Pulp Fiction | The Invisibility Affair by Thomas Stratton (15 page)

"I don't see a boat," said Illya.

"Neither do I, and I don't think he's been treading water for the last hour. Either he discovered the bug and pitched it into the lake, or..."

"Or what? If Thrush's invisible dirigible was already here and he was in it, we wouldn't be receiving any signals. Remember, any electromagnetic energy generated within the field is invisible to anyone outside the field."

Napoleon nodded thoughtfully. "He certainly didn't drive all the way up here just to throw the bug into the lake."

"He could have been picked up by someone in a boat," Illya suggested.

"In which case, we need a more versatile means of transportation to follow him," Napoleon said, pulling out his communicator. "I wonder if the Milwaukee U.N.C.L.E. branch owns an airplane, or if we'll have to get one from Chicago."

Kerry suddenly clutched his arm and pointed out toward the lake. The night sky was beginning to lighten with the approach of dawn, and the waters a few hundred yards offshore had begun to roil and bubble.

"Something's going on out there," Napoleon said, "but it's too dark to see just what."

As the sky grew lighter, the observers could make out a low, sinister shape against the water.

"Submarine!" Napoleon whispered. "There's something for Mr. Waverly!"

"You don't suppose Thrush is behind the water pollution problem?" Illya asked.

Several men busied themselves on the deck of the submarine, launching a small boat. It putt-putted in toward shore and the three watchers scrambled for cover when it became evident the boat was headed directly for the pier. By the time it arrived, they were safely concealed in a thicket not far from Sanders' car.

With the boat safely moored, the man climbed onto the pier and sauntered onto shore and up to a log that lay only a few yards from Napoleon, Illya, and Kerry. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and settled down, apparently prepared to spend the rest of the morning there. A vagrant breeze tickled Kerry's nostrils. She opened her mouth to sneeze and immediately found Napoleon's hand over her mouth and Illya's fingers pinching her nose. The sneeze subsided into a muffled gurgle which the man evidently didn't hear.

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.

A large metal hook appeared with startling suddenness in the air a few yards in front of the boat. As Illya watched, it lowered until it almost touched the water. He could see a steel cable extending upward and disappearing mysteriously about ten feet above the water.

The operator of the boat motioned toward the hook as they pulled alongside it. "Hang your bag on the hook, put your foot in it like a stirrup, and get a grip on the cable. You'll be hauled up."

Illya stared thoughtfully at the cable, which rose straight up and disappeared into thin air. "Shouldn't someone be playing a flute?" he murmured as he followed instructions. "With a snake charmer waiting in the wings?"

The cable started to rise.

A few seconds later, everything went black. Even though he had expected it, he almost tumbled of his perch. The sun was gone, the water, the shore, even the cable and his clenched hands. His invisible body was being pulled by an invisible force to an invisible destination. A wave of dizziness swept him.

Then there was again illumination as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Above him he could make out a cluster of lights. As he was drawn nearer, he realized that some of the lights came from the control gondola, while the one directly above him must emanate from inside the dirigible itself. He could see the dirigible only as a vast bulk, fading away into the darkness away from the lights. The light above him became brighter and he could recognize what appeared to be tremendous bomb bay doors yawning above him. The clatter of a winch came to him. As he passed the doors there was a loud humming sound and he saw the doors begin to close beneath him. The cable halted as they swung shut.

"You can step off now," a voice came from a platform overhead. Illya stepped off the hook onto the closed doors and picked up his suitcase. As he looked around, he realized what the doors were: aircraft hangar doors. The United States had made at least one ship like this, which could carry, launch, and pick up three fighter planes; evidently the Germans had produced a similar design.

He considered what Thrush could do with this much invisible transportation. Fortunately, modern fighter planes were larger than those of the 1930's, so the hangar where he stood could not readily be used for its original purpose. But it could, he thought, be easily adapted for use as a bomb bay. He thought about the dirigible hovering invisibly over Washington, D.C. with a cargo of plague germs, and shuddered.

"Rudolph Salzwasser?" A large man with a gold earring in his left ear and his right arm in a sling approached. When Illya nodded, the man picked up the suitcase with his good hand and motioned Illya to follow him.

"My name is Hunter," the man said over his shoulder as he led the way up some steps. "We have some temporary quarters set up for you just back of the control gondola. According to McNulty, they used to be crew's quarters; they're not in bad shape when you consider this thing is probably forty years old."

Illya muttered noncommittal sounds to indicate he was listening, and took careful note of his surroundings. Looking back from the top of the steps, he could see over the edge of the platform, to where a large winch had begun to feed out the cable again. The winch operator had apparently just thrown a large switch which operated the hangar doors; they were beginning to open.

Hastily, he moved to overtake Hunter, who was still moving forward and idly conversing. "...probably had a bad few moments coming up," he was saying as Illya came up beside him. "You get used to it after a few times, though."

Illya muttered assent. This must be the keel, he thought. Now they were on a narrow metal catwalk. Surrounding them, in inverted triangles, were rows of metal girders. The girders, with their lacy Swiss cheese appearance, had a look of delicacy about them, as did almost everything about the dirigible except for the hangar doors and the winch platform. The design provided maximum rigidity with minimum weight, but it had a certain fairy-tale look about it. Between the girders were metal tanks of all shapes and sizes. Some probably contained spare helium under pressure, he supposed, while others could be fuel. He saw no evidence of sandbags, and wondered where the one that had nearly dropped on Lavell had come from.

Now the catwalk and girders were replaced b an almost conventional hallway with a half dozen doors opening on either side. Hunter led the way to the first door on the right. "You can have this one," he said, opening the door. "There aren't many of us on board so we can each have our own room. The air force gets the best of everything," he added sardonically. "Down in the sub they're packed in like sardines."