Текст книги "The Thousand Coffin Affair "

Автор книги: Michael Avallone

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

A NICE LITTLE PLACE TO BOMB

THE PLAN WAS daring. It had to be. Events had worked to that point where no other plan of action was feasible. Waverly had consulted with whomever he had to consult and the answer had come down from on high: Find out about Orangeberg. When you are certain, blast it off the face of the earth. We’ll take the consequences, whatever they may be.

So it was that on a foggy night later that week, a United States Air Force C-47 roared through the heavens over Europe, bound for Oberteisendorf.

Napoleon Solo sat in the passenger compartment. He was no longer sartorially elegant or well-groomed. Indeed, he was completely outfitted for a drop behind enemy lines. His flying suit was complete: helmet, goggles, fur-lined parka. His most vital possession, however, was X-757, the specially devised U.N.C.L.E. fire-explosive which produced so much heat that it could fuse an area to a depth of ten feet. Judiciously placed at Orangeberg, X-757 would reduce the cemetery to a pit of molten lava in which rock, earth, wood coffins and those hellish little capsules and their contents would lose their identities as separate substances.

Solo’s entire wardrobe was built for combat operation; map, pistol and complete detonation kit. This included five pounds of nitro jelly spread harmlessly about his person. It was only when the mass was put together like butter for a cake and frosted with blasting caps that it would take on a different, far more deadly character.

Seated across the aisle from him, beside a very worried looking Jerry Terry, was Illya Kuryakin, attired in exactly the same costume. The Russian’s face wore a blissful smile. Inactivity dulled him. This investigation of a cemetery in Orangeberg was more to his liking. He patted the entrenching tools fastened to his pack. Jerry Terry was busy making adjustments on a two-way radio before her. Each man had a walkie-talkie hand set which could make instant contact if they remained within a five mile radius of the plane.

“Ten minutes,” the intercom from the forward cabin crackled.

Jerry flung a worried look at Napoleon Solo. He smiled at her, trying to make her feel better. He knew he was wasting his time. She was too intelligent not to know how ridiculously short the odds were. It all boiled down to suicide, even on U.N.C.L.E.’s humanitarian terms.

Waverly had remained in London long enough to prepare the details of the plan. “Remember,” he had cautioned in his usual fatherly way, “You paradrop in as close as possible to your target, dig up one coffin. If it contains anything other than a corpse, radio the plane to make a fast pick-up and get out of there. You know what you have to do. Failing that, the bomber will carry a pay load. That could help.”

Yes, it would be easy, Solo reflected. Like dropping in to tea with the Grand Duchess.

“Radio’s working fine,” Jerry Terry said flatly. The roar of the bomber engines was like far-off thunder.

“Good,” Kuryakin said. “Communications mean a lot this trip.”

“Kuryakin,” she whispered suddenly. “Make yourself scarce, will you?”

He grinned, not offended. “I’ll see if there’s any coffee left in the commissary.” He shouldered down the aisle, going forward, his pack and parachute making him seem pounds heavier.

Jerry Terry slid into the seat alongside Solo. He turned from contemplation of the dark sky beyond the wings.

“Stinker,” she hissed.

“Who, me?” he said banteringly.

“Keep it up. Smile. Big hero. You could get killed on this stunt, you know that? Two to one old Skull Face is sitting down there just waiting for you to come back. You’re so irresistible in your own unforgettable way.”

“Am I?” he said, keeping a smile from creeping across his face.

“Oh, Napoleon.” She crumpled against him, all the anger gone out of her. “Why do you have to be so irresistible? I was doing fine until you showed up, you know that? Men don’t mean that much to me.”

“And they do now?” he asked softly, brushing her forehead with his lips.

“Yes, no. Oh, you know what I mean.”

“Jerry, listen to me.”

“Tell me to be brave and I’ll spit right in your eye.”

“No,” he agreed. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

She pushed away from him, searching his eyes. “No, you wouldn’t. What were you going to say, Napoleon?” He stared at her soberly.

“I owe this one to Stewart Fromes and a lot of other people. You understand?”

“Yes—I think I do.”

“Plus which I have no intention of dying. Believe it. I like life, cigarettes and coffee. And girls.”

She recognized what he was trying to say despite the mockery of his curved smile.

“You’re still a stinker, Solo.”

“Of course I am.”

The intercom came alive again. “Five minutes.”

They kissed. A quick warm kiss. Jerry Terry sighed and brushed a bright strand of hair from her face.

And then Kuryakin had come back, almost apologetically, checking his equipment and gear one final time. “I am sorry,” he said, “but it is just about that time.

“One minute to zero,” the intercom said.

They stood in line beside the bail-out door, their drop lines secured to the long bar parallel to the cabin. The voice on the intercom began a countdown. Solo did not look back at the girl. He stared into the darkness yawning beyond the fringe of the air door.

Kuryakin was right behind him, the dour face happy. He was idly humming something that sounded vaguely Russian. A gloomy, low refrain.

The slipstream made Solo’s flying suit billow. He concentrated on the voice of the intercom:

“…nine, eight, seven, six…”

Six seconds to eternity. And the solution of Stewart Fromes’ problem.

And then five. Had he really been right or was it all a game?

And then four. Three. Three to success or death.

“…two…one!”

He stepped through the air door and was caught by the wind, his line releasing him. Darkness sprang up to meet him. The engine’s roar moved on. And he was falling, falling…

The dark world over Orangeberg waited to meet his hurtling body.

Solo came down with a lurch on a rising hillock of ground. Luckily, he had missed the trees. His body rolled, the shrouds of his chute picking up the worst of a brisk wind which billowed the silken folds back to umbrella shape. He scrambled erect, fighting the breeze, pulling the shroud lines to him, shortening the bursting strength of the wind. Soon he had collapsed the chute and unbuckled the harness, standing on the thing before it could sail away into the darkness of the night.

He searched the sky for Kuryakin, happy to see the white mushroom of his chute making contact with the ground less than three hundred yards away. Elatedly, he balled up his pack and hurried toward his fellow agent. You could never be sure about a drop. The unexpected was always likely to happen when you least expected it.

Kuryakin had mastered his own difficulties by the time he reached him. They shook hands warmly, glad to be alive, and set about burying their silken passports to Germany.

From on high came the muffled boom of the bomber as it flashed on for a fifteen minute run toward the Russian border. On its return flight, another fifteen minutes, it would attempt to make contact with them. That gave Solo and Kuryakin exactly thirty minutes to find Orangeberg, dig up one grave, and reach a decision. One half hour to discover if they were right or wrong about the cemetery sleeping quietly in the lowlands beyond Oberteisendorf.

Kuryakin tamped the earth down on the remainder of his parachute. He grunted in satisfaction and replaced the entrenching tool on the hook fastened to his pack. The wind billowed his flying suit as he turned to Solo.

“It’s your expedition, Napoleon.”

“All expenses paid. I make the cemetery out due north of us according to the compass. Maybe a thousand yards. Not too bad a drop, considering.”

“Recognize anything yet?”

“Hard to tell. Landmarks at night are always a fooler. But there’s a reasonable familiarity about the neighborhood. Shall we go?”

“Let’s,” grinned Kuryakin, his teeth flashing in the darkness. “I haven’t dug a grave in years.”

They worked toward the direction Solo’s wrist compass indicated, finding the going amazingly even. The land was low, flat and undisturbed by foliage of any kind. Had it been a moonlit night, it would have been a cakewalk. Yet the extreme darkness was a blessing in disguise. They were, after all, in enemy territory, Golgotha’s back yard, and while the possibility of land mines, booby traps and electronic alarm systems was not to be discounted there was no time to worry about incalculables.

They pushed on, finding the ground easy to traverse, watching the shadowy distance unfold before them, identifying each indistinguishable clump of earth and darkness as a potential enemy until they reached it. Solo had his automatic pistol at the ready. A nighthawk cawed once and they both waited for the tell-tale sound of men moving that might follow. None came. They moved on.

The earth narrowed and the high walls of a gorge rose about them, only to level off into more flatland. Solo spotted a familiar rise in the terrain and his hopes rose with it. Something about the topography was eminently right, now. Yes, yes—there it was. The earth stopped and suddenly a long, knee-high bunker of concrete was before them. Here and there, a gleaming tombstone winked white in the darkness, its stone angles catching random stabs of reflected light.

“Napoleon—” Kuryakin whispered.

“Yes. Orangeberg. Let’s find a dead one.”‘

“Right. No sense in pushing our luck. We’ll take the first one we come across. I want to stay as close to the wall as possible.”

“Check.”

They slipped over the wall, careful to keep their many items of equipment from making undue noises. Their boots made contact with soft dry ground. The even, terraced nature of the earth was not lost on them. A row of headstones, barely twenty-five yards away, poked eerily into view.

The utter desolation of Orangeberg was now readily apparent. An almost palpable silence hung over the cemetery. An aura of everlasting stillness. Solo had seen Orangeberg from the air and understood the vast size of the place. Yet down here, the sensation was one of telescoping in size, as if in microcosm—it was only another burying place like a million other nameless ones all over the world. It was an odd sensation. The miles had shriveled down to the twenty-five yards that was as far as his eyes could make out in the darkness. Were it not for the silvery shafts of the headstones just before them, they might have stood in any gloomy vacant lot.

There seemed to be no caretaker’s house or night watchman to contend with. Yet it was impossible to tell. They would have to operate as though discovery were imminent and they might have to shoot their way out any second.

Solo reached the headstone that was closest, a square slab of marble, barely knee-high. It was placed directly between two oblong arches of granite.

“Here,” he whispered, unfastening his shovel from the pack on his back. “This one will do. The smaller the better.”

Kuryakin nodded and moved abreast of him.

Solo bent down, cupping his pencil Hash and beaming it directly on the slab. The engraved Old English lettering on the stone was bold and final in its epitaph:

WILHELM VANMEYER

1919—1959

Requiescat en Pace

Solo and Kuryakin exchanged dour glances.

“Latin and German don’t exactly go together,” Kuryakin muttered.

“No,” Solo agreed. “But these are a collection of books we can’t afford to judge by their covers. Dig.”

Grimly, they set to, easing their spades into the ground. It was tougher going than they might have expected. Here, on the outer perimeter of the cemetery, the earth was considerably harder. Ruefully, Solo now remembered a peculiarity of burying grounds: the borders of most of them tended to be the less ideal ground for interment. Which was why most vaults and crypts turned up at the entranceways and gateways of cemeteries. Not because the richest corpses wanted to be showed up front. Still, it should be only a matter of moments—if there were no interruptions.

They dug quickly, making a dark mound of uncovered earth to one side of the slab. It didn’t take too long. Solo’s spade thucked hollowly on a box of some kind. The sound spurred them on. Soon they had cleared a sufficient amount of space about the top of a simple pine coffin.

The box had not been six feet down. Three was much nearer the mark.

“If there’s a skeleton in there, I promise to defect to the Russians,” said Kuryakin.

“Fair enough. And I’ll do the Watusi in Macy’s window on Christmas Day. Ready?”

“Ready.”

The lid came off, pried loose by their straining fingertips, after Solo had raced a claw hammer about the edges to speed things along. There was a creak of wood and suddenly the lid was free, pulling back in Kuryakin’s startled hands. Overhead, the wind sighed across the graveyard, as Solo thumbed his pencil flash on once again and played its beam over the contents of the coffin.

A twinkling galaxy of clustered stars lay revealed in the dime-sized circle of light.

Round silver balls, identical with the one placed between the toes of Stewart Fromes’ corpse, lay boxed by the thousands in the coffin before their eyes. The coffin. was filled almost to lid level with them. They were like some mammoth collection of ball-bearings saved by a fanatic collector of the things. But Solo knew they were nothing so harmless as all that.

“Bingo,” said Solo, “and end of the search.”

“Napoleon,” Kuryakin said in an odd, tight voice. “Don’t move too fast. We’re being infiltrated upon and though I hate to say so—we’re surrounded.”

Solo cursed and turned the pocket flash off, rolling to the ground. Yet even as he did so, the dark cemetery lit up with the brightness of full daylight as powerful searchlights trained their traveling beams on the headstones that marked the bogus resting place of Wilhelm Vanmeyer.

“You will stand as you are and do nothing,” the funereal voice of the man called Golgotha yelled hollowly across the open ground, “or you will most certainly die before we have a chance to talk again.”

GOLGOTHA AGAIN

THE SEARCHLIGHTS were blinding. Caught in the merciless exposure, Solo and Kuryakin were like two shafts sticking in a mammoth circular dartboard. Beyond the dazzling glow of the beams, once their eyes had become adjusted to the light, they could barely make out the tall shadows of the men behind the glare.

Solo raised his arms, blinking his eyes to clear them, saying out of the side of his mouth to Kuryakin:

“Let me do the talking.”

Kuryakin, grotesquely unreal in his flying suit, loaded down with equipment, the walkie-talkie hung from his throat like a lantern, nodded slightly.

“Golgotha!” Solo called. “Can you hear me? It is important that you do!”

There was a murmuring rumble of voices from the direction of the glare. Then came a fierce German guttural for “Silence!” and the metallic, almost lazy voice of Golgotha floated on the night air.

“Yes, Mr. Solo, I hear you. What do you propose to say?”

Solo blinked in the lights.

“Tell your army not to fire at us. We are wired with explosives. Enough to blow this cemetery and all of us to Berlin and back. Let me make that very clear—shoot us and you destroy yourself! Shall I repeat the message?”

A hard, mocking laugh rode the wind.

“Really, my dear Solo. Such melodramatics. You would die so readily for U.N.C.L.E.?”

Napoleon Solo shrugged and stared back into the lights. A tight smile held his mouth rigid.

“Suit yourself. Take the long shot—tell them to shoot. We knew the risk we took coming in here. But remember—when we die, so dies your glorious plan for the element which you so cleverly stockpiled in this cemetery. Throw away your years of planning. It will be worth it.”

Several of the bright, dazzling beams cut off with the suddenness of a thrown switch. The newer darkness was as pleasant and gratifying as fresh air after a long submersion in the water. Dimly, Solo could now make out the tall figure of Golgotha behind the remaining lights, his cloaked figure rising from the graveyard like some ghostly specter of the imagination. More importantly, there were four more uniformed figures flanking him at intervals of five yards, sub-machine guns at the ready.

Kuryakin rumbled in his throat like a trapped lion. Solo hoped his impetuous partner would sit on his impatience to move into action.

“Solo,” Golgotha said. “I believe you. Now, may I ask what sort of bargain you ask me to make for your lives? You are not suggesting I turn you loose?”

Napoleon Solo laughed.

“You heard the bomber upstairs a while ago? It dropped us off. If they don’t hear from us in ten minutes, they will know that we were captured or killed and they will go ahead with the target for tonight. I leave you to guess what that is.”

There was a harsh intake of air. He saw the figure of Golgotha raise its skeletal arms and bring them down together in crackling anger. He had pegged the man correctly. To see the bubble burst after so many years of careful building must have been a crushing blow. Solo was banking on Golgotha’s mammoth ego to assist their escape from this deep, deep hole.

“Tell me, Solo. What excuse would the U.S. have for bombing a peaceful German cemetery in the middle of nowhere?”

Solo threw his head back and laughed.

“Be yourself, Golgotha. We have a sample pellet of the contents of your coffin stockpile. No matter what wreckage the bomber makes here, investigators will find enough of the pellets to justify the obliteration of a menace to world peace. Then the evidence of Utangaville and Spayerwood will speak out loud and clear. Well, hurry up—time is very literally on the wing.”

Kuryakin, without a signal from Solo, unhooked his walkie-talkie and reached for the antennae.

“Wait!” the voice of Golgotha screamed. But Solo repressed a smile of triumph. The man’s voice was hesitant now. Was the bluff working?

There was nothing to be done yet, not with that ring of sub-machine guns trained on them. It all depended on the weird brain of the devil who commanded them.

“Solo!”

“I’m listening.”

“Call the plane. Tell them you were wrong. There is nothing here. Tell them to come down and pick you up.”

“Then what?”

“We will bargain.”

“What kind of bargain? I give you the United States and you give me Russia?

“Don’t play the fool, Solo. Whatever your lofty ideals are, I’m sure you’re still interested in living.”

Solo hesitated, making hesitation visible and obvious. He bit his lip, flinging a look at Kuryakin. The Russian shrugged. Solo turned back to face Golgotha and the lights and the threat of the guns. Time was all he and Kuryakin needed, really.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll call. But no tricks, Golgotha. That plane is loaded with army men who won’t take anything lying down, so if you have any notions about capturing the whole lot of them, forget it.”

He unharnessed his own walkie-talkie and set it on the ground before him. But Golgotha had stepped forward, one hand raised in authority. To all ears now, came the powerful throb of the bomber. The roar of its jet engines returning from the Russian border blasted toward the cemetery.

“Just a moment,” Golgotha said icily. “I wish to hear whatever you have to say to them.”

“Come ahead,” Solo said. “It’s your party.” As he waved his arm, the gesture allowed the concealed trench knife strapped upside-down on his forearm to slide handle-first into the palm of his hand.

“Yes,” Golgotha said. “I shall come. But do not, I warn you, commit the mistake of treachery. Death is not such a fear to me that I will not save myself for the last laugh. You will blow up, you say. But I do not think you would have risked the parachute jump thus armed. Yet I cannot afford to guess, so I parry with you. All I lose for the moment is time, which is not so precious to me as it is to you. I find it hard to believe your bomber would destroy the field with men such as yourself in doubt, but we shall see. So make your call—but remember, you are covered by four sub-machine guns.”

He came forward across the ground, skirting a tombstone, his ghastly figure unreal in the lights. Kuryakin, who was seeing him for the first time, stifled an oath. Even Solo had to admit that Golgotha—hard to take under ordinary conditions—was a leftover from a very bad nightmare when seen here in a searchlight-flooded cemetery.

Golgotha halted about ten feet away from them. He pointed a bony forefinger.

“Call the bomber,” he said hollowly.

Solo switched on the walkie-talkie. It hummed with static, until he found the circuit that Jerry Terry was tuned in on. Carefully, while his brain raced, his right hand balanced the handle of the trench knife.

Kuryakin had abandoned his set. He was staring at the four shadows behind the glare of the lights. Solo knew Kuryakin was busy too, but he wished fervently that he knew exactly in what way.

“Baker, this is Sugar,” Solo said distinctly into the mouthpiece. “Baker this is Sugar. Over.”

The walkie-talkie hummed with static. Solo strained for the answer that he knew would not come. He was keeping his forefinger on the receiving lever, using only the sending half of the set. The bomber and Jerry Terry would hear his voice but the answer would never sound from the set. He hoped hard that neither Golgotha nor any of his minions had had any previous experience with the Army Walkie-Talkie M1.

“Baker, this is Sugar,” he repeated, letting desperation enter his voice. “Come in, please.” He was sure Kuryakin had tumbled to what he was doing. But he turned to him and winked: “Something’s wrong. I can’t reach the plane.”

“Let me try my set,” Kuryakin agreed readily. Golgotha muttered hollowly in his throat.

“You seek to trick me?” He stared up at the heavens, unable to see the bomber or its riding lights though the roar of the plane filled the heavens. Solo turned, his arms outstretched.

“Don’t be stupid,” he gritted. “They’ll blow us up if they don’t hear from us soon. What time is it, Kuryakin?”

“We have three minutes left,” the Russian said in an awed voice. “Stop talking, for God’s sake—I’m trying to contact them now!”

Tension is a curious thing.

Solo had worked hard for it, building an uneasiness in Golgotha and his followers, knowing that when it finally enclosed them in its sweaty palm the odds in favor of him and Kuryakin getting out alive would go up. Golgotha had his dream of world conquest; he had Thrush and its agents to help him. But now these men of flesh and bone stood in a stockpile cemetery in the middle of the night, listening to the roar of a U.S. Army bomber which at any moment might blow them all to bits. Solo knew the human mind. Someone was bound to break. Something had to give.

“Bitte,” a voice pleaded hoarsely from the ring of guns and lights. “They waste valuable time—“

Shaking with rage, Golgotha spun on the voice.

“Silence!” he screamed. “Who dares question my authority—” For that brief second while his cloaked back was to Solo, Golgotha’s body was a barrier against the threat of the sub-machine guns.

Kuryakin spotted the split-second opportunity as soon as Solo did. At the same instant, they moved—Solo leaping for Golgotha, Kuryakin grabbing for the hand grenades taped to his harness straps. A high cry of warning split the night, but there was no time for any of Golgotha’s men to dare a shot.

Solo swept Golgotha backward, forcing the trench knife to the man’s neck, digging his knee into the cloaked figure where he thought the small of the back should be. His first intention had been to use Golgotha as a shield for the safe travel of himself and Kuryakin from the cemetery. But now there was no need for that. Golgotha let out a strangled cry of rage. No machine-gun barked and Solo had his sudden, startling answer. They would not shoot if it meant the death of their leader. But more than that, Kuryakin too had free rein.

A metallic hand grenade, looking like a mottled egg, flipped in an arc toward the group behind the lights. Solo bore Golgotha to the ground and burrowed deep. But the man came with him scratching and tearing, his hands like claws.

They found his throat, twisting away from the trench knife as Solo thrust savagely. He had forgotten—the blade clanged tinnily and he cursed himself for not remembering the oddness of this man with the burned, withered body. Some sort of protective chain mesh collar encircled the fiercely ravaged throat—

And then there was no time to think.

The grenade detonated with a bursting, blinding roar of metal and fragments. A man screamed hideously before the explosion trailed off into a dying gurgle of sound. A sub-machine gun stuttered now, its coughing noise popping like fireworks across the open air. Kuryakin yelled something. And another grenade echoed the thunder of the first one. Glass shattered and the earth seemed to lift in a soaring gravitational pull that left Solo feeling weak and giddy. Golgotha’s lanky, heavy weight pinned him to the ground.

In the darkness, he heard Kuryakin rushing toward them. The Russian was panting. “Napoleon—are you all right—”

And then, the sharp, unmistakable cough of a hand pistol, a single sound, cracked just above Solo and he heard Kuryakin blurt in pain and wonder.

He blundered to his feet, his ears still pounding from the too-close explosion. His eyes made out the shadowy, weaving form of Golgotha heading across the smoking cemetery.

Kuryakin’s voice was close to his feet.

“Get him, Napoleon. Don’t mind me. Shoulder wound—I’ll call the bomber before it’s too late—”

Solo hesitated only a second, then set sail across the cemetery, skirting the mangled corpses of Golgotha’s hirelings, barely able to make out the bobbing, weaving cloaked figure of the man who had designed a cemetery as a warehouse for a weapon that could enslave the world.

Golgotha was a ghastly shadow dancing past the tombstones of the Orangeberg graveyard.