The Deadly Dark Affair Read online

  “Make some noise,” Solo said. “Sound like two of us. I’ll try to get at them from another angle.” He ripped off his powder blue blazer, jammed his pistol into his belt and leaped high.

  His fingers caught the edge of the roof of Dr. Currant’s empty trailer. Kicking up a leg, Solo pulled himself up onto the blistering–hot corrugated metal of the top. He inched forward on his belly, in the direction of the dun-colored van.

  Peering down into the dirt aisles around the trailer, he saw nothing moving. Just across the way acid continued to eat into the fender of the van. Solo was watching that when a flicker of motion to the left caught his eye.

  Immediately Illya began to rattle off shots. That saved Solo’s life.

  One of the Thrushmen had jumped up from a hiding place inside the van cab, sighted Solo, leaned from the left window to take aim. The sudden flurry of firing from Illya distracted him just enough. The THRUSH slug spanged and ate roof metal two inches from Solo’s cheek. Flecks of it bit into his skin, stinging hellishly.

  Solo fired back. The Thrushman in the cab howled and flopped down across the cab’s window, half in and half out but all dead.

  Three left now, plus Corrigan, Solo thought.

  His flesh was beginning to roast against the sun-heated metal of the trailer roof. Suddenly two of the THRUSH agents leaped into the open at the rear of the van. They sent a stream of bullets toward Illya’s position. Solo took fast aim, quickly checked his shot. From his vantage point he could see the strategy.

  Corrigan and the other agent were stealing down the other side of the van, intent on taking Illya by surprise. Solo pumped shots at the other Thrushmen, the ones staging the diversion, and shouted, “Flankers coming up to port, Illya!”

  Solo’s bullet downed one THRUSH agent. The other dashed forward, into the protection of Currant’s trailer, below on Solo’s right. Below on Solo’s left, Illya had spotted Corrigan and his companion. Illya’s gun popped and spurted. Corrigan, looking anything but the inept bungler now, hit the dirt.

  Illya’s bullet caught the second Thrushman in the stomach, spun him away dead. But Corrigan was up and running again, his murderous acid-firing gun at the ready.

  Illya fired again, missed. Corrigan danced along like a broken-field runner, zig-zagging. Solo took aim, was a second slow. Corrigan disappeared down to Solo’s left. Suddenly there was a loud, wicked thud.

  Illya groaned, groaned again. Solo started to crawl toward that side of the trailer roof so he could fire downward, help Illya. What was Corrigan doing? It sounded as though he were beating the U.N.C.L.E. agent, swarming all over him, not shooting.

  What Corrigan was doing became lethally clear in seconds, as the THRUSH agent lunged into sight again, running back toward the dun-colored van with Illya slung over his shoulder. Illya’s temple showed a huge, murderous bruise. He flailed, kicked feebly. But Corrigan had him.

  Midway to the van, just as Solo heard somebody scrambling up the right side of Currant’s van---the other Thrushman who had hidden down there---Corrigan turned and emptied his mammoth pistol at the front edge of the roof where Solo lay.

  The acid projectiles , four of them, plowed into the front edge of the roof. White smoke billowed. Solo rolled frantically backwards, covering his face with his arms. If he got a dollop of that stuff on his skin he was finished.

  The whole front end of the trailer seethed. So did the front wall, all of it buckling, dissolving into a lethal cauldron of bubbles and smoke. The roof tilted sickeningly in that direction.

  Solo started to slide forward, realized with alarm that the acid bullets had so weakened the trailer that the whole front end had become a death-trap. With the front walls eaten away from beneath, the roof was giving under his weight. He was sliding into the fuming acid-bath walls at the trailer’s front.

  Wildly he flung out his left hand, tried to grab the corrugations of the roof, hold himself back. The metal was scorching hot. Solo’s fingertips came alive with pain. The roof gave another lurch. Solo was practically hanging head downward over an immense hole where the front of the roof had been. Directly below, the floor of the trailer was dissolving into hissing, smoking ruin.

  As if Solo didn’t have his hands full enough, the remaining Thrushman chose that moment to pull himself up to the right-hand edge of the roof and throw his leg over for support. Hanging there by an arm and a leg, he brought his gun hand over. The muzzle pointed right between Solo’s eyes.

  It was a nightmare for Solo: he slipped inexorably downward again, on his belly and helpless. He kicked out with his left leg. He managed to hook his toe over the left edge of the roof behind him. The face of the THRUSH agent loomed, slick with sweat. The agent grinned like a skull as he steadied his gun hand.

  Time seemed to stop. The agent’s trigger finger turned white.

  Whiter.

  Then Napoleon Solo took the kind of chance for which he had trained.

  He still had his pistol in his right hand. He had been digging the butt hard against the roof corrugations to help stop his slide forward into the acid. In a split second he jerked his right hand up and fired.

  The THRUSH agent fired back. Solo’s head would have been spattered away by the THRUSH bullet if his toe hadn’t slipped free. He began to slide faster down the tilting roof, straight into the gaping hole where the acid smoked and hissed.

  Solo’s shot had missed. The Thrushman dragged himself higher on the roof edge, aiming. Solo was sliding fast, but his mind and his muscles had been schooled to respond almost without thought. Even though he was sliding, he fired once again. The Thrushman screamed, mortally wounded. He flung his arms forward. One struck Solo’s cheek. Solo let go of his pistol and grabbed.

  Wildly he hung on to the THRUSH agent’s wrist. The Thrushman’s lower body had jolted off its precarious purchase on the roof edge. The dead man’s legs flopped down against the trailer’s side. And it was this sudden force of counterweight which stopped Napoleon Solo’s slide, just when his shoe-tips had slipped over the edge of the eaten-away hole.

  Solo’s arms ached in their sockets. But he hung on.

  He hung on and, by virtue of his superb conditioning, managed to stretch his right hand out far enough to grip the roof’s edge with his left. Slowly, agonizingly, he dragged himself over until he could flop off the edge and let the blessed pull of gravity tug him down to earth.

  In mid-air Solo tried to twist so that he would fall properly. He miscalculated. His left ankle corkscrewed under him. He sprawled, chewing a mouthful of tan dust. Solo’s ears filled with a frightening high-power whirr of electric motors. He screwed his head around.

  The acid-eaten dun steel walls of the big van were slowly folding back upon themselves. In the center of the van’s rear bed, the steel of some kind of double track began to untelescope from its bed.

  The track extended up and outward at an angle of about forty-five degrees. At the base of this track, nestled in massive padded rockers, was a short, stub-winged missile plane. The needle-nosed craft had a round black rear end that showed the scorch marks of after-burning.

  Solo tried to rise, but he was weak from the struggle. He fell down again, breathing hard. His pistol was gone. Abruptly, lined against the junction of brassy blue sky and the sweep of the little missile plane’s see-through cowl, Corrigan reared up.

  Illya was still slung over his shoulder like a meal sack, and showed practically no fight now. A second bruise, this one oozing blood, marked Illya’s other temple.

  Corrigan’s movements were lithe, trained. He slapped against the cowl with the butt of his free hand. It flipped backwards on a hinge. Corrigan dumped Illya into the rear of the cockpit, then jumped into a forward seat.

  A few feet away, Solo saw a revolver in the dust. Dropped by one of the THRUSH agents? He started to crawl toward it.

  Corrigan glanced back over his shoulder. He half rose in the cockpit of the stub-nosed missile plane. Gone was his whining tone.

  “You won’t be q
uick enough, my U.N.C.L.E. friend. I’ll be off before you pick that gun up. I’m taking your friend Kuryakin along. We have Martin Bell. We are keeping him alive to utilize his talents for the benefit of THRUSH. So we can’t kill him, can we? Go on, Solo, crawl! You’ll never make it in time.”

  Corrigan’s laughter was cruel. Solo was wracked by pain. The struggle on the trailer roof had drained more from him than he’d imagined. He wrenched along in the dust, crawling crab-fashioned, jerkily, like a cripple. He was roughly eight feet from the pistol. His muscles screamed silently as he pulled himself on.

  The world of tents and trailers and merciless sun blurred into a surrealistic mural of pulsing unreal colors. He pulled himself forward again.

  Again.

  Now he was only four feet away from the gun---

  In the distance Corrigan shouted a last warning: “Your friend Kuryakin is our insurance policy, Solo. If there is further pursuit, if you try to find Martin Bell again, Kuryakin will die. We can’t kill Bell but we can kill him. Good-by Solo. Take my message to your chiefs at U.N.C.L.E.”

  And with a thud, the transparent cowl of the stub-winged plane smacked down. Immediately the after-burner belched and screamed. A horizontal column of flame jutted out. The stub-winged craft abruptly accelerated, angling up and out along the double track aimed at the sky. The roaring increased.

  Smoke poured down around Solo as he dragged himself the last couple of feet, clamped his fingers on the revolver butt, forced himself upright by the sheer strength of his will.

  The escape plane cleared the end of the high-pointing track, rising in a burst of jet power into the sun. It banked to the left.

  Face wrenching in agony, Solo pulled the trigger. There was an empty click. Solo flung the revolver down in the dust, furious with frustration and despair. In the blue Arkansas sky the THRUSH missile-plane vanished on an unraveling thread of white smoke. Solo watched until it had become a dot. The little plane’s escape velocity had been incredible.

  Staring into the sky to the north where it had disappeared, Solo allowed himself the luxury of a lost temper and a few roaring oaths, all directed against himself. Suddenly an awl of pain bored into his eyes from behind.

  In a moment he was leaning against the side of one of the trailers, dirty, pain-deviled, and frankly terrified by what had happened to his friend Illya Kuryakin.

  TWO

  Lights blinked and winked with comforting brightness beyond the East River. The little apartment in the luxury high-rise was quiet. A small ship’s clock on the mantel ticked. It showed ten past eleven, on an evening six days after Illya’s abduction from Spoon Forks.

  The small apartment was a pleasant place, even though it had a semi-rumpled air typical of bachelor occupancy. The furniture was tasteful, modern. Here and there were nautical touches which bespoke Solo’s term as commander of a corvette in the Royal Canadian Navy: a sextant; an antique brass spyglass; a wall arrangement of whaling prints; a large, framed full-color photo of Solo’s 30-foot sloop which he kept harbored in a marina on Long Island. Through one doorway there were glints from a row of copper-bottomed utensils hanging in a small, neat kitchen.

  Through another doorway Solo himself could be seen putting on a dark, impeccably tailored formal jacket. With a gloomy expression he tramped out of the bedroom, flicking out the light behind him. He scowled at the polished tips of his expensive evening shoes.

  Usually he enjoyed his apartment. He enjoyed the privacy it afforded, the release from the tensions which automatically went with his frequently dangerous line of work.

  But here he could relax and indulge himself.

  Yet for the past five days, after a swift trip back to New York on the U.N.C.L.E. turbojet out of Little Rock, he had felt like a helpless animal in a cage every minute he was inside the apartment.

  Tonight, he had a date with Babette as soon as the performance let out up at the Met. He recognized just how raw his own nerves had become from the fact that he was only mildly interested in the idea of seeing his charming fan-carrying soprano.

  Ever since the stub-winged escape plane had rocketed into the blue Arkansas sky, there had been, professionally speaking, nothing but one unmitigated disaster after another.

  Before his departure from Spoon Forks he had been forced to confront Harold and Maude Bell, not to mention Beth Andrews. He told them as much as he dared of what had happened at the Fairgrounds. He tried to reassure them that the full resources of U.N.C.L.E. would be put into the search for Illya and Martin Bell.

  They listened, but they could not conceal the emptiness of their hope. And Beth was not strong enough to completely conceal it for long. She broke and fled from the shady side porch, sobbing.

  The Bells did not accuse him. It was unnecessary. No one had to inform Napoleon Solo that he had failed. The knowledge was gall in his mouth as he drove back to Little Rock.

  In New York Mr. Waverly listened to his report with a quiet impassivity which was worse than the worst possible denunciation for incompetence. Mr. Waverly could accept the fact that even his top agents were human, prone to human mistakes. Therefore he did not bother to make the simple observation that Solo and Illya should have checked with U.N.C.L.E. and Washington to determine whether Felix Corrigan and his aides were legitimate.

  And Solo didn’t need to be told that either. The knowledge ate painfully in his stomach as time passed.

  A few hours after Solo had returned to New York headquarters the first dismal report came from North American Air Defense came in.

  Yes, NORAD had picked up a strange track, coming out of Arkansas and heading north. Fighters had been jetted aloft. But the THRUSH escape plane had been traveling at an incredible velocity. The stub-winged plane rocketed north across the border into Canada practically before NORAD scrambled. The problem was instantly relayed to Canadian Air Defense. But it turned out to be insoluble.

  Moments after crossing a parallel running roughly east and west through Ottawa, the blip vanished in a scramble of noise and light, the product of sophisticated THRUSH jamming devices.

  Somewhere over northern Canada, then, the THRUSH craft with Illya aboard had disappeared.

  Instantly the entire U.N.C.L.E. network was alerted. Agents all over the world turned their attention to the matter, since there was no guarantee that Illya and Martin Bell were being held prisoner in Canada. They might have been trans-shipped to Brussels or Kabul or Tahiti.

  But one thing was fairly certain by the second day. Very likely Illya and Martin Bell were prisoners of the semi-maniacal Dr. Leonidas Volta. A fresh programming of the U.N.C.L.E. computers revealed that the report of Volta’s death at a THRUSH research project site in Iceland was erroneous.

  Solo wanted action. He wanted to be in action, hunting, searching, finding Illya and Bell. He had absolutely no leads. Nor did the U.N.C.L.E. organization.

  Solo prowled round and round headquarters during the day, round and round his apartment or the smaller bistros all night, trying to get himself to accept Alexander Waverly’s counsel of watchful waiting. It was no good.

  On the fourth day after Solo’s return to New York, at 5:42 in the evening, a forty-mile area surrounding Omaha, Nebraska lost all of its electrical power for thirty minutes.

  At 8:12 that same night, Chicago, the Wisconsin and Indiana shores bracketing it, and cities as far as forty-five miles inland from Lake Michigan, went dark for ninety minutes.

  The following evening all of Connecticut, New York City, a major portion of Long Island, and parts of New Jersey all the way down to Philadelphia blacked out at the rush hour, staying dark for122 minutes. This was followed one hour later by total darkness and power failure for three and a half hours in the Virginia-Washington-Maryland area.

  During the first blackout in Omaha, citizens behaved in reasonable good order. Chicago too escaped with but a few reports of looting and a slight rise in the nightly tally of thefts and personal assaults.

  But when it happened again the sec
ond night up and down the Eastern seaboard, it somehow gave the people involved the terrified feeling that the phenomenon was controlled. And panic set in.

  There were riots in New York. The worst occurred in the subways under Grand Central. The Grand Central debacle, resulting in two dead and dozens injured, was started by one frightened, hysterical woman shrieking about invasion.

  All that long, dreadful night, others at U.N.C.L.E. were manning the phones, the communicators, the teletypes. U.N.C.L.E. teams, as well as forces under the direction of top-level U.S. intelligence agencies, infiltrated the critical riot areas. Vast arrays of technical equipment, most of it almost other-worldly in its degree of sophistication, were pressed into service in an effort to triangulate upon a single source of the power failure.

  If Martin Bell’s device were being quickly airlifted from test site to test site, then THRUSH was also managing to handle the accompanying electronic deception very well.

  No source could be located.

  Fires were set by terrified mobs in Washington around midnight. Federal troops rolled into the city to restore order. The President took to the radio and television at seven the next morning. He reassured the nation that matters were under control.

  It was a hollow statement.

  Solo worked, ghoul-eyed and haggard from fatigue. The thought, If it all goes dark from coast to coast at one time, all we can do is try to stop the panic---and then think very seriously about acceding to a THRUSH ultimatum for surrender when it comes.

  For it would surely come. And after the first nation crumbled, another would become the victim to the darkness that bred fear, bred chaos, bred the emergence of man’s secret, unreasoning self. It was light which held all that at bay. THRUSH had unearthed a fundamental psychological weapon---

  Beep-a-beep-a-beep-beep-a

  Dazed, Napoleon Solo woke up. He had been standing in the center of his living room, staring like a man hypnotized into the pool of light cast by an old ship’s lantern which had been refurbished as a table lamp. For how many seconds now had his communicator been signaling?