“You look like the proverbial walking death.”
Illya’s smile was humorless. “Actually I’m being kept alive by drugs.”
Out in the darkness headlight beams flashed and heavy truck motors roared.
“Edmonds and crew---“
Solo swung swiftly toward the cage door.
Illya clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“Easy, my friend. There are enough of us to take care of them. One full ‘copter load from the capitol came in half an hour ago to get into position. Another landed on the strip two minutes ago. Pfolkerstone and I flashed beams to show them the way. He’s an old warhorse.”
“How did you get here?” Solo blurted. “I mean, how did you know---“
“Time for that later.”
Illya unlocked the other cuff. Solo threw the steel manacles away, trying to chafe some life back into his tingling lower arms. All at once he felt dizzy.
Illya said something about going back to direct the activities of his men. He started through the cage door ahead of Solo. Out of the dark, screaming his hate, came Mr. Chandra.
Chandra’s turban was awry. A great glittering kris knife was locked by its hilt in both his shaking hands.
Men down the path shouted for Chandra to stop. Evidently he’d seen Illya and Solo emerging from the cage and decided to spend what life he had left taking revenge against the people who had upset his master’s plotting.
Illya whipped his head up as the kris sliced the air straight for his neck. Chandra charged in, amber face distorted and foam-lipped with fury.
“Get down!” Solo gave Illya the shove in the small of the back that saved his life.
Illya Kuryakin sprawled. The kris flew past the spot where his neck had been. Its tip nicked Solo’s chin. He jerked back, stumbled against the cage bars. All over the station guns were blasting, men were shouting.
Chandra shook his head like some enraged animal. He came charging in at Solo again, kris slash-slashing back and forth through the air. Solo was caught up against the cage. Slash-slash, the blade arced at his face---
Diving, Solo rolled over. He seized Illya’s machine pistol from the dazed agent’s hands. Illya fought feebly, not really understanding what was happening as Napoleon Solo rolled away again.
Chandra was directly over him now, the kris held back over his head. Chandra let out a scream of anger and brought the blade flashing over and down in the split second that Solo got braced into position on his back and left elbow and let loose with the machine pistol.
Twisting, literally jumping from the impact of the bullets, Mr. Chandra crashed back inside the cage. Bullet holes sewed dark red little periods across the soiled bosom of his long linen coat. Dying on his feet, he disappeared into the cage’s gloom-thick interior.
“Here’s a hand,” Solo panted, stumbling up. Illya Kuryakin didn’t take it.
Solo stared down past his fingertips, saw a scarlet seep spreading under Illya’s hair. Quickly he knelt. He inserted his fingers between head and ground, discovered the medium sized rock protruding up from the earth. Illya’s skull had crashed against it.
He’s got to have help.
Solo started to run into the darkness. He bumped into men who seized him, spun him around before he could raise his machine pistol. A hand came chopping at his throat, was pulled away suddenly.
“Hey! This is a Section II man! Solo, isn’t it?”
“Right. Kuryakin’s lying over by that light. He needs medical aid. He smashed the back of his head.”
One of the three U.N.C.L.E. operatives in the group rapped out an order: “You go find Pfolkerstone, Miller. He should be over by the landing strip. I think he fetched his medical kit along. Maybe he can give---“
Suddenly a double beam of light washed over them. An engine growled. Solo whipped around, realizing he’d encountered the group right at the edge of a curving road from the motor pool.
The road arrowed toward the jungle. It was in this direction that the heavy, stake-bed truck was racing now, whipping past them in a rush of fumes and screaming heavy-duty tires.
As the truck went by Solo saw a sweat-dripping face limned at the window on the driver’s side. Feverish eyes, a wind-whipped wisp of goatee---all this registered in split seconds. Solo remembered pictures he’d seen.
Dantez Edmonds.
Solo hurled himself at the truck, leaped into the air as it careened around a bend. His right hand caught the rim of the open window, then his left. He hung from the side of the speeding truck as Edmonds shrieked and pounded at his fingers with a free fist.
The truck swerved from side to side. Solo heard a fiendish chittering of monkeys from the back. Edmonds beat at his hands furiously. Then abruptly, he stopped. Solo knew he was going to fall off. The truck was picking up speed, hurtling ahead to the point where two concrete barracks buildings flanked the road. Beyond them lay rain forest.
Edmonds drove with his left hand, bringing his right up and over. The muzzle of a pistol pointed through the window at Solo’s face.
Edmonds screamed obscenities as he tightened his finger on the trigger. Solo let loose with his right hand, drove a feeble punch up through the window, felt it graze Edmonds’ head.
Edmonds shrieked, fired. The bullet hit the upper edge of the open window, spanged away harmlessly as Solo dropped off and hit the earth with jarring force, rolling over and over. He tried to rise. Blackness swam at the edges of his eyes. There was a red thunder---
Solo twisted around. A fireball gouted up from the truck’s hood. Edmonds had gone out of control, rammed the truck into one of the concrete blockhouses, probably as a result of Solo’s punch. Edmonds’ spindly figure came tumbling out of the cab.
From the truck’s telescoped rear stake-bed, monkeys jumped chittering as their stacked up cages crumpled and burst. Edmonds went to one knee, his hair smoldering. He sawed the air with supple-fingered hands, like a demented symphonic conductor, trying to fend off the animals.
The first of the monkeys leaped in past his guard, went for his exposed neck and bit. Others, crazed like the first, darted in and bit for his hands. The monkeys crowded around Dantez Edmonds, chittering, chittering, biting, biting---
There was a single inhuman scream. Then there was silence.
The monkeys continued to crawl over the body, worrying it. Sickened, Napoleon Solo turned away. He went staggering into the pandemonium to round up the U.N.C.L.E. agents and organize them.
He met one of them near the motor pool. The man was grinning and holding a rifle on three Thrushmen who stood with hands raised over their heads. The gunfire was diminishing.
Solo opened his mouth to greet the other agent. He wanted to find out whether Illya had been turned over to the trader for first aid. Before he could utter so much as a single syllable, Purjipur and all the rest of the earth went into a spin, and he blacked out.
Four
Ice tinkled gently in the tall frosted glass in Napoleon Solo’s right hand. Wearing an immaculate jacket and slacks and seated in a high-backed bamboo chair in the air-conditioned hotel cocktail lounge, he looked only a little worse for wear.
His wrist displayed a thick bandage. There were smaller pieces of bandage at various places on his face. But he managed to smile.
“You look very fetching for a girl who went through all that you did,” he said.
Across from him, very fetching indeed in a pale frock of lime-colored linen, Indra Bal smiled wanly in return.
Past her shoulder Solo could see through the slatted blinds of the lounge into a sun-drenched street of Purjipur’s capitol. A tank rumbled by. Another. But slowly. In the past forty-eight hours since Solo wakened in the hospital helicopter, the plague attacks had dropped off sharply.
Most of the infected monkeys had disappeared into the rain forest. Hospitals were caring for the dying and hoping for word from the U.S. The war had blown itself out, once Solo and Illya had exposed THRUSH’s calculated role in it. A search back at the jungle p
ost had revealed files outlining the whole THRUSH plot.
“So I look fetching, do I?” Indra answered tartly. “I wonder if I should accept that compliment.”
“Why not?”
“Out here, men like you are sometimes called colonialists. Not to be trusted.”
“Rubbish! That’s an idea spread by THRUSH malcontents. What I want for the moment is peace, more peace, and plenty of quiet.” Solo lifted his glass. “Drink to that?”
“I’m ashamed of myself, Napoleon.”
“In heaven’s name why?”
“Trying to joke with you. This is really not the time for it. Your chief is---“
“Yes.” Solo’s face turned grave. He sighed, “Forgive me. It’s just that if I think about Mr. Waverly still lying there in the hospital, I’ll probably go stark staring---“
Suddenly there was a rush of warm air into the purple dimness.
Illya Kuryakin came running in. The top of his head was circled round and round with a bandage, a sort of semi-mummy effect. He raced up to the table.
“They’ve done it!”
“You mean found the antidote?” Solo asked.
“Exactly. The technical people came through two hours ago. As someone remarked earlier, they knew they could isolate the antidote if they had enough time. Well, the first of the serum arrived at Kennedy Airport from the Isle de Mal at noon. Mr. Waverly has just had his first injection and---“
“You’ve been talking to New York?”
“On Channel D, yes. Mr. Waverly is responding well, I’m delighted to report.”
The tension broke. Napoleon Solo pinched the bridge of his nose, laughing.
“The tough old stallion. They’ll never kill him.”
“He was one of the lucky ones,” Indra Bal said. “With the stamina to resist.”
Solo nodded. “A lot of them just couldn’t hold on. Like Plympton,”
Illya said quietly, “Well, our maniacal friend from the past came as close as anyone ever has to killing Mr. Waverly.”
“And some of his little pets are still roaming,” Solo brooded.
Indra spoke up: “You forget. Our government’s agricultural department is recruiting special teams of young men to beat the jungles near the villages. The monkeys are not native to Purjipur, you know. They can be spotted very easily. And there are only half a dozen alive. Those which are will be shot. So long as they are kept from the cities, the worst is over.”
“And,” Illya Kuryakin added, “there will be plane loads of the antidote on the way here soon. All the big pharmaceutical companies are going on a crash production schedule to manufacture it in quantity, according to the formula the Isle de Mal technologists worked out.”
Another tank rumbled by outside. Solo reached for his frosted glass. “Well. At last we can, as the saying goes---“ He toasted Indra. “Enjoy, enjoy!”
Illya scowled. “Isn’t anyone going to invite me to sit down?”
Solo gave Indra a rather wicked leer. “My dear, I was under the impression this was to be a private party.”
Indra Bal flushed. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to spoil a friendship---“
A trace of Solo’s old rakish grin came back as he said to Illya. “Definitely a private party.”
“As usual.” Illya sniffed. “Very well, Don Juan. Carry on. I promised to buy old P.C. Pfolkerstone a toddy anyway. He’s hanging around the lobby somewhere. He said he had plenty of anecdotes about his days as a hunting guide.”
But Illya looked as though he didn’t precisely think the amusing anecdotes were going to be all that amusing.
Napoleon Solo was already turning away. “I’m sure you’ll find it very educational.”
And, slipping one arm around Indra Bal’s shoulder, he leaned close.
The Man from Yesterday Affair Page 11
