Nothing could match the vision of a Hawaiian sunset. That had been
Napoleon Solo's thought as he and Illya watched the incredibly blue
water and listened to the laughter and conversation drifting up
from the beach, carried on the warm breeze.

Closing his eyes, Solo savored the moment of this place that was as
far removed from New York City as he could possibly get and still
be standing in the U.S. of A. Their mission in Honolulu had been
neatly wrapped up, and Mr. Waverly, generous to a fault, had
granted them two days layover to enjoy the sights.

At the moment, the sights wearing draw-string bikinis were what
interested Solo. But he'd noted that Illya, even more impassive
than usual, was unaffected by either the pastoral or the feminine
scenery. The blond Russian stared sullenly at the water, not
seeing it, his mind someplace a thousand miles away.

Solo yawned and stretched from his sitting position on the rock
wall. "Two days," he complained, "is not exactly the length of a
dream vacation."

Not unexpectedly, Illya hadn't heard him. Solo frowned, surveying
his partner's rigid stance, the far-away look in his eyes, and the
wind tossing his hair away from a forehead that was still bandaged
with a small square of white gauze.

It had been four weeks since Anya Irini Pavalanovka had died at
U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York City. And three weeks ago, the
silenced bullet from a sniper's gun had narrowly missed killing
Illya on the very doorstep of Del Floria's. Solo was certain the
two incidents were somehow related. But Kuryakin, stubbornly
tight-lipped, had refused to shed any light on the mystery.
Knowing better than to press, Solo had stopped asking questions and
had kept his suspicions to himself, saying nothing to Waverly. But
he wondered now if that had been wise. Whoever had made the
attempt on Illya's life in New York might well have been determined
enough to follow them here.

Loudly, Solo cleared his throat. "Penny for your thoughts," he
said. "Or has that price gone up along with everything else in
Hawaii?"

For the first time in many minutes, Illya Kuryakin acknowledged
that Solo was there. "Shouldn't we be getting back to the hotel?"
he asked, in a voice that sounded irresolutely bored.

"Now?" Solo asked, disappointed. "I was just beginning to enjoy
the scenery."

A faint half-smile tugged at one corner of Illya's mouth. "Well,
nevertheless," he said, and began walking slowly away from the rock
wall toward a spot down the road where the silver-blue U.N.C.L.E.
car, acquired from the local office, was sandwiched between parked
tourist cars in the beachside lot.

"You've certainly been the life of the party today," Solo jibed,
following after the Russian agent. "You sure you don't want to
tell me what this latest dour mood is all about?"

He never had a chance to hear the answer. From somewhere, Solo
heard the faint _chuff_ of a muffled gunshot. Before he'd had time
to react and draw the U.N.C.L.E. Special from under his jacket, he
saw Illya go down on the pavement in front of him. The danger of
the sniper's gun instantly forgotten, he dropped beside Kuryakin,
reached to turn him over.

_"IIlya--"_

There was no wound. No blood. What had... ? Solo's eyes caught
the glint of something metallic then, embedded in the fabric of
Illya's left coat sleeve. A tranquilizer dart. He grasped the
blunt silver end of the thing and yanked it cleanly free. But
Kuryakin was already unconscious.

_This stuff works fast,_ Solo thought, and his own silenced pistol
still in hand, he turned to squint at the darkening hillside above
them, feeling suddenly naked on the deserted roadway.

The _chuff_ sound came again.

Solo fired rapidly three times in the direction he thought it had
come from, but the sudden sharp pain in his left thigh told him the
sniper's gun had found its second mark. He reached to pull the
dart out, feeling the lethargy already overtaking him. And as he
went to his knees on the sand-swept pavement, he stared at the tiny
needle in his hand and noticed something odd.

_It isn't the same. Not the same dart they shot Illya with. Now
why in the world would they use different...?_

Solo never completed the thought. The hard surface of the blacktop
had come rushing swiftly up to meet him.
* * *
Illya Kuryakin opened his eyes to the unexpected sight of stars in
a clear night sky. He felt moist earth beneath him, and the odor
of damp grass was heavy in the air. There was an annoying buzz
inside his head, the effects, he assumed, of the anesthetic. His
arms and legs felt heavy, like lead weights. He couldn't move
them.

Above him then, something blocked out the starlight. Something
shadowy, and man-shaped.

"Good evening, Illya Nickovetch," it said in deep-throated Russian,
and though Illya could not make out a face, he knew the voice. It
belonged to a man named Oleg Kugoshev Pavalanovka. Anya's husband.

And the man she had warned Illya about before she had died.

"Are you comfortable?" the voice boomed, still in Russian. "Oh,
you will be able to move soon. That half of the drug will wear
off."

"Half?" Illya echoed, not understanding. He turned his head,
straining to see past the fringes of tall grass around him. What
had they done to Solo?

"You need not search for the other one," Oleg said, reading the
thought. "We are many miles from the place you last saw him. At
the moment, he is doubtless attempting to explain to the local
police how he came to be sleeping on a public throughfare."

Illya struggled to sit up in the grass, found the effort still
beyond him, and sank back again. Dimly now, he could make out the
features of Oleg's face. Older. Heavier. But the same face he
had known in Kiev many years before.

"What do you want with me, Oleg?" he asked in English.

The response was phrased, persistently, in Russian, as though Oleg
wanted to prove some point by adhering to the mother tongue. "I
want nothing," he said. "In fact, I will leave you now. The city
lies due east of here. If you wish to rejoin your friend, you must
walk in that direction."

The towering figure vanished from overhead. Moments later, Illya
heard a car engine roar to life and then recede swiftly into the
night. Breathing hard, he forced himself to sit up, aware of the
increased rush of sound in his ears, and the onslaught of a
splitting headache.

_Half of the drug,_ Oleg had said. What did that mean? What had
been in that sleep dart?

Unsteadily, he found his feet, and with a sluggish gait that any
casual observor would have taken for a drunk, began walking in the
direction Oleg had indicated, toward the distant lights of
Honolulu.

He began to feel better as he walked. The anesthetic qualities of
the drug were indeed wearing off. But there was something else...
Something gnawing at the pit of his stomach and growing, stretching
tentacles slowly into every part of him. Something else...

_Oleg will try to kill you,_ Anya had insisted from the hospital
bed in U.N.C.L.E.'s medical section. _I know he will._

And try he had. In New York three weeks ago. And now ...

Illya put the thought out of mind and walked. He had to reach the
city, find Solo. His hand went automatically in search of his pen
communicator, but he wasn't surprised to find it missing. The
U.N.C.L.E. Special was also gone from its close-fitting holster.

By the lights, he judged the city to be some twelve miles ahead of
him. Several hours on foot. Less, if he could flag down a
passing car or find a house nearby with a phone. Neither seemed
likely just now. Oleg had chosen his deathtrap very well.

Shaking his head to dispel the insistent buzzing, Illya walked on.
* * *
In the Section One office of U.N.C.L.E.'s Hawaiian branch
headquarters, Napoleon Solo stared wearily at the communications
console. He'd just come from a long and tedious session with
H.P.D., and he hadn't slept. It was 2 A.M. in Honolulu. In New
York, fully one quarter of the Earth's surface away, it was 7 in
the morning. Alexander Waverly's voice over the speaker sounded
mildly annoyed.

"I take it then that you've had no response from Mr. Kuryakin's
communicator."

Solo rubbed his eyes. "No sir. I have to assume it's been taken
from him. Either that, or..." He didn't finish the sentence.

Waverly didn't respond to the unspoken implication. "For the
moment," he said, "I will overlook your not informing me of your
suspicions about the attempt on Mr. Kuryakin's life here in New
York. But you may be interested to know that our follow-up on Anya
Pavalanovka indicates she was once, well... shall we say,
'privately involved' with Mr. Kuryakin."

Solo winced at the euphemism, thankful that his link to New York
was non-visual, and said, "Yes sir. Is that all?"

"Hardly. The man she ultimately married was a former classmate of
Mr. Kuryakin's. Oleg Kugoshev Pavalanovka. This man is presently
in the employ of the KGB, Mr. Solo. And Intelligence placed him in
New York City as of three weeks ago."

Solo chewed his lip, contemplating. An old flame, a former rival,
the KGB. Suddenly this whole affair was beginning to make a vague
sort of sense. "And you think," he said into the microphone pick-
up, "that for some reason this Oleg wants to kill Illya."

"I think the reasons may not be all that difficult to discern,"
Waverly said knowingly. "Many men have killed over far less than
the affections of a woman, after all."

Dubious, Solo answered simply, "Yes sir."

"Whatever the reason may be, Mr. Solo, it is imperative you locate
Mr. Kuryakin as swiftly as possible. The head of Honolulu's
Section Four is prepared to work with you in attempting to
triangulate a fix on his communicator. I suggest you begin
immediately."

Solo said, "Yes sir," signed off, and rubbed his eyes again. It
was going to be a long night.

The lights of Honolulu seemed farther away than ever, and Illya
Kuryakin was no longer positive if he were even travelling in the
right direction. The humming in his ears had swelled to a full-
blown roar, aggravating the headache, and his vision was blurring,
making navigation on the dark road more and more difficult.

He was certain now that Oleg had mixed another drug with the sleep-
dart's tranquilizing substance. If the KGB agent had remained true
to form, it had probably been a slow poison. The same death Oleg
had chosen for so many of his adversaries in the past.

Illya stopped walking, squinting into the shadows beside the road
at something he thought he had seen moving there. But there was
nothing. Only the wind in the trees, and a thousand insects
trilling over the throb of his headache. He turned back to the
road -- and saw Anya Irini standing on the blacktop.

He shook his head, stared again, and saw that the figure was still
there. Arms outstretched, she called to him without making any
sound, lips silently forming his name again and again, like some
laser-image hologram doomed forever to repeat the same short
sequence of words.

He stumbled toward the place in the road where she stood. But when
he reached it, she was no longer there.

_Hallucination,_ he told himself. _A drug-induced hallucination._

He refused to accept any other explanation for what he had just
seen.

Illya Kuryakin had never believed in ghosts.

Twin beams of light sliced through the darkness then, crossing the
space where Anya's illusory image had been. Illya spun, and heard
the sound of the car's engine approaching as the headlights caught
him in their glare. He stood waiting, wondering if this were yet
another illusion. If not, he hoped the driver would stop for him.

The car, a late model Cadillac, slowed its approach and pulled to
a stop, wheels crunching the gravel under heavy tires. Illya moved
gratefully to the driver's side, waited for the tinted window to
slide down, and was suddenly staring down the barrel of a Russian-
made automatic pistol.

"You are taking far too long to reach the city, my friend," said
the unfamiliar man behind the gun. "Comrade Pavalanovka would like
to see you again. Now."
* * *
The head of U.N.C.L.E.'s Intelligence and Communications Section
Four in Honolulu was an attractive brunette named Mary Overton.
Solo, having failed to conceal his surprise at her gender, was at
least grateful that she'd pretended not to notice. She led him
through the maze of corridors that was a smaller twin to New York's
complex, and into the communications section, where Solo recognized
a specially-rigged directional finder and triangulation grid.

"We should be able to isolate Mr. Kuryakin's communicator," she
told Solo, and took a seat beside him in front of the apparatus.
"Even if someone else is carrying it, this ought to lead us
somewhere..."

"Yes, but how?" Solo wanted to know. "Illya's transceiver is the
same as every communicator carried by every other U.N.C.L.E. agent
in Hawaii."

She nodded, adjusting frequency controls as she spoke. "Yes. But
this isn't New York, Mr. Solo. There are a given number of field
agents operating in the islands at any given time, and we know
where all of them are." She pressed a microphone switch, and spoke
rapidly. "Beth, give me full range for starters, will you? G-80
through 410."

The Plexiglas grid in front of them came suddenly to life: a map of
the islands crisscrossed with grid lines and pulsing with small red
lights, each representing an U.N.C.L.E. communicator.

"All right," Mary Overton said. "From the beginning. Bardona and
Marston are in Hilo, so we can eliminate those." Two lights winked
out on the island neighboring Oahu. "And these three are
Chesterton, Eilers and Kim-Sung." Three more red points were
extinguished.

Solo watched her work, hoping against hope that one of those lights
would indeed be Illya. There was a greater likelihood, however,
that his mind wanted to reject out of hand: the probability that a
successful triangulation might only lead them to a dead man...
* * *
While Solo and Mary Overton were conducting their painstaking
search, Illya was standing, facing Oleg Kugoshev Pavalanovka across
a basement roon that was barren of furniture. His KGB escorts had
handcuffed his wrists in front of him, but though he was otherwise
unrestrained, Illya knew there was nowhere to go. The only exit
from the basement was a single door atop a steep flight of stairs,
and the mansion above them had appeared well-guarded.

"I do hope you enjoyed your walk," Oleg gloated, still speaking in
Russian. "I wanted you to have plenty of time to think along the
way."

"You've changed none of your tactics at all, have you?" Illya said,
reverting to his native tongue as well. "Tell me, which slow-
acting poisons do you most prefer these days?"
The ghost of a smile curled Oleg's lips. "Is that what you
thought, Illya Nickovetch? That I had poisoned you?" He laughed
hardily, and his right hand reached to pull a customized Tokarev
automatic from beneath his coat. "Ah, but of course you would
assume that. No, my old friend. You were shot with a tranquilizer
and a simple hallucinogen. Nothing more."

Illya glared, clearly not believing him.

"It is in fact the same hallucinogen," Oleg went on, "that I
slipped to Anya and the pilot of your U.N.C.L.E. plane before they
left Budapest."

New interest suddenly glimmered in Illya's eyes, followed closely
by a realization. "It wasn't Thrush who fired on that plane at
all," he said accusingly. "It was you."

"The point, my dear Illya, is that my drug saw to it your pilot
_believed_ it to be Thrush. For my purposes, that is all that
matters."

"Why?" Illya's voice was a half-whisper. "Why did you want to kill
her?"

Toying with the gun, Oleg pulled and reloaded the oversized clip
before replying. "For the same reason," he said, "that I wish to
kill you. Surely she lived long enough to explain it all to you?"
He worked the Tokarev's slide once, and then, almost as though it
were an afterthought, levelled the gun at Illya. "If not, you may
ask her to do so very shortly."

"You're making very little sense, Oleg," Illya said, ignoring the
threat. "Perhaps you've been working too hard."

The spectral smile came again. "Not too hard to appreciate the
proper touch of irony, I think. You see, _this_ gun _is_ loaded
with poisoned darts. Six agonizing hours of death in every round.
And this..." From another pocket, his left hand produced a second
gun: Illya's Special. "This one contains your most unimaginative
ammunition -- real bullets. A swift death, in perhaps no more than
a few seconds." He balanced the two weapons, one in either hand.
"Would you like to choose the way in which you are to die, Illya
Nickovetch?"

His intended victim stared at him and said nothing. Oleg therefore
made a pretense of choosing for himself. Dropping the Tokarev back
into a pocket, he came within six feet of Illya, and raised the
muzzle of the U.N.C.L.E. Special to eye-level.

"There's a certain poetic justice in killing a man with his own
gun. Don't you agree, Illya?"
Kuryakin waited until the KGB agent had come as close as possible:
until the Special was aimed at him, waiting only for Oleg to finish
savoring the moment before it would fire. Then he pretended to
collapse, going to one knee on the hard concrete floor. He saw the
glint of triumph in Oleg's eyes -- the split second of
overconfidence that was all he'd needed to gain precious seconds --
and inches. With Oleg now less than four feet away, he lunged
upward from his crouching position, cuffed hands aiming for the
U.N.C.L.E. Special. The chain between his wrists caught the weapon
and flipped it neatly out of Oleg's grasp. There was a crashing
sound from somewhere, and the echo of voices as the gun hit the
floor, and Illya dived after it, rolling, coming up again with the
Special held in both hands just as Oleg's Tokarev had reappeared
from its pocket and taken deadly aim. Oleg was grinning as his
finger began to depress the trigger.

Illya shot him between the eyes.

Almost on top of the Special's unsilenced report, another shot
caught Oleg from behind, and spun him sideways as he fell. At the
top of the basement stairs, Napoleon Solo lowered his own
U.N.C.L.E. Special and came rapidly down the concrete steps.

Tired, aching, and still more than a little ill from the effects of
Oleg's drug, Illya sat heavily down on the damp floor and waited
for him. "Just once," he said wearily when Solo had reached him,
"I wish you'd come over the hill a little sooner."

Scowling, Solo stepped to the fallen Oleg, turned him over, and
searched his pockets until he'd come up with the keys to the
handcuffs and Illya's communicator pen. "If it hadn't been for
this," he said, hefting the small transceiver, "I might not have
come over the hill at all. Besides, I don't see what you have to
complain about. You appeared to have matters well in hand. As
usual."

Mary Overton and a small battalion of U.N.C.L.E. commandos appeared
at the top of the stairs. "We've struck out up here," she
announced, coming on down the stairs. "Looks like the rest of the
KGB performed a disappearing act."

"All right," Solo told her. "I guess you can cancel the cavalry."

She smiled, then glanced from Oleg's body to Solo and finally to
Illya, still sitting on the floor. "Mr. Kuryakin, are you all
right?"
Illya nodded slowly. "I will be."

"We'll take you in to med section anyhow," Solo said, unlocking the
handcuffs. "They'll want to be sure."

He was helping Illya up when Mary Overton suddenly snapped her
fingers. "Oh, Mr. Solo -- I almost forgot. McGarrett from Five-0
is outside: wants to talk to you. I think he's bent out of shape
that U.N.C.L.E. didn't let him in on the action."

Solo grimaced. "Well I hate to bend him out of shape any more," he
said, "but tell him I'll talk to him later."

"But Mr. Solo, he's--"

"Later, Mary."

Shrugging, she fell silent and followed the two New York agents up
the stairs.

When they'd reached the door, Illya turned back to stare for a
prolonged moment at Oleg Pavalanovka's body on the floor below.

Misunderstanding, Solo said, "It's all right, Illya. It's over."

The Russian agent looked at him for the briefest of moments. Then
he turned his back on the basement room and went on through the
door.

"Yes," he said quietly. "It is."
 

+++ End +++