The Diving Dames Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "Yes, but where is Waverly?- if we're to take the message seriously at all."

  Waverly? Sure he's in Rio."

  "Well then…"

  "If we'd waited for him, stayed there until he reached us from New York, we'd not have left until this morning. So we decided to drive up yesterday and last night - its not over six hundred miles - for the times of the planes were not convenient and anyway the car's rather – er - special."

  "I'm afraid I still don't see..."

  "Your Mr. Waverly's safe in my place. Joana and Consuela will look after him. Now come on and eat. We're not due to speak to him until two."

  And not another word of business would the Irishman talk until that time. Rafael - who turned out to be the boy from the auto rental company in Brasilia - arrived with a fistful of thin green leaves. They ate and drank their way solidly through an excellently prepared and served meal, and at five minutes to two, O'Rourke pushed back his wheelchair, dabbed his mouth delicately with napkin, and said, "Right, me boyo! While Rafael and Raoul entertain the lady and prepare some coffee and Izarra, let's you and me cross the road and get to work, eh?

  The enormous trunk of the Cadillac was entirely filled with electronic equipment - transmitting, receiving and recording. As the electrically operated lid rose, Kuryakin drew in his breath with a gasp of astonishment at the sight of the valves, transistors, condensers, selectors, tuners, spools and knobbed chassis packed in there.

  "Ruddy old tin can," O'Rourke said, slapping the car on one of its huge fenders. "I'd rather have an Iso Rivolta, an Aston or a Maserati. But where else would you get about ninety cubic feet of stowage and enough motor to haul all this weight?"

  "It's certainly most impressive," Illya said. "But isn't this a bit public? I mean, we're right on the side of road -"

  "Have you heard any traffic while we've been eating? Did you see one single vehicle going in either direction Tell me."

  "Well, no, now that you mention it. Even so -"

  "Could happen there's a roadblock a while up the road. Just a routine check, no doubt. But these things do take time... and sure there are so many uniforms in Brazil that it's a bold man can tell the genuine from the spurious," the Irishman said innocently.

  "O'Rourke! You haven't... you didn't... Actually, you did, didn't you? You really take the cake! You seal off half a state just so that you can make a private radio contact without inconveniencing yourself! I don't see too much difference between your setup here and in Casablanca. Talk about having your cake and eating it…"

  O'Rourke merely smiled broadly as he wheeled his chair to the rear of the car and leaned in over the open trunk, twiddling knobs and dials.

  "That must be a pretty powerful combination in there," Illya said conversationally.

  "Powerful? Wait'll I show you, boy. It was built for me by a fellow he got drummed out of the CIA. electronics research department for helping radio hams with G.I. stores. Listen…?"

  Through a burst of static a calm voice enunciated: "This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the eight o'clock news.... The rail strike is to go on as planned. Britain's balance of payments problem was described last night as 'chaotic' by the President of San Marino. In the county cricket championship -"

  Chuckling, O'Rourke twirled his dials. "C'est ici Radio Monte Carlo," a voice said loudly. "Voire programme de vedettes. Et voici l'heuro: troisieme dop, ii sera exactement…"

  Kuryakin looked at his watch. The minute hand was just beginning to coincide with the second hand over the hour. The hour hand stood at two.

  "Hoe laat is het ontbijt? Wat hebt U klar? Wat is de specialiteit van het land?" the loudspeaker intoned. "Vandaag, morgenochtend altijd-het is de Corn Flakes van…"

  "I don't wish to seem discourteous," Illya began as a lilting German voice began to croon of loves lost and regained, "but if Waverly is expecting us to call at two, don't you think perhaps…"

  "You're right, boy. You're absolutely correct," O'Rourke said. "Here, wait'll I get the call sign going and you can speak privately on this." He handed the agent a radio telephone receiver shaped very like the normal domestic instrument. "It's scrambled at both ends. Not to worry!"

  He spoke into a microphone in the trunk, adjusting knobs. Illya heard a girl's voice speaking in Portuguese and then, after a pause, Waverly's well-known dry tones: "Mr. Kuryakin? Are you there?"

  "I'm here, sir."

  "Good. We have very little time. I shall try to come out there myself later today, since I've come this far. But you'll have to act on your own. At once."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'll give it to you straight, a run-down from the top. Anything you've already found out, so much the better. Afterwards you can fill me in on anything I don't know. Understood?"

  "Certainly, sir. Go ahead."

  "I intend to, Mr. Kuryakin… First, Mr. Solo is still alive - or at least he was early this morning when he managed to reach me with a radio message. The message was interrupted, so presumably he was caught and will now be in great danger. Here's what he has discovered: Thrush used the ostensible building of a new city and a spurious hydroelectric station as a blind to get a large force of contractors into the area of San Felipe.

  "Secondly, this force built a sophisticated fortress powered with atomic fuel on the floor of the valley behind the dam. When the valley was flooded to make the artificial lake supposed to supply the hydroelectric station with power, the fortress was submerged. It can now be entered only through a tunnel bored under the mountain separating the dam from the adjoining valley, or via a special underwater entrance.

  "Thirdly, the false D.A.M.E.S. are a collection of women with criminal records recruited from the West Coast to help resettle and pacify those Negro and Indian peasants dispossessed through the scheme; their subsidiary tasks are to assist with certain underwater aspect of the plan.

  "Fourthly, the dispossessed natives and others likely to spread gossip about the rather unorthodox procedure at San Felipe have been actively discouraged by the head of a spurious Candomblé terreiro, a man called Hernando, who plays upon their superstitions and invokes their gods to obtain their silence - which is why no stories of these activities seem to have reached Brasilia or Rio or Salvador.

  "Fifthly, and most important, the purpose of all this: The lake has been built as a safe base for tests involving a new atomic-powered submarine, something between Polaris and Nautilus, which has been developed by Thrush scientists at the fortress."

  "What!"

  "In a landlocked lake far from civilization in the Matto Grosso, they can experiment on a scale impossible in the crowded seas of the world. The underwater vessel is at the moment engaged in a series of proving runs in the depths of the reservoir, but in a day or so the plan moves into its next phase - which brings me to point five. Mr. Solo tells me they plan to fire a series of intermediate range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads."

  "What?"

  "This whole operation is only a pilot scheme to give them information to be used later for plans under the oceans of the world. Even so, it involves warheads of several megatons each being launched at six cities in Argentina and Chile - Buenos Aires, Bahia Blanca, Cordoba, Santiago, Valparaiso and Concepcion, we understand. With the Pan-American conference coming up, you can readily imagine what such an attack would do to the O.A.S."

  "But that's fantastic!" Illya exclaimed. "What can we do about it?"

  "The briefing is simple," the voice in his ear said crisply. "I want you to go in there tonight and get Solo out. And at the same time I want you to put that submarine and its armaments out of action. Permanently."

  "You're joking, of course," Illya said.

  "Mr. Kuryakin!"

  "Oh, sorry. Silly of me. You never do, do you?"

  "Do you have anything constructive to say?" The voice was icy.

  "Yes, sir. You cannot get in, for a start... The reservoir fills a valley which is one of several running parallel - and the hills buttressing it on either side
are too bare and too steep for wheeled vehicles. Nor can they be overlooked from anywhere: what goes on in the lake remains completely without witnesses. It's all very well chosen as a site. The only way in, as you said, is through the tunnel connecting the adjoining valley directly with the underwater fortress. But we already tried to rush that, at dawn today. And it's impossible."

  "Impossible?"

  "Virtually impossible. Impossible with the means I have here. You'd need a battalion of troops with medium artillery, bazookas, flame throwers and all to bust in there. The tunnel is radar-guarded with electronica1ly operated steel shutters, computerized small arms, mortars, and so on."

  "What do you suggest then?"

  "As I see it, there's s only one possible plan that could work in the time. But it would need an awful lot of cooperation from the Command headquarters, from the U. S. or Brazilian navies, and from you, sir!"

  "You can have all you want, Mr. Kuryakin. Tell me about it."

  Illya spoke persuasively for three and a half minutes, put down the receiver, closed the Cadillac's trunk, and walked back across the road to the picnic. The Irish man was sipping his inevitable liqueur, telling the others an improbable story about his exploits in the Easter Rising of 1916.

  "I may be calling on your services, later tonight," the. Russian said when he had finished. "And anybody else who's available. Mr. Waverly has told me that you" - he turned and smiled at Coralie - "are officially in the 'to be trusted' category. And I imagine that Raoul can come wherever Senhor O'Rourke directs. But what about Rafael, here?... Is the car rental company yet another of your sidelines, O'Rourke?"

  "Ah, now look," the fat man protested, scandalized. "Would I be likely to run a hire company? Sure I'm no businessman and you know it. Rafael earns a little money on the side by supplying me with information about clients every now and then - but he's only here with us today because it's his day off, you know. There's no professional connection!"

  "Absolutely not, old boy," the boy said with his wide smile. "Simply couldn't have the staff with divided allegiances, now could we? Be a terribly bad show, too, to go for a picnic on a working day, don't you know. Must keep in with the jolly old providers, what!"

  "Where in Heaven's name do you get that comic-opera English from?" Illya asked, grinning.

  "But its the latest, the very latest," Rafael protested. "Very in indeed. Mr. Williams told me."

  "Mr. Williams is too busy to go to the movies often," Illya said gravely. "It is true that the English style is in - but the play-it-cool, stiff-upper-lip, drawing room manner's not the proper style. Its the so-called kitchen sink bit that's in today. The poor-but-honest, working class meritocrat - he's the man that gets the votes now."

  The boy received this information with a blink of surprise, but he recovered quickly. "Whyn't you keep your flamin' lip buttoned, mate?" he said. "Straight up, you perishin' know-alls fair turn me stomach, you do!"

  Chapter 11

  In At The Back Door....

  THE SUN HAD sunk beneath the bleached rim of rock formed by the higher sierras a quarter of an hour before the giant helicopter whirred in from the east. It had been touch-and-go whether or not they got a troop-carrier but Waverly had been pulling strings in Rio and Washington all afternoon and eventually he had made it. The nearest chopper with a bomb bay had been aboard a ship somewhere off Central America, even then, and they had spent an anxious hour and a half wondering whether the pilot was going to get there in time. Eventually he had sunk onto the runway at Brasilia and explained that he had thought it best to bring the ship with him rather than trust to another plane. Waverly - who had been sitting up front with the pilot - had nodded exasperatingly his agreement.

  And now the operation was at last under way. Waverly had driven off in the Cadillac with O'Rourke and Raoul and Rafael - who had refused point-blank to be left out of it - and was to wait within transceiver call of the tunnel in case they might be able to fight their way out and could use assistance.

  Illya and Coralie, gleaming in skin-tight suits of black rubber, sat just behind the double doors of the bay. In front of them, the midget submarine with its perspex blisters lay sleekly in its specially rigged davits. It looked as frail and crushable as the fabric of the aircraft itself in the faint light drifting back from the instruments showing through the half-open door of the cockpit. Presently the copilot emerged from the cabin and shut the door. He sat down next to Illya and began to speak. He was a navy man, crewcut, with a Bostonian accent.

  "Just to check out the details with you people," he said, "I'd like to repeat, one, that you take your places and we screw you down before we lose height at twenty-seventeen. You've already been briefed on how to release the hatches from inside. Two, we shall set her down to within about twenty feet of the surface and then lower away. You'll have to be prepared to get bumped if there's anything of a breeze down there, anything enough to make a wave on that lake. Three, in her present trim, it would be most unwise to go lower than about forty fathoms - this hasn't the depth capability of that Squid you used on your last assignment,*See THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. #8, The Monster Wheel Affair. and we didn't have time to fly the Squid here for you. Besides it wouldn't have worked in this lake - it's fresh-water, not salt-water. How far below the surface is this underwater pen, d'you know?"

  "We have no idea," Illya said. "Deep enough, obviously, for the buildings to escape detection from the air."

  "Well, even with nearly vertical sides and good camouflage, that would need a good twenty to thirty fathoms to the top of the buildings.

  "I know. We'll just have to hope the entry to the pen is on an upper floor, that's all! The place is built up from the floor of the old valley of course, but we don't know yet how many stories there are."

  "I see. Now, what. else? Oh, yes: radar. The equipment's the usual gear, handled by the back-marker. There's not much room in there, as you can see, but there's a miniature aqualung each. If you do have to get out, though, remember you have only thirty minutes of oxygen in them. Now I have to ask you a question. Number One wants to know: Do they have any AI at all? Can they spot a UFO and if so will they open up? It's a question of being prepared to take evasive action," he said apologetically.

  "We don't know," Illya said. "Our whole scheme is predicated on the assumption that they don't. Having taken all this trouble to build a secret place where nobody can observe them, making their own sea to sail on as it were, we imagine they'll feel secure enough not to have bothered. No scheduled air corridors cross the region and we can see no reason for them to have guarded against air or water invasion - in the first place, there's nothing for a plane to see; and in the second, how can there be any other craft on the lake when it's just been made and their underwater base is the only dock on it?... All the same, to be honest, we don't actually know. And if they can tape planes, they'll be on to us!"

  "We'd better keep our fingers crossed for each other, then, hadn't we?" the navy man said agreeably. "Now come on - in you go."

  The girl bunched her hair on top of her head and dragged on the tight-fitting rubber helmet. Highlights slid along the surface of the polished latex as she reached up to set the oval mask in place. A moment later she was lowering herself into the tiny rear compartment of the submarine.

  Illya climbed into the forward cockpit, turned to give her the thumbs-up sign, and lowered the perspex nacelle over his head and shoulders. The navy man screwed down both the transparent hatches and shortly after wards they felt the helicopter sinking towards the lake invisible in the darkness below them. The cigar-shaped craft with its twin blisters, despite its aerodynamic shape, lurched sickeningly and swayed from side to side on its guide ropes when the bomb bay doors were opened and the helicopter crew winched them slowly down towards the water. Through the perspex, they could see the drowned valley curving away to the southwest, fifteen or twenty miles of smooth lead foil among the darkness of the jagged hills. Lights pricked the dark to the south and northeast, but they
were a long way away. Immediately below, there was not a sign of life.

  They hit the water stern first with a ringing slap that echoed thunderously in the tiny craft. Half a minute later, they were pitching uneasily in the choppy waves agitating the surface of the lake. The helicopter, having activated the automatic release grapples on the guides, rose into the night and clattered away towards Brasilia

  Kuryakin immediately switched on the motors and took the sub beneath the surface. Coralie Simone had a fleeting impression of waves splashing towards her up the inclined surface of the screen that was so close to her eyes, and then they were in a blackness so intense that it almost hurt. She was aware of a complex hum from the electric propulsion system and its auxiliaries - and of a dark and heavy chill that pervaded the air in the minute cockpit and numbed her senses.

  "We shall have to hurry," Kuryakin's amplified voice split the silence from the intercom by her ear. "The air's very limited and we don't dare use the cylinders in case we have to get out underwater. Can you get the equipment working right away?"

  "Of course," the girl said, and she willed her hands to the tasks they had learned that afternoon. There were two systems aboard: the usual echo-sounding device for revealing subterranean topography, other shapes in the sea and so on, and a more modern technique, analogous to the system used in air-to-air missiles, homing on the heat energy released by the motors of the quarry.

  "Do you think they'll have the same equipment on their submarine?" she asked as she busied herself with dials and indicators.

  "I would guess not," Illya said. "We hope not, anyway. Even if they have it, they'd hardly have it in use. I mean, they'd use the navigational aids, of course - but why would they watch a screen for possible enemy ships when it's their lake and they know they're the only ships, in it?"

  "I suppose you're right. But if they did have it... and use it?'