The man on the roof, whoever he was, had sharp eyes. The white had barely fluttered when there came a sharp crack and the scream of a bullet that gouged sparks out of the top of the wall and went wailing away. “That was no shotgun!” Kuryakin muttered as he pumped three rapid shots into the spot where that flash had been. He thought he heard a strangled howl from up there. Sarah evidently heard it too.
“You hit him!” she cried, waving her hand excitedly. There came another spurt of flame from up there, from another spot, and the handkerchief was plucked from her fingers. Kuryakin swung savagely, pumped three more shots, and heard the scream and then the impact of a body falling.
“I said keep your head down!” he said tensely, over his shoulder. “There were two of them up there!”
“But you hit the first one!” she protested, stooping to collect the ripped linen and waving it again. He swung back as another flash sent a scream of death by her cheek, and drove three more shots into that area. Then he drew back and down, grabbed her arm and drew her down too.
“Give me that handkerchief! You’ll get yourself killed!” He took the tattered white, draped it over the muzzle of his rifle, and poked it up gingerly. Nothing. He shoved it higher, higher—and there came a crashing blast of fire from the upper windows that whipped the linen away. “We’ve cleared the roof, at any rate,” he decided.
Napoleon Solo, meanwhile, was flat on his face by the bottom of the edge of the gate, studying the situation. Intermittent gunfire came from the roof of the black car. He heard Illya’s successful attempts to clear the snipers off the roof. He had a bazooka over his shoulder, loaded and ready. Gray light was just getting good enough now for him to be able to make out the darker blotches of windows.
“I think,” he mused, “that we will start upstairs and work our way down.” He took careful aim; the bazooka coughed and surged forward. The bomb went sloping up on a tail of smoke. There came the crash-tinkle of glass, and then a battering blam! as the explosion sent smoke and flames gushing out of the broken window. Almost by recoil there came a stuttering hail of machinegun fire from a lower window that kicked up the dirt in front of his face and gouged stone-dust from the wall. He scrambled back hastily.
“I see!” he murmured. “All ready for a siege, are we?” He pulled out his transceiver and spoke into it to raise Stevens, on the other side of the gate. “They want to make it hard. I think we’d better help them. Grenades and gas-bombs, right?”
He rolled over and stood up in the shelter of the wall, then circled the truck, climbing into the back. He picked up a grenade, tapped Sarah on the ankle to gain her attention and said, “Watch this carefully. You pull out this pin, you say ‘Eenie, meeny, miney, mo!’ and you throw it—that way!” He winced at the crash from the other side of the wall, and then grinned at her. Kuryakin bobbed up, let off a rapid rattle of fire at the windows and ducked again.
“This is all very spectacular and noisy, Napoleon, but it’s not going to get us anywhere. All they have to do is keep down and away from the windows and laugh at us. We don’t have anything that can touch walls that thick—not even bazooka bombs will dent them.”
The two men stared at each other in the graying light. “Stalemate!” Solo muttered. “And with every minute the light improves, it’s to their benefit. We might try a bluff. Suppose you talked to them with a bullhorn, Sarah? They know your voice. You can promise them that if they come out with their hands up—”
“Wait!’ Kuryakin pointed away down the hill and into the gray sky there. “Maybe this will tip the balance on our side.” They turned and saw the whirling blades of a helicopter slicing the sky.
“That’s Peterson!” Solo grinned, and pulled out his transceiver. “Ground to chopper. Good work, Pete, just in time. It would help a lot if you could lay a nice heavy egg right on—hey! What the blazes is he doing? Pete? Come in, Peterson!”
He stared mystified as the helicopter swung away to one side and then swooped and streaked back in a run almost paralleling the wall. Just above the black car it released a small, dropping object. Instinctively, the two men ducked into the shelter of the truck, Kuryakin dragging Sarah down with him. The truck lifted and rolled back with the force of the explosion. Solo raised his head and peered at the bomb-crater in the ground just in front of the gate, then at the helicopter as it went swinging and circling away.
“Whoever’s up there,” he said softly, “is not on our side, that’s for sure!”
It had been a long, dreary and dull vigil for Lloyd Gumm and his partner, Louis Addel. Their instructions had been clear and concise: see Miss Sarah O’Rourke safely over to Shannon, and home, and then stay at the airport, watch incoming and outgoing flights and make sure she didn’t leave again, that none of the O’Rourke brood departed, and that nobody came in to interfere with Dr. Trilli and his operation. When the Thrush executive gave orders, it was wisest to obey implicitly. So the bored pair had watched all the flights, all afternoon and, in weary shifts, all night.
Gumm was in a snarling mood as Addel shook him out of a snatched slumber, but he stifled his petulance as his partner announced, “They’re here, Lloyd. Big Uncle himself and a squad, in a private plane. They look like this is a showdown! What do we do?”
“We watch and see what they do, stupid!” So they watched and saw the pickup being loaded, and the black car, then saw them both roar away. “We ought to chip in,” Gumm declared, not very enthusiastically.
“With what, pop-guns?” Addel said sarcastically.
As they hesitated and deliberated, they saw Peterson approach a uniformed official, and they were close enough to overhear.
“How long before that helicopter will be ready? Time for me to grab a cup of coffee, maybe?”
“You should just make it, sir. I’ll see that you’re called as soon as it’s ready for you.” As Peterson expressed thanks and hurried away, Gumm drew his partner to one side.
“That’s us,” he said. “I can fly one of those things. Come on!”
They made their way out and to the private comer of the field where a motor coughed into life and great windmill blades began to spin and speed up. Ducking under the downdraft, they ran up to the cab and Addel poked his head in.
“You giving Uncle a ride, mister?”
The pilot turned to grin and nod, and Addel shot him where he sat, then scrambled in, with Gumm on his heels to take over the controls. “Shove him in the back, out of sight!” he ordered. “We’ll wait a while.”
“What the hell for? Let’s get going now!”
“We wait!” Gumm snarled. “The U.N.C.L.E. guy will be along in a minute, and we want what he’s carrying. Now shift that body and shut up!”
The blades whirled into full speed, and now Peterson carne, staggering under the weight of two large bags, to duck against the slipstream and up to the perspex cab side. He hoisted up the bags one at a time, and then climbed in.
“Two of you, eh? All right, maybe I can use the help. Let’s go!” And then Addel shot him, dragged him out of the way, took his seat, and the helicopter lifted up and away, swooping swiftly across the wide waters of the Shannon estuary.
In the cold gray of dawn there was no one to notice as two bodies fell into the sleeping water down there.
Solo glared up as the helicopter circled back over its tracks, then he flung himself down and aside as the clattering machine suddenly spat a rain of lead, plucking dust and stones from the ground in a dotted line. A bullet whanged off the front fender of the pickup. He saw Stevens crumple and go down in a heap, and cursed in helpless rage.