At first glance the large olive-green room on the second floor could have been mistaken for a government office anywhere in the world. The floor was fitted with finest quality carpet and a large oak desk dominated one end of the room. Two spacious windows gave on to a courtyard at the back of the building and were fringed by heavy brocade curtains. On one wall was a large portrait of Brezhnev surrounded by a thin border of faded wallpaper which indicated where an even larger portrait of Stalin had once hung.
On the desk were two wire-frame baskets marked IN and OUT, a heavy glass ashtray, a carafe of water and tumblers and four telephones. One of the telephones was marked in white with the letters V. Ch. These letters stood for Vysoko-Chastoty, or High Frequency. Only fifty supreme officials were connected to the V.Ch. switchboard, and all were Ministers of State or Heads of selected Departments. It was served by a small exchange in the Kremlin operated by professional security officers. They could not overhear conversations on it, but every word spoken over its lines was automatically recorded. It was this telephone that had summoned Major Anya Amasova.
‘Ah, Major Amasova. Come and sit down.’ The warmth in the man’s voice surprised Anya. She had only met him on three occasions when answering questions about reports she had submitted.
Colonel-General Nikitin, the Head of SMERSH, was standing behind his desk and extending a hand towards a straight- backed red leather chair. He was a tall man dressed in a crisply pressed khaki tunic with a high collar, and dark blue cavalry trousers with two thin red stripes down the side. The trousers disappeared into riding boots of black, highly polished leather. On the breast of the tunic were three rows of medal ribbons - two Orders of Lenin, Order of Alexander Nevsky, Order of the Red Banner, two Orders of the Red Star, the Twenty Years* Service Medal and a ribbon that Anya did not recognize. It must belong to the newly struck Sino-Soviet Friendship Medal. Anya remembered the colours so that she could look it up when she got back to Military Records. Above the rows of ribbons hung the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
‘I apologize for my late appearance, Comrade General. You heard of the technical problems with the Ilyushin?’
Nikitin held up a peremptory hand that told her that her question was unnecessary. ‘I was informed.’ He paused and looked hard into her face. ‘How was the course?’
Anya was thrown by the suddenness of the question. It redoubled her fears that she had been summoned because of her relationship with Sergei. She could feel herself blushing. For the first time she wondered if his mission might have been engineered to separate them.
‘Very interesting, Comrade General.’
‘Very interesting?’ General Nikitin smiled. His face was rough and calloused, like a potato left to dry in the sun, but the eyes could have been prised from a week old corpse. There was no visible sign of life behind them.
Anya felt her blush deepen. ‘It was a most unusual and unexpected assignment.’
‘Which you took the fullest advantage of.’
Somewhere, in a distant corner of the room, a blue-bottle was beating against a window pane. A furious, high-pitched buzz and then silence for ten seconds. Then the buzzing starting again. Nikitin was still probing her with his cold, lustreless eyes.
‘The scope of the course came as a surprise to me.’ This was if anything an understatement. The movement order assigning her to the dacha on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea had confined itself to the words ‘Cold War Techniques’. It had come as considerably more than a surprise on the first morning of the course, in the company of twenty attractive young men and women, to be confronted by a folder with ‘Sex as a Weapon’ printed in bold letters on its shiny cover. What followed had been a revelation. Lectures, films, demonstrations, what was discreetly described as ‘Controlled Participation’ with electrodes attached to various parts of the body to measure the degree of response, tests, more measurements, interviews, instruction in the latest cosmetics available in the west and how to apply them, a course in haute couture. Military Records had suddenly seemed like a different world. Anya’s final rating had been ‘E Sensual’, which she knew meant that she made love well and enjoyed it. Despite every laboratory test that the scientists could devise her emotional stability had remained an unknown quantity. The private report which she did not see said that she had exceptional potential but with an element of risk attached to it.
And in the middle of all this she had fallen in love. It must have been that to which Colonel General Nikitin had been referring with his talk of taking the fullest advantage. Suddenly she felt a rush of anger. What right did they have to tell her if she could love or not? Was she to be punished because amongst all the guile and artifice, the antiseptic passion and the throbbing wires she had found something that could never be contained in any tawdry manual of eroticism? She stared back into Nikitin’s soulless eyes with a new determination.
The Colonel-General nodded as if in agreement with some sentiment that needed no expression. ‘He was a fine young man. One of our best operatives.’ He studied her wondering face. ‘Your’ - a slight pause - ‘relationship could not escape notice.
Anya felt alarmed. What did he mean - ‘was’?
‘And up to now, conspicuously efficient. It just shows how these affairs of the heart can affect people.’
‘What do you mean?’ Anya saw the pinpoint of red behind the eyes and corrected herself. ‘What do you mean, Comrade General?’
Nikitin rcached into a drawer and produced a small, rectangular scrap of paper. A light was extinguished before he opened his mouth.
‘I very much regret to inform you that Comrade Sergei Borzov was killed on active service behind enemy lines. I have just heard the news.’ He listened to the girl’s short intake of breath, then dropped his hand to switch off the tape-recorder below the desk.
With unusual haste, the general levered himself from his chair and circumvented the desk. ‘You must not blame yourself too much, my dear. Others might read more into the whole business than it warrants but you can rely upon me to keep an open mind. If Sergei’s judgment was at fault it was not because of you - because of your, your affair.’ The General seemed pleased at having found the word. ‘You are young and very beautiful, and you have need of guidance - of protection. You need a friend who is well placed. Especially at the moment.’ The rough hand dropped to her knee like a paw.
‘Where did he die?’
‘In the French Alps. He was on a mission to eliminate a British agent. He failed.’ With the recorder turned off, Nikitin was letting the words tumble out. His eyes had found life from somewhere and they glistened as he watched his hand push up her skirt like a burrowing animal.
Anya felt her nostrils twitch before the scent of roses that some Russian men wear to disguise the fact that they cannot be bothered to wash. Nikitin’s head was bending towards her lap and she saw that the crimped line across his forehead denoted a wig. An obscene dribble of rust-coloured adhesive leaked from beneath the hairline.
Anya fought a desire to be sick. Her skirt was now pressed back against her waist and the animal hand ... She rose to her feet and thrust Nikitin aside as she launched herself at the desk. She pressed a finger to her lips and snatched up a thin state-issued ballpoint. Nikitin watched her like an animal ready to spring.
The record of Sergei’s death still lay on the desk and Anya turned it over and wrote urgently. This had to work. She had seen Nikitin’s hand drop below the desk and she knew what it meant.
She finished her message and thrust it into Nikitin’s wary hand. He looked at her with slow-burning hate and raised it to his eyes. ‘Most honoured. But I know from Military Records that there is another microphone hidden in your room.’
Nikitin raised his eyes from the message and for a second let them rest on the ceiling. Then he slowly made his way back round the table. He lowered himself into his chair and a slight subsidence of the right shoulder revealed that a hand had been dropped. The eyes that looked towards Anya were a
s devoid of expression as the face of the moon.
‘But I did not bring you here to discuss the unfortunate death of Comrade Borzov. There is an assignment of great importance for which I think you may be suited ..
Hunt the Submarine
August had committed an act of treachery against the English summer and rain was lashing the windows of M’s office overlooking Regent’s Park.
The old man was having trouble with his pipe as usual. Bond let him get on with it and gazed around at the familiar fittings he had come to know so well over the years. The Venetian blinds that gave an impression of coolness even on the hottest day; the dark green Wilton carpet leading to the big, red leather-topped desk; the twin-bladed tropical fan, now immobile, set in the ceiling directly above M’s desk.
The Head of Britain’s Secret Service had lost no time in summoning Bond to his office. No sooner had Station J contacted him at Chamonix and told him that his presence was urgently required at headquarters than he had screamed down the motorway to Geneva and caught the first plane to London. And no sooner was he behind his desk staring glumly at the pile of routine signals and reports marked ‘for your urgent attention’ that always arrived in droves when he left the country than the telephone had rung.
‘007.’
‘Can you come up?’ It was the Chief-of-Staff.
‘M?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s it all about?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s serious.'
It always is, thought Bond as he put down the receiver. He left his office and took the lift up to the top floor. The walk down the long, quiet corridor was familiar and he knew exactly how many paces it would take. Thirty, before he came to the outer door of M’s office. The girl behind the desk was un
familiar and unbeautiful so the smile that Bond bestowed upon her was dutiful rather than anticipatory. She bent forward and pressed the switch of the intercom.
‘007 is here, sir.’
‘Send him in,’ said the metallic voice, and the red light which meant ‘on no account must I be disturbed' glowed above the door.
That had been ten minutes ago and Bond was still listening to the rasping and sucking noises. At last they stopped and M dropped the still smoking husk of a match in the big copper ashtray.
‘So you found Q’s gadgets useful did you, James?’
‘Very efficacious, sir.’
'I thought you were going to fire them into the side of mountains. That sort of thing.’
‘That was my intention, sir.’
M attacked his pipe with a small pick and turned away to billow clouds of smoke towards the ceiling. There was a dry twinkle in his eye as he turned back towards Bond. will be very impressed when you submit your report. I don’t think he had any idea that you were going to be so zealous in your testing of his new toys.’
‘It came as a surprise to me, sir.’
M looked at Bond, not without affection. ‘While we’re on the subject. We had a signal from the French DST.’
‘What are they going to do?’
‘Nothing.’ M registered the sharp rise of Bond’s right eyebrow and continued. ‘They’re leaving the matter in the hands of the local gendarmerie. A chalet fire of this description is not uncommon.’ Bond was now sitting forward in his chair. ‘Perhaps you did not notice that there was petrol stored by the hut - for the Snowcats. The young people must have tried to start a fire and - well you know how dangerous it can be with petrol.’
‘A man and a girl.’ Bond nodded. A sensible way for them to have covered their traces. The man he had shot and the girl in the cupboard consigned to flames.
‘There appear to have been two women and one man,’ said M. ‘The bodies burned almost beyond recognition. Any identification will have to wait for the next of kin to come forward.’
Which could take a long, long time, thought Bond. So, Martine Blanchaud, or whatever her real name was, had paid the ultimate price for incompetence. There was only one organization capable of that combination of brutality, guile and casual disregard for human life. Bond decided to express his feelings to M.
‘I think it was SMERSH, sir. They were after me. But, like last time, they wanted to make me stink even before I was rotting in my coffin. There was a dead girl in the hut - some drugged little tart from the back streets of Lyon, most probably. They’d hacked her up like shark bait.’
‘And you were the shark.’ M nodded grimly. He could see the newspaper headlines (‘DRUG-CRAZED BRITISH AGENT SLAYS IN MOUNTAIN LOVE NEST!), the Home Secretary on the telephone, the official denials, the snide questions from the fellow- travellers in the House of Commons, the satisfied smiles round the table of the High Praesidium in the Kremlin. Yes, once again 007 had been fortunate. Was it Napoleon who had always supported one of his marshals because he was lucky? ‘Strange that this should happen now, James.’
Bond looked at M inquiringly and reached for the flat, light gunmetal case containing fifty Balkan and Turkish mixture cigarettes, specially made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street. He extracted one and ran a finger over the triple gold band before placing it between his lips. ‘What’s up, sir?’
M’s tranquil, lined sailor’s face suddenly became tense. ‘What does HMS Ranger mean to you, James?’
Bond flicked through the card index in his mind. ‘One of our Resolution Class nuclcar-powered ballistic-missile submarines, sir.’ M’s approving silence told him to continue. ‘Laid down by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness in 1967. Operational in 1971. Length approximately three- hundred and seventy feet. Beam thirty-three feet. Surface displacement seven thousand five hundred tons - submerged eight thousand four hundred. Speed reputed to be twenty knots on the surface and twenty-five submerged - although the submerged figure may be on the slow side. Ship’s complement, a hundred and fifty-one men; sixteen officers and one hundred and thirty-five ratings - they operate on a two-crew basis to get maximum time at sea.’ Bond broke off and put the battered, oxidized Ronson to work on his cigarette. M’s demanding eyes bored into him as he directed a thin stream of smoke towards the ceiling.
‘And the armament?’
‘Six conventional 533 mm torpedo homing tubes placed forward and sixteen Polaris surface-to-surface intercontinental missiles with a range in excess of two thousand five hundred miles.’
M continued to stare levelly. Bond noticed that his pipe had gone out. ‘HMS Ranger has disappeared.’
The rain persisted in its attack on the windows and for long seconds its angry patter was the only sound heard in the cool* dark room.
‘You mean, there’s been an accident?’
M shook his head. ‘We don’t know. Radio contact is intermittent. The Admiralty first became alarmed when there was no Sitrep from the last reporting point.’
‘They sail on a predetermined course?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that if something had gone wrong and wireless communication had failed they could be lying on the bottom anywhere over a distance of, say, two thousand miles?’
‘Correct.’
So why is the department being involved? thought Bond. Wc have no expertise in raising nuclear submarines from the bottom of the ocean. Especially if we have no idea where they are. He looked at M, expecting more.
‘We don’t necessarily believe that it’s a question of mechanical failure. We have enjoyed the full co-operation of the United States Navy, whose tactical experience of this kind of situation is second to none, and we have found no trace of the Ranger.’
‘Are you suggesting that she’s been destroyed by enemy action, sir?’
The lines on M’s face suddenly seemed to be etched deeper. ‘Come here, James. I want you to look at something that arrived in the diplomatic bag from Cairo.’
M produced a scuffed leather map-case and drew out a cylinder of tightly rolled, translucent parchment. Bond moved to his side and looked down at the surface of the desk that had been specially prepared for his interview. Unde
r a sheet of glass lay a chart of the Southern Atlantic revealing the tell-tale bulge of the West African coast line. A thin black line zigzagged from north to south like the sales curve of a unsuccessful company.
‘This is the course that Captain Talbot, commander of the Ranger, was following,’ said M, following Bond’s glance.
‘How many people knew it?'
‘The Head of Operations at Holy Loch and Captain Talbot. A copy would be “posted” to Supreme Defence HQ.’
‘So there’s little chance of a leak.’
‘I would say none.’
M struggled with the parchment and eventually anchored it with his ashtray and an imposing heavy leather pen-holder and inkwell set that Bond had never seen him use before. Bond knew better than to try and help. Once the parchment was in what M considered to be a satisfactory position, he began to unfurl it laboriously. Bond watched patiently and saw a pattern beginning to emerge, identical to that on the chart but out of true, like the four-colour reproduction in a cheaply produced magazine. M extended the parchment to its fullest extent and edged it to the left until the two lines mated, one on top of the other. The line on the parchment stopped at a point where there was a cross on the chart and the submarine’s course had changed to the next, unfinished leg of its voyage.
‘Interesting,’ said Bond.
‘You realize what it means?’
‘One of two things. Either we have a traitor or someone can plot the course of nuclear submarines.’
M looked at his pipe and then put it in the copper ashtray. ‘Our communication from Cairo suggests the latter. This tracing is a sprat to catch a mackerel. Q, if he was not too busy designing rockets to be fired from ski-sticks, could explain it better than I.* It was easy to detect that M belonged to the old school. He did not entirely approve of Q’s ‘gadgets’, as he was wont to call them. ‘He says there’s something called “heat signature recognition". I can’t explain exactly what it is. I’ve always been out of my death with technical gobbledegook. Anyway, it works on the same principle as satellites with infrared sensors that can detect a nuclear missile in flight by its tail fire. It seems that ... someone ... can now locate a submerged nuclear submarine by its wake.’
James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me Page 3
