She swung about abruptly and pointed toward the shadowed corner where the desert warfare equipment had been piled up.
"There are several holstered pistols there," she said. "Strap two of them to your waist. As soon as you are in the inner courtyard start running—straight through the outer courtyard into the desert. You may be stopped, but it is a chance you must take. I would have planned your escape quite differently if I had had just a few hours—"
She paused an instant, then went on breathlessly. "The temple is in ruins. There are crumbling blocks of stone everywhere, a protection against bullets if you weave about and move in and out of the shadows."
Solo nodded and strode quickly to the equipment-cluttered corner of the enormous room. He picked up a gun-belt, strapped it to his waist and hurled another toward Illya Kuryakin, who had moved almost as quickly into the shadows.
Illya caught it and lost no time in buckling it around his slender hips.
Lhasa had unbolted the door and was standing a little to the left of it when they returned across the room to her side.
"You must hurry," she warned.
Solo had unbolted the door and was passing into the stone-walled passageway beyond when she clutched him firmly by the arm.
"Remember your promise," she pleaded. "My father is lost to all reason now. His death will be certain unless the destruction of both machines makes THRUSH abandon all thought of removing him the instant his usefulness ends. Only U.N.C.L.E has the means of accomplishing that. In utter defeat THRUSH will lose all interest in a pawn that has failed them."
It flashed across Solo's mind that in defeat THRUSH might take a vital interest in a man who might still be capable of rebuilding a destroyed Frankenstein monster. But he saw no reason for calling that to her attention.
TWELVE
THE DEATH-RAY MONSTER
A STIFF WIND had arisen, stirring the palms on both sides of the inner courtyard, hazing the sky with a curtain of' blowing sand. Solo and Illya broke into a run, the long-barreled guns jogging at their hips.
They saw no one until they were two-thirds of the way across the courtyard. Then a shaven-headed giant with a gleaming sword in his hand, his head a mottled blur in the half-light, barred their passage. He had leapt out of the shadows and stood directly in their path, his silken trousers blooming out on both sides of his knees. The trousers and shaven head gave him more the aspect of some huge-statured, evil jinni from the Arabian Nights than a Chinese armed guard with a red dragon at his back.
The dragon was made of porcelain, but the huge guard was not. He swung the sword back and forth as if he wished to demonstrate how easy it would be for him to cut off Solo's head and when neither Solo nor Illya stopped running advanced upon them, still swinging the mammoth sword.
Solo waited until he was very close before he tugged his pistol from its holster, steadied it carefully and drew just as careful a bead on the advancing guard's midsection.
He fired. The pistol leapt in his hand as it roared, and the guard bent double, then went staggering back against the red porcelain dragon and toppled sideways to the sand.
The shot brought two other guards rushing into the courtyard to avenge their fallen comrade. Luckily they were much smaller men, and Illya Kuryakin had no difficulty in disarming the nearest one by ripping his sword from his clasp and burying it to the hilt in the sand. While the sword vibrated like a tuning fork he gripped the still enraged guard by the back of the neck, and brought his forehead down forcibly on the heavy jeweled handle of the sword three times.
The guard crumpled with the groan to the sand and Illya was spared the need of stopping the remaining guard in the same way, for Solo did it with dispatch by bringing the barrel of his pistol into forceful contact with the man's shaven head.
Almost instantly a fourth guard appeared, his naked torso matted with coarse black hair. He was almost as huge as the Jinni-like guard but his features were not of oriental cast. But his nationality did not interest Illya at all. He was only concerned with the length and rapidity of his stride as he advanced and his wise refusal to slash at the air with his sword. The weapon was pointed directly at Illya's chest, and Illya was quite sure that he could not save himself simply by leaping aside.
His hand darted to his hip. But before he could draw and fire another shot rang out a few feet to the left of him. The sword fell from the huge Caucasian's hand and a red gleaming hole appeared on his chest just above his heart. The rage went out of his eyes. He fell to his knees and then forward on his face, a thin ribbon of blood trickling from beneath his right shoulder over the sand.
Illya turned and saw Solo, the still smoking gun in his hand. They encountered no more guards as they passed through the outer courtyard to the desert without slowing down.
They were a hundred feet from the ruin, still running, when a machine-pistol started blasting away at them. Looking back, they could see the small, birdlike figure of Lee Cheng perched on a crumbling ledge of stone high above the outer courtyard, the heavy weapon buckling as he fired.
And something else was standing there, immense and shining and misshapen that resembled a hunch backed giant. It towered at the frail little man's side, and was swaying back and forth, and suddenly as Solo and Kuryakin stared Lee Cheng stopped firing the machine-pistol and moved quickly up behind it.
They saw his hands moving up and down, frantically as if in despair of getting it to stop swaying and then back he leapt to the machine-pistol and started firing again.
"It's his second invention" Solo breathed, gripping Illya by the arm. "Lhasa told me about it—a death-ray machine! He must have mounted it on that ledge, hoping he could get it to work. But he wouldn't be using that machine-pistol if he was really sure of succeeding."
"I know," Illya said, shocked horror in his voice. "She told me about it too. If it does work—"
Tiny geysers of sand arose on the desert almost at their feet, and they could hear the whine of the bullets above the whispering of the wind that was stirring the sand in a less violent way.
Illya Kuryakin had leapt back, his face drained of all color, but Solo did not think it was the bullets that had caused him to break off so abruptly.
For the barest instant the firing stopped again and they saw that Lee Cheng had leapt back behind the giant.
It was Solo who finished what Illya had started to say." If it does work we're done for. Make no mistake about that. But Lhasa didn't know how near he's come to perfecting it. We're almost out of range of the bullets, so if we keep on running we may have a chance—"
They had barely started to turn when it happened.
Lee Cheng had just started to move back toward the machine-pistol when the giant-like shape of metal on the ledge gave a violent lurch sideways and crashed down on top of him.
They could see his frail body flatten beneath the impact of its enormous bulk and flatten still more as it went spinning out over the far end of the ledge, caught in a wedge of flying metal that had broken loose from the metal giant and was contracting like a giant claw.
The giant remained on the ledge for an instant after Lee Cheng started to fall, if some mechanism had been set into motion that was causing it to jerk erratically about. Then it followed its maker over the ledge, falling so rapidly that it struck the sand a hundred feet be low ahead of him, and burst into flames.