04-The Dagger Affair

by David McDaniel

  A third group came out of the north powerhouse and stood blinking in the sunlight while the guard picked a bullhorn out of a small weather-proof cabinet and addressed them.

  Napoleon looked up the face of the dam. It seemed like a sheer wall of old ivory rising almost out of sight between the jagged rock sides of the canyon. Incongruously, far up the cliffs of concrete, there were two steel doors with outside handles barely visible. There was a constant breeze blowing up the canyon towards the dam, keeping the temperature reasonable. In the sun, protected from the wind, it was too hot; in the shade, the wind was chill. And the sun was beginning to disappear behind the cliffs. Napoleon shivered, and moved back inside the powerhouse.

  The row of generators filled their huge cave with a penetrating subsonic song of pure power. Napoleon listened to it with his fingertips on the metal railing, and sighed. It was getting on toward three o'clock. He wondered what they would do if nobody showed up. Would they wait through tomorrow and the next day? Would they wait a week and then give up? Perhaps it was a wild goose chase. He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms.

  There went the group with the girl, down the corridor into the dam, toward the elevator that would take them back to the surface, the highway, and civilization. And there was the man in the loud shirt, still with his fancy expensive camera...And where was his camera bag?

  * * *

  Napoleon stood up straight as the group went into the glazed tile corridor and out of his sight. He hurried around the corner and up the stairs. There they went.

  There was a bend in the corridor, and his shoes skidded on the floor as he came around it at a run. The group was packing into the elevator, and near the front was the photographer. As he turned around, Napoleon saw clearly he was not carrying his gadget bag. The doors slid closed.

  Napoleon whipped out his transceiver. "Illya! Contact the south elevator and have it stopped. I think our man is on it. It just took off."

  There was no answer. He turned and headed down the corridor again. As he came into the generator house he thumbed the signal button again. Illya answered at once. "Were you signaling me a minute ago?"

  "Yes. Get to a phone and contact the south elevator. Our pigeon is trying to fly. Have it sent back down here."

  "I'm calling now." Illya's voice continued, more faintly, "This is Agent Kuryakin. We have reason to believe that the man we are after is in your elevator. Return to the bottom of the dam. Tell your passengers that you left somebody behind, or something that will not alarm them or upset the one we are interested in."

  Napoleon said, "Then come on over here. I'll be meeting the elevator." He hurried back to the end of the corridor, and waited. Soon the air stopped sighing out between the closed doors, and a moment later they slid open.

  There seemed to be a little consternation among the passengers as Napoleon raised his arms for their attention.

  "Sorry for the inconvenience, ladies and gentlemen — ah, ladies and gentlemen?" They were all chattering among themselves, and only paused at his second bid for their attention.

  "Sorry for the inconvenience, but we're afraid one of you may have inadvertently left something valuable around the dam." And then they weren't listening to him anymore, as they all started searching pockets and purses for their wallets, cards, and anything else that might have been lost and found. Napoleon paused with his mouth open until they settled down, then continued. "If the gentleman" — he pointed — "in the red and yellow shirt will step out, please, everyone else can go on to the top of the dam. Your camera case, sir," Napoleon said politely, as Illya came trotting up the corridor with three guards. "Sorry to have delayed you," he concluded to the remainder of the group in the elevator. "Thanks for your cooperation." The doors hissed closed and the two U.N.C.L.E. agents turned to the man in the loud shirt.

  Illya said, "I'm afraid you may have lost your accessory bag during your tour."

  The man looked blank for a moment, then his hand went to his side and an expression of surprise spread across his face. "Well — my gosh! How could that've happened? I sure thought I had it with me all the time. Did you find it?"

  "We thought you might want to help us look," said Illya, staring him coldly in the eye.

  He gave a nervous kind of laugh. "Well, I...I can't afford much time. But why all the fuss? It's sure too small for a bomb, fellas, and besides, I hardly have room for my lenses and film in there as it is." He laughed again, and did a little better at it.

  It takes an expert to be able to laugh convincingly — and this man was not an expert. Napoleon felt a small glow of satisfaction, knowing that this was the end of the vigil, and it had indeed paid off.

  Deep inside, a small voice whispered that he'd feel pretty foolish if it turned out this character had really only planted a bomb and they'd let the Energy Damper get away.... He shook off the thought.

  Whatever was in the camera bag hadn't gone off yet — the lights were shining brightly and the generators still hummed. And the man was talking again.

  "Now really, I can't stay much longer. It'll take me at least an hour to drive back to Vegas, and I've got to catch a plane at 4:30."

  Illya answered him. "It has your valuable camera equipment in it. Surely you won't mind waiting until we find it. The lenses alone must represent a considerable investment."

  "Well, sure, fellas, but I've got these plane tickets, and my wife'll be worried if I'm not back on schedule. Look, you can send the case to me C.O.D. when you find it — it's packed nice and solid." He reached for his pocket. "Here's my address."

  "There will be another plane," Illya said. "You can wait here..."

  The man's hand came out of his pocket with a pen, and a cloud of white smoke blasted out. Illya choked and doubled over. Napoleon grabbed for the man in the loud shirt, and got a face full of fog. He was holding his breath, but it squirted in his eyes and in a moment he was blinded with tears. He could hear the guards struggling, then a fist hit flesh and there was a grunt of pain.

  A moment later he felt a hand on his arm and heard the voice of a guard, strained as if through clenched teeth. "Mr. Solo — I think my foot's busted. But I can see okay. Help me and I'll guide you to the phone."

  "Which way?" asked Napoleon, feeling for the man's arm.

  "This way — a little to the right.... It's about fifty feet."

  "How's my partner?"

  "I dunno. He's on the floor, but he's still moving. I guess he really got a faceful of that stuff. Louie's helpin' him."

  "Where'd the other guy go?"

  "He ran off toward the penstock hatch. Wall's about five feet in front of you — that's it. Phone's ten feet to the right...here. Lemme dial."

  Solo's vision was beginning to clear a little. As the guard's weight shifted, he was able to raise a hand to wipe his burning eyes. The guard spoke into the phone.

  "Bill — close the elevators and get the tourists out. Watch out for a guy in a loud sport shirt, red and yellow mostly. He's got a big camera around his neck, looks like a regular tourist. He just gassed these two U.N.C.L.E. guys and me and Louie got bashed up a little too. He headed for the penstocks about two minutes ago.... Okay.... Right. I can make it to the first-aid kit. Yeah. Thanks."

  He hung up, and looked closely at Napoleon. "You can see again?"

  Napoleon shook his head to clear it, and said, "Well enough. Where's this first-aid kit? I can navigate myself — you want to stay here?"

  The guard looked down, and said, "I — I think I'd better. Lemme down easy, now..."

  Napoleon did, and got directions to the nearest first-aid station. He found the green metal box and brought it back. The guard got out bandages and a small splint. Napoleon took the box on to where Illya was now sitting up, gasping for breath. He unshipped the small green sphere and a plastic mask, fitting it over Illya's nose and mouth.

  "Hold this, and breathe deeply."

  Illya did, and in a minute or two the oxygen had flushed his lungs and revived him comp
letely. His eyes were running and bloodshot, but his breathing was easy as he got to his feet.

  "Caught like an amateur," he said bitterly. "I inhaled just as he fired the gas." He looked around. "Don't tell me you let him get away!"

  "Temporarily," Napoleon admitted; "but the top of the dam has already been closed off, so he'll be trapped."

  "Only theoretically. Let's go."

  They hurried down the long rugged tunnel carved out of natural rock to the little softly-lit room which afforded a view of the penstock tunnel. It was empty. The tunnel beneath the room ran off into darkness in both directions, and the huge pipes within it lay like the pulsing veins of an unimaginably huge animal. A red and yellow shirt would have stood out even in the dim light of the tunnel. And as Illya looked carefully down, it did.

  The shirt was draped over a stanchion a fair distance below them. It was no longer occupied. Their man had ducked in here, removed the shirt that had personified him to everyone, and stuffed it through the little access hatch at the side. But for the opportune intervention of the structural member, it would have fluttered to the bottom of the tunnel and remained undiscovered for years. Now...well, now all they had to do was look for a man who wasn't wearing a bright shirt.

  They headed out the rockwalled tunnel again.

  Guards were running about, and tourists were standing in nervous groups like sheep whose herd-dogs had suddenly taken to strange behavior. Napoleon took command.

  "Attention, please! Will all the tourist groups please line up along that wall. Guards come over here."

  They did. While Napoleon told the guards what they had found, Illya quickly scanned the faces of almost a hundred tourists — groups that had piled up since the elevator was stopped. Their man was not among them.

  Garnet came running up at last. "Napoleon — I think he might be over on the north side. I saw somebody in a white tee-shirt coming out of a little tunnel door."

  Leaving most of the guards with orders to send the tourists out by elevator and continue searching the Arizona side of the dam, Illya and Napoleon took four men and headed for the Nevada border, a hundred feet away. Garnet showed them the door.

  "Yeah, he could've," said a guard. "That goes down and under the whole front of the dam. Dunno how he'd know about it, though. I guess he's no regular tourist."

  "You can say that again," said Napoleon. "And that was no regular bomb he planted either, so don't worry about it exploding. What he planted not only won't explode, it'll prevent anything else from exploding too."

  The guards stared at him strangely. "Don't worry about it," Napoleon repeated. "We've got to find that man."

  "Mr. Solo," Garnet said, "hadn't we better concentrate on finding the E/D? Even if we catch the man, he probably won't know how to turn it off, and I'm sure he wouldn't tell us where it is."

  Solo looked at her. "Garnet," he said, "you have a gift for going right to the heart of things." He turned to the guards. "Look," he said, "catching the man won't do us as much good as finding that thing before it goes off. I want you all to spread out and cover every tunnel, every room, every trash basket, every corner big enough to leave a wad of paper in. What you're looking for is probably a brown gadget bag, about so by so by so." He gestured with his hands. "And if you find it in time, we may still be able to save Southern California — and all your jobs."

  They went.

  Chapter 6: "But He Left His Glass Slipper."

  Napoleon, Illya and Garnet retired to the office of the head of the maintenance department. Here they found maps showing the entire honeycomb of tunnels that filled the mountain of concrete that was Boulder Dam. The phone rang every few moments, as guards called in to say they had just finished searching some particular area. Illya would mark it off with a red line on their map, and Napoleon would direct the guard to another area.

  Half an hour passed. The tourists had all been cleared out of the dam and the area around had been evacuated. The searchers had found neither the camera case nor any sign of the man who had left it. They could have vanished together into thin air. Then the phone rang. Napoleon answered it.

  "Solo — Good! Where? Don’t move it. We'll be right there." He hung up and turned to the map. "There we are," he said. "Come on. We may be able to disarm that thing yet."

  * * *

  The case lay behind some boxes in a small cul-de-sac about the center of the dam, near the bottom. Since the tour went nowhere near there, the man must have planted it somewhere, probably the penstock-viewing room, and then picked it up and moved it to this safer place while on the run. And he might have re-set the timer to give himself more time, or to go off sooner. They had no way of knowing but had to expect the worst.

  "I've looked it over carefully, Napoleon, and I think it should be reasonably safe to move it. Handle it carefully; there might be a sensitive trigger inside."

  Since Illya's eyes had not recovered from the blast of tear gas, Napoleon now was the only one to carry the device out of the area and away to safety.

  The north elevator sat at the bottom of the shaft, door open. Napoleon got in, the camera case hanging from its strap beside him, and pushed the top button. He waved to Illya between the closing doors.

  The elevator started its long trip upward.

  It was some seven hundred feet up the elevator shaft, and it took the elevator about a minute to make the climb under ordinary circumstances. But to Napoleon Solo it was seven miles, and took an hour.

  He was aware of the silent menace in the leather case, of the immense mass of concrete around him, of the shaft extending up and down from his little steel cage. And he felt very much alone.

  There were access doors every couple hundred feet along the shaft, and if the E/D went off in the elevator, the automatic mechanical brakes would still function to hold him where he was. Then a rope could be let down from the next door up, so he wasn't in any real danger....

  If was still a long, long way to the top. The wall crawled endlessly past him, and the closed doors slipped from the top to the bottom of the frame and disappeared every now and then. The only sound was the hum of the air-conditioner and the sighing of displaced air in the shaft. Napoleon glanced at the light and realized that the climb on the rope ladder (should the thing go off before he reached the top) would have to be managed in total darkness.

  How long had he been in the elevator, now? It seemed like forever since Illya had disappeared between the doors as they'd slid closed at the bottom of the dam....

  And then another door slid into his field of vision, moved down, slowed, matched with his own, and stopped. The door slid open. Hot, blue desert daylight flooded into the little anteroom outside the elevator and made him squint.

  He stepped out through the doors and picked up the telephone. He dialed the extension at the bottom. Illya answered in the middle of the first ring.

  "Yes?"

  "Made it. I'll get this thing to the car, and you come on up with Garnet."

  "We'll be right up."

  Napoleon hoisted the bag to his shoulder and sauntered out into the sunlight.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later he was at the wheel of their car with Garnet beside him, climbing through the tangled hills toward the road back to Las Vegas. Illya sat in the back seat, holding the camera bag on his lap. There was a dour Russian look of triumph in his bloodshot eyes. Garnet had suggested looking inside to be sure it really was the Energy Damper, but Illya had vetoed it.

  "It would have been easy to wire a small explosive charge to go off in the hands of anyone trying to open the case. Or to close the circuit of the Energy Damper. Besides, our superior officer, Mr. Waverly, likes things handled neatly and would be most upset if we tampered with the object in any way under these circumstances."

  It was now late afternoon, and the sun was coasting down the western sky to quench its fire in the Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles west. There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and with any kind of luck, Napoleon thought t
hey would be back in Los Angeles with their prize tonight and sleep comfortably while the lab gang sweated for a change.

  He was wrong. There is another kind of luck besides good luck.

  None of them noticed the light plane that hummed out of the sun to their left. Illya looked up when it started circling low over the road ahead of them. Then it came roaring down the road straight toward them at an altitude of about thirty feet. An insignia was visible in the fraction of a second it flashed overhead, blazoned black-on-white on the wings and side of the plane — a taunting insignia. A stylized bird, wings raised in defiance and beak open. A Thrush.

  Napoleon sat low in the seat, and Illya leaned forward to push Garnet to the floor. She objected only momentarily, then dove and curled up under the dash in comparative safety. Illya cranked down his back window and started clipping the long barrel and shoulder stock to his powerful automatic pistol.

  The little airplane zoomed off over the desert, circled and started back. Illya clipped the telescopic sight to the top of his gun as the plane came tearing over the barren ground, perpendicular to the highway this time, to pass about seventy feet ahead of them. He fired several shots, but it was impossible to gauge the relative speeds accurately. Suddenly a row of dust-spurts shot up along the sand to their left like the footprints of a charging invisible centipede. The line chattered across the road ahead of them and into the sand on the other side. The car swerved slightly as the airplane roared overhead again and the wheels bounced on the strip of pavement chewed up by the steel-jacketed machine-gun slugs.

  Illya rested the arm holding his weapon on the window sill and sighted on the plane as it circled again to their right and started back toward the highway. He squeezed off four shots as it approached, correcting for the decreasing range. But either it was armored or the motion of the car was throwing his aim off, because his shots seemed to have no effect.

  This time he could clearly see the snout of the Thompson protruding from the side window of the plane. It flickered fire, and the line of impact scampered across the dirt directly toward them.