The World's End Affair (2 page)

Illya came crowding in behind him. The two men at the controls turned, rising up. Their faces were distorted out of the bland patterns of composure which Solo typically associated with flight crews on Oriental air lines.

The pilot was the more squat of the two, a heavy-framed, short man whose brush-cut black hair sparkled with sweat-drops in the dim green gloom of the instrument-lined chamber.

The pilot's lips peeled back. His pudgy right hand had a pistol in it. He aimed at Solo's stomach. The airliner bucked and plunged upward. Solo's squeeze of the trigger seemed to take an eternity.

Outside the front cockpit glass, oily black clouds boiled toward the aircraft and went whipping away past the radar nose. Time seemed to slip into slow motion. The trigger finger of the pilot went white, whiter –

A double crack as the pilot fired and Solo did too. Something ripped the shoulder of Solo's jacket. Behind him, metal clanged. From the lavatory, there was a splintering of glass. The pilot crumpled.

The flight engineer had swiveled round in his chair and now had a snub-nose small-caliber gun pointed at Illya's head. As soon as Solo fired, he whipped his right hand over. The muzzle of his pistol came chopping hard onto the flight engineer's wrist.

The snub-nose gun made a noise. Illya jerked to one side. He aimed at the flight engineer's left shoulder and shot once.

In seconds the duel had begun and ended. Solo's chest ached from the smoke, his stomach from the nauseating tossing of the cockpit floor under him.

The storm burst around the great jet in eruptions of lightning. Some of the explosive smoke had cleared away.

"Drag them out of their seats!" Solo shouted. It was necessary to shout. The storm noise was a continuous tympani roll from the sky. Passengers screamed. The engines whined; sparks from short-circuited wiring back in the passenger compartment crackled a sinister warning.

The flight engineer lay on the cockpit flour. Blood from his shoulder seeped into the ridged channels of the flooring.

Illya pointed his gun muzzle at the plane's control panel. "What do we do about those?"

Approximately seven thousand lighted dials with eccentrically jerking needles seemed to confront Napoleon Solo. One glance told him that he would never be able to fly the aircraft. A two-engine executive jet which U.N.C.L.E maintained on Long Island was his limit, and he had only piloted that a few times in emergency situations.

"I might be able to take it over," Illya yelled above the roar. "But only if the weather weren't so bad, and we could contact a control tower to talk me through the procedures -"

The pilot and the flight engineer out of action made the situation look hopeless. Solo wished he had not been so prompt to shoot. But would either of the renegade officers volunteer their services if they could, even at gunpoint? He doubted it.

Solo peered back through the murk into the passenger compartment. "Stewardess! Is the co-pilot awake?"

"Barely, sir. You had better come find a life belt, because we we will surely go down in another moment."

"The devil we will," Solo replied. "I've got an insurance payment to make next Tuesday. Get a bottle of your champagne and pour it down Mr. Han's throat. Tell him that Blue

Cross will take care of him in Hong Kong, but right now he's got to fly this plane."

"Napoleon," Illya said, "you are impossible. Perhaps that is why you so often accomplish it."

Solo's mouth whitened at the edges. "Do you think I think this is hilarious? I'm trying to keep the few people who are still sane on this plane from tearing each other's throats. Unless we can get out of this storm -"

Like punctuation, another crackle of lightning burst outside the rain-flooded windows. The immense jet tilted downward, with the tip of its port wing pointing toward the South China Sea. The stewardess had gone stumbling back along the aisle to the galley. Solo met her over the prostrate form of the co-pilot.

Mr. Han's eyelids flickered open and shut. He seemed to realize that he was needed. He tried to lift himself on his right elbow.

Kneeling, Solo propped him up. He tossed the champagne bottle to Illya, who thumbed the cork. A white foamy squirt sprayed across a couple who were silently praying.

Solo tried to keep everything else out of his mind except the necessity to prop up Mr. Han and get the bottle to his lips. He could feel the accelerating downward plunge of the plane in his viscera.

Han swallowed the champagne in great gulps. "Instant courage," Solo said. With his help Mr. Han lurched to his feet. The back of his uniform was bloody from shoulder to belt. Solo and Illya helped him forward to the cockpit.

They settled Mr. Han in the pilot's chair. He groaned, swayed. Then he jerked himself to attention and blinked at the controls.

Later, Napoleon Solo decided that they probably would have crashed had he not remembered something Mr. Han had said about Captain Loo's odd looking money belt. Solo left Han staring blearily at the controls, unable to comprehend them because he was having enough trouble simply keeping upright in his seat. Illya tried to steady him as Solo crouched in the semi-darkness of the instrument-lit cockpit

The flight captain's eyes were rolled far up in his head in death, shining like little, moons. Something shiny-black gleamed beneath his flight blouse, where the bottom two buttons had come unfastened.

With shaking fingers Solo undid the rest of the coat buttons. He fanned back the pilot's lapels. Around his middle Captain Loo wore what indeed looked like a fat money belt of tough black vinyl. Solo prodded the belt.

Solid. As though a number of small steel units like cigarette cases had been sewn inside the vinyl carrier. Solo's hand brushed across something hard which protruded from the unit located at about the position of Captain Loo's right hip.

Experimentally Solo felt around bit more. The device, which he could not see in the extreme shadow behind the pilot's chair, felt like an ordinary wall-switch.

Under his breath Solo said, "Here goes probably everything," and threw the switch over to the opposite position.

What happened in the next half minute left Solo and Illya slack-jawed.

First the pelting rain seemed to lessen. The violent down and updrafts buffeting the airliner grew less formidable. In a matter of fifteen seconds they stopped altogether. The thick black clouds began to shred apart. It was all so fast that it beggared belief.

Napoleon Solo stared at Illya. Illya stared back. Both of them stared down at Mr. Han.

The co-pilot was talking to himself in what sounded like Thai. He had a sick, pained grin on his face. He had touched two controls, two switches, thrown them, and the aircraft's response had been satisfactory.

Han raised his head. He started. "What has happened to the storm?"

Ahead of the radar nose, blue sky appeared, then the tilted horizon of the South China Sea. The maelstrom vanished behind. Sunlight flooded into the cockpit.

Now Illya could see what Solo had been doing down on the floor. He spotted the toggle device. Mr. Han let out a modest whoop, coughed violently, recovered, and repeated his question about what had happened to the storm. This time there was near-hysterical happiness in his voice.

In reply, Illya said, "I believe Mr. Solo has switched it off."

The full impact hit Solo. He stared down at the vinyl belt wrapped around Captain Loo's thoroughly dead midsection. He said, "My God in heaven."

Mr. Han was finding his way out of his pain daze and into the routine of disaster procedures for the giant jet. The emergency and fire systems soon controlled the worst of the damage. Three engines were operating at full power. Mr. Han shut down the fourth and the plane began to fly steadily again through the untroubled blaze of sunlight and sea.

Under Han's direction, Illya operated the radio. Soon they had ghostly voices from hundreds of miles away to help them. In the passenger compartments, the general hysteria was being controlled by more champagne.

Solo lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep. It would have been a relative piece of cake the rest of the way to Hong Kong if his gaze hadn't been pulled back time and again to that mysterious series of steel cigarette-case units around the dead pilot's waist.

Solo wanted to experiment. He wanted to throw the switch back again. He didn't. Why push for trouble?

They would have it in quantity, once that black belt reached New York and made its damnable, diabolical presence felt at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.

Two

Three days later there were several peculiar occurrences in a certain nine square block area in Manhattan's East Fifties.

The news media reported them. The commentators closed their broadcasts with them, usually making a joke. The United States Weather Bureau was powerless to explain them.

The peculiar occurrences were a series of black, furious rain showers accompanied by thunder, lightning, and high velocity winds. Each storm lasted five minutes or less.

The storms encompassed only nine square blocks.

But it was hardly a coincidence that the affected area contained an unbelievably modern complex of offices and research facilities concealed behind a front of decaying brownstones.

Within this complex, in the laboratories manned by scientists of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, tests of the black belt were going on. On a 24-hour priority alert basis, U.N.C.L.E. was attempting to ascertain an answer to the question, What hath THRUSH wrought?

High up in the chamber with the motorized revolving conference table, the planning room for U.N.C.L.E.'s Operations and Enforcement section, three men tried to pry loose some additional pieces of the puzzle from a reluctant fourth.

Mr. Alexander Waverly looked hale and well rested, although he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Solo and Illya both looked hung over.

Solo's fine linen shirt was rumpled and gray. Illya sat with his feet up on a desk, a vitamin pill in his hand. He tossed the vitamin pill up and caught it, tossed it and caught it, while Mr. Waverly tapped his forever unlit pipe against the sill of the window overlooking the panorama of the East River and the United Nations Building.

Solo had been doing the questioning for the past quarter hour.

"Your name is Chee," he said. "Alfred C. Chee. We know that. We have a file on you. You're not a Thai, you're Chinese. You were with the Reds for a while after the takeover. Then. later, you joined THRUSH in nineteen sixty-two as second echelon supervisor for the Ranjiranji cell. But apparently your pilot's training was too valuable. The last listing shows you were transferred to Strategic Logistics and Operations. Listen my balky

friend -"

Solo grabbed the shoulder of the man seated stiffly in the straight chair. "It's all on the computer and your undistinguished, not to say disgusting, face is on our microfilm.

Now we've got food and you haven't. We've got cots to rest on and you haven't. So you'd better start talking."

Mr. Waverly cleared his throat. "I might also remind our guest, Mr. Solo, that when more civilized methods of interrogation fail, we have chemical agents designed to immobilize the will and liberate the tongue."

"He means," said Illya, "we'll stick you with a needle. You'll betray THRUSH anyway. Why not get it over with? You've stalled long enough."

"Thirty-six hours," Solo said. "I'm getting damn sick of it."

"Temper, Mr. Solo," said Waverly.

"Temper, hell. We've gotten nothing out of this fourth-class Fu Manchu since the flight from Hong Kong landed. I vote to skip the drugs and try something ethnic, like bamboo shoots under the nails. Mr. Waverly, we can't waste days and days exchanging pleasantries. This man and his machine almost killed a planeload of people."

The man in the chair was the flight engineer of the Air Pan-Asia jet. He had been given a clean pair of trousers, shirt and other clothing. U.N.C.L.E. physicians had dressed his shoulder wound with fresh bandages. He looked ungrateful and slightly truculent over the whole business. He was a slender, sallow-skinned Oriental in his middle thirties. His lips were compressed primly. His black eyes shone with that fleck of fanatic resistance Solo had learned to recognize as the hallmark of the captured operative of THRUSH.

"Talk," Solo said.

"My name," the man said, "is Flight Officer Hiram Wei. I am so listed on the personnel roster of Air Pan-Asia Incorporated. My flight officer's certificate shows that I was born in Canton in 1929, of an English mother named -"

"Stow it," Solo interrupted. His face was red with fury. He'd had more than enough.

Mr. Waverly gave his pipe a final knock against the marble sill. A pastel phone rang. Mr. Waverly walked past the giant, light-flecked face of the huge computer and answered.

"Um. Oh. Ummm." He took an experimental chew at the stem of his pipe "Very good, Rolfe. Expect you in an hour. What? That big, eh? Remarkable, remarkable. Yes, I saw that particular newscast. I gather the Mayor was rather upset about the unexplained weather phenomena you fellows caused in the neighborhood. Can't be helped, can't be helped. Thanks, Rolfe. Appreciate the extra hours and all."

Mr. Waverly hung up, swung round.