by Peter Leslie
‘Illya,’ she said nervously. ‘I have to explain – I’m so sorry. That dreadful evening in Haut-de-Cagnes…I’m so ashamed…I was drugged, you see. And then they…they hypnotized me to…to behave like that. Oh, it was awful…’
The Russian looked down at the girl’s white, strained face. ‘That’s all right, Sherry,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Forget it, please. I should have realized they were trying either to frighten us off you, or to make us think you were the weak link in the T.C.A. chain…’
‘Now roll up, ladies and gentlemen!’ a huge woman with hoop earrings was bawling in front of the booth. ‘Five tickets for one franc. Any ticket with a five or a nine at the end of a number wins a prize. Roll up, roll up and try your luck!’
‘Did they harm you – back there in the house?’ Illya asked.
‘No. They just kept me tied to that table and gave me an injection every few hours. They were going to…they wanted to…’ she broke off and began to cry.
‘Every ticket ending in a five or a nine wins a prize – There! See: the little girl has won the giant teddy bear!’
A child with pigtails handed over a winning ticket and staggered away hugging the huge toy, her eyes wide in disbelief, as Kuryakin put his arm around Sherry’s shoulders. They moved on through the fair, anxiously scanning the faces in the light of the flares.
‘Break the bottles with the metal boules, ladies and gentlemen! Three broken bottles doubles your money. Six shots a franc…’
‘Coconuts, fine coconuts. Knock off the ones you fancy…’
‘Try your aim with the six-shot repeaters! Five bulls wins a prize – come on, now: only one franc fifty for half a dozen shots…’
They stopped by the shooting gallery as Solo forced his way through a knot of German tourists arguing over a quoit-throwing prize and came towards them. ‘It’s no good,’ he shouted over the din. ‘There’s not a chance in hell of locating her among this crowd. We’ll have to—’
Suddenly, Sherry Rogers screamed, pointing frantically over his shoulder.
Among the cardboard targets and ping-pong balls balancing on jets of water, Helga had appeared behind the counter at the far end of the booth. The long-nosed automatic in her hand was pointing straight at Solo.
Illya exploded into action. Hurling Solo aside as the gun – spat flame, he snatched a target rifle from a blue-chinned Provençal youth who had just loaded it and snapped three quick shots at the girl from THRUSH. Helga disappeared through the curtain at the back of the gallery.
‘Missed!’ Kuryakin called in exasperation. ‘These fairground guns all have bent barrels! Come on – she went this way…’
Through the crowd now scattering with astonishment and fear, they pushed their way towards the back of the booth. Helga’s shot had passed over Solo’s shoulder and severed the cord tethering a mountain of gas-filled balloons, and these, suddenly released, were now bobbing and swaying in bright blobs of colour over the heads of the throng.
‘Come on,’ Illya yelled. ‘This way. Over here!’
They fought their way through the jam of bodies, dodged round a blaring hurdy-gurdy and ran over a coconut-shy. Solo caught one of the hurled wooden balls one-handed as he leaped across and lobbed it politely back to the astonished thrower.
Helga was only a few yards away. As they sprinted towards her, she pulled to the ground a pyramid of canned food outside a food stall and sent them skating on the rolling tins.
As Solo picked himself up, a heavy blow on the shoulder knocked him to the ground again. The girl was behind a pile of metal boules, hurling the steel spheres viciously in their direction.
‘Keep down, Sherry, he called. ‘You could get hurt. Illya! Pick ’em up and throw them back!’
They gathered up the heavy balls and began to shy them back, flushing Helga out from behind the pile and forcing her to retreat among the other booths. Stubbornly, she fought a rearguard action back through the fair towards the ramparts, fending them off with coconuts, cheap crockery skittles, woolly animals – anything she could lay her hands on that could be thrown. And as they went, the crowd parted before them in amazement and then closed in again behind as though nothing had happened.
But finally the girl was clear of the last stall and running strongly towards the gate. ‘After her,’ Solo shouted. ‘She’s heading for the ramparts again. How many shots has she left in that gun, Illya?’
‘She’s used six now,’ the Russian panted. ‘Another couple and – if the gun’s the model I think it is – she’ll have to put in a fresh clip.’
They piled through the archway and laboured up the cobbled slope in pursuit, the watchers on the battlements gazing at them in astonishment as they ran past.
Once they left the narrow main street and swerved on to the wider roadway circling the top of the ramparts, it became suddenly quiet and dark. The torchlight and the noises of the fair were behind them. There was an acrid smell of used gunpowder lingering among the remains of the firework set-pieces fixed to the walls.
Helga’s white shirt was a blur in the darkness charting the progress of her pounding feet. Once she stopped, turned, and fired quickly twice in succession – but the bullets whined harmlessly over their heads.
Solo glanced at Illya, who nodded and increased his pace. ‘She can hardly reload while she’s running,’ he gasped. ‘Let’s close up and see if we can corner her.’
They dashed on. And then, rounding a curve in the road, came suddenly to a halt. The walls of the town bulged abruptly here into two turret-like belvederes. As they stood in the nearer of these, Helga Grossbreitner faced them across the gap from behind the parapet of the further one.
‘All right, Solo,’ she called, her body a lighter patch against the dark. ‘This is as far as you go. I’m out of range of your sleep dart toy – and this is another gun in my hand, in case you’re making foolish plans based on my having to reload. You and your friends stay right there.’
‘Put it down, Helga,’ Solo called back quietly. ‘There’s three of us and you don’t have a chance. The whole place will be swarming with Sûreté and Deuxième Bureau men at any moment.’
‘Don’t give me that, lover boy. Don’t kid yourself you’re good enough to take on THRUSH and win!…I’m going over this wall. There will be a car waiting for me on the La Colle road. And tomorrow I shall be making my report to the Council. After that, you’d better watch out. Your life won’t be worth a nickel…’
‘Why don’t you shoot now?’
The girl hesitated, a stray beam of light from somewhere glinting on the barrel of the gun in her hand. ‘I…have my reasons,’ she said. ‘Besides I’m not an executioner: we have special people for that…Now I’m going over. And I warn you: any heads looking over the battlements after me will be silhouetted. I shan’t hesitate to fire then.’
‘Helga…
‘I mean it, lover boy. Just watch out after tomorrow, that’s all.’
Dimly, they saw her climb on to the parapet. And then suddenly, in what seemed a flash of blinding brilliance, all the lights of the town came on at once. Windows, doorways, balconies and streets sprang into instant relief against the night as some municipal official somewhere threw a master switch.
Taken utterly by surprise, Helga gasped, looked upwards into the pitiless glare of a street light immediately over the belvedere, and lost her footing on the crumbling stone.
For an eternal moment, they saw her poised over the abyss. Then, with a strangled cry, she disappeared backwards over the wall.
A long time later, it seemed, there were two dreadful thuds followed by the sound of something heavy crashing among branches.
And after that there was silence.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE FINGER IN THE SKY
‘BUT, Illya, I don’t understand how they did it. How exactly did the laser thing work?’
Kuryakin smiled fondly at Sherry Rogers. The network of fine creases wrinkling her nose when she grinned fascinated him. �
�It is extremely interesting, Sherry,’ he said earnestly. ‘You know what laser really stands for?’
‘Indeed, I do not.’
‘It stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation…l-a-s-e-r.’
‘Great. So how did they shoot down planes with it?’
‘Well, you know ordinary light, ordinary white light, is made of energy of many different wavelengths? And all these different-sized waves bounce about in all directions?’
‘As a matter of fact I did know that.’
‘Good. Then you’ll realize at once why a laser is so powerful, when I tell you it emits only coherent light.’
‘I’m sorry. I…’
Kuryakin laughed aloud. ‘Coherent light is light in which all the wavelengths are exactly the same – and not only that: the individual light rays, all of the same wavelength or colour, all march as it were in step, trough to trough and crest to crest. Somebody once compared this kind of light and ordinary light as being like a platoon of well-drilled soldiers in comparison with a disorderly mob.’
‘Yes, yes, Illya. But—’
‘When light waves march in step like this, such frequency-coherent light can perform astonishing feats. This is because the way a laser makes the light causes the rays to come out parallel, instead of radiating from a point, as they do with conventional light sources. And since the energy of the rays is not dissipated by the beam spreading out, there’s a very intense concentration of energy within a very small area. Thus lasers can cut holes in metal, weld things together—’
‘Illya…How can a beam of light cut holes in metal?’
‘Because light’s a form of energy – and as I told you, lasers concentrate it within a tiny space, because of the way they’re made.’
‘All right,’ Sherry Rogers said resignedly, lighting another cigarette and stirring her coffee with an indulgent smile. ‘How are they made then?’
They were sitting at a table beneath a striped umbrella on the airport terrace, waiting for the Air France Boeing which was to take Solo back to New York to report to Waverly. Since Sherry had been given 48 hours leave – and since Kuryakin was still owed the leave which had been interrupted when the assignment began – he had decided to stay in Nice with her for the remainder of his time off.
‘Originally,’ the Russian continued remorselessly, ‘lasers were made by putting a rod-shaped crystal of synthetic ruby inside a xenon flashtube – the kind of thing they use for an electronic camera flash. When the ruby is irradiated by the flash, the light raises the energy of one of the components of the synthetic stone…kind of supercharges it…until, by a molecular process you would hardly understand, it bursts out of one end of the tube in the form of the laser beam I have described.’
‘And it was one of these which brought down the planes?’
‘No. It was a ruby laser which Helga used to set fire to the room – and which I used to burn the hole in the steel shutter. But there were two other kinds of laser in the apparatus also. Remember the thing had three barrels?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘The one they used to bring down the planes was a so-called “cold” laser – a gas laser using a mixture of helium and neon at very low pressure. The irradiation in this case comes from an ordinary radio transmitter: you probably saw the one they had on the bench. It works rather like fluorescent light, in a long thin tube of Pyrex…but this was a rather special one: there was a third gas mixed in the tube, which gave the beam very – shall we say? – special qualities.’
‘And those were?’ Sherry asked idly, waving to Solo and Matheson, who had appeared at the far end of the terrace and were making their way through the tables towards them.
‘The beam – in the infra-red range, like the others, and therefore invisible to the eye – passes through many normal substances without burning them. But it is warm enough to affect Toridium, a soft, heavy metal tremendously subject to heat changes. And there is a Toridium core in the memory unit of the altitude stage of the Murchison-Spears box.’
‘And so when the beam fell on the box…?’
‘The Toridium expanded, altering the altitude reading of the equipment and causing the controls of the plane to change in such a way as to make it crash. Once the beam is switched off, though, the metal returns to normal and shows no sign that it has been tampered with.’
‘And the adjustment is so fine that the beam would affect gear in front of the aircraft but not at the back?’
‘Up to a range of seven or eight miles – yes.’
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo,’ Matheson called, dropping into a vacant chair at the table. ‘Have you solved the secret of the secret weapon yet, young man? There was hardly anything of the bally thing left after that fire. My chaps don’t know where to start.’
‘It was very ingenious, really,’ Illya said seriously. ‘A triple barrelled affair. The operator could select an optically pumped ruby laser, a gas laser using a mixture of helium, neon and phrenium, or an injection laser – the usual forward-biased semiconductor diode of gallium arsenide.’
‘In a cryostat, I suppose?’
‘Yes – a double bottle of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen. I imagine THRUSH used it for long range communications.’
‘Enough of this love talk,’ Sherry Rogers interrupted sweetly, her nose wrinkling at Illya. ‘Mr Solo has a plane to catch, and we have a holiday to take…’
‘It’s all very well for you people, lazing in the sun,’ Napoleon Solo said crossly as they said goodbye in the departure lounge. ‘I’ve got to go back and make out my report. I should have realized it was Helga, the moment that Mustang came at me on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue: she was the only one who could have known I’d be leaving the building at that time…I’m not sure I approve of all this intercontinental dependency; it’s most unsettling, being whisked from country to country like this. Especially when you’ve lost the girl…’
He was still looking disgruntled as he settled himse1f comfortably into the seat of the luxurious Air France 707 and fastened his safety belt.
‘If you please, monsieur,’ a husky voice breathed in his ear. ‘You take something for the take-off, no?’
The French stewardess holding out the tray of chewing gum and boiled sweets was young and slim. Beneath the dark blue uniform cap, raven hair framed a face that was all lustrous eyes and full, wide lips.
‘You permit, monsieur, that I sit beside you during takeoff?’ she enquired, sinking into the empty place beside him and picking up the two halves of the belt.
‘All the way across, baby,’ Napoleon Solo said feelingly. ‘All the way…Maybe there’s something to be said for N.A.T.O. after all…And vive l’Air France, too!’
The silver plane hurtled along the runway, soared into the air over the speedboats creaming the Baie des Anges, banked steeply, and climbed rapidly until it was lost to view in the intense cobalt of the sky.