Colonel Sun

by Robert Markham

  ‘Be careful. I'll have to be close with this bloody sawn-off barrel, or I might hit you. Has he got a gun?’

  ‘Don't know.’

  ‘Give me five minutes.’

  ‘No more – the timing's tight.’

  In the hall they shook hands in silence and parted. Bond walked quickly through the sitting-room where he had first regained consciousness, out on to the terrace and along to the west corner of the house. From here he took a careful look.

  Von Richter was in the act of opening a box of ammunition on the firing-point. This, on its raised natural platform, was about twenty yards away, across mainly broken ground but not so much so as to give any cover for a direct approach. The only possibility was to move parallel with the sea into the shelter of the edge of the cliff, which would mean crossing the open in full view of anyone facing that way. At the moment, von Richter's position was such that the tail of his eye might just pick up this manoeuvre. But soon, surely he must turn his back to look out for Willi at the hillcrest. The man seemed in no hurry. A minute went by while he laid out a row of bombs on the ground, took the canvas cover off the mouth of the mortar, straightened up and lit a cigarette. At last he swung round and began studying the skyline. Bond moved.

  Before he had covered more than a third of the distance to the corner of the cliff his foot struck a loose chip of stone and immediately the German wheeled and saw him. Bond changed direction and made straight for the firing-point. With his feet stumbling and slipping on the smooth hummocks of rock, he expected a bullet at any moment. What he had not expected were the immense shuddering explosions from the mortar, driving into his ears: one – two – three … Then von Richter turned and waited for him, arms extended, with all the advantages of a higher and more secure foothold. But Bond caught him out of position by going for the mortar, not the man. He flung himself forward and brought barrel and base-plate and all toppling sideways, ruining any immediate prospect of further aimed shots. The pain lunged at him. He was halfway to his feet when his head seemed to dissolve and everything stopped.

  Litsas was there. His voice came through an invisible wall. ‘James. Come on. We've work to do.’

  ‘How long …?’

  ‘A minute. He kicked you and was looking round for a rock to drop on your head, so I fired at him. The range was too much, but I must have been close. He forgot you and ran into the house. Can you manage?’

  On his feet again, Bond steadied himself. ‘Yes. Let's go and get him. Together this time.’

  ‘But with me first. Don't forget he's mine, James.

  They went in by the side door. The rooms opening off the passage there were empty. They made for the stairs, then stopped dead as a motor started up in the anchorage.

  Litsas was in front when they burst on to the terrace and ran to the edge of the tiny quay. The dinghy with the outboard was swinging away, but the inexpert hand on the tiller brought the stern and its crouching occupant under their feet, and Litsas had no trouble in dropping lightly into the boat. He spoke without looking up. The Smith & Wesson was levelled at von Richter's chest.

  ‘The major and I will have a little sail, James. We're in not much hurry now. There's the major's boy-friend to deal with, but he's got some way to travel. I'll be back to help you dispose of him.’

  Von Richter cut back the throttle and turned his head. In the grey light, the patch of damaged skin looked ghastly, the product of some loathsome disease. ‘This man means to kill me, it appears,’ he drawled. ‘I'm quite helpless, as you can see. You're an Englishman, Mr Bond. Do you approve?’

  ‘You're beyond the law, von Richter,’ said Bond slowly. ‘After what you did at Kapoudzona.’

  ‘Clearly, argument is useless. Emotion has taken over.’ The man gave a faint shrug. ‘Very well. Let us go for our sail.’

  The boat began to move away. Abstractedly, Bond watched it receding for a couple of minutes, then sauntered back into the house. He had reached the hall before he noticed the blood-spots.

  There was a group of them at the corner of the passage, as if somebody had rested there for a moment, and another near the side door. Bond turned in his tracks and rushed to the kitchen.

  The trapdoor had been flung aside. Below, Luisa lay on her back with her eyes open, a metal meat-skewer through her heart. Dr Lohmann was sitting on the floor against the wall, his knees drawn up. Beside him was his black case and a shattered hypodermic. There was no colour at all in his face. He opened his eyes and spoke in a slurred voice.

  ‘He forgot,’ he said. ‘He forgot that morphia can do a lot for a man with holes in his guts. It never occurred to him.’

  Amazement as much as horror had tied Bond's tongue. ‘But how did he … do all this? According to you he was as good as dead twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Any ordinary man with those wounds would never have been able to get up off the floor, let alone spring at me like …’ Lohmann shuddered and gasped, ‘Supernormal vitality. There are cases in medical jurisprudence … Even so, after so much blood-loss … He's not human.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked Bond with unwilling compassion.

  ‘No. He pierced my intestine ten or twelve times with one of those skewer things. I've only got a few more minutes. Thanks to the morphia it's not intolerable. He wouldn't like to know that, would he? … Tell me … I suppose you've killed everybody else?’

  ‘All but Willi are as good as dead.’

  ‘Willi's as good as dead too. Sun's orders, agreed to by von Richter. They worked out it would take Willi over twenty minutes to get down that hill to the boat. Too long, they thought. So they got me to give him a pep pill before he took off. A capsule of one of the organophosphorus compounds. The first symptoms should have come on by now. I told you not to worry about him. So you see you needn't feel sorry for me.’

  Bond said nothing. Awkwardly, he laid his hand on Lohmann's shoulder for a moment and hurried away up the ladder.

  Beyond the side door the trail of blood was easy to follow. It led across the firing-point and into the twisting gully Bond had made his way down just over twenty-four hours ago. He pushed on as silently as he could, eyes alert, ears straining to reach through the woolly barrier in them that constantly thickened and thinned, knife-hand at waist level. The light paled every moment and progress was difficult. He came to one of the sections where the walls leaned in on each other, the landward one rising, the seaward falling away, turned a corner and found Sun not ten feet off.

  The Chinese had propped himself against a granite buttress to Bond's right. He looked shrunken, physically drained, and, judging by the pool of blood on the dusty rock at his feet and the half-coagulated stream that stretched from his mouth to his waist, that was what he must have been. His right hand was behind him, no doubt pressed against the wound he could reach. A sort of smile twisted the gory lips.

  ‘My reasoning was correct, then.’ Unbelievably, the voice was firm and full. ‘In fact I knew you'd come, James. You must be feeling pretty pleased with yourself. I take it you've killed everyone?’ he asked in grotesque unconscious repetition of Lohmann's question.

  ‘They've all been dealt with.’

  ‘Excellent. Then it's back to you and me again. Under conditions very much more favourable to you than those obtaining in that cellar, you may think. But you'd be wrong.’

  Colonel Sun brought his right hand into view. It gripped a mortar bomb.

  ‘You see? I am in control still. I need hardly tell you, James, that if you move suddenly, or even if I happen to drop this contrivance by accident, I shall kill us both. I'm dying anyway. So, in a sense, are you. Because very soon I shall dash the nose of this against the rock at my side. Our fates really were linked, weren't they? Can't you feel that now?’

  ‘What do you want, Sun?’ Bond was calculating distances in feet and split seconds, trying to visualize the shape of the corner behind him, estimating the possibility of leaping the lower wall to his left.

  ‘Ad
mit that in me you have found your master, who in an equal contest without the intervention of treachery, would have broken your spirit as finally and irresistibly as your limbs. Admit it, I say!’

  ‘Never! It wouldn't be true! You had the numbers and the initiative and the planning on your side from the start. And what have you done with all that? Got yourself killed?’

  Sun's stained teeth showed. ‘I insist! I order you to –’ Then the eyes flickered and blood pulsed from the mouth and Bond vaulted the seaward wall of the gully, dropped on all fours into a bowl of scrubby grass only five feet below, scrambled to a stump of rock like an eroded tombstone, swung himself to the far side of it. The rumbling in his ears pulsated on. Sun's voice, feeble now, came through from above and half right.

  ‘Where are you, James? But that's a question only a fool would answer. I should have dropped this thing a moment ago, shouldn't I? But the desire to hear you acknowledge defeat must have taken charge of my fingers. What am I to do with it now? That's easy. I'll explode it next to me. Go out with a bang. That's the way my world will end.

  ‘I want to tell you now that what I said to you earlier was quite wrong. De Sade misled me. Or I didn't read him properly. I didn't feel like a god when I was torturing you back there. I felt sick and guilty and ashamed. I behaved in an evil and childish way. It's ridiculous and meaningless, but I want to apologize. Can you forgive me?’

  Bond never remembered what he was going to say, only that he bit back the saying of it at the last millisecond. The roaring silence went on. Then, full-throated again, the voice crying, ‘Damn you, Bond,’ the oscillating dart-shape of the bomb thrown at random, the muffled, almost boxy explosion from the fissure where it landed, and more loud silence.

  Sun had slipped to his knees against the wall of the gully. The extraordinary eyes were open. They fixed on the knife Bond still grasped and their expression became one of appeal.

  Bond knelt, placed the point of the knife over Sun's heart, and pushed. Even then, in the last moment of that inhuman vitality, the bloodied lips stirred and mumbled, ‘Goodbye James.’ The moment was whisked away. Sun had turned into a life-sized doll.

  Now the dream came back. But this time Bond himself was the formless creature he had fled from earlier, not knowing what it was he pursued, everything dissolving into puffs of flame as he passed it. Litsas was somewhere, and Litsas was crying. Ariadne was near. Then there was nobody.

  21

  A Man from Moscow

  ‘I had a devil of a job this morning, squaring things with the local authorities,’ said Sir Ranald Rideout fretfully. ‘Sticklers for form and their own dignity, as always. A lot of talk about the honour of Greece and of the Athens police department. Mind you, I can see their point in a way. A gun-fight in the streets, four dead, two of them foreigners and one of those a diplomat of sorts. No evidence at all, but the Commissioner fellow I saw had his guesses all right. Ah, thank you.’

  Sir Ranald took a tomato juice from the white-coated waiter, set it down untasted on a table topped with marble, and went on at full speed.

  ‘Then this business on Sunday. Half a dozen corpses, two German tourists missing, mysterious explosions, goodness knows what else, and who have they got in the way of witnesses and/or suspects? A half-witted Albanian girl who won't or can't talk, and a Greek thug with a lot of burns who says he doesn't know anything about it either, except that a man called James Bond killed one of his friends and tried to kill him and blew up his boat. I must say, Bond – speaking quite off the record, you understand – I can't altogether see why you didn't square things off by getting rid of that fellow too while you were about it – he was only small fry, wasn't he? After all, according to your report you'd put paid to three of the opposition already that morning. Surely one more wouldn't have –’

  The air-conditioning in the upstairs banqueting room at the Grande Bretagne was not working properly and there was a good deal of noise, especially from the Russian group by the drinks table. But, encouraged by a nod from M at his side, Bond exerted himself to reply.

  ‘It would have been a killing in cold blood, sir. By that time I'd had enough, and there was nobody I could or would have asked to do it for me. I'm sorry if it's inconvenienced you, but an unsupported accusation doesn't carry much weight, does it?’

  ‘I see, I see,’ Sir Ranald had begun to mutter before Bond had finished. ‘Yes, I suppose knifing people one after the other can become a strain, even for someone like you. Someone who's been trained in that kind of work, I mean.’ The minister's feelings about the infliction of death seemed to have abruptly gone into reverse. He now stared at Bond with slight distaste.

  M broke in. ‘What happened finally, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, I was able to convince them they'd be wiser to take no action. Their Home Office chap agreed with me. He was on my side as soon as I mentioned this Nazi character, von Richter. Seems the man was quite a legend. And then the fellow with the burns was quite a legend. Aris or whatever his name is – they'd been after him for some time for theft and crimes of violence. He won't embarrass us. They were a bit huffy about our having conducted our quarrels on Greek soil, but I pointed out that it wasn't our choice. I managed to smooth them down in the end. I think the PM will be satisfied.’

  ‘Well, that's certainly a great relief.’ M's eye, frosty as ever, was on Bond.

  ‘Yes, yes. And it's a relief to have you back with us, too, both of you. Now. That Greek friend of yours, Bond – Litsas, isn't it? I wonder if I ought just to have a word with him before I catch my plane.’

  ‘I'm sure he'd appreciate it, sir,’ said Bond. ‘And I think he does deserve something in the way of thanks, after voluntarily risking his life on behalf of England. Don't you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I do. Excuse me a moment.’

  Bond grinned sardonically at the Minister's retreating back. M gave a faint snort.

  ‘Difficult not to think hardly of a man like that, James. But I suppose politicians are necessary animals. Anyway, we can afford to feel tolerant about them this evening. I must say our hosts have exerted themselves. Special representative from Moscow and so on. They seem quite pleased with us. No more than they ought to be, of course. Occasion for rejoicing, after all. Except for one thing – the absence of Head of Station G You won't see your friend Stuart Thomas again.’

  ‘Is that certain, sir?’

  ‘Pretty well, I'm afraid, after this time. My private bet is that he got himself killed rather than be used for whatever the Chinese party wanted him for. Better forget all that. Let me ask you a question, James. Your report. I'm curious to know why you didn't just sit back and let that Prussian blaze away at the people on the islet. They were no friends of yours, after all.’

  Bond nodded. ‘I've asked myself that. I must have just got caught up – I wasn't thinking. The three of us had combined to smash the lot of them and the job had to be finished. But I hope you agree it was the right thing to do anyway.’

  ‘I do. Very strongly. Quite against the cards, we've pulled off something that's going to have a favourable effect on the world balance of power. Or rather you have. The Russians realize that all right. Notably this delegate fellow. Who evidently wants a word with you.’

  An elegant young Russian with high Tartar cheekbones had made his way over. ‘Excuse me, Admiral, sir. Our Mr Yermolov from Moscow would like to have a talk with you, Mr Bond. Would you come, please?’

  The man from Moscow was tall, stout, red-faced, with small authoritative eyes. Bond put him down as a veteran Bolshevik, old enough, probably, to have seen some service as a youth in the Wars of Intervention, working his way up through the Stalin machine, coming to real power since the fall of Khrushchev. He looked quick-witted and determined; he would have had to be both these things to be still alive.

  Wasting no time on preliminaries, Yermolov led Bond to a pair of ornate pseudo-Empire chairs that had been placed, obviously with the present purpose in mind, near the marble fireplace
.

  ‘You have enough to drink, Mr Bond? Good. I shall not detain you long. I want to say first that you have done my country a considerable service and that we are properly grateful. Comrade Kosygin himself has of course been fully informed of your role in this affair, and he has asked me to convey to you his personal thanks and congratulations. But more of that later.

  ‘Besides our gratitude, it's also suitable that we offer your apologies. For certain specific failures of judgment on our part. I have to admit to you that our security apparatus in this area had been allowed to fall into disrepair. This was not the fault of the late Major Gordienko, a capable enough officer who –’

  ‘One moment, Mr Yermolov, if I may.’ Bond had grown tired of the official jargon he had had to talk and listen to and write for so much of the last three days – in being formally interviewed by Sir Ranald, in a six-hour session alongside Ariadne at the Russian Embassy, in compiling his own report. ‘Can we talk naturally? For instance, just to satisfy my curiosity, what happened to the traitor in your set-up here that Gordienko talked to me and Miss Alexandrou about?’

  Yermolov breathed slowly through his nose. His little eyes looked quizzically at Bond. Without shifting their gaze he produced a cigarette that had apparently been lying loose in his pocket, inserted it into a stained amber holder and lit it with a cheap metal lighter. He said abruptly: ‘Yes. Why not? I'm sorry, I've been opening too many power-stations recently. That sort of thing doesn't exactly encourage informality. Let's talk naturally, then. But that's not easy, you know, for a Russian. I'll have to have a serious drink, and I insist that you join me. Vodka. We can offer you Stolichnaya, not the best there is, but perfectly wholesome.’

  He snapped his fingers at the high-cheekboned young man and went on talking.

  ‘Putting it naturally, then, the traitor, or rather the double agent, tried to escape when he found his bosses' plans had gone wrong. He's been dealt with.’

  ‘Throat cut and dropped into the harbour, I suppose.’