The Doomsday Affair

by Harry Whittington

  When the elevator bumped to a stop and the doors opened at ground level Solo stepped out, walking purposefully. He turned left, because that was as good a way to turn as any, and a little way down the hall he saw a red lettered exit sign marked Maintenance.

  He strode to it, then paused, looking for a handle or button to open it. There was none. He felt a twist of. panic. If anyone should see him standing there searching the panels beside the door it would be obvious that he wasn’t a waiter, despite his uniform.

  He reached out and ran his fingers quickly along the door jamb, trying to control his mounting tension. His finger brushed an inset plastic bar. It gave slightly under his touch. Exhaling, he pressed it harder, hearing the door-lock buzz. He shoved the door, pushing it open, feeling the chill of early morning air sweep in across his face.

  He stepped through the door, almost afraid to glance over his shoulder. Never look back. Keep your eye on the future.

  The door sighed closed behind him, making a flat brick wall of the rear of the huge chalet. He found himself in a grease-tanned cement courtyard with dozens of metal refuse containers lined like soldiers at attention. The morning was far from silent out here. There was a discordant symphony of sounds: the disturbed barking of police dogs beyond the fifteen-car stone garage, the pulsing of generators, the keening wind out of the high mountains rustling the eucalyptus trees.

  He walked toward the front of the courtyard, off the cement and onto the firm, well-tended grounds surrounding Broadmoor Rest. There were guards stationed in strategic places all over the grounds; several of them glanced up as he stepped out into the open. But their glances bounced off his uniform and back to the silent boredom of their sentry duty.

  The morning was still only dimly lit by the sun peeping over the mountains in the east. Wind flung the manes of the trees wildly. And the dogs kept barking. Did they always bark? Solo wondered as he kept going purposefully across the grounds, neither too fast nor too slow.

  Suddenly the barking of the dogs became a roaring cacophony.

  As if that were an electronic impulse setting them off, white lights abruptly hissed on all over the grounds, turning the lawn into a brilliantly illumined cage set down in the dark morning. A rifle fired, the bullet humming only feet above Solo. The barking dogs raced from the kennels. Men came running from all directions.

  Solo whirled, looking for cover. But there was none out here; he was all alone on the flat expanse of the grounds, without even a bush to duck behind.

  And then he was not alone at all. The guards surrounded him, guns held at ready. Canine-trainers fought the huge dogs slathering at their leashes.

  And something crashed into the back of his head, sending him sprawling to his knees. He saw the grass fresh and dew-covered before him, then another blow drove everything into blackness.

  V

  THE HEAD SECURITY guard’s voice snapped out. The two men who had clubbed Solo into the ground now stepped back reluctantly and stood at attention. The security officer spoke in denunciatory tone:

  “The orders were to stop him, not to kill him or to beat him. Which one of you wants to be responsible for a dead body on your hands now when the leader gets here? Would you like to explain it, Warner? You, Merric?”

  One of the guards found the temerity to speak in reply: “We only wanted to be sure he would know what to expect if he tried it again, sir.’“

  While they spoke above him, Solo lay flat, staring in a puzzled way at the lighted field.

  The lights were set in banks on a space three to five times the length of a football field. The grass was close clipped, the ground hard-packed. Enough for what? Nobody needed this kind of light to illumine a park in order to run down inmates on the loose.

  Four guards carried Solo slowly back into the building and down the elevator, returning him to his room. He read the time on the wrist watch of one of them. It was after six in the morning. His smile was wry. He had no idea what day. Doomsday, perhaps?

  They tossed him into the suite like a sack of cheap coffee, and walked out. The door slid closed without a whisper.

  Solo lay on the floor for a moment, unable to get two thoughts out of his mind. The first was the size and shape of that lighted area out there. The answer struck him suddenly with the fierce impact of a thunderclap. An air strip. It was a long plateau, flat and level on the hip of a mountain larger than Rhode Island. An air strip where even a fan jet could set down.

  He sat up suddenly, thinking about that lighted air strip and what the security officer had shouted at his men: Which one of you wants to be responsible for a dead body on your hands now when the leader gets here?

  Solo got to his feet, the pain of the battering he’d taken on the field forgotten, his mind racing. The leader arriving? This had to be Tixe Ylno. And this meant his hunch had been right—Su Yan was a big wheel, but he wasn’t Tixe Ylno. He hadn’t dared to kill him and Barbry and leave their bodies in San Francisco. Su Yan was acting on orders, too.

  Su Yan had boasted in that hotel room that everything was in readiness. The dying spy in Tokyo had revealed an awesome plot involving an atomic device.

  Solo breathed out heavily. Perhaps it was doomsday, after all. Six A.M. the morning of doomsday.

  He prowled the room, listening for the sound of an arriving plane, but knowing he could not hear it. These underground walls were soundproofed.

  He stared helplessly at Illya. When he spoke to him, it seemed to him once that Kuryakin shook his head, but he could not get him to repeat it. There was a razor-sharp mind behind those eyes, but it was trapped, held incommunicado in a useless body.

  Solo went to the table where the countless component parts of his attack gadgetry were sorted out. He glanced across his shoulder at Illya, then back at the wires, the batteries.

  He sat down, gathering the batteries, wires, building a simple ground and a metal contact. He set the contraption up on a sideboard. Getting a damp cloth from the bathroom, he soaked Illya’s hands and arms and then led him to the sideboard.

  He placed Illya’s hands on the metal contact pieces, made the connection between the positive and negative wires. Illya flinched, leaping back. He made a small whimpering sound, but then merely stood, staring, eyes empty.

  “Come on, Illya,” Solo said. “It’s got to work.”

  He pushed Kuryakin’s hands against the contacts a second time. Illya cried out, and his limbs jerked spasmodically for long seconds. Then he lay still, staring hopelessly at Solo. It was no use; whatever Su Yan had done to Illya could not be broken through by electric shock. Solo sighed, and returned Illya to the bed.

  He shook Barbry. She opened her eyes, followed him blankly to the setup on the sideboard.

  He closed her dampened hands on the contacts, crossed the wires and Barbry cried out, lunging away from it.

  He caught her in his arms, watching her face. He saw the slow return of color, the way her eyes focused as though she were awakening from a deep sleep.

  She straightened, looking about the beige-toned suite. She did not appear particularly astonished to be in this place.

  “I was in your room—at the hotel,” she said. “And Sam Su Yan came to the door.” When Solo nodded, she continued matter-of-factly: “I know this place. Broadmoor Rest. I was—here once before.”

  Solo didn’t speak, watching her. Barbry drew a deep breath. “I had a nervous breakdown—they sent me here. I saw Su Yan here for the first time…I didn’t want to tell you before, but that was the real reason why Su Yan refused to hire me to spy for Thrush when he hired Ursula. He knew I’d had a breakdown; he was afraid I’d break under tension. That’s why they tried to watch me—they were afraid to trust me with the little I knew.

  “What do you know about this place? Is it really a private sanitarium, or something else?”

  She frowned. “It was a sanitarium once, yes. But then Su Yan got control of it, and it’s changed. I’m not sure…”

  “What was this threat Su Y
an held over you?”

  She sighed. “I knew that Ursula worked for him—for Thrush. He told me if I ever breathed a word about it to anyone, he’d see that I was committed to this place for life. It looks like he’s done it.”

  Solo did not say anything, because he saw no reason for holding out empty hopes for her. Her nerves were fragile enough without being strained with the awesome facts of life in this place.

  He was pleased when, frightened, she succumbed to a natural fatigue and sank down on the bed, soon deeply asleep.

  He heard the inner hum of motors from the earth beneath him. Stacking chair upon table, he pressed his ear to the air conditioning duct grate, but the sounds through the building were like vague, confused whispers always subordinated to the throb of the unexplained engines.

  He jumped down from the chair, replaced it as it had been. It occurred to him that listening devices were one of the easiest gimmicks to assemble. He strode to his table of sorted parts. Using the small aluminum cones, he fashioned larger ones from all available aluminum which he then formed into a telescopic rod. With an amplifier from the dismantled sender-listening set, and the reassembled earplugs, he had himself a directional sound pickup.

  Returning to the duct-grate, he aimed the cones, inserted the earplug which was connected to the sound amplifier.

  He smiled in cold pleasure. While the sounds he was able to pick up through the elaborate air conditioning system were faint, he could by moving the cones locate the direction of each different sound.

  He examined the duct-grate closely, but finally had to give up the idea of getting out that way. The grate was very solidly welded into the wall—a first-class piece of modern workmanship.

  But that thought gave him a different idea. The air conditioning had been added to Broadmoor Rest comparatively recently, but the building itself was an old one, probably dating back to the last century. A staid, respectable site for a Thrush retreat but perhaps with a few chinks in the armor.

  Solo strode to the fireplace in the corner, knelt and looked again at the heavy metal plate which blocked off the chimney. He smiled slightly. It was as he’d hoped: the chimney itself was constructed of brick, so it had been impossible to secure the plate any more firmly than by the use of bolts. And bolts, unlike welding, could be removed comparatively easily.

  It took him less than half an hour to get the metal plate out of the way. By the time he finished he was covered with soot that had probably been there for fifty years or more—since whenever the old mansion had been turned into an exclusive private sanitarium, and this room into isolation quarters. Looking into the chimney, he found that it led both downward and upward. Apparently the level he was on wasn’t yet the lowest one at Broadmoor; he’d suspected that, from his use of the directional sound pickup at the air conditioning grate. There had been the muffled sound of engines somewhere below…

  He took one last look around the room, at Illya and Barbry, both asleep. Then he shoved the sound-directional detector into the chimney ahead of him and worked his way into it.

  Bracing feet and shoulders against the rough walls of the chimney, he inched his way downward into darkness. Loosened soot and dirt cascaded around him; he had to move doubly carefully to avoid stirring so much of it that he’d be unable to breathe. Twice he gulped in lungsful of mostly soot, and barely managed to keep from breaking out into coughing fits. Then the soot would sink into the darkness beneath him and he would breathe in tortured gasps of comparatively clean air.

  The passage was apparently the main chimney for this part of the building; Solo passed several branches which apparently led to other sealed-off fireplaces. At one point light entered the shaft, and as Solo reached that place he saw another branch leading to another fireplace, this one not sealed off. No sound came from the room; apparently it was unused. From what he could see from the passageway it seemed to be just a storeroom. He went on, still downward toward the machine sounds, which were growing steadily louder.

  At last he reached the bottom. The sounds had by now become a deep drumming which filled the shaft with almost physical waves of sound. There was light here, bright light—another unsealed opening. Solo approached it cautiously, as silently as possible even though he knew any sound he made would almost certainly be lost amid the engine noise below.

  Then his feet touched a bed of soft ashes, and he sank into them nearly up to his knees. There was a semi-brittle crust to the ash pile, as though it had lain undisturbed for scores of years. Except for where his feet sank into them, the ashes remained undisturbed.

  It was a large burning area, Solo saw—apparently it had been used originally as the main incinerator for the building. Now, with the ashes settled to a depth of only a few feet, the unused incinerator formed a small, shadowed room with an opening about three feet square through which brilliant white light lanced sharply. Solo paused, then knelt slowly, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the light before he risked a look outside.

  When he did, he stared out into a hangar-sized area, blindingly white with lights. He couldn’t even guess how far below ground this massive room was, but he knew it must be deep inside the mountain. Electronic controls, computers, switches and testing equipment were banked along the white walls. He moved his gaze slowly until he had passed over the radiation-suited figures to the heart of the immense plant—the place where the separately gathered components had now been assembled into a small but obviously functional atomic device.

  He stared at the assembled device, his eyes wide.

  As he watched, an abrupt whistle blew through the huge arena scooped from the earth. The white-suited, helmeted engineers and scientists at work in the chamber where the atomic device had been assembled stopped working and lined up to exit the glass enclosed room within the larger plant.

  Solo held his breath as the first man stepped through the double set of exit doors. Outside the chamber, they pulled off their helmets.

  The impact was like a sharp karate blow in the face to Solo. One’s mind could reel under the incredulous truth being revealed to him.

  Abruptly, he remembered why the name of Broadmoor Rest had seemed so familiar to him from U.N.C.L.E. briefings. Again and again over the past two years, reports had come in from parts of the United States, Russia, France, Germany, records of scientists, engineers, physicists—all in sensitive missile work, each suffering mental breakdown, going to one sanitarium or another, but all, he now realized, eventually ending up here at Broadmoor Rest. Though the briefings had mentioned this place often enough to impress its title on his mind, there had been no concentrated reading of the names and professions of the men arriving here in an almost constant stream in the past twenty-four months.

  He shook his head. Though often repeated, the idea of mentally ill men and their arrival at Broadmoor had not been noted in any context that would give it meaning—not until now. Those men had certainly been subjected to unnatural pressures, tensions and strains. Many of them crumpled under it, and it didn’t add up to anything except the increased tempo of life in the atomic age. Men’s minds and nerves snapped; they needed hospitalization and treatment—Broadmoor Rest had been internationally respected as one of the best. These men had earned the best possible care; who would suspect they came here not because they were ill at all, but because they had sold out their governments, their families, their careers for the quick fortunes dangled before them by Thrush?

  Because here they were.

  Every face revealed to Solo by the removal of a helmet was familiar to him from the photos in the U.N.C.L.E. briefings. Every reputation was known to him, along with the facts of mental or nervous breakdown. Wolgang von Shisnagg, from the western zone of Germany, Kurt Helmeric, Pierre Curie de David—the whole long list of the brilliant engineers, scientists.

  He slumped there for a long time, hidden in the darkness of the abandoned incinerator shaft, watching the Who’s Who of missile scientists pass by him. It took some moments for him to recover, he who h
ad few illusions left concerning every man and his price.

  VI

  THE CHANGING of the shift continued. For a long time Solo remained where he was, watching the faces of those men who had sold out to Thrush.

  The pattern was clear enough now—as well as the time. Early morning—doomsday!

  He stirred, seeing how easily the mission would be accomplished. A plane would land on that strip out there, the bomb brought carefully up by lift—and flown to its target from well within the protective radar and early warning ring!

  He slowly made his way back up the narrow shaft. Going up to the next level was a matter of muscle and patience: lift a foot, brace it and lift the other one without slipping or losing balance.

  He stopped for a moment, exhausted, bracing himself as comfortably as he could in the dark chimney shaft. He placed the earplug against his ear, turning the barrel of the sound-detector upward in the passage, toward first one, then another branch of the chimney’s interior complex.

  He stayed some moments, listening. The aluminum cones picked up the sounds of persistent voices from above him, far to his left. The sounds were faint, but unlike any other throughout the entire complex at this early hour.

  He inched toward that sound, using his elbows, his knees, his feet to worm himself forward. The sounds in the earplug increased until he was able to distinguish words, and different male voices speaking.

  He hesitated, thinking he could stay where he was in safety and listen. But suddenly this was not good enough. He wanted to see those men engaged in an obviously high-level command meeting. Above him in the branch passage he had followed was a patch of light—another unsealed fireplace.

  He squirmed forward, his body aching with the pressures of the narrow confines, the inability to turn his head or tilt it more than a few inches.

  The voices were loud now, and he removed the earplug, carefully placing the sound-detector behind him for fear the sound of metal against brick might betray his presence only feet away from these men in what must be, except for the chimney shaft, a soundproofed room.