Jerry Terry was sobbing softly, her nerves coming undone at last. He let her cry in peace and stared at their surroundings. They were in the open, the side of some mountainous shelf of rock. Ahead was brown country ground and a thin smattering of gnarled trees. A crow was cawing from one of the branches. Overhead, foggy sunlight washed down over them. It was so still out here, compared to the madhouse inside.
“Come on,” he urged. “We still have to make a run for it.”
She nodded, her eyes showing she was still game. She was a peculiar vision stumbling along in Golgotha’s cape, her long, copper-colored hair catching random rays of sunlight.
They began to run in earnest, following a broken trail of stone and sand which seemed to wind downwards to lower levels. Solo kept his eyes open, the automatic pistol ready. It was such a peculiar setup there was no way of knowing what they could run into.
The road ended, spewing them into a flat table of land which showed a vast unbroken meadow stretching almost as far as the eye could see, only to end before the towering majesty of the Bavarian Alps. Solo cursed. Damn the terrain. It was all of a piece; one place looked exactly like another.
“Solo,” Jerry said softly. “Look.”
He didn’t see what she meant at first because of the camouflaging gnarled trees. Then his eyes cleared, making out the dark outlines of the MIG fighter. It sat, silent and ready, directly under a canopy of branches, its nose pointed toward the wide meadow before it. Only three hundred yards away.
There was no one in sight. But the bells were still sounding faintly somewhere and there was no time to lose. It was now or never for both of them.
“Jerry, listen.”
“I’m way ahead of you. Let’s move out.”
He was glad she understood. “Okay. We’ll be clay pigeons if anybody is watching. On the other hand, we’re dead anyway. May I say it’s been nice knowing you?”
“Forget it. We’re going to get out, Napoleon, and we can take up the subject there.”
He kissed her briefly, nodding half to himself, and then sprinted for the plane, knowing she would follow as best she could. He ran with his head low, his legs churning, putting forth everything he had for the run. There was no sense in looking back, no point in trying to pick out targets for the automatic. Either way, they had nothing but time on their side. Time, surprise and the fact that they were fast-moving targets.
Once, Solo had completed in the hundred-yard dash at college. He had come in first, a stride ahead of the number two man, but he had never forgotten the fever of the lungs from such a run, the flying spurt of the body as it strained for the tape. Even as he had plunged across the finish line to the cheers of the stadium, he had never forgotten the almost drunken exaltation of success.
It was something like that now.
The meadow grass disappearing beneath his heels, the plane looming closer, the expectation of a burst of gunfire, the fierce straining of his muscles. He was only dimly aware of Jerry Terry’s figure somewhere behind him. He could only keep his eyes to the left and right, a periphery of perhaps ninety degrees. There was nothing to alarm him from the front. The ship was unprotected. It was only the area behind them that disturbed him.
The first shot came, a singing, whining crack of sound across the flatlands. Dirt geysered somewhere near his heel. Another crack, two more.
He reached the ship and turned, just in time to catch Jerry Terry stumbling before him, falling to the earth. He stilled the alarm in his chest and picked up his targets.
Two uniformed men, rifles leveled, were stationed in the rocky recesses of the lowlands before the mountain. Too far away for his pistol to be of much use. Yet he blasted away all the same and had the extreme satisfaction of seeing them both duck back frantically.
Quickly, he helped Jerry up the wing, practically hurling her into the cockpit. It was only designed to accommodate one person but they were not about to concern themselves over such trifling matters just now. She fell in. The cloak caught on a rivet screw but she was all right as far as he could tell.
“I don’t know if I can fly one of these—” she panted.
“You won’t have to,” he said. “I’ll do it. Scrunch down and away we go.”
He found the controls, emptying the pistol as he clambered in. But the men were up and running now, coming on fast as they realized how close the quarry was to getting away. Solo had a bad few seconds trying to decipher the Russian words on the instrument panel but a plane was a plane be it a Flying Jenny or MIG. The rocket starters were going to be the big question mark, never mind the basic principles of aerodynamics. Solo found the release buttons, blessing Korea, where he had acquired skimpy knowledge of the MIG fighter plane, from one that had come down on the banks of the Yalu River ten minutes away from Solo’s reconnaissance patrol.
Crack!
Crack!
Two rifle shots were lost in the budding blast of the takeoff. The rockets whooshed with noise. He dug out the Luger, sighted quickly and got a shot off. One of the running soldiers suddenly dropped his rifle and rolled crazily on the turf. The other kept on coming.
From that moment on, getting off the ground was his only consideration. With Jerry Terry cramped into the narrow space between him and the floor of the ship, Solo eased back on the controls. With a powerful rush of speed, the MIG nosed forward, sending leaves flying before the tremendous backwash. The thunder of the engines drowned out all else.
The ship shot forward, thrusting like a rocket. The wheels lifted, the sun flooded Solo’s face, and the wide, clear sky stretched before them.
Below, the soldier aimed a final futile shot that died on the wind.
“Jerry, see if you can work that radio. We’ll contact NATO radar before they send some flyboys up to shoot us down. Not too sure about the border flyers around here. Jerry—”
It was only then that he saw the girl was bleeding. A streak of scarlet was painting her right hand. “Hey,” he began. “What gives?”
“Oh, that smarts,” she murmured drowsily, closing her eyes in pain, exhaustion and shock.
The thundering blast of the MIG drowned out Napoleon Solo’s fluent curses.
Golgotha sat before a short-wave radio set, complete with amplifiers and headphones. He had found another cloak. Such expression as his face could show registered extreme hatred. In his fantastically unreal voice he spoke of his displeasure.
It was exactly one hour since he had recovered in the dungeon room to find himself shamed and disgraced. By the reckoning of the account from the guards, the man Solo and his lady confederate had escaped in the MIG, sometime in that elapsed period of sixty minutes. Even the intricate network of alarm bells had been fruitless. Obviously, this Solo was a resourceful man. There was some vindication at that. Golgotha had warned the Council repeatedly that U.N.C.L.E. was not to be dismissed so lightly.
“I repeat, most strongly, we must continue with Plan M. I see no reason to delay. It is imperative that we move now if we are to convince the democracies that we have a weapon which will make them heed our demands. U and S should have sufficed—but they were so small scale, they served only our test purposes. Now, we must move ahead to the larger considerations. Therefore I respectfully advise that Plan M go into effect immediately.”
A voice spoke up from the amplifier.
“The corpse of Stewart Fromes?”
“They will gain nothing from it,” Golgotha chuckled with deep satisfaction. “A skeleton will reveal little, I see no reason to worry on that score.”
“You are certain he had none of the element secured anywhere on his person?”
“None whatsoever. In dying, he had only had time to dress himself. A small curiosity there—and one our research department might well explore. The element had confused him so thoroughly and upset his mental processes, that he attired himself in reverse.”