“No, you can wipe out the threat in Shunning with the bomb without affecting the control station. But What about Peking? When the bomb is exploded won't they suspect something?”
“They will get a report from me of a terrible accident,” Hanz Tiell said. “Sure, they'll send inspection teams. But it will be too late. By the time any plane can get here from Peking, there will be no Peking any longer! Nor a Washington, or London or Paris or Moscow, for that matter! There will only be THRUSH specially trained political teams to rush into the vacuum left by destruction of the world's governments!”
“Then go ahead,” the control technical chief said. “The explosion will not affect our equipment in the least.”
Tiell readjusted his secret channel transmitter to recall the cell's downtown headquarters.
“How are the Chinese taking the delay?” he asked.
“They refuse a delay!”
“Let me talk to the man in charge,” Tiell said.
Once he had the head of the Chinese inspection team on the radio, Tiell's arrogance vanished. He almost groveled on the floor as he profusely apologized for the “idiocy of my underlings.”
“I will come down directly and personally accompany you to the tracking station,” Tiell went on.
“And you will be required to explain why we were led to believe the control would be made from what we now know is a dummy station near Peking,” the Chinese Red official said coldly. “At first we thought it an U.N.C.L.E. trick when we were so informed by Alexander Waverly. An investigation proves it true. We want an explanation of your treachery now!”
“I shall certainly do so,” Tiell said hastily.
He asked to have the THRUSH technician put back on. When the man answered, Tiell said, “I will be down just as soon as I can. In the meantime---”
He paused and the awful significance of it was apparent to the U.N.C.L.E. prisoners. It was clearly mirrored in the vicious half-smile that crossed Tiell's face.
“In the meantime,” he went on, “please take care of our distinguished visitors.”
“I understand exactly,” the THRUSH man said from the other end of the connection.
Tiell turned from the radio to Pierce. “Did you hear that Chinese dog?” he said heavily. “Waverly tipped Peking that the Peking control station was a fake. How did he find that out?”
“How do I know? I tried to tell you in the beginning that U.N.C.L.E. was our greatest danger.”
“I believe it,” Tiell snapped.
“He must know a lot more to have sent this rat pack in here.”
He turned to glare at his prisoners. Then, making a sudden decision, he said: “Go ahead. Revive April Dancer. I'm not so sure you'll get away with fooling Waverly with a fake message from her, but maybe the hypnotic effect will work like a truth serum. We might get some indication of how much U.N.C.L.E. knows.”
“Okay,” Pierce said.
He dropped the mint into the glass of water. It happened so rapidly, it almost caught the prisoners off-guard. For a split second bubbles rose from the descending mint. Then the cup exploded with churning smoke.
Pierce fell with a strangled cry. Tiell whirled with a frightened yell. He jerked up the gun as the smoke engulfed him. He leveled it at Napoleon Solo.
April Dancer threw herself around. Her manacled feet caught Tiell's ankles. His gun exploded into the air. He fell heavily, coughing and choking.
April was on the floor where the air was clearer. The lighter smoke was rising. Hanz Tiell, who had taken a full lungful before he fell, was writhing and coughing. April twisted her body frantically, snaking her manacled body along the floor toward him. She did not know what the others were doing, but she was the closest to the THRUSH cell chief.
His gun had fallen from his hands when he fell. April could see it, but her hands were manacled behind her back. She twisted around and her groping fingers closed on the butt.
As she turned, she saw Solo slam his feet into Pierce's face, leaving only a bloody blob where the renegade's features had been.
Then she heard Mark Slate yell: “Tiell! He's getting away!”
April twisted around so her manacled wrists could aim the gun as best she could. She squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the wall far wide of its target. It glanced off, slamming into the floor only inches from Illya Kuryakin's head.
“We've got to get out of here!'“ Solo yelled. “Or we'll suffocate too!”
TWELVE
THE H-HELL BOMB
Mark Slate moved toward April Dancer as quickly as his body could twist along the floor.
“Shoot the cuffs off my feet!” he cried.
April raised the gun behind her back. Slate raised his legs until the center of the chain between the manacles rested against the barrel of the gun.
He moved his head back out of the line of fire.
“Shoot!” he cried.
April Dancer squeezed the trigger. The slug tore into the chair and the link broke. As he got up April shot the leg manacles off Illya Kuryakin as well. Then she took care of Solo.
Shooting off the wrist manacles was more dangerous, for neither could see. She tried Solo first. The shot glanced slightly and ripped a gash across the Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s forearm.
Blood spurted, but Solo ignored it. He grabbed the gun from April's hands. With his own hands free he would work more safely.
As soon as she was free, April grabbed her purse with its precious U.N.C.L.E. protective devices and started crawling for the door. Her own tiny miniature model of the famed U.N.C.L.E. Special was inside. A smaller duplicate of the bigger gun, it had been reduced in size to permit it to be carried in her handbag for emergencies.
She crawled along the floor to escape the thickest part of the smoke. She could not see Tiell, but knew he was not far ahead of her. It had taken only a few seconds to shoot off the manacles.
“This way!” Solo gasped.
The others started after him down the smoke-choked corridor. In the distance a gun boomed. A bullet slammed into the wall near April's head. Another came so close to killing Illya Kuryakin that it brought blood from a tear in the top of his ear.
“It's suicide to go on!” Solo gasped. “Tiell didn't have another weapon. There must be others below.”
“There's another door on the opposite side of the room where we were!” April cried.
“I'm not sure we can get back through,” Solo said. “The smoke is damned awful in there now.”
“Shall we rush them then?” Kuryakin gasped, still partially choking from the smoke in his lungs.
“No. That's suicide,” Solo said. “Back in the room. Hold your breath as long as you can. Get down on the floor. Keep your eyes closed. Prepare for a blast”
They understood what he meant when he said blast. All of them carried the miniaturized U.N.C.L.E. bombs intended for use against the satellite control station if they were lucky enough to find it.
“It's pretty close quarters to use so powerful an explosive,” Slate said. “The concussion will backfire on us---”
A hail of bullets ripped through the smoke. They heard Tiell yell to his men to keep shooting. Faced with no alternative now, the U.N.C.L.E. group retreated back into the smoke filled room.
Solo was the last through the door. He turned and threw one of the pill-sized explosive packages down the corridor. Then he leaped inside and slammed the door to stop as much of the concussion as possible. He fell on the floor, eyes streaming. His lungs burned for want of oxygen as he tightly held his breath.
For a minute the THRUSH gunmen continued to pour a wild fusillade of bullets into the closed door. It was made of heavy metal and none penetrated.
Then the U.N.C.L.E. bomb went off. The floor leaped and buckled under them. The concrete walls of the shelter, obviously put up by a thieving builder who skimped on cement, split.
April Dancer was thrown heavily against Mark Slate. She could not tell what was happening to the others. Her eyes were completely blinded
by the smoke.
She knew there was a door on the other side of the room, but had no idea where it led. She started to crawl toward it. Her lungs were on fire. Blood was pounding in her head. Every cell in her body was screaming for air.
The building structure was still shaking from the force of the confined explosion. Suddenly the crack in the wall widened. There was a tremendous grinding noise and the rumble of a giant's thunder.
The wall collapsed with a roar of sliding earth. The floor under them tilted crazily. The smoke poured through the rent.
April rose up. For a moment she couldn't see. She wiped her eyes on her skirt hem. She got shakily to her feet.
“What happened?” she asked unsteadily.
“Apparently this shelter was sunk in the ground under an old temple like the place in Taiwan,” Solo said, his voice broken by rasping breathing. “The explosion caused the soft ground to give away. The cheap concrete work in the shelter couldn't stand the strain.”
He walked gingerly to the broken edge of the floor. Half the hill had given away, sliding down in a miniature avalanche to the edge of the Mekong River that snaked about the hill. Broken slabs of concrete stuck up from the loose dirt. As best they could see in the moonlight, none of the THRUSH people had survived. The slide had covered them all.
Their room apparently partially rested on a solid rock foundation. It had only partially slipped. Except for several bad cracks and the loss of one wall, it had survived the explosion and slide in fairly good condition.
Solo turned to face the others. “Is everybody able to travel?” he asked. “We've got to get out of here fast.”
“The tracking station is downriver,” April said. “At least that is what Tiell indicated in his talk.”
“Then let's get moving,” Mark Slate said. “I don't know how much time we have left to stop the cluster bomb firing, but whatever it is, it isn't enough!”
“I'd say, judging from Tiell's statements, we have just about two hours,” Solo said.
“As best I can tell in the dark,” April said, “there appears to be several sampans drawn up along the river bank. If Tiell was correct in the tracking station being fifteen miles down the river, it will take us about an hour, from the looks of the river's current.”
“That will give us an hour to find some way into the place, elude the guards, and blow the place up,” Illya Kuryakin said gloomily. “One hour!”
“Oh, that's plenty of time,” April said with a positive note in her voice.
It caused Solo to give her a sidewise grin. “I think we had better ride on your confidence instead of my own!”
They started down the hill toward the river. Solo went first but only because he deliberately got in front of April. The others fell in behind them.
The dirt was soft. They sank down over their ankles. It kept sliding under them.
Then suddenly the night was gone! It was brighter than any day---more brilliant than if there were two suns in the sky. There was a searing blast of heat.
“Don't look around!” April cried. She had to scream to be heard above the hellish roar that followed the initial burst of light and heat. “It's an H-bomb! THRUSH set it off after all!”
“Back to the shelter!” Solo yelled. “There's a small chance we can save ourselves yet! The hill stopped much of the first shock and radiation from hitting us. Into the shelter before the fallout comes!”
The brilliance faded as the initial fireball went out. There was still a ghastly light from the towering column of vaporized rock and dirt whose incandescent mass was being sucked into the mushroom.
The four from U.N.C.L.E. struggled to climb up the soft sliding dirt. Below them the entire world seemed on fire as flimsily constructed wooden buildings burst into flames from the thermal heat.
The mushrooming cloud pulled in the wind so rapidly that it became a gale. The flames were whipped to wild fury, lashing and eddying into a fire storm. It swept across the river below the hill. Gusts caught streamers of pure fire and hurled them like living thunderbolts through the air. Two such flaming death traps licked up the hills, almost engulfing the struggling group from U.N.C.L.E.
They almost reached the edge of the shattered fallout shelter. April was slightly in the lead. Then the soft ground gave way under her feet. Mark Slate lunged to catch her---and slipped himself. The dirt started to slide.
Kuryakin grabbed a piece of partially buried concrete and held on. The others slid halfway down before they could stop.
They pulled themselves out of the dirt and started to climb again. The hill's blockage had saved them from receiving a lethal dose of radiation when the bomb exploded. Its bulk also shielded them from being burned to a crisp from the terrible thermal heat.
But it could do nothing against the danger of nuclear fallout. They were all well-versed in the conditions to be expected in case of a nuclear war. The situation was the same here now.
They knew that a ground-burst bomb would not throw out as large an area of total destruction as one exploded in the air. But the terrible thermal heat so close to the ground would vaporize more rock and dirt and non-combustible building material than a bomb exploded in the air.
This vaporized material was being sucked up the incandescent column of the mushroom cloud. This debris would be coming back down shortly. It would be intensely radioactive. Thus the initial lethal fallout would be greater from the ground-burst bomb.
It would rain out of the sky upon them. Nothing could prevent their death except very heavy shielding. Nothing they could hold over themselves would be sufficient.
They had to reach the fallout shelter or die a miserable, lingering death from acute radiation sickness.
The U.N.C.L.E. group started fighting their way up the hill again. The open side of the shelter yawned ahead, but it did not promise complete safety. One side had been blasted open by the U.N.C.L.E. bomb. This was wide open and too large for anything inside to be jammed into the breach. So the goal they were fighting to reach represented only a chance to save themselves---and perhaps a very small chance at that!
THIRTEEN
“BOMBS AWAY!”
The entire sky was ablaze as the fury of the fire storm swept across the doomed city. The four from U.N.C.L.E. kept struggling up the sliding incline. They fought for each step, aiding each other, slipping back, falling and desperately picking themselves up for still one more try.
The fire storm was fanning the flames to greater fury. As they finally reached the tilting concrete floor of the wrecked shelter, a new danger reached out hungry, fiery fingers to destroy them.
Floating piles of wreckage, knocked into the river by the blast concussion against shacks along the banks, were fired by the terrible thermal heat. The entire upriver area was ablaze. The swift current was sweeping it down opposite the hill where the four from U.N.C.L.E. fought to stay alive.
They were near collapse from the hard struggle up the sliding break in the hill. Napoleon Solo leaned against the tilting wall and looked at his haggard companions.
“The fire storm is going to pull the river flames right up the hill on top of us,” he said, his voice shaking with his utter exhaustion. “We can't run any farther. There's no place to run.”
“We've got to block the opening to keep the flames out,” April Dancer said.
“There's nothing big enough,” Mark Slate said.
“There's a door and a tunnel leading up to the place where the old temple was on top of the hill,” Illya Kuryakin pointed out.
“If we open the door, it will create a suction that will bring draw fire and radioactive debris right in on top of us,” Napoleon Solo objected.
“Then bury us!” April cried. “Throw one of the pill-bombs higher up on the hill. Let the slide cover us!”
“We'll suffocate!” Slate objected. “There'll be enough air trapped in here with us to breathe for a while. By that time we can hope the fire storm will pull all the flames off the river.”
Solo
went to the edge where the broken concrete floor met the slide. He looked up. The wild flames from the river licked halfway up the hill. The heat was terrific.
“The top hangs over too much,” he said, his voice dull with fatigue. “We can't throw the bomb around the bulge. It would start the slide too near us. This cheap concrete would collapse. We'd be killed.”
“If I went down the hill a short distance, then I could throw it past the bulge,” April said quickly.
“You couldn't get in fast enough. You'd be covered by the slide.”
“Isn't that better than all of us burning?” she asked quietly.
“Let's flip a coin for it,” Illya Kuryakin said. “That's a fair way to determine who will be sacrificed.”
“Nothing doing!” April snapped. “It was my idea!”
“Stop arguing!” Solo rasped. “You'll have plenty of time for that when we get home.”
“Are we going to get home?” Slate asked.
Napoleon grinned wearily. “Sure! Did you ever doubt it?”
He took a deep breath and looked down at the hellish churning flames that were climbing higher up the hill as the blaze on the river increased.
“Let's try something first before we give in to sacrificing some one of us,” Solo said. “We'll form a human chain. Maybe we can pull up the bomb thrower before the slide hits.”
“I'll go down,” Mark Slate said quickly.
“No!” Solo got in before the others could object. “We have to leave everything out of this except consideration of our best chances to succeed.
“Mark, you have the largest hands. You're the anchor man. Get a grip on that concrete edge. Now, we don't want our heaviest on the bottom. So I'll come next. Take my hand, Illya, and go next. April, it is up to you to do the dirty work. You weigh less than any of us.”
“Let's go!” she cried.
Swiftly they went into position, stretching their arms out to support each other down the hill. The toughest position of them all was that of Mark Slate. Upon his one-hand grip on the concrete edge depended all their lives.
At the moment there was not much pressure on him. Each of the others had sunk their feet into the soft ground. The critical moment would come when his sweaty, slippery hand had to pull them to safety.
The Sinister Satellite Affair Page 7
