The Light-Kill Affair (3 page)

They approached the cotton warily, waiting until the three of them were regrouped. They spread out slightly now and crept forward in tile sunlight, guns drawn.

From where he crouched, panting, Solo watched their shortened shadows creep toward him. The biggest part of the shadows it seemed to him were the guns in those outstretched hands.

"Ho," one of them said. "Why should we walk in on him and his friction bombs? Fire from where we are into the cotton. We drive him out, or we kill him. It's all one."

"I've a better idea," said the man who'd been blasted a second time. "Burn him out. I want to burn him out."

Crouched under the bales of tinder-dry cotton, Solo watched the wounded man, crazed with rage and pain, set flame to waste from a cigarette lighter.

Solo held his breath. It was time to move. Gripping his fist closed as if holding a friction bomb poised to hurl, he lunged out from beneath the cotton bale, directly in the path of the pain-crazed hoodlum.

The man toppled back and screamed like a woman. He had learned twice, the hard way, about friction bombs.

His terrorized screams halted his pals for a split second. The frightened man forgot to hurl the fiery waste. The flames seared his hands. He cried out again.

He released the waste and the flames flickered, falling along his arms and inside his coat.

Solo kept moving. He struck the man hard, carrying him down and along the heated planks.

He rolled over quickly, putting the yelling man between him and the other two gunmen.

Before the frightened man could recover his wits in any part, Solo drove his extended fingers into his Adam's apple. Solo's other hand was ripping the gun from the hood's relaxing grasp.

Solo fired upward, with the dead weight of the hoodlum as his shield.

A shoe caught his wrist and the gun flew from his hand. He heard it rattling along the planks. At the same instant he heard, rather than felt, a shoe driven into his face.

They were on him then. The burned man was jerked away from him, and they worked him over smoothly and professionally. They ripped away his glasses, tore off his jacket. They pulled off his shoes and dragged him across the wharf to the water.

Distantly, Solo heard a man's shouting. It was unreal. It was as if someone called his name from some remote place—

His head bumped across the planks, but there was no place for new pain in his body; all agony trunk lines were overloaded; new messages had to wait.

He heard the shouting growing closer. He heard the two men swearing. One of them said savagely, "Let's get out of here!"

Solo's head banged the thick planking at the edge of the wharf and for a moment he hung over the side. The water glittered impossibly far, brighter than the sun and as distant.

Then he was being pulled back to the dock, and he recognized the voice of Carrero, his guide.

Solo stretched his eyes wide, trying to see Carrero's face, but all he could see was the blinding red ball of the sun.

Carrero's voice was quavering with concern. "I came looking for you, Senor. I worried. I thought you would not look right without your butterfly net. I went out and found it for you."

Solo grinned, whispering it. "What you did, was, you saved my life, old friend."

He tried to smile, but knew his face was a bloodied, hideous caricature of smiling.

FIVE

IN THE pressurized Pan-American jet cabin at thirty thousand feet, Napoleon Solo sweated.

He heard people chatting calmly around him. A stewardess tried to engage him in conversation, but he was in too much discomfort to think casually.

He went back over all he had seen, and had not seen, what he'd found and failed to find in that jungle.

He was still kicking it around in his mind when the plane set down at Kennedy airport. He passed through customs, came out on the concourse and hailed a taxi.

The cab driver had just missed making a killing in the market. He told Solo all about it on the ride into Manhattan. He was still explaining the details when Napoleon Solo stepped out of the cab in the east forties.

He walked toward the gleaming structure of the United Nations Building which dominated the neighborhood.

Going down a flight of steps, Solo entered Del Floria's Cleaning' and Tailoring shop, an unprepossessing establishment in the basement of an ordinary-appearing whitestone building in the middle of a long block.

At the rear of the shop, Solo passed through a curtained dressing room; soon he entered the charged atmosphere of United Network Command for Law and Enforcement headquarters.

It was a gleaming place of chrome and steel where men and women moved swiftly.

The building itself quivered with the electronic feelers that reached out from roof and under ground to the farthest crannies of the earth, continuously sending and receiving messages by every known method from carrier pigeon to the highest-secret sound-by-light apparatus.

At the admissions desk the young receptionist pinned an identification tag to Solo's lapel. This tag would be scanned and read and approved by concealed electric eyes every few feet throughout the labyrinth of corridors.

Solo had gone only a few steps when lovely April Dancer came hurrying from one of the many elevators. "Solo." She touched his arm, wincing slightly at the sight of his bruised face. "What did you learn about Don?"

"I'm afraid he's dead," Solo said.

"You look as if you'd met his enemies. I hope they look even worse than you do."

"Afraid it was THRUSH's inning this time, April. But at least I know they were there, even if I don't why, or where they got to."

"You look ready to fall on your face."

Napoleon Solo tried to smile. "Nothing that a little loving care wouldn't improve. How about dinner after I report to Waverly?"

"Afraid I wouldn't be very good company," April said. "Just can't get my mind on pleasure—this dreadful business we're in."

Solo smiled at her. "Man does not live by dread alone, April."

April squeezed his arm. "Why don't you see me after you've talked with Alexander?"

Solo hadn't realized he was still smiling faintly when he faced Alexander Waverly in the Command Room until the chief demanded testily, "What do you find to smile about in a battered face like that?"

Solo wiped away the smile. "No, sir," he agreed. "There's nothing to smile about."

He made a full report of his arrival in San Miguel, his trek into the jungle. "At first I thought the whole thing was insane. There was absolutely no trace of this laboratory that Sayres described in such detail. In fact, the jungle in that spot looked exactly like all the swamp around it."

"Impossible."

"That's what I thought. But I was able to find the general outline of where the lab had stood—less than a week before!"

"Plant life grows lushly in the tropics, Solo," Waverly said. "But nothing like this."

"Nothing like this," Solo agreed. "Plants, vines, trees growing, full height, where a lab had stood a few days earlier. There is some kind of artificial stimulation of growth here, and as far as I can see, this must be behind whatever project THRUSH is working on."

"You're convinced THRUSH is behind this?"

Solo touched gingerly at his bruised face. "Physically I am convinced, sir. THRUSH—or somebody—left three guards at the port shipping warehouse to be sure nobody pried into the shipment of plants and equipment."

"Obviously you pried," Waverly said with a faint smile.

"I have the scars to prove it," Solo said. "But I also have an address. Big Belt, Montana. I could barely locate it on any map. A village in the Big Belt Mountain ranges."

Waverly stood up, smiling crookedly. "I am proud of you, Solo. And I don't often say this to my men. I don't like to spoil them."

"I didn't find out how Sayres and Diego Viero were killed," So lo said. "But somehow, all traces of their body, clothing and equipment were destroyed, as if by some kind of intense heat."

Waverly nodded. "You'll want to be most cautious then."

"Sir?"

"When you arrive in the Big Belt Mountains. Our computers showed an area of disturbance up there. We dispatched Mr. Kuryakin to investigate a short time ago. You will join him at once via jet and copter."

Solo opened his battered mouth to protest—he could barely walk and he was looking forward to a hot shower and a date with April Dancer, in that order—but he was too tired to make the effort. Mr. Waverly was like the umpire in a baseball game. You couldn't win, disputing one of his decisions anyhow.

SIX

ILLYA KURYAKIN stepped off the Greyhound bus into the flat village silence of Big Belt, Montana.

"You're sure this is the place?" he said doubtfully to the driver.

The driver grinned at him. "Leave the driving to us."

"Your driving was all right. I'm worried about your sense of direction," Illya said. He stared along the single hard packed main street, the dusty trees, the aged, wind abrased buildings.

Inside the cafe-bus station, Illya inquired about the four-wheel jeep that had been ordered for him.

The clerk behind the desk didn't even bother looking up. "Afraid that jeep's not ready, sir."

"But we ordered it ready and waiting!" Illya said, annoyed by the villager's apathy.

The clerk shrugged. "Like I said, I'm sorry, mister."

Illya counted a slow ten. He managed a smile. "Where is the jeep?"

"Round the corner there at Mapes' Garage. You can't miss it."

Illya grinned. You couldn't miss anything in this town.

The bus was gone and there were only a few people lounging along Main Street when Illya stepped out on the walk.

He turned right, going past a grocery store, a dress shop toward a bar and the side street.

The gun that fired was not silenced. The rifle cracked and instinctively Illya toppled forward. The bullet sang waspishly past his head.

Illya crawled forward, then sprawled behind the questionable concealment of a rain barrel.

He did not move for a moment. He tried to make sense in his being ambushed. Friendly little town. No wonder U.N.C.L.E.'s computers kept spewing out reports of turbulence in the area, mysterious influx of strangers, sudden unexplained activity.

Cautiously, Illya edged his unruly blond head around the barrel. He stared across the street. A two-storied brick hotel, a window open, a curtain riffling in the breeze. The shot had come from that window, all right.

He waited another few seconds. The rifle barrel did not reappear in that window.

People ran out of stores, and at the hotel men and women were shouting.

Illya leaped up from behind the rain barrel, taking advantage of the excitement and people milling in the streets.

He almost bowled over a stout man in straw hat and smudged butcher's apron outside the grocery. The man yelled involuntarily.

"Charming little town," Illya said to him, bowing as he hurried past. "Charming. Loud, though."

The greasy mechanic at Mapes' garage had run halfway down the block as Illya rounded the corner.

"What's the excitement?" the man called to Illya.

Illya forced himself to walk slowly, speak casually. "Tire blew out."

"That a fact?" The mechanic's face showed disappointment. "Could have sworn it was a deer rifle. Thought I knowed a deer rifle for sure. You positive it was a tire?" He fell in beside Illya and walked back to the littered garage-filling station with him.

Illya gazed in sick disbelief at the jeep parked on the garage ramp. The four tires were pancaked flat, the hood was up and he saw the wiring had been ripped loose.

The mechanic said, "You the fellow ordered this jeep? It was ready. Last night I checked it out myself. It was all ready for you. But this morning, when I got here, I found it just like this."

"My grandmother always said never waste time crying over spilt milk," Illya said. "Let's get to work."

"Your grandmother live around here?" the mechanic asked.

"Why?" Illya bent over the engine.

"Lots of folks have that saying around here. I never really knowed what it meant."

"You repair the tires," Illya said, "I'll get these wires back together."

In less than half an hour the tires were fixed and Illya had the jeep engine purring.

"Never heard that car running so sweet," the mechanic said admiringly. He smiled at Illya. "Say, you ever want a job as a mechanic, you got one with me."

"I'll remember that," Illya promised. He swung into the jeep.

"You going up in the Big Belts prospecting, mister?" the mechanic shouted.

"Why?"

"Lots of men up there prospecting lately. Never have seen so much action going on."

"Not me," Illya assured him with a bland smile. "I'm just looking for the place where the deer and the antelope play."

A few miles outside the settlement the hard-packed road ended. An ill-defined trail led upward to ward the foothills and the raw brown mountains rearing above them.

The car rattled as if the rocks would shake it to pieces. Illya clung to the wheel, bouncing on the hard seat.

He frowned, hearing distant thunder.

He checked the sky, finding it cloudless, sun-struck. But the thunder rumbled closer.

Illya turned, staring across his shoulder. His eyes widened. The noise was not thunder. From the foothills south of him a Cessna four-seater raced toward him.

He tried to tell himself that cattlemen and coyote hunters used small planes up here. But in less than two minutes, Illya admitted that the Cessna was zeroing in on him.

The plane banked, losing altitude. Watching it, Illya almost drove headlong into a boulder.

He jerked the car back onto the trail at the moment someone in the Cessna opened fire with a repeating rifle.

Illya yelled, clinging to the wheel. This attack was senseless. But it occurred to him that the attack from the hotel window in Big Belt village hadn't made a lot of sense, either.

Illya stepped down hard on the gas.

The plane zoomed down, hawk-like, in pursuit. Bullets battered the little car, windshield shattering.