The Finger in the Sky Affair

By Peter Leslie

Mystery in the Skies

Five major air crashes in two months—the cause of all of them a complete mystery. In each case the plane's instruments were working perfectly, the crew was in command and ground control in contact. Then the plane would suddenly nosedive into the runway as it came in to land, killing most of the passengers. Those who weren't killed outright died mysterious deaths soon after.

Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin hurried to Nice to follow a trail that led unavoidably to THRUSH—and to a monstrous master-plan that was moving steadily toward the point of no return...

1. Turning on the heat

2. Mr. Waverly is worried

3. A question of asking questions

4. The girl on the Promenade des Anglais

5. A surprise for Napoleon Solo

6. Some advice from the man on the top floor

7. The ray on the hill-top...

8. A missed appointment—another surprise

9. The silent witness

10. An eye in the wall

11. Solo and Illya take a back seat

12. An interrupted journey

13. Outdoor fireworks

14. Indoor fireworks

15. All the fun of the fair

16. The finger in the sky

Chapter 1 — Turning on the heat

Screaming, the man pelted from the blazing wreckage towards the airport buildings and the control tower. Flame licked the trousers and sleeves of his lightweight suit, his tie was on fire, and thin trails of smoke streamed from his hair. Behind him, the inferno which lay across the main runway dwarfed the scarlet shapes of fire truck and ambulance racing towards it along the perimeter track.

To the horrified watchers in the tower and along the crowded observation terraces, the man's pumping legs seemed hardly to move him across the immensity of the apron (one of the ambulances had changed course and was dashing across the field to intercept him). "Lie down, man! Lie down and roll," the duty officer was shouting impotently behind his green glass window high in the tower. "Lie down and roll on the ground to smother the flames, you idiot!" But the injured man was still running, staggering now, falling to the sun-drenched asphalt, dragging himself to his feet and stumbling doggedly on. When he was near enough for the airport workers pounding towards the crash to see his open mouth and staring eyes, a second explosion erupted from the center of the wrecked plane. One of the lazily spinning fragments of incandescent debris brushed him lightly with its flaming tail as it flew past and dropped him once more to the ground. This time he did not get up.

Less than sixty seconds before, the huge Trident—Transcontinental Airways Flight T.C. 307 from New York—had been planing in from the west to land on the main runway at Nice airport dead on time after its four thousand mile journey. No cloud sullied the dark blue of the sky. No breeze ruffled the sea. The visibility was perfect and the friends, relatives and onlookers thronging the terminal building in the heat of the early afternoon scarcely gave the silver plane a look as it neared the finger of reclaimed land which carried the runway emptily out into the Mediterranean.

A porter driving an electric baggage trolley shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun and watched the aircraft take shape against the dark outline of Cap d'Antibes on the far side of the bay as it sank from the brassy bowl of the sky. The pilot of a private Cessna waiting on the perimeter to take off throttled back his engines and glanced out to sea as the giant undercarriages and nose-wheel thumped down from the belly of the Trident. Holidaymakers on the beaches at Cros-de-Cagnes looked up as the great jet, air-braked now by seventy degrees of flap, roared overhead.

The plane's shadow undulated across the crowded little port, snaked over a storm beach of shingle and sped on along the sparkling sea. Soon it was hurtling towards the markers spaced out along the landward side of the runway.

As the dusty grasses flattened beneath the machine's 250-mph approach, the shadow and the substance drew inexorably nearer: slowly the speeding aircraft sank towards the tarmac, and as slowly the skimming shadow moved out towards the middle of the runway to join it. The only unusual thing about the whole operation was the rapidity of the junction: instead of leveling off, throttling back and settling gently down, the Trident continued flying at exactly the same speed and inclination until the two, the aircraft and its shadow, met together. It flew, as it were, straight into the runway...

As the shattering sound of the first impact split the hot afternoon, a mushroom of dust spurted from the dry ground. With its port oleo snapped, the jet bounced high into the air, slewed sideways when it crunched to the runway for a second time 400 feet further on, dug its port wingtip into the earth and cartwheeled for a further 250 feet in a slow arc before it slammed upside down across the tarmac and instantly burst into flames.

Ambulances and fire trucks were racing towards the stricken plane almost before the bloomp of the explosion was over, but it was outlined in fire long before they got near. On either side of the white-hot fuselage, the stressed metal of the triangular wings buckled and curled like charred paper in the fury of heat. Off to one side, the skeleton of the tall tailplane with its trefoil of jet engines streamed flames and smoke into the air. And between the blazing mass of the machine itself and the point where it had first touched the runway, an irregular trail of spilled baggage, window frames and shattered fragments of auxiliary controls sprawled. Two hundred yards away in the middle of the airfield, one of the giant landing wheels rolled slowly to a halt, wobbled and fell over to one side.

And from the holocaust, just this one man emerged. Spewed onto the ground by who knows what chance of mechanics when the tail and the fuselage parted company during the Trident's last cartwheel, he picked himself up, flaming, and zig-zagged in panic away from the disaster.

The ambulance reached him just after he had been struck down by the second explosion. By the time they had smothered the flames and lifted him tenderly on to a stretcher his eyes were already glazing. Once on the way back to the terminal building he gave a deep groan, tried to sit up, and said quite clearly: "It's too high...it's much too high..."

The nurse pushed him gently but firmly back on the pillows. "Don't try to speak," she said in French. "You must not exert yourself."

The burned man writhed beneath the red blankets. "They...they...lifted up...the ground," he panted. "Not...far...enough below...I tell you I...it's too high up..." And his voice died away in an incoherent mumble.

"You must not speak, my friend," the nurse said again. "I am afraid I cannot understand your language—and anyway, you have to conserve your strength. Be quiet now and rest..."

But the injured man continued to twist and turn, though his voice remained a low babble just above the threshold of hearing and he said nothing further that could be identified as words.

The other ambulances were halted a hundred meters away from the crash by the intense heat. One of the asbestos-suited firemen lumbered towards them scissoring his arms in a gesture of negation. "No use," he called out. "There's not a chance in hell. Apart from that one poor devil, the whole bunch must have fried in there like sausages. There's not even one chucked out onto the runway to die of a broken neck!" He looked over at the dense pall of black smoke and shook his head.