Pulp Fiction | The Ghost Riders Affair (July 1966) (2 page)

He moved along the aisle, thinking that he was equipped with the latest inventions, and yet he was on a witch-hunting errand. Could fifteen-car trains actually vanish in this modern world?

He could not rid himself of that rising feeling of something wrong.

What could be wrong? He bent over and stared through the thick windows at the night country whipped past on the hundred-mile-an-hour wind drift. Great, rich country, its people sleeping in security in their beds. The wan lights of a midwest village flared by, then the distant glow of a farm house window.

It was all too normal to support the idea of unearthly disappearance; yet, he waited, tense for the unknown into which this train raced.

At the furbished desk, Illya lifted the intra-train phone, pressed the engine button.

After a moment a man's casual voice spoke, "Engineer."

Illya said, "Kuryakin in the special car."

"You living it up, Mr. Kuryakin?" the engineer asked.

"I don't know," Illya said. "That's what I called you to find out."

The engineer laughed. "If it was any smoother, Mr. Kuryakin, we'd be flying."

Illya replaced the phone, aware that he was less than reassured by the engineer's confidence. A train had disappeared a week ago.

Still, hundreds of trains had covered this same tracks, night and day, before and after that strange disappearance.

The railroad people had made every effort to conceal the loss. Failing this, they'd tried to minimize it while they retraced the known run foot by foot. The railings appeared unaltered, there was nothing to suggest any calamity. It was simply as if the fifteen cars, the special sleeper, and all its people had simply ceased to exist.

"We were called in at United Command," Alexander Waverly had told Illya and Solo in the command room three days earlier, "when world-wide panic might ensue if more publicized agencies were at work. We here at the command have determined to make up an exact duplicate of the vanished Chieftain down to the special sleeper in which Harrison Howell rode."

Now, Illya watched the night world skim past in darkness and sudden, quickly lost lights. The duplicate Chieftain had been altered in only one way. Illya himself had installed the United Command bleep-signal which would emanate from the train no matter where it went. These bleeps were being monitored on special receivers in United Network's command room.

Illya smiled. It was as if the entire evil-fighting organization rode this train with him.

Yet why did the hackles rise at the nape of his neck? Why couldn't he escape the sense of an impending wrong so incredible that even the full forces of United Command might be helpless against it?

"These thoughts don't make sense," Illya told himself aloud. "It's just another assignment, like returning a book to the library. And you can handle it."

Nevertheless, the slowing of the train went through him like a sudden electric shock and he lunged for the desk, grabbing up the phone, signaling the engineer.

"Engineer."

"What's wrong?" Illya asked. "Why are you slowing?"

"Just a water stop, Mr. Kuryakin," the engineer said.

"Why didn't you let me know?"

The engineer's voice sharpened. "You'll find the stop listed, Mr. Kuryakin, if you'd bothered to check the trip pattern."

"How long will we be stopped here?" Illya said.

But there was no answer. The engineer had replaced his receiver.

Abruptly, the train shook like a wet dog, the metal parts grinding and squealing in protest.

The lights flashed out, but came on again immediately.

The train was sinking, straight downward. It was not as if it were entering a tunnel, but as if the fifteen cars were being lowered via some kind of elevator!

Illya rushed to the door. He grabbed the knob, turning it. The door was locked.

Illya did not even bother checking it; the door was somehow electronically sealed, as if the door were frozen into its framing.

Heeling around, Illya caught up the nearest heavy object and ran to the windows with it.

He stopped, holding the bar aloft, useless. It was heavy enough to break the thick glass, but beyond them were walls of solid rock like close-pressed subway tunneling.

The train continued to plunge straight downward toward the center of the earth.

Illya jerked the sender-receiver from his jacket pocket. He pressed the button. "Uncle Charley, come in. Mayday. Come in, Uncle Charley. Acknowledge please. Over."

There was no sound. The instrument was dead metal in his hand. He loosed his fingers, letting the small sender slip from his grip to the floor.

The lights flared up and then were doused, putting the car into stygian darkness, a pall of gloom that pressed in hot and thick and suffocating.

THREE

Napoleon Solo stood in the United Network Command Room and stared at the blank screen of the instant-bulletin set.

A kind of creeping helplessness immobilized him.

Other men, of every age and nationality, moved around him, each wearing the same electronic identification badge that he wore, all of them vitally concerned in this latest unnerving disorder that left the world-wide organization impotent and disabled.

Though the others acted, trying to find ways around the crippled machinery, Solo remained staring at that silent screen, as if paralyzed by its sudden failure.

Slender, of medium height, Solo was a warmly handsome young man who might have been a doctor, lawyer, advertising executive, accountant—anything except what he was: a highly-rated precision-trained enforcement agent for what had become the most important secret service agency in the world, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

Solo pulled his gaze from the lifeless screen, forcing his mind away from the moment when every sound from the Chieftain ceased.

"They reached the water stop," Waverly was saying, reconstructing the final moments of communication. "We lost contact. However, the bleep-signal remained clear for—for how long, Mr. Solo?"

Solo looked up, his face drawn. "The bleep stopped three minutes after the train slowed for the water stop, sir."

"Have they been able to pick it up again?" Waverly asked.

Solo shook his head. "Negative, sir. We have agents on the spot. They report no trace of the train. It did not stop for water, by the way."

Waverly shifted papers on his desk. He scowled, studying the men ringed before him. Slowly, the machines and computers came to life on the walls around him. New coded messages were place before him.

He said, "There must be no panic. We have had a moment of complete breakdown here. But it is only momentary. There is some logical explanation for this, for all of this. Our communications cannot fail like this, not without some detectable cause. Two fifteen-car streamliner trains cannot vanish off their rails without logical explanation."

Waverly pushed his graying hair back from his lined forehead. No one in United Command knew Waverly's exact age. Solo wondered wryly if even the computers could give such information. Contrary to popular belief, the computers were not infallible. Lord help anybody programming Alexander Waverly's age into any United Command machinery!

Waverly's brilliant record in military and intelligence dated back to the first world war. He was one of the five men—of different nations—heading the far-flung operations of United Command. Age was his enemy—and so far Alexander Waverly had been able to walk on its face.

Solo said, "I'm ready to fly out immediately, sir."

Waverly's gaze fixed on him from beneath bushy brows. "Fly out, Mr. Solo? Where?"

Solo glanced at the silent screen of the instant-bulletin. It was his last contact with Illya Kuryakin, somehow seemed his final hope for finding him. "I imagined you'd want me to go out to the place where the second train disappeared, sir."

Waverly shook his head. "Negative."

Solo scowled. "But, sir. Illya was on that train—" He saw the older man's face and stopped.

Waverly nodded. "I assure you, Mr. Solo, we will make every effort to locate Mr. Kuryakin, as well as the two trains which somehow seem to have dissolved into thin air."

"Isn't the place where the train disappeared the place to start looking for Illya?"

"It might seem to be—"

"Before something happens to him."

Waverly's head jerked up. "Just a moment, Mr. Solo. We cannot let emotionalism enter into this, no matter how we might feel about Mr. Kuryakin. Surely I don't have to remind a professional such as you that there are larger issues at jeopardy here."

Solo exhaled heavily. "I'm sorry, sir."

Waverly's voice was flat. "As you yourself stated a few moments ago, we have
U.N.C.L.E.
agents on the scene where the train was last heard from. None has reported any trace of the lost streamliner. I am aware of the great personal peril Mr. Kuryakin faces at this moment, but these are risks we take—that all of us must be prepared to take.

I'm sorry, but perhaps the scene of the calamity might not be the best place to begin our search—for either Illya Kuryakin, or the missing trains."

Solo frowned, waiting. He could no longer oppose anything Waverly ordered. He had the same pride and faith in Waverly that he had in the United Command itself.

He waited, knowing that Waverly would send him out of this chrome, steel and glass office—that no matter what the command, he would try to execute it.

Waverly tapped his unlighted pipe.

"I don't have to spell it out for you, Mr. Solo," he said. "I'm sure the same thought has occurred to both of us."

Solo nodded.

"I know, sir. The pattern has suddenly changed."

He looked out the window, summoning up his thoughts.

"Yes," he said, "Before this it at least was one at a time. Isolated, mysterious disappearances. Buddy Evans, a second-string Red Sox catcher, vanished on his way to spring training. Never seen again. Just went off the face of the earth—and on his way to collect a fat bonus for signing."

Waverly said, "The Jeanne Lynch case. A premiere danseuse with the Sadler Wells ballet. Never showed up for a sold-out performance of
Swan Lake.
Never seen again."

"There was quite a few of them," Solo said.

"Eleven hundred and thirty-six," Waverly said grimly. "Plus three unconfirmed. Most of them were not celebrities, so the cases got no great national notice, Mr. Solo."

Napoleon said, "I see what you mean, sir. It was as though they—whoever they are—had been trying out some devilish abduction plan, testing it on individuals until they were sure it would work. Now they're sure. Now—entire train."

Solo sighed. "And tomorrow—God knows."

Alexander Waverly said gravely, "You said 'They—whoever they are.' I think we—er—have a pretty good idea, Mr. Solo. Only one organization in the world would have the audacity, the powerful scope, the sheer tenacity of evil to dare this monstrous thing."

THRUSH
!

Neither of them had to say it. The thought hung over them like a deadly, unseen nimbus of doom.

Solo drew a deep breath. "What are my orders, sir?"

Waverly allowed a faint smile, "I'm sending you to the Maynard Ranch in the Sawtooth ranges of Wyoming—"

"The place where the cattle disappeared?"

Waverly nodded. "Without a trace, without a hoof-print, or any other sign."

Solo frowned. "But you said we had no proof these two incidents were in any way related."

"I want you to get that proof."

Solo nodded. "You have some reason to believe there is a link, sir?"

Waverly thumbed through taped reports before him. "We have our computers' estimates that the incidents of missing train and vanished cattle are related." Waverly shrugged. "It's up to you, Mr. Solo, because I confess to you that's all we have to go on—the computers and my instinct."

Solo frowned because he'd never heard Waverly make just such a remark before. Waverly eschewed anything unscientific. "Instinct, sir?"

Waverly nodded. "That's how helpless we are, Mr. Solo. I'm placing my hopes on instinct now. My instinct tells me that the missing cattle and disappearing trains are all part of the same plan. How? I don't know. Nor does any one, except—
THRUSH
."

FOUR

Napoleon Solo stepped out of the station wagon that transported him from the Union Pacific station at Cripple Bend to the Maynard Bar-M Ranch.

A sense of unnatural silence was oppressive in the Wyoming afternoon. The ranch house looked to be at least seventy years old, built of fieldstones and mountain spruce, reconditioned with central heating and every luxury for dude ranchers.

It was a working ranch, too, deep in the rocky foothills of the inaccessible Sawtooth mountains.

Carlos Maynard prowled his littered office like a hobbled mustang. He stared at Solo, sitting in a straight chair tilted against the wall.

"It isn't that you aren't welcome here, Solo. You are! A very distinguished visitor, and I'm glad to know somebody is doing something! You're not a cop, are you?"

Solo shrugged. "You have somebody you want arrested, Mr. Maynard?"

The harried rancher grinned despite himself. "No. But maybe I'd feel better if you could make an arrest if we need one."

"First, we better find out what really happened," Solo suggested mildly.

Maynard shrugged. "I'll buy that. You can count on me for all the help I can give you. Only I can tell you, I feel pretty helpless about now."

"We all do."

"I just want you to understand. I'll do anything I can to help you people, but my first interest has got to be getting my cattle back."

Solo watched him. "If we can solve why they disappeared, Mr. Maynard, we should be able to find them."

Maynard nodded. "I hope so. Frankly, I stand to be ruined. No sense trying to hide that from you. People are scared. Scared to come here. Scared to stay after they do get here. We got some pretty wild rumors going around, I can tell you. Ghost riders. No matter how much I warn the men who work for me to knock off that kind of talk, it persists. And who are we to say? Maybe ghost riders did just drive my cattle out into the sky. They sure didn't leave any tracks behind them."