before the full assault force had been picked.
Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were appraised of the impending attack twenty six hours before T-zero, As usual, they received summons to Mr. Waverly's home-from-home, his field office, for 'a briefing,' subject unspecified.
'Gentlemen,' he began without preamble as they draped themselves appropriately over convenient pieces of furniture, 'tomorrow night we will be invaded by Thrush, hopefully with the KBG in full operation.'
'Hopefully?' said Illya.
'We know exactly when and where they will strike, as well as how hard and towards what goal. We also know what they want, where they expect to find it – and most important, how hard they are willing to fight to attain it. We shall therefore give it to them with a convincing minimum of resistance, including simulated casualties on our side and real ones on theirs. Neither of you will participate in the sham defense – the risk of your being recognised is too great.
'Nevertheless, I believe I can promise you an opportunity to stretch your atrophying muscles very soon. Less than an hour ago the locations of Thrush Central were identified, and we may be ready to move against them in forty-eight hours. You will be fully briefed after tomorrow night's action, but basically the situation is this: the Central complex which currently has control is located in Darjeeling – a ticklish spot, with Nepal and Pakistan, China, Bhutan and India clustered around the borders of Sikkim with missiles bristling and hostility heavy; any sort of overt military activity in the area could start World War III in a matter of hours. I would prefer to wait another few weeks until control-is shifted to the present stand-by Central, which is in an ideal site for our purposes, but Thrush is already aware of some kind of communications anomaly in this relay area, and has sent a team here to trace it. We cannot hope to remain undiscovered another week. We must act at once.
'Where is the back-up unit?' asked Illya.
'Are we going to Darjeeling?' asked Napoleon,
'No,' said Mr. Waverly, 'You're going to San Diego, The stand-by Central is set up in one of the exposition buildings in Balboa Park there.'
'And the third unit?'
'In six DC-3s in Central Africa. They are the most vulnerable, and we should be able to immobilize them with little effort.'
'But we'll go into all this in your briefing Friday. Tonight's operation demands most of our attention at the moment. Baldwin believes we stole the gamma laser the night Mr. Stevens was killed, and is anxious to recover it before we can finish analyzing it. I'm afraid, Mr. Solo, that your improvisation didn't hold up against even a relatively superficial autopsy.'
'I think we did pretty well, under the circumstances,' said Napoleon.
Mr. Waverly commenced stuffing a pipe. 'Be that as it may,' he said, 'they will be allowed to find the gamma laser in the second of six places they have been instructed to look for it – in the High-Energy Lab, next to the mass spectrometer. A work-order with it will indicate that it has not yet been subjected to more than a superficial examination. Considering how long it took us to borrow the X-ray crystallograph from Stanford, Section Eight is doing an excellent job – they expect to finish within twelve hours. Microphotogrammetry was completed the day after you brought the laser rod to us. If we offer Thrush a convincing resistance before allowing them to recapture it, they may retire convinced of an effective victory.'
'When are they due to arrive?'
'Fifteen minutes before midnight tomorrow, through a fire exit on the second level.'
At twenty minutes before midnight, though everything seemed perfectly normal in U.N.C.L.E. HQ San Francisco, a subtle atmosphere of tension seeped through the silent corridors. During the afternoon, Mr. Simpson had mounted two thermographs in protective housings, several sealed photographic plates and a recording magnetometer inconspicuously around the second-level fire exit which would shortly open to admit the not-unwelcome invaders. A Fastax WF-4 high speed instrumentation camera was mounted behind a ceiling fixture; it would be started by a burst of magnetic flux or heat striking the other sensors, and its 400 feet of XR film would last approximately fifteen
His personal portable observation post was centered around an optical thermograph which was too large to carry and too expensive to abandon, mounted on a rubber-tired waist-high lab cart which had been designed to bear an obsolete oscilloscope. His final preparations completed by 9:00 o'clock, he retired to a private office for an hour's nap.
Now as the moment of attack approached, the normally deserted corridors of the second level were quiet. Access doors leading to other areas had been secured, as had the main elevator bank. Guards were at their posts, nylon body armor under their suits, palms sweating slightly.
Mr. Simpson loaded and checked his motorized Nikon and its 250-shot magazine; as long as he held down its button it would shoot five pictures a second. He set the shutter to 1/1000th with the lens wide open at f/1.8, two stops underexposed for the 85 ambient foot-candles of the corridor, and took his position as ordered behind the first corner with instructions to fall back when the Thrush force advanced.
Napoleon paced his small quarters endlessly, watched by Joan, who was not to be told what was happening but' asked repeatedly if he was edgy. Illya was downstairs locked in his room, also- as ordered, drumming his finger-tips and fretting quietly. Considering the building's structure, he wasn't even likely to hear anything of the battle but what came over the intercom monitor considerately left open for him.
Mr. Waverly would be directing operations from the central communications room, where banks of TV screens showed him the corridors of the second level and a microphone stood before him to transmit orders to all his units, Now the command channel was silent, and cameras stared down empty corridors as the last minutes ticked away.
On level two Mr. Simpsom slipped into a heavy asbestos lab smock, with matching boots and hood. Under the exigencies of field observation of an unwilling and even uncooperative subject, certain discomforts were to be expected. He switched on his lab cart, directing current from the heavy batteries on the lower shelf to the recording optical thermograph and the magnetometer beside it. Five minutes remained as he took his position around the corner of a crossing corridor some thirty yards from the fire exit.
According to his Accutron it was T-minus-one when a flare of light around the fire door and a muffled i›WHAFF! pushed a wave of hot air down the passage. Instantly one hand dropped to the start-button on his datacorder and the other brought up the Nikon. Quickly, before the 15-second load of the Fastax ran out, he stuck the Nikon vertically around the corner, centering its right-angle viewfinder on the converging lines of the corridor and the action already starting towards him through the molten ruins of a once-sturdy door.
He held the button five seconds, long enough to record in color as much of two more fireballs as the relatively limited range of his emulsion could handle. He could synchronise these frames with the ultrahighspeed 16mm XR footage, perforce in monochrome, to study the development of the plasmoid.
Recorder needles leaped wildly as the drive motor hummed and tape flew past polished heads, while above ceiling lights flashed and alarm bells hammered through the halls. Guards burst forth from appropriate directions after a reasonable delay; By that time the attack force was two-thirds of the way to the corner and advancing rapidly. Mr. Simpson retired unseen down the hall they would follow, wheeling his equipment cart ahead of him at a dog-trot.
Gunfire spat behind him as he ducked behind the steel partition which backed the Section Receptionist's deserted desk. He paused here as U.N.C.L.E. guards rushed past him in both directions, then a fusillade of slugs slapped the wall and suddenly the corridor was empty again. Behind him and his steel shield, two members of the Home Team popped out, released a few rounds and popped back again.
Mr. Simpson barely had time to Blink as the leap of a, magnetometer needle, gave him a fraction of a second warning and a sphere of unspeakably intense light shot past a few feet away and burst with a quiet padded concussion ten yards behind him. He felt a wash of warmth reflecting from the wall he hugged and a surge of gratitude for the asbestos smock.
They were definitely coming this way. As if to remind him, a voice spoke tinnily from the open communicator in his pocket.
