"Give up?" said Illya, as- they started back up the hall. "Ernest Hemingway. Are you-historical as opposed to fictional?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Were you… hmm… Were you the subject of Shakespeare's only three-part play?"
"Come on – you can do better than that. No, I am not Henry VI."
Fog sifted through the dark and silent streets as a small force of men crouched motionless in the shadows beneath the concrete bulk of the Central Freeway where it crosses Hayes. They were prepared to go into action on three minutes notice anytime before dawn – or something might miss connections and they could never be called at all. Two miles away to the south an expendable tank truck waited in concealment, its diesel engine warm, its body filled with 2500 gallons of rocket fuel officially bound for a missile site in Marin County: and its cab empty but for a radio receiver and a few cables.
Behind the supporting pier immediately south of Hayes, two more vehicles waited – a panel truck, identical in most details to the Thrush transfer van, and an ambulance which held half a dozen corpses legally requisitioned from the Unclaimed section of the City Morgue. There would be little left of the panel truck when Thrush or the San Francisco Fire Department found it, but every effort was being made to insure that subsequent investigation would show everything that should have been there. Mr. Simpson had sacrificed a malfunctioning PDP-8 calculator unit, a CRT with a burned-phosphor, a misaligned photo-printer and a captured Thrush terminal housing shell, all of which would leave convincing remains after a brief but intense cremation. The same could be said for the corpses, since the Thrush guards in the truck would be taken in peacefully and held incommunicado until the entire affair was resolved. "Sometimes," Illya had remarked at one point, "it's inconvenient to be the good guys."
Now both agents crouched in the rear of their panel truck, an open communicator lying on the carpet between them. Three-quarters of a mile away an observer stationed at a third-floor window was watching a pair of heavy doors which concealed the basement garage through which deliveries were made to the subterranean Thrush complex. His eyes rested in the rubber cups of a tripod-mounted pair of 10x80 binoculars focussed by the blue light of a solitary streetlamp-on the enigmatic steel of the unmoving doors. A cigarette stump lay cooling in the ashtray by his elbow; a can of soda sparkled faintly in the silence.
The watcher blinked into the darkness. A Vine of deeper black had appeared between the slabs of dull metal, and as he stared it widened. He reached for his communicator, which lay open on the table,, and spoke without removing his eyes from the lenses. "Open Channel R."
Solo's communicator chirped for attention and got it instantly as the distant watcher's voice reported. "Biederman here. The-door's opening. I think somebody's looking out. Be ready… There's a car – the car. A blue Fiat with three men in it. They haven't turned their lights on yet. They're turning east – there go the lights. Stand by for the truck… I think – there it is. They're waiting for the lead car to get to the corner. I can't make out what color it is yet…
"There they. go. And there go the doors. It's a drab grey – pretty close to the ringer. Okay, go to it, you guys. I wish I was down there."
"If I'd known, I would've been happy to trade," said Illya. His own silver transceiver was assembled as he listened, and now he said, "Open Channel L. Stand by all points. Drivers, start your engines."
For all its flexibility, Thrush had fallen into a habit pattern and Harry had known the regular route followed by such vital caravans; he'd picked up an occasional hundred-dollar bonus for riding in the lead car on previous occasions when visiting dignitaries or top technicians were being transported in secrecy. The armoured Fiat preceded the plain van by two or three blocks, and total radio silence was maintained between the two vehicles since even a scrambled signal can be triangulated.
The Thrush would drive down Hayes from Alamo Square towards the center of town, and turn right on Gough, which rhymed with cough, when Hayes became one-way the wrong way immediately after passing under the freeway. They would jog right crossing Market and continue south on Valencia for two miles, then turn east again on Army, towards the Army Street Terminal. At each corner the Fiat would be out of sight of the truck for about fifteen seconds. This could be stretched to twenty without arousing suspicion, but no longer. And the U.N.C.L.E. ambuscade had a three-minute alert – of which barely two minutes remained.
Solo and Kuryakin, black-clad, stood in shadow against the soaring concrete piling, their three aides behind them. Beneath the next intersection, Hayes and Octavia, a two-man team was poised with tank and nozzles and respirators, ready to cloud the space immediately above them with rapid-dispersal gas. The duplicate panel truck waited behind the freeway pier, lights out and engine idling. Silence and wisps of drifting fog filled the street, but tension crouched in the shadows as the endless seconds passed.
Then the muffled stammer of the Fiat could be heard approaching and Solo murmured into his microphone, "Check Point One, are you there?"
"Here. They haven't – There's the Fiat. License JGB 817. Now crossing Laguna… Mark. And… there's the truck. A-OK on identification."
"Thank you. All points: This is target. Repeat, this is target. Ready to do it -" He drew back to invisibility as the Fiat cruised by, echoing between parallel concrete walls, its two passengers looking in both directions. As it turned the corner and passed from sight, he said, "Do it!" and slipped a re-breather unit over his face.
As the Thrush panel truck crossed Octovia, half a block away, colorless gas hissed out to fill the cubic yards between building fronts. The truck swayed unsteadily as its driver felt an overwhelming urge to sleep. A nylon landing net dropped into his path from above, anchored to the elevated structure which concealed the main U.N.C.L.E. force – the truck shouldered heavily into it and bumped to a stop as cables creaked and held.
Simultaneously the duplicate let in his clutch behind Solo and swung out into the street and around the corner, docily following an unsuspecting Fiat south towards Market.
The ambulance backed smoothly out of the shadows as the net was lifted from the nose of the truck. Napoleon and Illya were the first ones to reach the cab, dragging the drowsy Thrush out. The key to the rear door was in his pocket; as Solo fished it out and ran around to unlock the van two rehearsed agents loaded a corpse into the opposite side of the front seat. Four sleepers were dumped out of the back of the truck and the prize was exposed, a desk-size unit four by three by two feet. Its screen and keyboard were tastefully hidden by a sliding walnut panel. Positive identification took only a few seconds in back while Illya replaced the driver in front; a couple boxes of carefully chosen junk were lifted into the rear as the terminal was hoisted smoothly out between two men, then the other grisly replacements took place and Napoleon slapped the side of the truck as his last scan over the interior showed everything his mental checklist called for.
"Key," said Illya, grimly ignoring his cold passenger, and Napoleon slammed the back door, locked it for the last time and tossed the key to his partner. If the impending holocaust lived up to its billing, no trace would ever be found of the key amid the remains of the truck, but both men were trained to situations where such details were the pivots of life or death, and the Thrush van was as perfectly prepared as forty-five seconds of professional care could manage before the Russian engaged its clutch and started off to catch up with where he was supposed to be.
Illya swerved past the Do Not Enter sign at the entrance to the next block of Hayes and raced two illegal wrong-way blocks before cutting right on Van Ness, straight across Market and south, parallel the route of their ringer and four blocks farther east, heading the van towards its rendezvous six minutes away.