The Utopia Affair - McDaniel David. Страница 27

The hands of his watch crawled around, snipping the last minutes off the hour, one by one, until at last he looked up to see Andreas, his replacement, coming on duty. They exchanged the usual pleasantries until Illya yawned politely and Andreas bid him a good evening.

There was only one way to draw them out—he'd have to offer himself as a target. His conservative soul shrank from the idea, but it was the only one practicable at the moment, and the need was pressing. All he could do was attract their attention, and then stand ready to move very fast.

He'd go to their room as if to examine his mysteriously silenced bug. If they were looking for their secret friend, they'd find him. He decided to eat lightly and do a few warm-up exercises before he went in. He debated carrying a pistol, a knife or a weighted stick, and finally compromised on all three. Bound by the order not to let anybody get killed if he could help it, his U.N.C.L.E. Special carried only the knockout darts. Illya wished heartily for a sturdier arm like the Webley-Vickers 50/80 machine pistol, but the word for this mission was still Don't Make Waves. He took the note addressed to Curley out of his drawer and propped it up on the desk just before he turned out the light and left.

A popular film was being shown in the employee auditorium this evening, and the halls were nearly deserted. The elevator door slid open on level four and Illya stepped out, glancing in either direction. If anyone was watching, he was well hidden. If there was only one, Illya hoped it was the Turk; the little Japanese was more than he felt up to, even at his best. Their door was just around the corner; a concealed guard wouldn't bother him until he was obviously working on the door of the suite.

He glanced perfunctorily up and down the corridor again before he quite stopped at the door; he knew if they were watching he would see nothing. His muscles tensed as he stopped and fumbled at the keyhole, and he willed them to relax. But the skin of his back itched with expectation as he completed the action and turned the knob, the stick ready in his left hand.

Suddenly the knob was jerked from his grasp as the door opened inward, pulling him off balance. His right wrist was clamped in a bone-crushing grip and he was yanked violently into the room. He twisted in the air and caught a neck-breaking karate chop across his left shoulder which didn't quite break, but the stick flew from his hand into the sudden light. He slipped away from the manacle grip as he rolled limply with the blow and came to his feet.

Kiazim stood before him in a half crouch, his wiry brown arms spread low, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He carried no weapons. Illya feinted for a shoulder holster and flipped the knife from its wrist sheath. The slim blade flashed from his hand, but somehow the Turk slid away from it like smoke and picked it up the moment it hit the foot of the sofa.

He toyed with it a second, the sliver of steel dancing on his fingertips like a cold flame, and without turning his body sent it flicking back. Before Illya could begin to react the blade struck, quivering in the doorframe a precise centimeter beside his neck. The vibrating hilt brushed his throat warmly as a whisper of dry, contemptuous laughter rustled through the room over the deep THUNK!

Illya jumped sideways, back towards the opening of the door. He'd been seen and could he identified—that was all he needed to accomplish this time out. Now to try to take a whole skin home with him.

He fell back to grab the doorknob, but a hard bare foot slammed the door closed again and he kept falling back. Stay beyond his leg reach and get the gun out— he almost stumbled as he backed into a chair, and Kiazim leaped forward. Illya rolled sideways and knocked over a small table, caught it as it fell and threw it legs first. One leg caught the Turk just under the rib cage and his face paled as he staggered before the blow. He's human after all! Illya felt an insane flash of relief as he grabbed for the holster under his short coat, back pedaling a few more paces while Kiazim recovered his balance. He fired from the hip as the wire-hard assassin came forward in a rush, and saw the dart strike home, sticking in his shirt front. The drug would act in seconds after hitting his blood stream.

Those were very long seconds for Illya as one brown arm batted his gun aside and an axe-blade hand stabbed into his left pectoral. His guard crumpled and vise-like fingers clutched at his throat. His vision darkened around the edges as the leering face of the killer loomed before him. Then the fingers relaxed and the cold face went suddenly vague, and he slumped to the floor like a slack-stringed puppet.

Illya brought his right arm up to massage his bruised throat, and tried to breathe again. He could, though not easily. Nothing broken, he thought, feeling the larynx gingerly and swallowing. His functioning fingers probed gently into his throbbingly numb left shoulder and found a badly bruised muscle. Hot packs tonight. He rubbed his arm gently, restoring the stunned circulation, as he retrieved his U.N.C.L.E. Special, his knife and his stick. Five seconds was, objectively, a very fast-acting knock out. But subjectively, it could be an awfully long time to wait. He let himself out and hurried down the hall.

Kiazim would sleep the sleep of the innocent for six hours—or considering his constitution, maybe four. But when he awoke, he would certainly hurry to tell Sakuda, and they would be after him. Somehow he couldn't quite look forward to the prospect. Oh well, he told himself, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

Inside the Field Command Post, somewhere in the vast backyard of Utopia, the man called Leon Dodgson sat surrounded by papers. Maps littered the chairs, charts were tacked to the wall, coding sheets lay covered with scrawls on the desk. A desk calculator squatted, humming a minor fifth with the teleprinter which stood at Dodgson's elbow, and muttered quietly from time to time. When it did, he would study the row of symbols it gave him and consult his charts.

Very good. The skirmishing unit he had sent over the ridge had attracted the attention of the major defending force while his armor traversed the far end of the defile unobserved, which might mean a theoretical debate later in the evening over whether a real detachment of the size represented could have accomplished the maneuver. The same argument cropped up in different forms every few days, and remained theoretical. In practice, his air cavalry were in position to hit Silverthorne's key supply point, and by nightfall he should have regained almost half the area factor he had lost in the last few engagements. He smiled, savoring a very real feeling of triumph.

The teleprinter nattered, signaling readiness for his next move. He checked his coding sheet against neatly written notes on a slightly wrinkled sheet of paper, and began to type orders into the machine.

Outside in the balmy morning sun, a green slope dotted with trees crested just above the converted trailer. From the ridge, some fifty feet away, a good pair of binoculars on a tripod could survey the entire field of conflict up to a mile and a half across the valley. Real men, armed with simulated weapons, were maneuvering down there, directed as pieces in a gigantic and complex game. Since the field below was a sca1ed-down version of the imaginary playing-board, the hypothetical pieces moved much slower than the men who did their fighting. These men were a thoroughly random mixture of races and nations, recruits for mercenary armies which fought for anyone anywhere in the world, sent here for practical training. They'd had basics, and many of them had previous experience, but here they shared experiences which welded them into a unit. Soldiers declared killed were locked away for the duration of that particular game; they were effectively dead—they saw no one and no one saw them. Their equipment was modem, but their ammunition was blank. The judge was the Battle Results Computer, which magnified their actions to the Game's scale and decided who lived and who died. Each individual was notified by radio the moment he committed his fatal mistake, and removed himself from combat immediately.