"But I thought your friend -"
"The mission," Illya said almost savagely. "The mission comes first. I told you what Waverly said. We'll try to get back to the control room on the top floor and see what we can do there."
They completed the circuit of the corridor, past a half-open door hedged with red notices warning unauthorized personnel without protective clothing to keep out - and through which they glimpsed behind coils of tubing a segment of the great reactor's silver sphere. As they approached the elevators again, they saw a number of trucks drawn up in two ranks facing an immense pair of doors on rails. To Kuryakin's astonishment, there seemed to be no guard, no sentry box, only a series of metal housings flanking the doors with inset magic eye discs and an old-fashioned set of stop-go lights.
"The whole thing's electronically controlled," he said softly. "If we only could get to that control room… Come on!"
They skirted the empty trucks and gained the stair case. By the time they reached the A Level again, they were both panting. But they were in luck: they had seen nobody. "Come on," the Russian urged again. "The door's a little way further around the curve, on the inside wall. I saw it in the distance when we left the briefing room."
Suddenly - bullets splatted against the concave surface of the outer wall. Simultaneously, from behind them, the sharp crack of an automatic, three times, reverberated in the narrow corridor.
"Run!" Illya yelled, hauling her after him, pelting further, further, further around the curve of the convex inner wall. The uniformed officer he had seen out of the corner of his eye as he glanced over his shoulder fired again and again, trying to hit them with ricochets off the outer wall now that they were invisible to him.
As they ran, voices shouted. Footsteps started after them from somewhere out of sight. A door in the outer wall opened and two women in D.A.M.E.S uniform emerged just in front of them. One was carrying a black frogman suit over her arm.
"Apologies, madam," Kuryakin said hurriedly as he snatched the heavy rubber garment from her hands, twisted it around her head and pushed her, reeling, across to the other side of the passage. The second woman swore violently and began to tug something from the pocket of her uniform jacket. Without breaking her stride, Coralie Simone slashed a backhanded blow across and caught her Karate-style on the side of the neck. She dropped straight to the floor, rolled against the calves of the woman struggling to free herself from the folds of the diving suit, and brought her down too.
Kuryakin and the girl sprinted on. The shooting from behind had stopped when the marksman had come into sight of the two D.A.M.E.S. But now there were heavy footsteps pounding towards them from around the curve ahead. A deeper report thundered in the confined space and a slug chiseled a groove in the wall beside Coralie's head.
"I was afraid of that," the agent panted. "Sent… friend... around the other way... cut us off." He dropped to one knee. Along the surface of the outer wall where it curved out of sight ahead of them, a grotesquely distorted shadow was approaching. He sighted along the barrel of the PPK and fired.
There was a puff of plaster dust where the bullet gouged itself a channel. Before the screech of the ricochet had died away, both footsteps and shadow had halted. Behind, too, there was silence now.
"Let's go," Illya whispered, his lips close to Coralie's ear, "before they realize they can sidle up to us along the inner wall. If the control room door's near enough, we'll reach it before we come in sight of the man ahead of us."
"Suppose it's locked?" the girl murmured as they began to move.
Illya merely shrugged. There were more footsteps in the distance now, and a susurrus of low voices asking questions somewhere in the circle of corridor behind them.
Backs to the inner wall, they inched towards the elusive door. Slowly, inexorably, the corridor uncoiled before their advance... and as relentlessly, the inner wall remained exasperatingly blank.
With a lightning-like pounce, Kuryakin leaped suddenly to the far side and ripped off a shot, left, right, each direction. There was a distant scrambling of feet as he jumped back again, a single shot from their left, the bigger caliber gun with the deeper tone, and then a cry of protest from the other side as the slug screamed to the right.
"They're too close up to shoot at us now, really," Illya said. "Every shot's in danger of bouncing on and hitting their own people around the curve… The door's not far now: I could see it from the other side."
And sure enough, the heavy flush-fitting steel door, like the entrance to a warship's cabin, was soon sliding around the curve towards them. Once it was fully in view, the Russian sprang forwards and grasped handle. It turned easily in his grip and the door swung inwards. With a gasp of relief, he motioned the girl through, closed the door, and dropped two steel struts in place across it. They were in.
The door admitted directly to a narrow gallery which ran all the way around the walls of a huge circular room on the floor below. Halfway around to the left, a staircase spiraled to the lower floor; and opposite this to the right the gallery bore a glassed-in projection resembling the control room of a television or recording studio. Through the huge panes, they could see colored lights winking, the gleam of stainless steel levers, banks of bright terminals. There were a number of desks with telephones on them distributed about the floor space below, but the majority of the enormous room was occupied by a circular table so vast that the seven people grouped along one sector of it were dwarfed by its size.
A woman in the now familiar green uniform was standing talking to the thin man with the skull-like face at the center of the group as they came through the door.
"... took the prisoners through and left them on the quay as you ordered," she was saying. "The girl was a little difficult and I had to subdue her, but the man was still quiet. Mr. Greerson's shoes do their job well."
A bony man lost in a voluminous brown suit smiled thinly. "After that," the woman continued, "I locked the double -" She stopped, staring up at the gallery.
Every member of the group reacted differently to the sight of Kuryakin and Coralie Simone and the sound of hammering which had broken out on the steel door behind them. The Negro, Hernando, gaped in astonishment without moving. Two thick-set, heavy men pushed their chairs back from the table and sat tensely watchful. The woman's hard face creased into an expression of contempt. A heavy, gray man cowered and seemed to shrink into his chair. And the man called Greerson sprang backwards, tipping over his seat as a gun blossomed in his right hand spitting fire. Quick as he was, though, the leader with the skeletal face was more rapid still. Only his hand moved, diving into the space between his lapels while the rest of him remained motionless as a statue. But the gun with which it reappeared had fired twice while Greerson was still in mid-air.
Illya and the girl had ducked down behind the solid steel balustrade of the gallery and were moving towards the control room as fast as they could. The first of the leader's shots passed so close to the agent's head that he felt the scorching breath of its passage on his neck.
"Greerson! Quick!" they heard the man shouting below. "The spiral staircase! Enfilade them before they reach the control room! You, Schwarz, run underneath… you know, Plan D!"