The Thousand Coffins Affair

GOLGOTHA AGAIN

The searchlights were blinding. Caught in the merciless exposure, Solo and Kuryakin were like two shafts sticking in a mammoth circular dartboard. Beyond the dazzling glow of the beams, once their eyes had become adjusted to the light, they could barely make out the tall shadows of the men behind the glare.

Solo raised his arms, blinking his eyes to clear them, saying out of the side of his mouth to Kuryakin:

“Let me do the talking.”

Kuryakin, grotesquely unreal in his flying suit, loaded down with equipment, the walkie-talkie hung from his throat like a lantern, nodded slightly.

“Golgotha!” Solo called. “Can you hear me? It is important that you do!”

There was a murmuring rumble of voices from the direction of the glare. Then came a fierce German guttural for “Silence!” and the metallic, almost lazy voice of Golgotha floated on the night air.

“Yes, Mr. Solo, I hear you. What do you propose to say?”

Solo blinked in the lights.

“Tell your army not to fire at us. We are wired with explosives. Enough to blow this cemetery and all of us to Berlin and back. Let me make that very clear — shoot us and you destroy yourself! Shall I repeat the message?”

A hard, mocking laugh rode the wind.

“Really, my dear Solo. Such melodramatics. You would die so readily for U.N.C.L.E.?”

Napoleon Solo shrugged and stared back into the lights. A tight smile held his mouth rigid.

“Suit yourself. Take the long shot — tell them to shoot. We knew the risk we took coming in here. But remember — when we die, so dies your glorious plan for the element which you so cleverly stockpiled in this cemetery. Throw away your years of planning. It will be worth it.”

Several of the bright, dazzling beams cut off with the suddenness of a thrown switch. The newer darkness was as pleasant and gratifying as fresh air after a long submersion in the water. Dimly, Solo could now make out the tall figure of Golgotha behind the remaining lights, his cloaked figure rising from the graveyard like some ghostly specter of the imagination. More importantly, there were four more uniformed figures flanking him at intervals of five yards, sub-machine guns at the ready.

Kuryakin rumbled in his throat like a trapped lion. Solo hoped his impetuous partner would sit on his impatience to move into action.

“Solo,” Golgotha said. “I believe you. Now, may I ask what sort of bargain you ask me to make for your lives? You are not suggesting I turn you loose?”

Napoleon Solo laughed.

“You heard the bomber upstairs a while ago? It dropped us off. If they don’t hear from us in ten minutes, they will know that we were captured or killed and they will go ahead with the target for tonight. I leave you to guess what that is.”

There was a harsh intake of air. He saw the figure of Golgotha raise its skeletal arms and bring them down together in crackling anger. He had pegged the man correctly. To see the bubble burst after so many years of careful building must have been a crushing blow. Solo was banking on Golgotha’s mammoth ego to assist their escape from this deep, deep hole.

“Tell me, Solo. What excuse would the U.S. have for bombing a peaceful German cemetery in the middle of nowhere?”

Solo threw his head back and laughed.

“Be yourself, Golgotha. We have a sample pellet of the contents of your coffin stockpile. No matter what wreckage the bomber makes here, investigators will find enough of the pellets to justify the obliteration of a menace to world peace. Then the evidence of Utangaville and Spayerwood will speak out loud and clear. Well, hurry up — time is very literally on the wing.”

Kuryakin, without a signal from Solo, unhooked his walkie-talkie and reached for the antennae.

“Wait!” the voice of Golgotha screamed. But Solo repressed a smile of triumph. The man’s voice was hesitant now. Was the bluff working?

There was nothing to be done yet, not with that ring of sub-machine guns trained on them. It all depended on the weird brain of the devil who commanded them.

“Solo!”

“I’m listening.”

“Call the plane. Tell them you were wrong. There is nothing here. Tell them to come down and pick you up.”

“Then what?”

“We will bargain.”

“What kind of bargain? I give you the United States and you give me Russia?

“Don’t play the fool, Solo. Whatever your lofty ideals are, I’m sure you’re still interested in living.”

Solo hesitated, making hesitation visible and obvious. He bit his lip, flinging a look at Kuryakin. The Russian shrugged. Solo turned back to face Golgotha and the lights and the threat of the guns. Time was all he and Kuryakin needed, really.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll call. But no tricks, Golgotha. That plane is loaded with army men who won’t take anything lying down, so if you have any notions about capturing the whole lot of them, forget it.”

He unharnessed his own walkie-talkie and set it on the ground before him. But Golgotha had stepped forward, one hand raised in authority. To all ears now, came the powerful throb of the bomber. The roar of its jet engines returning from the Russian border blasted toward the cemetery.

“Just a moment,” Golgotha said icily. “I wish to hear whatever you have to say to them.”

“Come ahead,” Solo said. “It’s your party.” As he waved his arm, the gesture allowed the concealed trench knife strapped upside-down on his forearm to slide handle-first into the palm of his hand.

“Yes,” Golgotha said. “I shall come. But do not, I warn you, commit the mistake of treachery. Death is not such a fear to me that I will not save myself for the last laugh. You will blow up, you say. But I do not think you would have risked the parachute jump thus armed. Yet I cannot afford to guess, so I parry with you. All I lose for the moment is time, which is not so precious to me as it is to you. I find it hard to believe your bomber would destroy the field with men such as yourself in doubt, but we shall see. So make your call — but remember, you are covered by four sub-machine guns.”

He came forward across the ground, skirting a tombstone, his ghastly figure unreal in the lights. Kuryakin, who was seeing him for the first time, stifled an oath. Even Solo had to admit that Golgotha — hard to take under ordinary conditions — was a leftover from a very bad nightmare when seen here in a searchlight-flooded cemetery.

Golgotha halted about ten feet away from them. He pointed a bony forefinger.

“Call the bomber,” he said hollowly.

Solo switched on the walkie-talkie. It hummed with static, until he found the circuit that Jerry Terry was tuned in on. Carefully, while his brain raced, his right hand balanced the handle of the trench knife.

Kuryakin had abandoned his set. He was staring at the four shadows behind the glare of the lights. Solo knew Kuryakin was busy too, but he wished fervently that he knew exactly in what way.

“Baker, this is Sugar,” Solo said distinctly into the mouthpiece. “Baker this is Sugar. Over.”

The walkie-talkie hummed with static. Solo strained for the answer that he knew would not come. He was keeping his forefinger on the receiving lever, using only the sending half of the set. The bomber and Jerry Terry would hear his voice but the answer would never sound from the set. He hoped hard that neither Golgotha nor any of his minions had had any previous experience with the Army Walkie-Talkie M1.

“Baker, this is Sugar,” he repeated, letting desperation enter his voice. “Come in, please.” He was sure Kuryakin had tumbled to what he was doing. But he turned to him and winked: “Something’s wrong. I can’t reach the plane.”

“Let me try my set,” Kuryakin agreed readily. Golgotha muttered hollowly in his throat.

“You seek to trick me?” He stared up at the heavens, unable to see the bomber or its riding lights though the roar of the plane filled the heavens. Solo turned, his arms outstretched.

“Don’t be stupid,” he gritted. “They’ll blow us up if they don’t hear from us soon. What time is it, Kuryakin?”

“We have three minutes left,” the Russian said in an awed voice. “Stop talking, for God’s sake — I’m trying to contact them now!”

Tension is a curious thing.

Solo had worked hard for it, building an uneasiness in Golgotha and his followers, knowing that when it finally enclosed them in its sweaty palm the odds in favor of him and Kuryakin getting out alive would go up. Golgotha had his dream of world conquest; he had Thrush and its agents to help him. But now these men of flesh and bone stood in a stockpile cemetery in the middle of the night, listening to the roar of a U.S. Army bomber which at any moment might blow them all to bits. Solo knew the human mind. Someone was bound to break. Something had to give.

“Bitte,” a voice pleaded hoarsely from the ring of guns and lights. “They waste valuable time—“

Shaking with rage, Golgotha spun on the voice.

“Silence!” he screamed. “Who dares question my authority—” For that brief second while his cloaked back was to Solo, Golgotha’s body was a barrier against the threat of the sub-machine guns.

Kuryakin spotted the split-second opportunity as soon as Solo did. At the same instant, they moved — Solo leaping for Golgotha, Kuryakin grabbing for the hand grenades taped to his harness straps. A high cry of warning split the night, but there was no time for any of Golgotha’s men to dare a shot.

Solo swept Golgotha backward, forcing the trench knife to the man’s neck, digging his knee into the cloaked figure where he thought the small of the back should be. His first intention had been to use Golgotha as a shield for the safe travel of himself and Kuryakin from the cemetery. But now there was no need for that. Golgotha let out a strangled cry of rage. No machine-gun barked and Solo had his sudden, startling answer. They would not shoot if it meant the death of their leader. But more than that, Kuryakin too had free rein.

A metallic hand grenade, looking like a mottled egg, flipped in an arc toward the group behind the lights. Solo bore Golgotha to the ground and burrowed deep. But the man came with him scratching and tearing, his hands like claws.

They found his throat, twisting away from the trench knife as Solo thrust savagely. He had forgotten — the blade clanged tinnily and he cursed himself for not remembering the oddness of this man with the burned, withered body. Some sort of protective chain mesh collar encircled the fiercely ravaged throat—

And then there was no time to think.

The grenade detonated with a bursting, blinding roar of metal and fragments. A man screamed hideously before the explosion trailed off into a dying gurgle of sound. A sub-machine gun stuttered now, its coughing noise popping like fireworks across the open air. Kuryakin yelled something. And another grenade echoed the thunder of the first one. Glass shattered and the earth seemed to lift in a soaring gravitational pull that left Solo feeling weak and giddy. Golgotha’s lanky, heavy weight pinned him to the ground.

In the darkness, he heard Kuryakin rushing toward them. The Russian was panting. “Napoleon — are you all right—”

And then, the sharp, unmistakable cough of a hand pistol, a single sound, cracked just above Solo and he heard Kuryakin blurt in pain and wonder.

He blundered to his feet, his ears still pounding from the too-close explosion. His eyes made out the shadowy, weaving form of Golgotha heading across the smoking cemetery.

Kuryakin’s voice was close to his feet.

“Get him, Napoleon. Don’t mind me. Shoulder wound — I’ll call the bomber before it’s too late—”

Solo hesitated only a second, then set sail across the cemetery, skirting the mangled corpses of Golgotha’s hirelings, barely able to make out the bobbing, weaving cloaked figure of the man who had designed a cemetery as a warehouse for a weapon that could enslave the world.

Golgotha was a ghastly shadow dancing past the tombstones of the Orangeberg graveyard.