The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗

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!"

Feet pounded amid the hubbub of voices, and then the leader called again: "Moraes - stay where you are, man. Or get under the table if you're so scared." The tone was full of contempt. "You up there - Mestoso! - we're relying on you... "

Mestoso? Greerson's feet were stamping up the staircase on the far side of the gallery. Who was Mestoso? Where - Just in time, Kuryakin caught the flicker of movement behind the windows of the control room. It was a difficult shot, across the curve of the gallery and through a sheet of glass angled away and obscured by reflections, but it had to be quick. The Walther roared in the confined space between wall and balustrade.

The man Mestoso, standing on a table with a submachine gun ready to rake them from above, leaned forward out of the reflections and touched the glass. At the same time the entire pane seemed to leap outwards, to hang frozen in the air for a moment, and then to plunge floorwards in gigantic shards. After it, lazily somersaulting, arced the body of the man with the gun. In the appalling crash of the plate glass on the floor below Illya and Coralie gained the door of the control room and slipped inside.

"Check what's happening down below," the agent panted. "I've got to find... have to cut off all the troops and submarine crew in the canteen somehow… must be something like watertight bulkheads…"

While he scanned the banks of dials and screens, the girl peered over and into the room below.

The big gray man, Moraes, seemed to have been cut by a fragment of flying glass. He was sitting on the floor, looking owlishly at the blood streaming from a gash in the sleeve of his jacket. The rest of them had retired out of sight beneath the gallery - though they couldn't have left the room, for the only lower-level exit door was in full view on the far side of the room. Of Greerson there was no sign: he must have gained the top of the spiral stairs and must now be worming his way towards them around one or the other side of the gallery...

Illya was intent about a great slanting control board at the back of the room. It was covered in levers moving in labeled slots and there was a console full of knobs in front of it and a series of three illuminated screens behind.

"Look!" he exclaimed excitedly. "These screens are schematic diagrams of the three floors of the fortress. And the place is divided into watertight compartments; there are bulkheads partitioning it in case of flooding. So here's our chance of blocking off half the opposing forces - if we're lucky and get them on the far side of the watertight doors! Anyway, here goes..."

He spun a small wheel on the console until an arrow on its perimeter pointed to the words MAXIMUM POWER. Then, staring fixedly at the screens, he began hauling the levers set in the board. As each one moved, a bar of red light blocked off some portion of the diagram above.

"A-7 and A-9," he muttered, his eyes roving the screens until they located the references. "That'll be the two top-floor doors to the canteen. There… that should have them sealed off. We have already done the ones below. Now let's see… B-12 and 14 - there! - should barricade the living quarters below; and this - B-13, is it? - Yes, B-13 will keep anyone from getting at the armory -"

Glass splintered to his left. A needle spun emptily around a black dial pierced with a small hole as the pieces tinkled to the floor. The girl was firing her Beretta at a section of balustrade a third of the way around the gallery.

"Greerson," she said succinctly. "Obviously he's not risking a straight attack from either side to enfilade us. He'll just keep popping up here and there from across the well, because he knows one of us has to concentrate on the controls and the other can't watch the whole - Look out!"

Kuryakin flung himself to the floor as she loosed off two shots, at the other side of the gallery now. But the gunman had already dropped behind the shelter of the steel balustrade. A torn sheet of paper fluttered down from a clip projecting from the wall just behind where the Russian had been standing. He pulled the girl down beside him. "Thanks," be said soberly. "That was just in time." He drew up the hem of his sweater. Around his waist, a lightweight, pocketed band something like a cartridge belt was fastened. From one of the compartments he withdrew a small, square object with a sliding switch on one side.

"Okay," he said. "Draw his fire. I'll pretend to be busy at the control board again. You sweep the right hand arc of the gallery. If I know the psychology of these boys, this will be the time he'll shoot for the second time from exactly the same place."

The girl turned deliberately away from the section of gallery where the last shot had been fired and stared to her right. Kuryakin had his back to the main room. He was bending over the console - but one hand shielded a black-dialed pressure gauge in such a way that it acted as a mirror. A few seconds later, he saw the reflected head of Greerson rise cautiously above the ba1ustrade exactly where he had said it would. The agent whirled. Instantly, the head dropped from sight. But it wasn't a gunshot target Kuryakin wanted: it was enough to know the section of gallery Greerson was in. He sprang to the glassless control room window.

His right arm straightened like a baseball pitcher's. The small, square object sailed across the well and dropped down between the balustrade and the wall.

There was a subdued, flat detonation and a surge of smoke. Something rose above the level of the rail for an instant, threshing, and then dropped from sight. There were no more shots from across the gallery.

"Small grenades are very useful in confined spaces," Illya said, "even if they are only made with bakelite covers. Now, let's see - the watertight bulkheads are closed, all those that can be of any use to us. That leaves us free in the central area with the six people below and any other military who happened to be in the passageways when I started to close the doors."