The Thousand Coffins Affair

THE WINGS OF THRUSH

Jerry Terry said, “Oh!” and that was all. For Napoleon Solo, it said it all. Oh, indeed. The wings of the Debonair shivered and seemed to flap wide open under the withering hail of lead. And then the black shadow had shot past them into full view.

Solo’s eyes opened wide as he saw the plane. It was an MIG fighter, one of those Russian destroyers he had seen in action in Korean skies. The Debonair was a go-cart compared to it. He and Jerry Terry didn’t have a chance.

“Go down,” he barked. “Right now. We haven’t got a prayer staying up here with him. One more pass and he’ll rip our wings off like canceled stamps.”

“Hang onto your breakfast,” she sang out. “There’s only one way out of this.” He knew what she meant. Even as he scanned the skies for the MIG, he knew what she would do. He had gauged her mind and her courage well. She wasn’t an Army Intelligence officer because she had nice coppery hair or good legs.

The Debonair heeled over, almost whining in protest, as she worked it into a flat spin. A dangerous maneuver but with death staring at them over the muzzle of twin .50 calibre machine guns, it was the only chance worth taking.

And the MIG had banked and roared on back at them.

Jerry Terry’s quick-thinking slip down caused the fusillade of new fire to spray harmlessly across the heavens. The Debonair had one advantage — it could fall faster than the MIG could fly forward. Unless the MIG decided to follow them down. Solo bit his lip to ease the tension. He felt helpless and useless. She was doing all the work.

The Debonair dropped like a rock, the wings dancing erratically because of the gaping wounds in the metal. The pilot of the MIG barrel-rolled beautifully, shortened a pass that would have carried him miles away and hummed on back for another try. But the altitude was giving away. Another loss of five hundred feet and the MIG couldn’t dare stay close.

Still, the unknown pilot had his instructions — and cast-iron nerves. Even as the Debonair spiraled swiftly toward the ground, reaching that point of no return where Jerry would have to level off, the MIG pilot was setting itself for one last-ditch, all-out effort.

The MIG loomed in the rear-view mirror. A black phantom of unbelievable speed, shooting at them from nearly a forty-five degree angle to catch them as they passed his angle of observation.

“Brace yourself,” Solo gritted. “Some more singing telegrams coming this way.”

“Watch out for yourself,” she snapped back.

The air came alive with the pounding of machine-gun fire. Solo cursed. This time it was for keeps. Pounds of lead found a home in the right wing. He watched it happen, too fascinated to turn away. A stitching, ripping pattern of trouble worked along the left wing to the point where it met the fuselage. Too late, he shouted a warning. Too late, he saw the wing crumple backwards, like an arm being bent at the elbow. And then came the tearing, grating song of doom. The wing buckled and flew off like a leaf in a gale wind. The Debonair flipped over on its side, throwing Solo against the girl. Flying on one wing now, the plane plummeted helplessly like a rock cast down a deep well. Jerry Terry screamed once.

Solo ignored her. The earth was rushing up at them. Time was lost now. So was letting anybody else do the thinking for him. Solo seized the stick from Jerry and pulled back.

The sky reeled over, the terrain spun in a dizzy kaleidoscope, scored with the diving whistle and whine of the Debonair..

But the reversal of direction on the stick, coupled with the wing loss, had a nullifying effect on the power of their dive. The plane tried to climb, losing a lot of its flying speed. But the crippled wing caused a conflict of desires, aerodynamically.

Solo kept his eyes riveted to the earth. The flat ground rocketed toward them. The Debonair flipped on its side, groaned mightily and swooped back downward again in a pancaking sweep of the ground.

It was only then that Solo closed his body over the girl’s and burrowed her head into the cushion of his shoulder. There was nothing left to do now but count ten and pray.

The Debonair came down with a groaning, wounded glide of erratic flight and crumbled on its landing gear.

And then came the jarring concussion of the crash.

For Solo, it was an exploding, pile-driving thunder of reverberation which seemed to lift the top of his head off. The world blazed with light and the ringing of bells — and then the darkness rushed in.

Napoleon Solo’s last conscious thought was that somebody had gotten pretty damn angry just because he had wanted to take a close look at the beautiful cemetery of Orangeberg.

In the jet bomber carrying Stewart Fromes’ corpse back to America, Waverly sat in the forward compartment, quietly studying his report folders. His bony forehead was beaded slightly with perspiration. His hands toyed endlessly With the silver pellet Napoleon Solo had found — the little round enigma discovered between the fourth and fifth toes of a very important corpse.

The bomber soared above the choppy green Atlantic.

Staring down from his window seat, Waverly could see the limitless expanse of water. Far off on the horizon, he could make out the tall funnels of an ocean liner plowing toward France. Probably the S.S. United States, he thought idly. He was giving far more attention to the problem of Utangaville, Spayerwood and, possibly, Oberteisendorf.

Waverly sighed. He wished dearly for a lengthy chat with his laboratory technicians. The time lost in travel was irksome. The Air Force was extremely cooperative, thanks to the General and his top priority classification, yet there was no one on board to confide in. Thrush was no matter to discuss with pilots, bombardiers and navigators. Nor with crew chiefs, no matter how well intentioned.

He studied the silver pellet, rotating it in his strong fingers. Was this, perhaps, the answer to the problem?

He restrained a sigh. U.N.C.L.E. had its limitations, for all of its vast organizational powers. Too often, the future had to rest in the hands of a single agent — capable and highly trained, to be sure, yet still only one man. A single human being, in the last analysis.

The range and scope of problems attacked by U.N.C.L.E. was enormous. There was usually a sense of something international about all of the organization’s activities. But, just as some of the smaller nations of the world called upon the U.N. for assistance with certain domestic problems beyond their own abilities to handle, so did U.N.C.L.E. find itself called in on occasional local situations. Anything which affected large masses of people, or which could set up a general reaction affecting other countries or forces, was a target for U.N.C.L.E.

An organization’s attempt, for example, to cause the accidental firing of a missile from one friendly power onto the territory of another friendly power, in order to cause complications within the Alliance, would suffice to bring U.N.C.L.E. agents into the field. Or the vagrant wandering of a tube of germ bacilli lost from an experimental station would have U.N.C.L.E. tracking down that bottle before all hell broke loose on the international scene. Any attempt to manipulate a nation’s currency values would demand U.N.C.L.E.’s immediate countermeasures.

So it was. So it had to be. Waverly had devoted his life to U.N.C.L.E.

He sighed again, recognizing the mental process he was going through as personal justification for his own existence, and reached for his pocket ballpen. Time to make notes, jot some specific memoranda that would give him a starting point once they reached New York—

“Mr. Waverly?”

He looked up to see Captain Hendryx staring down at him. The man was tall, efficient, with a pioneer look to him. One could have imagined him in buckskin and beaver cap rather than his crisp Air Force uniform.

“What is it, Captain?”

“It’s the coffin, Mr. Waverly. You’d better have a look.”

Waverly rose in alarm. “Out with it, man. What’s wrong with the coffin?”

Captain Hendryx shook his head.

“Wish I knew for sure. But the damnedest odor is coming from it. The coffin’s in the rear hold, beyond bomb bay. Sergeant Peters has been checking it every now and then—”

Through the maze of narrow passageways, with the ribs of the ship seeming like the inside of a whale in a museum, Waverly followed the Captain. The hold was a narrow, cramped space just before the tail section where stood a baffled-looking young Sergeant, poised respectfully beside the oblong box containing Stewart Fromes’ body.

Waverly stooped and sniffed. An awful odor of decay was present. Waverly straightened, trying to hold back a sense of loss and defeat.

“Sergeant,” he said, “raise the lid, please.”

The body had been carefully packed in dry ice. Curls of cold vapor wafted up as the Sergeant raised the lid. Waverly gasped. He couldn’t help himself. It was one of the few times in his well-ordered life that he didn’t know quite what to say. Or think.

Captain Hendryx said, “Oh, my God!” and the young Sergeant was about to become suddenly, violently ill.

With the lid upraised, the sight was there for all to see. To give the lie to the dry ice, the time of death and the scientific mind.

Stewart Fromes’ face, hands and feet were skeletized. His flesh had vanished, leaving the bone-white, dull gleam of his skeletal figure. It was unearthly, it was weird — it was impossible.

It was a condition which no mere two days could have brought about. The sight was awesome and terrifying. The corpse’s teeth were bared, the hollow eyes staring sightlessly up at the men surrounding the coffin.

“Close the lid, will you, Sergeant?” Waverly said calmly. “There’s nothing that we can do now.”

“Shakespeare,” Waverly reminded Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin in U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters. “I kept being hoisted on Hamlet’s line. Act Two, wasn’t it?”

“Hamlet?” Kuryakin looked puzzled.

“Yes, Hamlet, man. What was the line — about Yorick—‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’”

Kuryakin nodded. “Yes. I see what you mean. Only rotting isn’t the thing now, is it? We have a skeleton to contend with.”

Waverly grunted, his smile blank.

“Well, it’s your department. What’s the answer?”

The Russian pursed his lips thoughtfully and considered his reply for a few well-chosen seconds before answering.

“I can’t tell you exactly how rapidly decomposition works — that could only be determined by where the body was buried, under what conditions and just how long the interment continued — but I can tell you one thing. It certainly is a far greater period of time than three days. More like two months.”

“Exactly. And that is the condition of Fromes’ body on Sunday when he only died on Friday of the same week.”

“We’re working on it, sir. We need just a bit more time.”

“And Solo’s pellet? What of that?”

Kuryakin frowned. “It’s not just a pellet, we’ve found. It’s actually a capsule — inside is a chemical substance which we’re analyzing now. Every available researcher in Section II is on it — we’ll have a report within hours.”

“Hmmm.” Waverly selected another briar from his desk drawer. “And Solo. Any word yet from Paris?”

“Nothing on the teletype. No cablegrams, no transatlantic phone calls. Which is not like him.”

“No, it isn’t.” Waverly consulted his watch. It had been a mere three hours since the jet bomber had set down on the La Guardia runway. Time and more than time. U.N.C.L.E. should have heard from Solo hours ago. He would have reached Paris long before Hendryx landed in New York. After all, they had had an entire ocean to contend with.

Perhaps the girl — no, that couldn’t be. She had checked out thoroughly with Security. Damnation. Things were getting a bit thick.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Kuryakin?”

“When we finish analyzing the chemical in the pellet, I’d like to go to Paris.”

“Oh? Why, may I ask?”

“He might need a hand.”

“He has one. Two, in fact. Two very pretty ones.”

Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin grinned. It made him seem more harmless than ever, his straw hair untidily youthful.

“Three agents are better than two.”

“You are needed here, Kuryakin. But we shall see. Time enough to decide when we clear up these lab matters.”

“Peculiar about Fromes’ clothing, sir. It must mean something.”

Waverly smiled. “You too, eh? Perhaps you and Solo are correct. It is odd to find a body dressed that way.”

“Any ideas?”

“A few. None that would interest you right now. If you’ll be good enough to return to your office, I shall make some inquiries about our dear Solo.”

“Yes, of course. Goodbye, sir.”

When Kuryakin had gone. Waverly put a few well-oiled wheels of communication into motion. Within twenty minutes he would know if Napoleon Solo had returned to Paris.

It was damned worrisome that the young idiot hadn’t gotten through to Headquarters as yet.

The frightened people of Oberteisendorf had another mystery on their hands. The afternoon sky had been full of the angry, violent buzzing of two airplanes in a battle of some kind.

They had seen the fall of the lighter plane and the frenzied attack of the black one. Then the awful crash that made the ground shudder. The most ambitious and adventurous of the townspeople, a blacksmith named Goethal, set out in his battered truck for the scene of the crash. He was certain the plane had fallen somewhere in the vicinity of Orangeberg Cemetery.

When he returned two hours later, he had a grim report to make.

Yes, it was the plane that the American had come in. Yes, the plane was a mass of twisted wreckage.

No, he had not found the bodies of either of the Americans.

It was as if the earth had swallowed them up.