The World's End Affair Read online

  They settled Mr. Han in the pilot's chair. He groaned, swayed. Then he jerked himself to attention and blinked at the controls.

  Later, Napoleon Solo decided that they probably would have crashed had he not remembered something Mr. Han had said about Captain Loo's odd looking money belt. Solo left Han staring blearily at the controls, unable to comprehend them because he was having enough trouble simply keeping upright in his seat. Illya tried to steady him as Solo crouched in the semi-darkness of the instrument-lit cockpit

  The flight captain's eyes were rolled far up in his head in death, shining like little, moons. Something shiny-black gleamed beneath his flight blouse, where the bottom two buttons had come unfastened.

  With shaking fingers Solo undid the rest of the coat buttons. He fanned back the pilot's lapels. Around his middle Captain Loo wore what indeed looked like a fat money belt of tough black vinyl. Solo prodded the belt.

  Solid. As though a number of small steel units like cigarette cases had been sewn inside the vinyl carrier. Solo's hand brushed across something hard which protruded from the unit located at about the position of Captain Loo's right hip.

  Experimentally Solo felt around bit more. The device, which he could not see in the extreme shadow behind the pilot's chair, felt like an ordinary wall-switch.

  Under his breath Solo said, "Here goes probably everything," and threw the switch over to the opposite position.

  What happened in the next half minute left Solo and Illya slack-jawed.

  First the pelting rain seemed to lessen. The violent down and updrafts buffeting the airliner grew less formidable. In a matter of fifteen seconds they stopped altogether. The thick black clouds began to shred apart. It was all so fast that it beggared belief.

  Napoleon Solo stared at Illya. Illya stared back. Both of them stared down at Mr. Han.

  The co-pilot was talking to himself in what sounded like Thai. He had a sick, pained grin on his face. He had touched two controls, two switches, thrown them, and the aircraft's response had been satisfactory.

  Han raised his head. He started. "What has happened to the storm?"

  Ahead of the radar nose, blue sky appeared, then the tilted horizon of the South China Sea. The maelstrom vanished behind. Sunlight flooded into the cockpit.

  Now Illya could see what Solo had been doing down on the floor. He spotted the toggle device. Mr. Han let out a modest whoop, coughed violently, recovered, and repeated his question about what had happened to the storm. This time there was near-hysterical happiness in his voice.

  In reply, Illya said, "I believe Mr. Solo has switched it off."

  The full impact hit Solo. He stared down at the vinyl belt wrapped around Captain Loo's thoroughly dead midsection. He said, "My God in heaven."

  Mr. Han was finding his way out of his pain daze and into the routine of disaster procedures for the giant jet. The emergency and fire systems soon controlled the worst of the damage. Three engines were operating at full power. Mr. Han shut down the fourth and the plane began to fly steadily again through the untroubled blaze of sunlight and sea.

  Under Han's direction, Illya operated the radio. Soon they had ghostly voices from hundreds of miles away to help them. In the passenger compartments, the general hysteria was being controlled by more champagne.

  Solo lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep. It would have been a relative piece of cake the rest of the way to Hong Kong if his gaze hadn't been pulled back time and again to that mysterious series of steel cigarette-case units around the dead pilot's waist.

  Solo wanted to experiment. He wanted to throw the switch back again. He didn't. Why push for trouble?

  They would have it in quantity, once that black belt reached New York and made its damnable, diabolical presence felt at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.

  Two

  Three days later there were several peculiar occurrences in a certain nine square block area in Manhattan's East Fifties.

  The news media reported them. The commentators closed their broadcasts with them, usually making a joke. The United States Weather Bureau was powerless to explain them.

  The peculiar occurrences were a series of black, furious rain showers accompanied by thunder, lightning, and high velocity winds. Each storm lasted five minutes or less.

  The storms encompassed only nine square blocks.

  But it was hardly a coincidence that the affected area contained an unbelievably modern complex of offices and research facilities concealed behind a front of decaying brownstones.

  Within this complex, in the laboratories manned by scientists of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, tests of the black belt were going on. On a 24-hour priority alert basis, U.N.C.L.E. was attempting to ascertain an answer to the question, What hath THRUSH wrought?

  High up in the chamber with the motorized revolving conference table, the planning room for U.N.C.L.E.'s Operations and Enforcement section, three men tried to pry loose some additional pieces of the puzzle from a reluctant fourth.

  Mr. Alexander Waverly looked hale and well rested, although he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Solo and Illya both looked hung over.

  Solo's fine linen shirt was rumpled and gray. Illya sat with his feet up on a desk, a vitamin pill in his hand. He tossed the vitamin pill up and caught it, tossed it and caught it, while Mr. Waverly tapped his forever unlit pipe against the sill of the window overlooking the panorama of the East River and the United Nations Building.

  Solo had been doing the questioning for the past quarter hour.

  "Your name is Chee," he said. "Alfred C. Chee. We know that. We have a file on you. You're not a Thai, you're Chinese. You were with the Reds for a while after the takeover. Then. later, you joined THRUSH in nineteen sixty-two as second echelon supervisor for the Ranjiranji cell. But apparently your pilot's training was too valuable. The last listing shows you were transferred to Strategic Logistics and Operations. Listen my balky

  friend -"

  Solo grabbed the shoulder of the man seated stiffly in the straight chair. "It's all on the computer and your undistinguished, not to say disgusting, face is on our microfilm.

  Now we've got food and you haven't. We've got cots to rest on and you haven't. So you'd better start talking."

  Mr. Waverly cleared his throat. "I might also remind our guest, Mr. Solo, that when more civilized methods of interrogation fail, we have chemical agents designed to immobilize the will and liberate the tongue."

  "He means," said Illya, "we'll stick you with a needle. You'll betray THRUSH anyway. Why not get it over with? You've stalled long enough."

  "Thirty-six hours," Solo said. "I'm getting damn sick of it."

  "Temper, Mr. Solo," said Waverly.

  "Temper, hell. We've gotten nothing out of this fourth-class Fu Manchu since the flight from Hong Kong landed. I vote to skip the drugs and try something ethnic, like bamboo shoots under the nails. Mr. Waverly, we can't waste days and days exchanging pleasantries. This man and his machine almost killed a planeload of people."

  The man in the chair was the flight engineer of the Air Pan-Asia jet. He had been given a clean pair of trousers, shirt and other clothing. U.N.C.L.E. physicians had dressed his shoulder wound with fresh bandages. He looked ungrateful and slightly truculent over the whole business. He was a slender, sallow-skinned Oriental in his middle thirties. His lips were compressed primly. His black eyes shone with that fleck of fanatic resistance Solo had learned to recognize as the hallmark of the captured operative of THRUSH.

  "Talk," Solo said.

  "My name," the man said, "is Flight Officer Hiram Wei. I am so listed on the personnel roster of Air Pan-Asia Incorporated. My flight officer's certificate shows that I was born in Canton in 1929, of an English mother named -"

  "Stow it," Solo interrupted. His face was red with fury. He'd had more than enough.

  Mr. Waverly gave his pipe a final knock against the marble sill. A pastel phone rang. Mr. Waverly walked past the giant, light-flecked face of t
he huge computer and answered.

  "Um. Oh. Ummm." He took an experimental chew at the stem of his pipe "Very good, Rolfe. Expect you in an hour. What? That big, eh? Remarkable, remarkable. Yes, I saw that particular newscast. I gather the Mayor was rather upset about the unexplained weather phenomena you fellows caused in the neighborhood. Can't be helped, can't be helped. Thanks, Rolfe. Appreciate the extra hours and all."

  Mr. Waverly hung up, swung round.

  "That was the laboratory," he said, primarily for the benefit of the THRUSH agent. "We have concluded our initial tests of the components of the device discovered aboard your plane. While we waited for our laboratories to finish the preliminary phase we had a certain latitude in this interrogation. Now I'm afraid we must begin to put the parts together, and rather quickly. Will you talk?"

  With composure the flight engineer regarded his hands folded in his lap.

  "My name is Flight Officer Hiram Wei," he said. "I am so listed on the -"

  Mr. Waverly sighed, a sigh befitting the heavy decisions which fell to a man so highly placed in U.N.C.L.E's policy and operations section.

  "Obviously drastic measures are required."

  Illya said, "I have a nice set of brass knuckles which I confiscated in Athens"

  Solo grinned. "The knuckles, Mr. Waverly?"

  "The drugs, Mr. Solo."

  Three

  Three hours later, Solo, Illya and Waverly waited in a short, aseptic corridor.

  The corridor was situated one flight below the planning room. Dim, hooded little bulbs burned along the baseboards in either direction. At either end the corridor ended in double swing doors. It resembled a wing of a private hospital which, in fact, it was.

  Solo pinched the bridge of his nose. He glanced at his watch. Illya stood across the hallway. In his right hand he held a drum of magnetic recording tape. Abruptly the swing doors to the right opened.

  A long grotesque reflection was cast out ahead of a rubber-wheeled hospital cart. The attendants in white pushing the cart seemed to take forever to wheel it down to the door where Solo impatiently was jigging from one foot to the other.

  "Are you having some sort of internal upset, Mr. Solo?" Waverly asked. He appeared exhausted. Pouches showed under his eyes.

  "Well, sir," Solo said, "it is getting late. And there's this girl, sir. Her name is Bernice. A charming thing. She'll only be in Manhattan one more night. Since we've already heard the tape of what Chee said while he was under the drugs, I thought maybe we could wait until tomorrow to pursue this matter."

  Mr. Waverly knocked his pipe against the wall. "No, Mr. Solo. We are going to proceed from here to the audio-visual conference room."

  "Oh." Solo sighed as the cart squeaked up on its big wheels. "Bye-bye, Bernice," he said under his breath.

  Waverly spoke to the physician attending the cart: "Dr. Bailey, how soon will Mr. Chee recover?"

  The physician glanced down. Under crisp sheets, Alfred C. Chee, flight engineer, lay asleep. The doctor said, "He should be out from under most of the fog in an hour. Will you want him again?"

  "In the audio-visual conference room, under maximum guard," Waverly nodded.

  "I'm afraid the questioning didn't pull much out. Obviously he didn't know enough to be useful."

  "On the contrary, on the contrary," Waverly said, dismissing the cart. It rolled into the gloom of the small, neatly-furnished recovery bedroom. Waverly enjoyed the looks of puzzlement on the faces of Solo and Illya. He said, "Come along, gentlemen. You may think the tape we made of Mr. Chee's babbling was worthless, but you are not in possession of all fragments of the mosaic. I have one more bit to add, in the audio-visual room. Until today, I confess I didn't know what to do with it."

  Illya said, "About all this tape contains is the information that Alfred Chee was a THRUSH agent placed on station eighteen months ago in his cover post as a flight engineer. He was based in Hong Kong and told to wait. He received his first orders only one week ago Friday."

  The elevator doors opened. Solo thought one last time of Bernice and followed the others inside. As the doors closed he said, "But Illya, that does reveal one other thing, sort of by implication."

  Illya hooked up an eyebrow. Solo continued: "It indicates the priority THRUSH assigned to the testing of the weather control apparatus. Chee was to get into place, hold his cover and, apparently, let nothing else disturb it pending the test. Last week he finally received the components - the switch belt which Captain Loo, also of THRUSH, was to wear around his waist, and the black generator box we found stowed in Chee's luggage when the plane landed at Hong Kong."

  The elevator doors opened again. The men moved down a long corridor walled in stainless steel. Recessed ceiling lights blinked blue, amber, red, in signal patterns. Through an open doorway a teletype chattered. A girl spoke into a microphone.

  "But actually, the sum of our information is that THRUSH has perfected a dreadful weapon," Illya commented" as they entered a large room off the corridor.

  Shutting the door, Mr. Waverly said, "Well. Mr. Kuryakin, thank you for grasping that point. Perhaps it will lessen Mr. Solo's concern about his cancelled amours."

  Waverly swung round beside a highly polished board room table. "I believe it is quite apparent from the report which Rolfe brought to us, just before we followed Chee into the operating theater, that an enormous peril is posed by this new discovery of THRUSH research. Control of the weather is a weapon ruthless men have dreamed about for centuries."

  "I understand the danger," Solo said. "Under the cover of a man-made storm like the one produced from the jet, a cadre of THRUSH people could move in and take over virtually any city in the world. There'd be no defenses. People would be too busy finding cover, caring for their dead and wounded, trying to prevent looting -" Solo's voice trailed off. Pictures of the possible carnage flicked in his mind like images thrown by a slide projector. None was pleasant.

  "We must discover the source of this THRUSH breakthrough," Waverly said. "How far along is the development of the device? Does the mission of Chee and Loo - which was to be a suicide mission if necessary, as Chee revealed under the drugs - represent an early test? What will be the next test? An entire city? Is every THRUSH satrapy now equipped with such a generator? Or if we locate and wipe out the research unit, will we have cut off the rooted tree before it grows to full size?"

  Waverly cleared his throat. "We must operate on the assumption that the generator is a research project only. We will prove the truth or falsity of our theory only by locating the research center responsible for the machine."

  Waverly turned to a console. He pressed one of many colored studs. A rheostat began to reduce the light level. Soundlessly, an ultra-wide screen descended from the ceiling on the far wall. Illya slouched in a deep leather chair, smoking. Solo paced.

  "About that damned generator itself, sir -" he began.

  "You heard Rolfe's report."

  "Yes. They're sure downstairs that the generator will produce violent weather on command, but they're not sure how yet."

  Waverly nodded. "Rolfe is wary of using destructive testing to analyze the components, the belt and the black generating box found in Chee's luggage. Since those are the only samples we have, tearing them apart must be done with utmost caution."

  "That also means it will be some time before the laboratory people discover a way to counteract the ion reversal which Rolfe thinks is at the heart of the process," Illya said.

  "Um." From the underside of the gleaming table, Waverly took small microphone from a carrier receptacle. He pressed a button beneath the tiny mike grid. A red light on the wall glowed. "Stand by to let me have the aerial photos, will you, Jacques?"

  There was a disembodied, "Right, sir," from a concealed loudspeaker.

  "I have brought you two here," Waverly explained, "to offer you the one additional piece of the mosaic which is in U.N.C.L.E.'s hands. It came through while you were returning from Bangkok. We routinely receive unusual
aerial reconnaissance material from the various governments banded together lo support U.N.C.L.E. What you are about to see was culled from a batch I received while you were on the other side of the World.

  The photos were taken by an aircraft similar to the American U-2. It was flying a routine patrol mission. Normally the weather in the region photographed prohibits clear photography, which is why views like these have never shown up before. Now the only other facts Mr. Chee revealed on that tape which Mr. Kuryakin is holding were what again?"

  Solo frowned. "He didn't know the man who brought the weather equipment and the sealed orders to Hong Kong."