Solo had regained consciousness. Owlishly, he stared out over the Lancia's tail, loosing off an occasional shot at the Cadillac from the Berretta, which had unaccountably still been in his jacket pocket.

Lala drove boldly past notices proclaiming in red lettering on white boards that the way was prohibited, that it was mined, that it was dangerous, and that it was army property subject to artillery fire. She skirted a hutted camp, drove past two astonished sentries in boxes, and sent a group of officers leaping for the hedgerow as she careered past a staff car drawn up by the roadside. Eventually, after looking anxiously around, she steered the convertible into a space below a clump of pine trees and stopped. The Cadillac was laboring up a hill two hundred yards behind them, and the other cars were not yet in sight.

"Quick!" she cried. "Over there, beyond the Nissens! I'll hold them off from here while you run!"

"I only hope the equipment in the Commendatore's car is as good as that in ours. In theirs, rather!" said Solo. "Equipment?"

"I left a homing device in the Fiat," Solo grinned. "I rang the old man before we left Turin and told him the wavelength. He promised to keep a few kilometers away as long as it was transmitting. He shouldn't be far off."

"I hope not," Lala Eriksson said."Now run! Quick!" She opened the boot of the Lancia, took out a Mannlicher rifle, loaded it, and settled down behind the car's bonnet to fire at the Cadillac. At the first shot, the big sedan stopped and men disgorged on either side to seek shelter behind bushes.

A moment later, bullets were zipping through the leaves above their heads as the girl's fire was returned with interest. The Fiat pulled up behind the American car and its driver and passengers fanned out through the underbrush in an obvious attempt to outflank her. The third vehicle had stopped some way down the track.

Solo had completely regained his usual alert wakefulness now. He dropped one hand on the girl's shoulder as she reloaded. "Okay, this is it," he said. "Thank you, bless you—and good luck..."

Kuryakin flashed her one of his rare smiles. "Thank goodness I remembered they were testing these things, and that you knew exactly where they were," he said. "It's a sick wind that doesn't blow somebody well."

Lala Eriksson laughed. "An ill wind, Illya! Look! For Heaven's sake, go while I still have some ammunition. I'll be all right. Really."

Together the two agents plunged through the bushes, swerving wildly to avoid the Thrush fire, and dashed down an incline to a row of Nissen huts behind which a line of half a dozen strange machines were drawn up. Each one had a seat with safety straps, a control panel, some kind of motor, and four vertical tubes about a foot in diameter at the corners. Above them, rotor blades projected from a short shaft rising from the motor housing.

Solo drew the splintered sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, "What on earth?" he began. "They look like miniature tractors under umbrellas that have been blown inside out!"

"One man helicopters, partly conventional, partly jet," Illya explained briefly. "They're trying them out for extra-short-range communication. If we can evade the bullets, they'll get us to Caselle in time for the evening plane... "

Feverishly, they zigzagged across the clearing and began strapping themselves in. Then, as the Russian called instructions, men in olive green battledress ran from the huts, shouting, and there was a burst of rifle fire from the top of the slope they had just run down.

With a sudden roar of power, the motors caught. The unwieldy machines bounced on the ground, hovered, and then rose astonishingly, straight up and over the trees. "Just in time," Illya shouted. "Look! Lala's still firing from the Lancia, and the men from the Cadillac are pinning her down. But the Fiat crew beyond—the ones shooting at us!—are in for a surprise!" He pointed down.

As they soared two hundred feet above the ground, the scene below lay revealed as clearly and as simply as the models in an army sand-table exercise... the scarred convertible shielding the girl with her rifle; the professional gunmen deployed around the Cadillac, now pockmarked with bullet holes; the four killers from the Fiat, kneeling, firing up at the helicopters; the army platoon from the Nissen huts advancing warily up the scrub-covered slope to see what was going on.

Two ridges away, the ground was alive with men moving between the pines as the genuine maneuvers continued, unaware of the drama being played out in their midst. The third car in the Thrush cavalcade, the one carrying Carlsen, had turned round and was heading back towards Buronzo. By the remaining quartet of helicopters, a fat sergeant in uniform was standing with his mouth open, shaking his fists at the sky. And on the far side of the slope on which the Thrush men were staked out, hidden from the gunmen but clearly visible from the viewpoint of the airborne agents, six police cars had halted on a parallel track as their crews fanned out to take the gangsters from above and behind,

"There you are, you see!" Kuryakin yelled again above the clatter of the rotors. "The Commendatore made it, after all!" But from Solo's helicopter there was no reply. One of the men in the Fiat must have been an uncommonly good marksman, or unusually lucky, for a stray shot had creased the agent's temple, leaving a scarlet furrow across the skin and plunging him into unconsciousness for the second time in two hours.

And that was not all. The slug that had knocked out Solo had scored a second and more valuable bull.

In its trajectory, it had passed clean through an eyepiece of the sunglasses and shattered forever the remaining lens of the damaged pair...

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

Glass— Handle With Care

"There are two things I do not entirely understand from your report," Alexander Waverly said to Solo and Kuryakin. "In the first place, why did you decide to secrete a homing device in your car when, so far as you knew, you were driving straight to the airport to catch a plane for New York? Had you in fact reason to suspect the young woman at that time?"

"Oh, yes," Solo replied. "Look: my car was sabotaged when I left Rinaldi's laboratory. That had to be somebody connected with the S.I.D., or somebody who had access to S.I.D. information: nobody at Carlsen's house could possibly have known I was going there. Then we met the del Renzio girl just after we had nearly been run down in the street. She could have fingered us there. Again, it was she who suggested we ate at Angelo's—and the gangster in the next booth was the man who fixed the lift at Leonardo's apartment. Only Giovanna knew that we were on our way there. She must either have tipped him off or made sure that he overheard the crucial part of our conversation."

"Also," Illya added, "when I overheard Carlsen talking to that same gangster, he made a great point of the fact that we were 'very well covered'—so well that it was unnecessary to try and kill us any more! We had just met Giovanna: if she was doing the covering, they would certainly not need to have outside help, for she was in on all our plans... the men we saw in the street were not Carabinieri or S.I.D agents at all, but covering agents from Thrush."

"Exactly. It had to be her," Solo said. "I borrowed a car and someone fixed a bomb in it. She knew the number of the borrowed car. We were attacked in an arcade on our way to a meeting with her. Only she would have known where we were coming from, and therefore the route we would take."