[Magazine 1966-­12] - The Goliath Affair - Jakes John - Страница 9

At that moment Solo noticed a small pin on the collar of the leather jacket of the incredibly tall girl with the gun. The pin had a black border. In the center, on a white field, he saw the ugly configuration of a swastika.

"So we were right," he said. "The birds and the beasts have gotten together."

"Do you mean THRUSH and the Fourth Reich?" Helene asked. "You are correct. With one purpose." Her blue eyes flamed like illuminated diamonds, hard, cold. "To build an organization of such strength that the world cannot stand against us. We shall succeed."

The Rolls raced on out of the city. Trapped, Solo felt that Fraulein Helene Bauer just might be right about succeeding.

Because he, thus far, had failed.

ACT TWO — The Bigger They Come

ONE

A clock in the spire of the Lutheran church on the square chimed the hour of seven.

Sun spilled gold on to the sloping slate rooftops of the village of Ommenschnee. The gilt light painted the dun-colored cobbles of the square, where a stout farmer's cart drawn by a sway-backed horse was just clopping out of sight around the corner of an inn.

The windows of the inn were still tightly shuttered against the night.

Here a policeman wandered, there the driver of a milk lorry paused to pack his meerschaum with a cut plug before driving on with a puttering of exhaust.

Under the shadow of the porch arch of the great church, a smaller blob of shadow seemed to stir, as though about to venture forth among the few good souls who were beginning to move along the narrow streets of this hamlet deep in the pine-scented forest.

The shadow figure peering from behind a pillar at the picturesque square was an equally picturesque sight: a spindly, seedy peddler with a sack full of cheap imitations of Hummel figurines slung over his shoulder. He wore dark trousers, an ill-fitting coat which hung nearly to his knees and was nearly worn through at the elbows, and a battered old hat. The face of the itinerant peddler was the color of used leather, exceedingly lined. A white soup-handle mustache drooped below white eyebrows. But the man's eyes were alert, concerned—and young.

Finally this picturesque personage decided that he could cross the square in relative safety. The cobbles were filling with up-early pedestrians—several shopgirls; children riding bicycles; a couple of sporty youths on muttering motor scooters; half a dozen nuns hurrying towards a chapel of another religious persuasion. Into this setting stepped the disguised Illya Kuryakin, his bag of figurines rattling.

With shuffling step Illya made for a street which angled west from the square's far side. He kept his head down so that the brim of his hat hid his face. He was beginning to feel his exhaustion. He hadn't slept at all the past night, and to compound the fatigue, he was nagged by an unproveable certainty that his whereabouts were known to THRUSH.

The biggest question was—did THRUSH now have his friend Napoleon Solo in captivity?

A warbling note barely perceptible to Illya's ears because the receiver was swaddled in thick layers of cloth under his coat seemed to indicate so.

Where was Solo being held? Apparently westward, in the green-boughed fastness of the Black Forest.

Early last night Illya had been rather lacksadasically perusing the isometrics pamphlet in the hotel suite in Munich. Solo had been gone for almost an hour. Illya had just about decided that no amount of finger-flexing and bicep-tensing would transform him into a strong man. He had been about to phone the hotel pantry for a snack and a good stein of dark beer when he became aware that the rod-like communicator lying there on the coffee table was emitting a signal which was growing steadily weaker.

The next twenty minutes were desperate.

Keeping the communicator pressed against his left ear so as not to lose the signal, Illya phoned a lesser official of the Munich U.N.C.L.E. station and rather high-handedly commandeered the station's expensive electronic detection and search sedan. The car took ten minutes to arrive at the hotel; the operator had had a minor brush with the law over speeding. By then Illya had nearly lost the signal from his pocket communicator.

With an emotion almost akin to frenzy, he practically knocked the operator out of the front seat of the dark, unobtrusive sedan and leaped in.

For the next ten minutes he drove round and round Munich's downtown, steering with one hand while he used his right to twist, turn the various knobs and rheostats on the complicated dash panel.

At last a greenish tear-drop blip appeared on the display glass in the center of the panel. The blip signal corresponded in its interval with the nearly imperceptible warbling still coming from his pocket communicator on the seat beside him.

There! Illya was locked on to Solo's transmitting frequency. But where was Solo going?

After ten more minutes of cruising, the glass showed him.

Either under coercion or of his own free will, Napoleon Solo was heading west. The blip inched steadily toward the left of the screen.

In the direction of the Schwarzwald! Illya hit the gas pedal and sent the sedan careening through the streets at the edge of the nightclub district. After another interval of high-speed driving, he had the blip again centered in the display glass.

He drove steadily now, his nerves fine tuned by tension. The blip was not outrunning him.

At three in the morning the blip abruptly disappeared from the glass. Illya computed its last position to be some three miles northwest of a village which the map called Ommenschnee. Illya parked the car on the shoulder of the highway, which at this point cut through giant trees that soughed into the darkness.

Illya hadn't seen another vehicle for an hour and a half.

Working by the feeble glow of the dash instruments, he rummaged in a trunk which had been loaded aboard the sedan at his request. A sour face indicated his attitude toward the seamy contents of the Munich station's so-called Emergency Disguise Kit.

He had his choice of imitating a police officer, dressing up as a non-denominational nun—what were the Munich people thinking, anyway?—or settling for some scrofulous-looking rags which were meant to cast him in a peddler's role, if he judged by the sack of figurines that completed the outfit.

Slipping into the noisome garb, Illya made a mental note to write a memo to Mr. Waverly concerning the witless choice of quick-change outfits offered by the Munich station. For an U.N.C.L.E. operative to be caught masquerading as an officer of the law or as a member of a non-existent holy order was abolutely idiotic. Inefficiency, inefficiency everywhere!

Illya pulled the floppy hat down on his head and paused in his mental tirade. He realized with some chagrin that he had just been hunting a scapegoat.

He was desperately afraid that through his own ineptitude his friend Solo had falled into the hands of THRUSH.

But perhaps Solo had only discovered a particularly warm tip, and was off to follow it. Illya reassured himself with this thought as he slid the ersatz walnut dashboard in place over the electronic dials in the car, and locked all doors. The detection and search sedan was constructed of the heaviest steels and equipped with bullet-proof glass. It would take a heavy tank with its cannon blasting to gain entrance.

Illya began to trudge down the shoulder of the road. Pine needles crunched faintly under foot. Suddenly headlights sprang up behind him, racing fast.

Illya's heart slugged wildly as he started for the protection of the trees. He was too late—

The headlights sprayed his back white. Illya hunched over, swung around, slitting his eyes and hoping that the facial stain and white mustache would serve to make him look old. Like white-yellow juggernauts the headlamps raced at him. He prepared to reach for his long-muzzled U.N.C.L.E. pistol beneath his rags of disguise. The vehicle was almost on him -