The Radioactive Camel Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 28

Helpless on his back in this position, he had endured the age-old water torture. It was quite simple and very effective. They had plugged his nostrils with cotton wool and wedged an iron ring into his mouth so that it was jammed open. Broken-nose had then draped a long strip of thin muslin over Solo’s face and carefully, lovingly poured water—gallons and gallons of water—into the open mouth through the cloth. With his head unable to turn because of his own arms on either side, the victim can only get rid of the water by trying to swallow it—but before each mouthful is swallowed it has always been replaced by another. And in the meantime the victim has to breathe; the tortured lungs heave and try to drag in air, but the attempt only draws in water…and with the water comes the muslin, which is remorselessly sucked into the windpipe. In a very short time the victim, gagging and retching, is half drowned with the water in his lungs, and half choked with the cloth.

The only trouble was that Solo’s iron will was sufficiently strong to allow himself to be choked into unconsciousness before the spasms became violent enough to cue the torturers to remove the muslin and start again.

After this had happened three times, Ahmed—whose dirty-nailed fingers had been occupying themselves pinching and prodding and squeezing here and there to punctuate the water treatment—straightened up from the agent’s body and growled, “This is no good, my friend. We shall never get anywhere this way. The salaud will just go on choking himself unconscious. And the colonel said he wanted results quickly. We must make him talk some other way.”

Broken-nose put down the fuel drum and attached radiator hose he had been using to supply the water. “Very well,” he said. “Let us see how he reacts to electricity, eh?”

“You must have been someone’s star pupil,” Solo gasped.

Broken-nose snarled, “We learned a few lessons in Algeria about water and electricity—and the boys upstairs learned some things by keeping their ears and eyes open when the French exploded their atom bomb in the Sahara in 1960.”

“Of course,” Solo muttered to himself. “W equals mc²—I thought it was familiar...”

“What is he gabbling about?” Ahmed asked.

“A sum I saw on a blackboard. That’s the French way of expressing the atomic equation. We—others, that is—express it as E equals mc². But don’t worry yourself about it—it’s far too intelligent for you.”

The camel-master plunged his fist into Solo’s unprotected midriff. Once again the world dissolved into a red mist.

When the agent came to, the two men were attaching lengths of wire to various prominences about his person with miniature bulldog clips. “This will make your beautiful eyes open wider,” Broken-nose grinned, feeling Solo stir. “We have a fine truck magneto handy—when we hitch up the wires and spin the armature, you’ll have your own built-in central heating system! And we can make it as hot as you like, according to how fast we spin. Sure you wouldn’t like to change your mind and tell us all about it?”

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.