by Peter Leslie
"What they're going to do—they plan to put your friend in the cab of an old truck. He'll be lightly drugged so that he doesn't know what's happening, but he won't be bound or anything. And then they'll push the truck out onto the viaduct and…"
"Down will come vehicle, Illya and all?"
"That's it. The bridge is so shaky that a bicycle might start it crumbling away. A heavy truck will just make it fall down. It won't bear that much weight."
"Okay," Solo said crisply. "Now just how are they going to do this? You say they are going to push the truck out onto the viaduct?"
"Not literally. The barbed wire barriers can easily be displaced. And the track approaching the bridge is on a downhill slope which continues at a slight incline across the viaduct itself. They are going to tie a rope to the back of the truck, give it a push down the slope, and then winch it out gradually as it rolls across the bridge. When it falls, they'll cut the rope and then hurry down to the bottom of the valley to remove the other end from the wreckage. The truck is the one that was used this morning to hijack your friend from the military. This way, the authorities will think he killed himself making his getaway..."
"It's up to us to stop them, then, isn't it? The important things to know are, when is this murder due to take place, how far am I from the viaduct, and exactly how do I get there?"
"Where are you now?"
"I'm on the Autobahn about fifteen kilometers southwest of Chemnitz—or Karl Marx-stadt, as they call it now. I crossed the border about an hour ago. It's funny how quickly those crazy little vineyards in Franconia, with the stone walls that zigzag from one terrace to another, get swallowed up in all this Gothic forest as soon as one's over that frontier!"
"I'm sure it is. You should be able to get to the valley—you do want to go straight there, I suppose?—in a little less than an hour. That'll be running it a bit fine, but they do have preparations to make, after all. As far as directions go, it's about twenty minutes' drive from Tharandt, to the south and west of Dresden. But detailed directions would be difficult. Would it help if I gave you a six-figure map coordinate?"
"That would be perfect," Solo said. "But before you do, there's one thing that's puzzling me. You keep on saying 'they'—yet I thought Bartoluzzi was a lone wolf. Where does the hired help come from?"
"It's anything but that! It's the girl I told you about from Prague. My successor. But she seems to be mistress in more senses than one; she's the one that's giving the orders, making the decisions, working everything out. And she keeps on talking about 'my principals' and asking questions as though she were worried about the credit rating of Bart's network. You'd almost think she was trying to buy her way into it!"
"Maybe she is. Does she say who these principals are?"
"Not directly. But she has several times used the name Thrush—Thrush would not permit this, Thrush would expect that," the girl said in a puzzled tone. "Isn't that a funny thing to say!"
Chapter 17
Drama At The Bridge
BY THE TIME Solo reached the lower end of the valley a wind had risen and rain was sweeping down toward him between the trees.
Ten minutes later, he stopped the Citroën at the roadside and took out his field glasses. The viaduct was in full view, spanning a steep, wooded cleft between two belts of forest
—seven tall, narrow arches with a revetment at each end and six slender pillars in between. Even from this distance (it was still six or seven miles away) the agent could see clearly that the small blocks of yellow sandstone composing it had been fatally damaged by erosion.
There were two small observation platforms built out over the third and fifth arches—probably to act as refuges for linesmen when trains passed—but otherwise the single-track road was guarded only by a solitary iron rail above the shallow parapet.
It was no wonder, Solo thought, eyeing the flimsy structure through the binoculars, that they had been forced to bar the approaches!
He drove on—and found to his disgust that he must have made an error in reading the large-scale map of the area. For instead of climbing up to the rim of the valley as he had expected, the road plunged suddenly down and began following its floor. There was a network of lanes and byroads crisscrossing the forest just here, and he had obviously confused two of them in his haste. And so now—although he would arrive at the precise coordinate on the map that the girl had specified—he would be below the viaduct instead of above it.
Agitatedly he traced his path back on the map until he had found the point where he had left the correct route. To regain it, he would have to go back four or five miles… but could be afford the time?
Again he focused the glasses on the bridge. At the higher end he could see signs of activity—the cab of an old-fashioned truck above a clump of bushes, the roof of a car, figures moving.
No, the macabre stage for murder was already set. There was not a moment to lose; he would have to go on…
The valley road he was following seemed to be fairly well screened by trees. There was nobody actually on the viaduct or its approaches yet. It was just possible that he could run the car up to the arches without being spotted. In any case he would have to try. As quietly as he could, he urged the DS onward.
Overhanging trees and the steepness of the banks prevented him from seeing the ground beyond the lip of the valley—and presumably prevented those up there from seeing him—until he was almost below the bridge. But the slope on which the great piles were built was much gentler, and the trees had all been cut down. For a short distance on each side of the viaduct the road and all traffic on it would be visible to anyone above, if they happened to be watching.
Solo hoped they weren't watching as he coasted the Citroën to a halt under the third archway. It was over the fourth—through which ran the stream that had carved out the valley—that the section of old permanent way was most dangerous, according to Annike. Solo got carefully out of the car and gazed upward.
The viaduct seemed to be immensely high—a multiple façade soaring toward the sky on slender feet that tapered gently toward the top. Solo estimated its height at around a hundred and fifty-feet… and now that he was actually beneath it, he could see how precariously the pillars supported the old track far above. The stonework was cracked and fissured in dozens of places, and there were great gaps at the apex of the central arch where chunks of masonry had fallen away from the part immediately below the road.
He peered around the edge of the pillar and looked up the bank. He could just see the top of the truck's cab, but the steepness of the slope hid the rest of the vehicle and the people working on it. At any minute now, though, the cab might start moving over the bridge... and that would mean Illya Kuryakin would be moving too, moving to a certain death when the roadway collapsed.
Solo scanned the exposed slope bordering the revetment of the viaduct. The arch was wide enough at the bottom to conceal the DS parked behind it. But if he waded in to the rescue up that bank, he would rise into view as soon as he had scrambled up the first few yards, and for Bartoluzzi and his helper, he would be as easy a target as a duck in a shooting gallery.
Somewhere up there, Annike would be waiting to help him. He had told her to hide along the approach road and contact him when he appeared. But time was running out; he had no time to find her now. He had to get up there and stop that truck from reaching the unsafe part of the bridge.
And from where he was, deep in the valley, there was only one way to do it—he would have to scale the weathered face of the pillar itself!
It was an idea born of desperation. But there was a slim chance it might work. First, he could begin the climb by the car, on the inner side of the pillar, where he would be hidden from the truck. And when he reached the beginning of the curvature of the arch and had to move around to the outside, he could at least profit from the fact that the pile tapered and would thus be leaning very slightly away from him. Instead of forcing himself up a perpendicular face, he would only have
to cope with a slope one or two degrees off the vertical!
On the other hand, of course, there was the rain.... Solo shrugged. There was no point in hanging around. He took a half dozen steel climber's pitons from the interior of the car and stuffed them into his jacket pocket with a small, heavy-headed hammer, slid a streamlined Walther model PP automatic into his waistband, and approached the face of the pillar.
Napoleon Solo had done a great many dangerous things in his life, and a good many mad ones too. But the maddest and most dangerous of all was that wild climb in the rain up the crumbling façade of the viaduct near Tharandt.
For the first twenty or thirty feet the sandstone blocks were fairly large and the interstices between them correspondingly wide; climbing was simply a matter of wedging in the toes, reaching up and finding a handhold, taking the weight of the body on the fingers as the foot scrabbled for a higher toehold—and then starting the process over again.
But, as soon as the blocks got smaller and the cracks narrower, the trouble began. Rain was gusting across the valley now in great clouds, plastering Solo's hair to his face, weighing down his clothing, and rendering slippery the polished surfaces of the stone. It was also turning the crumbs of old mortar and eroded flakes of sandstone in the gaps into a greasy paste in which fingers and toes skidded more easily than grasped. Under such circumstances climbing without a rope up an almost vertical face was a nightmare.
Every foot became a test of willpower, coaxing the screaming muscles and overtaxed sinews to hang on for just that second longer while the questing foot found a temporary resting-place that would take the strain, the groping fingers a crevice that wouldn't flake away the moment any weight was put on it.
When Solo was seventy-five or eighty feet from the ground, the face he was climbing began to curve outward over his head. He had reached the curvature of the arch. Now he would have to move around to the outside of the pillar.
Gritting his teeth, he started to edge around the corner. For a moment he was splayed out, like a butterfly on a pin, with his right hand and foot on the inner face of the pillar and his left on the outer. The problem now was to swing the right hand and foot outward and around the edge without losing purchase with the left while doing it!
Solo knew better than to look down. Behind him was an eighty foot drop to certain death, a dizzying perspective of wet stone dropping away to the road and the stream far below. But he did look up. He had to.
There was more than forty feet of smooth, damp stonework to climb before he reached the parapet. His glance raked the whole wide expanse of the viaduct, and his eye was drawn by the clouds scudding across the sky. As they streamed out of sight behind the façade, it appeared that the clouds stood still and the bridge moved, leaned over toward him… falling toward him, forcing him back and back.
Abruptly the niche into which his left toe was wedged crumbled away and the foot shot into space. He plunged downward.
The shock of the fall tore his right hand and toe away from their holds around the corner, and for a breathtaking moment his body dropped to the full extent of his left arm and he hung giddily over the void supported only by the four fingers of that hand. The air was torn from his lungs in an agonized gasp. From below—seconds later, it seemed
—he heard clearly the patter of rubble on the Citroën's roof. Desperately he fought for purchase, pressing himself as close to the wet stone as he could to minimize the strain on those fingers... and at last his foot found a ledge, it held firm, and then his fingers groped for and found a crack, level and strong enough to hold him.
For the moment the panic was over! With laboring breath, he continued the climb.
The next crisis came when he was only ten feet from the top. The rain increased in volume, stinging his face. The wind plucked at his drenched trousers. And suddenly he could go no further. Shrieking muscles refused to drag his weight up against the pull of gravity any more. Spread eagled between heaven and earth, he dropped his face to the cold stone. His breath sobbed hoarsely in the extremity of his exhaustion. He would have to use the pitons and risk the attention the noise of the hammering would draw.
As he moved one hand warily toward his pocket he heard from somewhere above a curious rhythmic squeaking. Turning his head slowly, he squinted along the line of the bridge toward the abandoned permanent way leading to it.
Now that he was higher up he could see—Bartoluzzi and a girl dressed in black were crouched by a winch in the middle of the road, paying out a hawser hooked to the old truck. And the truck was rolling slowly down the incline toward the viaduct. The squeaking was from one of its wheels.
Solo thought furiously. If he did hammer in the pitons, they would be bound to hear. But in his position, although exposed, he would be a difficult target to hit from the winch.
The parapet would get in the way, and it was in any case an extremely fine angle for a shot. If Bartoluzzi or the girl moved out wide, of course, he would be a sitting duck. But this was just what they could not do; they had to stay at the winch until the truck reached the unsafe central portion of the bridge if they left the rope and let it run free it might simply come to rest against the parapet... or even go over the edge before it reached the weak section. And that would throw doubt on the consciousness of the driver at once; they wanted it to be assumed that he had been driving normally and that the viaduct had collapsed beneath him. Solo should therefore be safe from shooting until the truck had plunged down... and by then he hoped to have reached it himself and pulled on the handbrake anyway!
What would happen then, he would have to decide later. For the moment it was enough to get to the top. Almost before the thought was formed, he was hammering in the first of the iron pegs.
He had rested his weight on it and was pounding on the second when the noise registered with Bartoluzzi and the girl. There was a shout from the winch, followed a moment later by the bark of a heavy caliber pistol.
Solo paid no attention. The squeaking was coming perilously close; the old truck was rolling slowly out over the first arch. He stepped cautiously onto the third peg and looked for a suitable crevice for the next.
Another shot cracked out. And another. Something that sounded like a large insect hammered through the air behind the agent's head. An instant later a shower of stone chips stung his forehead as a slug flattened itself against the wall a little way above him. Two more near misses sent fragments of sandstone flying from the parapet some way to his right and then at last his lacerated fingers had grasped the coping itself and he was hauling himself agonizingly up for the last time to collapse face down on the permanent way beyond the lip.
The truck, between the second and third arches, was just drawing level with him. Through the grimed window he could see the lolling head of Illya Kuryakin drooped over the wheel.
Solo levered himself to his feet. His knees were trembling. He launched himself toward the door of the cab, prepared to wrench it open and dive for the handbrake.
And in that instant the gun by the winch spat flame once more. The bullet seared across Solo's forehead as he was in midleap and dropped him like a stone. The truck rolled on over the third arch.
As it did so, two things happened. In the cab, Kuryakin jerked suddenly upright and blinked his eyes. In the back, the pile of sacks under which he had been conveyed away from the ambushed riot truck was thrown aside and the girl Annike appeared.
She vaulted over the side and ran to the cab before the astonished pair by the winch had recovered sufficiently to fire at her.
Jerking open the door, she jumped onto the running board, leaned in over the awakening Russian and hauled frantically on the handbrake between the seats.
Shuddering, the truck ground to a halt with its front wheels only inches away from the section over the central arch. On the muddy surface of the bridge a network of small cracks appeared, raying outward like the filaments of a spider's web as they watched.
"Quick!" the girl hissed. "For your life's sake! D
rop out on the far side and lie underneath. Move!"
Kuryakin had suffered a great deal of pain, but he was not physically damaged. Also he was in superb training and used to hardship—which explained why the effects of the drug were wearing off sooner than Bartoluzzi had expected. Although the clouds in his mind had not entirely vanished, he reacted to the crisp note of command in the girl's voice and shot into action almost by reflex.
As the girl dropped back to the roadway on her side of the truck, he slid over to the far side of the cab, burst open the door and fell out onto the ground. Together, they crawled beneath the front wheels.
Bullets were whistling toward them from the winch, but for the moment the angle of the slope prevented them from penetrating below the truck.
"I don't know who you are," Illya mumbled through his drugged torpor, "but thank you! And couldn't you perhaps tell me where I am and what's going on?"
In a few crisp sentences, Annike filled him in. And then, "But what about your friend?" she asked. "Shouldn't we do something about him?"
"Solo? Where is he? I haven't seen him since before the case started."
"At the moment he's lying between the offside rear wheel and a kind of refuge built out from this viaduct like the flying bridge of a ship."
"Lying...? Good heavens!" Kuryakin exclaimed. "I'll go and get him." And suddenly alert again, he wormed his way toward the rear of the truck, scuttled rapidly out to grab Solo's ankles, and then hauled him back into shelter as a fusillade of bullets thwacked and spanged into the ancient vehicle above their heads.
"Is he hurt badly?" the girl asked anxiously.
"I don't think so. Fortunately, he was just creased—see, the furrow has hardly bled at all. But he'll be out of commission for an hour or so. Just when we need him most… Ah!" He had been feeling in Solo's pockets. Now he produced the Walther from Solo's waistband with a triumphant flourish.
Wriggling up until he was below the back axle, he squeezed off a couple of experimental shots. Marinka and the Corsican hastily ducked out of sight behind an old Steyr saloon that was facing back up the hill a little way behind the winch. From the shelter of this they loosed off desultory shots at the truck.