16 - The Splintered Sunglasses Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "Shhhhhh!" The girl's whisper was urgent. "Don't forget the tape!... And you're supposed to be getting electric shocks, so if you could groan a bit it would help."

  The Russian uttered a hoarse cry and then another. The light beam stabbed down towards his feet. Again the girl crouched, a strange figure shining wetly in the diffuse light as the spray twisted this way and that. And then he was completely free, sitting up damply on the cold floor, trying to massage life back into his limbs.

  Another three minutes, and they were manhandling the unconscious body of Napoleon Solo out of the door and into a dimly lit passageway. Kuryakin gave a final realistic cry of pain and closed the cellar door.

  "We'll be all right for ten or fifteen minutes," the girl whispered. "Even if they do listen to the tape so early, they'll just think I've left a gap in the 'treatment'; they'll be expecting that."

  "I don't wish to seem ungrateful—but what the hell goes on?"

  Lala Eriksson grinned, her face suddenly impish in the dim light. "Like Giovanna, I belong to the S.I.D.," she said. "But whereas she was using the S.I.D. as a cover for her membership of Thrush, I'm doing exactly the opposite—using my Thrush association to mask the fact that I'm with the S.I.D.! Giovanna doesn't know I belong, of course; but we've been watching her... and Mr. Carlsen's unsavory menage... for months!"

  Kuryakin tried to laugh, but he was shivering so much with cold and with reaction that all he managed was a kind of steam-engine stutter.

  "I'm so sorry!" The girl was all contrition. "You must be perished. Your clothes are here in this cupboard. Mr. Solo's too. I don't suppose he'll be coming round yet, will he?"

  "I doubt it. He must have been knocked out a full hour after I was, and I've only been conscious quite a short while. Since Carlsen came in."

  Lala bit her lip. "That's going to make it awkward. We've got very little time, you see. Any time after the next ten minutes, Carlsen or Giovanna may realize you're not in the cellar—and that tips them off that it's me that's responsible. If we could possibly get Solo unseen to a car, though, and I could bluff my way through the gates before we were spotted, we might..."

  She broke off abruptly and, signalling the Russian to help, began feverishly to dress Solo in the clothes she took from the cupboard. Illya felt anxiously in the breast pocket as they eased the jacket over his shoulders. The sunglasses—the vital link in the chain that would strangle Thrush's plans for Europe—were still there! Hurriedly, he put on his own clothes. Together, they manhandled the unconscious man up a flight of stairs, through a doorway and along a short passage. At the double doors which blocked off its end, the girl held up her hand for silence. "My car is just outside here," she whispered. "If we can get him into it without being spotted, we might just make the gates and crash through before anyone realizes... "

  Kuryakin eased back the catch and inched one of the doors open while Lala supported Solo's sagging figure. Gradually, the hairline of daylight widened until finally he could peer through into the open air.

  The doors gave out on to a cobbled yard beside the garage at the back of the house. On the far side of the yard, a high wall sheltered the kitchen garden; behind it were the stables—underneath which, presumably, was the cellar in which they had been imprisoned—and at the front, the drive ran past the long, low elevation of the house itself. The Lancia convertible was parked about five yards from the doors, with a clump of oleanders masking it from windows in the house.

  But between them and the car loomed the broad shoulders of one of the guards. He was standing with his back to them, his machine pistol at the ready, staring along the drive.

  The Russian motioned the girl to come and look. Gently, she lowered Solo to the floor and joined him at the door. She gave one comprehensive glance at the scene outside, sketched a brief pantomime with one hand, and then jerked the door noisily open, "Brockman!" she called. "Here!"

  The guard turned slowly round. His brutish face creased into a frown. "Was ist?" he demanded suspiciously, approaching the door.

  "One of the prisoners below," Lala said agitatedly. "He's... come and look. Quick!"

  The big man snicked back the safety catch on his weapon, bent his head and strode through the doorway. Lala was already at the head of the stair beckoning.

  Kuryakin had obediently cached himself in the deep shadows behind the open door. Now, as soon as the guard had passed through, he stole up behind the man, poised on one foot, and slammed his other heel down as hard as he could on the butt of the F.N. where it protruded between the torpedo's arm and body.

  The big pistol clattered to the ground as the gunman whirled round with a snarl of astonished rage.

  Before he could voice his alarm, Kuryakin had danced in close, his forearm held across his chest, his fingers extended. Like a cobra striking, the flat of the hand darted out once, twice, in a deadly karate chop to the guard's throat. The man staggered. He uttered a strangled grunt—and he would certainly not be able to cry for help for some minutes!—but he was tough. He did not fall. Choking, he rushed at the slender Russian with outstretched arms and seized him in a bear hug. Illya tried every dirty fighting trick he knew. He butted the man's nose with his forehead, he stamped on his toe, he hacked his shin, he brought up one knee. But the torpedo was unbudgeable. Purple in the face, wheezing, he merely increased the pressure.

  Inexorably, the arms tightened around Kuryakin like steel bands. His spine felt as though it was about to snap. His own arms, pinioned to his sides in that vice-like embrace, were seized with cramp.

  It was when his senses had begun to reel that he resorted to the oldest of all tricks and went abruptly limp.

  With a grunt of satisfaction, the guard relaxed his grip enough to let Kuryakin slide down within his grasp. And immediately his elbows were free the agent coiled and uncoiled like a tempered spring. With bunched fists, he slammed a left and a right with piston-like precision to the man's unprotected belly. And then all at once the rest of him was free....

  The purple face paled to a strange and livid green, the remainder of the breath wheezed from the lungs, and the guard careened over, leaned against the wall and slowly slid to the floor. Kuryakin stood over him and completed the treatment with a couple of quick rabbit punches to the neck. "Shall I tie him?" he asked the girl. She had been hovering on the fringe of the short struggle, unable to decide whether or hot to intervene.

  She shook her head. "We haven't time. We'll be discovered anyway before he regains consciousness. Come on... every moment counts... "

  Illya darted to the doors, glanced around outside to make sure that the coast was clear, and then they picked up Solo and waddled towards the car. They were within two yards of the nearside door when footsteps crunched on gravel just beyond the oleanders.

  Like lightning, they dropped U.N.C.L.E.'s Chief Enforcement Officer to the ground behind a border of lavender, and crouched down themselves behind the screen of pink and red-flowered bushes.

  Carlsen and Giovanna del Renzio came into sight beyond the car, walking fast and talking animatedly. They were heading for the cellar door.

  "... can't understand what's come over her," the man was saying, "for I distinctly told her, when I allowed her to take the first shift, that I wanted the current switched on after five minutes and then left on for some considerable time—those were my exact words—on the initial session."

  "Yes," the girl said. "And it's at least seven minutes since we heard so much as a groan. I can't imagine what all that whispering was about..."

  The double doors opened and closed behind them.

  Lala Eriksson was on her feet. Her face was white. "Blast!" she hissed. "They must have been listening to the tape, live, all the time. We've about thirty seconds before they raise the alarm. Let's go!"

  Bundling Solo unceremoniously into the back, they piled into the Lancia and the girl twisted the starter key. The motor caught and they were away with a crisp snarl of exhaust and a shriek of tires on the shiny cobbles. As t
hey swung wide into the driveway circling the house, Illya looked back over his shoulder and saw Carlsen, closely followed by the girl, burst out of the doors leading to the cellar.

  There was something in the man's hand. A moment later smoke blossomed three times from the muzzle of an automatic and a slug hummed over the agent's head, close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. As they screamed round the bend to the front of the house, the Thrush chief began running back towards the cellar doors.

  "He'll be telephoning the gatehouse," the girl said. "Hold tight!"

  They rocketed around the shrubbery, scattering gravel, and roared on to the main drive. For two hundred meters, Lala gave the Lancia its head, and then, as they entered the straight leading to the gates after swinging left, right and left again through the poplars, she braked the car down to a normal speed with repeated applications of the hand lever. "Can't afford to be seen in an obvious hurry," she panted. "They might get suspicious."

  Beside her, holding a rug over Solo's unconscious body on the back seat, Kuryakin lived and died through every second of their 20 mph approach. There was a gunman lounging against the bole of a tree near the mesh gates, and he could see two others over on the far side of the lawns.

  When she was fifty yards away, Lala gave a single sharp toot on the horn. Just before they got there, the iron frames began slowly to swing away. Illya could see through the window of the gatehouse the man who was twirling the wheel operating them—and he could see too, as in some nightmare pantomime, the operator's free hand reaching for a telephone which was presumably ringing....

  The girl changed down with a burst of revs. The Lancia surged forward—and in the same instant, Kuryakin saw the astonished face of the operator, the frantic lunge he made for the wheel.

  As they drew level, the gates halted their outwards swing and began rapidly to close again. The car was almost through when the right hand one slammed into the bodywork, scraped along the wing with a shower of sparks and screeched off the nearside rear quarter. The Lancia shuddered, seemed for a moment to stagger in its tracks, and then resumed its course as the girl's slim wrists expertly corrected the misalignment.

  A moment later, they were bellowing through the archway piercing the gatehouse. Lala swung the car broadside on into the lane with a shrill scream of tires and they howled back along the route to Turin.

  Machine-gun fire stammered a farewell before they were far down the road. The driving mirror vanished in a shower of splinters, a ricochet zinged off the chrome strip lining the wing, and there were several heavy thuds as the lid of the boot was holed. Then they were out of range.. and Kuryakin was able to look back over the Lancia's tail and see across the flat sweeps of meadow through which the road looped the strength of the pursuit.

  There were two cars quite close behind them, the Cadillac and Solo's borrowed Fiat, with a third whose roof he could not identify several hundred yards further back.

  In convoy like this they burned up the quiet afternoon countryside between Buronzo and Ivrea. Lala tried everything she knew; but no matter how perilously she cornered on the limit, no matter how much bhp she coaxed from the willing front-drive power unit on the straight, she was unable to shake off Carlsen's men.

  Then, on a long stretch of road arrowing across the plain beneath the poplars without a corner in sight, the big American car crept inexorably up on them. There were men leaning from its open windows, and soon over the boom of exhausts the sharper note of pistol fire split the air.

  "They must be mad—shooting on an open road in public!" Kuryakin gasped. "You'd think they'd wait until they had us cornered somewhere."

  The girl shook her head as she weaved the convertible from side to side. "It doesn't matter to them," she said. "Don't you see? Carlsen will be in the clear. You can bet he's not in the lead car. The Cadillac crew are all torpedoes—kind of like a kamikaze unit. The only thing that's important is that they destroy us, and with us the hologram glass. They'll try to shoot, bomb, force a crash, anything, no matter who else they involve, no matter who sees them do it. They'll worry about that afterwards."

  "Will they succeed?"

  "Not on this road. It gets twisty again after this next corner. But it's the outskirts of Turin, with the traffic jams and the lights, that worry me."

  The Russian glanced back at the pursuing cars again. "All right; we scrap Turin," he said. "Tell me: are those NATO maneuvers still going on in the Val d'Aosta? It's straight ahead from here, isn't it?"

  "Yes they are and yes it is. But it's another fifty kilometers."

  "Have you enough gas? And could you keep them off all the way?"

  "If we keep to the secondary roads," the girl said. "And naturally I know the dispositions of the army units fairly well. What have you in mind?"

  Kuryakin told her.

  A little less than forty minutes later, they were bumping along a dirt road undulating across a countryside scored with tank tracks. Somewhere to their right there was a cannonading of artillery, and behind, the sporadic rattle of shots marked the progress of Carlsen's convoy along the track.

  Solo had regained consciousness. Owlishly, he stared out over the Lancia's tail, loosing off an occasional shot at the Cadillac from the Berretta, which had unaccountably still been in his jacket pocket.

  Lala drove boldly past notices proclaiming in red lettering on white boards that the way was prohibited, that it was mined, that it was dangerous, and that it was army property subject to artillery fire. She skirted a hutted camp, drove past two astonished sentries in boxes, and sent a group of officers leaping for the hedgerow as she careered past a staff car drawn up by the roadside. Eventually, after looking anxiously around, she steered the convertible into a space below a clump of pine trees and stopped. The Cadillac was laboring up a hill two hundred yards behind them, and the other cars were not yet in sight.

  "Quick!" she cried. "Over there, beyond the Nissens! I'll hold them off from here while you run!"

  "I only hope the equipment in the Commendatore's car is as good as that in ours. In theirs, rather!" said Solo. "Equipment?"

  "I left a homing device in the Fiat," Solo grinned. "I rang the old man before we left Turin and told him the wavelength. He promised to keep a few kilometers away as long as it was transmitting. He shouldn't be far off."

  "I hope not," Lala Eriksson said."Now run! Quick!" She opened the boot of the Lancia, took out a Mannlicher rifle, loaded it, and settled down behind the car's bonnet to fire at the Cadillac. At the first shot, the big sedan stopped and men disgorged on either side to seek shelter behind bushes.

  A moment later, bullets were zipping through the leaves above their heads as the girl's fire was returned with interest. The Fiat pulled up behind the American car and its driver and passengers fanned out through the underbrush in an obvious attempt to outflank her. The third vehicle had stopped some way down the track.

  Solo had completely regained his usual alert wakefulness now. He dropped one hand on the girl's shoulder as she reloaded. "Okay, this is it," he said. "Thank you, bless you—and good luck..."

  Kuryakin flashed her one of his rare smiles. "Thank goodness I remembered they were testing these things, and that you knew exactly where they were," he said. "It's a sick wind that doesn't blow somebody well."

  Lala Eriksson laughed. "An ill wind, Illya! Look! For Heaven's sake, go while I still have some ammunition. I'll be all right. Really."

  Together the two agents plunged through the bushes, swerving wildly to avoid the Thrush fire, and dashed down an incline to a row of Nissen huts behind which a line of half a dozen strange machines were drawn up. Each one had a seat with safety straps, a control panel, some kind of motor, and four vertical tubes about a foot in diameter at the corners. Above them, rotor blades projected from a short shaft rising from the motor housing.

  Solo drew the splintered sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, "What on earth?" he began. "They look like miniature tractors under umbrellas that have
been blown inside out!"

  "One man helicopters, partly conventional, partly jet," Illya explained briefly. "They're trying them out for extra-short-range communication. If we can evade the bullets, they'll get us to Caselle in time for the evening plane... "

  Feverishly, they zigzagged across the clearing and began strapping themselves in. Then, as the Russian called instructions, men in olive green battledress ran from the huts, shouting, and there was a burst of rifle fire from the top of the slope they had just run down.

  With a sudden roar of power, the motors caught. The unwieldy machines bounced on the ground, hovered, and then rose astonishingly, straight up and over the trees. "Just in time," Illya shouted. "Look! Lala's still firing from the Lancia, and the men from the Cadillac are pinning her down. But the Fiat crew beyond—the ones shooting at us!—are in for a surprise!" He pointed down.

  As they soared two hundred feet above the ground, the scene below lay revealed as clearly and as simply as the models in an army sand-table exercise... the scarred convertible shielding the girl with her rifle; the professional gunmen deployed around the Cadillac, now pockmarked with bullet holes; the four killers from the Fiat, kneeling, firing up at the helicopters; the army platoon from the Nissen huts advancing warily up the scrub-covered slope to see what was going on.

  Two ridges away, the ground was alive with men moving between the pines as the genuine maneuvers continued, unaware of the drama being played out in their midst. The third car in the Thrush cavalcade, the one carrying Carlsen, had turned round and was heading back towards Buronzo. By the remaining quartet of helicopters, a fat sergeant in uniform was standing with his mouth open, shaking his fists at the sky. And on the far side of the slope on which the Thrush men were staked out, hidden from the gunmen but clearly visible from the viewpoint of the airborne agents, six police cars had halted on a parallel track as their crews fanned out to take the gangsters from above and behind,

  "There you are, you see!" Kuryakin yelled again above the clatter of the rotors. "The Commendatore made it, after all!" But from Solo's helicopter there was no reply. One of the men in the Fiat must have been an uncommonly good marksman, or unusually lucky, for a stray shot had creased the agent's temple, leaving a scarlet furrow across the skin and plunging him into unconsciousness for the second time in two hours.