The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric. Страница 17

This is no time to get glued to one spot, he decided firmly, and certainly not the place for it. By sheer force of will he managed to squirm and crawl forward between the beams until his body was stretched out away from the piling. The beams were just too far apart for Napoleon to use his elbows and upper arms to bridge between them. This put them too close together for him to use his hands. So pressing outward against the two beams with both forearms, shoulders creaking with the strain of supporting his 180 pounds, he slowly worked his feet and legs up off the piling and into a similar spread-eagle position.

With every move of his legs his knees were tom by the splintery beams, and his buttocks threatened to launch him downward through their contacts with the planking above. Both legs were bloody, and his shoes slipped constantly rather than grasping as bare feet might have. Napoleon worked his legs forward to crowd his trembling shoulders against his aching arms. There was now nothing at all between him and the knives below except the pressure he was exerting on the two eight inch beams.

Eons later, the jacket worn through, blood dripping freely and soaking both the cloth and the beam, Napoleon had worked himself four feet out from the piling, and years closer to his grave. Thwamm! The trap behind him slammed open, and nearly undid all of his work. He froze again, his muscles locked in a panic cramp.

“Arnold,” the voice of Apis bellowed out, “he ain’t down here.”

“What? He must be-look again.”

Napoleon sent up a fervent prayer to the patron saint of spies that Apis wouldn’t look anywhere but at the knives below, and waited for another eternity.

“Honest, Arnold, there isn’t anyone down there. He must not have fallen through after all.”

“Then he must still be in the maze. Come on.”

The trap door slid closed again, and Napoleon gasped, partly in relief, partly from the pain he was forced to endure. Slowly, he inched one limb and then another forward, every foot gained meaning another pound of flesh spent. Finally he forced first one and then the other of his numb yet aching hands into the crevice formed by the joining of the straight beams with the curved piling. He had crossed the ten feet, defying both death and gravity.

Deeper and deeper into the narrowing slots he forced his powerless fingers and palms. Finally, satisfied, he lessened the pressure on his legs and fell forward onto the piling. His legs flew apart, the straining muscles relieved of the pressure refusing to answer his brain’s command. Try as he might he couldn’t force them around the piling. His hands and the rough wood gouging into their flesh were his only support. Slowly he mastered his muscles again; his shoes, now in a position to be of use, cut grooves with their leather soles into the algae covering the piling.

I may not live through this, hut at least the hard part is done. I congratulate you o miraculous magi; you have pulled it off again. Napoleon worked his way painfully around the second piling until his back was to the open sea. The field of knives, five feet below, extended not more than two feet from his point of vantage.

If Thrush has taken the trouble to mine the entire Atlantic for falling spies, I suppose I’m still in trouble. With all the strength he could put into a final push with his legs, he leaped far out into the icy water.

His wrists were still bleeding from the bottle that had cut his bonds, and both hands were badly slashed by splinters. His right arm and both legs were deeply lacerated, his left arm lacerated too, but not to the same scale. When the freezing salt water hit his wounds the pain fled instantly, but his agonized muscles rebelled at the shock. Napoleon cramped as a swimmer had never cramped before.

He felt himself drawn up into a hard knot of fiery freezing pain as he sank like a dead weight into the sea.

Chapter 8

“Sorry to shoot and run.”

Three of the four streetlights were knocked out. The fourth lit a small portion of street, lone sentry in the last block of Coney Island’s attempts at a city by the boardwalk. Kind of sad, thought Illya. Probably only a matter of time before some kid lets fly with a rock; maybe if they break that one, too, the city will have to put up new lights.

He parked the gray U.N.C.L.E. sedan directly beneath the light. He always preferred to look ‘normal’ with that car. He had long ago discovered that any attempt to stay out of sight-such as parking in the dark here-brought up every curious bystander. In the glare from the only streetlight the streamlined sedan would be too obvious to be worth gawking at.

The chill of evening grew deeper as he walked away from the car toward the ocean. Cold wind off the water made him wish his jacket were a topcoat, but he zipped it up and kept his chin down to make the best of things. To cap the unpleasant temperature, the warm-voiced girl in Communications was trying to tell him they were unable to pinpoint Napoleon.

“But why is that?” he snapped. It was little comfort to talk to a personal communicator when you wanted to shake somebody, or get your hands on the computer that was causing all the problem. “When we left this morning the system would all but write down addresses of anyone we visited. If I had the expensive computer layout you have, I’d crack the whip with it. No computer of mine would say I don’t know,’ ” It did his temper no good to keep thinking about the hour lost in Gambol’s office with Napoleon being trundled out here by Thrush. Much too much could have happened in that hour. And, as Waverly would have added, the lost time was helping Thrush clean up its trail; the whole stock affair was getting further out of control each moment now that they knew U.N.C.L.E. was out after them.

“When we lost his signal, you and Mr. Solo were so widely separated that we had reduced the scale a very great deal,” she said. “He was apparently doing quite a bit of moving around, because the map was shifting back and forth, and going up and down rapidly.

“Up and down?” Illya looked at his communicator quizzically.

“Yes, sir. The altitude of his blip went from sea-level to the height you are at presently-we have determined that that is the boardwalk. Then it went up quickly, and down like a shot, with considerable lateral movement. Just as it quieted down and we started to triangulate, his signal stopped and yours became the primary.” She sounded miserable about that part of it. “The display jumped to you, and we weren’t ready for it. Four of us were sitting in front of the display console watching it and taking readings off known landmarks. But before we could get anything or even record the picture, all we had was your blip in Manhattan. All w know is that Mr. Solo was on the waterfront, right at sea level, and the picture sort of looked like it does now. Where are you.”

“Sort of,” he said scathingly. There was no answer.

He walked down a short flight of stairs from the promenade to the beach and began a reconnaissance in approved manner. The Atlantic looked forbidding under the stars, flat and entirely unappealing. As far as he could see along the beach, there was nowhere to hide Napoleon. He supposed he might look for a submarine conning-tower poking through the surface of Lower Bay, or search the sand for a Thrush picnic outing. Anything, never mind how ridiculous, would scratch the itch he was building up to have some kind of tangle with the black-hats. At least it would help warm him up.

Over his communicator, the girl back at U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters tried to apologize to him and cheer him up. “You know were all heartsick about not being able to help you and Mr. Solo. It’s an experimental linkage of the computer to a map-display, and we feel horrible about letting it snap out of our control like that. All of us are going to stay right on it until we can identify the last picture he sent against your whereabouts.”