"We'd better try to get the troops out before they send someone up to investigate," Napoleon said. He turned to McNulty. "What was the signal to jump?" he asked.
McNulty glared at him and said nothing. Napoleon glanced around the gondola. His eyes lit on the door. "How high would you say we are?" he asked no one in particular.
Illya thought for a minute, turned several switches on the OTSMID, then walked to the front of the gondola and looked out. "I'd estimate at least a thousand feet," he said. He looked thoughtfully at McNulty. "High enough for a parachute to operate. Too bad we don't have one for you."
Napoleon was studying McNulty with interest. "You could use some of the properties of a real Thrush in about thirty second, if we don't get some information out of you."
McNulty laughed. "You don't scare, U.N.C.L.E. doesn't operate that way."
Napoleon moved over to the door and released the catch. "When he's gone, I suppose we'll just have to make do. Do you think that we could just open that door back there and yell at them?"
"I don't see why not," Illya said. "The communicators could have been affected by the blackout, for all they know. Come on, now, Arpad." Each agent took one of McNulty's arms and urged him toward the open door.
McNulty held back. "Oh, come on, now. We all know that you're not going to push me out. You can't; it isn't civilized. You simply aren't going to do it, I know you're not. You..." He paused briefly as he faced the opening from a distance of less than a foot. "By George, I believe you would, at that," he decided. "All right, I know when to quit. There's an intercom system up front. You just announce 'Prepare to jump,' then give them a couple of minutes to get the hangar doors open, and say 'Jump' and they jump."
"Very cooperative," Napoleon said, keeping McNulty facing the open door. Illya stepped back to the OTSMID and reversed every switch he had previously thrown. The view of the ground outside the opening was replaced by blackness. He walked to the indicated intercom, studied it for a moment, then flicked a switch and announced, "Prepare to jump."
They could hear a grating sound from somewhere back of the gondola. When it stopped, Illya said "Jump!"
There was a very slight swaying motion as fifty men dropped almost simultaneously through the open hangar doors. "Go check, just to make sure," Napoleon said.
Illya crossed the length of the gondola, pausing for a moment to administer a thump to Sanders, who was beginning to show signs of life. "Tough old bird," he remarked. Checking the body of the dirigible he found no one. Even the man who operated the hangar doors had apparently jumped with the rest; the doors still swung open. Tidily, he closed them and returned to report.
Napoleon nodded in satisfaction. "See if you can find something to tie all these people up. We can't be stopping to crack someone over the head every few minutes."
Rummaging through the storage areas in the gondola, Illya located an assortment of odds and ends including a very large coil of rope. He cut several lengths from the latter and tied up the Thrushes.
"Now then," Napoleon said, "we are approximately a thousand feet up, invisible, and heading in the direction of, first, Cerro Bueno and, second, the Pacific Ocean. What does your dirigible lore say about getting us back to hearth and home?"
Illya looked about the interior of the gondola. "First, I'm going to look for some instructions. There must be an operator's manual somewhere."
Chapter 14
"Hi-Yo, Dirigible!"
After a few minutes, it became obvious that there were no operating instructions aboard.
"Well," Napoleon said as he looked around the control room, "there don't seem to be too many controls. Why don't we try them one at a time and see what happens."
Illya nodded. "I'm sure Arpad will let us know if we start to do anything dangerous; it's his neck as well as ours."
McNulty glared at them.
"And of course," Napoleon said, "if he doesn't cooperate, there's no real reason to leave him around, is there? Why don't we try waking up Hunter? We'll keep the one who cooperates and pitch the other one out the door."
McNulty grimaced. "Very well. A practical man must be governed by the circumstances, which seem to favor you at the moment."
"Fine," Napoleon said. "Now about these controls?"
"Quite simple, really. The wheel in front controls the rudders. The one on the left, facing the side, controls the elevators. The one on the right controls engine speed, and those switches above the elevator wheel releases the ballast. You seem to have figured out the OTSMID for yourself, and presumably you know something about sonar."
"We seem to need more ballast, not less," Illya said. "But I suppose the elevators can get us down...?"
McNulty nodded. "Just turn the wheel clockwise and set the engines at Slow."
"That's where they're set now," Napoleon said.
McNulty nodded. "We hoped they were. We had to set them by feel when the nullifier quit on us."
"What happened there, anyway?" Napoleon asked.
"I don't know. We were trying to expand the invisibility field, so the paratroops could jump from a good altitude and still be invisible most of the way down. Morthley had shown me how to work the controls. All at once the nullifier quit."
"Some sort of interaction with the expanding invisibility field," Illya said. He turned elevator wheel slowly. There was a slight shift in the deck beneath them as the dirigible's nose lowered, but nothing else.
"What does the sonar say?" Napoleon asked.
"I can't tell from here," Illya said. "Maybe we'd better shut off the OTSMID until we get some practice on this thing. I don't want to plow into any mountains." He walked over to the OTSMID and fiddled with the controls until the absolute blackness outside the gondola windows was again replaced by moonlight. He checked their progress. "We're going down slightly; still pretty high. Incidentally, hadn't we better get this thing turned around? I have no particular urge to provide target practice for El Presidente's boys."
Napoleon nodded, left the engine controls and approached the rudder controls warily. Several full turns were required before Illya reported that the ship was beginning to turn.
"While you were at it, you might have put in power steering," Napoleon told McNulty.
Suddenly the Thrush communicator in Napoleon's pocket buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket while Illya hastened to McNulty's side and gestured suggestively with his knife. McNulty nodded. Napoleon flipped open the communicator and put his hand over the pickup. Someone was already speaking.
"...what happened. We came down in the jungle. I don't even know where we are. I've just managed to collect the group, and we'd like somebody to get us out of here."
Another voice cut in. "Forbes here. You can't contact the dirigible if the OTSMID is functioning. I'll get some help to you from headquarters. Keep talking so we can get a fix on you."
The first voice began to swear, steadily and without inflection. After a minute, Forbes cut in again. "You're not more than fifteen mile from headquarters! You say you don't know what happened?"
"No. The lights went out, and Sanders came back and told us it was just a temporary failure and for us to sit tight. Then they came back on, and a couple minutes later we got the orders to jump. We jumped, and we landed here. Couldn't see the trees until we got out of the field and by then we were in them. Worst foul-up I ever saw!"