The Genghis Khan Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  “So?” the colonel said. “You know much. Perhaps too much. How can I believe such a story? What can Dr. Li do even if he is an impostor? You don’t imagine that we will trust him in any sensitive position yet!”

  Illya sat quietly. He gave no indication, but it was clear to him now that he was losing the colonel. Not that Hsuieh would forget it all, no, he would investigate, but he would not need Illya. And he would not investigate closely enough, or fast enough, to stop THRUSH.

  His bright, quick eyes watched for a sign of weakness. He saw that the colonel had relaxed. Only a fraction, but perhaps enough. Although he had been carefully searched and stripped of weapons, Illya still had a few emergency tools still hidden. Now what he had to do was somehow distract the colonel a fraction more.

  “I don’t think it matters, Colonel Hsuieh,” Illya snapped. “I think whatever Dr. Li plans he is already doing! I think THRUSH knew exactly how much Dr. Li could do. I think they are playing with you!”

  The colonel jumped up. “You think we are fools?!”

  “I think you are in serious danger, Colonel,” Illya insisted. “I think you need my help, and you need it fast.”

  The colonel began to pace the room.

  For one instant his back was to Illya Kuryakin.

  The small agent moved with the speed of a cat. His right hand swept a button from his black trouser rear pocket. In the same motion he brought the bottom to his teeth and bit.

  The colonel had turned, started to pace in the other direction, and had seen the movement of Illya. The colonel reacted instantly, his hand snaking to his pistol in its holster.

  Illya threw the bitten button directly in front of the colonel.

  The colonel’s pistol was out.

  A great cloud of white smoke burst from the button and instantly filled the small room.

  Illya Kuryakin flung himself sideways, hit, rolled, and came up on his feet.

  But the colonel did not fire.

  Totally obscured by the cloud of smoke that enveloped him, the colonel saved his fire and jumped through the smoke. But there was smoke everywhere now, and the colonel stumbled in the blinding cloud.

  Illya Kuryakin bent to pull the long scar from his right leg.

  The motion could be seen, dimly, through the smoke.

  The colonel jumped toward where he saw Illya’s faint black shape, his pistol ready---and vanished into the gaping hole in the center of the room.

  Screams sounded all the way down, echoed in the smoke-filled room for minutes.

  Then there was a horrible thud far below and silence.

  Illya wasted no time. The pit was deep and the colonel was gone. The small Russian whirled and jumped to the wall close to the door. The screams would have been heard.

  Already the door was being opened.

  Illya Kuryakin drew the long, thin, needle of especially strong metal from beneath the false scar on his leg.

  The three guards piled into the room in a mob. They stopped, stumbled through the thick smoke. One shouted orders to his blinded men. Illya stepped out from behind the door and snaked his arm around the throat of the last guard, thrust with his deadly needle, and the man sagged dead in his arms without a sound.

  Illya dropped the body and picked up the machine-gun the man had let fall.

  One of the guards stumbled toward him through the smoke. Illya rose up and thrust his needle again. The six inch blade struck the guard just below the rib cage, angled up. The guard screamed once and collapsed.

  The third guard fired.

  The shots went wild.

  Illya squeezed a burst at the flash of the guard’s gun. The man fell over the edge of the pit.

  Illya stood alone. But the shots would have been heard. Far off he heard voices already. He ran across the room, through the smoke that was now thinning, and looked for the secret door the colonel had come through.

  He found it---a large stone that swung easily; some ancient entrance to the room. He opened the door and went through into a narrow passage of stone steps that mounted upward.

  He closed the stone behind him, and began to climb with his eyes alert.

  THREE

  Napoleon Solo stood in the night outside the grim government building. His small sensing instrument showed that Illya Kuryakin was inside the building but below the level of the street. He observed the building closely. It was clearly some military or police headquarters.

  Some men in uniform who went in and out wore uniforms, but not all of them. The small brass plaque at the door identified the building as Peking Command Headquarters. But Solo had an idea that the building covered more than that. It had a feel of secret police.

  Solo took a deep breath, then walked up the steps and into the grim building. Eyes turned to look at him the instant he stepped into the bare, lighted lobby. Among the uniforms, and the Chinese faces, he stood out like a cat in a dog pound.

  Two guards converged on him.

  “My name is Vassily Kutusov,” Solo snapped in Russian, and then repeated the phrase in Manchu. “Agricultural expert assigned to the Nanphu collective. My papers. I have an urgent message for your security commander.”

  The two guards hesitated, looked at the papers which, of course, were in Russian. Solo had caught them off balance with his aggressiveness, as he had hoped he would. He did not let them recover.

  “I said the matter is urgent! Where is your commander?” he asked.

  The two guards looked for help. An officer came across the lobby. Solo greeted him with a blast.

  “Is there someone with authority here?” the agent snapped in Manchu dialect.

  The officer took the papers, looked at Napoleon Solo. Then the officer motioned to a man behind a desk in a small office just off the main lobby of the building. The man trotted up, took the papers.

  “Vassily Kutusov, Grade-1 Agricultural Advisor, Nanphu Collective,” the translator read from Solo’s papers. “It seems all in order, Comrade Lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant nodded, looked at Solo. “You have some information? You will tell me.”

  “I will not tell you!” Solo snapped. “I will tell your commandant! I suggest speed in this matter. It concerns the spy recently caught, who is probably even now under interrogation by your commandant!”

  It was a risky shot, yet not too risky. Solo knew that Illya Kuryakin was somewhere in the building. It was logical that the commandant himself would be concerned with an unknown spy. And Solo was aware of the bureaucratic mind---bureaucrats were impressed by a man who seemed to have “inside” information. They tended to take one fact and make the assumption that a man knew the rest.

  The lieutenant was impressed. If this arrogant Russian knew about the spy, then was he not most likely much more than he appeared to be? This was, clearly, out of the province of a simple lieutenant.

  “Come,” the lieutenant said to Solo, assuming a commanding and conspiratorial manner to impress the soldiers.

  Solo grinned to himself and followed the lieutenant along dim corridors and down stairs to a stone passage beneath the street level. The lieutenant ushered him into a large stone room, where the only furniture was a grey-metal desk and some straight chairs. One chair had an upholstered seat.

  The lieutenant seemed to look around, a little puzzled.

  “The colonel was here. I will find out what happened to him. You will wait here.”

  “Not too long,” Solo snapped. “I suggest you find your colonel fast.”

  The lieutenant nodded and left.

  Solo looked around the large stone room. It was clearly an interrogation room. But Illya Kuryakin was not there.

  Was he too late? They had forgotten to search him for weapons. They did not know just how they should treat a Soviet official. So they hesitated to do anything. Solo checked his U.N.C.L.E. Special, and went to the door to listen.

  It was not likely that he could play the same game of intimidation with a colonel.

  Far off, muted, and seemingly
below him, he heard shots.

  Solo frowned. Had they shot someone?

  There were more shots, and then he heard the pounding of running feet---feet that faded as they went not toward the surface, but deeper below.

  Solo looked around the room to see what cover there was in case he were trapped. He saw little cover. He opened the door and peered out into the corridor. It was a deserted corridor now, the sound of shouts from far below.

  The small noise was in the far wall behind Solo.

  The agent whirled and jumped for the cover of the metal desk. A section of the wall swung out like a door, and a man all in black stepped through. Solo raised his pistol. The figure carried a submachine gun.

  Then Napoleon Solo saw the face of the small man.

  “A dead pigeon,” Solo said. “You should be more alert, Illya, old buddy.”

  At the sound of Solo’s voice, Illya Kuryakin had dropped to one knee, gun ready. Now the Russian grinned.

  “We’re even it seems, Napoleon. Only I suggest we discuss all that somewhere else.”

  “An excellent suggestion,” Solo said. “I think anywhere else would fill the bill.

  “My thought exactly. What about that corridor?”

  “Clear now, but probably not for long. Was all that noise below your doing?”

  “I’m afraid so, and it won’t stay below for long. Shall we?”

  “After you, my dear Illya,” Solo said, grinned.

  The Russian U.N.C.L.E. agent moved soundlessly to the door of the room. Solo followed close behind.

  At the door they both peered out. The corridor was still deserted, the sound of a minor riot far below.

  “I got the colonel,” Illya said. “At least, he got himself. They don’t have a leader for the moment, and it’s made them careless.”

  “A little luck is vital,” Solo said.

  “Make that a lot,” Illya said. “Let’s go.’

  The two agents moved at a steady trot along the deserted corridor. They angled upward and still encountered no one. Behind them the sound of angry voices had begun to grow louder. Sooner or later someone behind them would think to call ahead and block the exit to the building.

  “We can’t make it across the lobby,” Solo said. “Too many guards and too much space.”

  “A suggestion?” Illya said.

  “There are windows on the ground floor level, probably from smaller offices. They’re barred, so our friends won’t think about them---I hope!”

  They reached the ground level. Ahead they heard shouts. The guards at the main entrance had been alerted at last. Illya pointed to a door to their right. Solo nodded.

  The two agents opened the unlocked door, locked it behind them, and turned back to look at the empty office. A barred window was directly across the small room. Solo reached it in two strides. He dug into his clothes and came out with two tiny strips of foil. He wrapped a strip around two bars, pulled a small thread on each, and jumped back. The thermite glowed red and then white. The bars burned through and melted in seconds. The two agents ran to the bars, strained them, and bent back the sections above and below the melts.

  Moments later they dropped to the dark street and ran off into the night of Peking. Behind them, inside the building itself, they heard the confused sounds of a frantic search.

  FOUR

  The two giant double-trailer trucks were parked in the early morning dawn light just off the highway between the roadway and the railroad tracks on the northern edge of Peking. The trucks of supplies and soldiers were parked in a neat line behind and ahead of the two trailer trucks. The missiles rested on the flat trailers, covered by canvas.

  Illya and Solo slipped among the slag heaps and steel shapes of the steel plant. They stopped at the last cover and looked across the open space to the trucks and soldiers gathered in the dawn. Illya nodded toward a small knot of figures near the lead truck.

  “Dr. Li and his friends,” Kuryakin said.

  Solo stared. “And a friend of ours. Look, the third from the left.”

  Illya looked. The figure third from the left in the group with Dr. Li was a woman. A tall woman. She was dressed now in the uniform of an Albanian officer. But there was no mistaking who she was.

  “Maxine Trent.” Illya said. “Your friend gets around, Napoleon.”

  “At least we know that whatever THRUSH is up to, Maxine will be at the center of it,” Solo said.

  “The question is, what are they up to?” Illya said. “All we know is that they have killed Dr. Li and substituted an impostor, that Maxine Trent and some of her men are here, and that they are involved with some missiles intended for Viet Nam, but obviously being diverted.”

  “A lot depends on where the missiles are going,” Solo said.

  “Which means we’ve got to go with them.”

  “I’m afraid it does,” Solo said. “But how?”

  “Look,” Illya whispered softly.

  Far down the road a truck was driving slowly toward the convoy of trucks. Almost at the same time whistles blew all along the convoy, and men started to go into feverish activity checking their trucks, securing loads. The group around Dr. Li split up and all started for trucks at the head of the column. “They’ve been waiting for a laggard,” Solo said.

  “Look at the markings on the new truck---they’re not the same!” Illya whispered.

  “A replacement truck from a different unit!” Solo said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m ahead of you,” Illya said.

  The two agents slipped through the dawn among the buildings of the steel mill until they reached the road. The new truck was coming along slowly, its drivers clearly not sure if just what they were doing. They got no chance to find out.

  Illya rose out of the grey dawn on the right, Solo on the left. The two agents moved swiftly. They signaled the truck to halt at a point where, for an instant, it was out of sight of the other trucks, part of the steel mill in between.

  The truck halted, the drivers peering down, obviously unfamiliar with their assignment or the unit they were to work with. Illya jumped up on the running board and got the relief driver. Solo took the man behind the wheel. They stripped the bodies, quickly dressed in the uniforms of the drivers, hid the bodies in the back of the truck, and drove off.

  The entire move had taken only a few minutes. As they drove slowly down the road, and around the steel mill toward the column, Illya studied the uniforms they wore and briefed Solo on what unit they were, what rank, what specialties, and what their names were from their papers.

  “There are orders directed to Captain Chang, Transport Command,” Illya completed.

  “Who looks like he is just ahead!” Solo said.

  The column was already on the road. It was moving south along the highway. The captain of the transport stood in the road with his hands on his hips. As Illya drove the truck up, the captain shouted: “Orders!”

  Illya handed out his orders.

  “Fall in line at the rear! What kept you?”

  “We got lost!”

  “The truck is in good condition?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “All right. Try not to get lost again!”

  The captain trotted away and jumped into a truck as it moved past. Illya and Solo waited and fell in line as the last truck. The convoy wound through the city and out across the plain, heading south and southwest.

  At first Solo and Illya were alert each night the long convoy stopped. But they soon learned that their fellow drivers had no interest in them. For the most part the convoy stopped in open fields along the highway, where curious villagers came up to stare at them, and the drivers curled up to sleep beneath their vehicles. After a few desultory questions, easily answered by Illya, the other drivers paid them no special attention.

  The convoy drove on, day after day, slowly beginning to turn west and then northwest. They passed over the Great Wall outside Lanchow and drove almost straight north. As the trucks pas
sed through Yumen the two U.N.C.L.E. agents knew their destination.

  “Sinkiang,” Solo said. “The nuclear test center!”

  “It looks that way,” Illya said.

  “What can they hit from Sinkiang?”

  Illya Kuryakin thought carefully. “India! Calcutta or Delhi! They are both about fifteen hundred miles, Napoleon.”

  “That’s great!” Solo said.

  The two agents drove on, the great mountains of the Tibetan plateau towering to the south, the mountains of Mongolia to the north. Then, suddenly one late evening, the convoy left the road and turned straight north just beyond Hami. A wide, straight, modern highway cut straight ahead through the barren wasteland toward the Mongolian border.

  Solo and Illya looked at each other. “Quite a road for this wasteland,” Illya said.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Solo said. “It’s a big installation of some kind, and new. This road has hardly been finished.”

  The convoy wound on for some time as darkness fell across the barren land. Then, ahead, set in a deep bowl surrounded by low mountains, Illya and Solo saw a complex of buildings. Solo studied the buildings as they swung slowly down the mountain road.

  “Nuclear all right,” Solo said, “and a new center. Look, two missile pads!”

  “I see them,” Illya said. “But, Napoleon, this is a Chinese installation. THRUSH didn’t build this. The Chinese are bringing the missiles here. Then---“

  “What is THRUSH doing?” Solo finished. “Why are they working under cover, even from the Chinese?”

  “Obviously, the Chinese think they are doing one thing, and THRUSH is doing something else,” Illya said grimly. “Unless one faction of the Chinese knows what THRUSH is up to. Have you noticed, Napoleon, at all our stops, the Chinese officers with Dr. Li are all from the anti-Mao party?”

  “I noticed. All General Po’s men,” Solo said.

  The two agents had no more chance to talk. The convoy wound down into the bowl-shaped valley and pulled up in a large area between the two missile pads. In the night all the buildings and the two pads were brightly lighted by floodlights.

  “They’re not hiding anything,” Solo said.

  “Which means that whatever THRUSH has in mind is going to come as a big surprise. Somehow, Napoleon, Dr. Li is going to do something, and I don’t think it’s something to help the Chinese!”