‘How are you feeling?’ Sixtine asked.
‘Not good. Need time …’
‘James, we don’t have time. We have a window of opportunity. An hour, maybe two. You have to get yourself back together.’
He nodded. ‘Ten minutes. Cigarette …’
She lit a cigarette for him and he sat down on one of the wicker chairs, not looking at the blood, focusing on the injection of nicotine quieting him down. At the same time, he took stock. He would be able to move but not to run. Sixtine had badly cut the wrist of his right arm and even if he managed to get hold of a gun, it would affect his aim. He was dizzy from blood loss. He could still feel the drug wreathing itself inside his head, clouding his thoughts. Any sense of invulnerability had well and truly vanished. On the contrary, he had become a liability. He would only hold Sixtine back.
As if sensing his thoughts, she spoke. ‘We’re going to break out of here together. First of all out of this cabin, then off this boat. You and me, James. We’re going to do it together. Don’t you dare argue with me.’
Bond nodded. The taste of the cigarette was an old friend. It was helping to restore him. ‘We can’t just … swim,’ he said. He still had to keep the sentences short. ‘Too far out. And I want to stop them. All the heroin. Tons of it. Sink the ship.’
‘Sink the ship?’ She stared at him. ‘How are we going to do that? Forgive me, but I forgot to pack a hand grenade.’
Bond’s thought processes were still disjointed. He had to force himself to concentrate. There were things he had learned – sabotage techniques – working in the secret service during the war. He thought about the fire extinguishers he had seen at the Wolfe Europe compound. And there was something else. What was it? Oh yes. The boxes being carried on board the Mirabelle when he had visited that first time, a century ago. And Wolfe telling him: ‘We’re going to have a party like you wouldn’t believe.’
Somehow, it all came together.
‘I have an idea,’ Bond said.
21
The Dark Blue Sea
It was soon after midnight that the hammering began – and with it a voice from the other side of the door.
‘Help me!’ It was the woman. She sounded desperate. ‘Someone … please. He’s stopped breathing. I think he’s dead.’
Two guards, not one, had been stationed in the corridor – and for a moment they were unsure what to do. They had been instructed not to enter the cabin until the morning. Then they were to take the Englishman back up to the promenade deck for another beating at Scipio’s hands. Still in shock from the first heroin injection, the pain would take him well past the point of endurance. They had seen this before. The last time Scipio had prescribed the same course of treatment, his victim had become a jabbering idiot in only a week.
‘Is there anyone there? Please!’
It could be some sort of trick. But the woman sounded genuine enough, close to hysterics. And they had heard what the doctor said. The spy would be semi-conscious for at least another five hours. Right now he would be out of his head, unable even to stand. On the other hand, if something had gone wrong, if he’d had some sort of reaction to the drug that had been injected into him and his heart had stopped beating, Scipio would be furious. They knew what his plans for Bond involved.
Everyone else was either working in the engine room or asleep. The men had to make the decision for themselves and in the end it wasn’t difficult. There were two of them. They both had guns. An unarmed woman and an unconscious spy weren’t going to present a challenge and anyway, they would proceed with extreme care. They unlocked the door and went in.
The sight that met their eyes was every bit as grim as they might have imagined – although imagination was something they had never had in great supply. Sixtine was on her knees beside the door, her whole body limp, tears streaming down her face. Bond was lying prostrate on the floor. He seemed to have struck his head when he fell. There was blood everywhere. It was impossible to see if he was breathing but it seemed unlikely. His muscles were locked together, his arms stretched out, his fists clenched.
‘He fell!’ Sixtine sobbed. ‘There was nothing I could do. He just fell and he lay there. You killed him.’
Was he dead? One man stayed by the door, covering Sixtine, while the other continued further into the cabin, moving forward to examine the body. He had no doubt that Sixtine was right and that Bond was beyond help. The quantity of blood spoke for itself.
So he was careless as he leaned down to check for a pulse. In the blink of an eye, he saw Bond’s lifeless arm suddenly twist round – but before he could react it was already too late. Bond rolled sideways, driving his fist upwards in a savage blow that dislocated his opponent’s jaw and smashed him into unconsciousness. The man at the door swung round, aiming at Bond, at the same time taking his attention off Sixtine. At once, she seized hold of his arm and, dragging it towards her, bit hard into his wrist. The man howled and dropped his gun. Bond was already on his feet, rushing towards him. The man was aware of two pitch-black eyes, filled with a ferocity that was truly animal. Sixtine was on her feet. She jerked upwards, twisting his arm behind his back and almost breaking it. As he bowed down involuntarily, Bond kicked out, his toecap slamming into the man’s head. Sixtine let go and he collapsed.
Bond stood catching his breath, swaying on his feet. Even this short burst of action had been almost too much for him. Sixtine knew that what he had been through in the last few hours – the beating, the injection, the makeshift surgery – would have finished most men. Bond was fighting back but the situation was still almost hopeless. They were out at sea. There must be at least fifty crew members on the boat and all of them were on Scipio’s payroll. For the time being, they had the element of surprise but that could change the moment someone came to relieve the two guards on the door. Sixtine was certain that their best course of action was to get over the side and swim for the shore, and she said as much.
Bond shook his head. ‘No. It’s too dangerous. We don’t know how far out we are. We might not make it.’
‘What then?’
‘Tie these two up. Then follow me.’
Sixtine knelt beside the man who had been guarding her. She took his head in her hands and twisted it sharply, breaking his neck. Bond stared at her. ‘I don’t have any rope,’ she said. ‘And we’re running out of time.’ Before he could protest, she did the same for the second man. Bond was too exhausted to argue. Somewhere in his fuddled brain he realised that he had known their names. They were Carlo and Simone. He never had discovered which was which.
‘So, where are we going?’ Sixtine demanded.
‘Baggage Room. R deck. Aft …’
‘Why?’
‘Trust me.’
Locking the door behind them, they slipped out into a long, empty corridor, softly lit by the night-service lamps set at intervals between the multiple doors. Bond could hear the distant hum of engines and felt the vibrations beneath his feet. It was hard not to feel trapped in the warm, claustrophobic atmosphere, surrounded by so much metal. He and Sixtine both now had guns. Bond had taken a weapon – and also a shirt – from one of the two dead men. But he still felt very exposed. If someone appeared fifty or a hundred yards ahead, they would be seen at once, targets at the end of a long shooting gallery. There was nowhere to hide. The entire ship was a vast network of interconnecting spaces, stairways, corridors, doors and arches. They had no way of knowing what lay ahead. Bond wasn’t even sure he would be able to shoot straight. His mouth was dry and his vision blurred. His heart was pounding. The heroin was still in his system and he knew that it might be weeks before he was finally free of it. Thank God for Sixtine. She knew what she was doing. She was the most extraordinary woman he’d ever met.
They reached a stairwell and climbed down, sinking further into the bowels of the ship. Bond couldn’t be sure after his brief tour but he thought R deck must be immediately beneath the level where they had been held. Fortunately, there were
plenty of signs to direct them and sure enough the letter R was printed on the wall one floor down. They followed a second corridor almost identical to the one above, although the carpet was a different colour, perhaps designed to help guests find their way back to their cabins. Every ten yards, they came to a fire extinguisher. It was what Bond had noticed before. Irwin Wolfe seemed to have a phobia about fire.
Their journey took them through the tourist-class restaurant, simpler and more austere than the one Bond had seen in first class, the tables without cloths and shrouded in shadows. The lack of any life or movement was unsettling. The ship was like an abandoned city with only the constant hum of the engines to remind them they were actually moving. They passed a shop, a smoking room, a pantry, a vegetable store and finally a kitchen with different-shaped knives hanging on hooks above the polished worktop. Bond would need those for what he had in mind. He went in and helped himself to a couple, slipping them into his belt.
Despite the ever-present signs, the various sections of the ship looked very much the same in the half-light. Bond knew they were heading aft but there were dozens of doors to choose from. Which one was the baggage room? It could be on either side or somewhere concealed in the middle. It might take passengers days to find their way around. His life depended on his managing it in a matter of minutes.
He stumbled onto it at the very back, surrounded by offices for the ship’s baker, the restaurant manager, the storekeeper and the stewards. The baggage room was labelled and it wasn’t locked. He opened the door and turned the light on. And there it was in front of him, exactly what he was looking for.
Irwin Wolfe had told him there was going to be a gala reception when they arrived in America and had boasted about the $1,000 he had spent on fireworks. As it happened, just as Bond had come on board the Mirabelle, he had seen them being delivered and heard the purser yelling out the delivery instructions. There were about a dozen large boxes clearly marked FEUX D’ARTIFICE stacked up in front of him, isolated in the dry, empty surroundings of the baggage room. For a major display in the harbour of New York, some of the fireworks would be huge. They would be packed with explosive gunpowder along with all the other chemicals used to create the sparks and colours that would burst over the city skyline.
Sixtine had worked out what was on his mind. Bond wanted to produce a single explosion, one big enough to sink the Mirabelle. He planned to send Wolfe’s heroin to the bottom of the sea and possibly even Wolfe with it. The means to do it were right here in front of him. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You want to make a bomb. That’s not such a bad idea. But where are you going to put it? In the furnace?’
Bond shook his head. ‘That won’t work. We have to smash the cooling water system … the inlet valve.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘I can find it.’ Bond had served on ships. And as a lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, he had also learned how to destroy them.
‘Will it work?’
‘It might.’
Sixtine stared at the boxes of fireworks piled high in the storeroom. ‘There’s plenty of gunpowder here. But you’re going to need some sort of casing.’
‘One of the fire extinguishers.’
‘OK. But just out of interest – how are you going to get it open?’
‘Wait here.’
Leaving Sixtine in the baggage room, Bond went out into the corridor. A few moments later, he returned carrying one of the many red cylinders that he had seen lining the ship’s corridors. He rolled it on its side.
‘They’ve got too many of these,’ he explained. ‘There must be hundreds of them. And I saw the same models at the compound – when we were at Wolfe Europe. They’ve got to be the answer … how he’s going to do it.’ All the time, he had been examining the metal surface – and with a smile, he found what he was looking for. The mechanism couldn’t have been simpler. The base, in its entirety, unscrewed.
But there wasn’t water or sodium bicarbonate inside the cylinder. Bond took out a bulging plastic bag and held it in his hand. He and Sixtine had seen dozens more of them being prepared in the heroin laboratory and here they were, carefully packed into the shell, ready for the crossing to America. Irwin Wolfe had boasted of 12,000 pounds of the drug on board. That was the equivalent of 600 fire extinguishers with twenty pounds in each. When they arrived in New York, nobody was going to search the ship. On the contrary, they were going to welcome it with a celebration and they were going to miss what was sitting there, right in front of their eyes. Dirt-cheap heroin for anyone who wanted it. All too soon everyone would want it.
Bond felt sickened remembering the tiny quantity that had been injected into him and the devastation it had wreaked inside his mind. He clawed at the plastic, tearing it and allowing most of the contents to cascade between his hands onto the floor. Then he threw what was left into the far corner. It was a small gesture but one that made him feel better in himself.
‘You’re going to have to help me,’ he said, handing her one of the knives he had taken from the kitchen. ‘We need to cut open the fireworks. And we’ll need a fuse …’
‘It’s one o’clock, James. How long have we got?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Let’s get on with it.’
He and Sixtine tore the lids off the cartons, revealing the brightly coloured fireworks inside, packed together in straw. There were cannons, rockets, mortars and zip-bangs, each one industrial-sized, fat boxes filled with explosive. Using the knives, they sliced them open. Bond had cut a piece of cardboard into the rough shape of a funnel and he used it to pour the gunpowder into the empty fire extinguisher, packing it in as tightly as he could. The fireworks had come complete with one-minute fuses. He fed one into the nozzle, then screwed the base back on. What he had, he hoped, was an effective bomb. He wondered how he would explain himself to Sixtine if all he managed was an attractive display of pink sparks.
‘How many of these are we going to need?’ Sixtine asked.
‘One should do.’ Bond looked at his watch. It was a quarter past two. Their work had taken them over an hour. He thought about the men they had left behind in the cabin. Was it too much to hope that they were meant to stay on guard duty for the whole night? Bond had locked the door and taken the keys. But the moment they were found to be missing, someone would raise the alarm.
‘Did you bring your lighter?’ he asked.
‘I have it here.’ She took it out of her jacket pocket. ‘Nice of them to let me keep it.’
‘Very considerate.’ With an effort, Bond hoisted the fire extinguisher onto his shoulder.
‘Let me take it,’ Sixtine said.
‘No. I can manage.’ He grinned at her. ‘When this is all over, I’m going to take you to Rome. I’m going to take you to the Piazza Navona and buy you the biggest ice cream you’ve ever eaten, and then we’re going to go back to the hotel and drink martini cocktails the way you like them and stay in bed for a week.’
‘I’ll take you up on that,’ she said. ‘If we get out of here alive …’
They went back out into the corridor. Nothing had changed. Inside a cruise ship like the Mirabelle night and day were interchangeable and the atmosphere would always have this blank, sterile quality. They made their way past the various offices until they came to a staircase that led them down two more decks. The further down they went, the less luxurious their surroundings became. Finally, they reached a door marked CREW ONLY and pushed it open. At once, they were greeted by a waft of warm air that smelled of oil. The sound of the triple expansion engine leapt up in volume. It was accompanied by the whirr of the fan-assisted ventilators and the disjointed clanking of steel.
This was the hidden world of the luxury cruiser.
There were at least three separate spaces: the engine room, the boiler room and the generator room. But with so many pipes, so much machinery, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The entire area rose up through three decks, connected by wide me
tal stairways, gantries and more of the submarine-style hatches that Bond had noticed when he was shown round. Everything was brutal, harshly lit, intensely hot, utterly lacking in luxury. The air was being circulated but with little effect. Bond was standing on the uppermost level, his eyes already smarting as he made his way down, breathing in the fumes that leaked out of the twin Lobnitz & Co. boilers.
The Mirabelle was cruising gently off the coast of France. Had it begun the transatlantic crossing, there would have been forty or fifty people at work and the noise would have been deafening. Instead, the engine room was eerily empty with just a few figures in overalls absorbed in their work – and nobody noticed as Bond and Sixtine continued past the air pipes, the turbines and the main condensers. Bond carried the fire extinguisher on his shoulder, hiding his face. Sixtine stayed close to him, using him as cover. There was little chance of his being recognised, but a woman in the engine room would have drawn attention to them at once. They didn’t speak. They had to look as if they knew what they were doing, do it, and then get out of there as quickly as possible.
But where was the bloody inlet valve? Bond knew that it would resemble a very ordinary circular tap on a pipe about twelve inches in diameter. It would be connected to the hull, drawing in a constant stream of seawater that passed through the engine, removing the heat from the cylinder heads, the exhaust valves and the turbochargers. If this had been a corvette or a battle cruiser, he would have been able to go straight to it. But it was a brand-new, purpose-built cruise liner. Bond barely recognised half the machinery around him. Although he would never have admitted it to Sixtine – she had followed him all the way without question – he would need a great deal of luck if he was going to find what he was looking for.
Forever and a Day Page 22
