The Monster Wheel Affair
By David McDaniel
A Gigantic Space Station Orbiting The Earth...And No One Knew Who Put It There!
United States officials knew the monstrous space satellite was not theirs. The Russians could not claim it either...nor England, nor France. It was an enigma, an awesome weapon of war hanging over the entire world...waiting...
Waiting for what?
Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin had to uncover the mystery behind the Monster Wheel before it was too late—and with each clue they uncovered, the threat became more horrifying.
THE MONSTER WHEEL AFFAIR
Dawn was a ghostly tint of gold separating the sea from the sky. The stars were lost behind the brightening glow of the coming day, and the horizon was a flat circle with only a misty lump of distant island to break its perfection.
The tramp steamer Paxton Merchant extinguished her running lights as morning began to overtake her from astern. A new day of work was beginning for her crew, and a new day of pleasurable boredom for her half-dozen passengers.
Suzie Danz, 26, American, stood at the after rail on the bridge and checked over her camera. Three years' savings had gone into this trip, and she intended to capture everything possible on film. She had a plentitude of studies of shipboard life taken since their departure from Perth, but she had chosen this morning to rise early to view the Indian Ocean dawn, reputedly the most beautiful in the world. The weather had been inclement the last few days, but this morning the sky was as clear as could be imagined.
She took a last light reading and set her camera towards the horizon above the fantail. Her long telephoto lens would magnify the first bright sliver of the sun, and her wide-angle lens stood ready to catch the splendid panorama of golden clouds and angel-eye blue which would herald the morning. She cocked the shutter.
Behind her, at the forward rail of the bridge, John MacKendricks squinted suddenly through the powerful binoculars which were at that moment focused on the nameless island some twenty-five miles ahead of them. Something was happening there. A cloud of smoke rose from the haze-shimmering mountain peak, and a flickering light illuminated it from below. A volcanic eruption?
He turned and called to the pretty photographer, whose attention was half a horizon away.
"Miss Danz! Come forward and look. There's a volcano going off up there!"
She only took a moment to react. After all, dawn happened every day, wherever you were. But volcanoes were a special treat, and took priority. A glance at her light meter, and her telephoto-magnified viewfinder centered on the island as she braced the camera on the rail. She snapped the first shot, and then looked again.
"Look, Mac!" she said. "The smoke's getting thicker in the center. No..." She gasped, wound the film and fired again. "There's something coming out of the volcano!"
She got a third shot as something did indeed rise from the smoking crest of the distant mountain. To MacKendricks it seemed for a moment of disbelief like the neck of some impossible monster, rising straight up from a prehistoric hillside. Then the shape resolved into a shining cylinder. A fraction of a second later its base was clearly visible, and he squinted against the brilliance of the ravening waterfall of flame that drove it upward.
Suzie crouched, tilting and firing her camera at the thing as fast as she could wind and shoot. Then the sound began to reach them, faint over the watery distance. It was a familiar sound to a girl of the city, where jets crossed the sky dozens of times a day, but an alien one here, halfway around the world from her home. It was the roar of a continuous explosion—a rocket blast driving an intercontinental ballistic missile either on a test flight, on a sudden atomic attack, or on a space voyage. Whatever it was, it had no place here, far from the world's centers of international conflict and scientific research.
The rocket left a rising white track behind it as it drove up through the stratosphere, and became no more than a glittering speck in the camera's viewfinder, catching the sun. Suzie wound one more time, and felt the advance lever stick as it pulled at the end of the film. She looked up at last and was slightly surprised to find she could hardly see the vapor trail a few miles above them. She started to rewind the film as she looked around for MacKendricks.
Mac was no longer there. He was inside the wheelhouse in excited converse with the steersman, Kurt Schneider.
"Did you pick that up on the navigational radar?"
Kurt nodded. "Ja. It was a missile. Did you see it?"
"Sure did, and I think Miss Danz got some pictures of it. What island is that, anyway? Got it on the chart?"
Kurt turned and bent over a large map. "I make our position here," he said slowly. "This would be the island." His closed dividers touched their slightly bent points to a speck on the chart. "There is no warning notice here—but this is an old chart. Perhaps I should suggest the Captain write it in himself."
MacKendricks grunted agreement, while privately reserving his opinion as to the public knowledge on any chart concerning this little island. The Paxton Merchant was a good many miles north of the regular shipping lane, as their course from Perth was not directly to Capetown, but to Tamatave. This island might not be seen by a ship from one year to the next.
He looked again at the little green screen of the radar, where the shape of the island glowed near the top. Then he looked more closely and pointed. "What's that?"
"That" was a speck of green that had detached itself from the larger mass and was moving directly down the face of the tube towards the central dot that represented the ship. Kurt watched it for a few seconds while the pale green radius swept once around the face of the tube. Then the spec was visibly closer.
"Donnerwetter!" he said as he jumped for a panel high on the wall. His fingers flipped aside the red metal cover and his palm slapped against the red button. Instantly a clangorous alarm went off all over the ship. Kurt grabbed the log book from its case and ran for the door of the wheelhouse.
"In the absence of Captain I take command," he barked to three sailors who appeared, unshaven and half dressed. "Lower boats—right now!"
MacKendricks grabbed his arm. "What was that?"
"Either a jet plane or a rocket launched from the island. In two minutes we could be blown out of the water!"
The emergency alarm hammered its hysterical monotone as the nearest boat was swung out over the water. MacKendricks grabbed Suzie, who grabbed her camera case, and threw her into the boat as it was being lowered. One by one sleep-dazed heads began appearing as crewmen stumbled on deck. The Captain himself stepped out, struggling into a bathrobe.
"Schneider," he bawled, "what the hell is all this?"
"We are under attack, sir, and may be hit in a minute or two. There is not time to explain."
"Take command here—I'll rouse the passengers." The Captain turned and dived down a hatch.
The first boat, with Suzie in it, hit the water. Mac and three other sailors were in it with her—how they'd got there, she couldn't tell. Someone started the motor, and they began to pull away from the ship.