The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 36

And from where he was, deep in the valley, there was only one way to do it—he would have to scale the weathered face of the pillar itself!

It was an idea born of desperation. But there was a slim chance it might work. First, he could begin the climb by the car, on the inner side of the pillar, where he would be hidden from the truck. And when he reached the beginning of the curvature of the arch and had to move around to the outside, he could at least profit from the fact that the pile tapered and would thus be leaning very slightly away from him. Instead of forcing himself up a perpendicular face, he would only have to cope with a slope one or two degrees off the vertical!

On the other hand, of course, there was the rain.... Solo shrugged. There was no point in hanging around. He took a half dozen steel climber's pitons from the interior of the car and stuffed them into his jacket pocket with a small, heavy-headed hammer, slid a streamlined Walther model PP automatic into his waistband, and approached the face of the pillar.

Napoleon Solo had done a great many dangerous things in his life, and a good many mad ones too. But the maddest and most dangerous of all was that wild climb in the rain up the crumbling facade of the viaduct near Tharandt.

For the first twenty or thirty feet the sandstone blocks were fairly large and the interstices between them correspondingly wide; climbing was simply a matter of wedging in the toes, reaching up and finding a handhold, taking the weight of the body on the fingers as the foot scrabbled for a higher toehold—and then starting the process over again.

But, as soon as the blocks got smaller and the cracks narrower, the trouble began. Rain was gusting across the valley now in great clouds, plastering Solo's hair to his face, weighing down his clothing, and rendering slippery the polished surfaces of the stone. It was also turning the crumbs of old mortar and eroded flakes of sandstone in the gaps into a greasy paste in which fingers and toes skidded more easily than grasped. Under such circumstances climbing without a rope up an almost vertical face was a nightmare.

Every foot became a test of willpower, coaxing the screaming muscles and overtaxed sinews to hang on for just that second longer while the questing foot found a temporary resting-place that would take the strain, the groping fingers a crevice that wouldn't flake away the moment any weight was put on it.

When Solo was seventy-five or eighty feet from the ground, the face he was climbing began to curve outward over his head. He had reached the curvature of the arch. Now he would have to move around to the outside of the pillar.

Gritting his teeth, he started to edge around the corner. For a moment he was splayed out, like a butterfly on a pin, with his right hand and foot on the inner face of the pillar and his left on the outer. The problem now was to swing the right hand and foot outward and around the edge without losing purchase with the left while doing it!

Solo knew better than to look down. Behind him was an eighty foot drop to certain death, a dizzying perspective of wet stone dropping away to the road and the stream far below. But he did look up. He had to.

There was more than forty feet of smooth, damp stonework to climb before he reached the parapet. His glance raked the whole wide expanse of the viaduct, and his eye was drawn by the clouds scudding across the sky. As they streamed out of sight behind the facade, it appeared that the clouds stood still and the bridge moved, leaned over toward him… falling toward him, forcing him back and back.

Abruptly the niche into which his left toe was wedged crumbled away and the foot shot into space. He plunged downward.

The shock of the fall tore his right hand and toe away from their holds around the corner, and for a breathtaking moment his body dropped to the full extent of his left arm and he hung giddily over the void supported only by the four fingers of that hand. The air was torn from his lungs in an agonized gasp. From below—seconds later, it seemed

—he heard clearly the patter of rubble on the Citroen's roof. Desperately he fought for purchase, pressing himself as close to the wet stone as he could to minimize the strain on those fingers... and at last his foot found a ledge, it held firm, and then his fingers groped for and found a crack, level and strong enough to hold him.

For the moment the panic was over! With laboring breath, he continued the climb.

The next crisis came when he was only ten feet from the top. The rain increased in volume, stinging his face. The wind plucked at his drenched trousers. And suddenly he could go no further. Shrieking muscles refused to drag his weight up against the pull of gravity any more. Spread eagled between heaven and earth, he dropped his face to the cold stone. His breath sobbed hoarsely in the extremity of his exhaustion. He would have to use the pitons and risk the attention the noise of the hammering would draw.

As he moved one hand warily toward his pocket he heard from somewhere above a curious rhythmic squeaking. Turning his head slowly, he squinted along the line of the bridge toward the abandoned permanent way leading to it.

Now that he was higher up he could see—Bartoluzzi and a girl dressed in black were crouched by a winch in the middle of the road, paying out a hawser hooked to the old truck. And the truck was rolling slowly down the incline toward the viaduct. The squeaking was from one of its wheels.

Solo thought furiously. If he did hammer in the pitons, they would be bound to hear. But in his position, although exposed, he would be a difficult target to hit from the winch.

The parapet would get in the way, and it was in any case an extremely fine angle for a shot. If Bartoluzzi or the girl moved out wide, of course, he would be a sitting duck. But this was just what they could not do; they had to stay at the winch until the truck reached the unsafe central portion of the bridge if they left the rope and let it run free it might simply come to rest against the parapet... or even go over the edge before it reached the weak section. And that would throw doubt on the consciousness of the driver at once; they wanted it to be assumed that he had been driving normally and that the viaduct had collapsed beneath him. Solo should therefore be safe from shooting until the truck had plunged down... and by then he hoped to have reached it himself and pulled on the handbrake anyway!

What would happen then, he would have to decide later. For the moment it was enough to get to the top. Almost before the thought was formed, he was hammering in the first of the iron pegs.

He had rested his weight on it and was pounding on the second when the noise registered with Bartoluzzi and the girl. There was a shout from the winch, followed a moment later by the bark of a heavy caliber pistol.

Solo paid no attention. The squeaking was coming perilously close; the old truck was rolling slowly out over the first arch. He stepped cautiously onto the third peg and looked for a suitable crevice for the next.

Another shot cracked out. And another. Something that sounded like a large insect hammered through the air behind the agent's head. An instant later a shower of stone chips stung his forehead as a slug flattened itself against the wall a little way above him. Two more near misses sent fragments of sandstone flying from the parapet some way to his right and then at last his lacerated fingers had grasped the coping itself and he was hauling himself agonizingly up for the last time to collapse face down on the permanent way beyond the lip.

The truck, between the second and third arches, was just drawing level with him. Through the grimed window he could see the lolling head of Illya Kuryakin drooped over the wheel.

Solo levered himself to his feet. His knees were trembling. He launched himself toward the door of the cab, prepared to wrench it open and dive for the handbrake.