The Deadly Dark Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  The Deadly Dark Affair

  By Robert Hart Davis

  The cunning of a madmen…the creative brain of a boy genius---together they had forged a weapon of ultimate horror that could plunge the world into black ruin. Only Solo and Illya stood in their way and the sands of time were running out too fast…

  PROLOGUE

  WHERE DID THE GOLDEN GATE GO?

  If it ended with the kind of terror and crisis typical of a major confrontation with THRUSH, it began with a kind of terror somehow typical of San Francisco.

  A cable car was clanging in the crisp twilight. Heedless of the California traffic laws about stopping for pedestrians at intersections, a Comet Cab careened uphill. It turned left in front of the cable car at California Street, narrowly missing two girls. The motorman rang his bell furiously.

  People moved into the intersection again. The first cab shot on up toward the crest of Nob Hill.

  “Give them the horn!” Napoleon Solo yelled from the rear seat of a second cab racing up the hill toward the busy intersection. “If you don’t we’ll kill somebody making that turn.”

  The driver edged around the right side of the cable car and leaned on the horn.

  An executive who had been about to jump off the cable car hung on. The cab’s left fender grazed the man’s shoetips as the driver outbluffed the motorman and made a wide turn into California.

  The taxi missed a florist’s van in the oncoming lane by a whisker. Pedestrians melted out of the way. Finally the cab had a clear shot ahead. The driver floored it.

  “They always tell us U.N.C.L.E. is supposed to safeguard the law, not break it,” said the taxi driver.

  “We chose the lesser of two evils, I’m afraid,” said Illya Kuryakin. He looked as tense as Solo. Both of them were sitting forward in the rear seat.

  Illya’s right cheek bore a bruise. His left jacket pocket hung in shreds. Napoleon Solo’s custom-tailored suit was in an equal state of disrepair. And Solo had several other reminders, including a fiercely aching spot just over his kidney, of the fight just minutes ago in the shipping office of Pacific Fisheries, Ltd., on the Embarcadero.

  Illya Kuryakin said something less than polite. A large, expensive automobile with a white-haired senior citizen at the wheel pulled jerkily into the intersection toward which they were racing. It stopped. Apparently the old gentleman had stalled his engine. His be-chromed chariot confronted the speeding cab broadside.

  The driver paled, slammed the brakes as the cab came rocking to a halt, one foot from the stalled car.

  Napoleon Solo craned for a view of the street ahead. The stalled machine blocked much of what he wanted to see.

  “We’ll get out and walk,” he said, levering the door handle down on his side.

  When Solo put his weight on his right foot his leg nearly collapsed. Illya jumped out the other door. The U.N.C.L.E. agents took to the right-hand sidewalk while their driver uttered a long, shuddering sigh of relief.

  Solo could see ahead now, up the slope of the sidewalk to the end of the next block. The Comet Cab was pulling in to the curb. Twilight sun, golden and growing feeble, leaked out of the west directly into Solo’s eyes, making it difficult to see. Already a tinge of the fog was in his nostrils.

  A light blinked on in a drugstore window as he and Illya pounded up the sidewalk. Halfway to the top, a pair of black stick figures, men silhouetted against the evening sun, jumped out of the Comet Cab. One carried an attaché case.

  The Comet taxi had stopped at the head of the cab rank on this street, just at the corner. The THRUSH agents raced to the right, vanishing behind the huge marble cornerstone of the Mark Montfair Hotel. Then one of the men wheeled back into sight, whipping up his right arm.

  Something tubular extended from his right hand like an oversized finger.

  “Down!” Solo shouted. He bowled Illya over with his right shoulder.

  The soft, lethal triple chow was barely heard in the cacophony of evening traffic. Flakes of concrete lifted from the sidewalk where Solo and Illya had been running a moment ago. The U.N.C.L.E. agents clambered up and sprinted forward along the unbroken marble façade of the hotel’s lower floor. The THRUSH agents vanished again up at the corner.

  During the deadly seconds when they’d dodged bullets, Illya instinctively pulled his U.N.C.L.E. pistol from an inner pocket. Such was the heat of the chase, the perilous importance of not losing their quarry, that he forgot to hide it again. When the two agents rounded the corner, Illya still had his gun in his right hand.

  He skidded to a stop.

  Two feet in front of them, a smart-looking matron was dragging on the leash of her clipped, yapping poodle. The woman has several thousand dollars’ worth of mink on her shoulders and a bemused smile on her face. She glanced at Solo---unkempt, hair mussed, a vicious-looking purple bruise on his left jawbone. Then she studied Illya with equal calm, seeming to rather admire his boyish looks and bowl haircut.

  It was this typical fashionable lady of San Francisco whom the U.N.C.L.E. agents had avoided knocking down only by great effort and the braking power of their shoe soles.

  “A pair of men,” Solo said. “One had an attache case handcuffed to his wrist. Which way did they go?”

  In any other city the lady would by now have been screaming in terror. “Down, Bosworth,” she said to her poodle. One immaculate glove pointed to the gilt entrance of the twenty-story Mark Montfair Hotel. “They went in there. My, that’s a realistic looking pistol.”

  Illya tugged Solo’s sleeve. Whispered, “And that’s a realistic gendarme coming, Napoleon.”

  Solo whipped around. One of San Francisco’s finest was bearing down on them with a hostile, suspicious glower. Solo spied an unpainted delivery truck parked at the service entrance of the old red stone Union Pacific Club just across the way.

  “Back, back, officer!” Solo cried, gesturing and pointing. “You’ll ruin this take.”

  The officer halted on the curb. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  Solo indicated the panel truck. “The camera’s running right now.”

  “You’re movie people,” the woman explained. “I should have known. They’re always up here shooting chase sequences.” Typically San Franciscan, she lost interest. The poodle yapped.

  Solo started for the hotel’s main entrance. He shouldered past the knot of guests, doormen and bellboys that had collected. He called back over his shoulder, “We’re doing an U.N.C.L.E. Production called The Birds Are Flying. On your theater screens soon. Watch for it!”

  And he plunged into the revolving door with Illya Kuryakin at his heels.

  The policeman’s frown of puzzlement---it could be true; there were often Southern California nuts filming chase scenes on colorful Nob Hill---gave the U.N.C.L.E. agents the edge they needed.

  Quiet pandemonium reigned in the lobby. A bellboy with blood dripping over his split-open forehead lay by one of the Express elevators. An assistant manager dithered. Solo and Illya raced up as the bellboy panted:

  “Two of ‘em, Mr. Withers. I told ‘em the next chopper wasn’t due from the airport for another twenty minutes. One pulled a gun and smacked me---“

  An unobtrusively as possible, Solo and Illya edged around the gathering crowd to the next car in the bank. Solo thumbed the call button. Tense moments passed.

  Solo was afraid they would be noticed, questioned. Illya peered back into the lobby.

  “Oh-oh. The law has discovered there isn’t any camera in that truck. He’s coming this way.”

  The crest-blazoned doors of the elevator popped open. Solo dived inside, taking just time enough to notice the display board for the next car indicated that the stolen elevator had reached its r
ooftop destination. Amber lights spelled out the word Heliport.

  Solo’s nerves tightened another notch. Illya leaped into the car just as the policeman shouted a command to stop.

  “Heliport, fast,” Illya said.

  The operator shut the door and gave the bruised, bedraggled pair the fish-eye. He didn’t start the car.

  “You’re early,” he said. “The next chopper isn’t due in until---“

  Solo brought up the business end of his long-muzzle gun. “We like to get places early. You make sure we get up to the heliport early, would you?”

  The operator punched the button.

  Solo wasn’t particularly proud of himself, terrorizing an innocent person this way. On the other hand, he and Illya could afford no more delays. No more delays at all.

  They had been on the West Coast three and a half days, working night and day to track down the THRUSH cell which had been hiding behind the cover of Pacifica Fisheries, Ltd. It was a particularly noxious and clever operation in which this cell had been involved. Its function was to import narcotics.

  A plastic flounder had turned up a month and a week ago in the net of a Portuguese fisherman operating out of Fisherman’s Wharf. Inside the dummy fish was a waterproof phial carrying a small fortune in uncut heroin. The Portuguese reported it.

  U.N.C.L.E. had amassed evidence in the past year that as part of a continuing program to undermine its enemies in every conceivable way, THRUSH had opened fresh narcotic pipelines into the country. The plastic fish finally gave a clue as to how the goods were smuggled in.

  Finally, with some aid from a sleek, unpainted U.N.C.L.E. cutter, Solo and Illya had caught another fishing boat---the guilty one---just yesterday, off the San Francisco Banks in the early evening fog.

  The THRUSH skipper was a low-echelon man. He talked.

  Twice a month a THRUSH submarine dumped several dozen of the plastic fish into the water of the banks. Then the two little boats owned by Pacifica Fisheries, Ltd., cruised the area. Electronic gear hidden in the bellies of the trawlers hooked in on magnetic recovery devices installed in the heads of the fish. Up from the deepest deeps the fish came homing, straight into the nets, where they hid as part of a real catch, and brought their poisonous contents safely and easily onto U.S. shores. Somehow one fish had malfunctioned, and the Portuguese sailor had netted it.

  Solo and Illya had followed the trail to the shipping office on the Embarcadero. The THRUSH cell had dissolved in the midst of gunfire. But the section chiefs had gotten away in the melee. In the attache case handcuffed to the wrist of one of them were all the cell’s records, very likely including the all-important list of couriers who carried the fresh heroin across America and distributed it. That list U.N.C.L.E. wanted.

  The elevator rose steadily.

  “If they’re going to the heliport,” Illya said, “they must be expecting a pickup.”

  “One of them could have gotten a message out during the fight,” Solo said.

  The operator said, “H---heliport,” as though about to faint from terror.

  Solo didn’t waste words as the door opened. He thrust the operator back into the corner, then followed him there until the doors were open full.

  No THRUSH bullets came slamming into the cage.

  With a single long stride apiece, he and Illya went out of the car into the terrazzo foyer of the ticket and boarding area. A gateman passenger agent lay sprawled with a bullet hole in his temple. A ticket girl, wounded in the shoulder, slumped on the counter. In the waiting area a young mother huddled in a chair, eyes wide with fright. She hugged her little girl and the little girl’s suitcase against her.

  Directly ahead, out on the sun-and-shadow flatness of the concrete landing pad, two flight controllers had been shot down. Their bright yellow coveralls were black with ugly flower-like bloodstains.

  The wounded flight controllers lay beyond glass doors. And on the pad proper a huge gunmetal-gray ‘copter was just setting down, its rotors slowing to a whine.

  The two THRUSH agents were hurrying toward the unfolding hatch. The whirly-bird had to be a specially-summoned THRUSH craft kept on call for hasty escapes such as this. Solo took a tight grip on the butt of his pistol and raced ahead.

  Illya came right alongside. They hit the glass doors low, like football blockers.

  The doors sprang outward under the impact. From the helicopter’s cockpit the pilot spotted them, began to wigwag furiously to the THRUSH agents getting aboard.

  One of the agents twisted round, Solo remembered him, an emaciated middle-aged man with a disfiguring white scar near his right ear. His companion was stouter, a more polished-looking man wearing a homburg. He carried the attaché case and was already up inside the ‘copter.

  The thin Thrushman’s mouth twisted unpleasantly. He jerked a pistol from under his coat. Solo threw himself out prone. The bullet missed by a fraction, putting a huge crystal star in the plate glass waiting room window.

  Illya dodged behind a guard-rope stanchion. Solo propped up his gun hand by using his elbow. He fired. White–scar cried out, staggered.

  The THRUSH pilot was frantically giving the thumbs-up signal, urging takeoff. White-scar went to one knee, hands reaching up desperately for the ‘copter hatch. He couldn’t quite catch it. The pilot worked the controls.

  Utterly without emotion, the Thrushman in the homburg looked down from the open hatch as the giant ‘copter rose.

  White-scar screamed, tottered to his feet. Homburg scowled in anger, gave a single thumbs-up signal to someone inside the craft. White-scar fell down again, wailing and left behind. The craft’s running lights flashed on, for the dusk was well advanced.

  Solo scrambled to his feet. Up here the wind keened. The great glittering hotels of Nob Hill, the gleaming necklaces of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges and the lighted splendors of Marin County and Oakland made a breathtaking circular panorama. Car headlights shone by the thousands.

  Illya leaned back and pumped bullet after bullet at the rising ‘copter. Solo heard them sing and ping off armor plate harmlessly. He growled under his breath. They had lost their catch. Now he had to see whether special planes could move in fast and track the helicopter before the attaché case and the courier list were gone, lost in the night darkness rolling fast out of the east, there beyond Oakland’s hills.

  Furious with himself, Solo reached into his coat pocket for his communicator. Suddenly something caught his eye. He spun half to the right, peered far westward across the lighted jewelbox of the city.

  Where Marin County should have been, there was darkness.

  And there was a sweeping black blot of darkness too where only a moment ago the shining chain of the Golden Gate bridge had lit the way to Marin. Solo saw nothing there now, no bridge lights golden in the dusk, no white or red auto lights, only blackness. And the darkness was working its way eastward into the city like a tide, coming in past the Presidio, past the outlying areas. Every single light in street after street, section after section began to flick out like dominoes falling.

  “The bridge, Illya!” Solo shouted over above the suddenly loud roar of the ‘copter. “The bridge and everything else is blacking out. It’s---“

  Why was the rotor racket increasing? Solo glanced up, gasped.

  The helicopter was plummeting erratically, plummeting straight down. Its rotors spun faster than normal, threatening to fly off. The cockpit was pitch black. All the running lights had gone out.

  “An electrical failure,” Illya yelled as the roar increased. “It’s incredible.”

  “Like New York’s,” Solo replied. “Only worse. Look.”

  High to the south he had spotted a gigantic four-engine commercial jet rising on takeoff from San Francisco airport. It too flew without running lights. And now it was banking steeply, much too steeply.

  “He’s making a forced landing!” Illya could barely be heard above the noise of the THRUSH ‘copter shuddering and pitching down toward the pad.

&n
bsp; Suddenly the THRUSH craft heaved violently. It was still fifty feet over their heads. The cockpit window slid back. The pilot thrust out a pistol, his face a white blur of rage. Illya shoved Napoleon Solo hard as the pilot’s gun cracked. Illya tumbled, coming up on one knee beside Solo. Illya’s silenced pistol popped, popped, popped again. They heard the pilot’s faint scream in the rotor thunder.

  “He must have thought we’d killed his power somehow---“ Illya began.

  He was interrupted by the shriek of the rotors as the ‘copter plunged straight down, pilotless, to crash with a shudder that shook the concrete pad. Before the wreckage stopped grinding, a twisted tin-can mass of metal now, Solo was racing forward. The open hatch was pinched over on itself.

  The THRUSH agent in the homburg had tried to jump clear, hadn’t made it, was pinned under folded metal. An edge of this metal cut into the belly of his suit. Solo saw black blood oozing in the starlight.

  Starlight, that was all. The lights on Nob Hill had blinked out. The incredible tide of total darkness was sweeping on across San Francisco toward the bridge to Oakland.

  The man with the homburg hung head down from the wreckage. His arm with the attaché case handcuffed to the wrist dangled free. With a grimace, Illya began working the attaché case handle back and forth until it snapped. Solo knelt, peered up inside the wreckage. The two other THRUSH crewmen were invisible, most certainly dead inside all that mangled wire and steel.

  Glassy eyed and incoherent, Homburg was cursing, cursing and damning them. “Lights all gone,” he burbled as a trickle of blood ran out the corner of his mouth. “Couldn’t---wait till we got clear. Knew---we were making a run for it but the miserable experiment---“

  Napoleon Solo’s neck prickled. Illya’s eyes shone white and startled as he turned to listen.

  “---experiment comes first,” the dying man gasped. “THRUSH scientists get---anything they want. They tell a section chief like me---get out of the way. If you don’t---you’re in hard luck. Experiment already scheduled. They---knew we were making a run. Needed power. I radioed---Needed ten more minutes. But it was all planned. They---couldn’t wait. They always---get what they want, the muck-a-mucks---“