After that, he would have to play it by ear. He only hoped that fate would allow him to consolidate a position strong enough at least to bargain from. If not, his own position - and the girl's - would be as bad, if not worse, than Solo's.
Still - he had to try. There was nothing else he could do.
Coralie was looking through the gunsight again now, squinting along the barrel at the strange lunar landscape thrown into relief by the magic beam of the flashlight in her other hand. She idly scrutinized the shadowed interstices of the cliff face, glanced at the trees standing proud like cardboard cutouts against the rock, looked past the closed door to the guardhouse, and up at the arched tunnel mouth –
"Illya!" she screamed. "Look out! The tunnel… Stop!"
Tires screeched as he stamped on the pedal to lock the car's back wheels. The great steel shutter that she had glimpsed rumbling down to seal off the entrance slammed home in its metal guides. The VW, slowing but not able to stop entirely in the time, slid straight into it with a noise like a hundred thunderclaps.
"We must have crossed a photo-electric cell guard," Kuryakin shouted as he started the engine, crashed the gearshift into reverse and backed the buckled car away from the blanked off tunnel mouth. "That thing was automatically operated or I'm -"
A burst of shooting drowned his words. Bullet thumped into the bodywork and spanged off metal projections as he screamed around in a half circle, thumped a tree bole, coaxed the car back into first and shot back the way they had come. The VW's gas tank was in the front of the car and if there was to be shooting it was better to keep it at the far end! "The light! Put the light on again!" he yelled to the girl as he wrestled with the wheel. "Nobody can see it but us!"
Coralie had, almost as a reflex, switched the flashlight off as soon as she'd seen the steel shutter crashing down. Now she thumbed the lever again and stared anxiously through the screen as Illya rocketed them up towards the house. There was nobody to be seen, although the gunfire was as intense as ever. Above the explosions, an insistent, thin shrilling, an alarm bell could be heard ringing and ringing.
"Get down below the seat back!" the agent shouted.
"They're firing at us from in front too, now." He zigzagged the car wildly from side to side. The windshield starred and a side window shattered. Shards of glass fell noisily to the floor.
"As I thought," be continued. "Those guns must be computer-aimed - they could never fire so accurately in the dark otherwise. Look! In the infrared! You can see a bank of them."
The girl peered over the edge of the door and saw in the beam from the flashlight a group of muzzles belching flame and smoke from a steel screen behind a clump of bushes.
"Hold tight!" Kuryakin called. "I'll go in here: maybe the trees will slow down their radar responses." The car careened off the roadway and bumped on flat tires among the great trunks studding the woods between the tunnel and the estancia. Abruptly there was a stinging sensation in Coralie's hand and the light from the lamp dwindled and vanished. A stray slug had killed the flash light. At the same time the motor spluttered and died; it was all very well to turn your back to preserve the tank, but that put your carburetor in a very vulnerable position.
Now that the car was silent, they could hear above the shrilling of the bell the distant shouts of orders, the trampling of feet, a door opening and slamming as men filed through. Somewhere through the trees, a searchlight dazzled on and outlined the leaves in golden light.
For a moment Kuryakin sat tense, his lower lip thrust out, his deep-set eyes glittering beneath that bulging brow. His forehead was beaded with sweat and a trickle of blood from a furrow scoring one cheekbone had dried on his face. For the moment, the shooting seemed to have stopped.
"They've halted the automatic fire to let their men move in," he said at last. "Come on! Let's go while the going's good." Seizing the girl by the hand, he pushed his way out of the riddled car and dodged away through the trees. A moment later they heard a tractor grinding along the road towards the thicket.
There was a flurry of commands and a second searchlight killed the dark just behind them. Tiger-striped with bars of blazing light, the little wood seemed suddenly a bare and empty place, the black shadows the only hints of comfort and warmth within it. There was a rattle of bolts and a volley of gunshots again. Bullets thwack into the leaves around them and the girl heard one zing past her ear with a noise like an angry bee.
"Stay behind a tree and give me covering fire," Kuryakin cried.
As the girl turned to pump slugs from the unfamiliar U.N.C.L.E. gun in the general direction of the shouts, she saw him flit from shadow to shadow, from trunk to trunk, until he was only forty or fifty yards from the tractor. He dropped on one knee and cradled the gun to his right shoulder.
Then flame stabbed the dark as the gun leaped in his hands. A moment later, the searchlight on the tractor went out suddenly.
Kuryakin was back at the girl's side, materializing from the dark. "Come on," he whispered. "We'll get out. If they rim true to form, it'll be grenades after this. Then dogs... I know when I'm beaten - temporarily. We'll have to retire to lick our wounds and rethink."
There was a dull plop from behind them as they threaded their way through the undergrowth as quietly as they could. It was followed by a second, a third, a fourth. Among the tatters of mist that the approaching dawn limned white against the trees, another and more pungent vapor eddied and swirled.
"Tear gas!" Illya cried hoarsely, suppressing a cough and trying not to dab his streaming eyes. "Good thing we left in time to miss the full effect."
For a fraction of a second, the wood sprang lividly to life in the green glare of an explosion. Simultaneously, they heard the flat crump of the detonation. Metal rasped, glass tinkled and things tore through the leaves.
"Mortar," the agent said curtly, hauling himself up onto an overhanging branch and hanging motionless beside the wire fence which showed dimly in the watery lights seeping into the sky from the east. "Here - put your arms around my legs and swing yourself across. It sounds as though they've disposed of the old VW for us. Next they'll start quartering the thicket before they send in the dogs."
He shifted along the branch hand over hand and dropped silently to the road.
"Lucky for us," he said, taking the girl's hand and setting off at a run, "that we thought of bringing the other VW and leaving it a hundred yards further down the road..."
---
In San Felipe do Caiapo, one of the ill-lit houses fronted by the boardwalk boasted a larger opening linking interior and exterior than did its neighbors. This was the nearest thing the village could produce to a coffee shop, and here Illya and Coralie repaired to soothe the feelings of humiliation and defeat engendered by their dawn patrol.
"They teach us never to underestimate an enemy," Illya said ruefully as he called for the bill, "and yet we appear to do it all the time; we just never learn, it seems!" There was a bandage across his cheek and he needed a shave. The girl - despite the dry heat of what promised to be a blazing day - looked as cool and self-possessed as ever.