The World's End Affair (8 page)

The technician said, "General? The aircraft -"

"Yes, I'll be on my way. Good day to all of you. Dr. Dargon, Major Otako, I leave our guests to your tender ministrations."

And, with a potentate's magnificence, General Weng lifted his chin and marched toward the ramp.

Solo sidled near Illya. He hoped to whisper a code word. He had to alert Illya to what he was planning. A desperate course, naturally.

General Weng had already reached the base of the ramp. THRUSH functionaries followed him, one carrying the decal-decorated suitcase, the other pushing the trunk. Each wore a holstered pistol.

The light above the ramp doors changed from red to amber. Then it showed green and stopped blinking. Solo inched closer to Illya.

Major Otako whacked Illya viciously on the right wrist with his swagger stick. "Keep a suitable distance between you!"

Solo would never have a chance to communicate with Illya now. From the corner of an eye he observed the TV monitor scanning the hangar. The screen showed a sleek, unmarked four-engine THRUSH turbo-jet taxiing forward. Solo took the action the moment required.

He spun on the ball of his foot, catching a last glimpse of the monitor camera as it panned to follow the turbo-jet out to the loading ramp.

"Stand still!" Major Otako shouted as Solo moved.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent spun, yanked the swagger stick from the hand of the astonished officer, and bashed him over the nose. Blood spurted. Otako howled and reeled backwards. Solo shoved his hand into the voluminous folds of his holy robe.

The THRUSH searchers had not been quite thorough enough. A couple of items had gone undetected. Solo pulled out one of those now, thumbing the clip on the combination ball point pen and anti-personnel weapon.

A deadly lime-colored cloud of 14-4 tranquilizer gas sprayed over the THRUSH soldiers and technicians who were charging him from the left.

"Down, Illya!" Solo shouted. The younger agent flattened, dragging Ah Lan and Mei with him. Solo kept spinning like a top. The swath of greenish gas trailed around him in a circle.

One THRUSH minion leveled his machine pistol at Solo's neck. He caught a whiff of the gas. He grinned foolishly and fainted away.

Alarm sirens warbled. Scarlet lights danced on the console boards. The huge iron doors to the ramp where the prisoners had entered clanged open. Fresh THRUSH reinforcements charged in, bumbling against one another in their eagerness to be the first to shoot. But the greenish gas had made vision difficult. Solo seized Illya's shoulder.

"We've got to stop that plane! Follow me!"

Quickly Illya helped Mei and a struggling Ah Lan to their feet. He threw his woolly-robed arm across his mouth and nose by way of demonstration. "Cover your faces when we go out through the ring of gas. Now run!" And he followed Solo, who was already charging toward the ramp.

The guards at the head of the ramp sighted their rifles at him. Solo wrestled with the folds of his robe. He had to hold his skirts up with one hand and hunt for what he wanted with the other.

He found it. The rifles of the guards crashed. A bullet whizzed past his head, tugging at the earflap of his hat. Solo flung the globular pellet he had taken from a concealed pocket in his robe.

The pellet went
pong
on the iron doors. Then the ramp heated up to an unbearable temperature. Solo ran straight ahead into the billowing, steamy clouds. Sweat popped out on his face. His cheeks felt parboiled. But in seconds the effect diminished.

Solo pulled up short in front of the doors. They had melted in their frames and now resembled puddles of metal margarine. Both THRUSH guards were dead, boiled alive by the thermal device. One had stood a bit too close. The white bone of his skull leered.

Beyond the doors the corridor ran on to an elevator. General Weng was struggling with his wheeled steamer trunk and his valise. Finally he crammed them inside. A moment later the doors snapped shut.

Nearer to Solo, the two THRUSH functionaries who had been assisting Weng had turned back. They each went to one knee, sighting their pistols. Solo tossed his second and last thermal pill. Heat and steam vapor and shrieks of agony filled the corridor.

About to jump over the superheated metal of the melted doors, Solo jerked up short. He whirled.

"Illya?" The shout of alarm was out before he saw what had happened.

On this side of the chamber, the only threats had been the door guards. On the other side, the THRUSH reinforcements were advancing warily toward the greenish fumes which hung like a mammoth smoke ring in the air. Charging through that smoke, Ah Lan had evidently been overcome despite the precaution of holding his arm across his face. He had fallen. In the thick of the smoke Illya and Mei were bending over the prostrate old man.

They were inhaling too much of the gas. Illya staggered. He wigwagged his arm vaguely in Solo's direction.

"Go - on, Napoleon. Can't make it. The old man is -" Illya corkscrewed to the floor, his humanitarian efforts having undone him. Mei collapsed on top of him. The THRUSH soldiers across the room let out a bay of triumph.

Solo remained at the top of the ramp for one tortured moment. In that moment his emotions rebelled against his training. Of necessity, training won. With a choked curse he turned his back on the control chamber and ran.

He tried to wipe the sight of Illya's stricken face from his mind as he pounded up the corridor to the elevator. The sirens wailed insanely.

How much time had passed? Was the plane already taking off? Solo hit the elevator's call switch, waited, prayed.

The THRUSH officers yelled as they charged through the tranquilizing gas, uniform sleeves covering their mouths and eyes. Solo wanted to go back to the chamber, fight and die in the attempt to rescue Illya. Yet he knew that he had no choice but to go the other way. Should General Weng reach Hong Kong with the storm generator, war would be unleashed. Solo had a higher allegiance than that which he owed to Illya. The name of it was U.N.C.L.E.

Machine pistols began to stutter. Solo ducked, dived, dodged. The elevator doors opened. He leaped inside. Bullets stitched a pattern up and down the rear wall of the cage as the doors banged shut.

Panting, Solo leaned against the side of the elevator. His heart thudded hard in his chest. The elevator rose steadily, humming. Solo worried that THRUSH would cut off the power and trap him inside. But evidently his break had thrown the base into confusion. Sirens still wailed tinnily through speakers in the elevator's ceiling. But the sensation of upward movement did not stop.

Solo tried to organize his thoughts. He had no weapons left. He had to find one, so that he would be armed when he got aboard the plane - if he got aboard.

The elevator stopped. The doors rolled back and sinister sundown light flooded in. Dead ahead Solo saw the turbo-jet on the concrete ready line.

A controller stood on the tarmac near the black-painted nose, wigwagging with lighted batons. The main door of the fuselage was open. The elephantine General Weng was struggling up a baggage ramp with his suitcase and steamer trunk. The turbo-jet's engines screamed at full rev. Weng's suit flapped like laundry in the prop wash.

All this registered on Solo in an instant. So did the two THRUSH soldiers turning to charge him, bayonets fixed.

Solo sidestepped at the last second. He kicked the soldier nearest him in the backside. The man hit his head on the black concrete wall of the building. Solo seized the man's rifle, spun around and thought of Illya and rammed the bayonet to its hilt in the stomach of the THRUSH soldier still on his feet.

The man wasn't on his feet for long. Solo wrenched the bayonet free. He knocked it off its mount and left it behind, checking the rifle mechanism as he ran toward the aircraft.

The controller with the lighted batons threw them aside. He jerked out a pistol. He began firing as Solo's weird, flapping figure came charging out of the weird reddish gloom.

Up the baggage ramp Solo went, two steps at a time. Just before he jumped inside he heard the controller shout something to the plane's pilot.

The fuselage door closed and locked automatically. Solo blinked in the gloom of the lavishly appointed cabin. The cockpit door remained closed. There was an odd aroma in the air, coming through tiny ceiling ventilators as the plane began to roll.

On the carpeted floor General Weng lay spread-eagled, unconscious. Solo took a step toward the obese man. The smell from the ceiling ventilators increased. Solo recognized it.

He raised the rifle to try one shot at the steamer trunk. His hands were putty. He could not hold the rifle.

He cursed the THRUSH pilot who had decided on his own authority to incapacitate General Weng in order to incapacitate Solo also. He cursed the THRUSH technologists who had dreamed up the idea of pumping ether through the air system into the plane's cabin. He cursed most of all his own miserable failure, as everything around him took on the blurred motion of a camera in the flash pan.

Slowly Solo spiraled to the floor. With a scream of turbo-jets, the THRUSH aircraft lifted in the red sunset toward the high Himalayan peaks.

Two

You are a very brave girl," said Illya Kuryakin to the pale-cheeked Mei.

"The worst shock has passed," she replied. "My honorable father was advanced in years. His ancestors will make him welcome. And the blow which the THRUSH soldier gave him with the butt of his rifle –"

Mei's lovely face wrenched. "The blow was quick. I pray he felt little pain."

Illya's wrists were already tingling. "How about you? Does it hurt?"

"Not too much."

"Good. Because I am afraid it will get worse."

"You are a very brave person yourself, Mr. Kuryakin."

Manacles had been placed around his wrists. These had been hooked to a chain which hung from the center of the ceiling of a large room. The room was shaped like the interior of a chicken's egg, point downward. Its walls were gray. The lighting was medicinally bright, but diffuse.

A winch had raised Illya so that his feet were a good yard above its floor.

Mei was similarly chained, dangling by her wrists beside him. The THRUSH guards had completed hanging up their prisoners some ten minutes earlier. They had vanished through an oval door in the wall. Illya noticed that the door had thick gasketing all around it. A very tight seal on the chamber boded no good.

A faint electronic hum filled the chamber. Illya twisted his head too suddenly. The effort put additional strain on his arms. The manacles cut into his wrists and he swayed uncontrollably. He reminded himself not to indulge in that sort of violent maneuver again.

"Greetings, conspirators," said the voice of Dr. Dargon. It was a voice with a somewhat crazed cackle in it. Dr. Dargon was peering at them from behind a thick window in the curved wall. The electronic hum had been the sound of the motor which rolled back the panel covering the window.

Beside Dargon, in some sort of control booth, stood Major Otako. His S-scar shone like a white worm on his cheek. Illya made out two technicians huddled over consoles where small lights flickered in sequence.

"Major Otako suggested that we give you a first-hand taste of our storm apparatus," Dargon said.

"If it's all the same to you -" Illya began.

Filtered through amplifiers, Dargon's voice rasped: "Unfortunately it is not."

"Well, Napoleon Solo got away, and he'll cook your Cantonese hash for you, I promise!" Illya shouted. "What happens to us is of no importance."

"Why must you hurt us?" Mei said. The blood had drained from her face. "Why can't you simply kill us? What can you want from us at this point?"

Dr. Dargon sucked his tooth noisily. The sound carried over the amplifiers. His pig eyes loomed through the double thickness of his spectacles and the control booth glass.

"Why, my dear child, all we want from you is a simple thing." Dr. Dargon pressed his nose against the glass. "We want to hear you say - as the Americans have it - uncle!"

This convulsed Major Otako. Dr. Dargon's face beaded with perspiration. The THRUSH scientist obviously enjoyed torturing people. To one of the technicians he exclaimed:

"Shall we demonstrate our weather control chamber? Perhaps some winds to begin with?"

A ring of concealed panels up near the ceiling sprang open. Gusts of air whipped into the chamber. Illya began to twist and sway as the winds gripped him.

The chain linking his wrists to the ceiling creaked and revolved. Illya was twisted one way until the chain could twist no more. Then the chain unwound. Illya spun back the opposite way. To this wild motion was added the back and forth thrust of huge air currents which alternately caught him from two directions.

Over the keening sound of the mechanized wind came Mei's whimper of pain. Then Dargon's voice again:

"In this chamber, Mr. Kuryakin, we first achieved our breakthrough. We created artificial weather conditions. Of course this room is primitive. This antiquated installation is ideal for our present purpose, however." Dargon clapped his hands. "Major, our guests are not suitably impressed. Shall we generate a bigger storm?"