April felt the barest influx of air playing over her flesh. It had to come from an opening of some kind. Then it was gone. The trickle of wind came from the gloom just ahead of them, no more than fifteen feet away. April flattened against the wall, straining to listen. She pushed her long dark hair back, away from her ears. She kept herself from trembling, concentrating on the source of the sound. This was a typical THRUSH maneuver, this baiting-in-the-dark. She remembered ruefully the way they had bottled up poor Donegan in Granada. The abandoned air shaft of an old apartment house. Donegan hadn't had a chance, either.
She was dimly aware of the sound of Mark's breathing. Or was it the enemy's? Too hard to tell. She couldn't risk a whisper now. She had almost lost sight of the pale blur of his body. Where exactly was Mark?
Had someone decided to traverse the width and length of the corridor with scathing bursts of machine-gun fire, they wouldn't have had a chance in a million. Either of them. Therefore, that could only mean one thing. The enemy was in the corridor with them. And they were wanted alive. That was worth knowing, but—
Far too late, she sensed the rush of bodies. She tried to scuttle back in the darkness. And then a hard knee rocketed from nowhere, ramming into her stomach. The air shot from her lungs. Tears sprang to her eyes; a fierce stab of agony filled her middle. She staggered, only to feel herself vised by a pair of arms which should have belonged to a gorilla. She shook herself violently, trying to dissolve the waves of shock. But it was too soon. She allowed herself to fall forward against her assailant, smelling the sweaty nearness of an enormous, muscular body. From somewhere, she heard Mark Slate's clipped voice blurt something. Then there was a savage series of smacking, thudding noises, suggesting a terrible fight at close quarters.
Someone else cried out in pain and terror. A blue shaft of gunfire lit up the darkness, briefly, as a streak of lightning ignites an overcast sky. And then April was too occupied with her own troubles to think of anything else. The dry, acidic taste left her mouth and her senses cleared.
Her heavy assailant mashed her in a crushing embrace. She allowed herself to sag further. Now, her attacker, well aware of the softness and pliancy of the curved figure in his hands, roved with his brutal fingers, mixing pleasure with business. April gritted her teeth, shifting her weight into a dead, unstruggling mass. The attacker made himself more comfortable, lessening his fierce hold slightly. April tightened like a bowstring, flipped quickly and her legs levered like scissors. There was a startled curse and the heavy body, anchored at the waist by suddenly lithe and superbly conditioned legs, crashed into the wall.
April broke free and regained her feet.
The gorilla had been deposited somewhere behind her. She braced herself for a return onslaught. It came. A second animal-like charge. She sidestepped but the corridor was too narrow. A wedge of a shoulder clipped her and the man collided with her. April hugged him, in order to avoid a killing kick in the groin.
A hoarse, angry laugh echoed close to her ear. Hot breath washed over her face. There was a rough, tweedy feel to the man's clothing as it chafed against her exposed flesh. She shot a hand into where she knew the face to be, fingers pronged. Another howl as she found the target. She lowered her head and butted. The distance wasn't great for maximal effect but it served. The gorilla's grip loosened as his head snapped back. But he grunted and hung on.
April pushed fear out of her mind. She had run up against a man who had at least ninety pounds on her. Ninety pounds and years of experience as a back-alley fighter. This was obvious from the gouging, corkscrewing motions of the man's hands as they ground cruelly at her flesh.
It was impossible to use her legs now. She was cramped like a pretzel beneath a mammoth opponent. Desperately, she kept her arms high to protect her face and throat. The gorilla added pressure.
"I'll make you say Uncle, baby," his low, gutty voice chortled near her ear.
The sound was all April needed. It measured the distance for her. Swiftly, she reared her head, butting again. There was another howl, followed by a curse. For one precious second, the tight hold about her loosened. She heaved and followed through, slashing savagely with a stiffened palm, driving her right arm out from the shoulder like a pile driver, exactly the way a Karate expert drives through the thick slab of a wooden door.
A hideous gurgle of sound, ending in a tingling, snapping sensation at the very socket of her armpit, told her how successful she had been. The gorilla's body swept from her like a chaff of wheat in the wind. A crash signaled the fall of his heavy body to the floor of the corridor.
April sagged against the wall, her right arm limp and useless. She strove to clear her head of its blurred agony. Her heaving breasts strained at the bra. Her heart was tom-tomming.
The corridor had remained dark. Only now was she conscious of the sudden, terrible silence. Mark—
No, the silence was not healthy. She had to find her way out. She needed light to see by. She staggered down the dark corridor, toward the direction from which the gorilla and his friends had come. There had to be an entranceway somewhere.
She came up hard against a barrier of some kind. She pushed out with her hands. A door fell inward, exposing a bare, drab, basement of sorts. There were low-running water pipes, damp cobbles from another era of New York living and a cracked porcelain sink filled to overflowing with cobwebs and the soot and grime of years of disuse. The light that illuminated the interior of the basement was daylight. Pale, dirty daylight, streaming through a high window that was grilled.
April moved warily into the basement, breathing hard, her body on fire with fatigue and pain. Her eyes roved rapidly. She sniffed the air, experimentally. She waited for some sound, anything, that might alert her faculties. But there was none. All of her training in the U.N.C.L.E. Academy, where she had graduated with honors, plus her actual experiences on assignments, had taught her how to read the atmosphere of a room, a building—a place.
There was no mistaking the aura that hovered over the basement.
The birds from THRUSH had flown. It was quite obvious that they had taken Mark Slate with them, once again. She moistened her lips, reflecting. How could they have? True, she had been occupied in the corridor with Tom Too-Many Thumbs, but she had seen and heard nothing to indicate Mark Slate's mysterious disappearance. How could they have gotten him out of that corridor without her hearing something? There had to be another exit then—it was all too confusing. April, fighting the agony of her bruised shoulder, found it hard to assemble her thoughts.
But there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. Hadn't Napoleon Solo told her that more than once? She had to choose an alternative course of action. For one wild second, a sense of doom dominated her. Damn Mark Slate, damn THRUSH—
Why had THRUSH chosen to take Slate and leave her behind? It didn't make sense. There had to be some explanation for such a move. After all, hadn't they been keen to make a swap for Zorki? They were surely lessening their chances against Mr. Waverly's concern for his agents by kidnapping only one. Unless—
Grimly, April ran to the doorway leading from the basement. A door on the far side of the dank area. It wouldn't budge. Her eyes roamed to the grilled window, far above her head, where she could just make out the ancient, cracked sides of a stone building adjoining. The grilled window stood twenty feet above her head, inaccessible except to someone with a ladder or to Superman. Biting her lips, a nervous habit she gave in to only when she was alone like this, she reentered the darkened corridor. She roved with her hands and feet in the gloom. As she had expected, it was a blind alley. The wall ended against the door of the room that had served as their jailhouse. No, the only way out of the basement was the locked door. There was no telling just how much of an impossible barrier that was.
They had locked her in.
She had no outer clothes, no weapons, no tools. None of her fancy devices for extricating herself. The nail polish explosive X-757 had been the last arrow in her bow. That's a
ll there was; there was no more.
They knew that.
So what could it mean—that they had chosen to leave her behind?
It was at just about this time that she began to realize that the basement and/or the building was expendable. They would probably never need to use it again. THRUSH had a "scorched earth" policy; they liked to burn their bridges behind them, once they had used them for a purpose. Burn them or blow them up.
The building had to be wired for an explosion. It was all too clear, now. A dead U.N.C.L.E. agent was much better than a live U.N.C.L.E. agent, no matter what yardstick THRUSH used.
April shivered in her panties and bra, responding now to the chill dampness and dankness of the corridor and basement.
Where was the bomb?
When would it go off?
The curious blue panel truck with the painted sides that bore the legend ROMEO'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS EXHIBIT, traveled smoothly in the heavy traffic throttling Grand Concourse. It turned off at 161st Street, roared past Yankee Stadium and bore rapidly toward the Harlem River Bridge.
The beautiful redhead at the wheel, a white ribbon pony-tailing her vivid tresses, stared straight ahead, mindful of the jammed lanes of cars going South. Beside her, the man with the Frankenstein child's mask sat with his arms folded serenely. Passing motorists and people on the pavements, glimpsing the offbeat couple, as the truck stopped for red lights, grinned and waved. The redhead and Frankenstein and the blue panel truck were a novelty in the prosaic Bronx afternoon.
"I'm not convinced it was clever leaving her back there," Mr. Riddle said, without any complaint in his voice.
"Slate is sufficient to arrange the trade," Arnolda Van Atta said. "Miss Dancer can't be much more than a female. I wasn't too impressed with her."
"But if Uncle learns of her death before—"
"They won't. There won't be enough left of that old dye factory to put in a stamp album. Her body could never be identified."
Mr. Riddle looked at the Timex watch strapped to his left wrist.
"Five minutes more," he said crisply. "I wonder if we'll hear the explosion from here?"
Arnolda Van Atta laughed harshly, spinning the wheel to bypass a slow-moving Cadillac.
"If the noise bothers you, I'll have Thrush send you some earplugs for future assignments."
Mr. Riddle said nothing. Only the gruesome mockery of his Frankenstein face seemed to smile in approval of the remark.
"What about the other woman?" Mr. Riddle asked unexpectedly.
Arnolda Van Atta shot him a look. "What about her?"
"If Miss Dancer should find her—"
His superior, for that is who Arnolda Van Atta clearly was, laughed again. It was an ugly guffaw that held more invective than a sentence full of oaths.
"If she does, so much the better for her. Perhaps, before they both get blown into infinity, they can tell each other all about the men in their lives."
The paneled truck roared on toward Manhattan, its brightly painted sides as gay as a carousel in the waning sunlight.
Mr. Riddle had only one thought.
He would hate to have been a woman who had raised a spark of envy or jealousy in the heart of a terrifying female like Arnolda Van Atta.
She was a tigress with long, jagged claws that needed, wanted blood.
Demanded it.
Dancer With Cold Feet
In the quiet of the basement, April dressed quickly. She didn't know what drove her to such modesty, except that you couldn't run around town in your underthings, could you? If there was to be a time when she would be out of this damnably cold basement.
She had scavenged the trousers, shoes and shirt of the giant assassin in the hallway. It was robbing the dead, of course. When she had dragged the supine man into the light of the basement, it had been quite obvious that she was toting a corpse.
The Karate blow at such short range had smashed the man's larynx and broken his neck in the bargain. She didn't like to kill but she couldn't think twice about it, either. It was that kind of a profession, being an U.N.C.L.E. agent. You or them. It was a much better arrangement when it was them.
She had entertained some hope that the victim possessed a weapon of some kind. But there was none, the man's pockets holding no more than the usual loose coins, keys and a wallet. These and identity cards in a plastic case indicated that in life, the corpse had been one Clyde C. Charleston, a New Jersey truck driver. Beyond that and his Negroid lineage, she knew nothing. Possibly some poor recruit whom THRUSH had inveigled for the use of his vehicle. The woman in her was fully glad that the wicked Mr. Charleston seemed to have been a bachelor, also.
The trousers and shirt were baggy, swimming on her slender, compact figure. Her feet were lost in the shoes too but they would serve. Time now for an examination of the basement. A true, thorough, painstaking search to discover the bomb mechanism she was certain had been left as a legacy to her. Wasn't the Great Zorki a specialist with explosives? These were his friends.
Soundlessly, swiftly, she checked the place. The rusting pipes were a maze of thick, crisscrossing snakes running at all angles about the room. The cracked porcelain sink, large as it was, revealed nothing. The cobblestones of the floor all seemed secure and undisturbed. The very walls, limned with grease and layers of grime, revealed the desolation of abandonment in the long, long ago. No, there had not been any life in this place until recently. Perhaps this very day.
There was a row of thin, dilapidated metal lockers, lined up like soldiers on the opposite wall. April debated with herself briefly. She could knock the lockers over, and pile one on top of the other, to form a height sufficient to reach the grilled window. Yet, she was as certain as she was of her shoe size that once she attained that giant step, she would be no better off. The barred window opened on an alleyway far from the sound of human ears. She was sure of it. Still, there wasn't enough time, to squander on guesswork. She could be mistaken about the bomb, of course—but she didn't think so.
She had nothing with which to tackle those bars on the window.
Suddenly, she heard a sound—and froze, senses alert.
A vague, almost far-off whisper of noise. She cocked her head, listening. Now the noise grew louder. A scratching, pawing sort of sound.
It was coming from one of the metal lockers.
Mark? A feeling of jubilation surged through her. Was it possible Slate had dashed in here.... The sound abruptly materialized as a whimper. A human moan of despair. That wasn't Mark Slate. You couldn't have gotten a sound like that out of him if you nailed him to a barn door.
There was no mistaking now the sobbing murmur of a woman's voice.
She stepped rapidly to the locker cabinets, and waited. The sound came again. Muffled and indistinct, but a woman's moan all the same. It seemed to be coming from the third battered file on the line. April moved to the tinny door, jiggled the damaged handle and pulled it back.
Almost timed to the gesture, the woman crammed inside, her figure distorted from the narrow confines of her prison, fell forward. April caught her. She had a fleeting glimpse of untidy brown hair, cut in a boyish bob, a piquant face and a shapely arrangement of curves encased in a winding sheet of some kind. The sheet came apart, grey and molding, to reveal a torn, tattered blue dress of a wooly texture.
The woman, girl really, squirmed in her grasp, her arms fighting the folds of the sheet. She settled on the basement floor.
"You—you—" she gasped, breathing deeply.
"Me, me," April agreed. "Do you usually hide in closets? You don't look like an old maid."
She plucked the remainder of the crumbling sheet away from the girl so that she could sit up. She watched as the girl caught her breath. No matter how smudged and sooty the face, there was no hiding the gloriously creamy skin. Her eyes were dark and flashing, her mouth a fine cherry bud. The nose was retroussé. All in all, the last person April would expect to find in a battered tin locker in a damp old basement in the middle of
nowhere.
The girl brushed at her cheek, nervously. "You can't be one of them. You wouldn't have let me out—"
"By them, you mean Thrush?"
The girl nodded, her eyes frowning at April's unusual garb of oversized male clothes. "Have they gone?"
"Yes. Leaving me here to wonder what surprise they have in store for me. Who are you, Alice-Hide-in-the-Closet?"
The girl shook her head, pushing to her feet.
"I'm just somebody they don't want on their hands anymore."
April studied her. "That means you are either from Internal Revenue, Discarded Lovers Incorporated or Enemy Agents, Unlimited. Which is it?"
The girl winced. "I can't tell you."
"All right. We'll discuss that later. Do you know anything about bombs?"
Her eyes opened fearfully. "They haven't—no, they wouldn't do that—this place was one of their best hideouts in the city. Oh, unless—they did pack all their supplies in that blue panel truck!"
"Ah." April smiled, as little as she felt like it. "Then perhaps you'll rack your newly air-conditioned brain and try to think where they might have left some explosive forget-me-not for both of us?"
"I can't," the girl wailed. "I just don't know. Oh, are you sure? If they do that it means the end of my assignment and—"
April shook her head.
"Honey, you haven't been listening. If there's a loud noise in here, we will both have no tomorrow."
The girl swayed, falling back against the sink for support. She saw the faucet and the tiny drip of a globule of water from the rusty tap. "I'm so thirsty," she whimpered. "I need some water—" She looked around for a glass, her eyes almost glazed. April could see that she still hadn't quite collected all her faculties. She might have been sealed in the locker for a long time.
But something the girl had said held her. It set off a bell in her brain, an alarum of warning that meant something. Something important.
"Water," April echoed. "Say that again."
"Water," the girl flared. "I want some water. What's so peculiar about that?"
The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.: The Birds-Of-A-Feather Affair Page 5
