The Moby Dick Affair Page 8

  Swallowing to drive the blue dancing spots away, Solo turned ninety degrees.

  To the left.

  "I've turned," he croaked. His throat felt clogged with foul air.

  "Now you will walk fourteen paces straight ahead. Each pace will be measured thus. Put your right foot down. That is a pace. Move your left foot so that the heel rests against the toe of your right. That is your second pace. So on. Report as soon as you completed the maneuver."

  Carefully Solo followed the instructions. He was growing dizzy and weak. Seven paces.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten—then thirteen—and fourteen.

  "I've taken fourteen paces." His voice sounded rougher than ever.

  "All right. Now remove the explosive packet from your waist. Report when you have done so."

  Solo did.

  "Now feel its left end until you have located the stud which activates the trigger-release weight." Again Solo obeyed. Mixed with his swirly-headed feeling of impending death was the knowledge that he'd foxed Commander Ahab at last, and that THRUSH's careful calculations would be thrown awry. Perhaps the tidal wave would simply spend itself in the Channel now. Solo had no way of knowing. Nor did he care. He had done all he could.

  Ahab again: "Mr. Solo, on my command and not before, you will press the stud and immediately let go of the explosive packet, allowing it to sink straight down. However, before we begin that very critical operation—"

  Another jagged ripping sound inside the suit. Solo barked, "Something else just gave, Ahab."

  "Why, Mr. Solo, you sound concerned. Trust me. I want you to speak to a friend of yours. Mr. Kuryakin is standing at my elbow. Mr. Kuryakin, kindly describe your position to Mr. Solo."

  Over the crackling connection came Illya's gloomy voice: "I'm afraid Miss St. Cloud is holding a revolver against the back of my head, Napoleon."

  Deep in Solo's belly fear tightened its hold. Ahab returned:

  "I cannot describe what exquisite chastisement poor Cleo will receive for bungling your hypnosis, Mr. Solo. But frankly, I am surprised at you. Did you think we would send you down there without tracking you? We have been watching you on scan scopes all the way."

  His voice harshened: "I congratulate you on a most excellent job of dissembling. You fooled me, and Miss St. Cloud is going to suffer for it, I don't mind telling you. Unless you instantly turn around one hundred eighty degrees, a full turn, walk twenty-eight paces back and signal that you are in the correct position—we are watching you, remember—I am going to have Mr. Kuryakin shot."

  Numbed with a sense of failure, Solo hesitated. Blue dots danced furiously on his retinas.

  Suddenly Illya shouted, "Napoleon, drop the cursed thing right there! Don't listen to—"

  A thudding sound, another groan as Illya was forcibly removed from the microphone. For one moment Solo's torment was complete. Loyalty to U.N.C.L.E. fought with loyalty to his friend.

  And friendship won, because there still danced in Solo's mind the crazy will-of-the-wisp hope that there might be another way. There had to be another way. He couldn't let Illya be killed.

  Napoleon Solo turned and paced off the twenty-eight steps.

  "That's a little more like it," Ahab rumbled. "The scope shows you precisely in position. Touch the stud and release the package."

  With a feeling of horror Solo carried out the act. Weight was gone from his hand.

  The air inside the suit was becoming unbearably foul. He was going to pass out. He took an involuntary step and nearly tumbled off the rock shelf into an abyss of water. The lurching movement produced another ripping noise, louder than the first two. Then came a loud hiss.

  "By all rights," Ahab's voice boomed into his ears, "I should let you remain down there to die, Mr. Solo. But you have aroused my anger, and that is not done with impunity, I assure you.

  "I think it would be more suitable if you came back aboard the Moby Dick and we took you to London, to be an eyewitness to your own handiwork. But that doesn't mean we can't give you a sharp lesson on your return trip. You men on the power winches! Bring him up at twice the safe speed."

  Without warning Solo was jerked from overhead. He went sailing up through the dark water. He yelled a curse over the headset, but it came out a scrambled gurgle. His tongue bulged in his throat. His eyes hurt as though needles pierced them. His guts churned as the pressure decreased, decreased, too fast—

  Five minutes later Solo lay on the carpet in Commander Ahab's private quarters. He writhed, arching his back and gasping for air like a beached fish. He could barely see as Ahab towered over him and delivered a vicious kick to his ribs, rolling him over and forcing a wild yell of pain out between his teeth.

  Into the distorted crazy-mirror of Solo's vision Commander Ahab dragged someone else. It was Cleo St. Cloud, sobbing and mopping at her bloodied nose with a handkerchief. One eye was already darkening.

  Commander Ahab knotted his fist in her hair, and shook her back and forth like a doll. He alternated this sport with a few more crashes of his boot-tip against Solo's midsection. Ahab choked: "There is only—one master aboard—the Moby Dick. Perhaps you have learned that—by——now—"

  A thin line of blood dribbled out of Solo's mouth, down his chin. He felt as though his body would explode.

  He'd failed.

  Napoleon Solo spun off toward darkness. Before he went the whole distance, he heard a sound.

  The Moby Dick's atomic engines were thrumming. The sub was on its way back to England.

  Solo was slipping down a long slide into the biggest dark that had ever swallowed him. In his pain-ridden mind he heard a tune, crazy, as though played on a flute.

  London Bridge is falling down, falling down—drowned in ten mil lion tons of water.

  Solo saw the wave rise up. It smashed against him, driving him all the way down the slide, to nothing.

  Two

  MISS CLEO ST. CLOUD looked bad. Displaying her black eye, plus a sticking plaster over the bridge of her nose, she sat up front beside the chauffeur in Ahab's big Daimler as it sped into London. A soupy gray dawn was breaking over the city.

  The Moby Dick had surfaced off the coast during the night. It was met by two rubber raft-loads of THRUSH agents. Ahab's car waited on the lonely little coast road where they had landed. The Moby Dick slipped out to sea again, a gray-white phantom whose dim blue running lights sank under the roiled water of the Channel.

  They had taken back roads to the city, Solo and Illya in the spacious tonneau with Commander Ahab beside them. Two THRUSH agents in bowlers sat on the jump seats facing them. Each held a pistol pointed at one of the U.N.C.L.E. agents.

  The Daimler nosed through the thick fog, narrowly missing an on coming taxicab. The cab driver leaned on his horn. It blatted as he skidded on past them, then faded in the murk. Commander Ahab, who had been complaining of a sore throat, sprayed his palate noisily with a golden atomizer. He put the atomizer away and slapped his knee, again the soul of cheerfulness.

  "Well, Mr. Solo, it won't be long now. You have quite a treat in store. The spectacle of London inundated should be thrilling, especially since we shall be observing it from an altitude of better than ten thousand feet."

  Illya cocked an eyebrow. He looked paler than usual. His face was badly bruised. His thin fingers drummed against his trousers. "We're going up to watch in an airplane, are we?"

  "Precisely," Ahab returned. "We'll take my private turbojet. We should arrive at the field in another twenty minutes. Allow me to bring you up to date, Mr. Solo, since you didn't regain consciousness until we were halfway to London."

  Solo said nothing. His eyes were flicking right and left out the bullet proof windows. The car seemed to be rolling through some kind of district of small shops. In the fog it was hard to tell exactly. A few electric lamps burned behind smudged plate glass windows.

  Solo's belly growled emptily. He ached from end to end. Now and again he experienced double vision. One rib migh
t or might not be cracked. Ahab was leaning forward on the seat.

  For no reason, he jabbed Solo in the ribs. Solo groaned, restrained an impulse to start swinging. Time was running out. Heroics would gain them nothing. One or the other of them had to escape from the car before it reached the private THRUSH airfield.

  Ahab hadn't stopped speaking:

  "Splendid timing, don't you think? The detonation of the underwater charges is set for 4:30 this after noon, just as the homeward rush begins. Can't you see the good burghers of London wiggling and squiggling in panic, trying to jam the tubes and the trains, when suddenly, splash!" Eyes rolling a trifle maniacally, Ahab closed his fist. "Water, water, water! It's not every day a man destroys a symbol of civilization."

  Levelly Napoleon Solo said, "You, Commander, are an unspeakable maniac. Like every member of THRUSH."

  The commander's upper lip began to tremble. He was on the point of striking Solo when the driver of the Daimler cursed and hit the horn. The car slewed wildly.

  From a narrow, murky cross street, a dairy van had pulled out suddenly. The Daimler's brakes locked as the driver desperately tried to cut around past the van's hood. The rear tires squealed, skidding—

  "Too fast!" Ahab burst out, losing control. "Too fast in this fog, you fool!"

  The wrath he had been about to vent on Solo become focused on the driver, in the form of a wild, lashing blow of his fist against the back of the man's neck. From that point on the driver never had a chance.

  There was a crash, a wrenching of metal, a second, louder crash, the sound of glass smashing. The Daimler's right rear end suddenly elevated. The bowler-hatted THRUSH agent on the right side of the tonneau peered out.

  "Gawd 'elp us! Turned over the blinkin' milk wagon. And we're 'ung up on 'is front bumper to boot."

  Commander Ahab whipped out a pistol, pressed it against Solo's side.

  "Out, both of you. We'll lift the car free. Hadkins, you and Blightsome go first. Get out here on the left. And no funny business, Mr. Solo, or I'll splatter your skull all over the cobbles."

  The two THRUSH agents climbed out. Then Ahab unlimbered himself. Solo watched Illya move out next. While the slender agent momentarily cut off Ahab's view, Solo quickly mouthed the single word Go.

  Illya's eyebrows quirked as he bent to get out of the car. His expression indicated his reluctance to leave his friend. Solo repeated the single syllable silently, pushing Illya ahead of him.

  A couple of curious early risers watched from down the sidewalk. Otherwise the street of shops was quiet. Quiet, that is, save for the outraged screams of the dairy van driver.

  His vehicle had been turned over on its right side. Milk and cream flowed through broken glass all over the street. And from the left, upward side of the van rose the driver himself, portly, red-faced, his tweed cap askew and his wattles quivering

  "Lousy stinking swells in yer big cars!" he yelled, knocking a big smear of butter off the point of his chin. "Been out all night partyin', 'ave yer? 'oo's goin' to pay for all my goods, answer me that? You are, fuzzy-whiskers, you are!"

  Under the goading of the concealed guns of Messrs. Hadkins and Blightsome, Solo and Illya were laboring to lift the right rear fender off its hang-up on the upthrust point of the van's bumper. They grunted, heaved, grunted, heaved. A bobby's whistle sounded in the fog somewhere as Ahab shouted at the truck driver, "Be quiet, you insufferable pig!"

  "Pig, am I?" howled the driver. He flung a couple of pound chunks of butter at his tormentor.

  At that moment Napoleon Solo lurched against the THRUSH agent named Blightsome, simultaneously heaving with all his might on the fender.

  Down came the Daimler's weight, released, onto Blightsome's foot.

  The man howled. Solo whirled, gut-chopped the other THRUSH agent, just as Commander Ahab lost his temper completely, pulled his pistol and shot the dairy driver in the shoulder.

  Solo shoved Illya hard in the spine, turned to fend off the attack of the first THRUSH man he'd hit. Illya hesitated only an instant. He leaped up on the van, jumped down on the other side and was gone into the murk.

  The first THRUSH agent smashed Solo in the nose with his gun barrel, staggering him. On his knees, Solo took another blow in the neck.

  "Get after Kuryakin!" Ahab cried, apoplectic. The THRUSH gunmen hesitated. Their reason was evident. From the rear the bobby's footsteps clacked at them in a dead run.

  Ahab heard this, hastily ordered them all into the Daimler as the bobby's whistle split the morning air again. Solo tried to pull away. Ahab kicked him in the leg and threw him on his face in the tonneau.

  The THRUSH agents dragged Solo's legs into the car as it gathered speed, snaked around past the wrecked van and raced away into the fog. Somewhere Ahab was cursing:

  "Kuryakin's loose. Loose! Well, we can't let that stop us. Too much at stake. They'll never believe him anyway. Never in time. We'll go ahead. We must. Ah, you—causing me all this difficulty!"

  He jammed his sole against Solo's head. "I should put your light out now, Solo. But you've earned a much more painful death. Besides, no matter what Kuryakin does, it won't help. Why, 4:30 will be here before they know it." Ahab began to titter, somewhat crazily.

  Groggy and nauseated, Solo lay on the floorboards of the racing car. He hoped Illya would make it. He hoped something could be done in time. But he was worried that Ahab was right: Then it was already too late.

  Commander Ahab settled down and, as if he needed a scapegoat for all of the things that had gone wrong, instructed his two agents to work Solo over thoroughly. They beat him with the indifference of professionals, all the way to the THRUSH airfield.

  THREE

  THE HANDS on the huge clock high overhead registered two in the afternoon. All around, there was an atmosphere of tension, of men finally engaged in a battle for which they had trained for years.

  One entire wall of the immense chamber consisted of frosted Plexiglas panels. They were illuminated from behind. They bore on their surfaces intricate maps of various areas of the greater London area.

  Small lights popped and winked over the various portions of the map like a pinball backboard gone mad. Animated arrows pointed down main thoroughfares, pulsing with light to indicate a maximum traffic flow. Underneath the great Plexiglas boards, controllers, all of them officers from the various military services of Her Majesty, sat on stools on ten-foot high motorized platforms. They called signals through headsets and watched the changing light patterns.

  This was the highly top secret Program Room from which, if the time ever came, the British could unleash nuclear devastation upon an aggressor who struck first. The room was located six levels underground. Today its occupants were engaged in a strange kind of war: a war against the hands of the master clock high above them.

  The clock's hands ticked over to register two minutes past the hour.

  Grimly fascinated, Illya Kuryakin watched the movement of the hands. He was seated in a comfortable easy chair, high up behind glass in the master programming booth overlooking the floor. The upholstery on Illya's chair was black, like that of the chair beside him in which Mr. Waverly sat.

  Waverly's forehead was puckered. He kept tock-tocking his pipe stem against the lucite counter. To the right of the U.N.C.L.E. operatives, the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the C.I.D. sat in red-upholstered chairs, anxiously watching floor operations.

  All available members of the armed forces plus the entire London police department to a man were on the streets, directing what might become the greatest mass exodus ever attempted.

  Running away from Commander Ahab's car in the morning fog, an exhausted Illya had fled for several blocks before phoning a coded U.N.C.L.E. number.

  Relays had switched him to Mr. Waverly. Illya reported what was likely to happen at four-thirty in the afternoon.

  An official Whitehall limousine sped out of the fog ten minutes later. It carried him to No. 10 Downing Street. From that address at shortly pa
st eleven issued the order that all resources were to be mobilized to put into effect a defense Program left over from the days when the exodus of a city's population seemed feasible in the face of nuclear attack.

  By noon bayonet-armed troops were on the streets and outward traffic was flowing sluggishly. Citizens milled in panic at the tube entrances. Nearly everyone had heard the Prime Minister's emergency broadcast alluding to a situation of grave emergency which required orderly but instant evacuation.

  For two hours now the evacuation had been in progress. Thirty-nine gigantic TV monitors positioned on the floor of the Program Room showed London's various main traffic arteries. Each road was hopelessly clogged with motionless traffic. Eleven additional monitors relayed pictures from other main points around London. A riot was in progress outside the Parliament Building, for example. The rioters were panic-stricken students who had no idea why they were rioting, or what they were protesting.

  The Prime Minister himself had decided to put the evacuation plan into operation. He had digested the facts presented by his aides: only a third of the population, perhaps less, could be gotten out before the THRUSH tidal wave struck at half after the hour of four. Hardly satisfactory, but better than nothing. The Prime Minister had ordered the evacuation. And it had been a bad choice.

  As Illya watched with growing horror, scenes of chaos and confusion multiplied on the monitors. Up to this point the behavior of London's population had been generally both exemplary and amazing. But now, with all roads jammed and horns blasting everywhere, and still no word from the government as to the reason for the exodus, sporadic riots of serious proportions were breaking out. Many led by howling teenagers.

  "It will be less than a third surviving," Illya breathed.

  Mr. Waverly heard him, said, "Very likely. Our only hope is to locate the underwater craft."

  Every hunter-killer sub unit in the North Atlantic, every available NATO vessel, had joined the search, with no results thus far. Illya studied the huge clock beyond the glass. It was suspended by modernistic stainless steel rods from the arched ceiling. The hands. moved again, inexorable.