The Hungry World Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  Solo ducked for cover behind the jam of the portal as the guns in the elevator lifted toward him. In a crablike run, Kuryakin scrambled for the door and dove through. He hit the deck, rolling. He heard Napoleon slam the door.

  He floundered dizzily as Solo grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet. He wondered how many bullets had picked at him. Time enough later to count the leaks.

  “Had a gun taken from a THRUSH guard who got cooked in his own juices,” Solo said as they plunged for the railing. “Heard the bang-banging and decided to drop in uninvited.”

  Kuryakin yelled, “Thanks.”

  Solo had no reply, for they were over the railing, knifing toward the dark water in long dives.

  Solo sliced into the water, turned, surface. He treaded, blew water from his nose, and hissed, “Kuryakin!”

  “Here.”

  Overhead on the deck of the Benevolence feet pounded. From up there in the darkness, Gould yelled. “Lights! Grenades! Quickly! They haven’t a chance, the swine.”

  A beautifully modulated female voice spoke to Solo from a much closer source, almost at his shoulder.

  “This way, Mr. Solo!”

  Solo made out the wet face of Princess Andra in the dim nightglow. Her teeth glinted. “I didn’t follow your orders very well, Mr. Solo. I hesitated. I looked back. Now take hold of my right ankle with your left hand when I turn. Have your friend link up with you. We mustn’t get separated. And should I add that we should all swim as hard as possible?”

  “For dear life,” Illya sputtered gustily.

  “Literally,” Solo added.

  They linked up, the princess leading and choosing the direction. From the deck of the Benevolence came the first probing finger from a spotlight. As it swept near, the human chain in the water slid beneath the surface and kept striving shoreward.

  The light searched toward the further end of the harbor, chilled. A gun blasted from the deck of the Benevolence.

  “You fool,” Dion Gould shouted, “you’re firing at a rolling porpoise. Keep that light moving!”

  The dark rise of the palisades slipped closer by inches. Three times the fleeing swimmers slipped under the surface as the light threatened them.

  Gould’s voice was far enough behind to strike the first echo from the water as he shouted a fresh command. “They’re ducking under water to avoid the light. Excellent. Keep the light moving. Make them stay under. And bring up the grenades---the big ones! We’ll depth-charge the fools!”

  Princess Andra’s voice drifted back to Solo. “One more time, gentlemen. A charge of oxygen in your lungs now---Here we go!”

  They curved into the dark depths, swimming hard, Solo and Illya touching the churning feet ahead of them now and then to stay on track.

  Napoleon Solo’s lungs began to ache. The first faint ringing started in his ears. On and on…were they standing still against a running tide? It felt that way, although he knew the tide was running in, sweeping them forward.

  The pain in his lungs became fire. Blue sparks began to dance against the walls of his eyes. Some of the tenseness of waiting for the concussion of the grenade under water had left him. He was too absorbed with the need for air in these Stygian depths.

  Then, as his lungs began a convulsive sucking even at the water, his shoulders slammed into the legs of the princess. She had surfaced, was treading water.

  Solo shot up beside her. In a moment Kuryakin appeared. Their panting efforts to fill and refill their lungs had a weird tonal quality. An echo.

  “ We’re in a grotto deep in the cliffs,” Andra said, her voice bouncing and rebounding off the stone walls of the vast natural chamber. “I’ve come here often looking for unusual marine specimens, or just for the joy of coming into a place carved by the sea when dinosaurs were young. Come.”

  As they swam deeper into the vast cave, the first bull boom of the grenade barrage vibrated the water about them.

  “This place gets cozier by the minute,” Solo remarked, “With those confounded grenades going off out there.”

  A wan light flared ahead, several feet higher than the water. The princess had pulled herself up onto a ledge.

  “I keep a few things here,” she explained as Solo and Illya crawled up beside her, “so my visits will not be entirely without the comforts of civilization. Electric torch. Cigarettes. A few tins of tidbits to snack on.”

  Solo and Kuryakin sat side by side, legs dangling. From this distant reaches of the harbor came the almost continuous roar of booming grenades flashing their deadly impacts through the water, seeking them out.

  “All quite comfortable,” Solo said, still short-winded. “But we’re stymied. Stuck. No way to stop THRUSH. Bottled up and helpless like---“

  “Bottled up, Napoleon,” Illya said. “But not helpless.”

  “No?”

  “No. You see, Napoleon, I have a gun.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Big enough to blow a hole in the Benevolence?”

  “Oh, quite,” Kuryakin said. “Big enough to pulverize Mr. Gould, his ship, his mistress, his crew, his entire scheme. I’m speaking of the submarine Dolphin. I came from her to the Benevolence. She’s standing by just outside the harbor. One of her pea-shooter missiles is zeroed in on the stacks of the Benevolence .”

  “And you have a communicator? You can contact the Dolphin?”

  “Assuredly. Furthermore, we have a mountain of stone over and about to protect us,” Illya said, rubbing his shoulder gingerly.

  “Then give the order to fire! What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m getting my breath back,” Kuryakin said somewhat nastily. “I’d prefer to sound like an U.N.C.L.E. agent, not a gasping schoolboy, when I converse with the skipper of the Dolphin!”

  EPILOGUE

  Mr. Alexander Waverly crossed the thick carpeting of a sedate office in New York central control, nodding and shaking hands as Kuryakin and Solo entered. “Have a good flight home, gentlemen?”

  “Routine,” Solo shrugged.

  “The press reports a tremendous explosion in one of the rock-bound coves south of Chambasa a couple of nights ago,” Waverly reflected.

  “The very mountain shook,” Kuryakin assured him.

  “But you two and the princess swam out in due time.”

  “When the water stopped rolling,” Solo said.

  Waverly strolled to a magnificent desk of carven hardwood, half sat against its edge. “Now about those missiles in the extinct crater Iaclasco. One of you had better go down as our representative when the Peruvian government dismantles them.”

  Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin each jerked a thumb at the other and said in one breath, “He will go!”

  Mr. Waverly’s bushy brows lifted. “Is there something special---a major attraction---in New York at the moment?”

  “---Princess Andra is in town,” Illya said. “---and really deserves an escort to show her around,” Solo said. “She … uh… is waiting in the anteroom.”

  “Hmmm.” Waverly rubbed his chin. He pondered. When he raised his eyes, they held a twinkle. “The problem is easily solved, gentlemen. You both go to Peru.”

  And while his ace agents stared, Mr. Alexander Waverly strolled out of sight, in the direction of the anteroom.