The Volacano Box Affair
Page 5
April Dancer had taken his wrist in her hand and her nails almost cut through his flesh. All at once a low beeping sound emitted from the short wave set.
"That will be headquarters," Napoleon said. "And Philip Bouvier—where is he now, April?"
"Returning here he was shot at and wounded. I was able to get most of this first-hand information from him in the hospital in Singapore."
ACT V
THE MAN FROM SINGAPORE
EVERYTHING pointed to Singapore.
Paul Rollins, who had purchased the oil wells in Oklahoma had cabled to Singapore when the deal was made.
Kae Soong had called himself The Man from Singapore.
His helicopter squadron appeared to be based in Singapore.
It was clear that the THRUSH operation was being controlled from Singapore. But what had begun to grow clear only in the last week was that Singapore might be the next victim of volcanic aggression. It was this that Waverly told Napoleon Solo.
Napoleon sucked his breath in sharply when his chief suggested the possibility, and gazed blankly at the short wave radio as if it might be the old warhorse himself, his unlit pipe drooping out of the corner of his bloodhoundlike face, eyes sad with a kind of perpetual contemplation of calamity. Behind Napoleon, April burst out with, "But there are millions of people in Singapore—"
"Is that April?" Waverly asked in response to the girl's high voice.
"Yes, sir," Napoleon said.
"You may tell her that we're aware of Singapore's population. But just as important, we're aware of THRUSH'S total indifference to the lives of millions if the stakes are big enough. In this case the stakes are the souls of billions—that is to say, control of all the world's governments. At this moment, so far as we've been able to conclude, THRUSH is establishing volcanic centers in key locations around the globe.
"We've little idea about their whereabouts specifically, because we've no instruments for detecting the Dacian device. But our Singapore headquarters has been tracking down the sources of cables and other communications to THRUSH and the conspiracy appears to be global.
"I have Illya working on a system to detect and destroy volcano boxes, but I can't count on its being perfected in time, even if it's developed at all. There are too may unknowns, so we have to aim at the source and try to stop the head man from giving the signal to detonate the volcanoes. And of course, we have to find Dacian."
"To your knowledge, sir, are the volcano boxes fully operational?"
"I suspect they are not. But I believe intense pressure, if not torture, is being applied to Dacian to disclose his formula for a key element in the boxes. In anticipation of his yielding, the boxes, minus the key element, are being installed. The moment he relents the element will be mass produced and set into the boxes. That is why it is imperative to find Dacian. I am almost certain he is in Singapore."
"But what makes you think Singapore is next on THRUSH'S agenda?"
"Well, it happens that Sarabando, that nice little tyrant who wiped out Tapwana, has suggested to the government of Singapore that its presence in the Federation would be most welcome. More significant, Sarabando has hinted that Singapore's refusal to come into the Federation would be regarded as an unfriendly if not hostile act.
"I will not go into the political implications now, though I'm sure you can figure most of them out for yourself. It only needs be said that those implications are worldwide. If Singapore is destroyed, no other government will resist a THRUSH demand for surrender. The volcanic weapon will simply be too potent for any sensible government to resist."
"Just one question. Why destroy Singapore if that's where THRUSH is basing its operations?"
"Singapore," Waverly explained, "is a highly strategic location. It's a valuable port and its position, in relation to the Boruvian Federation, gives THRUSH an unbroken chain of control in that part of the Pacific Ocean. So they will, if necessary, destroy it and move their headquarters elsewhere.
"You have to understand, Napoleon, that Dacian is being forced to make one of his secret elements at a time, but THRUSH is going to try to blackmail the world by claiming it has the formula and can make as many of them as it wants. And remember, if Dacian talks, THRUSH will be able to make as many operational volcano boxes as it wants. So you must proceed to Singapore at once, locate Kae Soong and Dacian, and capture or kill."
"Any hint of their specific location?"
"SINGOIL, Napoleon. That is their cable address, but we've been unable to ascertain how they pick up their messages. If you can do that, it will lead you to Kae Soong."
They signed off and Napoleon turned to April. The muscles of her jaw were rigid with tension, and her brow deeply furrowed as if she were in pain. Napoleon, thinking it was only the news from U.N.C.L.E. headquarters that was disturbing her, was about to speak when April Dancer silenced him.
He held his breath and the muscles of his legs tightened in expectation of fast movement. She was straining her ears, and her eyes darted to the left as she heard a bird screeching.
Napoleon Solo tiptoed over to her.
"What is it?" he whispered.
"My guards haven't signaled as they're supposed to, every half hour. Instead I've been hearing—it could be a macaw, but... Come this way."
She moved towards a bamboo panel in the side of the hut, which she gingerly removed. She fell to her hands and knees and crept out after looking both ways. Napoleon followed, and after exiting paused beside her. April reached under a pile of leaves and drew out a pair of machetes.
They crept along the side of the hut and peered cautiously around the corner. It was pitch black, but a dim glow from the doorway of the hut highlighted a few objects directly in front of it.
One of these was a skinny oriental with machete raised. The machete was bloody. He stood poised before the doorway, as if to strike down anyone who emerged from it. Then Napoleon caught the glint of something metallic a few feet away from the intruder, and his eyes at last made out the shape of a second one bearing what might be a grenade.
After a moment the grenade-bearer crept up to the doorway of the hut, and behind him appeared yet another oriental, a loincloth his only piece of clothing. He came to a stealthy halt.
The obvious plan was for the second to toss his bomb, and for the others to position themselves in such a way that any survivors would be slain as they emerged. Napoleon nudged April and nodded with his chin in the direction of the grenade-bearer. She was to take care of him, and he would tackle the other two.
The second intruder released the silvery object, and as he did April and Napoleon rushed them. A pop and hissing noise told them it hadn't been a grenade but a teargas canister, and as they covered the ten yards between themselves and their antagonists their nostrils caught the pungent odor of the gas seeping out of the hut.
They took the intruders completely by surprise. The bomb-thrower reached for a gun, but April's machete lashed across his shoulder. He cried out hideously as blood gouted out of the wound. The nearest oriental with the machete whirled around but had scarcely brought his blade back when Napoleon's caught him fiercely on the neck. The other man was ready for Napoleon and lashed quickly at his exposed left side, but the agent twisted out of the way and warded off a backhand swipe of the blade as the attacker tried to get him coming back.
For an instant they squared off, and it looked as if it would be an even duel. But April had now freed herself and was making ready to join the fray. In matters of world defense, two-to-one odds were not unfair. But as the oriental glanced at April, Napoleon lunged, catching him off his guard, and slashed at his mid-section.
He dropped his machete to defend the blow, and the ring of crossed blades raised a violent chatter of jungle birds. Napoleon brought his foot up and caught the swordsman in the kidney. He yelped in pain, but it was the last noise he was to make, for with immense speed Napoleon brought the razor tip of his weapon up into the man's throat, and he dropped, dying, at Solo's feet.
"You'll come with me to Singapore," Napoleon said. "Now hurry. I don't know how many more of these guys there are, and how much time it will take for them to get here."
Out of a compartment in her belt she removed a piece of cloth as fine as silk and placed it over her nose and mouth. It was a filter which folded into a package as big as a sugar cube.
Protected against the gas, she went into the hut and came out a few minutes later with the radio and some papers. They ventured into the jungle for twenty or thirty yards, then destroyed the radio by pulling out its vitals and twisting the dials so that even if the radio were found no one would know what wavelength it was on. They buried it and burned the documents beside it. Then they care fully covered everything with dirt and leaves and headed towards the beach.
When they got there, April's guide lay slumped over a gunwale, his head almost separated from his body by a vicious machete blow, and the bottom of the boat had been stove in with heavy stones.
April Dancer ran down the beach to a point where the island cut sharply inland. As they rounded a point they stopped abruptly and spied a sailboat guarded by another oriental.
"I knew this is where it would be," she whispered, drawing out a gun and slipping a silencer over the muzzle. She aimed it at the man guarding the boat, and as the gun hissed he dropped.
"I knew they'd place their boat here to sneak up on yours," she explained once they'd shoved off and were making for open sea, "and the footsteps in the sand showed that I was right."
Napoleon took out his communicator and signaled the ship off shore to send a launch to pick them up. The cool leeward breeze carried them quickly to their destination.
TWO
THE GOVERNMENT of Singapore had read Sarabando's letter with barely stifled amusement. The dictator of the almost invisible little federation of islands to the south was extending to one of the primary centers of trade in the Asian complex an "invitation" to join, in exchange for certain privileges and prerogatives.
With elaborate oriental politeness the government had declined the invitation, explaining that its commitments to other interests made it more feasible to keep its hands untied.
Under any other circumstances such a rejection would have satisfied an insolent petty tyrant like Sarabando. But a week later he issued another invitation to Singapore. This time, cheerfully and patiently, he explained that the honorable governors of the city must have misunderstood his first note. That initial invitation was not so much a cordial expression of good will as it was a subtle suggestion of the unpleasant consequences that might follow if Singapore held out.
So, in case Singapore did not clearly get the implied message, Sarabando spelled it out a little more explicitly.
This note too provoked mirth in the cabinet of this queen of Southeast Asia, except for the response of one minister, who was convinced that Sarabando had a weapon of grave potential, and believed that the dreadful spectacle of Tapwana's volcanic destruction had been no accident.
But his pleas were rejected by his colleagues, and though Sarabando's final message—an undisguisedly severe warning—caused some serious discussion in the higher echelons of the government, no serious measures were considered to defend against, let alone look into, Sarabando's "ravings."
A few days after the diplomatic positions jelled Kae Soong made his appearance in the secret Singapore laboratory of Edward Dacian. Dacian, who had never carried much meat on his bones, had become gaunt and stringy. His hands shook and his muscles twitched, and he had begun to blink frequently.
"I understand you are in the final stage of preparing the liquid reflectors," the chunky, tall THRUSH agent said to him.
"Y—yes, if my hands will stop trembling long enough."
"Why are you so nervous?"
"Hungry, tired."
"You're being mistreated?"
The scientists nodded jerkily.
"You know why, don't you?"
Again Dacian nodded.
"Would it not be easier, then, simply to let us have the formula for the reflectors? Then we would require no further work from you, and we would send you some place pleasant where you would dine well and sleep and never trouble with formulas."
"Heaven," Dacian said.
"You must realize that we are on the verge of deducing your formula anyway. We know what materials you have been using, we even know their measurements and combinations, and it is only a matter of time before we put together our own."
It was sheer bluff, for in spite of all attempts to assess the work Dr. Dacian was doing, his captors hadn't the slightest idea where to begin. Once they had entered the laboratory after Dacian left it for the night, and taken samples of the material he had created, by the next morning Dacian told them that by so tampering with it they had altered its nature, and he would have to start all over. Whether it was true or not, Dacian knew how to play the game of bluff as well as they.
"Why are you letting them kill you by inches?" Kae Soong asked as if "they" were on one side and Soong was on Dacian's. "If you would only be reasonable they would release you from this torture and roil."
"I'm down, not out," said Dacian in one of those American phrases which made little sense to the Oriental mind.
"You mean you will not alter your course?"
"I agreed—one device at a time," Dacian droned, his eyes shutting involuntarily, then snapping open.
"I don't know if they will tolerate such tardy progress any longer. There is too much at stake."
"Learn my formula, then kill me. But you won't learn any more from me."
Trembling almost as if palsied, the scientist returned to his worktable where, crouching over his formulas to prevent televised eavesdropping, he continued his painstaking development of the key device for the next volcano box.
The location for the next eruption had been tentatively settled on the week before. The island of Singapore is for the most part a low and of twenty or thirty feet above sea level, but the central portion is a granite formation dominated by a mountain called Bukit Timah.
It is not high as mountains go, and is really more of a hill than anything else, being less than 600 feet high. Nevertheless its position is enough to radiate destruction in all directions, and a volcanic eruption there would have at least disruptive, and probably critical, effects on rail, shipping and air traffic. And if the eruption were of greater intensity than calculations predicted, the effects would carry into the city itself, with its magnificent skyline and superb harbor facilities.
Bukit Timah, then, was the location of THRUSH'S next display and possibly its last. It was beginning to look dubious that Dacian would ever reveal his formula, and even less likely that he would survive to make the reflectors for even one more box. The threat of suicide became a consideration now. Though Dacian was a coward, his suffering could reach the point where he would be performing a kindness to himself to take his life.
And to his physical suffering must be added the mental torture of realizing that his device was responsible for countless lives lost and an unimaginable number of lives threatened.
But THRUSH was not as disturbed over the prospect of losing or killing Dacian as it could have been. It was planning to use the destruction of Singapore as the key chess piece in its game of world domination. Kae Soong and his colleagues had hoped that the destruction of Tapwana would be a broad enough hint to the nations of the planet that failure to heed a THRUSH warning would result in a spasm of volcanic fury.
But obviously the hint hadn't been broad enough. Some people were convinced that Tapwana's destruction, after rebelling against the Boruvian Federation, was strictly a coincidence. A similar event on Singapore, however, would leave no doubt in anyone's mind. Nor would anyone wonder how far THRUSH would go in its bid for conquest.
Thus, when Singapore fell, THRUSH would issue its warning to the governm
ents of the world, and none, witnessing the awful havoc wreaked on the island-nation, would be able to resist. Without the possession of another volcano box, THRUSH could nevertheless secure its goals.
On Bukit Timah, a pair of observers emerged from a helicopter and examined the structure of the ground. On the north side evidence of a great fissure in the granite suggested itself to their trained eyes, and a series of tests confirmed it. It was here that Dacian's next volcano box would be placed.
ACT VI
A NETWORK OF SATELLITES
ILLYA KURYAKIN and Frieda Winter had spent almost every minute together in the two days since his arrival at the Texas laboratory. But by the end of the second day they were no nearer a solution than they'd been at the beginning of the first.
There were two problems: to devise a way of locating volcano boxes, and to devise a way of destroying them once they were spotted. The first difficulty arose out of the fact that the Dacian machine emitted no special radiation, either while in operation or while dormant. True, it did project the polarized light of a laser beam when it was activated, but all of that light was directed downward into the earth, and could not therefore be detected by a conventional scanning device.
And because it did not utilize an excessive amount of electricity—in fact, it could operate on a self-contained power-pack attached to a gas generator—it could not be traced by means of its drain on conventional sources of electricity.
Of course, the workings of a volcano device might eventually be ascertained by seismograph, but that would probably make it too late, for the laser would probably bore into the magma beneath the earth's mantle a mere hour or two after causing an earthquake.
And even if you could locate a volcano box in advance of the final stage of destructiveness, there were still the problems of reaching and destroying it.
Illya said dourly, "We've been sitting in this room for eight hours. Why don't we go out and get some fresh air? Maybe it will clear our heads and help us think."