“Uh-huh . . . have you got your most likely targets already worked out, as to where and when and so on?”
Geisler said, “Why, sure we have! It’s all worked out for every conceivable target.”
“No possibility of error?”
“None at all, unless something goes dead wrong.”
“Hartog’s in charge of the actual operating, is he?”
Technically, yes. I’m in general charge, of course, and entirely responsible as C.O.”
Shaw nodded. “Quite.” He looked round. “It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it. . . that this room’s got so much destructive potential, I mean.”
“You’re dead right there. When and if Bluebolt ever drops that load, wherever it lands . . . well, there’ll be devastation for thousands of square miles.”
When they got back to the office block Shaw said he would like a word with Julian Hartog—alone.
Hartog gave him a peculiar glance. He said loftily, “If you really want to, I’ll be delighted, my dear chap. But you’ll be wasting your time, of course. I don’t know anything beyond what I told you on the way in.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “Anyway, come along to my room.”
“Thanks.” Shaw followed the tall, lanky man down a passage and into a barely furnished office. Hartog motioned him to a chair and walked over to a cupboard.
He said, “There’s still time for a quickie before lunch. What’s it to be?”
“Gin, please.”
Hartog poured a gin and took it over to Shaw, who noticed that the man’s fingers were still shaky. Hangover, of course—or could it be something else now? For himself, Hartog poured a very stiff whisky and immediately took a big gulp at it. Then he sat down in a swivel-chair behind his desk and said, “By the way, Steve doesn’t know I keep booze on the premises. Well now—what do you want?”
“There’s just one or two questions,” Shaw replied slowly. “One or two things puzzle me, Hartog.”
“As to what?”
“As to you, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?” Hartog grinned, lifted his glass. “Mean this, do you?”
“Not specifically. That’s really none of my business, is it?” “Not really.”
Shaw gave him a sharp look and leaned forward. “Listen, Hartog. You told me, didn’t you, that the Kamumba mine was near where the attack on my train took place last night. How can you pinpoint it so accurately?”
“I can’t, it was only a guess, that’s all. But don’t forget, I know this area very well. From what you told me of the distance out from Manalati and so on, I reckon I can place it within, say, two or three miles—knowing the lay-out of the country and where an attack would be most likely to succeed.”
Shaw nodded. “You were at the Kamumba mine yourself last night, weren’t you?”
Hartog’s mouth hardened and his hand jerked a little. “I never said so.”
“No—but you were, weren’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“Let’s just call it—bush-telegraph.”
Hartog glowered. “I suppose it was that girl of mine.”
“It’s not really important how I found out,” Shaw said mildly. “The point is, you didn’t mention it yourself. I’m wondering why, that’s all.”
“Is there any particular reason why I should have mentioned it?”
“Perhaps not. Only I’d have thought you might have done, as we were talking about that area. Tell me, what exactly were you doing there last night?”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Hartog gave a hoarse, grunting laugh and then took another gulp of whisky. His eyes glittered and his face seemed to hold a curious inward grin. Shaw had the idea he was enjoying this, though he couldn’t for the life of him make out why that should be so. The scientist went on, “If you really insist on knowing, I went to a party. A booze-up, I dare say you’d consider it. I happen to have some very good friends there.”
“Friends who’ll substantiate that you were in fact at the mine?”
After a short hesitation Hartog said, “At the manager’s house, to be exact.”
“And this party went on till after about six in the morning?”
Hartog grinned again. “Why the hell not? This isn’t Esher or Clapham. . . it’s the Manalati province of Nogolia. There is a difference, you know.”
Shaw smiled briefly. “I appreciate that. Now—would you mind telling me just how that accident happened to your arm?”
“A skid on a lousy, rotten road. You know that.” Hartog laughed shortly. “Hadn’t had quite enough to drink, that was the trouble!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not enough, I mean, to steady my judgment. There’s a certain point, I find, when one’s more or less incapable. Go on a little longer, and you begin to improve again. I hadn’t got that far. . . anyway, the road’s a shocker at the best of times, soon as the rains start. It would have happened at any state of the alcoholic barometer, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“It’s just the arm . . . you’ve no other marks, no abrasions, scratches, bruises?”
“Not that I know of. Why? Should I have?”
Shaw murmured, “Not necessarily, I suppose. Only I’d have thought that a—forgive me—a man who’d had too much to drink and so had a skid on a bad road, a skid severe enough to result in an arm in a sling and a Gertain amount of blood, might have had a little more to show for it in the way of subsidiaries. That’s all- Hartog, would you object if I were to ask you to remove that bandage?”
Hartog stared at him and laughed in his face. He said, Yes, I’d call it bloody nerve, but I see from the look in your sleuthing eye that you wouldn’t let that stop you. Am I right?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Hartog slammed his empty glass down on the desk. “Very well, then.” Mockingly he extended his arms across the top of the desk towards Shaw. “Slip the bracelets on, Inspector, I’m coming quietly.”
“I think you’d better tell me anything you haven’t told me already, and skip the funny stuff.”
“Oh, all right.” Hartog shrugged and sat back again. “The arm wasn’t due to a skid—though for the record I did have one.” He held the arm up. “There’s been a bullet in there.”
“Which you got when my train was attacked?”
“Exactly—but don’t bother to reach for that gun under your shoulder, because it isn’t what you think.” Hartog jabbed a finger towards Shaw. “It’s a long story. But I got that bullet when I followed the natives who were mounting the attack. It was a stray shot, one that had gone over and wide, and I was just unlucky. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t get back to the car and drive it home, but it was bad enough. If you check up you’ll find that I didn’t go to a doctor, either here at the station or in Manalati. I got my wife to fix it.”
“Why was that—if you were only eavesdropping—”
“I couldn’t prove that, could I, and everybody would have known about the train hold-up and they’d have jumped to wrong conclusions. Anyway, there’s another and more important reason. It’s this.” Hartog leaned across the desk, bloodshot eyes fixing Shaw intently. “Steve Geisler doesn’t like me. He loathes my guts, in fact. He’d love an excuse for getting rid of me.” Gently, he tapped his arm. “This could give him that excuse, if he cared to stir up trouble and come to the wrong answer—like you’re doing now. Besides which, he’s already warned me that if I go on with this business he’ll shop me to London or Washington. That’d mean I’d be relieved double-quick, and I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t want everything mucked up now.”
“What do you mean by that? And what do you mean when you say ‘this business’?”
Hartog’s mouth twisted. “Look, Shaw, I’m not a fool. You’ve formed your own conclusions already, and you think I’m up to something pretty nasty. I believe that was the general drift of your remarks to Steve about some one signalling the missile down, or causing an accident. You meant me when you said that—didn’t you? Right, now let
me do a little explaining. In the first place, you must have checked up on all of us by now. Did you find anything against me?”
“No. If there had been, you wouldn’t have been employed here anyway. But sometimes people’s loyalties change after they’ve been screened, you know, and no screening’s a hundred per cent, anyway.”
Hartog said, “I wouldn’t know about that. But my loyalties haven’t changed. Other things have, but not my loyalties.” “Can you elaborate on that?”
Hartog said slowly, almost wearily, “Yes, I can, but to understand it you’ve got to have lived in this bloody country really. You’ve got to have watched this thing building up, Shaw, you’ve got to have felt its effect, and seen the whole place degenerate into fear, terror of what’s going to happen.” He wiped beads of sweat from his face. “You’ve got to have watched a whole country gradually dying just because some bastard has got hold of the blacks’ imagination and worked on it through their own voodoo. You’ve got to have lived where you can’t trust anybody with a bit of colour in them—or rather, not many of them. Even those you do trust, you don’t feel absolutely sure of. The change that’s come to me. . . it stems from all of that.”
Hartog got up and went over to refill his glass, long legs moving in that loping stride. Coming back, he said, “There’s people here, Steve Geisler’s one of them, my wife’s another, who’ll tell you I am just an alcoholic—or going that way at least. Very sad, they say, to see a brilliant brain going to the devil like that. What the hell do they know about it, Shaw?” He ran a hand through his black hair. “There’s some who probably think I’m crazy. Well—in a way I am. Both. Drunk and crazy. Only that’s not all. Look, after the current troubles are over, they can send me home any time they like—and they will too, if Geisler can fix it that way. I shan’t care— then. But not yet, d’you see—not yet! I’ve got things to— finish.”
“What things?”
Hartog didn’t answer that directly. He said moodily, “I told you I was at the hold-up last night. As a matter of sober fact. . . I was part of it, I wasn’t eavesdropping at all—”
“You—-”
“Wait!” The man’s closed fist smashed down on the desk and his lips went thin, hard. “Let me finish. I didn’t try to stop it because I couldn’t on my own, and even supposing I hadn’t been killed out of hand as a result, I’d have lost months of patient work. Months of getting myself accepted on my own merits and therefore—trusted.” He paused. “You see, Shaw, I’m a member of the Cult of Edo.”
Shaw’s face was white. “Do you really mean that, Hartog?”
“Yes, of course I do. What’s more, Geisler knows it.”
“He does?”
Hartog nodded. “I told him a couple of days ago. I got in a mad temper and it just came out. That was when he warned me officially to stop it all. Said that as a serving officer in an executive command he couldn’t let the station get mixed up in what was essentially a political matter. He said it’d be the boot for him if anything came out, which I dare say is true enough, but for God’s sake!” He looked almost appealingly at Shaw. “There’s more in the pot now than one man’s career. Anyway I didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him. You see, in a way, I’m doing your job for you. Finding out what’s going on—or trying my best to.”
Shaw said slowly, “Hartog, it’s a damned tall story. Have you in fact found anything out?”
“No. Only what I told you before—that the blacks think Edo’s turned up somewhere.”
“Nothing else at all?”
“Nothing else at all. They’re a close lot, you know. They accept me all right, but the impression I get is that they don’t know themselves what’s going to happen, and they won’t know till Edo tells them. Out here, they’re only the small fry, the labourers of the racket, as you might say, who’re waiting for the big bugs to join them—but there’s millions of them and they’re the Africa that counts. This thing’s going to be big if it’s allowed to come off.”
Shaw asked, “What do you think is going to happen?”
Hartog shrugged, fingers drumming on the desk nervously. “That’s anybody’s guess. It may be a wholesale uprising if Tshemambi doesn’t back down—and I’m damn sure he won’t. It may be some attack on the base here, it could even be . . .well, I just don’t know. Theorizing doesn’t help much.” He paused, then asked, “Well? D’you believe me?”
Shaw bit his lip, frowned. He said, “You’ve put me in a spot. What you’ve said does begin to make a curious kind of sense, I suppose. Look, what are your own real feelings about the Africans? I know Geisler said you didn’t like them, but—”
“I detest their stinking hides.”
Shaw was startled by the sheer venom in the man’s tone; the feeling, he was convinced, was absolutely genuine. He asked, “In that case, isn’t it a little odd that they accept you—a member of the station staff, too—as a sympathizer of the Cult?”
Hartog said, “Well, it wasn’t quite that way, not in the first place.” He paused. “They blackmailed me into it at the start, Shaw, and that I’ve not told Steve, by the way, because he wouldn’t understand. But I’ll tell you why, if you’re interested. I dare say you’ll ferret it out for yourself now, anyway.”
“I’m more than interested.”
“Right. It’s like this: When I was in the Russian zone after being liberated from that German P.O.W. camp, I was ... forced to do some work in the guided missiles field for the Reds. God knows, it wasn’t anything they couldn’t have worked out for themselves in time—and it never came out in the screening process after I escaped back to the West. I didn’t say anything, neither did the Reds.” He paused, rubbed at his eyes. “Then a long time later, a couple of men came to see me in London and they told me I was only at liberty through the good offices of the Reds and that if they just let some information trickle through I’d be for the high jump. They said, however, that they never would let on. . . but there was a suggestion in the air that one day they might ask foi; payment for keeping quiet. D’you follow?”
Shaw nodded. “Indeed I do. And I suppose Edo was asked to collect—right?”
“Bloody right! His people out here told me that if I didn’t do as they wanted, they’d see to it that there was a nice little calculated ‘leak’ that I’d worked for Russia in the past—and was still doing so. That I was a Communist spy. Obviously, that would have meant curtains for me. So—I pretended to go along with the Cult. I even went a little further and said I’d had a change of heart since being back in the West. You see, all the Cult knew about me were the bare facts that I was a scientist, that I’d been interned by the Nazis during the War and very badly treated by them—and that it was the nice, kind Russians who’d released me in the end. And of course they knew the basic fact that I’d quite genuinely worked for the Russians, even if at that time it was against my will. So it didn’t take too much fast talking on my part to convince them a little further—some of the leaders of the Cult are educated, westernized men, and they know about these things, but they don’t know enough on their own to sort out the sheep from the goats altogether. They knew that in the past it hadn’t been unknown for a scientist’s loyalties to change, and they knew that such men are apt to be thinkers, reasoners who don’t automatically accept all the dished-out dope, intelligent and even sensitive men.”
Hartog paused again, shrugging big shoulders. He went on, “Well, that became my line. As a pure physicist by early training, I told them, I knew what atomic war would mean and I hated to see my skill being used . . . you know the sort of thing—blah, blah, blah. I let it be known that I wouldn’t say no to the offer of a decent job inside Russia, working on electronics or atomic matters as applied to peaceful purposes, once this thing was over. I told them I was in sympathy with the anti-nuclear boys, the Aldermaston Marchers, and all that lot. I tell you—it was dead easy—”
“But couldn’t your security record disprove a lot of that?”
“Yes, I reckon s
o, but these bastards wouldn’t have access to that, would they? Anyway, I took that risk. They’d have had to have some one planted right inside the security sections in London and Washington to find out what was written about me, and evidently they hadn’t, so the chance paid off. And now I’ve been able to work myself into just the right position to find out exactly what their plans are as soon as they’ve got their orders themselves. So far, as I said, I haven’t got very far and I can’t even tell you the names of the local high-ups—they all use code names and code names only. I don’t know who Edo is yet, either. But I’ll find out. They’re such simpletons, Shaw, such goddam kids! If they hadn’t been that, they’d never have fallen for Edo in the first place, of course.”
“Which makes it all the worse that Edo and his friends are prepared to exploit them. Look, Hartog—what do you think about my theory that they might use inside assistance, say to prepare the way for an attack on the station?”
Hartog laughed. “Still meaning me? May as well be honest, my dear fellow! Anyway, the answer is—I think you’re on the wrong tack there.”
“Why?”
“Because there isn’t anyone they could use—so far as I know—except me. And they’ve never made any such suggestion to me. Of course, they’re delighted to have some one, as they think, from inside the base on their side, and I dare say the suggestion could come. If it does I’ll let you know!” “Uh-huh....” Shaw was about to say something else when there was a knock at the door and a naval rating came into the office.
Bluebolt One Page 18
