Solo peered back through the murk into the passenger compartment. "Stewardess! Is the co-pilot awake?"
"Barely, sir. You had better come find a life belt, because we we will surely go down in another moment."
"The devil we will," Solo replied. "I've got an insurance payment to make next Tuesday. Get a bottle of your champagne and pour it down Mr. Han's throat. Tell him that Blue
Cross will take care of him in Hong Kong, but right now he's got to fly this plane."
"Napoleon," Illya said, "you are impossible. Perhaps that is why you so often accomplish it."
Solo's mouth whitened at the edges. "Do you think I think this is hilarious? I'm trying to keep the few people who are still sane on this plane from tearing each other's throats. Unless we can get out of this storm -"
Like punctuation, another crackle of lightning burst outside the rain-flooded windows. The immense jet tilted downward, with the tip of its port wing pointing toward the South China Sea. The stewardess had gone stumbling back along the aisle to the galley. Solo met her over the prostrate form of the co-pilot.
Mr. Han's eyelids flickered open and shut. He seemed to realize that he was needed. He tried to lift himself on his right elbow.
Kneeling, Solo propped him up. He tossed the champagne bottle to Illya, who thumbed the cork. A white foamy squirt sprayed across a couple who were silently praying.
Solo tried to keep everything else out of his mind except the necessity to prop up Mr. Han and get the bottle to his lips. He could feel the accelerating downward plunge of the plane in his viscera.
Han swallowed the champagne in great gulps. "Instant courage," Solo said. With his help Mr. Han lurched to his feet. The back of his uniform was bloody from shoulder to belt. Solo and Illya helped him forward to the cockpit.
They settled Mr. Han in the pilot's chair. He groaned, swayed. Then he jerked himself to attention and blinked at the controls.
Later, Napoleon Solo decided that they probably would have crashed had he not remembered something Mr. Han had said about Captain Loo's odd looking money belt. Solo left Han staring blearily at the controls, unable to comprehend them because he was having enough trouble simply keeping upright in his seat. Illya tried to steady him as Solo crouched in the semi-darkness of the instrument-lit cockpit
The flight captain's eyes were rolled far up in his head in death, shining like little, moons. Something shiny-black gleamed beneath his flight blouse, where the bottom two buttons had come unfastened.
With shaking fingers Solo undid the rest of the coat buttons. He fanned back the pilot's lapels. Around his middle Captain Loo wore what indeed looked like a fat money belt of tough black vinyl. Solo prodded the belt.
Solid. As though a number of small steel units like cigarette cases had been sewn inside the vinyl carrier. Solo's hand brushed across something hard which protruded from the unit located at about the position of Captain Loo's right hip.
Experimentally Solo felt around bit more. The device, which he could not see in the extreme shadow behind the pilot's chair, felt like an ordinary wall-switch.
Under his breath Solo said, "Here goes probably everything," and threw the switch over to the opposite position.
What happened in the next half minute left Solo and Illya slack-jawed.
First the pelting rain seemed to lessen. The violent down and updrafts buffeting the airliner grew less formidable. In a matter of fifteen seconds they stopped altogether. The thick black clouds began to shred apart. It was all so fast that it beggared belief.
Napoleon Solo stared at Illya. Illya stared back. Both of them stared down at Mr. Han.
The co-pilot was talking to himself in what sounded like Thai. He had a sick, pained grin on his face. He had touched two controls, two switches, thrown them, and the aircraft's response had been satisfactory.
Han raised his head. He started. "What has happened to the storm?"
Ahead of the radar nose, blue sky appeared, then the tilted horizon of the South China Sea. The maelstrom vanished behind. Sunlight flooded into the cockpit.
Now Illya could see what Solo had been doing down on the floor. He spotted the toggle device. Mr. Han let out a modest whoop, coughed violently, recovered, and repeated his question about what had happened to the storm. This time there was near-hysterical happiness in his voice.
In reply, Illya said, "I believe Mr. Solo has switched it off."
The full impact hit Solo. He stared down at the vinyl belt wrapped around Captain Loo's thoroughly dead midsection. He said, "My God in heaven."
Mr. Han was finding his way out of his pain daze and into the routine of disaster procedures for the giant jet. The emergency and fire systems soon controlled the worst of the damage. Three engines were operating at full power. Mr. Han shut down the fourth and the plane began to fly steadily again through the untroubled blaze of sunlight and sea.
Under Han's direction, Illya operated the radio. Soon they had ghostly voices from hundreds of miles away to help them. In the passenger compartments, the general hysteria was being controlled by more champagne.
Solo lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep. It would have been a relative piece of cake the rest of the way to Hong Kong if his gaze hadn't been pulled back time and again to that mysterious series of steel cigarette-case units around the dead pilot's waist.
Solo wanted to experiment. He wanted to throw the switch back again. He didn't. Why push for trouble?
They would have it in quantity, once that black belt reached New York and made its damnable, diabolical presence felt at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.
Two
Three days later there were several peculiar occurrences in a certain nine square block area in Manhattan's East Fifties.
The news media reported them. The commentators closed their broadcasts with them, usually making a joke. The United States Weather Bureau was powerless to explain them.
The peculiar occurrences were a series of black, furious rain showers accompanied by thunder, lightning, and high velocity winds. Each storm lasted five minutes or less.
The storms encompassed only nine square blocks.
But it was hardly a coincidence that the affected area contained an unbelievably modern complex of offices and research facilities concealed behind a front of decaying brownstones.
Within this complex, in the laboratories manned by scientists of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, tests of the black belt were going on. On a 24-hour priority alert basis, U.N.C.L.E. was attempting to ascertain an answer to the question, What hath THRUSH wrought?
High up in the chamber with the motorized revolving conference table, the planning room for U.N.C.L.E.'s Operations and Enforcement section, three men tried to pry loose some additional pieces of the puzzle from a reluctant fourth.
Mr. Alexander Waverly looked hale and well rested, although he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Solo and Illya both looked hung over.
Solo's fine linen shirt was rumpled and gray. Illya sat with his feet up on a desk, a vitamin pill in his hand. He tossed the vitamin pill up and caught it, tossed it and caught it, while Mr. Waverly tapped his forever unlit pipe against the sill of the window overlooking the panorama of the East River and the United Nations Building.