The Finger in the Sky Affair

by Peter Leslie

  The party from T.C.A.—there were really three separate parties—was easy enough to identify. The alert young men and women in their crisp uniforms had taken over the three outside tables on one of the café terraces.

  Helga, Illya and Solo took a table nearby and watched them curiously for a while. But the stereotyped banter, the stereotyped horseplay and the expected ploys soon palled and they began to look around at the other tourists there. Next door to their restaurant was another, and those sitting outside under the floodlit vine pergolas were separated from them only by a row of white fencing running from the junction of the two buildings. It was very warm in the soft summer darkness—a little humid, perhaps—and the shrill banalities of the holidaymakers sounded loud in the night air. On the far side of the square, beyond the massed lights of the parked cars, away from the milling convolutions of the café patrons, blue-clad men with lined faces the color of walnuts played a quiet game of pétanque.

  After a while, someone came out onto the terrace with an accordion and sang. They drank a bottle of cold, aromatic Alsatian white wine and ordered another. A second cabaret performer drifted among the closely packed tables playing a guitar and singing American folk songs. In the distance, they could hear the first singer and her accordion entertaining customers in the basement of the next-door café.

  Automobile engines started up, revved and whined away in low gear. New arrivals labored up the hill seeking a place to park. Every now and then a burst of applause or a concerted shout of laughter testified to the success of the evening.

  After the second cabaret act, waiters at the place beyond the white fence pushed together three tables and started laying out glasses and napkins. Several parties had left. Obviously a larger one was expected. Soon a dozen or more people were threading their way among the other patrons to reach the long table. All of them, Solo saw when they were installed, were women—and the majority of them were in trousers. Several were very heavy around the haunches, with severe, mannish shirts and lined faces wearing a determined look. Others were willowy and slim, with voluptuous bodies below cropped hair. One red-haired girl with shining eyes wore a low-cut bronze cocktail dress. She was very beautiful.

  Some of them drank pastis but the majority nursed wide, heavy glasses carrying whisky and ice. They were very gay and giggled a lot, the small conversational clumps every now and then coalescing into one big group when someone related an item sufficiently salacious, funny or astonishing to engage their attention.

  The red-haired girl appeared to be the enfant terrible of the party and at the same time a kind of butt. Almost everything she said was greeted with whoops of laughter or exclamations of feigned outrage. After one low-voiced confidence entrusted to her immediate neighbors had resulted in a shriek of mock dismay, a broad-beamed woman at the far end of the table called out: "If Macnamara's going to drag us all down to her level again, at least let her for God's sake speak up so we can all hear!"

  "Oh, but she isn't," the redhead's neighbor assured the woman, forcibly preventing the girl from rising to her feet and declaiming, "We're having no more of Macnamara!"

  "Darling, but I insist..."

  "No, Kay. No," they chorused, laughing. "Macnamara's banned!"

  And they they all started to sing at once: "Tara ra-raaa, Ta-rat-taraaaa Raaa..."

  They had been there about twenty minutes when Solo suddenly realized that Sheridan Rogers was among them. She had her back to them and he hoped that Illya would not notice her—for in fact she looked rather drunk, with smudged make-up, a blotchy face and hair over one eye. But unfortunately the Russian chanced to look up then, saw the intensity of his regard, and—following his eye—also noticed the girl.

  "Sherry!" he exclaimed with a great deal of warmth. "What happened to you? We've been wondering all day. How nice to see you..." He rose to his feet and crossed to the fencing, leaning over to address the missing date from behind her shoulder. The girl called Macnamara bent her head and whispered something, causing Sherry Rogers to giggle and glance shyly over her shoulder at the Russian. "Hi, comrade!" she said thickly. "How goes the investi—investiga—How goes the spy hunt, eh? Found any more enemy agents under your bed?" She rose clumsily to her feet and faced him.

  One of the girls in trousers murmured something behind her hand and the whole table burst out laughing again.

  "That's ri'," Sherry giggled. "I don't 'spect he has!...But what are you doin' here, lover-boy? Have you come to have yourself a bit of 'xperience? Or are you still after the bold, bad villains for Uncle Sam?"

  Illya had fallen back in bewilderment. "Sherry!" he began; "what happened? I thought we had a date...?"

  The girl laughed raucously. "That's a good one," she cried. "A date with a dream! My li'l Russian Lull'by....What makes you think I stick aroun' for spy-catchers, comrade?"

  "But, Sherry —"

  "Oh, wrap it up...You make me tired. You think I've nothing better to do —" The girl's voice died away. Swaying slightly, she stared across the low fence at him for a moment, then lurched a step to one side and sat down abruptly in her chair. "I want a drink," she complained.

  In the silence which had fallen over the long table the voice of one of the beefy, butch girls rang out, finishing a sentence: "... at his hair, darling! It could be one of us in drag..." A dozen pairs of eyes, bright with maliciousness and amusement, stared at the Russian as he stood dumbfounded among the red linen tablecloths. Then Helga left her seat and walked over to him. "Let's go, Illya," she said softly, touching his arm. "I'm afraid you'll do no good staying here. I'm terribly sorry but there's no doubt about it...the girl's plastered!"

  Kuryakin was very quiet as Solo drove them back towards Nice. Once or twice he shook his head as though in disbelief. At length Solo glanced into the rear-view mirror, raised his eyebrows at the reflection of the Russian's glum expression which he saw there, and said seriously:

  "Look, Illya—I was as astonished as you were. The girl's behavior doesn't seem to add up. But we all saw it; we all heard. And I'm sorry—believe me, I real sorry...But I guess anyone can make a mistake over somebody. In the meantime, I don't want to come on as the heavy, but we do have a job to do. We went out to keep an eye on the social life of T.C.A.'s people out here. The ones we went to watch seemed innocent enough—but don't forget Sheridan Rogers is a T.C.A. employee too."

  The Russian sighed heavily. "Thank you, Napoleon," he said. "You are quite right, of course. And anyway I have long ago trained myself never to be surprised by what human beings do...at least not after the first shock. It was the...implications that were bothering me here."

  Solo nodded. "I know," he said, pulling the car into the side of the road to allow an ambulance to hiss past, the blue light on its roof winking and the urgent two-tone siren blaring. "It does rather suggest a new dimension, doesn't it?"

  Helga said good night and left them at St. Laurent du Var, half-way between Cagnes and the airport. She refused Solo's offer of a late meal in Nice on the grounds that she had to get back to her own apartment and see to various things. "Where do you have to get to, Helga?" he asked.

  "St. Paul-de-Vence. It's not far—and look, there's a taxi stand on the other side of the road. That's why I asked you to stop here."

  "But Helga—we were halfway there at Haut-des-Cagnes! Why didn't you let me take you there? Let me turn around and take you now..."

  The wide mouth gleamed in a smile. "My dear," she said softly, leaning in at the window and laying a hand on his arm, "I wouldn't dream of it. You two boys get back to your hotel. I'll see you tomorrow. Promise..."

  Before they reached the entrance to the airport another ambulance passed them, followed a moment later by two more.

  "They're in a hurry!" Illya commented. "There must be a big pile-up on the Promenade des Anglais or something."

  But he was wrong. The ambulances turned right at the airport. Beyond the spiky palms and the low, rectangular, blue-lit bulk of the terminal building, a crimson glare pul
sed in the night sky. Across the dark field vehicles and people on foot swarmed towards an incandescent tangle of wreckage on the main runway.

  And above them, piercing the clouds of smoke, rose a shattered tailplane bearing the three-letter monogram of Transcontinental Airways.

  Chapter 9 — The silent witness

  In the confusion among the frantic comings and goings of firemen, nurses, policemen, airport officials, gendarmerie and salvage corps, it was almost impossible to find out what had happened. In the excess of zeal which always afflicts officialdom on the occasion of disaster, the airport police were moving people on so fast that Solo wasn't even able to explain who they were. Eventually, they had to leave the Peugeot in one of the public parking area some distance away from the buildings and make their way out onto the apron by dodging the patrols.

  It seemed—from what they were able to glean—that T.C.A.'s evening flight from Paris had crashed on arrival; that the aircraft had hit the ground and burst into flames with the loss of many lives; and that the accident had happened ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before they had arrived—probably while they were driving down from Haut-des-Cagnes, which would explain why they had not heard the impact or the explosion.

  Ultimately, it was the Technical Director who supplied the details. He was hurrying back to the T.C.A. block from the scene of the crash when he saw them and paused.

  "Hello, you chaps!" he called, actually taking his pipe from his mouth as he spoke. "What about this, eh? Carbon copy. Absolute carbon copy of the others, you know...This time I happened to be out on the terrace, watching the crate come in—and he flew it right straight into the ground again. No doubt about it. He flew it right down onto the deck." He shook his head uncomprehendingly.

  "And everything was working perfectly, of course?" Solo asked.

  "Well, we can't say until we've examined the pieces, can we? But judging from the dialogue between the captain and the bods up there"—he jerked his thumb towards the green windows of the control tower behind them—"everything seemed to be. Looks as though it's what you chaps call a dead ringer, what?"

  "Survivors?" Illya queried.

  The Director held up a single finger. "Only one. Again," he said. "Forty-two passengers and the rest of the crew gone west—the survivor's a steward, for a change."

  "Where is he?"

  "Hospital, naturally. Don't know which one they took him to—probably the Anglo-American between here and Villefranche—but I'll find out for you in a jiff."

  "Is he badly hurt?"

  "Apart from shock and shakings, not really—and that's a change too. He was dead lucky, that one. Dead lucky. In the baggage compartment, you know. Near the tail—so when that broke off..." he shrugged, smiled and added: "He made it."

  "Which way was the plane landing?" Solo asked.

  "Coming in from the Cannes direction. I told you, didn't I? I saw him take it right down onto—I was going to say into—the deck. Must have been a muckup on the altitude stage of the Murchison-Spears gear. Must have been...And there's another thing. Just occurred to me, as a matter of fact. Had you noticed—all three...no; four! All four of the crashes here have been landing? None taking off, no wrong trims, no stalling or any of that nonsense. Which again supports the idea of it being altitude evaluation at fault, doesn't it?"

  "Yes," Solo said slowly. "You have a point there. I guess it does, at that."

  "Oh, most definitely, old chap. No doubt about it."

  "Any V.I.P.'s aboard, by the way?"

  "All holidaymakers or businessmen—fortunately."

  Illya smiled a crooked smile. " 'There's Less to Pay With T.C.A., Because of the Care they give you There,' " he quoted softly.

  The Technical Director looked flustered. "Oh, no, old chap. I mean, really," he protested, puffing great clouds of smoke from the pipe. "Of course any passenger's death is a tragedy. Naturally. Perhaps I didn't express myself too well...But it's just that if V.I.P.'s are involved, so many bods kick up such a stink that one simply cannot get down to one's job...which is, after all, to find out what happened and why."

  Solo clapped him on the shoulder. "Never mind," he said with a grin. "Don't take us too seriously...old chap!...nobody else seems to."

  A smoke-grimed fire engine, the words Sapeurs-Pompiers and Ville de Nice blistered in its scarlet sides, passed them on its way to the exit gates in convoy with three closed ambulances. A young fireman dropped from the truck, wrenched off his metal helmet, and was quietly sick into a clump of bushes.

  Dang—Dong—Dinggg...the three-chime call sign of the airport announcing system shouldered its incongruous way through the confusion. "Lufthansa regrets to announce the cancellation of their Flight number..." The amplified words echoing from the P.A. speakers sounded oddly thin out of doors. Solo and Illya Kuryakin walked around to the T.C.A. maintenance unit and waited for the Technical Director to find them the name of the hospital to which the plane's only survivor had been transported. Helga Grossbreitner was in the main office, lovely as ever if a little harassed, coping with a flood of calls on three different phones. She had heard the news on the radio as soon as she got home, and had hurried to the airport at once to offer what help she could to the airline's staff.

  The hospital was a small one, lying somewhere back behind the harbor. The two agents drove past rows of small shops—still brightly lit even at this late hour—a couple of sidewalk cafés thronged with people, a terrace of old houses. Beyond the mellowed ochre fa�ades with their delicate iron balconies, an apartment block reared towards the sky. Between the two, an archway spanned the entrance to the hospital driveway.

  They drove through and found themselves among trees. A double row of plane trees bordered each side of the drive and carried the eye on to the hospital itself. It was an elegant building in the style of the old houses at one side of the entrance—tall, narrow, weathered shutters leading onto the balconies and a shallow roof of sheltering painted friezes.

  Halfway along the avenue, the Peugeot's motor coughed to a halt. "That's funny," Illya murmured as the car stopped. "Why should the thing suddenly..." He turned the ignition key and stabbed at the pedals experimentally, operated the switch again. The starter spun...but there was no sign of life from under the hood. The acrid tang of gasoline drifted through the car.

  "You've flooded her now," Solo said. "Sounded to me like some kind of ignition failure. Perhaps we'd better have a look."

  Illya pulled on the handbrake and opened his door to get out.

  In the dense shadows beneath the plane trees a man squatted beside a cumbersome box-like machine on a tripod. Above the swivel mounting, an attachment like a wide lens with a long hood pointed at the front of the car.

  "Look out!" Solo shouted suddenly.

  Moving with incredible speed, he leaned across Kuryakin and yanked the door shut. Then, in a single complex movement, he slumped back against his own door, opening it with his elbow, and subsided backwards onto the ground, dragging the Russian bodily after him.

  "Napoleon! What the...? What are you..." Illya gasped as he landed in the grass beside the roadway. "What was that...?"

  "Quick!" Solo hissed. "Into the bushes..."

  The soft explosions of the silenced revolvers wielded by the men on the far side of the drive were hardly audible as they wriggled backwards into the shrubbery. Bullets thwacked heavily into the leaves above their heads.

  "Did you see them?" Solo whispered. "Four, I think—two on each side of the guy with that tripod thing."

  "Yes, I saw. Just an instant before you pulled the door shut. I'm afraid my reaction was very delayed....I wasn't expecting to be ambushed. But at least we know why the motor stopped."

  "What d'you mean?"

  "The thing on the tripod. I saw them testing one like it in East Germany some time ago. It's an electronic gadget—creates a field of force which will put any electrical machinery in its orbit out of commission. Too short range for general use—they've only been able to make
them with an effective field of three or four yards so far—but perfect for a job like this!"

  "So in effect it was ignition failure? The field stops the coil functioning properly, I suppose?"

  "Yes—look out! I think they're going to rush us..."

  The shooting had stopped. A hundred yards to their right, the lighted windows of the hospital stared impersonally down the drive. On their left, the glare of the city silhouetted the archway through which they had driven a few minutes before. Straight ahead, the dark bulk of the stationary car masked the adversaries whose stealthy movements they could just hear over the rumble of distant traffic.

  "I guess they'll be fanning out," Solo murmured. "Cross the drive further up and come down through the shrubberies to take us on the flank..."

  But for a long time nothing happened. The two men lay in the soft mold under the bushes, straining every nerve to see or hear a significant movement, their guns at the ready. Once Illya reached out for a fragment of tree branch lying on the ground and pitched it into a clump of oleanders some way to their left. At once the plopping of the silenced guns recommenced. Twigs and morsels of leaf shredded to the ground as the heavy slugs ripped through the bushes.

  "They have spread out, Napoleon," the Russian whispered. "Those shots were coming from almost opposite the place that branch landed..."

  He groped around in the mold and discovered a flat stone half buried in the loam. Prising it loose he spun it a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. The moment it landed among the leaves a similar fusillade started. After a few seconds, it stopped.