08-The Monster Wheel Affair

by David McDaniel

  Waverly said something to acknowledge, and pressed the disconnect button. He sighed deeply and leaned back in the chair. Absently he picked up his cold pipe and puffed at it for several seconds before realizing that it was still unlit. He stared at it vaguely, then set it down and leaned his head on the back of the chair and stared at the light metal ceiling.

  Almost a quarter of the way around the world Napoleon Solo lay on a bunk and also contemplated a metal ceiling. The bunk was comfortable, the room was air-conditioned, the food was fairly good and regular. Personally, he had no complaints—unlike his partner, who was currently standing near the middle of the room, his head turning uncertainly from side to side.

  "They don't have the room bugged, Illya. I'm sure of it. Now stop worrying. They would have no earthly reason to plant a bug in the first mate's cabin, and no time to rig a good one in the few minutes they had before we were booked into it."

  "All right. Besides, if it is bugged, we've probably given ourselves away by this time."

  "Be honest—what you mean is I have given us away. And since we've gotten no reaction from anywhere it becomes increasingly obvious that I haven't. So stop worrying and relax."

  Illya looked down on the American. "You look so relaxed it bothers me. What do you have up your sleeve?"

  "Absolutely nothing but my trusty right arm, old friend. They've taken everything away from us but the clothes on our backs."

  "They haven't taken our shoes, or the contents thereof—we could walk out of here anytime we wanted to."

  "And where would we go? The ship is still all at sea, and so are we. We may be superhuman, but there are an awful lot of men on an aircraft carrier, even one this small. And since I haven't eaten my spinach today, I don't quite feel up to taking it over and turning it around single-handed."

  "Not single-handed," said Illya. "After all, you've got me."

  "All right," said Napoleon reasonably. "Double-handed, then. Even with my faithful Russian companion it's more of a job than I feel up to at the moment." He tapped at his chest and coughed experimentally. "Now maybe in another day or two I'll feel better. Sea air often does wonders for my constitution. When we get to wherever we're going, then you and I will have someplace to jump to if the going gets rough. Besides, our assignment was essentially to interrupt the transaction before the bird people flew away with the goodies. Wouldn't it be more fun to snatch them from their very claws?"

  "And wouldn't you feel foolish if we missed?"

  Napoleon shrugged, which was not easy while lying on his back. "There's nothing we can do now," he insisted. "We'll wait until there is." And as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.

  The Florida sun was touching the horizon behind them as they passed the armed guard at the door of the blockhouse, and the heat of the day that had just ended radiated back at them from the concrete block walls. Alexander Waverly removed his hat and passed a handkerchief across his moist forehead as the steel door closed behind them. A mechanical voice somewhere said, "X minus two hours and counting."

  Doctor MacTeague found a pair of padded chairs with a reasonably unobstructed view of the control area and lowered himself into one. "The broadcast has been prepared," he said. "The range safety officer will send it off about thirty seconds after the course correction has been made for a collision orbit. It'll be broadcast on the same frequency the Wheel uses to talk to the ground, as well as on the International Distress frequency and a half a dozen other reasonable frequencies including the one that carries the world standard time signals from Greenwich. If there's anyone on board that Wheel listening, they'll hear it."

  Waverly took the other chair while MacTeague talked. Now he said, "How long will the total orbit take from launch?"

  "About half an hour. The correction will take place about plus seven minutes. Have you heard anything from those two agents of yours?"

  "No. It's been four days. The one piece of actual reconnaissance we dared do showed the ship this morning still on course, approaching the island of San Juan de la Trine, about seven hundred miles south of the Cape of Good Hope. It looks as if this missile is our last hope."

  "I wish it was a sturdier one." MacTeague sighed, and shook his head. "If you're wrong about this, and they're not bluffing..."

  "I am quite aware," said Waverly tiredly. "I will be responsible for the destruction of the United States of America."

  "I don't suppose the responsibility really matters so much," said MacTeague. "If you're right, they will never know. And if you're wrong, there will be no one left to assign responsibility anywhere—let alone in a position to know what really happened. If that's any comfort."

  "Not especially," said Waverly, and lapsed into silence. The decision had been made and implemented—the only decision possible under the circumstances. And now it simply had to be waited out. He fumbled for his pipe and tobacco, and began fitting one into the other.

  It was dark outside the porthole, and only a single light burned in the comfortably furnished cell containing the two U.N.C.L.E. agents. There in semi-darkness, both minds were working vigorously.

  "Did you once write, 'A poet can survive anything but a misprint'?"

  Napoleon thought a moment and said, "No, I'm not Oscar Wilde. And it's everything, not anything."

  With time weighing on their hands, they had returned to their game of Botticelli. At the moment Illya had two and Napoleon was currently defending, with a "W."

  Illya lay back with his feet up and thought. Solo had a strong predilection for American poets, but so far only the literary field had been established by his free questions, so he was unrestricted in the nationalities he chose. "Did you write 'Jacques Bouchard'?"

  Silence followed. There is a lot of silence in the game of Botticelli, either preparing questions or searching for answers. Napoleon finally decided he didn't have this answer and said so.

  "Pierre Wolff," said Illya. "You should pay more attention to the European theater. Now: Are you an American?"

  "Yes."

  "Thought so. In that case..." He went back to his mental file of American writers and was leafing slowly through it when the ship's engines stopped.

  Both sat up. The faint distant throbbing had surrounded them for three days, until they were no longer aware of its presence. Then suddenly they were aware of its absence.

  Napoleon spoke first. "Well," he said. "We seem to have arrived."

  Illya rolled to his feet. "Fine. Now do we take over the ship?"

  The American held up a restraining hand. "Not so fast, you mad impetuous Russian. There are many factors to consider. After all, it will take some time to unload all the cargo we think is here—unless they're throwing the ship and crew into the bargain..." He stopped short, and a thoughtful look darkened his face.

  Illya smiled. "You hadn't thought of that, had you? They might not even bother to unload the gold. This is a good place to store it."

  "And it's a good place to hijack it from. No, I think they'll put it in a secret cavern somewhere." He got up and went to the porthole, cupping his hands around his face and peering out into the night. "I wish I could tell where we are."

  "No street signs visible?"

  "Not even any lights. For all I know we may have stopped in mid-ocean, to transfer the cargo to a submarine."

  "Or a dozen submarines. That much cargo is a lot of volume as well as a lot of weight."

  "Wait a minute. There's something. Turn out that light, will you? Thanks." He looked long through the small porthole, then spoke again, and a deeply satisfied note was in his voice. "All is very well. There is an island out there, and we're lying to about a quarter mile from shore. I can see some buildings on the island—there's a moon. And I think I see what we were hoping for. There's something that looks like a radome on top of a hill maybe half a mile up from the beach." He stepped away from the window. "Come on and take a look. Our goal is in sight."

  "Somehow," said Illya, "every time you say that it means we'r
e in for a fight." But he came and looked, and eventually nodded. "It's a radome. Probably where they broadcast the signals to the Wheel."

  "I wish we had our communicators."

  "And I wish we had our guns. I also wish we had a battalion of Cossacks and a few tanks."

  "I doubt if the Captain could supply us with those, but he has our radios—and our guns. And my cigarettes, come to think of it."

  "So we walk up to him, explain the situation, and ask for them back?"

  "No," said Napoleon regretfully. "He strikes me as the kind of man who would obey orders no matter how ridiculous they seemed. We'll just have to take them by force—or by stealth."

  Illya expressed resignation. "Lead the way," he said.

  As the moment approached for the launching, an air of tension quite out of proportion to the size of the firing grew in the quiet dimness of the control center. Every man there knew the actual mission of the missile on Pad Four. They had been briefed after the door was sealed.

  On one monitor speaker the familiar voice of the Wheel droned in Esperanto about the beauties of outer space. The tracking station at Johannesburg had begun relaying the signal as soon as the satellite had cleared the horizon there.

  The local controller's voice was steady over the loudspeakers as the last minute was ticked off by the hundreds of synchronized clocks inside the control system.

  When the time came, only the faintest vibration was felt inside the building. On television screens the missile was surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and then it stood like a spike from the boiling clouds. It grew on a stalk of flame from the blasted earth, gathering speed until it pulled its taproot up after it and vaulted into the sky and was gone. Only a radar trace showed its path.

  Attention shifted to a plotting board. The Monster Wheel was there, in its orbit safely away from the path of the short red line of grease pencil which already had a visible extension southeast of the peninsula of Florida on the map.

  And the voice was counting again. "Coming up on minus five minutes to course correction. Mark. Minus five minutes."

  Waverly found that his pipe had gone out, and the bitter taste of cold, used tobacco crept up the stem into his mouth. He grimaced, and spat into a wastepaper basket. He glanced at his companion, who reclined in his chair without a sign of tension—except where his hands gripped the arms. Waverly smiled slightly to himself, and started to clean the pipe.

  "Course correction minus four minutes."

  One of the detonators from the hollow heel of his shoe had opened the first door that stood between Napoleon Solo and freedom. The sound it made was not loud, and as hoped the crewmen were not thronging in the corridors. "Probably all up on deck," he whispered to Illya as they crept out and started for the Captain's cabin.

  It was not difficult to find—they had been taken there for dinner shortly after their crash, and there had been relieved of all their possessions and had watched them being locked in the safe. They had received in return the Captain's assurance that the goods would be safely restored once this mission was completed and they could be sent on their way.

  The Captain was probably on deck with his crew, supervising the unloading of his precious cargo. His door did not require the expenditure of another detonator, but the safe door did.

  "Shameful security they have on this ship," said Illya disapprovingly as they blew the safe. "We should probably write them a letter about it when we get home."

  "I wouldn't," said Napoleon. "We may need to do this again sometime, and I would rather it was easy."

  "That's the trouble with you," said Illya. "You're soft."

  There was a sharp sizzling sound and a whap! like two padded boards being slapped together as the charge went off. A bit of smoke dissipated quickly and revealed the safe door hanging by one hinge.

  "Sloppy," said Illya.

  Napoleon shook his head. "You're just full of criticism tonight," he said. "Right now we're in a hurry."

  "We could have taken ten or twenty minutes to feel out the combination," he continued as he began to rifle the safe, "and risked being walked in on if the Old Man wanted a drink. That would have taken some fast explaining. Our absence won't remain a secret very long anyway, and I'd much rather...Ah! Here we are. He is, at least, an honest man." He tossed Illya his automatic, and pocketed his own U.N.C.L.E. Special and the Gyrojet that had saved his life twice so far. He handed Illya one of the communicators and kept the other, then snapped open his cigarette case. "Bless his little heart," he said as he checked the contents. "They're all here."

  "I'm sure his mother would be proud of him," said Illya. "Now that we have the radios, shouldn't we check in? We've been out of touch for three days, and they might start to worry."

  "We can wait a little longer. Mr. Waverly has more things to worry about than us. Besides, if we did call him, he'd only say, 'Well, Mr. Solo, do you have that job done yet?' and we'd have to tell him we don't. And I'd be ashamed to do that after three days. So let's go finish the job..."

  "... And then we'll call him," said Illya. "All right. After three days another few hours won't matter."

  "It's not irrevocable, Waverly," said Dr. MacTeague. "You can still have it stopped."

  "My orders are not valid here," said Waverly. "You can have it stopped."

  "I will not do so unless you recommend it."

  "Then, my dear sir, it will not be done," said Waverly with cold finality.

  And they sat and listened together as the last seconds trickled away in metallic clatterings of the loudspeaker.

  "Five...four .. . three...two...one...

  "Zero! Course correction implemented." Pause. "Radar check reports correction accurate. Collision minus approximately twenty-two minutes."

  "Ready with radio transmission," said another voice. There was a wait of almost a minute, and then the voice said, "Calling Space Station One. Calling Space Station One. This is Cape Kennedy Control. Calling Space Station One. This is Cape Kennedy Control. We have had an accidental misfire, and a small missile has left its planned orbit. The ground destruct mechanisms have failed to operate. It will approach your orbit in twenty minutes, forty-five seconds. Coördinates relative your position three-twenty degrees polar, azimuth minus fifty degrees, plus-minus five degrees on both. This is not a hostile missile. It is an accidental misfire. Destroy the missile. Repeat—destroy the missile."

  The voice of the Wheel chattered on inanely, as the message began to repeat.

  MacTeague and Waverly looked at each other in the cool darkness of the control center.

  "Now," said MacTeague, "it is irrevocable."

  Chapter 16: "Dauringa Island Calling The World!"

  Floodlights sparkled on the surface of the ocean on the landward side of the ship, and voices shouted back and forth from the deck to small boats which bobbed on the night-black water.

  The seaward side was unlit, unwatched, and nearly deserted. The control tower which rose from the starboard side of the flight deck cast a broad dark shadow across the midnight sea. And within that shadow two men quietly lowered a convenient lifeboat. The davits were well-lubricated, and not a sound betrayed them. In a matter of minutes they were free of the ship and pulling their oars in the direction of the open sea.

  It was some time before they were far enough away from the ship to turn; then they rowed parallel with the shore for almost half a mile. The illuminated area was large, and their success was of greater importance than the few minutes which could be saved by a more direct course.

  They had been rowing with only the stars and the distant lights from the ship to guide them for almost an hour before Napoleon whispered, "Up oars!" In the silence that followed, he could hear clearly the hiss and rumble of breakers behind him. Beaching a small boat through surf is a great deal more difficult than swimming through it in scuba gear, and neither their guns nor their other gear was waterproof.

  He shipped his oars and turned in his bow seat to face ahead, then whispered over his sho
ulder to Illya, "We're coming up on the surf. Get set for a few strokes with all your weight when I give the word."

  His partner grunted acknowledgment, and Napoleon opened his eyes wide, reaching through the darkness for the frothing lines of white that would mark the shore.

  The soft repeating hiss grew as they neared the beach and then he could see the foam. The little boat rocked violently as a wave rose up and swept under them, and Napoleon said, "Now! Hit it!"

  Illya hit it—three powerful strokes with the oars that drove them along the trough of the following wave. The water rose as the wave overtook them, lifting them up as he shipped the oars and grabbed the gunwales, and then, with a swoop like a high-speed elevator, leveled itself out upon the sand with a muffled roar, sank away in a welter of white suds, and was gone.

  Napoleon leaped out of the boat and grabbed the bow. "Come on," he said. "We've got to get this under cover."

  Together they dragged the boat up the narrow hard-packed beach and into the shelter of the first row of vegetation. Then they crouched in the shadows for several minutes listening for any evidence of their detection.

  Finally Illya spoke softly. "So much for their security systems," he said. "Napoleon, do you realize how many times we have breached Thrush's walls in the last few weeks?"

  "Yes," said Solo. "Approximately twice. And if you will remember, it hasn't been exactly easy either time. Would you feel better if they caught us?"

  "Well, no. But I wouldn't be so worried. There ought to be guards patrolling the island."

  "Why? Nobody could get here without being detected."

  "Unless they came underwater, like we did on Dauringa. And I imagine they'll be taking steps to prevent that, now, too. And in addition I still expect some kind of beach patrol."