Pulp Fiction | The Invisibility Affair by Thomas Stratton

by Unknown

  "Even if we got him off, we probably couldn't do it, not with these." Illya held up his U.N.C.L.E. Special. "We'd need at least a machine gun to bring it down under the circumstances."

  "It looks as if the missing German dirigible pilot may be our best bet, if we can waylay him," Napoleon said.

  Illya nodded. "Ja, mein kapitan; I was afraid you'd think of something like that."

  They wriggled backwards out of the thicket and crept as silently as possible back into the trees. Then they moved back down the road until they were near the highway. As they went, Napoleon reported the submarine to Mr. Waverly, who promised to have their Chicago office look into the matter. With that meager assurance, Napoleon called Brattner, who was more cooperative but couldn't guarantee to have his agents there in much less than three hours.

  "Looks as if we're on our own," Illya remarked as Napoleon pocketed his communicator. "Any ideas on how to stop our missing pilot?"

  Napoleon looked up and down the path, then pointed to an especially bumpy section. "We'll have as good a chance here as anywhere. He'll have to go slow. If he has a window open, one of us can get him with a sleep dart. If the windows are up, I think we can get the door open before he can react. After all, if he was a German dirigible pilot, he can be very young."

  "And if the windows are closed and the doors locked?"

  "Then we hope we can pry him out before he thinks of calling his friends." Napoleon opened the briefcase he had been carrying, removed what looked like a lump of wet clay and placed it in the center of the road, just beyond the rough stretch. "That should stop him, if we have to use force."

  They didn't have to use force. The pilot was a fat little man who turned off the highway with excessive care, traversed the woods road in low gear, happily humming "Muss i Denn", and came to a complete halt at the rough stretch.

  As he leaned forward to peer myopically through the windshield, Napoleon aimed carefully at his neck and fired the sleep dart. The man slapped at his neck, turned to stare in astonishment at the side of the road, and collapsed on the front seat. Napoleon and Illya rushed forward and lifted him out of the car.

  Illya stared at the pudgy unconscious form. "I hope none of the crew knows him personally," he said. "My powers of impersonation are restricted to a bit of German air lore and an accent; amorphous, I'm not."

  "How about the ability to cloud men's minds?" suggested Napoleon, removing a bottle of hair dye from the briefcase. "How are you at humming 'Muss i Denn'?"

  Illya sat stoically on one bumper of the car while Napoleon applied the dye to Illya's hair, transforming it to a dark, dirty brown, going gray around the temples. The eyebrows were darkened and made to appear bushier, and the eyes underlined to appear baggy. A few lines were skillfully applied to the face, and within fifteen minutes Illya had aged twenty years to the casual observer. When it was over, he stood up and checked himself in a mirror.

  "Does he or doesn't he?" he inquired of his image. "Only your U.N.C.L.E. agent knows for sure."

  His handiwork on Illya completed, Napoleon searched through the unconscious man's pockets. They revealed little except that the man's name was Rudolph Salzwasser and that he was a Thrush. Illya pocketed the walled, identity card, and Thrush communicator.

  "Now we wait, as long as we can," Napoleon said. "If we can hold off long enough, maybe Brattner will get here in time to help."

  As if on cue, the Thrush communicator buzzed.

  "Better answer it, or they'll get suspicious and maybe pull out without you," Napoleon said.

  Illya snapped open the communicator. "Salzwasser here."

  "Now what's wrong?" a voice asked. "You called an hour ago and said you'd be here in half an hour."

  Wishing they had left Rudolph conscious long enough to get an idea of what his voice sounded like, Illya held the communicator away from his mouth and answered, "I missed the turn-off. I'll be there in a few minutes."

  "Snap it up. McNulty is getting impatient. He's ready to pilot the thing himself, after the way he lucked out in getting it all the way here yesterday."

  Without giving Illya a chance to sign off, the communicator went dead.

  "Well, here goes," Illya muttered and climbed into the car and drove off down the road at a leisurely pace. Napoleon recovered his gob of plastic explosive from the middle of the road, tied and gagged Rudolph securely and, with some help from Kerry, dragged him under some bushes.

  Ten minutes at a fast walk brought them back to their thicket. The road was much shorter in the daylight. The boat had apparently been waiting for Illya when he had driven up, for he was already well out into the lake, Rudolph's bulky suitcase clutched in his lap.

  Napoleon checked his tracer and discovered that it was no longer picking up anything. Evidently Sanders was on board the dirigible. He hoped

  Brattner could get there faster than he had promised. It wasn't likely that Illya could get Morthley off the ship without raising an alarm, and once Thrush was alerted, the odds against the U.N.C.L.E. agents would be formidable. A less optimistic man would have said overwhelming.

  Chapter 11

  "Well, If It Isn't Mr. Kuryakin Again"

  A large metal hook appeared with startling suddenness in the air a few yards in front of the boat. As Illya watched, it lowered until it almost touched the water. He could see a steel cable extending upward and disappearing mysteriously about ten feet above the water.

  The operator of the boat motioned toward the hook as they pulled alongside it. "Hang your bag on the hook, put your foot in it like a stirrup, and get a grip on the cable. You'll be hauled up."

  Illya stared thoughtfully at the cable, which rose straight up and disappeared into thin air. "Shouldn't someone be playing a flute?" he murmured as he followed instructions. "With a snake charmer waiting in the wings?"

  The cable started to rise.

  A few seconds later, everything went black. Even though he had expected it, he almost tumbled of his perch. The sun was gone, the water, the shore, even the cable and his clenched hands. His invisible body was being pulled by an invisible force to an invisible destination. A wave of dizziness swept him.

  Then there was again illumination as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Above him he could make out a cluster of lights. As he was drawn nearer, he realized that some of the lights came from the control gondola, while the one directly above him must emanate from inside the dirigible itself. He could see the dirigible only as a vast bulk, fading away into the darkness away from the lights. The light above him became brighter and he could recognize what appeared to be tremendous bomb bay doors yawning above him. The clatter of a winch came to him. As he passed the doors there was a loud humming sound and he saw the doors begin to close beneath him. The cable halted as they swung shut.

  "You can step off now," a voice came from a platform overhead. Illya stepped off the hook onto the closed doors and picked up his suitcase. As he looked around, he realized what the doors were: aircraft hangar doors. The United States had made at least one ship like this, which could carry, launch, and pick up three fighter planes; evidently the Germans had produced a similar design.

  He considered what Thrush could do with this much invisible transportation. Fortunately, modern fighter planes were larger than those of the 1930's, so the hangar where he stood could not readily be used for its original purpose. But it could, he thought, be easily adapted for use as a bomb bay. He thought about the dirigible hovering invisibly over Washington, D.C. with a cargo of plague germs, and shuddered.

  "Rudolph Salzwasser?" A large man with a gold earring in his left ear and his right arm in a sling approached. When Illya nodded, the man picked up the suitcase with his good hand and motioned Illya to follow him.

  "My name is Hunter," the man said over his shoulder as he led the way up some steps. "We have some temporary quarters set up for you just back of the control gondola. According to McNulty, they used to be crew's quarters; they're not in bad shape when you consider
this thing is probably forty years old."

  Illya muttered noncommittal sounds to indicate he was listening, and took careful note of his surroundings. Looking back from the top of the steps, he could see over the edge of the platform, to where a large winch had begun to feed out the cable again. The winch operator had apparently just thrown a large switch which operated the hangar doors; they were beginning to open.

  Hastily, he moved to overtake Hunter, who was still moving forward and idly conversing. "...probably had a bad few moments coming up," he was saying as Illya came up beside him. "You get used to it after a few times, though."

  Illya muttered assent. This must be the keel, he thought. Now they were on a narrow metal catwalk. Surrounding them, in inverted triangles, were rows of metal girders. The girders, with their lacy Swiss cheese appearance, had a look of delicacy about them, as did almost everything about the dirigible except for the hangar doors and the winch platform. The design provided maximum rigidity with minimum weight, but it had a certain fairy-tale look about it. Between the girders were metal tanks of all shapes and sizes. Some probably contained spare helium under pressure, he supposed, while others could be fuel. He saw no evidence of sandbags, and wondered where the one that had nearly dropped on Lavell had come from.

  Now the catwalk and girders were replaced b an almost conventional hallway with a half dozen doors opening on either side. Hunter led the way to the first door on the right. "You can have this one," he said, opening the door. "There aren't many of us on board so we can each have our own room. The air force gets the best of everything," he added sardonically. "Down in the sub they're packed in like sardines."

  Illya stepped into the room behind Hunter. It was a small spartanly furnished cubicle with a pair of double bunks along the outer wall and a single chair and table in the middle of the floor. The section of wall beyond the head of the bunks was clear glass. Illya noted that the partitions dividing this room from the next didn't match the rest of the construction, as if they had been added later.

  "I understand a Mr. McNulty is in charge of the operation," Illya said. "I would like to see him, please..."

  Hunter's rumbling chuckle sounded. "McNulty likes to think he's in charge. Ivan Forbes, head of the Milwaukee Satrapy is in charge of the operation, but he's gone on ahead. Right McNulty is down in the sub overseeing the transfer of the sonar equipment, so you take orders from me."

  Illya kept an indifferent expression on his face and nodded. Apparently Rudolph was expected to know about the sonar.

  "Now then, unless you'd prefer to rest for a bit, we'll take a look at the control room."

  "Ja," Illya replied. "I'm quite anxious to become familiar with the operation. I understand we do not have much time...?"

  Hunter took the bait. "Very little. If we can get the sonar installed today, we'll start moving this evening. You'll be expected to give us some instructions on handling the dirigible; we've been having a few problems. That ass McNulty—" He broke off abruptly.

  "Good, good," Illya said. "It sounds like an efficient operation. Shall we go forward?"

  "Follow me," Hunter said as he went out into the hallway, through another small compartmented section, slid back a door that blocked the end of the hallway, and went down a short flight of steps. "The control gondola," he announced as Illya followed him down the steps and let the door slide shut behind him.

  The area, about twenty feet long by ten feet wide, was bare of any decoration. The front third seemed to contain all the controls, although from Illya's position at the rear he could see only a few items, including a pair of wheels that looked as if they belonged on a small sailing ship. The entire curving front of the gondola was glass, whit the roof supported by braces that seemed to have been built from a giant's erector set.

  One of the crew was inspecting something near one of the control wheels. The back two thirds of the gondola was completely bare except for a huge box-like metal affair, a good six feet square and three feet deep, with dials and controls clustered on the front of it. A wispy, white-haired man stood in front of the machine, watching the dials.

  Luck, Illya realized, seemed to be running his way for a change. Dr. Morthley was already located and the only Thrush who could identify him was on the submarine. "Ach, this must be the invisibility device," he said heartily, moving forward. "Fascinating, utterly fascinating! How does it work?"

  He reached Morthley's side and clapped him solidly on the back. Morthley looked up annoyed. "I'm an inventor, not a lecturer," he snapped. "Get McNulty to explain it to you; he likes to talk."

  The door at the rear of the gondola opened. Illya turned, noted that the man standing in the entrance was the elderly caretaker of the dirigible hangar. He hastily turned back and peered at the OTSMID with feigned eagerness.

  "McNulty says he's got to see you right away," Sanders said to Hunter.

  "Now what?" muttered Hunter in annoyance. He turned to Illya. "Take your time and familiarize yourself with the invisibility device," he instructed. "I'll be back as soon as possible." He and Sanders vanished up the stairway.

  Illya whispered urgently to Dr. Morthley, "Come with me, please," and led the scientist toward the rear, away from the man who was still puttering around the controls. "I'm Illya Kuryakin," he began, "and—"

  Dr. Morthley's face lightened in recognition. "Ah, the U.N.C.L.E. agent, he whispered. "I thought you looked familiar, but I saw you so briefly in that hotel room..."

  "Is there any way out of here besides those hangar doors?" Illya asked.

  Dr. Morthley nodded to a dimly-lit spot in the shadow of the OTSMID. "There's a door, right there, but we must be a hundred yards in the air."

  "We have ways," Illya said, and nodded at the man at the front of the gondola. "What's he doing?"

  "I think he's the sonar man. He's either looking for a good place to install it or he's trying to look so busy that he won't be called on to help McNulty move the thing."

  Illya nodded thoughtfully. So far the man had not looked up from his work since Illya had entered. After a second, Illya tiptoed up the steps to the rear door, opened it a crack and peered through. Seeing no one, he let it slide noisily shut, then strode to the front of the gondola. "They're bringing the sonar aboard," he said crisply. "McNulty wants you back in the hangar."

  Sighing, the man put down a wrench and headed for the stairs. As he passed Illya, the latter chopped him neatly at the base of the neck, caught him as he doubled up, and eased him to the floor. Wasting no time, Illya ran to the door Dr. Morthley had indicated and twisted it open. From inside his shirt pocket he pulled a duplicate of the miniature wire and grapnel that he and Napoleon had used to cross the fence surrounding the dirigible hangar. He fastened the grapnel firmly to a girder, let the wire dangle outside the door, and produced two pairs of leather gloves. He handed one pair to Dr. Morthley.

  "Put these on, then grab that wire, and slide," Illya told him. "You may have to drop a few feet into the water, but not far. Can you swim?"

  Morthley nodded.

  "Fine. Get your shoes off." Illya had kicked off his own oxfords. "When you hit the water, head for shore. Napoleon Solo and your niece will be there to give you a hand."

  "How very interesting," came a voice from behind them. Illya whirled, to confront McNulty, Hunter and Sanders. Hunter and McNulty held automatic pistols, but it was the old Ithaca double-barreled pistol, held lovingly by Sander that made Illya hesitate to do anything rash.

  McNulty was smiling broadly. "Well, if it isn't Mr. Kuryakin again. Do close the door like a good fellow and step over this way."

  * * *

  Napoleon looked irritably at his watch. Brattner should have been here by now. One U.N.C.L.E. Special, even with shoulder stock, wasn't going to provide much covering fire against a dirigible and a submarine. He wished he'd brought his Gyrojet rocket pistol along. Even if it wasn't very accurate, a dirigible was a pretty big target.

  He looked at his watch again. I had been over
an hour since Illya had disappeared into the sky on that hook. The submarine had appeared again, transferred cargo to the dirigible, and resubmerged, but there was no sound from Illya's communicator.

  Suddenly the communicator beeped and simultaneously Kerry was pounding him on the shoulder and shouting, "They're coming!" Napoleon looked up in time to see a man appear in midair, apparently sliding down some invisible support. A second figure was already in the water. Shots sounded from somewhere overhead.

  "It's Uncle Willard!" Kerry shouted. "I saw his white hair!"

  "Napoleon!" Illya's voice, sounding slightly muffled, came from the communicator. "We'll head for the pier. They're going to be after us; get out there to pull us out."

  Napoleon leaped from the thicket, followed by Kerry. He motioned her back, but didn't have time to argue when she failed to obey. A third figure had appeared, lowered from thin air by the giant hook. He was holding on to the cable with one hand and firing at the fugitives with the other. He didn't appear to be a very good shot. The water began to roil, marking the emergence of the submarine.

  Napoleon reached the end of the pier before the two in the water did, and was waiting to pull them out. He wondered for a moment how Illya had managed to keep Rudolph's little cap tightly on his head throughout the affair, as he knelt down to haul up the first swimmer. The man grasped his hand and then suddenly swung his feet up against the pier. Napoleon had a split second to realize that the suddenly upturned face was not that of Illya; then he was flying through the air. He managed to retain control of his gun as he floundered in the water, but when he managed to come upright and facing the pier he was also facing Ezra Sanders and the twin muzzles of the old Ithaca. McNulty, cap discarded, was holding Kerry.

  "Mr. Solo and Miss Griffin," McNulty said. "I think this more than makes up for my unimaginative method of capturing you and Mr. Kuryakin the other day. And to think my parents always told me that my ability as a mimic had no practical value!"

  * * *

  Sometime later, McNulty finished fastening the handcuffs to the frame of the bunk and stepped back to admire his handiwork. From the lower bunk, Illya watched interestedly. "I hope you don't mind taking the upper bunk," he remarked, "but after all, I was here first." McNulty chuckled appreciatively and left. Sanders spat a stream of tobacco juice on the deck and followed.