"But that's crazy, Illya! One plane, one set of buildings, but two landing grounds—No! Wait a minute!...It's not so crazy, is it?...One plane, one set of buildings, and two landing grounds, only one of which is related to the plane. Is that it?"

"That's it. And the 'ground' related to the plane by the dotted line is lower than the real one, the one with the airport buildings on it. I'm sure that's it."

"You mean he's trying to tell us, via this dotted line, that—so far as the plane was concerned—the ground appeared to be lower than it really was?"

"Yes—and if the pilot, or in this case the Murchison-Spears equipment, is informed the ground is lower than it really is —"

"The aircraft will obviously level off too late; it'll fly straight in. Just as though, in an old-fashioned crate, the altimeter was reading incorrectly."

"Exactly."

Solo picked up the chart, scrutinized it, and laid it down on Matheson's desk. "Okay, wonder boy," he said with a grin. "Sold to the gentleman with the rich uncle! And if the survivor was tipping us off that the crash was due to faulty evaluation of height by the Murchison-Spears box, that ties in with what we already know, doesn't it?"

"It does. Witnesses all say the aircraft 'flew into the ground'; the survivor from the last crash was babbling something about 'it' being too high; Matheson advised us to look for a fault in that particular stage of the gear. It all ties in. I suppose the survivor meant that the ground, as it were, was too high: it rose up and hit them."

The door opened and Helga Grossbreitner came into the room. She hurried across to a filing cabinet, pushing a strand of golden hair that had worked loose out of her eyes.

"Sorry to interrupt you, boys," she said absently, flicking through a stack of folders. "Oh dear—those poor people. I'm trying to deal with inquiries from relatives and friends. It really is most distressing..."

"It's a tough job, honey," Solo sympathized. "But don't worry: I think we may be on our way."

"You mean you've found out who's causing these terrible crashes?"

"Not the actual individuals—though we know it must be THRUSH members. But we do have a line on how it's being done...and once we've established that definitely, it should be easy enough to pin down the culprits."

"But that's good. What have you found out?"

Solo gave her a brief resume of the conclusions they had arrived at and the evidence which had led to them, adding: "And I'm real sorry, Helga—I guess I have to stand you up on that date tomorrow night...tonight, I mean: it's already past one A.M."

She flashed him her golden smile. "That's okay, lover boy. It'll keep—and me with it. What's the big deal, then?"

"We have to check our deductions, honey. No good acting on them unless we can prove they're right. Illya and I will go to Paris and fly into Nice tomorrow on the T.C.A. Trident—the same flight as the one that crashed here this evening—and keep watch in the pilot's cabin to see what we can see. They seem to be stepping up the disaster rate and there's a chance that we may find something out."

"Yes, I guess that seems sensible—but, darling, you will be careful, won't you? I can't have another date broken!"

Solo patted her rounded shoulder. "I'll take an ejector seat and a 'chute," he promised with a grin. "Expect me to drop in any time after nine...:

After the girl had found the file she wanted and returned to the outer office, Kuryakin looked up from some notes he had been consulting. "You know, Napoleon, there's one angle of this case that we haven't taken into account at all," he said seriously.

"What's that?"

"T.C.A.'s franchise to carry the fissionable material from here to the U.S. We haven't looked into that end of it at all. Do you think we should?"

Solo shook his head. "I guess that wouldn't figure in the case until after THRUSH had gained control of the airline," he said. "From their point of view, the number one priority is to discredit the company to the extent that they can take it over. Until they've achieved that, they can afford to ignore the radioactive bit. It only goes on one flight a month anyway—and there's a squad of men with automatic rifles guarding the armored car that brings it to the airport...Besides there's no question of the crashes being in any way connected with an attempt to grab the stuff."

"You are sure, Napoleon?"

"Sure I'm sure. All the crashes are incoming planes, and the fissionable material is flown out."

"Yes, of course. I just thought I'd mention it."

"Quite right, my boy! Quite right...And now let's go grab some sleep. We have to be back here on the first available flight to Paris tomorrow morning."

"You really meant what you told Helga?"

"Certainly. We'll sit right up in the front of that Trident with our slide rules and our compasses, watching every move," Solo said with a curious emphasis. He opened the door and ushered the Russian out of the office.

A shutter fell noiselessly over the concealed lens of the videotape camera which had been recording their conversation from its hiding place behind a relief map of Europe which hung on the wall.

Chapter 11 — Solo and Illya take a back seat

A fringe of waves laced the edge of the blue-green Mediterranean as the Trident turned in a shallow bank and headed east along the coast towards Nice, gradually losing height. There had been stray banks of cumulus building up over the Basses Alpes and their passage over the Rhone delta had been quite bumpy. Once they passed Toulon, however, the sky cleared and the air was calm and still as the giant plane sank into the dusk which was beginning to shroud the fishing villages south of the Massif des Maures. The creased, iridescent surface of the sea dulled to a somber violet, reflecting the pinpoints of light beginning to twinkle among the craft massed in the harbors of Lavandou and St. Tropez.

Illya Kuryakin crouched with Solo in the airplane's rear baggage department, fiddling with a mass of dials which studded the steel surface of a complicated chassis packed, with other electronic equipment, in a huge suitcase lying open before them. The whining roar of the three jet engines above their heads made conversation difficult in the confined space.

Solo glanced at his wristwatch. "Stand by for action any time now," he shouted over the din. "We should be just about over Ste. Maxime."

The Russian nodded, spreading a sheet of squared paper marked with labeled columns across a board and clipping it into place at the top and sides. "I hope your hunch is correct, Napoleon," he called back. "I should have spotted that camera myself. Where exactly was it?"

"You know that enormous relief map fixed to one wall of Matheson's office—the one with all the mountains in Europe humped up across the surface?"

"Yes, I saw it."

"Well, you probably noticed that all the airports between the mountains—and those on the plains for that matter—were marked by small circles of colored glass; presumably to light up when T.C.A. planes were using them, or needed maintenance there or something."

Kuryakin nodded again.

"The camera lens had replaced the glass indicating one of the airports among the Alps—Zurich, I think—where it was least likely to be noticed among the relief. Fortunately, I happened to see it just when there was a slight movement...probably an alteration of aperture.. and the movement drew my attention to it."