The Light-Kill Affair Read online

  He reset the dials, glanced at Carrero. "You want to go with me?"

  The guide nodded, eyes wide. "I wish only not to be left alone in this place, even for a minute."

  "Then stay close behind me."

  "Senor need not worry about this, either. As his shadow is there, so will I be."

  They plodded through under growth until the red lines of the dial matched again. Solo spent an hour chopping away the high swamp growth.

  He felt the emptiness of defeat. According to Sayres' final report, a glass-walled lab had stood only days ago in this place, a cleared area with space for landing a helicopter.

  He shook his head. There was no trace of building and it seemed incredible that vines and trees could grow so lush in such a short time.

  "No!" He spoke aloud. "There's got to be an answer." He stared at Carrero without really seeing him. "We've got to find it, that's all."

  Solo prowled the underbrush a moment. Then he said, "Carrero, you're a jungle man. You could find out where you were by the growth, feed yourself, if you were lost, eh?"

  "You think us hopelessly lost, Senor?" Carrero's face twisted.

  "No. But I think if these plants are younger, newer, it should show. Do you understand?"

  "Young plants, no matter how tall, are more tender than the older. Young plants seldom have the berries that sustain life."

  "Now you're thinking, Carrero. That's what I want. You find where these young plants meet older growth. We should be surrounded by it. Mark it all out, and we'll narrow down the area that much."

  In less than an hour, Carrero had hacked out a rectangle that could have been the base for a glass-walled laboratory. Inside this area, Solo hacked with machete until he found what he had been sure must remain, the foundation for those walls.

  He shouted in his pleasure. Carrero came running. Solo was smiling through his three days beard, sweat and mud.

  "Here it is! Here it stood. Look, traces of garbage, food tins, broken glass, inside this foundation footing. We've found our butterflies, Carrero!"

  "Si! Si!" Carrero looked around timidly. "We can now go home, no?"

  Solo nodded, hardly hearing what the guide said.

  He returned to the long-range scanner on the knoll. It was as if he had found the key piece of a jig saw puzzle. Everything else fell into place.

  He found bits of electronic gear to show where Sayres' scanner had been destroyed. He found bones and teeth that must once have been Diego Viero and after a long search he found shoes with the x-marked identification tags.

  He gazed at the tags before he dropped them into his pocket. His face was bleak. Not only had Diego and Sayres been slain, but their bodies and their equipment had been destroyed.

  "All right, Carrero," Solo said at last. "Let's go home."

  FOUR

  THE NIGHT BEFORE they reached the village where Carrero lived, Napoleon Solo stepped back into his stooped, gray-haired person as the naturalist. Carrero watched in disbelief as he dyed his hair, donned rimless glasses.

  Carrero spoke hesitantly. "You are a man for whom I have learned great respect, Mr. Solo. You are a very smart man, but more, you are a brave one. I am glad, now that I reach safety, that I accompanied you on this strange trip, even if I went reluctantly."

  Solo nodded absently. "Thanks, Carrero. You're a brave man, too."

  "No. I am a man who thinks of his wife—fat as she is—and his children. I worry if I do not return alive to them."

  "It won't be long now."

  "I know. This troubles me. You return now to your disguise. This means that though trouble has ended for Carrero, it is not over for you."

  "I'm afraid it hasn't really begun yet," Solo said in that bland tone, peering over his glasses.

  At ten the next morning, Solo tottered into the shipping office at the San Miguel docks.

  A young man stared at him across the desk. "May I help you, sir?"

  "Yes. You can." Solo's voice was testy. "Indeed, you'd better. I have been expecting a shipment of scientific equipment. I can't even preserve my priceless specimens without it. It should have been delivered to me days ago."

  "I'm sorry, sir," the young man said in a voice that couldn't have cared less. "If your materials had arrived, they would have been delivered to your hotel."

  Solo pounded on the desk. "They arrived on the same boat with me, young man! Don't take that tone to me! Ill report you to the head of this company."

  The young man shrugged. "You do that, sir."

  Solo practically danced in impatience. "See, sir, I was an instructor of the man who owns this company. A word from me and you'll be reprimanded for your incompetence. Now I shall go back and inspect the shipping in your warehouse. I have no doubt I'll find my materials rotting back there!"

  Solo strode toward the rear of the huge warehouse. The young clerk ran around the desk. He shouted, "You can't go back there, sir!"

  But Solo was already through the doors into the dark cavernous storage rooms. The young clerk stopped at the door. Perhaps the old fellow's goods had been misplaced by some of the native handlers. Maybe he did know the company president. And besides it was too hot to run in this weather

  Solo wasted no time in pretending to look for a non-existent shipment of scientific materials. He knew what he was looking for and he searched, swiftly, diligently, and successfully.

  He straightened from the feigned stoop of the naturalist and gazed at the huge crates. He walked in triumph among them. He was incredulous at the variety of articles being transferred, lab euipment, materials, and crate after crate of plants, all seemingly alike, and all of different stages of growth.

  Pleased, he ran his hand across the address label. All were addressed the same: Via Air Freight from Mexico City to Helena, Montana, and reshipment by freight to Big Belt, Montana.

  He heard the whisper of sound behind him. It was like the skittering of mice, and yet he went tense, instantly alert to danger.

  The three men were young. They were Latin, dressed sharply. They walked shoulder to shoulder in their dark shirts and ice-cream suits and sleek new panama straw hats.

  Solo was not fooled. The dark outline of shoulder holsters showed at their armpits.

  They approached him steadily, their smiles fixed and unwavering. There was evil in their smiling, older than any of them.

  Solo felt the hackles rising along the nape of his neck and he grinned blandly at them, retreating.

  "Stand still, old fellow," one of them invited.

  "What's the matter, young gentlemen?" Solo asked in the quavering voice of a teacher.

  "We're going to take you apart, Uncle, and find out what's the matter," one of them said.

  "There's some mistake, Solo said, retreating.

  They came toward him steadily.

  "We'll know after we take you apart, Uncle," one of the attackers said.

  "If we are wrong, we'll apologize––"

  "Yeah. To each separate part of you," the third said, laughing as if drunk.

  Suddenly Solo grabbed a case and jerked it between himself and the three men. The crate landed with a crash.

  Solo didn't wait to see what happened. Bent over in the manner of an old man, he raced toward the rear exit of the warehouse. He saw the sunlight out there, the open docks, the waiting ships at anchor. They looked incredibly far.

  He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket, drew out a friction bomb. It was no larger than a capsule.

  Still running, he turned and threw the capsule with all his strength toward the packing cases.

  The explosion and fire were brief but intense. Concussion drove the men back. Solo ran.

  He ran out on the docks without looking back. In the brilliant sunlight, he paused. The piers stretched endlessly in the silence and the heat. Lethargic quiet lay across the waterfront and the town.

  He turned toward town and the main street. He had not run more than a dozen steps when one of the attackers appeared from a wall door.
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  He was no longer immaculate. His ice cream suit was smudged, black and torn. His hat was gone, but he was driven now by rage.

  He had drawn his gun and when he saw Napoleon Solo he fired.

  Tuh. Tuh.

  Solo threw himself behind a small stack of cotton. The silenced gun chattered again. Bullets splintered the dock.

  Solo hung close to the cotton bale. His sweated fingers closed on his last friction bomb.

  He pressed there, counting, his arm poised to throw. He heard the pound of steps as the gunman ran toward him.

  Now! he thought.

  He tossed the friction bomb upward, arching it over the cotton bale. The explosion was sharp, the screams of the young hoodlum wild, and at that precise instant, Solo heard the tuh, tuh of a second silenced gun behind him.

  He didn't bother looking over his shoulder. He burrowed there in between the cotton and the wall of the building.

  "Ho, Pedro!" The call came from farther down the wharf.

  Nearer, the first gunman still yelled in agony.

  The second had slowed now, made wary by what he saw happening to his partner.

  They approached the cotton warily, waiting until the three of them were regrouped. They spread out slightly now and crept forward in tile sunlight, guns drawn.

  From where he crouched, panting, Solo watched their shortened shadows creep toward him. The biggest part of the shadows it seemed to him were the guns in those outstretched hands.

  "Ho," one of them said. "Why should we walk in on him and his friction bombs? Fire from where we are into the cotton. We drive him out, or we kill him. It's all one."

  "I've a better idea," said the man who'd been blasted a second time. "Burn him out. I want to burn him out."

  Crouched under the bales of tinder-dry cotton, Solo watched the wounded man, crazed with rage and pain, set flame to waste from a cigarette lighter.

  Solo held his breath. It was time to move. Gripping his fist closed as if holding a friction bomb poised to hurl, he lunged out from beneath the cotton bale, directly in the path of the pain-crazed hoodlum.

  The man toppled back and screamed like a woman. He had learned twice, the hard way, about friction bombs.

  His terrorized screams halted his pals for a split second. The frightened man forgot to hurl the fiery waste. The flames seared his hands. He cried out again.

  He released the waste and the flames flickered, falling along his arms and inside his coat.

  Solo kept moving. He struck the man hard, carrying him down and along the heated planks.

  He rolled over quickly, putting the yelling man between him and the other two gunmen.

  Before the frightened man could recover his wits in any part, Solo drove his extended fingers into his Adam's apple. Solo's other hand was ripping the gun from the hood's relaxing grasp.

  Solo fired upward, with the dead weight of the hoodlum as his shield.

  A shoe caught his wrist and the gun flew from his hand. He heard it rattling along the planks. At the same instant he heard, rather than felt, a shoe driven into his face.

  They were on him then. The burned man was jerked away from him, and they worked him over smoothly and professionally. They ripped away his glasses, tore off his jacket. They pulled off his shoes and dragged him across the wharf to the water.

  Distantly, Solo heard a man's shouting. It was unreal. It was as if someone called his name from some remote place—

  His head bumped across the planks, but there was no place for new pain in his body; all agony trunk lines were overloaded; new messages had to wait.

  He heard the shouting growing closer. He heard the two men swearing. One of them said savagely, "Let's get out of here!"

  Solo's head banged the thick planking at the edge of the wharf and for a moment he hung over the side. The water glittered impossibly far, brighter than the sun and as distant.

  Then he was being pulled back to the dock, and he recognized the voice of Carrero, his guide.

  Solo stretched his eyes wide, trying to see Carrero's face, but all he could see was the blinding red ball of the sun.

  Carrero's voice was quavering with concern. "I came looking for you, Senor. I worried. I thought you would not look right without your butterfly net. I went out and found it for you."

  Solo grinned, whispering it. "What you did, was, you saved my life, old friend."

  He tried to smile, but knew his face was a bloodied, hideous caricature of smiling.

  FIVE

  IN THE pressurized Pan-American jet cabin at thirty thousand feet, Napoleon Solo sweated.

  He heard people chatting calmly around him. A stewardess tried to engage him in conversation, but he was in too much discomfort to think casually.

  He went back over all he had seen, and had not seen, what he'd found and failed to find in that jungle.

  He was still kicking it around in his mind when the plane set down at Kennedy airport. He passed through customs, came out on the concourse and hailed a taxi.

  The cab driver had just missed making a killing in the market. He told Solo all about it on the ride into Manhattan. He was still explaining the details when Napoleon Solo stepped out of the cab in the east forties.

  He walked toward the gleaming structure of the United Nations Building which dominated the neighborhood.

  Going down a flight of steps, Solo entered Del Floria's Cleaning' and Tailoring shop, an unprepossessing establishment in the basement of an ordinary-appearing whitestone building in the middle of a long block.

  At the rear of the shop, Solo passed through a curtained dressing room; soon he entered the charged atmosphere of United Network Command for Law and Enforcement headquarters.

  It was a gleaming place of chrome and steel where men and women moved swiftly.

  The building itself quivered with the electronic feelers that reached out from roof and under ground to the farthest crannies of the earth, continuously sending and receiving messages by every known method from carrier pigeon to the highest-secret sound-by-light apparatus.

  At the admissions desk the young receptionist pinned an identification tag to Solo's lapel. This tag would be scanned and read and approved by concealed electric eyes every few feet throughout the labyrinth of corridors.

  Solo had gone only a few steps when lovely April Dancer came hurrying from one of the many elevators. "Solo." She touched his arm, wincing slightly at the sight of his bruised face. "What did you learn about Don?"

  "I'm afraid he's dead," Solo said.

  "You look as if you'd met his enemies. I hope they look even worse than you do."

  "Afraid it was THRUSH's inning this time, April. But at least I know they were there, even if I don't why, or where they got to."

  "You look ready to fall on your face."

  Napoleon Solo tried to smile. "Nothing that a little loving care wouldn't improve. How about dinner after I report to Waverly?"

  "Afraid I wouldn't be very good company," April said. "Just can't get my mind on pleasure—this dreadful business we're in."

  Solo smiled at her. "Man does not live by dread alone, April."

  April squeezed his arm. "Why don't you see me after you've talked with Alexander?"

  Solo hadn't realized he was still smiling faintly when he faced Alexander Waverly in the Command Room until the chief demanded testily, "What do you find to smile about in a battered face like that?"

  Solo wiped away the smile. "No, sir," he agreed. "There's nothing to smile about."

  He made a full report of his arrival in San Miguel, his trek into the jungle. "At first I thought the whole thing was insane. There was absolutely no trace of this laboratory that Sayres described in such detail. In fact, the jungle in that spot looked exactly like all the swamp around it."

  "Impossible."

  "That's what I thought. But I was able to find the general outline of where the lab had stood—less than a week before!"

  "Plant life grows lushly in the tropics, Solo," Waverly said.
"But nothing like this."

  "Nothing like this," Solo agreed. "Plants, vines, trees growing, full height, where a lab had stood a few days earlier. There is some kind of artificial stimulation of growth here, and as far as I can see, this must be behind whatever project THRUSH is working on."

  "You're convinced THRUSH is behind this?"

  Solo touched gingerly at his bruised face. "Physically I am convinced, sir. THRUSH—or somebody—left three guards at the port shipping warehouse to be sure nobody pried into the shipment of plants and equipment."

  "Obviously you pried," Waverly said with a faint smile.

  "I have the scars to prove it," Solo said. "But I also have an address. Big Belt, Montana. I could barely locate it on any map. A village in the Big Belt Mountain ranges."

  Waverly stood up, smiling crookedly. "I am proud of you, Solo. And I don't often say this to my men. I don't like to spoil them."

  "I didn't find out how Sayres and Diego Viero were killed," So lo said. "But somehow, all traces of their body, clothing and equipment were destroyed, as if by some kind of intense heat."

  Waverly nodded. "You'll want to be most cautious then."

  "Sir?"

  "When you arrive in the Big Belt Mountains. Our computers showed an area of disturbance up there. We dispatched Mr. Kuryakin to investigate a short time ago. You will join him at once via jet and copter."

  Solo opened his battered mouth to protest—he could barely walk and he was looking forward to a hot shower and a date with April Dancer, in that order—but he was too tired to make the effort. Mr. Waverly was like the umpire in a baseball game. You couldn't win, disputing one of his decisions anyhow.

  SIX

  ILLYA KURYAKIN stepped off the Greyhound bus into the flat village silence of Big Belt, Montana.

  "You're sure this is the place?" he said doubtfully to the driver.

  The driver grinned at him. "Leave the driving to us."

  "Your driving was all right. I'm worried about your sense of direction," Illya said. He stared along the single hard packed main street, the dusty trees, the aged, wind abrased buildings.

  Inside the cafe-bus station, Illya inquired about the four-wheel jeep that had been ordered for him.