The Final Affair

by David McDaniel

  "You think an U.N.C.L.E. agent killed a guard in your own restricted area?"

  "I doubt it was Zodiac," said Baldwin sarcastically.

  "An U.N.C.L.E. infiltration, and a good one," said Kerrigan, obviously interested.

  "Infiltration, attempted kidnapping and double murder," said Baldwin.

  "And not a bad job on the first two, I must admit. For amateurs."

  "What about the KBG?" asked Chou. "You think this Stevens passed something of it to U.N.C.L.E.?"

  "I think he stole a spare unit from the aiming mechanism, which is a key sub-assembly. U.N.C.L.E. could just as well have broken in here to pick it up; we don't know Stevens took it. But he was not suspected of more than incipient nervous collapse; he could easily have carried the missing device on his person. We may never know how he was induced to betray us. His loyalty had been unquestioned. His profiles, his whole record was exemplary. Whatever force they used caused such emotional conflicts his mind apparently began to crack. I would like to know just what was the hold they had on him. Their meddling has cost me a valuable worker — I'm told — and an annoying security leak. Regrettably, my bailiwick has a shortage of such highly trained men as yourselves, or I should already have directed steps of retaliation against the United Network Command. My work here is largely of a theoretical nature — pure research, if you understand me. My staff is more suited for the battles of the laboratory than the conflicts of the streets, and against the Network's trained killers we would be hopelessly outmatched."

  "But not weaponless," Chou pointed out. "I believe your prototype KBG is operational. Has it been tested under combat conditions?"

  "Hey," said Vince. "That sounds like fun. How much dope do you have on U.N.C.L.E.'s local defenses?"

  "Quite enough," said Baldwin. "I do not lack for plans — only for men capable of carrying them out. I have permission to employ the KBG at my discretion, and inasmuch as U.N.C.L.E. already knows about it, I thought we might arrange to give them a practical demonstration."

  "What can it do best? We'll want to use it to best advantage."

  "You may have time to familiarize yourselves with it. But I want this punitive raid undertaken before the week is out."

  "Would Thursday night be convenient?"

  "Perfectly. Such a blow must be neither too hastily struck nor too long delayed. Pull up chairs, gentlemen, and I will show you an attack plan for your consideration..."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  "Absolutely Fascinating!"

  Of course Baldwin checked with Central for permission to use their ... two men and the KBG, and inevitably Alexander Waverly knew that permission had been granted about thirty seconds before Baldwin knew. Thus, when the final attack plans were confirmed and set in motion, recording units in U.N.C.L.E.'s San Francisco office copied down every step, and every calculation leading to that step. The defenders had begun preparations and rehearsals before the full assault force had been picked.

  Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were appraised of the impending attack twenty six hours before T-zero, As usual, they received summons to Mr. Waverly's home-from-home, his field office, for "a briefing," subject unspecified.

  "Gentlemen," he began without preamble as they draped themselves appropriately over convenient pieces of furniture, "tomorrow night we will be invaded by Thrush, hopefully with the KBG in full operation."

  "Hopefully?" said Illya.

  "We know exactly when and where they will strike, as well as how hard and towards what goal. We also know what they want, where they expect to find it — and most important, how hard they are willing to fight to attain it. We shall therefore give it to them with a convincing minimum of resistance, including simulated casualties on our side and real ones on theirs. Neither of you will participate in the sham defense — the risk of your being recognised is too great.

  "Nevertheless, I believe I can promise you an opportunity to stretch your atrophying muscles very soon. Less than an hour ago the locations of Thrush Central were identified, and we may be ready to move against them in forty-eight hours. You will be fully briefed after tomorrow night's action, but basically the situation is this: the Central complex which currently has control is located in Darjeeling — a ticklish spot, with Nepal and Pakistan, China, Bhutan and India clustered around the borders of Sikkim with missiles bristling and hostility heavy; any sort of overt military activity in the area could start World War III in a matter of hours. I would prefer to wait another few weeks until control-is shifted to the present stand-by Central, which is in an ideal site for our purposes, but Thrush is already aware of some kind of communications anomaly in this relay area, and has sent a team here to trace it. We cannot hope to remain undiscovered another week. We must act at once.

  "Where is the back-up unit?" asked Illya.

  "Are we going to Darjeeling?" asked Napoleon,

  "No," said Mr. Waverly, "You're going to San Diego, The stand-by Central is set up in one of the exposition buildings in Balboa Park there."

  "And the third unit?"

  "In six DC-3s in Central Africa. They are the most vulnerable, and we should be able to immobilize them with little effort."

  "But we'll go into all this in your briefing Friday. Tonight's operation demands most of our attention at the moment. Baldwin believes we stole the gamma laser the night Mr. Stevens was killed, and is anxious to recover it before we can finish analyzing it. I'm afraid, Mr. Solo, that your improvisation didn't hold up against even a relatively superficial autopsy."

  "I think we did pretty well, under the circumstances," said Napoleon.

  Mr. Waverly commenced stuffing a pipe. "Be that as it may," he said, "they will be allowed to find the gamma laser in the second of six places they have been instructed to look for it — in the High-Energy Lab, next to the mass spectrometer. A work-order with it will indicate that it has not yet been subjected to more than a superficial examination. Considering how long it took us to borrow the X-ray crystallograph from Stanford, Section Eight is doing an excellent job — they expect to finish within twelve hours. Microphotogrammetry was completed the day after you brought the laser rod to us. If we offer Thrush a convincing resistance before allowing them to recapture it, they may retire convinced of an effective victory."

  "When are they due to arrive?"

  "Fifteen minutes before midnight tomorrow, through a fire exit on the second level."

  At twenty minutes before midnight, though everything seemed perfectly normal in U.N.C.L.E. HQ San Francisco, a subtle atmosphere of tension seeped through the silent corridors. During the afternoon, Mr. Simpson had mounted two thermographs in protective housings, several sealed photographic plates and a recording magnetometer inconspicuously around the second-level fire exit which would shortly open to admit the not-unwelcome invaders. A Fastax WF-4 high speed instrumentation camera was mounted behind a ceiling fixture; it would be started by a burst of magnetic flux or heat striking the other sensors, and its 400 feet of XR film would last approximately fifteen seconds at 1000 frames/second. Samples, of various materials were placed along the projected invasion route, arranged to blend with the rather spartan decor.

  His personal portable observation post was centered around an optical thermograph which was too large to carry and too expensive to abandon, mounted on a rubber-tired waist-high lab cart which had been designed to bear an obsolete oscilloscope. His final preparations completed by 9:00 o'clock, he retired to a private office for an hour's nap.

  Now as the moment of attack approached, the normally deserted corridors of the second level were quiet. Access doors leading to other areas had been secured, as had the main elevator bank. Guards were at their posts, nylon body armor under their suits, palms sweating slightly.

  Mr. Simpson loaded and checked his motorized Nikon and its 250-shot magazine; as long as he held down its button it would shoot five pictures a second. He set the shutter to 1/1000th with the lens wide open at f/1.8, two stops underexposed for the 85 ambient foot-candles
of the corridor, and took his position as ordered behind the first corner with instructions to fall back when the Thrush force advanced.

  Napoleon paced his small quarters endlessly, watched by Joan, who was not to be told what was happening but" asked repeatedly if he was edgy. Illya was downstairs locked in his room, also- as ordered, drumming his finger-tips and fretting quietly. Considering the building's structure, he wasn't even likely to hear anything of the battle but what came over the intercom monitor considerately left open for him.

  Mr. Waverly would be directing operations from the central communications room, where banks of TV screens showed him the corridors of the second level and a microphone stood before him to transmit orders to all his units, Now the command channel was silent, and cameras stared down empty corridors as the last minutes ticked away.

  On level two Mr. Simpsom slipped into a heavy asbestos lab smock, with matching boots and hood. Under the exigencies of field observation of an unwilling and even uncooperative subject, certain discomforts were to be expected. He switched on his lab cart, directing current from the heavy batteries on the lower shelf to the recording optical thermograph and the magnetometer beside it. Five minutes remained as he took his position around the corner of a crossing corridor some thirty yards from the fire exit.

  According to his Accutron it was T-minus-one when a flare of light around the fire door and a muffled i>WHAFF! pushed a wave of hot air down the passage. Instantly one hand dropped to the start-button on his datacorder and the other brought up the Nikon. Quickly, before the 15-second load of the Fastax ran out, he stuck the Nikon vertically around the corner, centering its right-angle viewfinder on the converging lines of the corridor and the action already starting towards him through the molten ruins of a once-sturdy door.

  He held the button five seconds, long enough to record in color as much of two more fireballs as the relatively limited range of his emulsion could handle. He could synchronise these frames with the ultrahighspeed 16mm XR footage, perforce in monochrome, to study the development of the plasmoid.

  Recorder needles leaped wildly as the drive motor hummed and tape flew past polished heads, while above ceiling lights flashed and alarm bells hammered through the halls. Guards burst forth from appropriate directions after a reasonable delay; By that time the attack force was two-thirds of the way to the corner and advancing rapidly. Mr. Simpson retired unseen down the hall they would follow, wheeling his equipment cart ahead of him at a dog-trot.

  Gunfire spat behind him as he ducked behind the steel partition which backed the Section Receptionist's deserted desk. He paused here as U.N.C.L.E. guards rushed past him in both directions, then a fusillade of slugs slapped the wall and suddenly the corridor was empty again. Behind him and his steel shield, two members of the Home Team popped out, released a few rounds and popped back again.

  Mr. Simpson barely had time to Blink as the leap of a, magnetometer needle, gave him a fraction of a second warning and a sphere of unspeakably intense light shot past a few feet away and burst with a quiet padded concussion ten yards behind him. He felt a wash of warmth reflecting from the wall he hugged and a surge of gratitude for the asbestos smock.

  They were definitely coming this way. As if to remind him, a voice spoke tinnily from the open communicator in his pocket. "Simpson! Simpson

  Now for the first time since his glimpse at their entrance, he got a direct look at the fantastic weapon wielded by Thrush. It was probably the same unit he'd seen in the film; its fat, ribbed barrel blossomed like a flower into a two-foot translucent wire-laced dish with a slender Bright pistil tapering six inches to its focus at a needle point. Flux- in the dish could spin the plasma as it emerged from the nozzle until the mass of super-heated ionised gas was released in a whirling fireball. His Nikon fired ba-ba-ha-ba-bap as he stuck his head around the corner to aim and look for himself; as the hiss and crackle began again he ducked back, But held the camera out with, one gloved hand until the magnetometer needle slammed against its stop pin.

  He jerked back almost simultaneously with, another flare, this time from the opposite side of his partition, which suddenly grew uncomfortably warm about waist level as a large patch of paint Bubbled and stank. Boots clattered towards him over the sound of the KBG preparing another thunderbolt, until a shouted order stopped them and a two-foot circle in the middle of his sheltering wall smoked briefly as the blistered paint charred and evaporated, then turned cherry red and began to slag.

  By that time Mr. Simpson was racing down the corridor, heavy smock flapping behind him, rubber-tired cart slewing slightly on the waxed floor. The Nikon lay atop the bank of batteries, lens cracked and fused, paint burned from its face except for a clean patch where an asbestos glove had protected it.

  There were vague shouts behind him and another fireball burst ten yards short, throwing his blue silhouette before him on the wall beside the opening elevator. Enamel softened and bubbled on the exposed corners of the lab cart, and the rear tires stuck stringily to the floor a moment until he lifted it like a wheelbarrow and flung it ahead of him towards the padded rear wall of the waiting car, diving after it as the doors began to close and the last guard, who had stayed to hold the car for him, fired two shots between the shuttering sheets of steel as the KBG warmed up for another blast. The doors met a second before it came. They shuddered and smelt, but the elevator had already started up, and its occupants sighed with shared relief.

  "Get everything?" asked the guard.

  "Very nearly," said Mr. Simpson.

  "How was it?"

  His eyes gleamed with delight as he rose from a cursory check of his gear.

  "Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "It's A Nice Little Plan"

  "Tomorrow afternoon," said Mr. Waverly, "at 3:00 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time,

  Thrush, as a coherent international entity, will effectively cease to exist. In an operation of devilish subtlety, requiring a minimum of force and a maximum of surprise, as well as split-second co-ordination, not one, nor two, but all three Thrush Centrals ..should fall into our hands. The attack plans you will be using should be infallible; it was entirely prepared by the Untimate Computer."

  "Are you sure you can trust it?" Napoleon asked.

  "Implicitly. I'm afraid you and Mr. Kuryakin may find your part of the job frustratingly simple — there will be no frontal attack, just a few minutes' skulking in a public park on a Saturday afternoon."

  "It seems too simple," said Illya.

  "We have no reason to doubt Thrush's own top secret security files on the matter. Mr. Simpson has modified or manufactured — I myself am uncertain how — an Alpha variant of the Paralane knockout gas you have been using for the last year."

  "What does it do-besides put them to sleep in two seconds?"

  "Like the dog in the night-time, of primary importance is what it does not do: in this case it does not stimulate the ventilation monitor used in the Balboa Park enclave. The intake ducts will be your target."

  He tapped his pipe on the side of an ashtray as Napoleon said, "You mean we just put them to sleep and walk in?"

  "Exactly. Mr. Gold will go with you, and will check the proper reception of a full emergency dump from the other side of the world. Because simultaneously with your secural of the stand-by unit in San Diego, at 4:30 Sunday morning in Darjeeling, the second largest special assault force in the history of the United Network Command will move in quietly and surround the Bengali Opium Processing Plant, vacant for the last five years under the new regime, but an ideal location for Thrush Central."

  "The local government has been informed at the very highest levels and without being told just what will be going on they have been persuaded to withhold official reaction for up to half an hour, but with agent Castora in command nothing should be allowed to disturb the natives. A few shots exchanged, nothing more. Thrush expects to be able to lose one Central unit without serious inconvenience — hence this fan
tastic electromagnetic will-o'-the-wisp they have created. But you, Mr. Solo, Mr. Kuryakin, will have captured their backup system and effectively defeated them a moment before they became vulnerable.

  "The final unit is broken down for transportation in six DC-3's in Central Africa. It was bound for Lisbon, but our field agent Philip Lebow single-handedly sabotaged the aircraft, thus immobilising the third and last operational unit."