The Invisibility Affair - Stratton Thomas (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗

Several minutes later, there was the sound of a car bumping its way along the beach road. It came into sight shortly afterward, an elderly vehicle containing two men. The driver pulled off into the trees and the two men emerged and walked down to the beach where the boatman met them.

"There are only two of you," he said sharply. "I was told there would be three."

"He was detained," one of the men replied. "Some idiot driver ran him off the road north of Chicago. He called us while we were waiting at the rendezvous point; said he was going to get the car fixed and could follow us in a few hours. I would have been conspicuous to wait much longer, so we came ahead."

The boatman cursed casually. "McNulty won't like this. U.N.C.L.E. found the hangar, and McNulty wants to get the dirigible away from the state as soon as possible."

The other shrugged. "We're just technicians. If he wants someone with experience piloting a German dirigible, he's going to have to wait."

The boatman pulled a Thrush communicator from his pocket, snapped it open, and reported. There was a reply the observers couldn't hear, and the boatman closed the communicator. "Okay," he said, turning to the new arrivals. "Come on. We'll wait offshore."

The men boarded the boat and it moved slowly back toward the submarine. As it reached the sub, the boat was hauled aboard and the men disappeared down the conning tower. After a minute, the submarine submerged and, as it disappeared, there appeared briefly a shallow, circular pit in the water, not twenty feet from where the conning tower had been.

Napoleon watched closely as the pit vanished again. "The dirigible is right there. It must be moored to the sub with the OTSMID field ending just above the water to hide the mooring line. See there"—he gestured to where the pit had now completely refilled—"now that I know where to look, I can see a couple feet of line sticking out of the water. See how it disappears in midair?"

Illya nodded, "A sudden storm might produce interesting results."

"No such luck," replied Napoleon. "The weather forecast is for clear and calm. Well, now that we've located it, what do we do with it? Dr. Morthley is probably on board, so we can't shoot it down."

"Even if we got him off, we probably couldn't do it, not with these." Illya held up his U.N.C.L.E. Special. "We'd need at least a machine gun to bring it down under the circumstances."

"It looks as if the missing German dirigible pilot may be our best bet, if we can waylay him," Napoleon said.

Illya nodded. "Ja, mein kapitan; I was afraid you'd think of something like that."

They wriggled backwards out of the thicket and crept as silently as possible back into the trees. Then they moved back down the road until they were near the highway. As they went, Napoleon reported the submarine to Mr. Waverly, who promised to have their Chicago office look into the matter. With that meager assurance, Napoleon called Brattner, who was more cooperative but couldn't guarantee to have his agents there in much less than three hours.

"Looks as if we're on our own," Illya remarked as Napoleon pocketed his communicator. "Any ideas on how to stop our missing pilot?"

Napoleon looked up and down the path, then pointed to an especially bumpy section. "We'll have as good a chance here as anywhere. He'll have to go slow. If he has a window open, one of us can get him with a sleep dart. If the windows are up, I think we can get the door open before he can react. After all, if he was a German dirigible pilot, he can be very young."

"And if the windows are closed and the doors locked?"

"Then we hope we can pry him out before he thinks of calling his friends." Napoleon opened the briefcase he had been carrying, removed what looked like a lump of wet clay and placed it in the center of the road, just beyond the rough stretch. "That should stop him, if we have to use force."

They didn't have to use force. The pilot was a fat little man who turned off the highway with excessive care, traversed the woods road in low gear, happily humming "Muss i Denn", and came to a complete halt at the rough stretch.

As he leaned forward to peer myopically through the windshield, Napoleon aimed carefully at his neck and fired the sleep dart. The man slapped at his neck, turned to stare in astonishment at the side of the road, and collapsed on the front seat. Napoleon and Illya rushed forward and lifted him out of the car.

Illya stared at the pudgy unconscious form. "I hope none of the crew knows him personally," he said. "My powers of impersonation are restricted to a bit of German air lore and an accent; amorphous, I'm not."

"How about the ability to cloud men's minds?" suggested Napoleon, removing a bottle of hair dye from the briefcase. "How are you at humming 'Muss i Denn'?"

Illya sat stoically on one bumper of the car while Napoleon applied the dye to Illya's hair, transforming it to a dark, dirty brown, going gray around the temples. The eyebrows were darkened and made to appear bushier, and the eyes underlined to appear baggy. A few lines were skillfully applied to the face, and within fifteen minutes Illya had aged twenty years to the casual observer. When it was over, he stood up and checked himself in a mirror.

"Does he or doesn't he?" he inquired of his image. "Only your U.N.C.L.E. agent knows for sure."

His handiwork on Illya completed, Napoleon searched through the unconscious man's pockets. They revealed little except that the man's name was Rudolph Salzwasser and that he was a Thrush. Illya pocketed the walled, identity card, and Thrush communicator.

"Now we wait, as long as we can," Napoleon said. "If we can hold off long enough, maybe Brattner will get here in time to help."

As if on cue, the Thrush communicator buzzed.

"Better answer it, or they'll get suspicious and maybe pull out without you," Napoleon said.

Illya snapped open the communicator. "Salzwasser here."

"Now what's wrong?" a voice asked. "You called an hour ago and said you'd be here in half an hour."

Wishing they had left Rudolph conscious long enough to get an idea of what his voice sounded like, Illya held the communicator away from his mouth and answered, "I missed the turn-off. I'll be there in a few minutes."

"Snap it up. McNulty is getting impatient. He's ready to pilot the thing himself, after the way he lucked out in getting it all the way here yesterday."

Without giving Illya a chance to sign off, the communicator went dead.

"Well, here goes," Illya muttered and climbed into the car and drove off down the road at a leisurely pace. Napoleon recovered his gob of plastic explosive from the middle of the road, tied and gagged Rudolph securely and, with some help from Kerry, dragged him under some bushes.

Ten minutes at a fast walk brought them back to their thicket. The road was much shorter in the daylight. The boat had apparently been waiting for Illya when he had driven up, for he was already well out into the lake, Rudolph's bulky suitcase clutched in his lap.

Napoleon checked his tracer and discovered that it was no longer picking up anything. Evidently Sanders was on board the dirigible. He hoped

Brattner could get there faster than he had promised. It wasn't likely that Illya could get Morthley off the ship without raising an alarm, and once Thrush was alerted, the odds against the U.N.C.L.E. agents would be formidable. A less optimistic man would have said overwhelming.