Licence to Kill
Page 21
Underneath, watching and waiting as he hung from the undercarriage strut, Bond saw movement in the cab. It was Sanchez himself and they were now only fifty yards from the tanker, and around a hundred feet up.
Forty feet, and fifty up. Bond’s heart missed a beat. He could clearly see Sanchez now, half in and half out of the cab, another missile balanced on his shoulder as he took careful aim at the light airplane. Down, Pam, fast, Bond willed her.
Ten feet away and about fifteen above the tanker. Sanchez leaning further out to make certain of his shot. Over the tanker now, and at almost the same moment, Bond dropped, Pam raised the airplane’s nose and Sanchez squeezed the trigger.
Bond landed feet first, slipping and almost sliding right down the side of the tanker. He slapped his hands hard against the metal and, almost by sheer willpower, hauled himself up again.
Pam had climbed away when the missile struck, missing the fuselage but clipping the tailplane so that she lost all directional control. Bond could not bear to watch, in any case he had other things to do. Pulling himself to the back of the tanker, he swung on to the inspection ladder, once more heading for the valve and its precious gasoline. He was quite prepared to go as well if it meant ending Sanchez’s life.
He got to the valve as the rig slowed, obviously coming to a stop: he turned the valve and the gasoline spurted out. At the same moment he heard Pam’s aircraft slam into the ground a mile or so away.
As a tanker came to a skidding stop, so Bond climbed back on to the top of the tank as he heard the cab doors slam. He moved as quietly as possible along the gleaming metal surface, while below him Sanchez was screaming, ‘Get that valve! No, leave it, I’ll do it myself.’ Bond reached the end of the tank and was standing above the gap between it and the cab. He had been here before, he thought, but this was not the same.
He dropped, landing reasonably, and started to uncouple the tank from the cab. Once it was clear, he thought, the tank would roll back, for they were on a slight incline.
He uncoupled and started to reach out for the hydraulic lines which were the only things keeping the tank held to the cab. As he reached, he heard a roar of rage. Sanchez, a huge machete in his hand, stood beside the coupling.
‘Now, James Bond,’ he was breathing heavily. ‘Now, I’ll have your head.’ He leapt up into the space between the tank and cab, bringing the machete down in a fast hard chop which was deflected by the hydraulic lines. Both men stood on the tiny ledge of the tank which began to roll away from the cab, the final umbilical cord severed.
The tank gathered speed as it went backwards and neither man could move as they clung to pieces of the ruptured lines. They felt the first bumps as it left the road, and began to roll in Sanchez’s direction.
Bond jumped, pushing himself away and landing well clear as the tank turned over twice, its main seam ripping open and spilling gasoline onto the dusty dry ground.
After the noise came an eerie silence. Sanchez, Bond thought, could never have survived. He skirted the great pools of gasoline, keeping well away in case the whole thing blew. No sign of life anywhere. Taking no chances, he completed the circle, ending up where he had landed after his leap.
There was no sign of the driver, but he was the last of Bond’s worries. If Sanchez was dead . . . The hand caught his hair, strong and unexpected. Bond dropped to his knees. The stench of gasoline on Sanchez’s clothing was strong as he hauled Bond’s head back, the machete raised.
‘This really is the end, Bond. And I don’t even care why you did it any more.’ The machete flashed in the sunlight, and Bond’s last hope lay in his hand stealing towards his pocket.
‘Do you really want to know? I’ll tell you then.’ Bond’s fingers closed over the lighter given to him at the wedding which now seemed a million years ago.
‘Quickly!’ The machete hovered.
‘Felix Leiter,’ said Bond, flicking the cigarette lighter against Sanchez’s gasoline-soaked clothes.
He let go of Bond’s hair in a reflex action. Bond leapt away as Sanchez shrieked and cried out. He wanted to put a lot of distance between himself and this blundering, moving man of fire.
But he need not have worried. Sanchez, screaming and flapping was completely disorientated. Even Bond felt a cringe of horror. From behind the wreckage and into the pools of petrol came the driver. He saw Sanchez, a horrible walking torch, coming straight towards the spreading fuel. He reached it long before the driver could move away. Bond dropped to the ground, burying his face as he felt the flames. When he looked up at the broiling landscape, he thought he could still hear the screaming.
A few minutes later, feeling no sense of either victory or vengeance, he began to stagger along the road, back the way he had come, in the hope that he might find some kind of transport. He heard the engine of the cab before the two police helicopters.
It was the one he had ridden in. The one with the windscreen shot out. Someone was driving it slowly along the road, as though searching. Overhead the helicopters turned and began to drift downwards.
Bond reached the door of the cab. ‘Look what I found.’ Pam Bouvier, white and not a little shaken, looked down at him.
‘Want a lift, mister?’ she said.
18
SPECIAL FRIENDS
Pam told him about the crop duster as they waited for the helicopters. ‘The missile clipped the stabiliser,’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘So I had no rudder. I had pitch but couldn’t yaw the damned thing. And you need that for landing, James.’
‘I know. I fly as well.’ Bond was simply relieved that she had walked away from what had happened.
‘It was quite funny, really,’ she prattled on. ‘I got her into a glide, found a nice flat piece of ground, but when I touched down it wasn’t flat. It was a kind of gorge. I ripped the wings off. Want to buy a good crop-duster fuselage? Those missiles didn’t really do Sanchez much good, did they?’
‘I’ve a feeling,’ Bond said, ‘that he picked them up cheaply. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but my guess is they’re training aids. To acclimatise troops in the handling of portable missiles.’
‘Thank heaven he didn’t have Stingers, or Blowpipes.’ Pam raised her eyes upward. ‘We’d have been clobbered.’
Bond gave a wry smile. ‘So would Sanchez. Things like Stingers are portable, but you have to know a hell of a lot about them. The early ones, which just had infra-red, were not good, and the latest designs are just too technical for the kind of people he had around him. Anyway, if he’d had Stingers he couldn’t have made the shot that clipped your rudder. You have to carry around a terrible lot of gubbins with a Stinger.’
Rojas and Q arrived with the helicopters. On the way there had been exceptional news. ‘We have had what is called a bloodless coup.’ Rojas gave them a big beam.
‘It wasn’t so bloodless out here,’ Bond muttered.
‘The President Lopez has resigned, and most of his government with him. Four of our senior military people have come from the closet, and declared themselves with us. At last, I think maybe the corruption will end.’
‘What will you do with Hector Lopez?’ Bond asked.
‘Probably nothing.’ Rojas did not seem to wish any ill on the politicians who had been in Sanchez’s thrall. ‘You know, old Hector Lopez’s heart was in the wrong place for a few years, that’s all. Before he tried politics he was a pretty fair lawyer. He was a greedy man, rich in his own right. He just wanted more. The sin of avarice . . .’ He cut himself short, conscious that he was about to make a lot of boring statements. ‘I fear I shall have to ask you to stay in Isthmus until we have held the inquiry into Sanchez’s demise, and other matters.’ He looked from Bond to Pam, and then Q.
‘Naturally.’ Bond answered for all of them. ‘How long will that take?’
‘Oh, twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours. I don’t think we want to go into it too deeply.’
They all laughed. Anywhere but Isthmus, the inquiry would have gone on for mo
nths, even years.
Two nights later, when everyone was rested and statements had been made to the authorities, Lupe, who had assumed control of Sanchez’s palatial estate, invited what she called, ‘A few very special friends’, to a celebration of the new regime.
Two hundred guests ate, drank and generally enjoyed themselves. ‘A few special friends?’ Pam said with a quizzically raised eyebrow. ‘I always thought that about Lupe. Nice girl, has no enemies.’
‘Well, I like to think of her as a special friend.’ Bond knew, as he said it, that he was in trouble with Pam, who flounced away.
Early in the evening, Bond placed a person-to-person call to the hospital in Key West. The Isthmus telephone company, true to form, managed to get the call through around midnight. At the time, Bond was sitting alone at the bar, occasionally feeding Sanchez’s iguana with cocktail nibbles.
‘Good of you to call, James.’ Felix sounded down but not out. ‘They’re giving me a lot of therapy.’
‘The pain goes with time, Felix.’ Bond was not talking about physical pain, and he knew all the hurt his old friend was suffering from Della’s death. ‘I’ve been there, old buddy. Never leaves you, but it does get easier. Look, I’ll be over to see you in a week or two.’
There was a silence at the distant end, then Leiter said, ‘Great. I might even be on new feet by then. Oh, did you know M’s been nosing around? Says he wants to see you in London. PDQ.’
‘He’ll wait.’
‘Yeah, there are other things to life than the crazy business we’re in.’
‘You’re right there, my friend. I was just going to find another thing. See you soon.’ He closed the line, and looked up to see Lupe stroking the iguana.
‘I thought you didn’t like this beast.’
Lupe raised her elegant right hand. The iguana’s diamond-studded collar was around her wrist. ‘Iguanas, James, are a girl’s best friend.’
‘So I see.’
‘Can you come into the garden with me, James? I’ve got something to talk about. I need your advice.’
They went out and stood near the waterfall.
‘Hector Lopez, our former presidente, has asked me to marry him,’ she said quickly, not meeting his eyes.
‘And?’
‘And I wanted to know what you thought about it.’
‘You love him?’
‘No. But that could happen. He has much money. I would be safe. Before I say yes, I had to ask if I’d be safer with you?’
‘Nobody’s ever really safe with me.’ Bond did not smile. ‘I think you’d make a beautiful couple. Go in peace, Lupe. Go and say yes.’
She nodded, then reached up, twining her arms around his neck and kissed him hard. At last, she pulled away, whispered ‘Goodbye’, and walked off towards the house, the night and the music.
Bond turned away from the waterfall. Pam stood there, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘If that’s how you want it, James.’
He went to her. ‘You’re wrong. Lupe’s going to marry Lopez. That was just a goodbye. I was about to come looking for you to say hello.’ He pulled her, almost roughly, into his arms, and kissed her with passion.
After several minutes, she pushed him away. ‘Why don’t you wait till you’re asked?’ There was a sparkle in her eyes.
‘Then ask me,’ Bond said, reaching for her again.
By John Gardner
Licence Renewed
For Special Services
Icebreaker
Role of Honour
Nobody Lives For Ever
No Deals, Mr Bond
Scorpius
Win, Lose or Die
Licence to Kill
Brokenclaw
The Man from Barbarossa
Death is Forever
Never Send Flowers
SeaFire
GoldenEye
COLD
John Gardner served with the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Marines before embarking on a long career as a thriller writer, including international bestsellers The Nostradamus Traitor, The Garden of Weapons, Confessor and Maestro. In 1981 he was invited by Glidrose Publications Ltd – now known as Ian Fleming Publications – to revive James Bond in a brand new series of novels. To find out more visit John Gardner’s website at www.john-gardner.com or the Ian Fleming website at www.ianfleming.com
ALBERT R. BROCCOLI
presents
TIMOTHY DALTON
as IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007
‘LICENCE TO KILL’
starring
CAREY LOWELL ROBERT DAVI
TALISA SOTO ANTHONY ZERBE
Production Designer PETER LAMONT
Director of Photography ALEC MILLS
Music by MICHAEL KAMEN
Associate Producers
TOM PEVSNER and BARBARA BROCCOLI
Written by MICHAEL G. WILSON
and RICHARD MAIBAUM
Produced by ALBERT R. BROCCOLI
and MICHAEL G. WILSON
Directed by JOHN GLEN
An Orion ebook
First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
This ebook published in 2012 by Orion Books
© Glidrose Publications Ltd. as Trustee 1989
The right of John Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
James Bond and 007 are registered trademarks of Danjaq, LLC, used under licence by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4091-2725-3
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.ianfleming.com
Table of Contents
Title page
Contents
1 Get Me to the Church on Time
2 Unwanted Guests
3 Lightning Sometimes Strikes Twice
4 What a Terrible Waste
5 For Whom the Bell Tolls
6 The Journey of the Manta
7 Final Contact
8 Dollars and Dealers
9 Face to Face
10 Dear Uncle
11 Crystal Night
12 Both Sides of the Street
13 The Blow-Out
14 The Temple of Meditation
15 Into the Jaws of Death
16 Goodbye James Bond
17 Man of Fire
18 Special Friends
By John Gardner
Author biography
Film Credits
Copyright
Table of Contents
Title page
Contents
1 Get Me to the Church on Time
2 Unwanted Guests
3 Lightning Sometimes Strikes Twice
4 What a Terrible Waste
5 For Whom the Bell Tolls
6 The Journey of the Manta
7 Final Contact
8 Dollars and Dealers
9 Face to Face
10 Dear Uncle
11 Crystal Night
12 Both Sides of the Street
13 The Blow-Out
14 The Temple of Meditation
15 Into the Jaws of Death
16 Goodbye James Bond
17 Man of Fire
18 Special Friends
Author biography
Film Credits
Copyright