"Well," he said to Illya. "We know one thing."
"Yes?"
Solo grimaced. "The door's locked."
At precisely that second, the new madness began.
The interior of the aircraft grew gloomy, as though a curtain had descended. The transformation was instantaneous, from the sun-sparkling brightness of day to murk.
The giant jet gave a lurch, another. The windows streamed with rain.
A bluish flare lit the interior. This was followed by the most shattering drum-roll of thunder Napoleon Solo had ever heard. The plane seemed to rocket upward, then drop sickeningly. Passengers rolled in their seats, side to side.
"Where did that come from?" Illya said. "Didn't" the pilot announce -?"
Solo barked. "Yes. Just before this all started, he announced perfect weather in every quarter of the sky. Not a cloud. Perfect weather." The faces of both men were drawn. Solo expressed it for both of them: "I've never known a pilot to fly into a storm deliberately."
"Unless he wanted to destroy an aircraft," said Illya.
"Maybe. But I've never seen a storm like this, either."
Solo stared past the terrified passengers. There was little to be seen. Great dark clouds boiled past. Another lighting bolt flared. The entire starboard wing seemed to glitter and dance with eerie radiance. The big aircraft shuddered. Thunder pealed.
The stewardess who had been kneeling beside the wounded co-pilot had enough presence of mind to find an emergency control of the compartment lights. She turned it on. The lights flickered briefly. There was a whine, a smell of ozone. Another loud thunderclap
rocked the aircraft. The lights went out.
Even the relatively calm stewardess began to show signs of breaking. She gripped Solo's arm.
"I don't know who you are, carrying those –" The girl's trembling hand indicated the long-barreled weapons the U.N.C.L.E. agents were holding close to their bodies. "- but if you can use them. Do something about those insane men in the cockpit. I tried to call the cockpit from the galley intercom. They have cut off communication."
"And they're apparently set on sending this plane down," Solo said.
"It can't take much more of this," Illya said.
Napoleon Solo sensed this was true, felt it with each great heaving of the great jet. The wings groaned. The compartment ceiling creaked. The ozone smell was increasing as the ventilation system failed. A seam slowly widened in the compartment ceiling, suddenly buckled open for a good eight inches of its length. Up above the paneling there was a display of blue, shooting sparks.
"Are we in a typhoon?" Solo asked the stewardess.
"Wrong season. And such violence at this height? I've never known it -"
"There's something diabolical about it."
Solo's head banged against the lavatory wall as the plane gave another sickening buck-and-drop. "The storm came up too fast, all too fast. Almost as though somebody threw a switch -"
The moment the words were out of his mouth he felt foolish. It was impossible to control weather that way.
An ill-defined, crawling sensation gripped him. Illya's fingers on his arm pulled him back to reality. Already the jet engines had acquired an odd, low-pitched sound, full of ominous groanings.
"Napoleon," Illya said, "we hardly have time to stand around beating our gums. There are two men in that cockpit intent on destroying this plane in this storm, whatever the motive. I suggest we suspend meteorological discussion and do something."
Solo said, "Right." He bent down, tapped the heel of his left shoe.
Its surface slid partially aside. He palmed a small, dough-gray pellet. He kicked his heel on the rug to re-seal the closure. Then, ducking low, he headed into the narrow aisle leading to the cockpit door.
He could hear nothing from the other side of the door. The roar of the storm, the sound of the aircraft shaking itself apart were too deafening. He jammed the doughy pellet against the cockpit door and leaped back, shoving the stewardess to one side.
Illya had already jumped the other way, gun up, ready. He and Solo had worked together long enough to need next to no communication in times like this.
With a boom louder than the thunderclaps the door blasted off its hinges. Acrid smoke billowed into the compartment. Solo barked, "Now!" He and Illya jammed into the narrow aisle and went through the smoke into the cockpit.
Act I: Green Is The Color Of A Deadly Place
The Cockpit of the Air Pan-Asia jet afforded little room for maneuvering. Napoleon Solo lunged through the smoke and found himself practically up against the pilot's chair.
Illya came crowding in behind him. The two men at the controls turned, rising up. Their faces were distorted out of the bland patterns of composure which Solo typically associated with flight crews on Oriental air lines.
The pilot was the more squat of the two, a heavy-framed, short man whose brush-cut black hair sparkled with sweat-drops in the dim green gloom of the instrument-lined chamber.
The pilot's lips peeled back. His pudgy right hand had a pistol in it. He aimed at Solo's stomach. The airliner bucked and plunged upward. Solo's squeeze of the trigger seemed to take an eternity.
Outside the front cockpit glass, oily black clouds boiled toward the aircraft and went whipping away past the radar nose. Time seemed to slip into slow motion. The trigger finger of the pilot went white, whiter –
A double crack as the pilot fired and Solo did too. Something ripped the shoulder of Solo's jacket. Behind him, metal clanged. From the lavatory, there was a splintering of glass. The pilot crumpled.
The flight engineer had swiveled round in his chair and now had a snub-nose small-caliber gun pointed at Illya's head. As soon as Solo fired, he whipped his right hand over. The muzzle of his pistol came chopping hard onto the flight engineer's wrist.
The snub-nose gun made a noise. Illya jerked to one side. He aimed at the flight engineer's left shoulder and shot once.
In seconds the duel had begun and ended. Solo's chest ached from the smoke, his stomach from the nauseating tossing of the cockpit floor under him.
The storm burst around the great jet in eruptions of lightning. Some of the explosive smoke had cleared away.
"Drag them out of their seats!" Solo shouted. It was necessary to shout. The storm noise was a continuous tympani roll from the sky. Passengers screamed. The engines whined; sparks from short-circuited wiring back in the passenger compartment crackled a sinister warning.
The flight engineer lay on the cockpit flour. Blood from his shoulder seeped into the ridged channels of the flooring.
Illya pointed his gun muzzle at the plane's control panel. "What do we do about those?"
Approximately seven thousand lighted dials with eccentrically jerking needles seemed to confront Napoleon Solo. One glance told him that he would never be able to fly the aircraft. A two-engine executive jet which U.N.C.L.E maintained on Long Island was his limit, and he had only piloted that a few times in emergency situations.
"I might be able to take it over," Illya yelled above the roar. "But only if the weather weren't so bad, and we could contact a control tower to talk me through the procedures -"
The pilot and the flight engineer out of action made the situation look hopeless. Solo wished he had not been so prompt to shoot. But would either of the renegade officers volunteer their services if they could, even at gunpoint? He doubted it.