Man From U.N.C.L.E. 01 - The Thousand Coffins Affair

by Michael Avallone

  “Exactly. The Chinese Orange Mystery. Pointing to one stockpile that has to be destroyed at all costs.” There was a new silence in the room.

  “Orange,” Kuryakin said, almost ruefully. “What a gamble.”

  “Orangeberg Cemetery,” Waverly said with grim finality.

  Oberteisendorf.

  Darkness in the village. A few scattered lights. The livestock lowing in the sheds. A rural solitude dominated the hamlet at five o’clock in the morning. The sky was moody black, pierced only by an occasional star.

  There was a light gleaming in Herr Burgomeister’s house—a lone bulb shining steadily through the drab, linen curtains. Herr Muller was busy with a visitor: the awesome, terrifying man he knew only as Herr.

  “Bitte, what you want of me now?”

  “A friend of mine has passed away,” Golgotha said. “He must be buried immediately.”

  Herr Muller’s face in the harsh light of the bulb, reflected fear.

  “Ach. Another?”

  “Yes. The poor fellow died of a tumor. Brain tumor. There was no chance. It is better this way.”

  “Ja, ja.” Herr Muller sipped his glass of Rhine wine. He did not like these conferences with this strange, cloaked man. The money was fine, one hundred thousand of the new marks, but Gott in Himmel!—was it worth it to have to talk with this man from hell each time?

  “The coffin will be at your friend’s mortuary in the morning. You will see to it that all the arrangements are satisfactory. You must arrive at Orangeberg Cemetery no later than twelve o’clock noon. It has been agreed on that way.”

  “Ja, I do. Same as ever.”

  Golgotha chuckled dryly.

  “You are sweating, Herr Muller. Are you warm?”

  “Ein bischen,” muttered the Burgomeister. “A little. I feel—tired. Makes me sweat.”

  “Certainly.”

  “You must not misunderstand, mein Herr,” the scrawny mayor cried. “My devotion is—strong.”

  “It had best remain so.”

  The unspoken threat lingered in the. closeness of the room.

  “I do the job.”

  “You must. We have other coffins. Many, many coffins. Sometimes we actually do use them as they were intended to be used. Remember that, Herr Muller.”

  The Burgomeister paled. “Ja, I remember.”

  Golgotha stood up, a towering, dark shadow which cast a ghostly silhouette across the floor. He seemed all of seven feet high and as palpable as a nightmare.

  “Oberteisendorf will become famous, Herr Muller. People will point to it one day and say ‘There. There is the place and there is where it happened.’ Greatness will come to Oberteisendorf, Herr Muller. And fame. And exalted memory. Remember that.”

  “I will remember,” Herr Muller whispered, wishing his frightening visitor would go as silently as he always came. The man completely destroyed whatever soul he had left.

  “Good. Twelve o’clock then. One coffin. Orangeberg. Gute Nacht, Herr Muller.”

  “Gute Nacht, mein Herr.”

  With his cloak wrapped about him like a shroud Golgotha left. Herr Muller crossed himself again, as he always did, and then reached once more for the bottle of Rhine wine.

  The ghastly business would begin all over again on the morrow and there was not a thing he could do to stop it.

  Verdammt! What in God’s name were they burying in that lovely cemetery just beyond the rimrock?

  Herr Muller did not know. He was only certain of one thing. The coffins he had delivered for the Herr had never contained dead bodies. He did not care what the Death Certificate claimed nor how many headstones they put up with all the lying inscriptions.

  Orangeberg was not a place where dead men slept.

  A NICE LITTLE PLACE TO BOMB

  THE PLAN WAS daring. It had to be. Events had worked to that point where no other plan of action was feasible. Waverly had consulted with whomever he had to consult and the answer had come down from on high: Find out about Orangeberg. When you are certain, blast it off the face of the earth. We’ll take the consequences, whatever they may be.

  So it was that on a foggy night later that week, a United States Air Force C-47 roared through the heavens over Europe, bound for Oberteisendorf.

  Napoleon Solo sat in the passenger compartment. He was no longer sartorially elegant or well-groomed. Indeed, he was completely outfitted for a drop behind enemy lines. His flying suit was complete: helmet, goggles, fur-lined parka. His most vital possession, however, was X-757, the specially devised U.N.C.L.E. fire-explosive which produced so much heat that it could fuse an area to a depth of ten feet. Judiciously placed at Orangeberg, X-757 would reduce the cemetery to a pit of molten lava in which rock, earth, wood coffins and those hellish little capsules and their contents would lose their identities as separate substances.

  Solo’s entire wardrobe was built for combat operation; map, pistol and complete detonation kit. This included five pounds of nitro jelly spread harmlessly about his person. It was only when the mass was put together like butter for a cake and frosted with blasting caps that it would take on a different, far more deadly character.

  Seated across the aisle from him, beside a very worried looking Jerry Terry, was Illya Kuryakin, attired in exactly the same costume. The Russian’s face wore a blissful smile. Inactivity dulled him. This investigation of a cemetery in Orangeberg was more to his liking. He patted the entrenching tools fastened to his pack. Jerry Terry was busy making adjustments on a two-way radio before her. Each man had a walkie-talkie hand set which could make instant contact if they remained within a five mile radius of the plane.

  “Ten minutes,” the intercom from the forward cabin crackled.

  Jerry flung a worried look at Napoleon Solo. He smiled at her, trying to make her feel better. He knew he was wasting his time. She was too intelligent not to know how ridiculously short the odds were. It all boiled down to suicide, even on U.N.C.L.E.’s humanitarian terms.

  Waverly had remained in London long enough to prepare the details of the plan. “Remember,” he had cautioned in his usual fatherly way, “You paradrop in as close as possible to your target, dig up one coffin. If it contains anything other than a corpse, radio the plane to make a fast pick-up and get out of there. You know what you have to do. Failing that, the bomber will carry a pay load. That could help.”

  Yes, it would be easy, Solo reflected. Like dropping in to tea with the Grand Duchess.

  “Radio’s working fine,” Jerry Terry said flatly. The roar of the bomber engines was like far-off thunder.

  “Good,” Kuryakin said. “Communications mean a lot this trip.”

  “Kuryakin,” she whispered suddenly. “Make yourself scarce, will you?”

  He grinned, not offended. “I’ll see if there’s any coffee left in the commissary.” He shouldered down the aisle, going forward, his pack and parachute making him seem pounds heavier.

  Jerry Terry slid into the seat alongside Solo. He turned from contemplation of the dark sky beyond the wings.

  “Stinker,” she hissed.

  “Who, me?” he said banteringly.

  “Keep it up. Smile. Big hero. You could get killed on this stunt, you know that? Two to one old Skull Face is sitting down there just waiting for you to come back. You’re so irresistible in your own unforgettable way.”

  “Am I?” he said, keeping a smile from creeping across his face.

  “Oh, Napoleon.” She crumpled against him, all the anger gone out of her. “Why do you have to be so irresistible? I was doing fine until you showed up, you know that? Men don’t mean that much to me.”

  “And they do now?” he asked softly, brushing her forehead with his lips.

  “Yes, no. Oh, you know what I mean.”

  “Jerry, listen to me.”

  “Tell me to be brave and I’ll spit right in your eye.”

  “No,” he agreed. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  She pushed away from him, searching his eyes. �
��No, you wouldn’t. What were you going to say, Napoleon?” He stared at her soberly.

  “I owe this one to Stewart Fromes and a lot of other people. You understand?”

  “Yes—I think I do.”

  “Plus which I have no intention of dying. Believe it. I like life, cigarettes and coffee. And girls.”

  She recognized what he was trying to say despite the mockery of his curved smile.

  “You’re still a stinker, Solo.”

  “Of course I am.”

  The intercom came alive again. “Five minutes.”

  They kissed. A quick warm kiss. Jerry Terry sighed and brushed a bright strand of hair from her face.

  And then Kuryakin had come back, almost apologetically, checking his equipment and gear one final time. “I am sorry,” he said, “but it is just about that time.

  “One minute to zero,” the intercom said.

  They stood in line beside the bail-out door, their drop lines secured to the long bar parallel to the cabin. The voice on the intercom began a countdown. Solo did not look back at the girl. He stared into the darkness yawning beyond the fringe of the air door.

  Kuryakin was right behind him, the dour face happy. He was idly humming something that sounded vaguely Russian. A gloomy, low refrain.

  The slipstream made Solo’s flying suit billow. He concentrated on the voice of the intercom:

  “…nine, eight, seven, six…”

  Six seconds to eternity. And the solution of Stewart Fromes’ problem.

  And then five. Had he really been right or was it all a game?

  And then four. Three. Three to success or death.

  “…two…one!”

  He stepped through the air door and was caught by the wind, his line releasing him. Darkness sprang up to meet him. The engine’s roar moved on. And he was falling, falling…

  The dark world over Orangeberg waited to meet his hurtling body.

  Solo came down with a lurch on a rising hillock of ground. Luckily, he had missed the trees. His body rolled, the shrouds of his chute picking up the worst of a brisk wind which billowed the silken folds back to umbrella shape. He scrambled erect, fighting the breeze, pulling the shroud lines to him, shortening the bursting strength of the wind. Soon he had collapsed the chute and unbuckled the harness, standing on the thing before it could sail away into the darkness of the night.

  He searched the sky for Kuryakin, happy to see the white mushroom of his chute making contact with the ground less than three hundred yards away. Elatedly, he balled up his pack and hurried toward his fellow agent. You could never be sure about a drop. The unexpected was always likely to happen when you least expected it.

  Kuryakin had mastered his own difficulties by the time he reached him. They shook hands warmly, glad to be alive, and set about burying their silken passports to Germany.

  From on high came the muffled boom of the bomber as it flashed on for a fifteen minute run toward the Russian border. On its return flight, another fifteen minutes, it would attempt to make contact with them. That gave Solo and Kuryakin exactly thirty minutes to find Orangeberg, dig up one grave, and reach a decision. One half hour to discover if they were right or wrong about the cemetery sleeping quietly in the lowlands beyond Oberteisendorf.

  Kuryakin tamped the earth down on the remainder of his parachute. He grunted in satisfaction and replaced the entrenching tool on the hook fastened to his pack. The wind billowed his flying suit as he turned to Solo.

  “It’s your expedition, Napoleon.”

  “All expenses paid. I make the cemetery out due north of us according to the compass. Maybe a thousand yards. Not too bad a drop, considering.”

  “Recognize anything yet?”

  “Hard to tell. Landmarks at night are always a fooler. But there’s a reasonable familiarity about the neighborhood. Shall we go?”

  “Let’s,” grinned Kuryakin, his teeth flashing in the darkness. “I haven’t dug a grave in years.”

  They worked toward the direction Solo’s wrist compass indicated, finding the going amazingly even. The land was low, flat and undisturbed by foliage of any kind. Had it been a moonlit night, it would have been a cakewalk. Yet the extreme darkness was a blessing in disguise. They were, after all, in enemy territory, Golgotha’s back yard, and while the possibility of land mines, booby traps and electronic alarm systems was not to be discounted there was no time to worry about incalculables.

  They pushed on, finding the ground easy to traverse, watching the shadowy distance unfold before them, identifying each indistinguishable clump of earth and darkness as a potential enemy until they reached it. Solo had his automatic pistol at the ready. A nighthawk cawed once and they both waited for the tell-tale sound of men moving that might follow. None came. They moved on.

  The earth narrowed and the high walls of a gorge rose about them, only to level off into more flatland. Solo spotted a familiar rise in the terrain and his hopes rose with it. Something about the topography was eminently right, now. Yes, yes—there it was. The earth stopped and suddenly a long, knee-high bunker of concrete was before them. Here and there, a gleaming tombstone winked white in the darkness, its stone angles catching random stabs of reflected light.

  “Napoleon—” Kuryakin whispered.

  “Yes. Orangeberg. Let’s find a dead one.”‘

  “Right. No sense in pushing our luck. We’ll take the first one we come across. I want to stay as close to the wall as possible.”

  “Check.”

  They slipped over the wall, careful to keep their many items of equipment from making undue noises. Their boots made contact with soft dry ground. The even, terraced nature of the earth was not lost on them. A row of headstones, barely twenty-five yards away, poked eerily into view.

  The utter desolation of Orangeberg was now readily apparent. An almost palpable silence hung over the cemetery. An aura of everlasting stillness. Solo had seen Orangeberg from the air and understood the vast size of the place. Yet down here, the sensation was one of telescoping in size, as if in microcosm—it was only another burying place like a million other nameless ones all over the world. It was an odd sensation. The miles had shriveled down to the twenty-five yards that was as far as his eyes could make out in the darkness. Were it not for the silvery shafts of the headstones just before them, they might have stood in any gloomy vacant lot.

  There seemed to be no caretaker’s house or night watchman to contend with. Yet it was impossible to tell. They would have to operate as though discovery were imminent and they might have to shoot their way out any second.

  Solo reached the headstone that was closest, a square slab of marble, barely knee-high. It was placed directly between two oblong arches of granite.

  “Here,” he whispered, unfastening his shovel from the pack on his back. “This one will do. The smaller the better.”

  Kuryakin nodded and moved abreast of him.

  Solo bent down, cupping his pencil Hash and beaming it directly on the slab. The engraved Old English lettering on the stone was bold and final in its epitaph:

  WILHELM VANMEYER

  1919—1959

  Requiescat en Pace

  Solo and Kuryakin exchanged dour glances.

  “Latin and German don’t exactly go together,” Kuryakin muttered.

  “No,” Solo agreed. “But these are a collection of books we can’t afford to judge by their covers. Dig.”

  Grimly, they set to, easing their spades into the ground. It was tougher going than they might have expected. Here, on the outer perimeter of the cemetery, the earth was considerably harder. Ruefully, Solo now remembered a peculiarity of burying grounds: the borders of most of them tended to be the less ideal ground for interment. Which was why most vaults and crypts turned up at the entranceways and gateways of cemeteries. Not because the richest corpses wanted to be showed up front. Still, it should be only a matter of moments—if there were no interruptions.

  They dug quickly, making a dark mound of uncovered e
arth to one side of the slab. It didn’t take too long. Solo’s spade thucked hollowly on a box of some kind. The sound spurred them on. Soon they had cleared a sufficient amount of space about the top of a simple pine coffin.

  The box had not been six feet down. Three was much nearer the mark.

  “If there’s a skeleton in there, I promise to defect to the Russians,” said Kuryakin.

  “Fair enough. And I’ll do the Watusi in Macy’s window on Christmas Day. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  The lid came off, pried loose by their straining fingertips, after Solo had raced a claw hammer about the edges to speed things along. There was a creak of wood and suddenly the lid was free, pulling back in Kuryakin’s startled hands. Overhead, the wind sighed across the graveyard, as Solo thumbed his pencil flash on once again and played its beam over the contents of the coffin.

  A twinkling galaxy of clustered stars lay revealed in the dime-sized circle of light.

  Round silver balls, identical with the one placed between the toes of Stewart Fromes’ corpse, lay boxed by the thousands in the coffin before their eyes. The coffin. was filled almost to lid level with them. They were like some mammoth collection of ball-bearings saved by a fanatic collector of the things. But Solo knew they were nothing so harmless as all that.

  “Bingo,” said Solo, “and end of the search.”

  “Napoleon,” Kuryakin said in an odd, tight voice. “Don’t move too fast. We’re being infiltrated upon and though I hate to say so—we’re surrounded.”

  Solo cursed and turned the pocket flash off, rolling to the ground. Yet even as he did so, the dark cemetery lit up with the brightness of full daylight as powerful searchlights trained their traveling beams on the headstones that marked the bogus resting place of Wilhelm Vanmeyer.

  “You will stand as you are and do nothing,” the funereal voice of the man called Golgotha yelled hollowly across the open ground, “or you will most certainly die before we have a chance to talk again.”

  GOLGOTHA AGAIN

  THE SEARCHLIGHTS were blinding. Caught in the merciless exposure, Solo and Kuryakin were like two shafts sticking in a mammoth circular dartboard. Beyond the dazzling glow of the beams, once their eyes had become adjusted to the light, they could barely make out the tall shadows of the men behind the glare.