The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 19

He heard the sucking whine of heavy-duty tires, the regular concussions of air as they thudded past cars and trucks, going in the opposite direction. From time to time, as some late traveler came up behind them and awaited his opportunity to pass, the cracks outlining the rear doors were limned in bright light. And then the noise of the tires altered to an oily hiss, and he heard the drumming of rain on the roof.

Shortly afterward the truck bumped off the road and groaned to a halt.

The rumble of the motor died away. The pattering of the rain appeared to increase in volume. A door slammed, and there were sounds of footsteps squelching on wet ground. Solo feigned unconsciousness, his breath snoring slightly through the gag, his eyes turned up.

There was a sudden rush of damp, cold air as the doors at the back were jerked open. Somebody stared inside, flashed a light, grunted, and slammed the doors shut again.

Through slitted eyes, the agent had a momentary impression of a small, nut-faced man in blue overalls, a man with a heavy, pugnacious chin, silhouetted against a glare of light in which rain sloped down in silver lances. And then the iron bar had been dropped across the doors and the footsteps were receding.

He waited for a moment to make sure nobody else was coming. And then he forced his cramped body into action. Rolling over on his back, he gathered his strength and launched himself upward, so that his pinioned feet were pointing at the roof and he appeared to be almost standing on his head—his whole inverted body balanced on his elbows, neck and shoulders. Then, opening his arms as wide as he could, he rolled himself downward again, drawing his knees tightly into his chin and keeping his heels against his haunches. At the same time he passed the hoop of his arms over his hips and tried to bring his bound hands over his feet.

He had almost succeeded, when the heels of his shoes fouled on his wrists—and no matter how hard he tried to bring his knees up further, the feet just wouldn't go through!

Panting and cursing under his breath, he struggled for some minutes before he hit on the obvious solution.

And then, grasping the heels of the shoes firmly in both hands, he jerked them off his feet and tipped them both to the floor. The stockinged feet slid smoothly through the loop of his hands and arms... and at last his wrists were in front of him.

The first thing he did was to reach up and tear off the strip of cloth retaining the gag—and then, painfully, he ejected the gag itself. It was, he discovered, an ordinary tennis ball.

With his bound hands, he explored his pockets as far as he could. The Berretta, of course, was gone. So was the cigarette pack. But the pen appeared to be in place, and the lighter was still in the breast pocket of his jacket. How ironic, Solo thought, that after all the trouble the Armory guys had been to, incorporating a weapon into the thing, it was in fact simply as a lighter that he was going to use it!

Fortunately, it was not one of the self-extinguishing type. Once the wheel had been flicked, the flame continued to bum until the hinged top was lowered over it. He flicked the milled wheel and set the lighter with its small flame on the truck floor.

In the flickering light he saw that apart from a pile of old sacks, the back of the truck seemed to be empty. Gritting his teeth, he lowered his wrists toward the flame.

Two and a quarter excruciating minutes later, the last charred strand of rope parted and he was able to snatch his wrists to his mouth and suck the seared and tender flesh. Quickly, he picked the knots at his knee and ankle and untied his legs. And then, massaging himself to restore his circulation, he took the lighter and began prowling around the truck to see if he could find anything that might help him to get out of it.

It was not very big—larger than a half-ton panel truck but not by any means a poids lourd—probably a two or three tonner, Solo thought. The back was, as he had supposed, empty apart from the sacks. But the boxlike storage space continued forward over the roof of the driver's cab.

And here, lying in a corner with a coil of wire, three plugs bound in insulating tape and a twist of oily rags, he found a rusty hacksaw blade.

This was a prize! Scrambling down to the floor again, he tiptoed to the back doors and flicked the lighter on. Although the paneling was rusty, it was a close fit, and the blade would not go through the gap between doors. Panting with the effort, he managed to lean against the outer door with one elbow at the same time as he hooked his fingernails around the edge of the other and painfully drew it toward him. Imperceptibly, the crack widened until he was able to slip the old blade through.

From there it was relatively easy to work it upward until it lodged against the bottom of the fiat iron bar retaining the doors. Sweat beaded Solo's brow as he wrestled the slender steel finger upward against the weight of the bar—but at last the bar was clear of its socket, and he tilted the blade away from him so that the bar slid off and clanked down, leaving him free to push open the doors.

The rusted paneling swung outward. Immediately behind the truck stood the short man the agent had seen before, his hair plastered to his skull by the rain, his jaw jutting more ferociously than ever.

Solo had no means of knowing how many others there might be. His only hope was to act fast and run. It was no time for detailed investigation of who they were or why they had kidnapped him. The thing to do was to get away!

He poised on the tailboard of the truck, waiting to leap. Watching him with glittering eyes, the little man hefted a big spanner wrench from hand to hand. Behind him the shrouded shapes of trucks and trailers in a parking lot blanked off the neon lights of an all-night cafe.

And then, as the man with the chin moved forward, the agent acted. But instead of jumping, he pulled the pen from his breast pocket, sank to his heels on the tailboard, and aimed the pen at his adversary's face.

Before the man could lift the spanner, Solo had operated the lever, and the jet of nerve gas screamed full at his adversary's nose and mouth.

Above the huge jaw, the man's eyes widened in surprise. His mouth opened—but before he could utter a sound, he had twisted around and slumped to the wet ground as dramatically as a puppet whose strings have been cut.

With a single bound, Solo cleared his recumbent figure and sped off into the rain and the night.

A moment later, he was back. He had forgotten, until his stockinged feet squelched into the wet ground, that he had not put his shoes back on. Cursing, he dragged them over his drenched and muddy socks and set off once more.

When he was a hundred yards away down the road, he stopped and looked back. There seemed to be nobody else around the truck and there had so far been no hue and cry. The blare of a jukebox seesawed from behind the steamed up windows of the cafe. Cars and trucks hurtling past in each direction sent long fingers of light probing the dark along the wet road. But otherwise there was no sign of life.

Astonishingly, though, he knew where he was! By a chance in a thousand, he recognized the stretch of road. It was a phenomenon he had remarked before—how suddenly, without any tangible clue, the mind would "read" into a certain confluence of landscape features here, an arrangement of wall and tower and roof there, the certain knowledge of place. So that rounding a bend, one would know positively that at any moment such and such a sight was going to appear. So that on an apparently unknown stretch of road, one would become irrationally possessed of the certitude that this village or that bridge was just ahead.

So that on a night like tonight, Napoleon Solo would know beyond all argument that he was—out of all the roads in Europe—on a section between Hasselt and Maastricht in southeastern Belgium and that a mile down the road, there would be a rather high-class roadhouse in whose vast parking area he would almost certainly be able to steal a car.