Napoleon Solo peered down through the perspex blister of the Sikorsky as they flew across from the north. There was something wrong with the village—something unexpected which he could not quite place. Beyond, a distant chain of bright lights marked the motor road which ran beside the shore. But here...
"It's a funny thing," he began, turning to Illya Kuryakin.
"I know," the Russian cut in, looking over Solo's shoulder. "The place is in darkness. There's not a light in the whole village. Even the street lamps seem to be out."
From below, a vivid red streak arrowed through the air towards them, accelerating fiercely as it approached. There was a bright flash a hundred feet beneath the helicopter, then a shower of stars subsided gently earthwards.
The pilot from the Deuxi�me Bureau turned his head and laughed. "St. Paul is en f�te tonight, messieurs," he said.
"Fireworks!" Solo exclaimed in relief. "For a moment you had me worried there: I thought THRUSH had dreamed up an anti-aircraft battery!"
Three two-stage rockets fizzed upwards to their left, bursting into golden streamers which exploded again to release red, blue and green stars.
"Every August the municipality puts on this giant display," the pilot said. "Some years it last an hour and a half, two hours. It is the most lavish spectacle in Europe. Truly it is fantastic!"
"What is it for?" Illya asked.
The pilot lifted his hands from the controls and spread his arms in a Gallic gesture. "For people to see, monsieur," he said. "To enjoy. Part of the season. They come from all over the south to watch—see, the roads for two kilometers around the village are choked with parked automobiles...There will be tens of thousands of people sitting on the terrace walls of the vineyards. The spectacle is free, after all. It is very good for the tourism."
"But how can such a small village afford this huge display?"
"St. Paul is not large, but the municipality is very rich. Many wealthy people live there. And what else can they do with all the tax they gather? The place is enclosed. There is electricity, water, drainage. There is no room for expensive improvements, wider roads and that sort of thing. So why not spend money on enjoyment?"
"A very civilized attitude," Solo said. "I wish we had known of this before. Still—it should make our task easier. All the lighting is switched off during the display?"
"Everything. Even the street lighting on the roads leading to St. Paul. For the finale, they reenact the sacking of the town by the Saracens, with smoke screens and red flares to simulate the burning. Then the lights come on and there is a fair outside the gates, in the place where the old men play pétanque under the plane trees. It is very gay."
The Sikorsky was sinking slowly into the deep valley beyond the spur. It skimmed the top of a geometrically planted orange grove and settled gently down in a field. Beyond the dark bulk of the ramparts, the sky shimmered with silver rain.
The pilot handed them climbing ropes, crampons, a pick. "Good luck, messieurs," he said. "If one may venture a question...?"
"By all means."
"You have to negotiate an extremely steep, rough hillside, scale a seventy meter cliff and then climb the stone ramparts to get in. At the other end of the village is an open gate with a road leading through. Why do you not use that?"
Solo laughed. "There are many THRUSH agents here who we do not know by sight—but who may know us," he said. "Even in a crowd, we might be recognized. And the success of this operation depends on surprise. So we enter by the least expected route..."
The pilot waved goodbye and slid shut the perspex canopy. Soon, the clatter of the helicopter's rotors was dying away in the sky towards Nice.
Illya and Solo walked across the field, threaded their way through the rows of a small vineyard and began the stiff climb to the rockface. The going was rough, the ground uneven and tussocky—and the sporadic bursts of different colored light erupting in the sky were more of a hindrance to their progress than a help. By the time they reached the foot of the cliff, they were out of breath and drenched in perspiration.
From directly below, the bluff and the ramparts surmounting it looked enormous: a giant's castle bulked against a fairy-story sky. Solo unhitched the rope from his shoulder and knotted one end around his waist. "We could do with a handful of those magic beans right now," he observed with a wry grin. "However—let's get on with it..."
Apart from the mutter and snap of fireworks from the other side of town, the night was quiet—and the mistral which had been blowing when they left for Grenoble had died down as suddenly as it had started. The cliff was not quite perpendicular but it was a difficult enough climb in the fitful light. The first fifty feet were the easiest, the rock being seamed and fissured with pockets of soil and vegetation to afford them footholds. After that the face became steeper, the weathered slabs larger and smoother. Having forced their way up a narrow chimney with shoulders and feet, they came to a halt on a ledge.
"It's no good, Napoleon," Illya gasped. "We'll have to use the crampons from now on."
Tapping the steel spikes into the rock seemed to them to raise echoes loud enough to waken the dead. But no heads appeared silhouetted against the ramparts far above; no searchlight beam split the night to discover them spread like flies against the wall. Laboriously, painfully, with screaming muscles, they forged upwards. Once the rock crumbled when Solo put his weight on a crampon, and the spike fell out and down, to tinkle from boulder to boulder in the darkness beneath. Solo grabbed wildly at the cliff face, his fingers tearing on the eroded stone. For a moment he arrested his fall, then the rock crumbled again and with a strangled cry of warning to Kuryakin, who was in the lead, he plunged downwards to the full length of the rope. Fortunately the Russian had one arm around a crag, preparing to knock in another crampon. As Solo called, he flung the other arm around the projecting rock and tensed himself for the shock as the agent's full weight jerked appallingly on the rope circling his waist.
Gritting his teeth, the Russian hung on, his lips drawn back with effort and his forehead beaded with sweat. For a giddy moment, Solo swung like a pendulum in space. Then his threshing feet found interstices in the rock face and he was able to slowly fight his way back to his former position. A few minutes later, they reached the top of the cliff. Across a stretch of grass, only the stone rampart, leaning away from them into the night, separated them from St. Paul.
"Thanks, Illya," Solo panted. "I'd have been a goner if you hadn't held on."
"I cannot say it was a pleasure," Kuryakin replied. "But I certainly wasn't prepared to complete this mission alone!...Let's move along this way a bit before we climb the walclass="underline" the crevices look wider over there."
Facing the rough-hewn blocks side by side, they edged along the foot of the rampart. Suddenly the Russian froze, his hand outstretched in astonishment.