[The Girl From UNCLE 01] - The Birds of a Feather Affair - Avallone Michael. Страница 11

Someone else cried out in pain and terror. A blue shaft of gunfire lit up the darkness, briefly, as a streak of lightning ignites an overcast sky. And then April was too occupied with her own troubles to think of anything else. The dry, acidic taste left her mouth and her senses cleared.

Her heavy assailant mashed her in a crushing embrace. She allowed herself to sag further. Now, her attacker, well aware of the softness and pliancy of the curved figure in his hands, roved with his brutal fingers, mixing pleasure with business. April gritted her teeth, shifting her weight into a dead, unstruggling mass. The attacker made himself more comfortable, lessening his fierce hold slightly. April tightened like a bowstring, flipped quickly and her legs levered like scissors. There was a startled curse and the heavy body, anchored at the waist by suddenly lithe and superbly conditioned legs, crashed into the wall.

April broke free and regained her feet.

The gorilla had been deposited somewhere behind her. She braced herself for a return onslaught. It came. A second animal-like charge. She sidestepped but the corridor was too narrow. A wedge of a shoulder clipped her and the man collided with her. April hugged him, in order to avoid a killing kick in the groin.

A hoarse, angry laugh echoed close to her ear. Hot breath washed over her face. There was a rough, tweedy feel to the man's clothing as it chafed against her exposed flesh. She shot a hand into where she knew the face to be, fingers pronged. Another howl as she found the target. She lowered her head and butted. The distance wasn't great for maximal effect but it served. The gorilla's grip loosened as his head snapped back. But he grunted and hung on.

April pushed fear out of her mind. She had run up against a man who had at least ninety pounds on her. Ninety pounds and years of experience as a back-alley fighter. This was obvious from the gouging, corkscrewing motions of the man's hands as they ground cruelly at her flesh.

It was impossible to use her legs now. She was cramped like a pretzel beneath a mammoth opponent. Desperately, she kept her arms high to protect her face and throat. The gorilla added pressure.

"I'll make you say Uncle, baby," his low, gutty voice chortled near her ear.

The sound was all April needed. It measured the distance for her. Swiftly, she reared her head, butting again. There was another howl, followed by a curse. For one precious second, the tight hold about her loosened. She heaved and followed through, slashing savagely with a stiffened palm, driving her right arm out from the shoulder like a pile driver, exactly the way a Karate expert drives through the thick slab of a wooden door.

A hideous gurgle of sound, ending in a tingling, snapping sensation at the very socket of her armpit, told her how successful she had been. The gorilla's body swept from her like a chaff of wheat in the wind. A crash signaled the fall of his heavy body to the floor of the corridor.

April sagged against the wall, her right arm limp and useless. She strove to clear her head of its blurred agony. Her heaving breasts strained at the bra. Her heart was tom-tomming.

The corridor had remained dark. Only now was she conscious of the sudden, terrible silence. Mark—

No, the silence was not healthy. She had to find her way out. She needed light to see by. She staggered down the dark corridor, toward the direction from which the gorilla and his friends had come. There had to be an entranceway somewhere.

She came up hard against a barrier of some kind. She pushed out with her hands. A door fell inward, exposing a bare, drab, basement of sorts. There were low-running water pipes, damp cobbles from another era of New York living and a cracked porcelain sink filled to overflowing with cobwebs and the soot and grime of years of disuse. The light that illuminated the interior of the basement was daylight. Pale, dirty daylight, streaming through a high window that was grilled.

April moved warily into the basement, breathing hard, her body on fire with fatigue and pain. Her eyes roved rapidly. She sniffed the air, experimentally. She waited for some sound, anything, that might alert her faculties. But there was none. All of her training in the U.N.C.L.E. Academy, where she had graduated with honors, plus her actual experiences on assignments, had taught her how to read the atmosphere of a room, a building—a place.

There was no mistaking the aura that hovered over the basement.

The birds from THRUSH had flown. It was quite obvious that they had taken Mark Slate with them, once again. She moistened her lips, reflecting. How could they have? True, she had been occupied in the corridor with Tom Too-Many Thumbs, but she had seen and heard nothing to indicate Mark Slate's mysterious disappearance. How could they have gotten him out of that corridor without her hearing something? There had to be another exit then—it was all too confusing. April, fighting the agony of her bruised shoulder, found it hard to assemble her thoughts.

But there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. Hadn't Napoleon Solo told her that more than once? She had to choose an alternative course of action. For one wild second, a sense of doom dominated her. Damn Mark Slate, damn THRUSH—

Why had THRUSH chosen to take Slate and leave her behind? It didn't make sense. There had to be some explanation for such a move. After all, hadn't they been keen to make a swap for Zorki? They were surely lessening their chances against Mr. Waverly's concern for his agents by kidnapping only one. Unless—

Grimly, April ran to the doorway leading from the basement. A door on the far side of the dank area. It wouldn't budge. Her eyes roamed to the grilled window, far above her head, where she could just make out the ancient, cracked sides of a stone building adjoining. The grilled window stood twenty feet above her head, inaccessible except to someone with a ladder or to Superman. Biting her lips, a nervous habit she gave in to only when she was alone like this, she reentered the darkened corridor. She roved with her hands and feet in the gloom. As she had expected, it was a blind alley. The wall ended against the door of the room that had served as their jailhouse. No, the only way out of the basement was the locked door. There was no telling just how much of an impossible barrier that was.

They had locked her in.

She had no outer clothes, no weapons, no tools. None of her fancy devices for extricating herself. The nail polish explosive X-757 had been the last arrow in her bow. That's all there was; there was no more.

They knew that.

So what could it mean—that they had chosen to leave her behind?

It was at just about this time that she began to realize that the basement and/or the building was expendable. They would probably never need to use it again. THRUSH had a "scorched earth" policy; they liked to burn their bridges behind them, once they had used them for a purpose. Burn them or blow them up.

The building had to be wired for an explosion. It was all too clear, now. A dead U.N.C.L.E. agent was much better than a live U.N.C.L.E. agent, no matter what yardstick THRUSH used.

April shivered in her panties and bra, responding now to the chill dampness and dankness of the corridor and basement.

Where was the bomb?

When would it go off?

The curious blue panel truck with the painted sides that bore the legend ROMEO'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS EXHIBIT, traveled smoothly in the heavy traffic throttling Grand Concourse. It turned off at 161st Street, roared past Yankee Stadium and bore rapidly toward the Harlem River Bridge.

The beautiful redhead at the wheel, a white ribbon pony-tailing her vivid tresses, stared straight ahead, mindful of the jammed lanes of cars going South. Beside her, the man with the Frankenstein child's mask sat with his arms folded serenely. Passing motorists and people on the pavements, glimpsing the offbeat couple, as the truck stopped for red lights, grinned and waved. The redhead and Frankenstein and the blue panel truck were a novelty in the prosaic Bronx afternoon.