"You've flooded her now," Solo said. "Sounded to me like some kind of ignition failure. Perhaps we'd better have a look."
Illya pulled on the handbrake and opened his door to get out.
In the dense shadows beneath the plane trees a man squatted beside a cumbersome box-like machine on a tripod. Above the swivel mounting, an attachment like a wide lens with a long hood pointed at the front of the car.
"Look out!" Solo shouted suddenly.
Moving with incredible speed, he leaned across Kuryakin and yanked the door shut. Then, in a single complex movement, he slumped back against his own door, opening it with his elbow, and subsided backwards onto the ground, dragging the Russian bodily after him.
"Napoleon! What the...? What are you..." Illya gasped as he landed in the grass beside the roadway. "What was that...?"
"Quick!" Solo hissed. "Into the bushes..."
The soft explosions of the silenced revolvers wielded by the men on the far side of the drive were hardly audible as they wriggled backwards into the shrubbery. Bullets thwacked heavily into the leaves above their heads.
"Did you see them?" Solo whispered. "Four, I think—two on each side of the guy with that tripod thing."
"Yes, I saw. Just an instant before you pulled the door shut. I'm afraid my reaction was very delayed....I wasn't expecting to be ambushed. But at least we know why the motor stopped."
"What d'you mean?"
"The thing on the tripod. I saw them testing one like it in East Germany some time ago. It's an electronic gadget—creates a field of force which will put any electrical machinery in its orbit out of commission. Too short range for general use—they've only been able to make them with an effective field of three or four yards so far—but perfect for a job like this!"
"So in effect it was ignition failure? The field stops the coil functioning properly, I suppose?"
"Yes—look out! I think they're going to rush us..."
The shooting had stopped. A hundred yards to their right, the lighted windows of the hospital stared impersonally down the drive. On their left, the glare of the city silhouetted the archway through which they had driven a few minutes before. Straight ahead, the dark bulk of the stationary car masked the adversaries whose stealthy movements they could just hear over the rumble of distant traffic.
"I guess they'll be fanning out," Solo murmured. "Cross the drive further up and come down through the shrubberies to take us on the flank..."
But for a long time nothing happened. The two men lay in the soft mold under the bushes, straining every nerve to see or hear a significant movement, their guns at the ready. Once Illya reached out for a fragment of tree branch lying on the ground and pitched it into a clump of oleanders some way to their left. At once the plopping of the silenced guns recommenced. Twigs and morsels of leaf shredded to the ground as the heavy slugs ripped through the bushes.
"They have spread out, Napoleon," the Russian whispered. "Those shots were coming from almost opposite the place that branch landed..."
He groped around in the mold and discovered a flat stone half buried in the loam. Prising it loose he spun it a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. The moment it landed among the leaves a similar fusillade started. After a few seconds, it stopped.
"You're right," Solo muttered. "Dead opposite again. They're strung out along the far side of the roadway. But I don't get it: they're at least five to two. Why don't they cross higher up and rush us?"
Illya shook his head. From their place of concealment, the two agents peered anxiously up the drive, strained back to look up into the branches above their heads, and craned under the immobilized Peugeot.
Nothing happened.
Solo fired two shots at random under the car. The double crack of the unsilenced automatic was thunderously loud in the darkness under the trees. But there was no answering fire from across the drive.
"I don't like it," he said quietly. "It's almost as though they were just keeping us pinned down. They only shoot if they think we're trying to move. If they wanted to kill us, they could easily —"
He broke off abruptly, his head cocked to one side, listening. From somewhere up by the hospital there was a clatter of feet. Voices shouted and a door slammed. Then a car engine burst into life and a moment later twin headlights blazed into view around a corner of the building and raced down the drive towards them. Fifty yards short of the Peugeot, the vehicle screeched to a halt. A wide door opened and two or three men ran from the bushes bordering the drive to pile inside. There was a grinding of gears, and the car lurched forward to stop again on the far side of their own.
"They're loading the tripod," Illya said, raising his gun arm as the driver engaged first gear and revved up the engine.
"Wait!" Solo laid a hand on his forearm and pressed it to the ground. "We might be sorry...Look."
The vehicle emerged from behind the Peugeot and slowed down as it came opposite the oleanders into which Illya had thrown the branch. It was—they saw now that they were no longer blinded by its headlights—a Citroen ambulance, long and low. A final man swung aboard, and the ambulance gathered speed, rocketing down towards the archway, where it swung left into the street with a squeal of its low-pressure tires.
Solo was already on his feet, running towards the hospital. "Come on!" he shouted. "I'm afraid we'll be too late, but we have to see."
They pelted down the drive and burst in through the swinging doors. In the middle of the tiled foyer a uniformed porter lay on his back with outflung arms. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead stared upwards like an obscene third eye. A receptionist slumped across the inquiry desk, her starched cap resting in a pool of blood. On the graceful curve of the stairway sprawled two male nurses in short white jackets.
At the far end of the entrance hall a young nurse stood petrified by the open door of an elevator, her eyes wide with horror.
"Nurse!" Solo shouted. "Quick! The man from the air crash—the survivor...What ward's he in?"
"Number s-seventeen...F-f-first floor," the girl faltered. "What happened? I c-c-can't understand —"
But Solo and Illya were already half-way up the shallow flight of stairs. They dashed down the rubber-tiled corridor, paused at an intersection to consult an indicator board, and then hurried on to the far end of a passage.
The general wards appeared to be situated on the higher floors, for the doors were so close together that the rooms on the first floor must be quite small. Number 17 was the last on the left.
Solo pushed it open and strode inside.
The narrow iron bedstead was empty, sheets, pillows and blankets tumbled in a heap on the floor beside it. Bottles, glasses and jars on the bedside table appeared undisturbed, but the gray-curtained screen which had been around the patient was folded back and now leaned against a wall.
"God damn it!" Solo exclaimed bitterly in a rare moment of profanity. "Abducted under our eyes! Those THRUSH men in the drive were told just to keep us pinned down. We could have made a break for it and at least tried to stop them, if only we'd realized..." He broke off with an exasperated shrug.