The Thousand Coffin Affair - Avallone Michael - Страница 22

There were just two uniformed soldiers and Jerry Terry in the building. They had formed a small semicircle in the center of the hangar. At first Solo had no notion of what they were doing until Denise Fairmount nudged him sharply with the muzzle of the Luger.

The soldiers had Jerry Terry suspended between them, each holding one of her arms. She was made to stand straddle-legged to support her own weight without slumping. Her face was ashen and drained of life. Despite the bandaged wound of her shoulder, she was standing up and taking notice. Notice had closed her mouth in terror.

There was a metal barrier of sorts on the concrete floor. It was alive with radiant heat of some kind, glowing like a sunburst. Solo could feel the suffocating warmth as they drew nearer. There was something hopelessly cruel about the white-hot poker resting in the heart of the brazier. An electric cord ran from the handle of the thing to a wall outlet nearby. The faces of the two soldiers were dull and expressionless. Like trained seals, Solo thought. They could stick knives in a lovely girl and not raise a sweat. Or brand her with a metal burning tool, the sort of instrument used to forge letters and numbers on steel parts.

Denise Fairmount halted him and stepped around to where she could keep him in her sights.

“Must I spell all this out for you, Solo? I could print the message across Miss Terry’s face.” She indicated the metal-burner and brazier.

“I get the idea. Roast lady spy if I don’t open my big mouth.”

Jerry Terry swallowed nervously, shaking her head, but her eyes had never left the white-hot tip of the burning poker.

“You don’t like me anyway, remember, Solo? Forget it.”

Denise Fairmount spun on her, viciously. “Quiet, you fool! He can save you a great deal of pain.”

As Denise Fairmount glared at the girl, Solo moved one step toward her. It was as far as he dared go with the guards watching, but it would have to be far enough. Denise was still well beyond arm’s length, but—

Solo cleared his throat. “All right then, Denise. Unaccustomed as I am to public squealing…

She turned back toward him, surprised that he was giving in so easily. It put her off her guard just enough—

Solo’s right leg shot upward and his body arched backwards in a perfectly executed Le Savate kick. The tip of his shoe caught the Luger directly under the barrel, sending it high into the air above their heads. It flipped twice neatly and he caught it before it hit the floor. He quickly turned it to the proper position, his finger on the trigger.

Denise Fairmount fell back with a shriek and the two men holding Jerry Terry released her and went for their guns. Unfortunately for them, their weapons were slung behind their shoulders in the required form for soldiers bearing rifles.

Yet they were foolhardy and wouldn’t stop. Released from their grip, Jerry Terry fell hard to the floor. Denise Fairmount, in her anxiety to regain control of the situation, went wildly for the white-hot poker in the brazier. There was no time to shout orders or commands to halt the carnage. The soldiers were bringing their rifles to bear and Denise Fairmount was already brandishing the glowing poker.

Solo’s first shot caught one soldier high in the chest and spun him around. His second found a nesting place directly in the forehead of the other man. Both of them were dead before they hit the stone floor of the hangar.

And then there was Denise Fairmount.

If she had stopped—if she had for a moment considered she was going up against a marksman at close quarters—he might have stayed his hand. He didn’t want to shoot the woman; she could be valuable later on. But Denise Fairmount had lost all power to think coherently or to evaluate consequences. All of her headlong charge, with the poker held like a flaming rapier, was spearheaded for the body of Napoleon Solo. Unluckily for her, he didn’t have the time for a fancy or well-chosen shot. The time had arrived at that split second when all lives are changed by the next bullet.

Solo triggered the Luger once more. A single, telling shot.

He stood and watched as Denise Fairmount’s face came apart with surprise and pain, as if she had never believed he would actually shoot her. The poker described a smoking eddy as it clanged to the stone, shooting off sparks. Denise Fairmount crumpled, her hands holding her Sam Browne belt as if that alone could hold her up and keep her from dying.

Wordlessly, Solo stepped over her body and lifted Jerry Terry to her feet. He kept an eye on the hangar entrance. Once again, the race would be to the swift.

Despite the obvious pain and confusion she was undergoing, Jerry couldn’t take her eyes off Denise Fairmount’s prone figure, curled up in death. “Solo—you killed her—”

“You can lecture me later,” he said impatiently. “Right now, I’m for that MIG and getting out of here, and nothing else.”

Her eyes were dazed.

“Come on—we have to move quickly. Can you walk?” She nodded dumbly, allowing him to half-push, half-drag her to the tarmac. Solo Hung a sweeping search over the field. The MIG was where he had parked it, even facing toward takeoff. There was no sign of the two patrol planes. It seemed as if there were no one else on the field. Everybody had been accounted for.

“You wide awake now, Terry?” he barked.

“Yes. Yes!”

“All right, then. Come on. And don’t look back. Just remember—it was Denise or us.”

Jerry Terry said nothing further. She lowered her head and staggered for the MIG. Solo was just behind her, imploring the silent gods to stay with them for just five minutes more until he got the damn MIG airborne once again.

But even as he made the unspoken plea, he could see a heavy motor lorry turn in from the roadway about five hundred yards down the field.

Grimly, he hurried Jerry Terry ahead of him, not bothering to mention the minor detail that their flight was not unobserved.

When the hounds were on the scent, it was downright amazing how they showed up at the most inopportune moments.

What was even worse, the pain had come back. Sharp, excruciating agony coursed through his body.

Partridge of the Paris Overseas Press Club was in the bar, finding new joy in the way Stanley mixed martinis, when he was summoned to the telephone. Shrugging heroically, he lifted his bulk from the leather stool and had a houseboy plug in a phone for him.

“Partridge here,” he said tiredly.

“Who gives the given signal?” a crisp voice asked.

He became alert immediately. “You do.”

“Who tells the untold millions?”

“I do.”

He knew it was Napoleon Solo’s voice at the other end, but one had to play the code out.

“Who had a second knife?’

“The same chap who had the first one.”

“Billy,” Solo said. “I need your help, and pronto.”

“Fire away, old sport.

“Fire one—I’m sitting at Landry’s airstrip. I owe him thousands of dollars for wrecking his plane. He won’t take a MIG in trade and the French Air Force is pretty mad at me for flying one in. Fire two—I’ve got a very sick girl friend on my hands. She could die if she doesn’t see a doctor soon. Fire three—the world is in sad shape. You’d better tell my uncle all about it. No doubt he’s dying to hear from me.”

“I see. Landry’s. Good show, old sport. Be there in two hours. I’ll call your uncle, of course. Think you can hold out until then?”

“I’ll try, Billy. And thanks.”

“Ever the faith endures,” Partridge chuckled. Anything else?”

“No, that ought to cover the preliminaries. The girl is my first concern right now.”

“Off I go.”

William Partridge hung up, drummed the phone for three taut seconds of preparation, downed his martini zestfully and left the bar like a shot.

Stanley, the bartender, had never seen him move so fast.