"We voted," Aly David said. The others nodded in assent. "We are more fortunate than you and Kuryakin in that we die first."
"Yes," Piebr said. "The waiting is the worst."
"No!" Solo straightened. "We've got to get out of here. If we only had a gun."
Illya withdrew the automatic Solo had given him at the palace.
Solo stared at him. "How did they miss that?"
Illya shrugged. "Ordwell. Wasn't thinking straight. Never occurred to him you'd arm a prisoner—me."
Aly David came up off the floor without touching his hands to it. His dark face glowed.
"Give me one gun, and I'll turn it into an arsenal!" he shouted.
Solo nodded. Illya handed over the gun.
Aly hefted it a moment m his hand, grinning, then started toward the door.
"Hold it," Solo said.
Aly David paused. Solo ripped open the seed sack. "Everybody. Hands full of seed."
They all scooped up seed. Solo lined them on each side of the door. Aly David took aim on the lock, fired once. The thick door quivered, hung there, slightly ajar.
In that instant a heavy boot thrust it open and an armed guard burst through, rifle up.
Handfuls of seed struck him in the face, blinding him, stopping him for the fraction of a second. It was too long. Aly David struck him with the gun butt neatly behind the ear and he pitched face first to the floor.
Frun caught up the rifle before it struck the floor and Piebr knelt, taking the hand gun from the guard's holster.
At the open door, Aly David wheeled around and fired upward. A second guard toppled down the stone steps. Illya got the second guard's rifle, and Solo snatched the hand gun from his bolster. They were already moving up the long stairs.
Wanda wailed, "I still don't have a gun!"
Solo said, "You stay right here at the head of these stairs until we clear a way out of here. We'll come back for you." When she opened her mouth to protest, he rasped, "That's an order, Wanda!"
She nodded miserably.
He closed the stairwell door, leaving it slightly ajar. The sound of running men was heard from the corridors. Solo motioned his party to fan out.
As the men came through the door, the waiting men, crouched along the walls, shot them. They moved forward, room to room.
Illya scouted ahead. He saw movement in draperies, fired into it. Two snipers fell forward, ripping down the draperies with them.
They reached the front room. Solo jerked his head toward the radio room. Illya shot the door open, then emptied the rifle into the sending sets.
"I'll get Wanda," Solo said. The others crowded at the front door, waiting, alert as Solo turned.
Across the foyer, Pretty Wilde appeared. "I think you'll stay where you are, Mr. Solo."
Solo stared at her. Pretty gave him a cold smile. "Did you think I was a fool like those men, to run into your trap?" She motioned with the machine pistol. "Drop those guns. All of you. I can cut you down with this if you move."
"Drop the guns," Solo said, shrugging helplessly.
"You are wise, Mr. Solo," Pretty Wilde said. "Now if you'll be smart enough to tell your superiors we have run out of patience and want our machine." She lifted her voice. "Ordwell! Come down here and keep these prisoners covered."
A whisper of sound behind Pretty Wilde made her shiver. But she hesitated, afraid for the moment to take her gaze off the five prisoners. When she had to swing around, it was too late.
Wanda cracked her across the skull with the spiked heel of her slipper. Pretty Wilde crumpled to the floor. "I could have done so much better," Wanda wailed across the room at Solo, "if I'd just had a gun."
Piebr dropped to his knee, grabbed up an automatic as Ordwell ran out to the head of the stairs.
Aly and Illya, too, caught up guns as Ordwell jerked up a machine pistol, but Piebr screamed. "No! He's mine!"
Piebr fired. His bullet struck Ordwell cleanly in the solar plexus. In a slow movement, Ordwell Slybrough dropped the machine pistol and then toppled over and over down the wide stairway.
As he reached the landing, Piebr was there. Zouida's son emptied the gun into the body of his father's slayer. Then he threw the gun down upon the bullet-riddled killer.
When Piebr turned, his eyes were bright with tears, but his head tilted in triumph.
Solo caught Wanda in the circle of his arm. He laughed down into her face. "Come on, Agent Kim! You just became one of the boys! And now, in the name of Allah, let's get out of here."
* * *
THE BLACK CAR raced toward the iron gates in the palace wall.
The driver pressed the horn hard. After a moment the gates were shoved open and the car sped through.
Napoleon Solo whistled as their limousine was braked down at the base of the forty steps. There were no servants out to greet them to day, but from all sides green-suited soldiers converged on them, bayonets reflecting the sun blindingly.
"I knew we were heroes," Illya Kuryakin said in sarcasm, "but I never expected a greeting like this."
"Any twenty-one gun salutes we get will be in our backs," Solo agreed, watching the threatening faces of the soldiers.
A dark-skinned officer jerked the door open and screamed orders at them in a dialect.
Solo glanced helplessly at Piebr. "What'd he say?"
Aly David spoke over his shoulder. "We are to get out of the car slowly, with our hands locked on top of our heads."
Solo smiled weakly. "If this is a friendly greeting," he said, "it loses something in translation."
Sheik Zud padded about the eighty-by-fifty conference chamber. The huge council room looked too small to contain the huge man and his massive grief.
Half the room was in darkness.
When Solo, Kuryakin and the others were led into the council room, Zud let them stand for some moments while he strode back and forth, his lion's face contorted with a sadness that furrowed it from brow to jawline.
At last, he turned and faced them. "Piebr!"
Zouida's son stepped forward and knelt near the table in the center of the light near his ruler. "Your Majesty?" he said.
"Piebr, I am being betrayed! By the only people I trusted and loved with all my heart."
"No, Majesty!"
Zud's roar shook the chandeliers, echoed inside the long room. "First, your father. Now you! Gone over to the enemy!"
"Majesty, no! My own father gave his life serving you with his last breath, as I will do if Allah grants it!"
"Don't lie!" Zud roared. "Look!" He waved his arm and an unseen servant snapped a switch. A single, high-powered light played down on a body laid out on a high table draped with robes. The onlookers held their breath.
"Kiell," Piebr whispered.
"Yes. Kiell. We found his body. Slain. Stuffed into a baggage locker at the Kurbot airport! The great Kiell! To be so foully treated in death! Did you kill him? Or did that one there?"
He thrust out his arm, pointing an accusing finger at Solo. "You're the one who impersonated Kiell, aren't you? Clever! In a plastic mask. I could not believe it was Kiell, and yet my heart would not believe I could lose Kiell and Zouida in the same moment."
"No, Majesty!" Piebr cried in anguish. "None of us in this room has betrayed you. We have slain the man who killed both Kiell and my father! The conspiracy of these people was against you, Majesty, not in your interests."