by Peter Leslie
"Oh, it's beautiful," the girl cried. "It looks just like full moon - only much brighter!"
Illya's face remained impassive. "Seems quiet enough,' he said. "I guess we'd better get moving while it's still dark Out there. Unless we can penetrate the tunnel mouth before dawn, we might as well go home."
While the girl held the infrared lamp out of the passenger window, Kuryakin strapped the lenses over his eyes and got out of the car. He crossed the road and busied himself with the latch of the wire gates blocking the entry to the estancia. In the unearthly light visible to him through his glasses, it took him less than thirty seconds to pick the lock. There seemed to be no alarm system connected with it. The gate was used so much that they probably considered the alarms were best left further inside the Thrush enclave.
When he had swung the gates open, he ran lightly back across the road and released the handbrake of the car.
"Here, take one of these guns," he said crisply to the girl, rummaging again in the attaché case. "Basically, as you see, they're long-barreled .32 automatics - too big for the pocket but splendid for using in a car. The great thing about them, however, is the accessory department: look, you can screw on, separately or together, a shoulder stock, a barrel extension with silencer that gives them greater accuracy, a butt extension that means you can use them two-handed from the hip, and an infrared viewfinder. That means you can see the light thrown by this flashlight for aiming - but you don't have to bother about wearing special glasses."
"I can't wait!" Coralie exclaimed, taking the spidery-looking weapon gingerly and examining it carefully.
"I'm serious," Kuryakin said. "You may have to use it if you're with me... In the meantime: let's go!"
Standing outside the open driver's door with one hand on the wheel, he began to push. Slowly the car began to move, gathering momentum as it left the grassy shoulder and rolled across the highway, moving still faster as the tires crunched on gravel and it passed the gateposts, accelerating at last as the wheels ran down the gentle I slope leading towards the screen of bushes and the tunnel mouth. As soon as the vehicle had enough momentum, Illya swung into the seat and steered from the inside, his eyes probing the space behind every bush in the weird illumination provided by the infrared lamp and the glasses.
The Volkswagen, without a light showing and with a dead motor, sped down the incline in the darkness, twisting past bushes and obstructions with unerring aim.
The dregs of the night hung heaviest in the wooded hollow just before the entrance to the tunnel. Taking her eye away for a moment from the infrared light, the girl was astonished to see how stygian the blackness was. Very dimly, now, she could make out the darker blur that was the cliff face, the indistinct opening of the tunnel mouth. From here, too, she could faintly make out the double row of low-power ceiling bulbs that marked the course of the subterranean passage curving away into the heart of the hill.
Kuryakin's plan was to switch on the ignition, put the car in gear and then let in the clutch to start the engine once they were inside the tunnel. He only needed the surprise brought by silence to get past any guards and keep the car rolling. From there on, he intended to roar through the tunnel as fast as he could, trusting again to that element of surprise to enable him to get through and establish a position on the far side before any of the defenders had realized what was happening.
After that, he would have to play it by ear. He only hoped that fate would allow him to consolidate a position strong enough at least to bargain from. If not, his own position - and the girl's - would be as bad, if not worse, than Solo's.
Still - he had to try. There was nothing else he could do.
Coralie was looking through the gunsight again now, squinting along the barrel at the strange lunar landscape thrown into relief by the magic beam of the flashlight in her other hand. She idly scrutinized the shadowed interstices of the cliff face, glanced at the trees standing proud like cardboard cutouts against the rock, looked past the closed door to the guardhouse, and up at the arched tunnel mouth –
"Illya!" she screamed. "Look out! The tunnel… Stop!"
Tires screeched as he stamped on the pedal to lock the car's back wheels. The great steel shutter that she had glimpsed rumbling down to seal off the entrance slammed home in its metal guides. The VW, slowing but not able to stop entirely in the time, slid straight into it with a noise like a hundred thunderclaps.
"We must have crossed a photo-electric cell guard," Kuryakin shouted as he started the engine, crashed the gearshift into reverse and backed the buckled car away from the blanked off tunnel mouth. "That thing was automatically operated or I'm -"
A burst of shooting drowned his words. Bullet thumped into the bodywork and spanged off metal projections as he screamed around in a half circle, thumped a tree bole, coaxed the car back into first and shot back the way they had come. The VW's gas tank was in the front of the car and if there was to be shooting it was better to keep it at the far end! "The light! Put the light on again!" he yelled to the girl as he wrestled with the wheel. "Nobody can see it but us!"
Coralie had, almost as a reflex, switched the flashlight off as soon as she'd seen the steel shutter crashing down. Now she thumbed the lever again and stared anxiously through the screen as Illya rocketed them up towards the house. There was nobody to be seen, although the gunfire was as intense as ever. Above the explosions, an insistent, thin shrilling, an alarm bell could be heard ringing and ringing.
"Get down below the seat back!" the agent shouted.
"They're firing at us from in front too, now." He zigzagged the car wildly from side to side. The windshield starred and a side window shattered. Shards of glass fell noisily to the floor.
"As I thought," be continued. "Those guns must be computer-aimed - they could never fire so accurately in the dark otherwise. Look! In the infrared! You can see a bank of them."
The girl peered over the edge of the door and saw in the beam from the flashlight a group of muzzles belching flame and smoke from a steel screen behind a clump of bushes.
"Hold tight!" Kuryakin called. "I'll go in here: maybe the trees will slow down their radar responses." The car careened off the roadway and bumped on flat tires among the great trunks studding the woods between the tunnel and the estancia. Abruptly there was a stinging sensation in Coralie's hand and the light from the lamp dwindled and vanished. A stray slug had killed the flash light. At the same time the motor spluttered and died; it was all very well to turn your back to preserve the tank, but that put your carburetor in a very vulnerable position.
Now that the car was silent, they could hear above the shrilling of the bell the distant shouts of orders, the trampling of feet, a door opening and slamming as men filed through. Somewhere through the trees, a searchlight dazzled on and outlined the leaves in golden light.
For a moment Kuryakin sat tense, his lower lip thrust out, his deep-set eyes glittering beneath that bulging brow. His forehead was beaded with sweat and a trickle of blood from a furrow scoring one cheekbone had dried on his face. For the moment, the shooting seemed to have stopped.
"They've halted the automatic fire to let their men move in," he said at last. "Come on! Let's go while the going's good." Seizing the girl by the hand, he pushed his way out of the riddled car and dodged away through the trees. A moment later they heard a tractor grinding along the road towards the thicket.
There was a flurry of commands and a second searchlight killed the dark just behind them. Tiger-striped with bars of blazing light, the little wood seemed suddenly a bare and empty place, the black shadows the only hints of comfort and warmth within it. There was a rattle of bolts and a volley of gunshots again. Bullets thwack into the leaves around them and the girl heard one zing past her ear with a noise like an angry bee.
"Stay behind a tree and give me covering fire," Kuryakin cried.
As the girl turned to pump slugs from the unfamiliar U.N.C.L.E. gun in the general direction of the shouts, she saw him flit from
shadow to shadow, from trunk to trunk, until he was only forty or fifty yards from the tractor. He dropped on one knee and cradled the gun to his right shoulder.
Then flame stabbed the dark as the gun leaped in his hands. A moment later, the searchlight on the tractor went out suddenly.
Kuryakin was back at the girl's side, materializing from the dark. "Come on," he whispered. "We'll get out. If they rim true to form, it'll be grenades after this. Then dogs... I know when I'm beaten - temporarily. We'll have to retire to lick our wounds and rethink."
There was a dull plop from behind them as they threaded their way through the undergrowth as quietly as they could. It was followed by a second, a third, a fourth. Among the tatters of mist that the approaching dawn limned white against the trees, another and more pungent vapor eddied and swirled.
"Tear gas!" Illya cried hoarsely, suppressing a cough and trying not to dab his streaming eyes. "Good thing we left in time to miss the full effect."
For a fraction of a second, the wood sprang lividly to life in the green glare of an explosion. Simultaneously, they heard the flat crump of the detonation. Metal rasped, glass tinkled and things tore through the leaves.
"Mortar," the agent said curtly, hauling himself up onto an overhanging branch and hanging motionless beside the wire fence which showed dimly in the watery lights seeping into the sky from the east. "Here - put your arms around my legs and swing yourself across. It sounds as though they've disposed of the old VW for us. Next they'll start quartering the thicket before they send in the dogs."
He shifted along the branch hand over hand and dropped silently to the road.
"Lucky for us," he said, taking the girl's hand and setting off at a run, "that we thought of bringing the other VW and leaving it a hundred yards further down the road..."
---
In San Felipe do Caiapo, one of the ill-lit houses fronted by the boardwalk boasted a larger opening linking interior and exterior than did its neighbors. This was the nearest thing the village could produce to a coffee shop, and here Illya and Coralie repaired to soothe the feelings of humiliation and defeat engendered by their dawn patrol.
"They teach us never to underestimate an enemy," Illya said ruefully as he called for the bill, "and yet we appear to do it all the time; we just never learn, it seems!" There was a bandage across his cheek and he needed a shave. The girl - despite the dry heat of what promised to be a blazing day - looked as cool and self-possessed as ever.
A waitress whose flesh cascaded in increasing convexities from chin to thigh wobbled over and handed Illya a grubby piece of paper with figures scrawled on it. Behind it was another. On this was written, in English: Thirty-one miles ENE on the road to Brasilia is a fork with a church between the roads. Be there for midday lunch. It was signed Waverly.
"Waverly!" the Russian cried. "But that's ridiculous! How could he possibly be there?... How could he possibly know that we're here?"
"Who is Waverly?" Coralie asked.
"The head of my department at the Command."
"Do you think it's some kind of trap?"
"Oh, no. If it were a fake message, it would be bound to be too clever - you know, too good, too cautious and so on. The fact that it's sent openly in English, in clear, with that laconic phrasing and superb unconcern for security - that's the genuine Waverly, all right. No, what astonished me isn't to hear from him, but to hear he's there!"
"But perhaps he isn't," the girl objected. "The message tells us to be there for lunch. It doesn't say he'll be there too."
Illya looked at the paper again. "So it doesn't," he said. "Let's see… Here! Senhora! Who gave you this paper? Where did you get it?"
But the slatternly waitress, suddenly unable to understand their Portuguese, merely shrugged her vast shoulders, spread her pudgy fingers and vanished into the interior of the house muttering something or other about a boy on a bicycle.
"Never mind," Kuryakin said. "We have the perfect way of finding out." He gestured to the Volkswagen parked across the square. "By the time we've got out of here and found a stream to clean up in, there there'll be just about enough time left to make it...."
---
It was in fact nine minutes after twelve when Illya checked the figures showing on the car's odometer and said, "Here's the thirty-first mile coming up now. But I can see ahead for two or three wiles and there's no sign of a fork."
"Yes," Coralie cried, "the side road we just passed coming in... Stop!... Look, it would be a fork if you were coming the other way, wouldn't it? And there's the church between the two roads, see!"
Illya braked and looked in the rear-view mirror. "Yes, you're right, of course," he said, turning the car on a piece of rough ground. "Thinking of the place as you come from Brasilia, it would never strike you that the fork wasn't one from the other direction!... Why, I believe it's the same junction that boy at the car rental company gave me for -"
"It is, it is," the girl interrupted. "He told me too. The signs tell you to take the right-hand road for Getuliana, but the boy said to take the left-hand one through San Felipe. Do you suppose the coffee shop there is run by his brother or something?"
"There are some misplaced hormones in the family if it is," Illya said. "No, I don't mean the enormous lady, you idiot - Oh! What's that just to the right of the church?"
Beyond the derelict church separating the roads was a dense thicket of tall trees. A short way down the right hand fork something white and metallic glittered in a shaft of sunlight piercing the shadows.
Kuryakin drove slowly down. A huge Cadillac convertible, blinding white from stem to stern, was parked beside the road.
He coasted fifty yards past the empty car and pulled off the road. "Most of my armory went up with the other VW," he said quietly. "But I still have this Walther PPK. It's a big gun, too clumsy for whipping in and out of waistbands and pockets... Do you still have your Beretta?"
The girl nodded.
"Good. You take the Walther and stay in the car to give me covering fire if necessary, and give me the Beretta to take with me, okay?... I'm sure it's all right, but it's better to be certain."
Coralie Simone dropped her chin to the back of the seat and watched him tread warily away among the trees, the big Walther with its brown cross-hatched butt held firmly in her small hand. The agent was grasping the Italian automatic inside the patch pocket of his lightweight jacket.
She watched him circle the Cadillac, glance at the registration number, peer inside the car, and scrutinize the trees surrounding it. Apart from the disused chapel, there wasn't another building in sight. A flock of green parakeets dipped and swooped from one side of the road to the other, and another bird, off in the thicket to her right, reiterated a harsh cry that she couldn't identify. There was a high, thin humming from the countless insects winging beneath the great leaves far above her head. Abruptly she saw Kuryakin stiffen. She brought up the gun and rested it on the seat back as he stared across the road.
The outlines of his sparse body sprang into diamond-hard relief as he stepped from the shadow to the brilliant sunlight barring the dusty surface.
"Sure 'tis over here, we are at-all, Mr. Kuryakin," the voice called from the far side of the highway. "Them blasted insects are a wee bit less attentive here for some reason - besides which we can use the extra few seconds to scrutinize the callers, eh?"
"Tufik!... I mean O'Rourke," Illya cried. "What the devil are you doing here, you old rascal?"
His face broke into a smile, he gestured the girl to join them, and he ran across the road. Behind a screen of flowering shrubs, the huge Irishman sat in his wheel chair at a table which had been erected in a space beneath the frees. On the white cloth covering it were plates, cutlery, glasses and plastic containers filled with food. Behind, the tal1 moustached man called Raoul busied himself with a silver bucket, bottles and a portable icebox laid out on the top of a suitcase. Four folding chairs were pulled up to the table.
"As to what we're doin' he
re," O'Rourke said, "well, you got the invitation, did you not? Sure, of course you did, for here you are! Well then - we're entertaining some friends to luncheon, that's what."
"Yes, but... It was surprising enough to hear from Waverly, but to find you here..." Illya shook his head, "Oh, I'm sorry - of course you don't know each other," he added as the girl pushed through the bushes to join them. "Manuel O'Rourke – Miss Simone. And this is a colleague of Manuel's, Coralie, whom I know only as Raoul."
"Ortiz," the moustached man smiled as he bowed and shook hands. "It is agreeable to see that now you are together and not one in pursuit of the other, eh?"
"I remember you, of course," Coralie exclaimed, "In Rio! You're the man who was following Mr. Kuryakin too, aren't you?"
"I am desolated to contradict a lady," Raoul said. "But I was actually following you."
"Come on then, let's start; let us begin," O'Rourke said. "We cannot offer you too exotic a meal, for this is peasant country, not like the coast. But there is mungunza, acaraje, a cucumber salad, a cold fish from the Pireneos not too unlike salmon, and vatapá - a Bahia dish made from manihot flour cooked with dende oil and pimentos, with slices of fish in between. Also there is a local white wine which is drinkable so long as you chill it enough to kill the flavor."
"So what about Waverly, then?" Illya asked as they sat down a few minutes later and prepared to eat.
"Waverly?"
The Russian gestured to the vacant fourth chair. "Aren't we going to wait for him?" he asked.
O'Rourke chuckled throatily. "The vatapá would be congealed to hell if we did," he said. "That not Waverly's chair. That's for Rafael - he's away in the forest finding some local leaf for the salad. It's a deal of a job, you know, for 'tis not like the old country, where it's all green grasses and moss and I don't know what-all. You have to go searchin' for your greenstuff in this dried-up hole!"