18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (20 page)

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 façade, 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 Citroën'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.

And in that instant the gun by the winch spat flame once more. The bullet seared across Solo's forehead as he was in midleap and dropped him like a stone. The truck rolled on over the third arch.

As it did so, two things happened. In the cab, Kuryakin jerked suddenly upright and blinked his eyes. In the back, the pile of sacks under which he had been conveyed away from the ambushed riot truck was thrown aside and the girl Annike appeared.

She vaulted over the side and ran to the cab before the astonished pair by the winch had recovered sufficiently to fire at her.

Jerking open the door, she jumped onto the running board, leaned in over the awakening Russian and hauled frantically on the handbrake between the seats.

Shuddering, the truck ground to a halt with its front wheels only inches away from the section over the central arch. On the muddy surface of the bridge a network of small cracks appeared, raying outward like the filaments of a spider's web as they watched.

"Quick!" the girl hissed. "For your life's sake! Drop out on the far side and lie underneath. Move!"

Kuryakin had suffered a great deal of pain, but he was not physically damaged. Also he was in superb training and used to hardship—which explained why the effects of the drug were wearing off sooner than Bartoluzzi had expected. Although the clouds in his mind had not entirely vanished, he reacted to the crisp note of command in the girl's voice and shot into action almost by reflex.

As the girl dropped back to the roadway on her side of the truck, he slid over to the far side of the cab, burst open the door and fell out onto the ground. Together, they crawled beneath the front wheels.

Bullets were whistling toward them from the winch, but for the moment the angle of the slope prevented them from penetrating below the truck.

"I don't know who you are," Illya mumbled through his drugged torpor, "but thank you! And couldn't you perhaps tell me where I am and what's going on?"

In a few crisp sentences, Annike filled him in. And then, "But what about your friend?" she asked. "Shouldn't we do something about him?"

"Solo? Where is he? I haven't seen him since before the case started."

"At the moment he's lying between the offside rear wheel and a kind of refuge built out from this viaduct like the flying bridge of a ship."

"Lying...? Good heavens!" Kuryakin exclaimed. "I'll go and get him." And suddenly alert again, he wormed his way toward the rear of the truck, scuttled rapidly out to grab Solo's ankles, and then hauled him back into shelter as a fusillade of bullets thwacked and spanged into the ancient vehicle above their heads.

"Is he hurt badly?" the girl asked anxiously.

"I don't think so. Fortunately, he was just creased—see, the furrow has hardly bled at all. But he'll be out of commission for an hour or so. Just when we need him most…
Ah
!" He had been feeling in Solo's pockets. Now he produced the Walther from Solo's waistband with a triumphant flourish.

Wriggling up until he was below the back axle, he squeezed off a couple of experimental shots. Marinka and the Corsican hastily ducked out of sight behind an old Steyr saloon that was facing back up the hill a little way behind the winch. From the shelter of this they loosed off desultory shots at the truck.

"If I could keep them pinned down there until Solo recovers..." the Russian called over his shoulder. And then suddenly he stopped and looked upward. Rain was falling on his head.

A stray slug, penetrating the wooden back of the cab, had bit the handle of the handbrake, knocking it off its ratchet and allowing the truck to resume its interrupted descent. Slowly, inexorably, their shelter withdrew, leaving them exposed on the rain-swept viaduct.

The truck itself rolled onto the cracked center section, continued across it... and then suddenly it wasn't there.

With the speed of a demon king in pantomime, it simply dropped from sight. The entire center of the arch, as soon as it received the full weight of the truck, plummeted downward with a roar like that of the trains the viaduct had once carried on their way. From below, the shattering reverberation of the impact was followed by a cannonade of blocks and small stones from the raw edge of the chasm. A cloud of choking yellow dust mushroomed up over the gap and blanketed them from sight.

Through the swirling fog they heard Bartoluzzi shouting: "No, no. Don't shoot now! We'll get them alive and drop them over on to the wreckage. It's perfect; it'll keep to my original plan, and the two extra bodies will provide scapegoats for the ambush of the riot truck."

When the dust had cleared enough for them to distinguish the winch, they could see the Corsican whispering something to the girl and pointing back up the hill toward his headquarters. The girl nodded. She eased the leather helmet from her head, shook loose a mane of blonde hair, and started off at a run.

"Who does she think she is?" Kuryakin asked. "She's auditioning for a part in an espionage series on television?"

"She's gone back for the helicopter," Annike said tightly. "We won't have a chance... and look!" She was pointing at the car. Crouched down in the driver's seat, Bartoluzzi was backing it cautiously toward them. He steered around the winch, with its snapped hawser, and slowly drew nearer along the bridge.

Illya felt in Solo's pocket for another clip of ammunition and fired the Walther as fast as he could. Glass in the Steyr's back window starred, and gasoline began to spray from the drilled tank below the spare tire.

But the Corsican continued to advance. When the car was only ten yards away, he stopped, ducking out of sight behind the seat. Obviously his tactic was to block them there until the girl arrived with the helicopter.

The rain redoubled in force. Beneath them, they felt the viaduct tremble in a surge of wind.

And suddenly it happened again. Safe enough while the structure was whole and rigid, the second arch became unsafe as soon as the bridge was breached. Beneath the car, the road appeared to warp. They watched, horrified, as the parapet on one side dipped sickeningly, canting the surface at a crazy angle. The heavy saloon began to slide toward the edge as great cracks zigzagged across the width of the bridge. They could see Bartoluzzi frantically fighting to reach the door on the upper side and open it. And then, with a roar like an artillery barrage, roadway, parapet, refuge, car and guard rails collapsed into nothing, vanished in a cloud of dust as dense as the first.

In a few minutes the girl from THRUSH would be back gunning for them in her helicopter.

And they were stuck like pigeons on a roost—marooned on a single isolated pillar of the ruined bridge...

Chapter 18

Nothing To Report

THE GIRL was crying, her drenched hair plastered across her cheek as she kneeled on the muddy road. "I'm... I'm sorry," she sobbed. "But he was... he used to be... I was very fond of him once."

Kuryakin kept a sympathetic silence. After a while the girl said quaveringly, "Is there any chance... your friend climbed up, I suppose we couldn't possibly climb
down
?"

The Russian peered over the edge into the dizzying depths of the valley. The single pile on which they were stuck, now that it had lost its anchorage at both ends, was swaying like a reed in the wind, and every few seconds they could hear another shower of stones break loose and plunge down to swell the twin disasters of rock strewn across the floor of the defile. He shook his head. "For one man, coming up, with the viaduct rigid, it was crazy enough," he said soberly. "But to try going down, with the pillar rocking like this and an unconscious man to carry... you might just as well jump!"

"What will happen when that... when she comes back?"

"She has only one aim now. THRUSH was interested in taking over Bartoluzzi's network, but only if he was there to operate it. He was the only one with the knowledge of all the details. Now that he's dead, I'm afraid her sole course is to eliminate the witnesses and go. They'll just write the project off as a deal that didn't materialize."

Five minutes later, the helicopter skimmed over the trees from the north and sailed across the valley, circling the pillar. They watched the black figure of the girl pull back the Plexiglas door, level a submachine gun with one hand, and coax the machine lower and nearer with the other.

Kuryakin pushed the girl to the ground beside Solo and flung himself across them as the stutter of the gun drowned out the noise of the helicopter's rotors. Fragments of rock spurted up from the road and drew blood from his cheek as the line of slugs ripped past only inches from his head.

The helicopter was turning, preparing for another run… and all at once he was aware of a third sound, louder than either of the other two. He twisted his head and looked up. Incredibly, a second helicopter, much larger than the girl's, was slanting over the valley toward it, spitting flame from the open door in its nose.

Marinka turned her machine swiftly. It rose in the air like an elevator and made off rapidly toward the west. Evidently she preferred to live to fight another day... and anyway there wasn't much the witnesses could say against
her
!

The bigger machine hovered over the stricken viaduct. A rope ladder snaked down to the top of the pillar. And over a bullhorn a voice exclaimed in the fruitiest accents of County Cork: "Going up now, ladies and gentlemen! Going up! Networks. Settlement of Accounts. Rescue Service. Information. Going up now
please
…"