by John Gardner
He relied solely on instinct to judge the moment to fire the piton. There was no accurate way of calculating the optimum second, and he knew that his sense of selfpreservation could now easily override accuracy.
Then, right or wrong, the moment was upon him. He clung to the handles of the piton gun as he pressed the trigger and felt the projectile charge thump, the tingling of the small explosion running up his arms. The barbed arrow that was the piton shot down, trailing a snake of around a hundred feet of ultra strong climbing rope behind it, moving with a speed that was a fraction faster than Bond’s downward momentum.
The piton smashed into the camouflaged concrete at the foot of the dam at just the moment that the bungee cord had paid out its normal length, but with around two hundred feet of elastation to go. Bond felt the pull and, for a second, thought his arms were going to be torn from their sockets. The muscles of both arms and the right leg screamed pain through him, and he wondered if this had been the kind of thing men first felt on the rack in those days of intense physical torture. He reached forward hand over hand, beginning to haul himself downwards to the bottom of the dam, his face contorted with agony as he fought against the pressure from the bungee cord which was now taut, pulling, trying to drag him back up the dam wall.
Finally Bond reached the bottom, strung between the rope and the thick bungee cord. Looking down, he could see the strain on the piton which was moving slightly in the concrete in which it was embedded.
If the piton was ripped out by tension on the bungee, he was well aware of what could happen: he would be catapulted upwards, against the side of the wall. His body would be scraped as though someone held him against a huge Black & Decker sander. In the end the bungee would leap into the air, eight hundred feet above, and what was left of him would be thrown down onto the top of the dam.
Even now, he felt himself being torn apart by the bungee’s tension and the anchored rope around his left arm.
He reached up to free his foot from the loop and the bungee shot back up the dam wall, flying upwards like a long fast-moving snake.
He stood for a moment, orientating himself, then moved in a crouch over the rocks, zigzagging between them to reach the air conditioning pump which stood like a grey painted drum about twenty yards away. The grille, next to the pump, had been opened and he could see the marks where Alec Trevelyan had used a metal-cutting instrument on the big padlock. As he pulled the grille back, Bond found himself looking into a dark square hole with the top elongated D-shape of a series of rungs set in the side of the wall below.
Swinging himself into the darkness, he began to descend, not rushing but moving slowly, his feet feeling out the rungs, his mind focused on finding the bottom of this black well, for he had no idea how far this maintenance shaft went down.
It turned out to be a long haul, for the wide duct seemed to go down forever. Though his eyes were gradually getting used to the blackness, Bond - for the first time in his life - started to experience a kind of vertigo, his senses stretched to the limit. His muscles still ached and his mind felt detached from what he was actually doing. Everything had happened so quickly that a part of him was still high ~ above the ground, plunging towards the rocks and cement; his hands on the rungs felt bruised and there was a musty damp smell in his nostrils. It was an odor that became stronger the further he moved downward.
After what seemed to be ten or fifteen minutes and hundreds of metal rungs, his feet touched solid ground.
A floor? Or was it a ledge from which he could easily fall into some bottomless pit? By now he had ceased to trust his senses, and his mind became obsessed with heights.
Very slowly he adjusted to the blackness of his surroundings. He appeared to be in some small chamber which he presumed was the access point to the maintenance shaft. To his right, Bond could just make out the shape of a door. His feet scraped loudly on the stone floor as he crossed to the door, gently pulling it open and moving through into what felt like a larger chamber.
Two steps in he stopped, frozen like a statue. He could smell the scent of blood and death. More, he was conscious of the cold metal of a pistol gently resting in his neck, just under his ear.
“Don’t even breathe,’ a voice said in Russian. Then, “Where are the others?”
“I’m alone.” His voice a fraction more relaxed.
“Aren’t we all?” There was a faint chuckle and the lights came on, almost blinding him with their brightness. He turned to see his old friend, Alec Trevelyan, grinning at him, still looking like the eternal schoolboy. Many had said of Trevelyan that he had a picture in the attic, like Dorian Grey.
“Glad you could drop in, James.”
“It was a slightly longer journey than I’d expected, but most of it was downhill.” Trevelyan motioned towards a second door, open and revealing a curved metal stairwell.
“You ready, James?”
“Let’s do it.” Bond moved first, through the door and down the spiral stairwell. “You come up this way?” he asked of 006.
“Yes. There’s a door at the bottom to your right and another facing you. That’s the one with the electronic locks. Behind it you’ll find Aladdin’s cave. After a fashion anyway.
Already Bond was unzipping one of the pouches on his belt. By the time they reached the electronic door he had the little oblong box in his hand. The box was magnetic and he clamped it onto the side of the door, throwing a small switch as he did so. Immediately a series of lights began to pulse and a small digital read-out started to move very fast “It’s really quite simple,’ Q had said. “It works very like an auto-dialer, except it sorts through every known permutation of numbers and letters at a speed of around five hundred a second. When it detects part of a matching pattern it starts to configure the entire electronic code. Even on a cleverly invented system it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to hit the right numbers or letters. As soon as it’s done that, the lock will be activated.”
“A very handy little gadget to take on a picnic,’ Bond had replied.
Q had given him the ghost of a smile. “I had it tested on the vaults below the Bank of England,’ he said. “The people there didn’t like it one bit.” By the time Bond’s memory took in the conversation, the box gave a final little beep and the door clicked open.
They were on a high, suspended walkway, looking down on what seemed to be a huge manufacturing plant. On the far side a row of some six massive stainless steel vats stood in line, linked together by slim metal tubing. This line of vats ended in a mass of tubes and pumps which went into a much larger container like some kind of pressure cooker. More tubes and pumps disappeared through the wall area to their right. By this time, Bond was completely disoriented. He had no idea of his position in relation to the ground above.
To the left, at the end of these gigantic containers was another electronic door, while directly underneath them Bond could make out a wide conveyor belt, running the length of the floor and rolling through a fringed rubber flap.
“What’s through there?” Bond indicated the electronic door.
“The rest of the laboratories, I should think.” Trevelyan gave another chuckle. “I just went missing into the connecting passages when I got here. The map M gave us was pretty accurate, so I hid up where you found me. I played at being a kind of phantom of the labs so to speak. The music of the night down here isn’t really my thing though.” Bond indicated the big red signs, decorated with skulls and crossed bones which hung everywhere. In Russian they said: “DANGER.
HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE.”
“And those?” he asked.
“They’re scouring out all the equipment. I gathered, from what I heard on that quite disgusting underground train ride, that this is all new stuff. Has to be absolutely clean before they start processing the new horror.”
“Smoking in here could seriously damage your health then?’ “Definitely, and the second-hand smoke would kill very quickly indeed.’ “Let’s get the place rigged up. Bond he
aded towards the steps that led down onto the deadly factory’s floor and clamped the electronic device onto the door at the end.
Then he began emptying his pouches and pockets of the neatly packaged timers and charges which he had carried in with him.
Together they set about placing the explosives behind the vats and on the connecting tubing.
“I’ll do the last one,’ he called to Trevelyan. “If I set it for three minutes or so that should give us plenty of time to get out. The rest’ll go up by spontaneous combustion.
The device on the door gave its final little beep, signifying that it had unlocked the electronic password, and as it did so a piercing, shrieking warning klaxon went off.
Bond swore. “Get behind this stuff, Alec. No time to…” He was cut off by the sound of a voice, magnified by an electric loud hailer “This is Colonel Ourumov, the disembodied voice grated. “You are surrounded and there is no way you can escape. Just drop any weapons and come out with your hands on your heads. Now!”
“No way,’ Bond muttered, continuing down the line of steel vats that towered above him. Aloud he called, “Alec, put that bit of high-tech gadgetry into reverse. Just hit the switch on the left side.” He had almost reached the final high pressure cooker device. “Alec?” He ducked down and peered around the corner of the drum.
His old friend 006, Alec Trevelyan, knelt on the floor. Behind him, with the muzzle of a pistol against Trevelyan’s cheek, stood a tall, sinister Soviet officer wearing the shoulder boards of a colonel.
He was backed by half-a-dozen heavily armed troops, one of whom loosed off a round in Bond’s direction.
“Fool. Stop that,’ yelled Ourumov. “If you hit any of the hardware, you’ll blow us all to hell and gone.
Bond drew back, and looked at the timer he was about to insert into the final charge, the one that would bring about a chain reaction and blow most of the place to pieces. He glanced across to the other side of the factory floor towards the conveyor belt. The start button was set into a metal post near the fringed rubber flap.
“I give you a count of ten,’ Ourumov shouted. “If you’re not out by then, I will shoot your coMr.ade.”
“And set off an inferno?” Bond set the timer for one minute and plugged it into the explosive charge.
Then he removed a grenade from the belt pouch that contained four of these lethal little bombs.
“One Two…” Ourumov began counting.
Bond pulled the pin from the grenade, holding down the safety lever.
“Three… Four..
Bond stepped from behind the massive steel pressure cooker. His arms were wide apart, the grenade in his left hand, pistol in the right.
“Five..
at was pretty near the truth. Apart from the grenade, the main charge would blow in about thirty seconds.
“You think I’m not afraid to die for my country?” Ourumov snapped.
Then he pulled the trigger and Bond saw his old friend topple over.
Without a second thought he dropped the grenade, leaped to his right onto the conveyor belt, his free hand smacking the start button on the metal upright.
He heard Ourumov yell at his men to hold their fire, and thought he saw him backing away, dragging Trevelyan’s body with him.
The conveyor belt started to move with a jerk and, now that he was away from the vats and cylinders filled with inflammable cleaning fluids, the Russian colonel fired two shots. The bullets smacked into the woodwork above the rubber skirt just as the belt carried Bond out of the processing room, angling upwards and moving fast
The grenade exploded with an ear shattering blast He thought he could hear screams, then, suddenly, he found himself being deposited onto a loading bay, outside the facility, only some fifty yards from the runway where the little Fiesler Storch was slowly taxiing, its tail towards him, ready to make the ninety-degree turn onto the threshold for take off.
The first explosion came from deep within the earth behind him, almost throwing him forward onto the unfriendly ground. Nobody was going to get out of the complex alive, that was a sure bet, so he began to run, heading towards the aircraft.
With bursting lungs, Bond reached it just as it started to turn and begin rolling. Behind him another explosion.
This time a blossom of flame, smoke and debris seemed to erupt from the ground. He leaped forward, catching the wing strut on the right hand side of the Storch. The pilot, concentrating on keeping the aircraft straight as it began to gather speed, glanced towards him and retarded the power, trying to abort the take off, as Bond reached out to the handle on the cockpit door.
The pilot, hitting the brakes to slow the plane, banged the rudder to the left, making the Storch yaw violently in an attempt to throw Bond from the wing strut, but when that did not work, he opened the door on his side and rolled from the cockpit, pushing the throttle to full power as he went.
With a push, Bond catapulted himself from the strut to the right hand seat, then leaned over to ease back on the throttle as he pulled himself across to get behind the controls.
The aircraft was turning in a wide circle, out of control, bumping along the rough ground, lurching and dipping first one wing and then the other, leaving Bond in no doubt that it would cartwheel any second.
He snatched back on the throttle, pressed the rudder pedals to gain control and, as another explosion fountained behind him, he swung the nose onto the runway, fishtailing violently until the Storch pointed down the centre line.
He was almost two thirds of the way down the runway and at a standstill, desperately looking around the cockpit to acclimatise himself with the controls when he felt the plane being rocked violently by another explosion.
Bond pulled down on the flaps lever and saw that the wide extensions to the trailing edge of the wings became fully extended. As they did so, he opened the throttle to full power and moved his feet back, easing off the brakes on the rudder pedals.
The Storch leaped forward, gathering speed, and eating up what was left of the runway. He felt the tail come up as the machine reached the end of the metalled section and bounced over the twenty odd yards of turf, heading straight for the long wide crevasse. Even with flaps fully extended, Bond knew he had not quite made enough speed to lift the Storch into the air. He eased back on the stick and felt the aircraft claw for its natural element. It rolled off the end of the solid ground, hung in midair for a second, before the nose dropped as she stalled and began to lose height, falling into the deep fissure.
He saw the rock face rising on both sides, great boulders and a stream less than two hundred feet below, getting closer with each second. Gently he eased off on the power, tilted the straining aircraft to the left, lifting the nose slightly so that he could gain enough airspeed for the plane’s wings to take over the weight.
It seemed an eternity before he could ease back, and feel the nose come right up, the whole machine stabilising.
Slowly he began to climb from the gorge and turn back over the facility which was now rubble and fire leaping from under the ground.
As he climbed away, Bond thought he saw the dam begin to split and crack, spilling water across the entire valley. It was no time to feel any sentiment. Alec Trevelyan had taken the same risks as anyone else in the Double-O Section. If not for a twist of fate, it could have been himself down there, shot through the head, his body being slowly covered by the water that was now crashing white from the lake.
Flying as low as he dared, Bond began to play tag with the mountains as he steadily made his way back to the area where in a matter of hours a submarine would take him back to England with Operation Cowslip successfully accomplished. On reflection, the one thing that pleased him was the fact that there had been no biological or chemical weapons actually in the complex. If there had been, the idea of blowing the place up was just about as foolish a concept as you could have. So, he presumed, M had already known there was little likelihood of deadly germs or toxic chemicals at the plant.
There was no way he could know that, in less than a decade, Colonel Ourumov would rise from the dead to become a thorn in his side and place him in even greater danger.
High Stakes The south of France, Bond often reflected, was not what it used to be. That coastline which runs from Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, just to the east of Menton, was packed to capacity during the season. The once leisurely Promenade des Anglais in Nice was even more leisurely, but today it was because of the steady, slow-moving stream of traffic - cars and an abundance of tour buses which made it more like Paris in the late afternoon.
Now, in the early summer of 1995, Bond detested the crowds, the traffic and the obvious growth of pollution, not only in the air, but also in the sea itself. There was trouble in what used to be paradise.
At this moment, however, he had risen above it all as he swung the old Aston Martin DB5 into a hairpin bend on the Grand Corniche, the highest of those roads which run parallel to the coast, in the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes. Up on this snake of a road which is perched on the cliff-like outcrop and sometimes even lances through tunnels blasted into the rock itself, you were removed from the snarl of traffic and crowds, yet afforded magnificent views of the sea and coastline.
He had almost forgotten what a joy it was to drive the Aston Martin which handled like the thoroughbred it was.
Just as much of a thoroughbred as the beautiful Caroline who sat beside him.
Caroline had not struck him as a girl who frightened easily, but he could feel her nervousness as he accelerated along the straight.
When she spoke it was in the cultured accent of a young woman who had been brought up in an atmosphere of relative privilege and had never felt guilty about it.
“James, do we really have to go quite so fast?” She glanced at him and then turned her attention quickly back to the road, for a large truck was rounding the bend taking up more of the Aston Martin’s road than it should.
Bond shifted down to third, and eased the car over so that the two vehicles passed safely with around an inch between them.
