Текст книги "The Diving Dames Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

Kuryakin flung himself to the floor as she loosed off two shots, at the other side of the gallery now. But the gunman had already dropped behind the shelter of the steel balustrade. A torn sheet of paper fluttered down from a clip projecting from the wall just behind where the Russian had been standing. He pulled the girl down beside him. "Thanks," be said soberly. "That was just in time." He drew up the hem of his sweater. Around his waist, a lightweight, pocketed band something like a cartridge belt was fastened. From one of the compartments he withdrew a small, square object with a sliding switch on one side.

"Okay," he said. "Draw his fire. I'll pretend to be busy at the control board again. You sweep the right hand arc of the gallery. If I know the psychology of these boys, this will be the time he'll shoot for the second time from exactly the same place."

The girl turned deliberately away from the section of gallery where the last shot had been fired and stared to her right. Kuryakin had his back to the main room. He was bending over the console – but one hand shielded a black-dialed pressure gauge in such a way that it acted as a mirror. A few seconds later, he saw the reflected head of Greerson rise cautiously above the ba1ustrade exactly where he had said it would. The agent whirled. Instantly, the head dropped from sight. But it wasn't a gunshot target Kuryakin wanted: it was enough to know the section of gallery Greerson was in. He sprang to the glassless control room window.

His right arm straightened like a baseball pitcher's. The small, square object sailed across the well and dropped down between the balustrade and the wall.

There was a subdued, flat detonation and a surge of smoke. Something rose above the level of the rail for an instant, threshing, and then dropped from sight. There were no more shots from across the gallery.

"Small grenades are very useful in confined spaces," Illya said, "even if they are only made with bakelite covers. Now, let's see – the watertight bulkheads are closed, all those that can be of any use to us. That leaves us free in the central area with the six people below and any other military who happened to be in the passageways when I started to close the doors."

"And the reactor?"

The agent gestured towards the indicator board. On the section detailing the lowest floor, the central rondel was bracketed at all its entrances by illuminated red lines. "It's the only part of the middle bit protected," he said. "Now we have to go to this other board and – ah – pull a few strings to open things… the doors to the tunnel, for example."

"But, Illya, what are we going to do? I mean, there are only two of us, after all… and at least one has to stay here in case they come back and reopen all the doors you've closed. And if that one was me, I wouldn't like to guarantee that I could hold out against all of them. On the other hand, what could I do out there if you stayed?"

"The point is well taken," Kuryakin said. "You couldn't complete the mission if I stayed here; I wouldn't be allowed to if you did. Ergo, we send for help… and don't forget, they wouldn't come back here: they are here. There are still six of them underneath."

"What do you mean, call for help?" the girl said.

Illya produced the tiny transceiver from his belt. "Waverly," he said. "He's waiting with O'Rourke and others not far from the estancia. If I can find some way of operating the far end of the tunnel, they can come right in. If not, they'll have to blast their way through. In either case, as you point out, we won't be able to get to the maintenance section and put the missiles out of action without them."

"And the second part of the mission – your friend?"

As Kuryakin frowned, the downstairs door to the council chamber was flung violently open. The crash of the steel door against the wall was drowned in the clamor of the submachine guns held by the two uniformed men standing there.

Once more they dropped to the floor – noticing from the corners of their eyes a blur of movement from beneath the gallery towards the soldiers and their covering fire.

The agent crawled a little way along the gallery as the staccato tattoo of slugs ripped into the walls and ceiling above them. After a moment he ducked up, gun in hand, and fired a single shot. The clatter of the Thompsons ceased. Something fell metallically to the floor. A moment later the door slammed again.

Kuryakin rose to his feet. "Got one of them," he said, blowing the curl of smoke from the gun's barrel. "It was just a diversion to get the top brass away. But we'll let 'em go: it's easier for us without them down there."

He turned his back on the chamber below and began studying the masses of equipment stacked around the control room.

"Look here," he said, opening the lid of what looked like an oversized record-player cabinet. "There's the usual ground-glass screen in the lid – complete with schematic diagrams and pilot lights in a pattern I don't recognize – plus levers and knobs on top of the chassis in the box it self. And the only identification is this strip here saying 'Section E.' Now if E could stand for estancia..."

He never knew what extra sense made him turn his head at that moment. A faint current of air, perhaps; something moving reflected in a bright surface in the corner of his eye; a sound too small to be registered by the conscious mind... Whatever it was, he did turn – and saw the bludgeon on its way down to the back of his skull.

As his breath hissed in with astonishment, he lurched to one side with an arm automatically raised to ward off the blow.

The girl, pivoting too, gave a gasp of alarm as she took in the scene in a single agonized glance: the yawning trapdoor which had been silently opened behind a bank of teleprinters, the attacker – he was one of the two thick-set men who had been at the table when they'd come in – with murderous expression and upraised arm, the whistle of the blackjack.

It was too late for Kuryakin to escape the blow completely. The blackjack glanced off his wrist and thudded into the muscle between his collar bone and the point of his shoulder, forcing a shout of pain from his lips and paralyzing his arm.

As the Walther crashed to the floor from his numbed hand, the man swung around in a smooth spiral of controlled energy, knocked the Beretta from the girl's grasp with the truncheon and – before the little gun had gone spinning out of the shattered window to crash to the floor below – had swung back on the rebound and knocked her sprawling to the far side of the room.

Illya reeled, pain searing his whole side. Desperately, through blinded eyes, he fixed his gaze on the blackjack and groped upwards to fasten wiry fingers on the wrist that wielded it.

The big man snarled, shaking the slight figure of the agent from side to side as a mongoose shakes a snake.

But eventually the crushing judo grip forced apart his fingers and the blackjack clattered down. Swearing, he collapsed suddenly to the ground, dragging Illya on top of him. The Russian brought up his knee to the man's solar plexus and forced his sound forearm under the blue chin. But the attacker knew all the tricks in the wrestling trade – and he was formidably strong, too. At a distance, Kuryakin could have held his own, but they were already too much at close quarters for him to stand a chance.

The thug rolled over, holding the agent to him in a bear hug, caromed off the telleprinters, and sat up with Illya in a scissors grip. Three times, viciously, his fist jarred the Russian's head – and then again they were locked together toe to toe, wrist to wrist, with every muscle, shrieking to sound out a weakness in the opponent's guard.

Abruptly, Kuryakin abandoned the trial of strength and went limp. For a moment he was bent over the opening left by the trapdoor – then, wrapping his legs around the man's hips, he dropped through, dragging the thug with him.

From below came the sound of splintering wood and a strangled shout.

The girl had picked herself up, sobbing, some time before. The Walther had been kicked somewhere under a cabinet in the fight and she bad been circling the struggling men, not knowing how to help. Her mascara had run and her nose was bleeding. Now, with a cry of alarm, she sprang to the edge and looked down.

Amid the remnants of a table, the Thrush man had Kuryakin bent backwards like a bow in the agonizing grip known as the Boston Crab. In wrestling bouts this dangerous hold almost always results in a submission; if there is no referee and the pressure is continued, a spine snaps.

Aghast, Coralie watched the veins on the big man's temple and arms bulge as Kuryakin's eyes turned up; and his face broke out in sweat.

"Illya!" she screamed.

"Pen… pen…" the agent choked. "Quick... floor."

In anguish, her eyes swept the boards below. In the exertion of the struggle, most of the contents of Illya's belt had been spilled out onto the ground. Among them was a slim cylinder resembling a ballpoint.

Without hesitating, she dropped through the trapdoor like a stone, hit the floor with a numbing impact, staggered, recovered herself – and reached for the tiny device. There was a button at one end.

Almost in a reflex action, before he had realized what was happening, she had pointed the other end at the thug's face and thumbed the button. There was a shrill hiss of gas escaping under pressure. The man's eyes widened, his mouth split open in an almost ludicrous expression of surprise, and he pitched forward as the agent collapsed with a groan of relief.

–

Ten minutes later, when the girl had tidied herself up and Kuryakin had recovered sufficiently to climb the ladder back to the control room, they began again to speculate whether the cabinet with the screen in the lid was a control for the outer gates of the tunnel.

"We can only try," Illya said. He stretched out his hand and grasped one of the levers on the control panel. "Let's see what E.l will do…"

"I wouldn't, Mr. Kuryakin. I really wouldn't." The voice came from behind them.

Together, they whirled. Zigzag lines chased themselves across the screen of a small monitor television set just above the shattered window. Above it was a fixed, closed-circuit camera. The voice had undoubtedly come from here.

"It may not do what the label says, you see," the voice went on. "Because although you have unfortunately incapacitated the man we left behind us, he had done his work first."

"I have no idea what you mean," Illya said, looking directly at the camera. Below it, white patches streamed across the screen, to coalesce and finally assemble with the darker zigzags into a picture of three men and a woman sitting behind a control panel similar to the one behind him. The woman was the one who had been in the chamber; the men were Moraes, Hernando, and the man with the skull-like face. It was the latter who was speaking.

"I will tell you," he drawled. "Ah – I see from your face that you can now see us. We have been able to see you all the time… When you burst in and interrupted our meeting, you may or may not have heard the lady here report that she had delivered two prisoners some where, a man and a woman."

"Well?"

"The place she had taken them to was the submarine pen."

"I'm afraid I don't see -"

"Where she had left them and double-locked the exit doors. There is now no conceivable way in which they can reenter the fortress."

"So?"

"The man is your colleague, Mr. Napoleon Solo; the woman is a foolish girl who for some reason tried to help him."

Illya caught his breath. "Even so," he said, "I don't quite -"

"We now come back to Schwarz, the man we left behind," the leader with the skeletal face said smoothly. "You may have heard me instruct him, at one point in the proceedings, to put Plan D into operation?"

"Okay, I'll bite," Kuryakin said, the hairs prickling on the nape of his neck. "What is Plan D?"

"An emergency plan evolved in case anyone should temporarily take over the control room. It is very simple: Schwarz merely disconnected some of the leads from the controls – and then replaced them in a different order."

"And that means?" Illya asked with a dry mouth.

"That when you pull lever A or twist Knob E, you may not now observe reaction A or reaction B on the indicator screens. Not necessarily. You may operate lever A and set in train reaction X."

The agent stared at the screen, his mind racing.

"You might find – to give a more concrete example – that you twisted a knob to open the gates to a tunnel... and succeeded only in flooding a submarine pen. Which would be awkward for your friend Solo."

There was a long silence.

Kuryakin turned and walked to the trapdoor, looking down into the room below. All along the back wall, metal housings like giant fuse boxes hung open – and inside, festooned like the fronds of anemone and weed in some fantastic undersea pool, he could see hundreds upon hundreds of strands of wire in dozens of different colors.

"And not one of those leads is labeled," the voice went on. "Nor are the leads above and below the connection boxes necessarily the same color or combination of colors."

It was quite true. From where he stood, Illya could see. He deliberately turned his back on the TV monitor and surveyed the control board. Any of the wheels or levers whose function, according to the coded numerals and letters on them and repeated on the indicator above, was to open or shut doors, operate fire extinguishers, raise or lower screens or put magic eye circuits out of' operation... any of these might in actuality open sluices which could bring thousands of tons of water in upon the defenseless Solo and his companion in their subterranean prison.

"You've been lucky so far," the voice said persuasively. "You have managed to seal off a good proportion of our forces because the watertight bulkhead doors are excluded from Plan D – for obvious reasons of security. But will you be so lucky next time?"

"Look. I don't know who you are." Illya began, still with his back to the camera.

"The name is Wassermann. A member of the Council of Thrush, along with Senhor Moraes and Hernando here. We are but three of many. You cannot possibly succeed against us. Why do you not simply give up? The odds are too heavily stacked against you."

For answer, Kuryakin reached out and grasped a lever.

"Illya!" the girl cried. "You can't! Surely -"

"Be quiet!" the agent rasped. "Remember what Waverly said."

"Never mind Waverly. You can't take the risk."

"I said be quiet."

"You are foolish, my boy." It was Hernando speaking now. His lined face was in close up on the monitor screen. "We are in a small extra control room here, next to the radio room. We cannot overrule any actions you take – but they are duplicated on our indicators. Think. You may bring death to your friends with that little lever; you may cut off the oxygen supply to the whole fortress; you may douse the room you are in with foam; you may over-fuel the reactor…"

Kuryakin set his teeth and pulled firmly on the lever.

"Watch the big board in the corner," Wassermann said. "The pen is an oblong at the moment glowing in green. The reactor is a red circle below it. If it is over-fueled, the red glow becomes intermittent. When water is admitted to the pen, it goes blank, then slowly fills with blue."

The agent's eyes were sternly fixed on the small indicator in the lid of the cabinet before him. He was staring at the red bar marking what he thought was the close exit to the tunnel – waiting for it to go green.

A sharp cry from the girl dragged his eyes to the other board.

The rectangle symbolizing the submarine pen was no longer green. As he watched, horrorstruck, a luminous blue line appeared at the bottom of the oblong, slowly thickening upwards.

With a smothered exclamation, he seized the lever and struggled to push it back up again. There was a chuckle from the television screen. "Oh, no, Mr. Kuryakin" – it was Moraes speaking this time – "you cannot do that! The action is irreversible. Think it out. There must be a censor overriding all controls while the place is filling: we could not have water levels rising and falling like yo-yos with expensive machinery like nuclear submarines in there, now could we? The 'Exhaust Pen' control will remain inoperative until thirty minutes after the chamber is full. To make sure nobody can empty it while the craft is maneuvering, you know. By which time, of course, your friend..." He shrugged eloquently.

There was a click and the sound went off. The vision dwindled to a tiny white square, brightened for an instant, and then vanished.

Illya dashed to the trapdoor, jumped to the floor below, and began frenziedly searching among the gaily colored leads. But Wassermann had been right: the task was hopeless. There were hundreds. It would have taken an expert electrician hours to trace them all back and check the altered connections through the fused junction boxes. Dispiritedly, he turned and hauled himself back up the ladder. The girl had set her back to him – and the oblong on the indicator board was blue more than three-quarters of the way up.

Twelve minutes later; as the Russian played desultorily with the levers on the cabinet devoted to Section E, the rectangle glowed blue all over.

Shortly after that, the TV screen suddenly came to life again. The picture was grainy and blurred, but the sound was fine. Wassermann appeared to be in some small room busy with pipes and dials. "Just to thank. you, Mr. Kuryakin, for filling the chamber and allowing us to make our escape in the submarine," he said suavely. "You have blocked off five missiles in the maintenance unit – but there is one aboard the ship. I am speaking from the conning tower, and we are on our way to the far end of the lake to prepare for firing... Buenos Aires, I think... It's not the full-scale effect we planned, but it'll be better than nothing. And just in case your friends outside should be stronger than we are, it's just as well,.. rather than risk failure, to get the Thrush mission least partly -"

The screen blacked out, losing both sound and vision in mid-sentence. Fragments of glass lying shattered on the floor jingled as the control room trembled beneath their feet. The lights dimmed and then brightened as a long rumbling roar, felt rather than actually heard, shivered and reverberated around the fortress.

"Illya!" the girl was saying despite herself. "Look!" She pointed at the ground-glass screen in the lid of the Section E cabinet.

Some of the controls he had idly operated had worked: for across the entrance to the diagram tunnel what had formerly been a red bar now showed bright green.

Kuryakin slumped into a chair. He pulled out his transceiver and held it to his mouth.

"Hello, Mr. Waverly," he said wearily, thumbing the button. "You may find one or two sentries outside, but as far as the tunnel's concerned, you can come in right now…"

Chapter 13

Illya Changes His Mind

"THAT WAS thoughtful of you to leave those aqualungs and diving suits behind the drums," Napoleon Solo said. "Without them we'd both have been in Davy Jones' locker for keeps! But when I heard the water come bubbling in from the vent beneath the submarine, we climbed onto the drums and saw those things down below."

"I can't understand why nobody saw you when they came in in their own diving gear to board the sub," Illya said.

"That was the drums again! They didn't float, you see: they had been used as ballast to simulate the missile payload – and, being filled with concrete, they just sat on the quay and we sat behind them."

"And you saw our midget submarine…?"

"As soon as the Thrush craft pulled out, there she was waiting for us on the other side. I guessed she would have the usual small, single HE torpedo underslung, so we hopped aboard and set sail after the target bird. Then it was simply a matter of waiting until she was far enough away not to damage the fortress when she went up."

"But the nuclear missile itself didn't actually explode?" Coralie Simone asked.

"Oh, no. It takes a small atom bomb to trigger off a thermonuclear device; ordinary high explosive isn't hot enough to start the reaction. But we made quite a big bang with our little tin-fish because she was carrying quite a lot of conventional armament and I was lucky enough to hit it..."

They were sitting in the Departure Lounge at Brasilia airport, waiting for the flight to be called which was to take Solo, Waverly and Alice Lerina back to Rio and thence to New York. To one side, the vast bulk of Manuel O'Rourke reared from his wheelchair, with the boy Rafael, in attendance. Since the Irishman had sent his Cadillac careening through the tunnel at the head of column of state troopers, scattering two separate nests of machine-gunners and personally helping the authorities to round up the troops within the fortress from that chair, the young car-dispenser, with the light of hero-worship in his eyes, had never left his side.

"One thing I can't understand at all," Illya said. He turned to Waverly, who was stuffing half an ounce of tobacco into the bowl of an enormous briar. "I got a message at San Felipe telling me to go to a certain rendezvous – and there I met O'Rourke, who put me in radio touch with you."

"Yes, Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly said. "Well?"

"Well, how did that come about?"

"I thought Mr. O'Rourke explained. He could get there quicker by car than if he had waited for me to arrive from New York and we had come on together by plane. That way , he could contact you in advance and talk to me by radio as soon as –"

"Yes, yes, yes," Kuryakin said with what was for him a near-miss at exasperation. "What I mean is – one, how did you know O'Rourke could contact me; two, how did you know he'd be equipped with all that special radio stuff; and three, how did you know about him at all? How did you know to contact him? How did you know he could be trusted? I'd never mentioned him in my reports on this affair."

Waverly coughed. "Both you and Mr. Solo mentioned him in your reports after the – ah – I believe we code-named it the Radioactive Camel Affair," he said. "I considered that a man with his capacity for gathering information should be persuaded to put that facility to work for the common good."

"But we thought he had been killed in Casablanca! I didn't know he was still alive until I saw him by chance in Rio."

"Our people made certain inquiries," Waverly said vaguely.

"Do you mean to say," Solo put in, amazed, "that Mr. O'Rourke is one of us? D'you mean he's on the payroll and we didn't know?"

"Doesn't always do to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing," the head o U.N.C.L.E.'s Policy and Operations Section said gruffly, stowing his unlit pipe in one pocket and searching in the other for matches.

"Ah... yes, sir," Solo said diplomatically, exchanging a wry glance with Illya.

"Sure it sometimes gets an idea into a fella's skull more easily if you let him discover it himself," O'Rourke said with an easy smile. "Isn't that so, Rafael?"

"It does so," the boy said. "And it's a queer ould life we'd be having if there was no place left for the adventurers at all."

Waverly had lit a match and appeared to be surprised that there was no pipe in his mouth for it to ignite. A time stewardess in a dark blue uniform passed them as an incomprehensible gargle of Portuguese poured from the PA speakers. It is forbidden to smoke," she said severely, "while proceeding to the aircraft. That is your flight being called."

Napoleon Solo rose to his feet. His face was still swo1– len and bruised from the beating he had taken from Greerson, but there was the old light in his eye as he placed one palm under Alice Lerina's elbow and guided her toward the door. "Okay," he said. "We're on our way. In view of various favors past received, Mrs. Lerina and I have a date with a parole officer somewhere on the West Coast, so that her life can be put in order again. After that, I hope we may have a date with each other."

"It depends," the girl said, "on the way you behave during that long plane journey!"

Waverly was already halfway to the aircraft, deep in conversation with O'Rourke and Rafael.

Coralie Simone and Illya watched them go with indulgent smiles. There was a genuine detachment of D.A.M.E.S. on their way to help with the local population while the Brazilian authorities decided what was to be done with the dam and the empty power house attached to it. Coralie was to wait and take charge of the women when they arrived – and the Russian had decided to spend the week's leave due to him in her company.

The girl took his arm. "Illya dear," she said, "do you think we'll have time to make a quick trip to Bahia before the girls' plane arrives tomorrow night? There's two churches and a sixteenth century presbytery I'd love to take you to there."

The agent was looking at her aghast.

"Churches?" he said faintly. "Presbytery?"

"Why, yes," Coralie Simone said, tucking his hand under her arm and walking firmly away from the bar. "You must remember, after all, that we are the Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service…”

But Illya Kuryakin had already pulled free and burst through the swing doors onto the field.

The plane, a glisten of stressed metal at the far end of the runway, was turning into the wind. "Napoleon!" he shouted, sprinting across the hot tarmac towards it.

"Napoleon! Wait for me, Napoleon!... I've changed my mind. Stop the plane – I want to come with you!... Napoleon…"