Mr. Simpson loaded and checked his motorized Nikon and its 250-shot magazine; as long as he held down its button it would shoot five pictures a second. He set the shutter to 1/1000th with the lens wide open at f/1.8, two stops underexposed for the 85 ambient foot-candles of the corridor, and took his position as ordered behind the first corner with instructions to fall back when the Thrush force advanced.
Napoleon paced his small quarters endlessly, watched by Joan, who was not to be told what was happening but" asked repeatedly if he was edgy. Illya was downstairs locked in his room, also- as ordered, drumming his finger-tips and fretting quietly. Considering the building's structure, he wasn't even likely to hear anything of the battle but what came over the intercom monitor considerately left open for him.
Mr. Waverly would be directing operations from the central communications room, where banks of TV screens showed him the corridors of the second level and a microphone stood before him to transmit orders to all his units, Now the command channel was silent, and cameras stared down empty corridors as the last minutes ticked away.
On level two Mr. Simpsom slipped into a heavy asbestos lab smock, with matching boots and hood. Under the exigencies of field observation of an unwilling and even uncooperative subject, certain discomforts were to be expected. He switched on his lab cart, directing current from the heavy batteries on the lower shelf to the recording optical thermograph and the magnetometer beside it. Five minutes remained as he took his position around the corner of a crossing corridor some thirty yards from the fire exit.
According to his Accutron it was T-minus-one when a flare of light around the fire door and a muffled i›WHAFF! pushed a wave of hot air down the passage. Instantly one hand dropped to the start-button on his datacorder and the other brought up the Nikon. Quickly, before the 15-second load of the Fastax ran out, he stuck the Nikon vertically around the corner, centering its right-angle viewfinder on the converging lines of the corridor and the action already starting towards him through the molten ruins of a once-sturdy door.
He held the button five seconds, long enough to record in color as much of two more fireballs as the relatively limited range of his emulsion could handle. He could synchronise these frames with the ultrahighspeed 16mm XR footage, perforce in monochrome, to study the development of the plasmoid.
Recorder needles leaped wildly as the drive motor hummed and tape flew past polished heads, while above ceiling lights flashed and alarm bells hammered through the halls. Guards burst forth from appropriate directions after a reasonable delay; By that time the attack force was two-thirds of the way to the corner and advancing rapidly. Mr. Simpson retired unseen down the hall they would follow, wheeling his equipment cart ahead of him at a dog-trot.
Gunfire spat behind him as he ducked behind the steel partition which backed the Section Receptionist's deserted desk. He paused here as U.N.C.L.E. guards rushed past him in both directions, then a fusillade of slugs slapped the wall and suddenly the corridor was empty again. Behind him and his steel shield, two members of the Home Team popped out, released a few rounds and popped back again.
Mr. Simpson barely had time to Blink as the leap of a, magnetometer needle, gave him a fraction of a second warning and a sphere of unspeakably intense light shot past a few feet away and burst with a quiet padded concussion ten yards behind him. He felt a wash of warmth reflecting from the wall he hugged and a surge of gratitude for the asbestos smock.
They were definitely coming this way. As if to remind him, a voice spoke tinnily from the open communicator in his pocket. "Simpson! Simpson
Now for the first time since his glimpse at their entrance, he got a direct look at the fantastic weapon wielded by Thrush. It was probably the same unit he'd seen in the film; its fat, ribbed barrel blossomed like a flower into a two-foot translucent wire-laced dish with a slender Bright pistil tapering six inches to its focus at a needle point. Flux- in the dish could spin the plasma as it emerged from the nozzle until the mass of super-heated ionised gas was released in a whirling fireball. His Nikon fired ba-ba-ha-ba-bap as he stuck his head around the corner to aim and look for himself; as the hiss and crackle began again he ducked back, But held the camera out with, one gloved hand until the magnetometer needle slammed against its stop pin.
He jerked back almost simultaneously with, another flare, this time from the opposite side of his partition, which suddenly grew uncomfortably warm about waist level as a large patch of paint Bubbled and stank. Boots clattered towards him over the sound of the KBG preparing another thunderbolt, until a shouted order stopped them and a two-foot circle in the middle of his sheltering wall smoked briefly as the blistered paint charred and evaporated, then turned cherry red and began to slag.
By that time Mr. Simpson was racing down the corridor, heavy smock flapping behind him, rubber-tired cart slewing slightly on the waxed floor. The Nikon lay atop the bank of batteries, lens cracked and fused, paint burned from its face except for a clean patch where an asbestos glove had protected it.
There were vague shouts behind him and another fireball burst ten yards short, throwing his blue silhouette before him on the wall beside the opening elevator. Enamel softened and bubbled on the exposed corners of the lab cart, and the rear tires stuck stringily to the floor a moment until he lifted it like a wheelbarrow and flung it ahead of him towards the padded rear wall of the waiting car, diving after it as the doors began to close and the last guard, who had stayed to hold the car for him, fired two shots between the shuttering sheets of steel as the KBG warmed up for another blast. The doors met a second before it came. They shuddered and smelt, but the elevator had already started up, and its occupants sighed with shared relief.
"Get everything?" asked the guard.
"Very nearly," said Mr. Simpson.
"How was it?"
His eyes gleamed with delight as he rose from a cursory check of his gear.
"Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating."
CHAPTER TWELVE
"It's A Nice Little Plan"
"Tomorrow afternoon," said Mr. Waverly, "at 3:00 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time,
Thrush, as a coherent international entity, will effectively cease to exist. In an operation of devilish subtlety, requiring a minimum of force and a maximum of surprise, as well as split-second co-ordination, not one, nor two, but all three Thrush Centrals…should fall into our hands. The attack plans you will be using should be infallible; it was entirely prepared by the Untimate Computer."
"Are you sure you can trust it?" Napoleon asked.
"Implicitly. I'm afraid you and Mr. Kuryakin may find your part of the job frustratingly simple – there will be no frontal attack, just a few minutes' skulking in a public park on a Saturday afternoon."
"It seems too simple," said Illya.
"We have no reason to doubt Thrush's own top secret security files on the matter. Mr. Simpson has modified or manufactured – I myself am uncertain how – an Alpha variant of the Paralane knockout gas you have been using for the last year."
"What does it do-besides put them to sleep in two seconds?"
"Like the dog in the night-time, of primary importance is what it does not do: in this case it does not stimulate the ventilation monitor used in the Balboa Park enclave. The intake ducts will be your target."
He tapped his pipe on the side of an ashtray as Napoleon said, "You mean we just put them to sleep and walk in?"
"Exactly. Mr. Gold will go with you, and will check the proper reception of a full emergency dump from the other side of the world. Because simultaneously with your secural of the stand-by unit in San Diego, at 4:30 Sunday morning in Darjeeling, the second largest special assault force in the history of the United Network Command will move in quietly and surround the Bengali Opium Processing Plant, vacant for the last five years under the new regime, but an ideal location for Thrush Central."