by Unknown
TWO
The pit, as Napoleon Solo and Illya sound found out to their dismay, had absolutely sheer sides. It was a perfect cylinder, illuminated by a single light high up in the solid stone ceiling.
That ceiling was at least twenty feet above the tightly-packed dirt floor on which they found themselves unceremoniously dumped by their THRUSH captors. Immediately the steel portal through which they had been pushed clanged shut. They heard the pong of electric bolts ramming home. Opposite they saw a similar steel port, also closed. It was barely three feet tall, and twice as wide as a regular door.
While Solo speculated upon what noxious poison fumes would probably come curling in upon them, Illya walked round and round the base of the cylinder. The pit was constructed entirely of ancient and faintly damp blocks of stone.
"Very exciting so far," Solo said.
"Don't make jokes, please."
"What else can I do? Yell for a Boy Scout to lend assistance?"
"It's a thought." Dourly Illya contemplated their surroundings. "If it hadn't been for Dr. Bauer catching you the way he did, we might have made it."
"Well, we didn't make it. So now we have to figure a way out of here."
A somber silence fell. The two U.N.C.L.E. agents had worked together long enough to know that false high spirits weren't going to help now.
Solo paced. So did Illya. Behind the smaller steel door they heard a peculiar snuffling or coughing.
Abruptly, amplified tinnily through a speaker, they heard Vanessa Robin say:
"Please don't stop the brittle conversation, gentlemen. We were enjoying it no end."
Illya and Solo snapped around, craned upward. An entire section of the stone block wall had slid aside to reveal a thick safety-glass window about six feet wide. The curved window was recessed into the wall of the pit about three feet above their heads.
Beyond the window, Vanessa Robin and Felix Klaanger lifted their right hands in a mock toast. Each held a dark brown highball. Lesser THRUSH lights crowded up behind them to watch the spectacle. The U.N.C.L.E. agents stood their ground and glared.
"Well," came Vanessa's voice again, "I suppose we might as well start the show if you've both run out of epigrams." She reached out to touch a control hidden by the window's edge.
The short steel panel behind them shot aside. They saw a dark stone tunnel from which issued that unusual coughing, plus a decidedly gamy animal smell.
"I must tell you," Vanessa said, "that we keep the poor creature on a starvation diet for occasions such as this. It will be interesting to see which one of you he selects for his first course—"
Crouching against the curved wall opposite the tunnel mouth, Napoleon Solo saw a pair of shining eyes regarding him with what appeared to be hunger. "Good Lord," he breathed as the thing's claws ticked on the stone and it lumbered forward into the pit—an immense, barrel-shaped, club-headed Bavarian brown bear with a wet black snout and dripping white fangs.
Illya Kuryakin looked at the monster and flattened his back against the wall.
"Try not to attract his attention," he whispered.
Both agents remained motionless. The bear lumbered one step forward, then another. It wagged its immense head from side to side, its large, brown, dumb eyes fixed on a point just between the two agents. It became obvious that the bear had located its prey.
The long, lolling red tongue shot out. The bear licked its chops. With a deep growl it started forward again.
When it had reached the midway point in the dirt floor, it paused. Then, ponderously, it swung its head to the right until its snout was pointing directly at Solo.
"If it lunges at me," Solo whispered, "you go out through the tunnel."
"Impossible," Vanessa's voice blared over the speaker. "There are thick bars, and a guard, at the other end."
Solo swallowed hard. The bear advanced again, baring its fangs. Illya was leaning down slowly, very slowly. Very carefully he dug the fingers of his right hand into the dirt.
Solo started to circle to the left around the wall, also slowly. The bear changed course, its huge foot pads making marks in the dirt. Abruptly, with a slavering roar, it lunged forward.
Napoleon Solo dodged wildly to the left. Not fast enough! The furry monster crashed against him, flattening him in the dirt.
Horrible weight crushed down on top of him as he tried to roll out from under. The bear snarled and bit at his head. Solo wrenched his head savagely to one side to avoid the bite.
The bear growled ferociously. Drool dripped off its tongue on to Solo's forehead. The bear dipped its head again to bite, and just at that second Illya darted in and flung a handful of stinging dirt into the creature's eyes.
Startled, the bear automatically chomped its jaws shut. Solo dragged his left arm out of the path of those murderous teeth and ripped himself to the right, out from under. The bear snapped blindly at him, tearing his shirt and leaving painful teeth marks that oozed blood on his left forearm. From the loudspeaker came a mocking patter of applause.
The bear gathered itself on all fours, shook its immense shoulders as Solo carefully backed away from it. There was, unfortunately, no place to run. Next time, Solo knew, he might not be so lucky.
With another mighty growl the bear leaped. Napoleon Solo dodged to one side. His left foot skidded in the dirt. He went down to one knee. The bear charged straight at his head, slavering jaws opening wide and wet and red.
Chommmp! The jaws shut, snatching something out of mid-air, a scarlet something which, incredibly, had sailed out of the mouth of the tunnel.
Now the bear tore at this, worrying it back and forth. Another, similar item sailed into the pit. Then two more.
Solo watched the bear go wild and attempt to ingest all four huge, succulent raw slabs of meat into its maw at once. There was a hiss from the tunnel.
Overhead, Vanessa Robin and Klaanger and the others shouted and cursed. Content with a less-than-human meal, bruin was sitting on his haunches, masticating bone, gristle and meat with loud crunching sounds. And on hands and knees inside the tunnel, her cheeks and knuckles smeared with meat juice, was the person who had called to them and tossed the meat in to save them.
"I stabbed the guard and—unlocked the bars," Helene Bauer panted. "I didn't know whether I could get here in time with the meat. I stole it from the kitchens. Hurry, the bear is nearly finished—" And she backed hastily down the tunnel.
Illya's face lit with hope. "Don't stand on ceremony, for heaven's sake!" He dove into the tunnel on all fours.
Solo followed immediately. Over the loudspeaker, Vanessa Robin shrieked in rage. An alarm klaxon began to scream; alerting the entire garrison to the atttempted escape.
THREE
Napoleon Solo banged his skull, shins and elbows as he crawled along the gamy-smelling tunnel with all possible speed. Illya reached the tunnel's end and tumbled out on to a ramp which ran down from the tunnel to the floor of a small cement-block room. Half of one of the other walls was the entrance to the bear's cage. A large section of bars had been slid aside, and a musky effluvium of straw and droppings floated from the dark place beyond.
On the floor of the small chamber sprawled the THRUSH animal handler, an electric prod in his lifeless fingers and a short kitchen knife projecting from his throat.
"Not very neat," Illya commented. "But let's not quibble."
Helene was trembling, obviously struggling to keep her fear under control. "I—I've never killed anyone before—"
"What happened? I thought you were one of the chief lady storm troopers of the Fourth Reich," Solo grunted as he unbent himself on the ramp outside the tunnel. He reached up and slammed a switch which lowered the bars into place. Behind, in the pit, the klaxon still howled.
Helene gave a quick, uncertain nod. "I thought I believed it. I pretended to be as tough as the next. But I've never killed. Not until now." Her head lifted. All the explanation the two U.N.C.L.E. agents needed was contained in the furious blaze of h
er eyes and the bitter way she said, "When that woman shot Papa, as if he were nothing, nothing but a lump of mud—everything changed. I had to strike back at them."
"We'd better get moving," Illya warned. "How do we get out of here?"
"The main gate of the estate is heavily guarded," the girl said.
Solo's eyes crinkled down to worried slits. "And the troops will be out in force."
Illya said, "I left two THRUSH fellows sleeping at another gate on the far side of the parade ground."
"Then let's try that," Solo said. "Helene, lead on."
The girl's wide black leather belt caught dull reflections from the ceiling lights as she spun around and unbolted an iron door. "This stairway leads up to a delivery passageway."
In the distance boots slammed. Other klaxons picked up the bleating ooogah-ooogah of the first. With Helene racing beside them, the two U.N.C.L.E. agents took the steps upward two at a time.
Solo was strangely conscious of the jaws of a trap closing unseen somewhere around them. His palms ran with cold sweat. Like a warning, the outraged bellow of the frustrated bear drifted after them.
They reached a feebly-lit landing.
"Here is the entrance to the delivery passageway," Helene whispered. She pressed her hands against a steel door patterned with rivets. Illya put his shoulder against it to help her roll it aside. Solo peered out.
To the left, a high, wide concrete passage ran back to double doors with round glass portholes blacked out with paint. To the right the passage opened on to what appeared to be a loading dock. A small, nondescript van was backed up to the dock. Beyond this vehicle Solo glimpsed the flood-lit parade ground, curiously green, empty, silent. In the far distance the wall reared up again.
"Decidedly peculiar," Illya whispered.
Even pitched low, his voice bounced eerily from the walls of the delivery passage. A field mouse nibbling at a wilted brown lettuce leaf inside a produce crate was the only living thing visible anywhere in the passage. The mouse raised its head, wiggled its nose, blinked its small ruby-colored eyes at them and bounded away into the thick-clustered shadows.
"Peculiar," Illya repeated. "No noise now. The klaxons have stopped. I should think Miss Robin and her cohorts would be boxing us in by remote control, locking every single door in the place until we were trapped."
"Maybe they're watching us on scanners," Solo suggested.
Illya chewed his lip. There were large circles of fatigue under his eyes. "Shall we see? They took my weapons away when they caught me, but evidently they thought they were leaving me my cigarettes."
From his pants pocket Illya pulled a gaudily-printed cigarette package. He flicked his thumbnail against the top. The lid popped open on a spring; the communicator was meticulously disguised with foil paper and cellophane.
"Napoleon," Illya said as he set a recessed control stud, "in the event that we don't get out alive, we should make certain that this little corner of the THRUSH empire ceases to function."
Solo nodded.
He gave a bleak nod. Illya breathed, "Open Channel D, please. Extreme priority, class triple-A red."
In a moment there came a measured voice:
"Alexander Waverly here."
"Kuryakin, sir."
"Mr. Kuryakin! Good heavens, I've been worrying about you for hours!"
"We've managed to stay alive so far, sir. How much longer we can do so is problematical."
Mr. Waverly went hmmm. "That serious, eh? Where are you?"
"Somewhere in the Schwarzwald, sir. I can't give you the exact coordinates. We're trapped inside the research station where THRUSH is manufacturing its Goliaths. We may or may not be able to get all the way out."
"Mr. Solo is there with you?"
"Yes, sir."
Static crackled for a few seconds as Mr. Waverly digested the news. In a more somber tone he said, "Please put Solo on."
Illya passed the small unit to his friend. When Solo had acknowledged, Waverly asked, "Mr. Solo, as senior Operations and Enforcement officer on this mission, what is your assessment of the threat posed by the THRUSH operation you have penetrated?"
Solo licked his lips. The words were difficult to say:
"Grave, sir. Just as we feared, these agents they're turning out—both men and women—are incredible." Solo avoided Illya's eyes. "We called in to recommend action, sir. A bomber strike. As quickly as it can be arranged. I can switch this unit to a homing frequency to guide them in."
Mr. Waverly coughed. "What is your personal situation as of this moment, Mr. Solo?"
In a few words Solo explained their predicament. Waverly was silent a second. Then:
"You may not be able to escape by the time the planes arrive. I have just consulted our system maps. According to my rough calculation, as soon as I flash the request overseas through London, a fighter-bomber squadron already airborne will be on its way. Perhaps a matter of ten minutes at supersonic speeds until they arrive."
Solo's temples hurt. Helene watched him with round, horrified eyes. Solo tried to keep his emotions out of play. He tried to remember that all of his professional traning had pointed to this moment—the moment when an U.N.C.L.E. agent had to make the last, hardest decision and place his own life and the life of others secondary to the preservation of the United Network Command.
It still wasn't an easy decision to make. Solo thought of the pleasures he enjoyed. Good wine. The aroma of freshly-broiled lobster. The raspberry tang of a girl's lips—
"Send in the strike, sir," he said.
Mr. Waverly said, "Good luck and God speed, Mr. Solo. Over and out."
The communicator went silent. And the clock began to run out for the three of them.
FOUR
Solo had switched to the proper channel. The communicator was now sending its homing signal into the sky, where it would be picked up at a range of fifty miles by the squadron of fighter-bombers that would soon be flashing in.
"All right," he said in a strained voice. "Let's make the most of the time we've got."
The three of them broke for the mouth of the tunnel. Their heels clacked loudly. Still the entire THRUSH estate was shrouded in a weird stillness. Solo emerged onto the loading dock. He cut to the left. Illya and Helene crowded up behind. Ahead, the green grass of the parade ground moved gently under a night breeze.
The tall floodlight stanchions shed a sharp radiance onto the empty expanse of turf. Solo dropped to the asphalt below the dock, helped Helene down.
Illya's eyes flicked from left to right and back again, hunting for signs of the trap which surely existed.
Solo edged his way around a parked lorry. He wished that he had a pistol, any kind of weapon.
The parade ground was wide, green, empty. And it looked like a journey of a thousand miles to that small booth which Illya pointed out on the far wall.
"Ready?" Solo asked.
Illya nodded, wiped a trickle of sweat from his chin.
Solo half-turned. "Helene?"
"I can make it."
With a quick bob of his head, Solo started running. The other two came right behind.
Their feet thudded softly on the turf as they charged toward the far wall. At any moment Solo expected to hear the stutter of machineguns from the high cornices of the great house. The wind keened eerily in his ears as he ran. Breath pumped in and out of his lungs.
He flashed a look back over his shoulder. Lights blazed in the curtained windows of the upper floors of the great house, but nowhere was there another human being moving.
They had safely crossed about a quarter of the distance to the booth in the wall.
Abruptly the trap sprang open behind them—literally out of the ground.
Whole sections of the parade ground flipped upward. The turf was imitation, laid down atop hinged steel plates like square manhole covers. The night was suddenly filled with an incredible wordless shrieking as up from the underground warrens surged the black-uniformed THRUSH girls, tall, hate
-faced, their hair streaming.
Their voices were raised in that chilling unison shriek of hate. Gun barrels winked. Boots shone. A dozen of them had come up through the sprung-back ports in the grass now.
Two dozen.
Three.
They fanned out and formed a long line, a human chain of women. From the parapets of the baronial hall, searchlights blinked on. Solo and his friends, running wildly, were pinned inside great white circles of brilliant light.
An automatic pistol stuttered. Illya gave a sharp cry and went down, blood blackening the left leg of his trousers.
Helene doubled back to help him. Solo had the feeling he'd take a bullet any second too. Through the stillness the unison chant of hate was dying out. The echo of the pistol burst was spun away on the breeze.
Like a sharp knife slicing through cheese, Vanessa Robin boomed over a bullhorn:
"No firing! No firing! Hold your fire until further signals are given!"
Solo twisted around, bent to pull Illya to his feet. Illya had gone pale. His eyes were glazing. Vanessa Robin, bullhorn in her left hand and a long-snouted pistol in her right, had emerged from the sprung-back trapdoor which was furthest on Solo's left. Climbing up the ladder after her came Felix Klaanger.
Klaanger's eyes glared like brown lanterns. His bulbous, lemon-shaped head waggled with delight.
"It will do you no good to run, Solo," Vanessa boomed over the horn.
"They've caught us," Helene sobbed. "I knew they would." She was on the edge of hysteria. Her whole body trembled as she tried to help Solo support Illya. "I—I have never seen these hellish traps before—"
Solo whispered, "THRUSH, doesn't tell all, eh? Doesn't matter. Keep moving. Back toward the wall."
"Stand where you are, Solo!"
"Come on, Illya, we can make it," Solo breathed, ignoring Vanessa's orders. "The closer we are to that wall, the better chance we have."
It was false encouragement; Solo knew they had no chance at all. But he would not stand and surrender.
Illya's wounded leg left a smear of bright blood on the grass as Solo dragged him along. They must have made a sorry sight, Solo thought, the three of them huddling and limping backwards, confronted by three dozen armed amazons with pistols and rifles.
