The Sinister Satellite Affair Read online

  THE SINISTER SATELLITE AFFAIR

  By Robert Hart Davis

  High over the earth, triggered to explode, the most terrible weapon known to man waited THRUSH’s orders to strike; as April Dancer alone held the leash to a vast nuclear time bomb---in full orbit!

  ONE

  DANGER FROM SPACE

  A leathery face man with iron gray hair leaned back in his chair and thoughtfully contemplated the United Nations building visible through his one-way window. He could see out, but from the outside the wall looked solid.

  “I wonder,” he said softly in a voice that held the slightest trace of a British accent, “if they are making a gross mistake over there.”

  Behind him a light flashed on the curving desk covered with buttons and switches. He turned his chair around with his back to the splendid view of the UN. He pressed a button and said into a concealed speaker: “Alexander Waverly here.”

  “Mr. Waverly, this is Section III Intelligence. We have the report you asked for.”

  “Excellent,” Waverly said. “Let me have it.”

  “Gustave Van Cleve underwent plastic surgery in a Zurich, Switzerland, hospital six months ago,” the intelligence clerk said. “The facial scar was removed. He has not been heard of since then.”

  “Thank you,” Waverly said. When the connection was broken, he leaned over and picked up an unlighted pipe from the desk. He caressed the bowl thoughtfully as his agile mind turned over the disturbing pieces of the puzzle that worried him.

  A light flashed again on the console.

  “Yes. Alexander Waverly here.”

  “Mr. Waverly. Section I. We have received the official reply from the secretary general of the UN to your super-secret message. Shall I read it?”

  “Under no circumstances,” Waverly said in clipped tones. “What is the gist?”

  “The secretary general says there is absolutely no evidence to support your suspicions about the Red Chinese Satellite I,” the voice from Section I replied.

  “I see,” Waverly said.

  “The message goes on to say in effect that the UN is very much against any investigation we might make of Satellite I. They feel that the entrance of Red China into the peaceful space race is an excellent sign of thawing international relations. They do not wish to arouse any Chinese suspicions that might disrupt these relations.”

  “Thank you,” Waverly said.

  He contemplated the pipe, talking to it as if the briar was human.

  “I am afraid we are in for trouble,” he said softly. “I am positive there is as great a menace as the world has ever known in that satellite. I---”

  “Mr. Waverly,” a voice from the concealed speaker in the communications desk console said. “It is time for the world-wide reports.”

  “So soon?” Waverly said. His seamed face showed a flicker of surprise.

  A glance at the recessed clock showed him that it was time to receive his daily reports from U.N.C.L.E. operatives scattered around the world. In his absorption in this new danger time had skipped by more rapidly than he realized.

  “Very well,” he said, “patch me into the network.”

  He leaned back, rubbing the bowl of the briar pipe while he waited for the communications net to be completed. Lights came on as each operative was contacted.

  Mentally Waverly checked them off. April Dancer in Paris. Mark Slate in London. Napoleon Solo in Hong Kong. Illya Kuryakin in Zurich, Switzerland. Swiftly the super secret communications channels of the organization known as U.N.C.L.E.---from the initials of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement---reached around the world to link the voices of the various operatives together.

  It was only a matter of a few seconds, but that was too long for the man who headed the world's greatest agency against international crime.

  It was a mysterious organization U.N.C.L.E. Its purpose was open enough: to provide a crime-fighting system that would not be hampered by international boundaries, which could operate anywhere at any time.

  But how it was founded, financed and operated is the secret of a handful of highly placed men of several major countries. Under its charter U.N.C.L.E. does not, in fact cannot concern itself with national crime problems. This is the responsibility of an individual nation.

  From its well-guarded headquarters in a disguised brownstone front building in New York's lower fifties, U.N.C.L.E. directs its world-wide organization solely against international crime and intrigue that threatens world safety.

  “The circuit is complete,” the voice from the speaker said.

  “Thank you,” the U.N.C.L.E. operations chief replied. Then into the speaker he said, “Report, please.”

  The secret radio beams flashed around the world. A girl's vibrant voice spoke first: “April Dancer in Paris, Mr. Waverly.”

  “Mark Slate in London, sir,” a man's voice came next. It was a casual tone with a decidedly British accent.

  “Illya Kuryakin, Zurich, Switzerland, Mr. Waverly.” This voice was flat and almost without expression, but carried an undertone of hardness.

  “Napoleon Solo in Hong Kong, sir.” This was a deeper voice than the others. It was somewhat soft spoken, but carried a ring of authority.

  “Before you make your own reports, let me bring you up to date on developments here,” Waverly said, choosing his words with great care. “The officials with whom I talked at the UN refuse, on the basis of the proof we have at the moment, to consider Red Satellite I as anything but the peaceful space experiment the Chinese Communists claim it to be.”

  “Then we will proceed alone?” Napoleon Solo asked.

  “That may be difficult,” Alexander Waverly said slowly. “I have discussed my suspicions with representatives of the foreign offices of both the United States and Great Britain. Both are reluctant to take any action that would antagonize Red China at this moment when it appears that diplomatic feelers are thawing the freeze between East and West.”

  “Can't they be shown that this thaw is to throw them off guard?” April Dancer asked.

  “They did not consider what little proof I had as conclusive,” Waverly said. “Even more important, they did not consider a single satellite in space, even if it were an orbiting H-bomb, to be a world threat.”

  “It would seem that a single bomb in space, no matter how large, could only menace a single point on the planet,” Kuryakin put in. “They certainly can't conquer the world with one bomb.”

  “That is exactly the argument I got,” Waverly said. “And unfortunately, it is an argument I cannot refute. All I know is that men from THRUSH assisted the Chinese in placing this Red Satellite I in orbit. That I have proved to my satisfaction. Certainly THRUSH would not be involved in this unless there were enormous stakes involved.”

  There was silence from his four operatives as they considered their chief's words.

  THRUSH! It was a word they heard with mixed emotions. It was an enemy they had fought in deathly struggles to save the world from frightful dangers. THRUSH! They didn't even know what the word was supposed to mean, but they did know that it was an evil organization of extremely brilliant scientists, spies, adventurers, and murderers. It had one objective: to bring the world under its total domination.

  “Actually I have very little upon which to base my suspicions,” Waverly went on. “I do know that a suspected THRUSH spy named Van Cleve disappeared after being seen with Wing Lee How, director of the Red Satellite I program. Also that four other THRUSH rocket scientists, those I had you investigating, were studying Chinese.”

  “My man, Percival Chamberlain, has left London,” Mark Slate reported. “His relatives report he is in the South Seas doing volcanic researc
h. I can find no record of any boat sailing to that area.”

  Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin also reported negative results concerning the men they were trying to trace.

  “I may have something!” April Dancer's voice held such suppressed excitement that Alexander Waverly sat up out of his slouch. The briar pipe slipped unnoticed from his hand.

  Despite an appearance more in keeping with parading chic fashions across the stage of a famous designer, April Dancer's feminine beauty hid a mind as sharp as any of the male members of the U.N.C.L.E. team. More important, she had never lost her almost little girlish enthusiasm for her work. Where the mention of their deadly enemy, THRUSH, brought grim expressions to the faces of the men, it made April's dark eyes dance like her name.

  “Yes?” Alexander Waverly said eagerly into his microphone.

  In London, Hong Kong, and Zurich the other three U.N.C.L.E. agents waited with equal expectancy. They understood the gravity of the situation and the problems they faced if they ran into political interference in this affair. At the moment all their investigations were running into a blank wall.

  In dealing with THRUSH it was imperative that they move in quickly. A delay could be fatal.

  “Yes, yes! What is it, Miss Dancer?” Waverly said somewhat testily as April hesitated.

  In her small apartment overlooking the Seine in Paris, April Dancer stretched out her long slender legs and stared through the window at the lights of the Eiffel Tower etched against the night sky.

  “I didn't know the investigation I was making of Francoise LeBrun was tied in with Satellite I,” she said. “But in trying to uncover his tracks, I did come across something that seems a little curious now.”

  “Please, Miss Dancer!” Waverly's anxiety put a sharper edge on his voice than he usually employed with his agents. “Could we possibly save the gossip until this affair is closed? What is the connection!”

  “Sorry, sir,” April said. “I checked with every person who had come in contact with LeBrun for the last two months. One of these was Franklyn Pierce!”

  “Franklyn Pierce? But we checked out Pierce when he defected,” Solo put in from Hong Kong. “The U.S. Space Agency said that he had no information that would reveal any U.S. secrets. He---”

  “But you don't understand!”

  April broke in impatiently. “Pierce was the one who---”

  The sudden break in her voice electrified the four men. They waited in a growing agony of expectation. They knew the circuit was not broken, for they could hear the faint humming which came from the automatic coder which garbled their voices into a super-secret code and then unscrambled them on receipt.

  After a suspenseful ten seconds, Alexander Waverly said, “Miss Dancer? Come in, please! Can you receive me, Miss Dancer?”

  Suddenly a shout blasted out from the speaker. Alexander Waverly gripped the edge of his desk. It was a man's voice.

  “Miss Dancer!” he cried.

  All he received in answer was the roar of a gun. The sound was unmistakable. It was the distinctive crash of an U.N.C.L.E. Special.

  “Miss Dancer!” the U.N.C.L.E. operations chief repeated.

  His reply was the blast of an explosion---and then the circuit to Paris went dead!

  TWO

  NIGHT ATTACK

  In Paris April Dancer, the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. had been lolling back in a chair in her apartment while she talked to Waverly in New York. She had darkened the room so she could enjoy the lovely view across the night skyline of the “city of light.”

  While Waverly had the intricate U.N.C.L.E. communications console in front of him, April spoke into what looked like a silver fountain pen. A six-inch antenna was pulled from its interior which converted it into the famous U.N.C.L.E. pen-communicator---an ultra-miniaturized transceiver that could transmit and receive world-wide over the secret U.N.C.L.E. channel.

  When Waverly's explanation suddenly triggered a startling idea in her mind, several apparently minor and unrelated bits of information fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle.

  She sat up straight, her eyes dancing, her face flushed with excitement. She blurted out her remarks about Franklyn Pierce. She heard Napoleon Solo voice his objections from Hong Kong. Then, before she could tell them her suspicions, her sharp eyes caught a movement outside her window.

  She leaped to her feet, dropping the pen-communicator on the army of the chair as her right hand darted for the bag lying on the table beside the chair. She jerked out the miniature version of the U.N.C.L.E. Special.

  “Quick!” A man's voice yelled from the tiny iron-railed balcony outside her window. “She sees me! Let her have it!”

  His frightened cry echoed off the walls and came in garbled on the still open pen communicator circuit. The tense men in New York, Zurich, London and Hong Kong could not distinguish the words.

  April saw a man's dark form dangling from a rope that evidently was thrown down from the balcony above. At the same time she saw a man already on the rail, climbing over.

  She fired. He yelled and pitched forward on his face. At the moment she shot, the man dangling from the rope hurled something at her.

  In the gloom it looked about the size of a wrapped book.

  “A bomb!” April gasped.

  Her finger tightened on the trigger of the U.N.C.L.E. Special. She fired at the hurtling package only a split second after it left the thrower's hand. Hours of hard practice on the U.N.C.L.E. firing range saved her life now.

  The bullet struck the bomb package. It knocked the explosive package back, but not far enough. It struck the edge of the iron rail and exploded with a tremendous crash.

  The shock wave hit April as she threw herself to the carpet. The balcony cracked and fell. The walls sagged. April frantically caught the leg of the chair. She pulled it around in front of her as the entire facings of the French windows leading to the balcony were ripped from the wall and thrown back at her.

  Plaster and smoke filled the air. She could scarcely see or breathe. For a moment the entire room quivered. Then the brick wall gave way around the explosion area. It collapsed into the street with a roar.

  Without the side support the floor sagged badly, dropping to almost a forty-five degree tilt. The chair April gripped to protect her from falling plaster and timber started to slide down the incline.

  April Dancer let it go and tried to save herself. There was nothing she could grab. She clawed at the carpet, but couldn't get a grip. She kept sliding. The gaping hole in the side of the building now opened on a three-and-a-half story drop. I was a killing fall at best, but now it was sheer murder.

  Piles of smoking masonry, brick and the jagged spears of shattered timber reared up directly in her line of fall.

  Frantically April tried to stop her slide. The floor tilted worse. She had to drop her gun, but she still couldn't stop her death slide.

  She jammed her shoe heels into the carpet and dug as deeply as possible with her fingers. It slowed her fall, but did not stop it. The overstuffed chair went over the brink. She heard the chilling sound as it shattered on the smoking piles of brick below.

  She was on her stomach, sliding down. Her feet, thighs and then her hips went over the edge. She couldn't stop herself.

  As her body slid over the edge of the sagging floor, her grasping fingers caught the edge of the wood. She hung there. The floor quivered for an awful moment so that she thought it would completely collapse.

  April Dancer looked down. Some of the wood from the explosion was burning. She could clearly see the piles of brick and jagged beams pointing up at her.

  She gave up the idea of dropping. It was sheer suicide. In the distance she could hear shouts of people running toward her. She thought she could hang on until help came.

  But a second later there was a sharp crack from across the street. April thought at first that it was the sagging floor giving away for wood splintered to the right of her head.

  Then she realized that it was the crack of a
gun. The distinctive sound marked it as a THRUSH gun, a special weapon patterned after but inferior to the U.N.C.L.E. Special.

  The gun cracked again. The slug smashed closer to April's head. The jar loosed another sagging beam. The floor tilted even more.

  In the split second she had to think April realized she could not hang on any longer. Digging her fingers into the quivering edge of the floor until her muscles almost cramped, she swung her legs back to get her body swinging.

  The THRUSH murderer fired again. His aim was better now, despite the darkness. The slug ripped through the air close enough to put a hole just above the hem of her mini-skirt. If she hadn't been swinging it would have torn into her body.

  Above her the tortured timbers were giving away. She could hear the cracking up of the remaining beams.

  The floor sagged more. She knew there was only seconds before it fell. Across the street the determined THRUSH liquidator fired again.

  At that instance April felt the floor give way. As it dropped she swung her body inwards, putting all her strength into a circus-like swing, and let go.

  She swung into the gaping opening, exposing the floor directly under the one that was falling. She hit with her feet on the rug, but at an acute angle that caused her to fall backward. She sat down hard and rolled over.

  There was a heavy library-type table near her. She scrambled madly to get under it as the falling ceiling-the floor she had just quitted came plunging down.

  The legs of the table cracked. Before it could collapse on her, April grabbed a broken board and propped it under the table.

  Outside car lights flashed in the dark street. A police car siren wailed. In the distance she could hear the whine of a fire siren as well.

  The ceiling had stopped falling. April stiffly pulled herself erect and walked gingerly over to the edge, where she could see below through the large hole made by the bomb exploding on the floor above.

  She could see a gendarme getting out of the police car.

  “Where were you when I needed you?” April said somewhat grumpily.

  Below the French policeman saw her. Profusely and with a large amount of explanatory arm-swinging he announced that he would personally save her.