Текст книги "The Finger in the Sky Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

"What did you do?"

"Naturally I tried to stop them, Monsieur. But two of them held me—one with his hand over my mouth—while the others...finished their vile work with the patient. And then...and then—while they still held me—one of the others...a little dark fellow, he was...came over and hit me with a —"

The nurse stopped talking suddenly and pressed her clenched hands against her mouth.

"And you have no idea at all, what the patient was talking about before they came in? You didn't catch anything he said—even a single word—before he was beaten insensible?"

The woman shook her head dumbly.

"He wasn't entirely unconscious, Napoleon," Illya said. "Look."

He had picked up from the floor the wooden board to which the patient's temperature chart was clipped. Wordlessly, he held it out for Solo to see.

Below the thick black line which had begun to move out from the left hand margin, a wider, more vivid line in red wavered across the squared paper. And above it, two hastily daubed symbols stood out against the white in the same sticky medium.

"He must have used his finger to write us a message," Illya said soberly. "using his own blood as ink..."

Chapter 10 – An eye in the wall

"The guy must have been lying apparently unconscious on the floor," Solo said. "And while THRUSH's thugs were beating up the nurse, he opened his eyes and saw the chart where it had been knocked to the ground in the struggle."

"Yes," Illya said. "And he'd only have a moment before they picked him up to put him on the stretcher, so he'd have to work very fast. The thing is—how would his mind have worked and what was he trying to tell us with these daubs?"

They were back in the T.C.A. building at the airport. Matheson, the Technical Director, had lent them his office while he supervised the crash inquiry team working in the wreckage out on the floodlit runway, and they had decided to have a council of war before deciding on their next move.

Solo picked up the temperature chart with its gruesome symbols. "This guy's a steward," he said, "so whatever information he has will at least be given with a semi-technical mind...Let's analyze this thing properly."

The survivor's temperature had been logged five times—once when he was first put in the ambulance, again just before they reached the hospital, and three times, at quarter-hour intervals, in Room 17. The graph joining the five blobs was almost flat: a heavy black line sloping faintly downwards towards the right-hand side of thte sheet with a uniform inclination. Standing on the line at its left-hand end was a long thin rectangle drawn in blood, with a smaller, tall rectangle on top of it. Higher up, on the far side of the paper, a crudely executed dart shape with a crossed tail dipped its nose towards the rectangles. There was a facsimile of the black line laboriously traced in red about an inch lower down the sheet. And apart from a few smudges below the dart shape, that was all.

"Well, one thing seems clear," Solo said at last. "Whatever the message is, it's not in any way an attempt at actual writing: there's nothing here remotely like lettering. So what we have to solve is a picture puzzle."

"I agree. And I should think it fairly certain that this sort of thin arrow with a stroke across its tail is meant to represent the aircraft, wouldn't you?" Illya asked. "It's not at all unlike a Trident."

"Yeah. Landing, I guess, since the nose points down....So okay: he's painting us a picture of the plane coming in to land. So what's the significance of the two box-like shapes on top of one another? How do you figure them?"

"I think...Wait a minute, Napoleon! Suppose he was using the existing line—the black line of the graph—to represent the ground..."

"Yeah?"

"...then surely the two rectangles might be a simple way of indicating the airport buildings with the control tower above them?"

"They might at that," Solo admitted. "But then so what? We have a picture of a plane landing. It doesn't tell us anything about the landing—or about the wreck."

"Oh, but it could, Napoleon. Don't forget these smudges. I don't think they are random. They are very faint, but they are in a definite line...coming downwards from the plan—Look!—and reaching the red line below the black one. There are none above the plane and none below the red line."

"Kind of a dotted line, it seems."

"Exactly. And what's implied by a dotted line—in comic strips, for example?"

Solo considered. "As far as I'm concerned," he said slowly, "a dotted line between two objects implies some kind of relationship between them—nothing more, in the absence of other data."

"But that's just it! A relationship between the plane—the red plane—and the red line..."

"I still don't quite see —"

"Look at the red line," Illya said excitedly. "Everything else has been scrawled roughly, daubed in great haste. But the red line has been done very carefully, laboriously, even. In the desperate hurry he was in to get the message across before he was discovered, he took time to get this bit exactly right."

"How do you mean—exactly right?"

"It repeats the black line very precisely; same slope, same slight differences where the blobs occur, same length—see, it ends on the very same line of the graph paper."

"But if the black line represents the ground, as we think..."

"Then the red one also represents the ground."

"But that's crazy, Illya! One plane, one set of buildings, but two landing grounds—No! Wait a minute!...It's not so crazy, is it?...One plane, one set of buildings, and two landing grounds, only one of which is related to the plane. Is that it?"

"That's it. And the 'ground' related to the plane by the dotted line is lower than the real one, the one with the airport buildings on it. I'm sure that's it."

"You mean he's trying to tell us, via this dotted line, that—so far as the plane was concerned—the ground appeared to be lower than it really was?"

"Yes—and if the pilot, or in this case the Murchison-Spears equipment, is informed the ground is lower than it really is —"

"The aircraft will obviously level off too late; it'll fly straight in. Just as though, in an old-fashioned crate, the altimeter was reading incorrectly."

"Exactly."

Solo picked up the chart, scrutinized it, and laid it down on Matheson's desk. "Okay, wonder boy," he said with a grin. "Sold to the gentleman with the rich uncle! And if the survivor was tipping us off that the crash was due to faulty evaluation of height by the Murchison-Spears box, that ties in with what we already know, doesn't it?"

"It does. Witnesses all say the aircraft 'flew into the ground'; the survivor from the last crash was babbling something about 'it' being too high; Matheson advised us to look for a fault in that particular stage of the gear. It all ties in. I suppose the survivor meant that the ground, as it were, was too high: it rose up and hit them."

The door opened and Helga Grossbreitner came into the room. She hurried across to a filing cabinet, pushing a strand of golden hair that had worked loose out of her eyes.

"Sorry to interrupt you, boys," she said absently, flicking through a stack of folders. "Oh dear—those poor people. I'm trying to deal with inquiries from relatives and friends. It really is most distressing..."

"It's a tough job, honey," Solo sympathized. "But don't worry: I think we may be on our way."

"You mean you've found out who's causing these terrible crashes?"

"Not the actual individuals—though we know it must be THRUSH members. But we do have a line on how it's being done...and once we've established that definitely, it should be easy enough to pin down the culprits."

"But that's good. What have you found out?"

Solo gave her a brief resumé of the conclusions they had arrived at and the evidence which had led to them, adding: "And I'm real sorry, Helga—I guess I have to stand you up on that date tomorrow night...tonight, I mean: it's already past one A.M."

She flashed him her golden smile. "That's okay, lover boy. It'll keep—and me with it. What's the big deal, then?"

"We have to check our deductions, honey. No good acting on them unless we can prove they're right. Illya and I will go to Paris and fly into Nice tomorrow on the T.C.A. Trident—the same flight as the one that crashed here this evening—and keep watch in the pilot's cabin to see what we can see. They seem to be stepping up the disaster rate and there's a chance that we may find something out."

"Yes, I guess that seems sensible—but, darling, you will be careful, won't you? I can't have another date broken!"

Solo patted her rounded shoulder. "I'll take an ejector seat and a 'chute," he promised with a grin. "Expect me to drop in any time after nine...:

After the girl had found the file she wanted and returned to the outer office, Kuryakin looked up from some notes he had been consulting. "You know, Napoleon, there's one angle of this case that we haven't taken into account at all," he said seriously.

"What's that?"

"T.C.A.'s franchise to carry the fissionable material from here to the U.S. We haven't looked into that end of it at all. Do you think we should?"

Solo shook his head. "I guess that wouldn't figure in the case until after THRUSH had gained control of the airline," he said. "From their point of view, the number one priority is to discredit the company to the extent that they can take it over. Until they've achieved that, they can afford to ignore the radioactive bit. It only goes on one flight a month anyway—and there's a squad of men with automatic rifles guarding the armored car that brings it to the airport...Besides there's no question of the crashes being in any way connected with an attempt to grab the stuff."

"You are sure, Napoleon?"

"Sure I'm sure. All the crashes are incoming planes, and the fissionable material is flown out."

"Yes, of course. I just thought I'd mention it."

"Quite right, my boy! Quite right...And now let's go grab some sleep. We have to be back here on the first available flight to Paris tomorrow morning."

"You really meant what you told Helga?"

"Certainly. We'll sit right up in the front of that Trident with our slide rules and our compasses, watching every move," Solo said with a curious emphasis. He opened the door and ushered the Russian out of the office.

A shutter fell noiselessly over the concealed lens of the videotape camera which had been recording their conversation from its hiding place behind a relief map of Europe which hung on the wall.

Chapter 11 – Solo and Illya take a back seat

A fringe of waves laced the edge of the blue-green Mediterranean as the Trident turned in a shallow bank and headed east along the coast towards Nice, gradually losing height. There had been stray banks of cumulus building up over the Basses Alpes and their passage over the Rhône delta had been quite bumpy. Once they passed Toulon, however, the sky cleared and the air was calm and still as the giant plane sank into the dusk which was beginning to shroud the fishing villages south of the Massif des Maures. The creased, iridescent surface of the sea dulled to a somber violet, reflecting the pinpoints of light beginning to twinkle among the craft massed in the harbors of Lavandou and St. Tropez.

Illya Kuryakin crouched with Solo in the airplane's rear baggage department, fiddling with a mass of dials which studded the steel surface of a complicated chassis packed, with other electronic equipment, in a huge suitcase lying open before them. The whining roar of the three jet engines above their heads made conversation difficult in the confined space.

Solo glanced at his wristwatch. "Stand by for action any time now," he shouted over the din. "We should be just about over Ste. Maxime."

The Russian nodded, spreading a sheet of squared paper marked with labeled columns across a board and clipping it into place at the top and sides. "I hope your hunch is correct, Napoleon," he called back. "I should have spotted that camera myself. Where exactly was it?"

"You know that enormous relief map fixed to one wall of Matheson's office—the one with all the mountains in Europe humped up across the surface?"

"Yes, I saw it."

"Well, you probably noticed that all the airports between the mountains—and those on the plains for that matter—were marked by small circles of colored glass; presumably to light up when T.C.A. planes were using them, or needed maintenance there or something."

Kuryakin nodded again.

"The camera lens had replaced the glass indicating one of the airports among the Alps—Zurich, I think—where it was least likely to be noticed among the relief. Fortunately, I happened to see it just when there was a slight movement...probably an alteration of aperture.. and the movement drew my attention to it."

"In turn, I hope my hunch is also correct," Illya said.

"It has a good chance. If what you tell me of your theory is true, the exact location of the Murchison-Spears box is critical—which is why we're lucky that T.C.A. equips its Tridents with a baggage compartment as far back as this."

"Yes, our duplicate box is as far away from the one in the cockpit as possible. I suppose that's why you made such a point of mentioning that we would be up front with the pilots—to tempt them to concentrate on that end of the plane."

"Sure. I figure that, since they know we're aboard and we know something of the system at least, then they're bound to try to bring the plane down. But it's a terrible risk, in a way—the crew's lives are at stake as well as our own."

"But we did manage to get all the passengers transferred to a relief flight ten minutes later, Napoleon."

"True. Nevertheless I—Wait a minute! The intercom's coming on!"

Over the noise of the jets, a metallic, disembodied voice was speaking: "Hello, hello. Third pilot here. We are just passing Fréjus and the M-S gear is in action. Are you ready to start operating? Are you ready to start operating? ..."

"Solo to Third Pilot," Napoleon Solo said crisply above the racket of the jets. "We are ready to start....And just for the record, here's a recap on the M.O. You have the airplane's normal M-S box in your cabin, receiving signals from Nice and the ground, and the box interprets them and adjusts the plane's controls in such a way as to effect a correct landing. We have a duplicate M-S box back here, receiving the same signals but not hitched up in any way to the controls. The aim of the operation is to check the readings of the two boxes one against the other—and spot any discrepancies if present: okay?"

"Roger. Our box up here has dials indicating distance from touchdown in meters, glide angle, and height in meters. I am to read you the relevant figures from our dials at quarter minute intervals, and you will write these down and check against your own readings at the same time."

"Roger. You can start any time you like."

"Wilco. First reading coming up in fifteen seconds."

Solo picked up the board with its prepared paper and poised a ballpoint over its surface as Illlya Kuryakin threw a switch and studied the needles trembling across the dials in the suitcase. In the dim lighting of the baggage compartment his bland face, normally so placid, appeared strained and anxious.

"First reading," the clipped voice on the intercom was saying: "Distance seventeen thousand five hundred; glide angle five per cent; height five thousand and forty."

"Seventeen thousand five hundred; five per cent; five thousand and forty," Solo repeated, writing the figures on the chart as Illya bent over the dials.

"Check," the Russian called. "One seven five double-o; five; five-o four-o."

Solo wrote the second set of figures below the first.

"Second reading: fourteen six fifty; five per cent; four thousand six hundred."

Solo repeated the figures, wrote them down and looked across at Illya.

"Check," Kuryakin called again. "One four six five-o; five; four six double-o."

"Third reading: twelve thousand; eleven per cent; four thousand and fifty."

"Check. One two o double-o; eleven; four-o five-o..."

Through the small double window on the port side of the baggage compartment, isolated lights spangled the dark bulk of the Alpine foothills massing against the sky to the north. Something on one of the luggage racks squeaked protestingly as the Trident's angle of descent steepened. Over the clamor of the engines, now altering in pitch, a faint rumble followed by two distant thumps marked the lowering of the wheels.

"... Fifth reading: six thousand and twenty; fifteen per cent; one thousand six hundred."

"Check."

The lights of the coastal strip streamed past the port window, long chains of street lamps, illuminated hotels and automobile headlights whirling past them into the darkness as the great plane forged inexorably onwards towards the invisible runway. Through the starboard porthole, a lighthouse far out to sea winked twice against the dark.

"Sixth reading: three thousand two hundred; eleven point five per cent; eight hundred and fifty."

"Check. Three two double-o; eleven point five—No! Wait, wait...the altitude reading's different! Napoleon—look!"

Solo was beside the dials in a flash. The needle of the height indicator was sinking steadily from 830 to 820.

The equipment in the cockpit, which was directing the plane's controls for landing, was registering the ground as between twenty and thirty meters lower than it actually was.

"Seventh reading: eight hundred and fifty; seven per cent; two hundred and ten."

The needle on the altimeter trembled past the 170 mark.

In seconds the pointer would be at zero—while that on the gear controlling the aircraft would still show between 40 and 50...

"Emergency!" Solo shouted into the intercom. "Emergency! For God's sake take over on manual and overshoot—your altimeter reading's gone all to hell!"

"Wilco." A different voice spoke coolly from the amplifier. "Second pilot speaking. Hold on—I am going to overshoot."

The thunder of the jets rose to a shrill scream; the Trident lurched forwards and up under the surge of power. Illya saw trees, airport buildings, parking lots, a Boeing 707 being refueled on the airport apron, whisk past and down, and then they were away and climbing over the glittering crescent of the Baie des Anges with the twin ribbon of the Promenade des Anglais dwindling beneath them.

"... and tell your Navigator for God's sake to get a fix on the position where the readings began to differ—the sixth, I think it was," Solo was calling as the Trident banked seawards in a steep climbing turn and headed back for its second approach.

A few minutes later they made a perfect touchdown under manual control and taxied slowly back to the apron.

Matheson and the airport director met them in a jeep. "I thought we'd be going back with two empty seats for a moment," Matheson said as they climbed down the portable companionway to the ground. "You were flying straight into the deck like the one last night. Still—Warwick caught her just in time and all's well that ends well, eh? I expect you could do with a drink..."

Solo mopped his brow with a handkerchief. "I guess it was a pretty close shave at that," he admitted. "As for the drink—the answer's yes, please!...Illya's just superintending the unshipping of both sets of Murchison-Spears equipment so that your boys can get to work right away on comparison tests. Now perhaps we'll be able to say just how the deed is done..."

But at midnight, Matheson came up to them in the airport restaurant, where they were sitting over coffee and cognac, and dropped into a vacant chair at their table with an expression of astonishment on his face. "It beats me," he said blankly. "We've really done the most exhaustive tests on both sets of equipment—even had them taken up in a helicopter to check them under operating conditions—and what do you think we found?"

"That both sets were working perfectly—and giving precisely the same readings all along the line," Solo said with a grin.

The Technical Director started, absently catching his empty pipe as it fell from his mouth. "But that's just it!" he exclaimed. "How on earth did you know? What have you chaps found out?"

"We don't know," Illya said. "It was a reasonable deduction; it fits the pattern, that's all."

"Well, I'm blessed! You mean something or somebody distorts the altitude stage of the gear as the plane lands—but that it's returned to normal a short while afterwards?"

"Yes."

"And that whatever it is has such a fine adjustment that it'll bitch up equipment in the nose of the plane—but leave similar gear in the tail unaffected?"

"That's what we think."

"Well, I'm blessed," Matheson said again. "All the same, it doesn't really get us much further, does it? I mean we're confirmed in our ides of what happened roughly—but we're no nearer to finding out who did it. Or how."

"I think you mistake our aims, Mr. Matheson," Solo said. "The point of the operation was, of course, to confirm this—but the main idea was to find out where it's done from. And that in turn will give us a lead to who."

"Can you find out where it's done from, then?"

"If your Navigator has been able to fix the position of the place where the readings began to differ—yes, we should be able to. Has he managed, do you know?"

"Yes, he has, as a matter of fact. He asked me to tell you. All the stuff is up in the tower, if you'd care to come along."

Illya went to see if he could find any news of Sheridan Rogers while Solo and Matheson made their way to the chart room of the control tower. He joined them a few minutes later with a long face. "I'm very much afraid, Napoleon," he said shaking his head sadly, "that things look very black for that girl. She hasn't been seen since the night she came out to dinner with us at Villefranche—apart from that disagreeable incident at Haut-des-Cagnes, that is. She didn't show up for her shift yesterday morning—and there's still no reply from her apartment."

"Relax, Illya," Solo said soberly. "Whatever's happened to her, she's not the bird we're looking for: the thrush flies in quite a different direction."

"Why do you say that?"

"Take a look at this." The Chief Enforcement Officer of U.N.C.L.E. was sitting with Matheson at a huge table strewn with papers. In the center was a large-scale map of the coast from Fréjus to the Italian border.

"We've charted the Trident's flight path here," Solo continued, pointing with a pencil at a dotted red line running approximately southwest to northeast a few hundred meters off the coastline. "And the Navigator has given us a fix on the position where the two sets of gear began to register differently—that is, the place where whatever it is began to affect the box in the cockpit. We were exactly here"—He leaned over and made a mark across the dotted line—"when the Third Pilot was reading out the details of the sixth check. Right?"

Kuryakin nodded, looking intently at the chart.

"Right. Well, here's the touchdown point." He made another mark a short distance from the end of the runway indicated on the map. "And we have already agreed that whatever device is beamed at the planes must be pretty short-range."

"Yes—otherwise it could presumably reach them when they were flying in from the other side of the airport...landing from northeast to southwest."

"Sure. So looking at these two points and the distance between them—and bearing in mind the distance between each of them and the far end of the runway—would you agree that ten kilometers would seem a fair estimate to allow for the range?"

Illya studied the chart for a few minutes in silence. "Ye-e-es," he said slowly at last. "Yes, I guess so, Napoleon."

"Okay. And we have further agreed that the device is probably operated from one of the hill villages just inland from the coast, right?"

"Right."

"Swell. That's all we need then." Solo picked up set square, protactor and scale, and set to work on the map. "Here's the position of the sixth reading...here. And here's the touchdown point...here. Now if we mark off the ten kilometer range and triangle inland...like this...we should be able to narrow down the number of hill villages we have to consider." He ruled a final line and stood back from the table.

Kuryakin stepped forward and gazed at the wedge of country thus marked off. "There's only one village eligible, then," he said slowly, " Vence is too far inland; Gatti�res and La Colle are just outside the triangle."

"Exactly. There's only one hill village in the triangle—and that's St. Paul-de-Vence."

"But Napoleon..."

Solo sighed. He looked past Matheson and out of the window at the darkened airfield. The lights of a liner moved slowly across the sea beyond. From the floor above the voice of the controller in the green-windowed operations room could be heard faintly as he talked down a private plane that was landing.

"I know," he said at last. "I know. Helga has an apartment in St. Paul-de-Vence. And apart from Matheson here and the crew of the plane, Helga was the only person we told of our plan. The only one..."