The Goliath Affair Read online

  The Goliath Affair

  By John Jakes

  December 1966

  Volume 2, Issue 5

  Trapped, lost, two desperate U.N.C.L.E. agents face their greatest peril — a horde of brainwashed, senseless girl monsters, who have been told — "One man must never escape from here alive. His name is Napoleon Solo..."

  They knew no law but evil, the laughing giantesses from the Black Forest, who murdered with a caress — and died with a smile. Their leader had said: "This man must not escape. His name is Napoleon Solo!"

  PROLOGUE: The Man Who Knocked Them Dead

  ACT ONE: Death to All 97-pound Weaklings!

  ACT TWO: The Bigger They Come

  ACT THREE: The Harder U.N.C.L.E. Falls

  ACT FOUR: Pick a Rock, Any Rock—Or Die

  Prologue: The Man Who Knocked Them Dead

  The comely young lady reposed on a multicolored beach towel, sunning herself. Her hair was long and red. Her figure was superb. Her two-piece white bikini was hardly more than a token acknowledgement of certain laws concerning exposure of the human body. Mr. Napoleon Solo didn't mind at all.

  What he did mind was the tantalizing way the redhead kept sipping from a tall, frosty glass of what appeared to be lemonade.

  Lying on his belly in the hot sand, with the sun driving a screw of pain into the back of his skull, Solo licked his lips and listened enviously to the tinkle of ice in her glass.

  Decidedly odd, Solo thought as he peered at the dune just ahead. On its crest the charming young lady was worshiping the sun with seemingly no ill effects. Suddenly her figure became blurred.

  Solo rubbed the back of his left hand against his eye sockets. He couldn't quite focus on her. The sun turned the screw of pain in the back of his head one more full turn.

  Odd, he thought again. Until this moment, Napoleon Solo had been unaware that there were any lemonade stands on the Nefud, the fearsome Red Desert of Saudi Arabia.

  A voice at his elbow distracted him: "Napoleon? We must keep moving."

  Solo turned his head drowsily to his left. There, on his belly, with bulky pistol holsters strapped under his armpits and glittering bullet-filled bandoliers crisscrossing his sweat-black rag of a shirt, Illya Kuryakin provided a decidedly unwelcome distraction.

  "Go way," Solo murmured. "You'll disturb her."

  Illya's eyebrows quirked downward. "Her? Napoleon, the sun is getting to you. We must keep moving. The station is just over that dune ahead but we are not certain whether the THRUSH unit has been alerted. If they have been, they may be making preparations for a hasty exodus."

  Napoleon Solo struggled to his feet, swaying in the light, furnace-hot breeze.

  Once he stood up, Napoleon Solo felt miserably ill.

  His belly churned. His temples began to vibrate. The tawny endlessness of sand tilted and swam. But the ice in the girl's glass still tinkled.

  "Got to ask her where to buy it," Solo mumbled through dry, sun-cracked lips. He stopped. Weird music, all off-key, wailed in his ears. He felt as though he was turning in slow circles, while his heavy desert boots somehow remained stationary in the sand.

  Solo tried to lift his right boot. Sand dribbled off the toe. He was hardly his dapper self, clad as he was in disreputable, grease-stained suntans which were supposed to help maintain the fiction that he, like the other two U.N.C.L.E. agents, was a member of a geological search crew whose 'copter had wandered off course.

  The tableau held one frozen moment longer: Solo swaying against the background of a brass sheet of sky, his beard sprouted and his eyes not quite sane. On his left, still belly down, Illya Kuryakin, equally sweaty and unkempt, glanced past his friend Solo to a third man, who also lay on his stomach.

  The trio had been crawling forward together, mile after skin-flaying mile. The third man had a blunt jaw and blond hair which the sun had bleached white. He was the U.N.C.L.E. station chief at Khaibar. His cable had pulled Solo and Illya out there in the first place.

  "Peterson?" Illya formed the man's name silently with his lips. "When I count three—Jump him."

  Peterson nodded quickly. A single yell from Napoleon Solo could give the game away, could alert THRUSH guards who might be waiting just past the dune. For his part, Napoleon Solo wondered idly why his companions were watching him with such peculiar expressions. Frankly, he found their attention irritating.

  Solo wished his head would stop buzzing. The sun-screw tightened again. This time it bored straight down into the top of his skull. Silently and profanely Solo dismissed his companions, bothering only to wave at Illya in disgust.

  Illya had gone into a half-crouch. He appeared to be mouthing some nonsense syllables. Napoleon Solo was annoyed by the whole moronic situation.

  "Listen," Solo began. "I'm going up there and ask that girl—"

  "—three!" Illya breathed, moving fast. He and Peterson jumped Solo from either side.

  A startled outcry nearly blasted the desert silence with sound as Peterson and Illya bore Solo to the ground. Fortunately Illya managed to get his left elbow jammed between Solo's teeth. Solo resented this. He thrashed vigorously and attempted to sink his teeth into the bone.

  Solo discovered someone's grimy fingers working their way around Illya's elbow into his mouth. Something rolled against Solo's tongue.

  "Let go," Peterson cried softly. "I got the pill in him."

  Illya whipped his elbow back an instant before Napoleon Solo's outraged molars clamped together. There was a faint crunch as Solo bit through the gelatinous shell of a capsule.

  Cool, thick, minty liquid rolled over his tongue. Pinwheels exploded behind his eyes. He passed out.

  Solo opened his eyes ten minutes later, groaning.

  The simmering sand grated against his right cheek. He had a feeling that he had done something very ill-mannered. He rolled over on his back. Peterson and Illya were hunkering down near him.

  Solo struggled to sit up. As he did so his eyes slid past the empty top of the dune just ahead. And he remembered the whole thing.

  First came the frantic communique from Peterson stating that operatives of the Saudi Arabian unit had at last located the THRUSH cell. Over the past months the cell had been methodically dynamiting major oil pipelines and leaving evidence behind that the work was done by terrorists who owed allegiance to a nation in this explosive, oil-happy part of the world.

  The THRUSH intent, of course, was to create frictions which could lead to an international incident and, if all went well, a disastrous war between two major Near Eastern powers.

  Such a war would seriously cripple the flow of petroleum to the world's industrial countries and would create the kind of unsettled situation upon which THRUSH could and would capitalize.

  Napoleon Solo looked sheepish. "I know something happened, from the way you're looking."

  "We thought," said Illya dryly, "that you planned to yoo-hoo a little greeting to our THRUSH friends over the hill."

  "The sun got you," Peterson said. "You saw a girl up there on the dune. She was drinking lemonade."

  Solo made a thoroughly adult face. "Lemonade! I did slip a cog."

  "Lucky I had the proper capsules with me," said Peterson, with a faint trace of a British accent. "You chaps who come out from Operations and Enforcement to knock over these cells ought to take climatization drill before popping off to crawl three miles across the Red Desert. We field chaps have the impression that you headquarters chaps train in cocktail bars."

  Illya made a sharp gesture. "Let's not fall to bickering. We've work to do."

  Peterson mopped his upper lip. "Sorry. The sun even makes me edgy, and I've been out here four years now. But I lost my best man to a dagger in the spine at Khaibar. I don't want thi
s particular little manoeuver to fail. When Tommy turned up knifed, I decided THRUSH had gotten wind that we'd located the cell. If so, they may be hurrying to close down and move on."

  Peterson's pale eyes grew extremely hard. "I don't care to see that happen. Tommy was a top U.N.C.L.E. man, you know."

  "I'm sorry I cost us time—" Solo began.

  Illya ticked a fingernail against the crystal of his watch. "It's already 0715 hours. We're fifteen minutes behind schedule. Shall we move out?"

  Some of the buzzing was clearing from Solo's head. He flopped belly-down in the sand. His companions did likewise. Silently the three men began to crawl upward toward the dune's crest, using their elbows and knees to propel themselves along.

  Through his sweat-sodden shirt Solo could feel the heat of the desert rising to flay his skin. On his back, where the sun beat, the heat was even worse. And it was as yet only a relatively short time past dawn. Fortunately they soon crawled into a patch of purple shadow on the near face of the dune. From there they worked themselves slowly upward in relative coolness.

  Here it felt only 100 or 110 degrees, not 130 or 140.

  Solo's mind slid over the events of the past hours. He and Illya had flown in from New York and met Peterson in the city of Khaibar the preceding sunset. In a ramshackle 'copter Peterson flew them roughly northeast out into the Red Desert. Toward the end of the night Peterson set the 'copter down, using its radar and the stars to hit the precise location he wanted.

  At first light they set out overland, their destination three miles away. Solo now felt chagrined that the heat had affected him so drastically, but he didn't indulge in self-pity for long.

  They were near the crest of the dune. Demolition of this THRUSH cell was crucially important. Every nerve, every ounce of his mental power had to be concentrated on the fast surprise attack—

  "Carefully, chaps," Peterson whispered. "Let's take a peep."

  With extreme caution the three U.N.C.L.E. agents raised themselves just sufficiently for a good view of the land beyond the dune.

  Perhaps a hundred yards ahead, round, ominous and helmet-shaped, a steel structure protruded above the sand. Its bluish surface appeared unbroken except for the tiny punctuation of rows of rivet heads.

  Beyond it a short concrete airstrip, pitted and cracked in many places, stretched away into the blazing, wavering horizon. An unmarked, double-engined turbo-prop plane stood on the ready line at the end of the strip nearest them.

  A hot breeze lifted sand whorls here and there. Otherwise nothing moved.

  "They're all underground having their morning vodka and potatoes," Illya said with a macabre grin.

  "Bacon and eggs," Solo corrected, working one of the special pistols loose from its holster. He palmed the heavy butt and began to insert bullet-like projectiles from his bandoliers into round receptacles at the muzzle end of the weapon.

  "Whatever they're eating in that warren under the sand," said Peterson, "shall we interrupt?"

  The three U.N.C.L.E. agents worked now with trained precision. Each loaded eight of the special rocket-propelled demolition bullets into the honeycombed ends of the weapons. The guns were the latest innovation of the U.N.C.L.E. research laboratories.

  Each man flipped up the homing sight on his weapon, extended his right arm and braced it. In a matter of moments three right arms were aimed out across the dune top at the pillbox.

  Solo began to count downward from five. On signal, the three pistols would discharge a total of twenty-four projectiles which would obliterate the pillbox structure above ground and fill the area below with such heat that the THRUSH agents lurking in the tunnels and offices would be crisped.

  "—three, two—" Solo counted.

  Up from the sand directly in front of him shot a periscope, its glass eye watching him. Klaxons began to warble.

  "A trip wire somewhere!" Peterson bawled. "We missed it, damn it!"

  At the pillbox, a section of its curved wall facing the dune was rolling back. From the opening a medium-caliber anti-personnel cannon shot forth its wicked barrel. There was a quick, ear-knocking chuff. Straight at the dune, a white-sizzling charge came rocketing.

  Illya was already throwing himself wildly to the left. Solo followed. Peterson rolled in the other direction. The rocket howled and crashed into the top of the dune where the three U.N.C.L.E. agents had been lying only moments before.

  The whole summit seemed to erupt in a white, spurting cloud. A thunderous explosion slammed Solo's ears and threw him forward forcibly three yards. Sandlike glass stung the back of his neck, drawing blood.

  "Dirty blighters got the jump on us!" Peterson was on his feet, aiming his demolition pistol at the pillbox.

  Illya and Solo began running to their left, Illya going ahead of his friend. Strung out, they presented three targets rather than a single one for the cannon. It was swivelling from left to right and back again as the gunners sought a new quarry.

  Where the dune on which they had been lying sloped down, Solo flung himself out on his stomach. The cannon chuffed. A sizzling streak of white fire flashed over his head and blew up the desert two hundred yards behind him. More sand rained down. Solo steadied his right arm and began triggering the demolition pistol.

  Another port in the pillbox had opened. Several ill-uniformed Thrushmen with high-powered rifles were stumbling out to do battle, egged on by a shrill-voiced officer who was ordering them forward in Arabic.

  The officer remained conveniently screened from danger behind his men. Solo's demolition pistol smoked and bucked. The tiny but potent projectiles spurted out one after another.

  Illya was setting up a cross-fire with his own pistol, mowing down the Thrushmen. Solo saw the muzzle of the cannon peel back upon itself, flow limp and molten for a heartbeat of time. Then it disappeared in a flash of scarlet fire. Solo's slugs had found their mark.

  Peterson's demolition pistol emitted four lethal blasts before Solo shouted, "Hold your fire! We won't have time to re-load if they try—"

  Unfortunately Peterson didn't hear. The morning burst open with a splatter of sound as the engines of the plane shrieked to life. Somehow a pilot had darted out—probably through an escape port on the pillbox's far side—and boarded the plane during the fighting. An escape seemed imminent.

  Peterson hadn't let up, either. His remaining four demolition bullets polished off the last of the Thrushmen who had rushed out, including their reluctant officer. The whole near side of the pillbox was a dancing apparition of flame and smoke.

  "The plane!" Illya bawled through the noise. "Napoleon, follow me! We must stop the plane!"

  Legs churning so hard they ached, Solo raced after his friend. Peterson was right behind.

  Solo tried to re-load the pistol on the run, with little success. The heat boiled out from the melting pillbox. Smoke billowed, obscuring the airstrip briefly.

  Just as Napoleon Solo caught up with Illya and the two of them started around the left side of the THRUSH station, two men darted from the hidden escape hatch nearest the airstrip and raced for the plane.

  One man, of slight stature, wore a rumpled THRUSH uniform and had an attache case handcuffed to his left wrist. That would be the station chief, taking all key documents with him. It was the man lumbering along at the station chief's side who curdled Solo's blood.

  Through the smoke the man loomed up, a misshapen apparition with sloping shoulders and arms that hung nearly to his knees. The man had a bulbous, lemon-shaped head of grotesque size. Huge ears stuck straight out. His nose was a gigantic wreck. His eyes seemed to burn through the heat and smoke like brown lanterns as he turned and whipped up a gun which looked like a toy in his huge fist.

  The man stood at least six feet eight inches tall, a grotesque giant.

  Illya and Solo slammed themselves on the ground for cover as the giant fired. The bullet buzzed harmlessly by. The hatch of the plane had been opened. The section chief was climbing up. The giant aimed a second shot. His gun
jammed. He threw it away. His face wrenched into the vilest expression of hatred Napoleon Solo had ever seen.

  From the plane's hatchway the chief called, "Don't waste time on them, Klaanger. Hurry—"

  Klaanger? Klaanger? Somewhere a frantic little bell rang in Solo's mind. But the meaning of the warning escaped him.

  The hulking Klaanger turned and lumbered toward the plane. At that moment Peterson came charging up behind Solo and Illya. He went right on past. Peterson's face was black with anger, and he ran with surprising speed for a man of his size.

  Illya and Solo went after him, both of them trying to load their pistols on the run so that they could halt the plane.

  Peterson dashed out ahead of them, fighting his way through the blast of air from the port engine just as Klaanger hauled himself clumsily up into the hatchway.

  Shouting curses, Peterson flung his empty demolition pistol at Klaanger. The weapon whanged off the fuselage, a bad throw. Peterson leaped, caught the edges of the hatchway, intending to pull himself into the plane in a suicidal attempt to stop it.

  Solo and Illya had just reached the plane's tail section. They were running at top speed. Wind from the engines blasted them, thrust them reeling back. And in that howling, smoking delirium, the horror came—

  Klaanger appeared to crouch down in the hatchway as the aircraft started to roll. The man's liverish lips curled up in a bleak imitation of a smile. He balled his right fist, shot it forward and gave Peterson, who was struggling and hanging there in the hatch, what seemed to be the lightest of taps on the top of the skull.

  Peterson's head popped open like a fruit.

  For a moment a piercing thread of a scream filled the morning. Then it was drowned out by the roar of the plane's engines. The turbo-prop surged forward. Klaanger hung in the hatchway, laughing uproariously as the THRUSH craft lifted lazily to its escape—

  There at the end of the airstrip, caught in the sudden intensified surge of wind from the accelerating plane, Napoleon Solo felt warm droplets against his face. The wind blew blood upon him, and upon Illya. Peterson's blood.

  The plane whined, screamed, lifted silver against the flaming circle of the sun. Gradually the noise of the engines diminished. Solo and Illya watched the craft become a speck vanishing far off over the desert. Defeat showed in the slope of their shoulders as they stumbled forward along the blood-spotted runway.