by LRH Balzer
"Good. But you should not have done it with your arm."
"I didn't."
"Good." Kuryakin yawned loudly and glanced around the cabin. "Is there something to drink here?"
"Hungry?”
"If I was hungry, I would have requested some food. I am merely thirsty. After all this time, must I still clarify my dietary requirements around you?" Illya touched his temple again and winced. "What a time to be isolated. Waverly has need of us, and we lie around here vacationing."
Napoleon returned with a glass of water and a few pills. 'Take these." He watched as his partner reluctantly swallowed the tablets. "I'll make us some food and then we can discuss what to do if Karl doesn't show up."
"I'm not hungry. I believe I made myself clear—"
"Yeah, I heard you. However, as you know, if you don't eat, those pills won't stay down, your headache will get worse, and I'll be forced to gag your mouth to avoid listening to your cranky voice."
"I'm not cranky and I'm not hungry." Illya tossed back the blankets roughly. But he ate some of the soup, then threw it up fifteen minutes later. They tended each other's wounds, then Illya plunked himself in front of the short wave and they listened to the reports filter in of power being restored to the entire Northeast States. Apparently none of the feared riots had materialized, and the police even reported a lower crime rate than was normal.
Once the reports started recycling, Illya flicked off the radio and spent the rest of his waking time wandering around the cabin restlessly, alternating between disoriented and snappy, before falling back onto the couch asleep by mid-afternoon. Napoleon made an attempt to ignore the foul mood, assuming it was brought on by the concussion and general frustration.
He was trying not to let his own tension get to him. Napoleon dozed in a rocking chair before the fireplace, reading his paperback while trying to breathe around the stabbing pain in his arm. They had taken a good look at it earlier in the day, and it appeared as though it would heal nicely, in a week or so. Meanwhile, it hurt like the dickens.
Surprisingly, they still had no idea where exactly they were, something that made them both feel disoriented. They were in Grayson's cabin, yes. But what state? What mountain were they perched on? There didn't seem to be any local maps lying around. Not even a list of phone numbers, since there was no phone. No telephone books. No handy brochures saying which ski lodge was in the vicinity.
Grayson was truly isolated here, just as he said he was. But the difference was, Grayson had a helicopter and could leave anytime he wanted to, and they didn't.
Illya woke again in the early evening and grudgingly ate some more soup, which stayed down despite the rather anxious look on his face on two occasions. They each took some pain killers for their respective injuries, and Illya rallied long enough to change the dressings on his partner's shoulder, announcing that the wound looked like it was healing without infection. Napoleon's wrist was then examined carefully in the dim light, the bruising now more livid, but it, too, appeared to be a minor inconvenience.
By nine-thirty that night, they were both ready for bed. Napoleon double-checked the short wave radio and the security system, built up the fire and collapsed, bone weary, on the bed, his shoulder still throbbing wickedly, despite the pain medication.
"Grayson didn't come," he remarked into the darkness.
He could hear the sofa creaking as Illya turned over, but there was no answer.
"We haven't heard from U.N.C.L.E.," Napoleon mused. The pen transceiver had remained silent. It was too dangerous to make a call, as long as they were being traced via the transmissions. "If Grayson doesn't come by eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, we should head to the resort he mentioned." Solo glanced to the sofa, at Illya's hair reflecting the fire and the bright eyes staring across the room at him.
"If we must," Kuryakin said finally. "Will your arm be sufficiently healed for such activity?"
"It'll have to be. Will your head?"
Kuryakin turned over again, facing the back of the couch. "At eleven o'clock tomorrow," he said, his voice muffled.
*****
"Remember our first assignment?"
At Illya's question, Napoleon glanced up from watching the oatmeal bubble slowly. The sun was just rising, spilling in the east window, making his partner's hair light up like a beacon. But beneath the crown of light, there was a darkness that he had come to recognize, a melancholy shroud that would periodically engulf his partner, drawing him away, eroding his defenses. Not his abilities as an agent; they were never affected. And not his knowledge, nor his dependability, nor his skill. It was as if an old wound had suddenly risen to the surface, much like the bubbles in the oatmeal, working its way through the man’s life until it reached the surface.
Alerted now, Napoleon took a moment and catalogued his partner's hunched shoulders. He watched the way Illya held the mason jar filled with sugar in his hands and slowly tilted it from side to side, absorbed by the sight of the white grains shivering down the side like sand in an hour glass. The dark circles beneath his downcast eyes. The weariness from his concussion and the pain medication and their isolated circumstances.
It was a measure of this man's trust in him that he saw it at all. They had come far in two years, lived enough for several lifetimes. "Our what?" he asked, biding for time.
"Our first assignment." Illya set the jar of sugar down and opened it.
"What about it? It was a disaster, as I recall. Half froze our butts off, stuck on the side of the mountain, and we spent a week or so in the infirmary at Headquarters." In truth, Napoleon remembered little of those harrowing hours, just the faint memory of warmth touching his icy universe, a human blanket desperate to keep him alive.
"It wouldn't have been a disaster, if you had just listened to me before you took off," Illya said quietly, stirring an indecent amount of sugar into his tea.
It was an old argument, the incident Illya brought up when they had differing opinions, or more correctly, the incident Illya brought up when Napoleon didn't bother to listen to him and he wanted his attention.
Napoleon smiled now, remembering how they had been at first. "Well, maybe if you’d had an ounce of personality then, I would have listened to you. As it was, it was rather hard to relate to a blank face." He tossed a box of powdered milk toward the table. "Here—make up a few cups for breakfast."
"Blank?" Kuryakin asked, after a moment.
Napoleon nodded, a smile touching his lips again at the memory of Illya calmly reading a book beneath his bed. "Blank. An almost total absence of personality." It wasn't true, of course. He had just been unaware of how to interpret the Russian.
When Illya made no response, Napoleon glanced up again, taking in the pensive expression. "Hey, it's just the way it was, then. I'm not saying you're like that now. You're Mr. Personality now."
"I almost left then." The words were spoken scarcely above a whisper, an admission of sorts.
Solo paused before answering, wondering where exactly his partner was going with this. "I didn't know that." He watched the emotions flicker over Illya's averted face. "Why were you going to leave?" he asked, when Illya remained silent. "Was I that much of a bastard?"
"No, not really," Illya said, still seeming distracted by the instructions printed on the powdered milk box. "It just seemed that it was going to be a waste of time trying to get into U.N.C.L.E., to be accepted as an agent. It was obvious I was not going to fit in.”
"You went from the newbie in Section Eight to the Assistant Chief Enforcement Agent of Section Two in one assignment. You broke all records. What more could you have asked for? How fast did you want it?"
Illya stood then and walked to the water jug. "I was there two years already."
"In Section Eight."
"I was there because I was not qualified for Section Two. Or even Section Three."
"That's ridiculous. You were over-qualified, if anything."
"But there were two tiny notations on my file tha
t disqualified me."
"That you were Russian?"
"Yes. And that I was a defector." Illya poured two cups of water into a pitcher, then stirred in the powder.
Solo shrugged. "Semantics. That's not really how it was, and the people who really needed to know, already knew. I think your paperwork is in order now. It doesn't matter now."
Kuryakin shook his head. "You're wrong. It always matters. People are just more willing to look the other way, because I am convenient. To overlook it, for the time being, because I am good at what I do and they need me. But if I make a mistake, be assured it will come back like one of those Australian boomerangs you like to play with."
Still stirring the oatmeal, Napoleon looked over at the man who had become his partner due to necessity, then choice, and his friend due to choice, and now necessity. "Is that why you never said much back then? You never offered any personal information. It made you seem as though you had no life outside of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. We'd worked together for almost a year before I even knew that Norm Graham and his family were important to you."
"Yet, you requested me as a partner." Illya continued to stir the milk mixture, not looking up.
"Hell, you saved my life. Plus, I may be stubborn and opinionated, but I figured I had just met my equal in that department, and after everything I had put you through, if you were willing to work with me on a permanent basis, I was willing to give it a shot. I'm not stupid," he added, almost as an afterthought.
Kuryakin smiled then, shrugging off the discussion—and his mood—as he returned to the table. "So back to our green energy beam—do you think it's the same thing?" Elbows on the pine surface, Illya rested his chin on his fists, a slight frown on his face. "On that first assignment, there was a green light, some kind of energy source, wasn't there? At that warehouse—the one I was assigned to go on a recon with you when I was still in Section Eight? The warehouse blew up; they never found a trace of the weapon. And then a few weeks later, you saw it in that Thrush base in Vermont. Remember?"
Napoleon brushed his hair from his eyes, trying to recall what it was he had seen. "That was over two years ago."
"That was exactly two years ago, almost to the day. Seems longer, though, doesn't it?" Illya mused.
Napoleon looked back at him. "You may have something, though. The light I saw had that same strange glow." He nodded, thinking back to the weapon on the office building roof. He knew it had sparked a memory; it had been that first assignment.
Illya nodded. "I only saw a glimpse of it at the warehouse that day, but it was the fluorescent aspect of it that I remembered. Like one of your Christmas lights, the ones that flicker."
"It was bigger then. Less controlled. What I saw the day before yesterday was contained and directed."
"Not perfect, though."
"No."
"So they're still working on it."
"Looks like it." Napoleon brought the pot of oatmeal to the table and dished out two bowls. "Illya, you said something strange the other night, and I'm not sure what you meant."
"What did I say?"
"You were looking at the Thrush car that was in flames, and you whispered, 'The baby is in the fire.' What did you mean?"
''What did I say?"
"The baby is in the fire. What did you mean by that?"
Illya stirred the powdered milk mixture, his face once again the blank mask Napoleon had come to hate through the years. "It meant I had a concussion. What else would it mean?"
"That's what I'm asking." When there was no response, he tried another angle. "Something from your childhood maybe? Last month you were having those nightmares about fire and Kiev burning when you were a little boy."
"That was probably what it was. No other meaning. Napoleon," Illya said, changing the subject. "Two years ago, that Thrush base we were after was in Vermont, on a mountain."
"Right."
"We were in Vermont two days ago. That's where we were attacked."
"True." Napoleon left the empty pot on the wood stove and returned to the table, pausing to ask, "What do you suppose the odds are that we're in Vermont right now?"
"The way our luck has been running lately, I'd say it's quite conceivable that we're perched on the top of a mountain that contains a top secret and deadly Thrush base." Illya dumped a few tablespoons of sugar on his oatmeal.
"Assuming you're right..." Napoleon tapped his fingers on the edge of his mug. 'Where does that leave us?"
"Eating breakfast, waiting for a ride out of here."
"Precisely."
- 10 -
Thrumming helicopter blades rattled the log cabin's windows, jolting both agents to their feet, breakfast dishes abandoned on the table.
"He's here!" Kuryakin hissed, already halfway to the door, detouring via the coffee table to scoop up his gun. The Soviet agent peered out the window long enough to identify the helicopter as Grayson's, then he threw open the door to the cabin, struggling into his suit jacket. As he watched, the chopper landed unevenly, and he could see the broken flight deck window. "Napoleon, something's wrong."
"If he appears to be alone, go see if he needs anything from here." Solo moved quickly to gather their things together. "Otherwise, wait for me before you head down. We've only got the one gun."
A white handkerchief appeared through the side window of the helicopter, waved once, then drifted to the snow. Kuryakin scanned the skies for further company, then pulled his thin jacket closed against the wind and slid down the hill in his dress shoes toward the helicopter sitting on the edge of the small landing field, its rotor blades spinning perilously close to the trees. He frowned, drawing his weapon and keeping both hands on it as he approached the helicopter. "Karl?" He could barely make out the pilot through the bullet-ridden cockpit windows, and the glare from the snow made it impossible to see into the cabin with any clarity.
Grayson's head lifted and the big man nodded, then doubled over as his whole body seemed to cramp. "I'm alone," he called out. "Got hit with a bullet," he managed, gasping for air before continuing. "I was okay for about fifteen minutes, but I'm hurting now, matey."
Kuryakin stepped up onto the skid, peering inside, inventorying the damage to the craft and its pilot. With a shake of his head, he looked upward at the cloud-strewn skies. "Another aircraft?"
"Yeah. Helicopter. It pulled off my tail about ten minutes ago." Grayson shakily removed a rolled up towel from where he had it pressed against his lower left chest and Kuryakin winced at the ripped, blood-soaked jacket beneath. "The bullet's lodged in my side. Didn't go through." Grayson's face was ashen, forehead bathed in cold sweat. "Damn it, Illya, they got me not long after I left our U.N.C.L.E. New York aircraft base—We secured it yesterday late, but they must have been on alert, waiting for us to leave."
"Where are they now?" Kuryakin asked, crawling into the seat next to him in the flight deck as he tried to get a look at the wound.
"I think I pulled one down," Grayson gasped. "Lucky shot, actually. But they'll know to look in this area, and if we stay here, they'll see the smoke from the chimney. I've got to get you blokes out of here."
The helicopter wobbled as Solo joined them, his eyes glancing from Grayson's blood-stained clothing, over to his partner to read the severity of their situation. "Thrush?" he asked, tightly.
Kuryakin nodded. "Can you fly this thing, or do you want me to?"
"I'll do it. You’re seeing double."
Unfortunately it was true, or almost true. Illya knew his sight hadn’t cleared yet and holding an image was difficult. "You've only got one arm, though."
"I'll muddle through. I can use my other arm a bit."
"Enough?"
"It'll have to be." Solo helped him get Grayson out of the pilot's seat and into the cabin area of the helicopter.
"Never mind me," the British U.N.C.L.E. officer complained as he grit his teeth against a new onslaught of pain. "They could be here any minute if they radioed for help. You've got to get under wa
y." His last words faded out.
Solo called back over his shoulder. "Karl, I've shut up the cabin and covered our tracks quickly. Fire's out, and the wind will carry away any remaining smoke. The wind's blowing pretty hard actually. Where to?" he asked, then repeated it a moment later when there was no answer.
"Karl?" Kuryakin demanded, reaching to squeeze one shoulder.
"HQ," Grayson wheezed, rallying. "New York HQ. Ask them to do a security b-block for you," he stammered. "Th-they should be setup b-by now. Agghh-" Grayson bit back on a scream as Kuryakin pulled open his jacket, then eased away the material to take a look at where the bullet had entered.
The Russian had the first aid box out and quickly pressed a drainage pad over the wound "Hold this," Kuryakin murmured, concentrating on his task, his eyes blinking from his exertion. His head was pounding from leaning over, unfortunately pointing out that despite his personal denial of the facts, he still was fighting the symptoms of a concussion.
Solo ignored the activity behind him and ran a quick one-handed check on the systems. "Okay, we're lifting in a few seconds. Illya, secure yourself somehow. Get the cabin door shut."
Kuryakin moved away from the fallen agent to slide the cabin door closed, then stumbled as the helicopter suddenly lifted. His headache was full blown now from the activity and he could imagine that his partner's was about the same. They weren't in as good condition as they thought they were, but both men were able—and motivated—to keep going.
Grayson was in visible pain, however, his breathing faltering as he lost consciousness. "Easy, Karl," the Russian muttered, trying to hold Grayson steady as Solo brought the helicopter up above the tree level. "Karl, can you tell us where are we? What state? Where is this place?" He grimaced, then slapped the dazed man across the face. "Karl! What mountain are we on?"
There was no response to his coaxing. Kuryakin could hear the crackle of the radio. "Anything?" he shouted to his partner.
"Nothing. Looks like the radio's out." Solo looked back at him, then down to Grayson's still form. "I could use some help up here. I can't fly this one-handed, after all. I need you on the collective pitch lever." The left-handed control was used to change the pitch of the main rotor blades. "What's Karl's condition?" he yelled to his partner. "Do we go to HQ or somewhere closer?"