by Unknown
The back of Solo's head struck the asphalt cruelly hard. Pain danced behind his eyes. Helene's high heels tick-ticked as she walked towards him.
A car door slammed. Other feet hammered heavily. Solo struggled to pull himself erect. The spotlight swam overhead like a bleary eye.
Helene's voice, suddenly harsh and throaty, snapped an order in German. Solo's translating abilities were sorely impaired at the moment, but he managed to figure out that she was commanding someone to watch the alley entrance, to avoid being surprised.
Dazed, Solo tottered to his feet. Helene Bauer stood a yard away, her fists planted on her hips. No longer the slightest bit girlish, she regarded him with contempt. Ugly understanding began to seep into Solo's mind then. He thought of Herr Sunglasses at the New York airport, and of the rat-faced man in the Volkswagen. He said thickly:
"Illya was right after all. The herrings were herrings."
"You refer to the THRUSH agents whom you no doubt identified, Herr Solo?" Helene said. "The ones watching you and Kuryakin?"
"The agents I was supposed to identify," Solo cracked out. "While the real operator sneaked up on me from behind some perfume and a pretty dress."
"We did not know, of course, that it would work. Now that it has, my superiors will have to admit that I was correct. We knew your filthy local U.N.C.L.E. operative had accidentally sighted Herr Felix—" There was a strange, mystical fanaticism in the girl's voice as she pronounced Klaanger's first name—"and we disposed of your agent as quickly as we could.
"But we also knew that you and Mr. Kuryakin, or some other U.N.C.L.E. operatives, would be sniffing on the scent soon. I am proud to say that I was the one who suggested the little scheme which snared you. My superiors were not so certain the plan would work.
"When I saw you at the air terminal, I was exalted. Napoleon Solo had been selected for the assignment after all. And Napoleon Solo's weakness for women is notorious. While we kept you bemused with obvious THRUSH agents pursuing you, I set the stage for this little finale. I trust it comes as a surprise."
"Well," Solo said, thinking of Illya, "somebody's going to say I told you so."
Helene Bauer smiled. It was a cruel smile. "No, Solo. You will not have the opportunity to hear those words. Your friend Mr. Kuryakin will never see you alive again."
And with that, Helene Bauer began to advance on him.
She threw aside her white stole. Her blue dress was sleeveless. For the first time, Napoleon Solo got a good look at her tanned arms. They were stronger and thicker than a woman's arms had a right to be. Not that they were unfeminine. They were smooth, firm, sun-browned. But underneath the skin, incredible muscles began to bunch and writhe.
"This is ridiculous," Solo said under his breath. "No ordinary girl can—"
Helene Bauer charged full tilt.
Solo whipped up his right fist, thrusting aside every mental reservation he'd ever had about smashing a woman on the jaw. Unfortunately his new attitude of expediency was of no use. Helene ducked under his guard and wrapped her arms around his waist.
Solo felt as though steel bands were constricting on his middle. The breath was squeezed out of his lungs. Helene picked him up with no effort at all and threw him six yards into the side of a parked Cadillac.
Solo hit the Cadillac's right door so forcefully that his head dented the metal. Pain blasted through his entire body as he slid down onto the asphalt. He braced his palms, tried to rise, upbraiding himself for this pitiful performance. After all, she was nothing but a girl—
Helene tapped him lightly under the chin with the toe of her right pump.
The contact resembled being run over by a diesel.
Injured both physically and in his ego, Solo lay on the asphalt, mumbling curses at himself. What was he, one of those ninety-seven pound weaklings?
It appeared so.
Helene Bauer was a female Klaanger. And marching up behind her, he saw blearily, were two incredible assistants, blond-haired, blue-eyed girls whose prettiness was marred by the inflexible, expressionless cast of their features.
Both girls wore short black leather jackets, skin-tight black ski pants and calf-high black leather boots. They were both at least six feet six inches tall.
Like storm troopers, the girls ranked themselves behind Helene, one to the right and one to the left. Solo wobbled up again. The three women regarded him with all the affection they might bestow on a lizard who had invaded their bedrooms.
One more try, Solo thought, doubling his bruised right hand.
"Inge?" Helene barked harshly. "Schnell!"
The girl on Helene's right darted forward. Solo rocketed his right hand out for what, in other circumstances, would have been a powerhouse punch. Inge had all the grace of a ballerina as she caught his wrist. She somehow snapped his entire person over her right hip, hurling him against the hubcap of a parked Chrysler.
"Are you persuaded, Solo?" Helene purred. "It is useless to resist."
Battered and bloody, he was beginning to believe it. Helene leaned down, picked him up and slung him over her shoulder. The girls marched to the silver Rolls-Royce, where Solo was dumped unceremoniously into the tonneau. Helene climbed in beside him.
Inge took the wheel. The second Amazon sat beside her, drawing a Luger which she aimed over the back of the seat directly at Napoleon Solo's forehead.
The Rolls motor hummed to life and the car swung back out the alley into the street, gathering speed. Helene got out a cigarette. Solo slumped against the leather. He was trying to gather his wits and not having much luck.
"Have you ever seen the Schwarzwald?" Helene inquired.
"The Black Forest? No. I don't think I'm going to like it."
"I assure you we shall do everything we can to make certain you don't. That is, before you die. What a dreary little man you are with your pretensions of strength! You don't know the meaning of strength. The joy of pure strength—"
Her fingers closed around the cigarette, crushing it to bits. She threw the remains on the floor of the car.
The Rolls sped on through Munich, heading in a direction Solo computed roughly as westward. He wondered whether the tiny transmitter concealed in the lining of his jacket was still functioning. If so, Illya would hear the signal begin to fade. He'd think Solo was smooching with this incredible, cruel-eyed superwoman who sat regarding him with such utter contempt—
At that moment Solo noticed a small pin on the collar of the leather jacket of the incredibly tall girl with the gun. The pin had a black border. In the center, on a white field, he saw the ugly configuration of a swastika.
"So we were right," he said. "The birds and the beasts have gotten together."
"Do you mean THRUSH and the Fourth Reich?" Helene asked. "You are correct. With one purpose." Her blue eyes flamed like illuminated diamonds, hard, cold. "To build an organization of such strength that the world cannot stand against us. We shall succeed."
The Rolls raced on out of the city. Trapped, Solo felt that Fraulein Helene Bauer just might be right about succeeding.
Because he, thus far, had failed.
ACT TWO — The Bigger They Come
ONE
A clock in the spire of the Lutheran church on the square chimed the hour of seven.
Sun spilled gold on to the sloping slate rooftops of the village of Ommenschnee. The gilt light painted the dun-colored cobbles of the square, where a stout farmer's cart drawn by a sway-backed horse was just clopping out of sight around the corner of an inn.
The windows of the inn were still tightly shuttered against the night.
Here a policeman wandered, there the driver of a milk lorry paused to pack his meerschaum with a cut plug before driving on with a puttering of exhaust.
Under the shadow of the porch arch of the great church, a smaller blob of shadow seemed to stir, as though about to venture forth among the few good souls who were beginning to move along the narrow streets of this hamlet deep in the pine-scented forest.
>
The shadow figure peering from behind a pillar at the picturesque square was an equally picturesque sight: a spindly, seedy peddler with a sack full of cheap imitations of Hummel figurines slung over his shoulder. He wore dark trousers, an ill-fitting coat which hung nearly to his knees and was nearly worn through at the elbows, and a battered old hat. The face of the itinerant peddler was the color of used leather, exceedingly lined. A white soup-handle mustache drooped below white eyebrows. But the man's eyes were alert, concerned—and young.
Finally this picturesque personage decided that he could cross the square in relative safety. The cobbles were filling with up-early pedestrians—several shopgirls; children riding bicycles; a couple of sporty youths on muttering motor scooters; half a dozen nuns hurrying towards a chapel of another religious persuasion. Into this setting stepped the disguised Illya Kuryakin, his bag of figurines rattling.
With shuffling step Illya made for a street which angled west from the square's far side. He kept his head down so that the brim of his hat hid his face. He was beginning to feel his exhaustion. He hadn't slept at all the past night, and to compound the fatigue, he was nagged by an unproveable certainty that his whereabouts were known to THRUSH.
The biggest question was—did THRUSH now have his friend Napoleon Solo in captivity?
A warbling note barely perceptible to Illya's ears because the receiver was swaddled in thick layers of cloth under his coat seemed to indicate so.
Where was Solo being held? Apparently westward, in the green-boughed fastness of the Black Forest.
Early last night Illya had been rather lacksadasically perusing the isometrics pamphlet in the hotel suite in Munich. Solo had been gone for almost an hour. Illya had just about decided that no amount of finger-flexing and bicep-tensing would transform him into a strong man. He had been about to phone the hotel pantry for a snack and a good stein of dark beer when he became aware that the rod-like communicator lying there on the coffee table was emitting a signal which was growing steadily weaker.
The next twenty minutes were desperate.
Keeping the communicator pressed against his left ear so as not to lose the signal, Illya phoned a lesser official of the Munich U.N.C.L.E. station and rather high-handedly commandeered the station's expensive electronic detection and search sedan. The car took ten minutes to arrive at the hotel; the operator had had a minor brush with the law over speeding. By then Illya had nearly lost the signal from his pocket communicator.
With an emotion almost akin to frenzy, he practically knocked the operator out of the front seat of the dark, unobtrusive sedan and leaped in.
For the next ten minutes he drove round and round Munich's downtown, steering with one hand while he used his right to twist, turn the various knobs and rheostats on the complicated dash panel.
At last a greenish tear-drop blip appeared on the display glass in the center of the panel. The blip signal corresponded in its interval with the nearly imperceptible warbling still coming from his pocket communicator on the seat beside him.
There! Illya was locked on to Solo's transmitting frequency. But where was Solo going?
After ten more minutes of cruising, the glass showed him.
Either under coercion or of his own free will, Napoleon Solo was heading west. The blip inched steadily toward the left of the screen.
In the direction of the Schwarzwald! Illya hit the gas pedal and sent the sedan careening through the streets at the edge of the nightclub district. After another interval of high-speed driving, he had the blip again centered in the display glass.
He drove steadily now, his nerves fine tuned by tension. The blip was not outrunning him.
At three in the morning the blip abruptly disappeared from the glass. Illya computed its last position to be some three miles northwest of a village which the map called Ommenschnee. Illya parked the car on the shoulder of the highway, which at this point cut through giant trees that soughed into the darkness.
Illya hadn't seen another vehicle for an hour and a half.
Working by the feeble glow of the dash instruments, he rummaged in a trunk which had been loaded aboard the sedan at his request. A sour face indicated his attitude toward the seamy contents of the Munich station's so-called Emergency Disguise Kit.
He had his choice of imitating a police officer, dressing up as a non-denominational nun—what were the Munich people thinking, anyway?—or settling for some scrofulous-looking rags which were meant to cast him in a peddler's role, if he judged by the sack of figurines that completed the outfit.
Slipping into the noisome garb, Illya made a mental note to write a memo to Mr. Waverly concerning the witless choice of quick-change outfits offered by the Munich station. For an U.N.C.L.E. operative to be caught masquerading as an officer of the law or as a member of a non-existent holy order was abolutely idiotic. Inefficiency, inefficiency everywhere!
Illya pulled the floppy hat down on his head and paused in his mental tirade. He realized with some chagrin that he had just been hunting a scapegoat.
He was desperately afraid that through his own ineptitude his friend Solo had falled into the hands of THRUSH.
But perhaps Solo had only discovered a particularly warm tip, and was off to follow it. Illya reassured himself with this thought as he slid the ersatz walnut dashboard in place over the electronic dials in the car, and locked all doors. The detection and search sedan was constructed of the heaviest steels and equipped with bullet-proof glass. It would take a heavy tank with its cannon blasting to gain entrance.
Illya began to trudge down the shoulder of the road. Pine needles crunched faintly under foot. Suddenly headlights sprang up behind him, racing fast.
Illya's heart slugged wildly as he started for the protection of the trees. He was too late—
The headlights sprayed his back white. Illya hunched over, swung around, slitting his eyes and hoping that the facial stain and white mustache would serve to make him look old. Like white-yellow juggernauts the headlamps raced at him. He prepared to reach for his long-muzzled U.N.C.L.E. pistol beneath his rags of disguise. The vehicle was almost on him -
There was a plaintive moo in the peaceful night as the truck sang past on rapidly humming tires. Illya feigned a rapid, rheumy-eyed blink the moment it went by. IN the backwash of its lights he saw the heads and horns of cattle outlined fleetingly against the stars.
As the eager dairy farmer raced onward toward his destination, a few more soothing moos floated out behind. Illya's heart beat slowed down.
He had been certain that he too had been tagged by THRUSH. But this time it had been a false alarm.
Illya shambled ahead, making himself practice the enfeebled gait of an old man. The trees melted from solid darkness into relative individuality as false dawn, and then the real thing, lit the landscape. Illya's mind churned. Question after question tumbled through it.
What had happened to Napoleon? It was quite unlike his partner to depart suddenly on a fresh trail without telling him. Further, there was no sound at all from the pocket communicator now. This indicated that Napoleon was not attempting to contact him and, worse, was no longer even transmitting.
Had THRUSH already moved in for the kill? Only further trudging to the westward, toward the point in the Black Forest where the display screen blip had blacked out, would reveal the possible tragic answer.
Presently Illya crept into cover at the Lutheran church and surveyed the square at Ommenschnee. Now, having crossed the square, he was moving down a narrow street where the houses were old, gabled, and close together. A slatternly woman dumped a pail of slops out an upstairs window. Illya had to hop to it to keep from being drenched.
He brandished a fist at the woman by way of keeping in character but he didn't stop to argue. In minutes he had left the village behind and was trudging slowly down what appeared to be a dirt truck track.
It branched off the main highway leading from Ommenschnee at the village limits.
The high
way swung roughly southwest. The track went due west, the direction Illya wanted to go.
He had walked perhaps five hundred yards along the track and had just poked his head warily around a bend when he got quite a surprise.
Parked up ahead was the same farmer's truck that had passed him several hours ago.
In the bed of the truck, half a dozen beeves jostled one another, gently discontented but no longer lowing. It was too late for Illya to turn back. The truck driver, a portly German with ruddy cheeks and a mustache fully as flowing as Illya's fake one, had seen him.
The driver was sitting against the truck's left rear tire, making a morning meal of a butt of bread and a quart of milk. Illya's trained mind sensed something awry, but he did not immediately know what.
Once again he swept his gaze across the truck. He couldn't locate the cause of his instinctive suspicion. Perhaps it was the driver himself. He was an immense man, Illya Kuryakin saw, as the latter stood up.
The driver wiped his none too clean sleeve across his lips, getting rid of a foam of milk. He towered at least halfway up to the seven foot mark, and bore a huge paunch out in front of him. He wore nondescript clothes. His black-haired arms were far too long to be called normally proportioned.
Carefully Illya adjusted his peddler's pack on his left shoulder. That way, his right hand would be unencumbered if he needed to get at the long-snouted pistol in the trick pocket of his shabby coat.
He put on a witless expression and shambled up to the beefy driver, whose fat cheeks were burgher-red but whose eyes were no warmer than glaciers.
"Lost your way, have you, mein herr?" said the dairyman in German.
"Nein, nein," Illya answered with an idle grin. His German was perfect enough to pass muster. "I am on my way to the village. Hermann is my name."
"The village," said the driver, "is back the other way." He pointed a porcine thumb.
Illya blinked several times. What was wrong here? Some detail was out of place. Something so obvious he should recognize it instantly. But light was bad in the forest; there were many shadows, pierced only at random by sunbeams. Illya heard a distant chatter start, somewhere far behind him.