat!”

He snapped his cane back under his arm, saluted, and strode smartly from the hut.

The guards raised the pole; Illya climbed wearily back into the Landrover and drove on. For fifteen or twenty miles, the rolling grassland continued. Then the clumps of trees grew further and further apart, the herds of antelope vanished, the grasses thinned—and soon the trail was twisting up into the desolate foothills of a range of mountains that had shown as a blue smudge on the horizon at the border. Three times he passed burned-out shells of African villages, only rings of scorched earth and a few crumbling mud walls remaining. The only sign of cultivation was a ragged line of corn by the roadside that had gone to seed. The route grew steeper, dipping every now and then into a rubble of stones and rocks in a dried-up riverbed, and then mounting again towards the saddle which pierced the limestone cliffs topping the ridge.