There were two cars quite close behind them, the Cadillac and Solo's borrowed Fiat, with a third whose roof he could not identify several hundred yards further back.
In convoy like this they burned up the quiet afternoon countryside between Buronzo and Ivrea. Lala tried everything she knew; but no matter how perilously she cornered on the limit, no matter how much bhp she coaxed from the willing front-drive power unit on the straight, she was unable to shake off Carlsen's men.
Then, on a long stretch of road arrowing across the plain beneath the poplars without a corner in sight, the big American car crept inexorably up on them. There were men leaning from its open windows, and soon over the boom of exhausts the sharper note of pistol fire split the air.
"They must be mad—shooting on an open road in public!" Kuryakin gasped. "You'd think they'd wait until they had us cornered somewhere."
The girl shook her head as she weaved the convertible from side to side. "It doesn't matter to them," she said. "Don't you see? Carlsen will be in the clear. You can bet he's not in the lead car. The Cadillac crew are all torpedoes—kind of like a kamikaze unit. The only thing that's important is that they destroy us, and with us the hologram glass. They'll try to shoot, bomb, force a crash, anything, no matter who else they involve, no matter who sees them do it. They'll worry about that afterwards."
"Will they succeed?"
"Not on this road. It gets twisty again after this next corner. But it's the outskirts of Turin, with the traffic jams and the lights, that worry me."
The Russian glanced back at the pursuing cars again. "All right; we scrap Turin," he said. "Tell me: are those NATO maneuvers still going on in the Val d'Aosta? It's straight ahead from here, isn't it?"
"Yes they are and yes it is. But it's another fifty kilometers."
"Have you enough gas? And could you keep them off all the way?"
"If we keep to the secondary roads," the girl said. "And naturally I know the dispositions of the army units fairly well. What have you in mind?"
Kuryakin told her.
A little less than forty minutes later, they were bumping along a dirt road undulating across a countryside scored with tank tracks. Somewhere to their right there was a cannonading of artillery, and behind, the sporadic rattle of shots marked the progress of Carlsen's convoy along the track.
Solo had regained consciousness. Owlishly, he stared out over the Lancia's tail, loosing off an occasional shot at the Cadillac from the Berretta, which had unaccountably still been in his jacket pocket.
Lala drove boldly past notices proclaiming in red lettering on white boards that the way was prohibited, that it was mined, that it was dangerous, and that it was army property subject to artillery fire. She skirted a hutted camp, drove past two astonished sentries in boxes, and sent a group of officers leaping for the hedgerow as she careered past a staff car drawn up by the roadside. Eventually, after looking anxiously around, she steered the convertible into a space below a clump of pine trees and stopped. The Cadillac was laboring up a hill two hundred yards behind them, and the other cars were not yet in sight.
"Quick!" she cried. "Over there, beyond the Nissens! I'll hold them off from here while you run!"
"I only hope the equipment in the Commendatore's car is as good as that in ours. In theirs, rather!" said Solo. "Equipment?"
"I left a homing device in the Fiat," Solo grinned. "I rang the old man before we left Turin and told him the wavelength. He promised to keep a few kilometers away as long as it was transmitting. He shouldn't be far off."
"I hope not," Lala Eriksson said."Now run! Quick!" She opened the boot of the Lancia, took out a Mannlicher rifle, loaded it, and settled down behind the car's bonnet to fire at the Cadillac. At the first shot, the big sedan stopped and men disgorged on either side to seek shelter behind bushes.
A moment later, bullets were zipping through the leaves above their heads as the girl's fire was returned with interest. The Fiat pulled up behind the American car and its driver and passengers fanned out through the underbrush in an obvious attempt to outflank her. The third vehicle had stopped some way down the track.
Solo had completely regained his usual alert wakefulness now. He dropped one hand on the girl's shoulder as she reloaded. "Okay, this is it," he said. "Thank you, bless you—and good luck..."
Kuryakin flashed her one of his rare smiles. "Thank goodness I remembered they were testing these things, and that you knew exactly where they were," he said. "It's a sick wind that doesn't blow somebody well."
Lala Eriksson laughed. "An ill wind, Illya! Look! For Heaven's sake, go while I still have some ammunition. I'll be all right. Really."
Together the two agents plunged through the bushes, swerving wildly to avoid the Thrush fire, and dashed down an incline to a row of Nissen huts behind which a line of half a dozen strange machines were drawn up. Each one had a seat with safety straps, a control panel, some kind of motor, and four vertical tubes about a foot in diameter at the corners. Above them, rotor blades projected from a short shaft rising from the motor housing.
Solo drew the splintered sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, "What on earth?" he began. "They look like miniature tractors under umbrellas that have been blown inside out!"
"One man helicopters, partly conventional, partly jet," Illya explained briefly. "They're trying them out for extra-short-range communication. If we can evade the bullets, they'll get us to Caselle in time for the evening plane... "
Feverishly, they zigzagged across the clearing and began strapping themselves in. Then, as the Russian called instructions, men in olive green battledress ran from the huts, shouting, and there was a burst of rifle fire from the top of the slope they had just run down.
With a sudden roar of power, the motors caught. The unwieldy machines bounced on the ground, hovered, and then rose astonishingly, straight up and over the trees. "Just in time," Illya shouted. "Look! Lala's still firing from the Lancia, and the men from the Cadillac are pinning her down. But the Fiat crew beyond—the ones shooting at us!—are in for a surprise!" He pointed down.
As they soared two hundred feet above the ground, the scene below lay revealed as clearly and as simply as the models in an army sand-table exercise... the scarred convertible shielding the girl with her rifle; the professional gunmen deployed around the Cadillac, now pockmarked with bullet holes; the four killers from the Fiat, kneeling, firing up at the helicopters; the army platoon from the Nissen huts advancing warily up the scrub-covered slope to see what was going on.
Two ridges away, the ground was alive with men moving between the pines as the genuine maneuvers continued, unaware of the drama being played out in their midst. The third car in the Thrush cavalcade, the one carrying Carlsen, had turned round and was heading back towards Buronzo. By the remaining quartet of helicopters, a fat sergeant in uniform was standing with his mouth open, shaking his fists at the sky. And on the far side of the slope on which the Thrush men were staked out, hidden from the gunmen but clearly visible from the viewpoint of the airborne agents, six police cars had halted on a parallel track as their crews fanned out to take the gangsters from above and behind,