"Oh, well," the ambulance driver said philosophically, "I guess it must have been pretty quick at that...How long before we can start getting the bodies away, then?"
"A little while yet, friend. Even with the foam and that, the whole lot's still practically incandescent. A messy job, I'm afraid. You'll be rooting about in those ashes with the salvage boys for hours."
"Hell! I was off duty in half and hour, too. Jeanette and I were going to eat at the Rotonde. Still—better a late dinner than being a client for me and the salvage boys, eh?"
Twenty minutes later, the duty officer and one of the directors of the airport clambered out of a jeep at the scene of the crash. Weeping relatives and anxious friends had been taken care of, the curious had been dragooned away, cables had been sent and pressmen dealt with. And now all that remained of the Trident was a cruciform patch of smoldering debris through which the salvagers combed in antlike convolutions. Many of the corpses had already been removed and laid out in rows, many more, in whole or in part, had to be extricated from the tangle of incinerated fabric, melted foam rubber and scorched steel and aluminum.
"I still cannot understand it," the duty officer was musing. "A perfect day, with everything in order. Everything. I was talking to the fellow. And he flew straight in. Smack into the ground. I can't understand it..."
He picked up a charred woman's handbag, opened it, took out a buckled address book, a lipstick and compact, and then, with a helpless gesture, dropped them back inside and carried the bag over to the growing pile of personal belongings at one side of the runway. The director was shaking the foam from a fire extinguisher off a child's teddy bear. "You had no warning, Calvert, no warning at all that anything was wrong?" he asked.
"Nothing, Monsieur le Directeur. Nothing at all. One moment, he was about to touch down; the next moment—this." He spread his arms in a Gallic gesture at the scene before them.
Trembling through the hot air which still rose in waves from the litter of wreckage, the long line of sightseers' cars illegally parked at the side of the motor road flanking the airport winked in the fierce sunlight. The director stared absently at them for a moment and then reached into his breast pocket for a piece of paper.
"Ninety-seven passengers and the crew killed," he said slowly, adjusting his spectacles with forefinger and thumb, "and only a single survivor...that would be bad enough in all conscience. But this is the fifth crash Transcontinental has had in the past two months—and the third they've suffered here at Nice."
Chapter 2 — Mr. Waverly is worried
"The fifth crash in the past two months!" Napoleon Solo echoed in astonishment. "But that's fantastic! Way above any normal average for civil airlines as a whole, let alone any one particular company..."
Alexander Waverly nodded. He selected a short briar pipe from a rack on his desk and began with a forefinger to feed tobacco into it from a circular tin. "The statistics are the least remarkable thing about it, I'm afraid," he said soberly.
"You mean the crashes were—sabotage?"
"Nothing as simple as ordinary sabotage. The report's on its way up from the second floor. If you'll be patient a moment, I can give you all the facts..." Ramming the tobacco down into the bowl of the pipe with his thumb, Waverly rose and crossed to the window which gave on to the panoramic view of New York's East River. From the middle of the tangle of roofs and walls, the United Nations building soared upwards like a huge glass replica of the matchbox in search of which he now vainly slapped at his pockets.
The window was the only one in the whole concealed fortress comprising the headquarters of U.N.C.L.E—the United Network Command of Law and Enforcement. The rest of the three-story enclave was masked by a front of crumbling brownstone buildings and buttressed at the ends by a public garage and a whitestone housing a restaurant and club.
Of the five Sections making up the multi-national organization of the Command, Waverly headed the very top echelon: the Policy Department of Section One. Napoleon Solo was his Chief Enforcement Officer—the leader of the operational elite, the men and women of Section Two.
Solo gazed with approval at the nubile figure of the blonde who knocked and came into Waverly's office a few moments later carrying a pink folder. The girl wore a tight black skirt and charcoal nylons. Her shirt was shadowed by the thrust of full breasts against the crisp poplin. The agent smiled and unconsciously raised a hand to smooth his dark hair as her gray eyes roved appreciatively over his athletic figure and clean-cut features. She placed the file on the desk, turned, and looked him boldly and provocatively in the eye as she left the room.
"Later, Mr. Solo. We have business to attend to." Waverly's lean, middle-aged face creased into an expression of momentary irritation as he swung around from the window. He sat down at the desk, laid the unlit pipe beside the blotter, and opened the folder. It contained half a dozen sheets of meticulously typed paper stapled together through a red stick-on seal.
"And now," he said dryly, glancing at the top sheet, "perhaps—if you are sure I have your full attentio—perhaps I can give you a rundown on this matter of the air crashes?"
"I'm sorry, sir. Please continue."
"Very well. I shall give you the whole story. You may stop me if I dwell on anything you know already. First of all, what do you know of Transcontinental Airways?"
"T.C.A? They're the next biggest domestic line to PanAm and T.W.A. And I guess they rate pretty highly on the international scene, too."
"They do. They're among the six biggest in the world."
"These crashes must be of some importance to them, in that case."
"They are of importance to everybody, Mr. Solo. Take this last one at Nice three days ago. I have here a digest of the inquiry carried out jointly by the French ministry of aviation and T.C.A.'s own investigators—among whom we, too, had a man." He flipped over two pages of the typescript and read aloud: "We are of the unanimous opinion that no physical or mechanical reason can be found to which this disaster may be attributed. A playback of the tape recording in the fire-proof black-box confirms that verbal communications between the pilot and the control tower were normal right up to the moment of the crash. The aircraft's three jet engines were all functioning perfectly. Our experts can find nothing wrong with the controls or control surfaces...The Trident was landing automatically—via the Murchison-Spears Automatic Landing Equipment housed in a container in the cockpit—and since the container was thrown clear of the flames, the investigators were able to test this also. Even after the impact, it was functioning one hundred per cent accurately..."
Napoleon Solo whistled softly but offered no other comment.
Waverly looked up at him over the papers in his hand. "Exactly," he said, leaning forward and selecting a rugged cherrywood from the pipe rack. "Why, then, the crash? How can it have happened? And in particular why did it happen again to T.C.A.? As I have told you, this is the fifth disaster they have suffered in two months. You have doubtless read about the others without specifcally noticing which airline they referred to."
"I probably have, sir. Where were they?"
"Two of them were here in the US—a plane blew up in mid-air; another stalled on take-off. But the remaining pair were carbon copies of the one we're discussing—absolutely identical. Both were at Nice, both involved Tridents, and in both cases, again, aircraft, crew and conditions appeared to be in perfect order."