The helicopter took off. Already they could see two jet fighters approaching high in the dawn sky. Solo and Illya, hidden in the grass, watched as the jets swooped in and forced the copter to land again a mile away.
Then they moved off along the fence.
The base was a friendly base, and the soldiers on guard would be their soldiers, but the soldiers would not know this, and the two U.N.C.L.E. agents did not have time to convince them. At the fence they went to work.
The fence was electrified and wired for alarm. Swiftly they attached special circuit loops to the wires they planned to cut so that no circuit would be broken. Then they shunted off the wires they would cut. Using insulated cutters and gloves, the cut just two wires, and squeezed through without touching the fence again.
Inside, they moved at a trot through the dawn light. The gauge in Illya's hand led them unerringly across the missile base, among the camouflaged silos, toward wherever Morlock The Great was working his deadly plan.
Twice they had to shoot guards with their sleep darts. The soldiers fell without a sound and the two agents moved on. The gauge led them directly to what looked like a simple English country house. There were two guards at the door. Illya and Solo crept closer.
The two guards did not move. They were dead.
"Morlock," Illya said.
"Yes, and that means he's inside," Solo said.
Without saying any more to show their thoughts that even now they could be too late, Illya and Solo entered the building and moved along the dim dawn hallways. They found deserted offices, empty halls, silent rooms.
"Even at dawn the base should be active," Illya said.
"Below?" Solo said. "That's where the control would be."
"And where Morlock is," Illya said, pointing to his gauge.
They followed the gauge until they located the heavy door that led down into the bowels of the earth where the heart of the missile base would be. The door was locked. It was an extra-heavy door, made of some strong metal. Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo looked at each other.
"Alloy steel, from the look of it," Solo said.
"Will our thermite melt it?" Illya said.
"I don't know. We may have to blow it."
"Try the thermite. We can't warn Morlock," Illya said.
Solo pressed the foil to the door over the lock, pulled the metal fuse. The white-hot glow filled the dawn hallway.
When the foil burned out there was s hole, but the door was still locked.
"Again," Illya said.
The second foil glowed in the dim dawn light of the silent corridor. The hole in the alloy steel door grew deeper, wider, and, then, was through. The door swung silently open.
Illya and solo faced a small antechamber—and a second door!
"Elevator," Illya said.
"But there has to be a stair also," Solo said. "They wouldn't have only one way down. Electrical systems can fail."
"There," Illya pointed to a flat panel that had a button beside it, an emergency stairway.
This door was much thinner and the thermite bit through with dispatch. The door opened and Illya and Solo plunged quickly down a narrow, winding staircase. At the bottom there was another steel door—but this door was open!
They went through and found themselves on a kind of balcony—a circular gallery that ran around the walls above a large room. They looked over the edge at the room below.
The sight that met their eyes made them stare in horror.
TWO
MASKS!" ILLYA barked.
The two agents quickly put on the small gas masks they carried for just such an emergency. Wearing the masks, they peered down at the scene on the floor below.
The room was the central control of the IRBM missile base. A giant illuminated plastic map covered the far end of the room. The most sophisticated tracking instruments lined the left wall—radar, DEW Line relays, telemetric relays from all across the world. A long table filled the center of the room. A row of telephones was at the right—the red telephone standing out like some malignant monster.
But it was not the room itself that chilled the U.N.C.L.E. agents. It was the men in the room—the frantic men.
At the giant map enlisted men with long pointers were tracking the moving lights that indicated the incoming enemy missiles detected by the tracking instruments. The men at the map were wild with excitement, shouting, screaming out the progress of the enemy. A mad, wild excitement mixed with a thick odor of fear.
At the tracking instruments the operators were equally excited, calling out the blips on the radar, relaying the messages of the reports from across the world. The enemy missiles were pouring in all over the world, were being tracked by the radar in the room, by the radar at other installations, by the Distant Early Warning line far up in Canada. The operators on the machines shouted their progress in mounting panic.
"A thousand miles!"
"Nine hundred!"
"Closing in on England now—five hundred miles!"
"Closing on Washington!"
"Four hundred miles!"
At the long table officers, pale and anxious, sat with their portfolios open, staring at the map and at the radar alternately like the audience at a tennis match.
There was fear on their faces, but there was also determination. Clear on the faces of all the officers was the absolute determination that, destroyed though they would be, they would do their final duty and take the enemy to destruction with them.
And at the red telephone there was one man. A man with a greater look of determination on his face than any one else in the madhouse of the room. A man wearing the uniform of a general. A man with his hand on the red telephone.
A man who, as Illya and Solo watched, heard the telephone ring.
There was a silence, sudden as death, in the control room.
The general picked up the red telephone.
"Yes sir. I know, sir. In five minutes they'll know what they started."
The general lowered the red telephone and turned to face the room, where the men at the map still followed the progress of the incoming missiles, where the radar men tracked the enemy, where the communications men received the reports from the rest of the world, where officers waited for the command to fire their own missiles.
Only—
There were no lights moving on the giant map.
There were no blips on the radar screens.
There were no messages on the instruments relaying form other bases.
The red telephone had not rung.
In the room, Illya and Solo saw, only the men were active, were moving—the instruments and the map were dark and silent.
And, unseen in a distant corner, was the small black-cloaked, satanic figure of Morlock The Great!
In the air was the diabolical powder thrown by the insane magician.
In the silent room nothing happened, but the men in the room, frantic, saw it all happening in some giant hallucination.
The general walked to the red button that would fire all his missiles into the heart of the Soviet Union.
The general took his key from his pocket to unlock the red fire button.
Illya and Solo saw that there was no time to bring the frantic soldiers from the nightmare. Taking careful aim, they both fired at once.
The sleep darts struck the general, who gasped once and collapsed on the floor.