Once more they dropped to the floor - noticing from the corners of their eyes a blur of movement from beneath the gallery towards the soldiers and their covering fire.
The agent crawled a little way along the gallery as the staccato tattoo of slugs ripped into the walls and ceiling above them. After a moment he ducked up, gun in hand, and fired a single shot. The clatter of the Thompsons ceased. Something fell metallically to the floor. A moment later the door slammed again.
Kuryakin rose to his feet. "Got one of them," he said, blowing the curl of smoke from the gun's barrel. "It was just a diversion to get the top brass away. But we'll let 'em go: it's easier for us without them down there."
He turned his back on the chamber below and began studying the masses of equipment stacked around the control room.
"Look here," he said, opening the lid of what looked like an oversized record-player cabinet. "There's the usual ground-glass screen in the lid - complete with schematic diagrams and pilot lights in a pattern I don't recognize - plus levers and knobs on top of the chassis in the box it self. And the only identification is this strip here saying 'Section E.' Now if E could stand for estancia..."
He never knew what extra sense made him turn his head at that moment. A faint current of air, perhaps; something moving reflected in a bright surface in the corner of his eye; a sound too small to be registered by the conscious mind... Whatever it was, he did turn - and saw the bludgeon on its way down to the back of his skull.
As his breath hissed in with astonishment, he lurched to one side with an arm automatically raised to ward off the blow.
The girl, pivoting too, gave a gasp of alarm as she took in the scene in a single agonized glance: the yawning trapdoor which had been silently opened behind a bank of teleprinters, the attacker - he was one of the two thick-set men who had been at the table when they'd come in - with murderous expression and upraised arm, the whistle of the blackjack.
It was too late for Kuryakin to escape the blow completely. The blackjack glanced off his wrist and thudded into the muscle between his collar bone and the point of his shoulder, forcing a shout of pain from his lips and paralyzing his arm.
As the Walther crashed to the floor from his numbed hand, the man swung around in a smooth spiral of controlled energy, knocked the Beretta from the girl's grasp with the truncheon and - before the little gun had gone spinning out of the shattered window to crash to the floor below - had swung back on the rebound and knocked her sprawling to the far side of the room.
Illya reeled, pain searing his whole side. Desperately, through blinded eyes, he fixed his gaze on the blackjack and groped upwards to fasten wiry fingers on the wrist that wielded it.
The big man snarled, shaking the slight figure of the agent from side to side as a mongoose shakes a snake.
But eventually the crushing judo grip forced apart his fingers and the blackjack clattered down. Swearing, he collapsed suddenly to the ground, dragging Illya on top of him. The Russian brought up his knee to the man's solar plexus and forced his sound forearm under the blue chin. But the attacker knew all the tricks in the wrestling trade - and he was formidably strong, too. At a distance, Kuryakin could have held his own, but they were already too much at close quarters for him to stand a chance.
The thug rolled over, holding the agent to him in a bear hug, caromed off the telleprinters, and sat up with Illya in a scissors grip. Three times, viciously, his fist jarred the Russian's head - and then again they were locked together toe to toe, wrist to wrist, with every muscle, shrieking to sound out a weakness in the opponent's guard.
Abruptly, Kuryakin abandoned the trial of strength and went limp. For a moment he was bent over the opening left by the trapdoor - then, wrapping his legs around the man's hips, he dropped through, dragging the thug with him.
From below came the sound of splintering wood and a strangled shout.
The girl had picked herself up, sobbing, some time before. The Walther had been kicked somewhere under a cabinet in the fight and she bad been circling the struggling men, not knowing how to help. Her mascara had run and her nose was bleeding. Now, with a cry of alarm, she sprang to the edge and looked down.
Amid the remnants of a table, the Thrush man had Kuryakin bent backwards like a bow in the agonizing grip known as the Boston Crab. In wrestling bouts this dangerous hold almost always results in a submission; if there is no referee and the pressure is continued, a spine snaps.
Aghast, Coralie watched the veins on the big man's temple and arms bulge as Kuryakin's eyes turned up; and his face broke out in sweat.
"Illya!" she screamed.
"Pen… pen…" the agent choked. "Quick... floor."
In anguish, her eyes swept the boards below. In the exertion of the struggle, most of the contents of Illya's belt had been spilled out onto the ground. Among them was a slim cylinder resembling a ballpoint.
Without hesitating, she dropped through the trapdoor like a stone, hit the floor with a numbing impact, staggered, recovered herself - and reached for the tiny device. There was a button at one end.
Almost in a reflex action, before he had realized what was happening, she had pointed the other end at the thug's face and thumbed the button. There was a shrill hiss of gas escaping under pressure. The man's eyes widened, his mouth split open in an almost ludicrous expression of surprise, and he pitched forward as the agent collapsed with a groan of relief.
---
Ten minutes later, when the girl had tidied herself up and Kuryakin had recovered sufficiently to climb the ladder back to the control room, they began again to speculate whether the cabinet with the screen in the lid was a control for the outer gates of the tunnel.
"We can only try," Illya said. He stretched out his hand and grasped one of the levers on the control panel. "Let's see what E.l will do…"
"I wouldn't, Mr. Kuryakin. I really wouldn't." The voice came from behind them.
Together, they whirled. Zigzag lines chased themselves across the screen of a small monitor television set just above the shattered window. Above it was a fixed, closed-circuit camera. The voice had undoubtedly come from here.
"It may not do what the label says, you see," the voice went on. "Because although you have unfortunately incapacitated the man we left behind us, he had done his work first."
"I have no idea what you mean," Illya said, looking directly at the camera. Below it, white patches streamed across the screen, to coalesce and finally assemble with the darker zigzags into a picture of three men and a woman sitting behind a control panel similar to the one behind him. The woman was the one who had been in the chamber; the men were Moraes, Hernando, and the man with the skull-like face. It was the latter who was speaking.
"I will tell you," he drawled. "Ah - I see from your face that you can now see us. We have been able to see you all the time… When you burst in and interrupted our meeting, you may or may not have heard the lady here report that she had delivered two prisoners some where, a man and a woman."