[Magazine 1966-­12] - The Goliath Affair - Jakes John - Страница 10

There was a plaintive moo in the peaceful night as the truck sang past on rapidly humming tires. Illya feigned a rapid, rheumy-eyed blink the moment it went by. IN the backwash of its lights he saw the heads and horns of cattle outlined fleetingly against the stars.

As the eager dairy farmer raced onward toward his destination, a few more soothing moos floated out behind. Illya's heart beat slowed down.

He had been certain that he too had been tagged by THRUSH. But this time it had been a false alarm.

Illya shambled ahead, making himself practice the enfeebled gait of an old man. The trees melted from solid darkness into relative individuality as false dawn, and then the real thing, lit the landscape. Illya's mind churned. Question after question tumbled through it.

What had happened to Napoleon? It was quite unlike his partner to depart suddenly on a fresh trail without telling him. Further, there was no sound at all from the pocket communicator now. This indicated that Napoleon was not attempting to contact him and, worse, was no longer even transmitting.

Had THRUSH already moved in for the kill? Only further trudging to the westward, toward the point in the Black Forest where the display screen blip had blacked out, would reveal the possible tragic answer.

Presently Illya crept into cover at the Lutheran church and surveyed the square at Ommenschnee. Now, having crossed the square, he was moving down a narrow street where the houses were old, gabled, and close together. A slatternly woman dumped a pail of slops out an upstairs window. Illya had to hop to it to keep from being drenched.

He brandished a fist at the woman by way of keeping in character but he didn't stop to argue. In minutes he had left the village behind and was trudging slowly down what appeared to be a dirt truck track.

It branched off the main highway leading from Ommenschnee at the village limits.

The highway swung roughly southwest. The track went due west, the direction Illya wanted to go.

He had walked perhaps five hundred yards along the track and had just poked his head warily around a bend when he got quite a surprise.

Parked up ahead was the same farmer's truck that had passed him several hours ago.

In the bed of the truck, half a dozen beeves jostled one another, gently discontented but no longer lowing. It was too late for Illya to turn back. The truck driver, a portly German with ruddy cheeks and a mustache fully as flowing as Illya's fake one, had seen him.

The driver was sitting against the truck's left rear tire, making a morning meal of a butt of bread and a quart of milk. Illya's trained mind sensed something awry, but he did not immediately know what.

Once again he swept his gaze across the truck. He couldn't locate the cause of his instinctive suspicion. Perhaps it was the driver himself. He was an immense man, Illya Kuryakin saw, as the latter stood up.

The driver wiped his none too clean sleeve across his lips, getting rid of a foam of milk. He towered at least halfway up to the seven foot mark, and bore a huge paunch out in front of him. He wore nondescript clothes. His black-haired arms were far too long to be called normally proportioned.

Carefully Illya adjusted his peddler's pack on his left shoulder. That way, his right hand would be unencumbered if he needed to get at the long-snouted pistol in the trick pocket of his shabby coat.

He put on a witless expression and shambled up to the beefy driver, whose fat cheeks were burgher-red but whose eyes were no warmer than glaciers.

"Lost your way, have you, mein herr?" said the dairyman in German.

"Nein, nein," Illya answered with an idle grin. His German was perfect enough to pass muster. "I am on my way to the village. Hermann is my name."

"The village," said the driver, "is back the other way." He pointed a porcine thumb.

Illya blinked several times. What was wrong here? Some detail was out of place. Something so obvious he should recognize it instantly. But light was bad in the forest; there were many shadows, pierced only at random by sunbeams. Illya heard a distant chatter start, somewhere far behind him.

"The other way? That can't be right," Illya complained, trying to sound elderly and irritable. "I saw no village—"

"Then your eyes are blind, old one." The farmer grabbed Illya's right shoulder. His fingers were thick. He applied far too much pressure for one casually interested in Illya's behaviour.

The beeves in the rear of the truck were responding to the man's angry voice. They began to stamp and swivel their heads so that their horns caught the light. They mooed loudly. All except one, which seemed to be standing stock-still and glass-eyed in the center.

Glass-eyed? Illya looked again.

The farmer spun him around bodily. Whirled in a complete circle, Illya had a flash-pan view of the hide of that stoical bovine that did not move. He would have sworn he detected something which distinctly resembled a moth-hole in its side—

"Verdammt old fool, be on your way!" The dairyman gave Illya a pop in the back of the spine that nearly knocked him off his feet. The man tried to sound hearty as he added, "It's for your own good. You'll merely become lost in the forest and die of hunger. I won't have your death on my hands."

Tottering and capering and wondering how much longer he should maintain this feeble fiction of being old, Illya plucked two handfuls of figurines from his sack and waved them at the dairyman.

"I don't know what a rude person like you is doing on this road," Illya piped. "But I have figurines to sell in the village. Clever little figurines, see? I intend to pass and go on my way—" Illya continued his tottering progress until he was back to within a yard of the dairyman.

The dairyman's cheeks grew plum-colored. He whipped a snub-barrel automatic from his side pocket.

"Your persistence is admirable," he barked. "But it is also your downfall—Herr Illya Kuryakin."

And with his free hand the dairyman knocked the hat off Illya's head, revealing the U.N.C.L.E. agent's youthful bowlcut locks.

Cold in his belly, Illya stood at bay, hands full of figurines, eyes watching the gun muzzle most carefully for the jerk which would signal a shot that could very well end his life. Behind him Illya heard the chatter-and-buzz growing louder in the sky. Without looking around, he knew a helicopter was skimming the tops of the trees.

"We suspected you would be coming, Kuryakin," the dairyman said. "Ever since we took your friend Herr Solo last night, we have been looking—"

"Is Napoleon alive?" Illya interrupted.

Like all Thrush men, this one relished cruelty. He shrugged. "I can't say."

"Where is he?"

"Where you almost got to, before I chopped you down to size."

The dairyman jerked his head to indicate the green-dappled forest depths behind him, to the west.

With surprising agility for a man of his stature, the THRUSH operative jumped up onto the rear fender of the truck and balanced himself, the gun muzzle never wavering from Illya's chest.

The agent reached with his free hand and caught hold of the left horn of the bovine which was standing statue-still in the center of the other animals. It was standing statue-still because it was dead and stuffed, as was revealed when the agent snapped off its left horn and pulled it toward him.

A cable ran from the center of the horn back into the animal's head. The agent said, "I would have taken you when I passed you earlier on the highway, but we preferred to lay the trap this side of Ommenschnee. It's quieter. Sometimes that highway is heavily trafficked before dawn."