The way ahead, back to the military transporter, which Bond could just make out on the flat horizon, was through a narrow defile with bare, pitted hills on both sides.
Chagrin took a pocket knife from his trousers and cut through the ropes at Bond’s wrists. ‘Hellfire Pass,’ he said.
Then something resembling a smile crept over his half-inanimate flesh. Bond thought of the Vietnamese children in their Bible-study groups.
‘You drive first Jeep,’ said Chagrin. ‘Go.’
All the other men were laughing.
Bond climbed into the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. There was no time for hejira, or tactical retreat. This was the moment to go hard. He rammed the gear lever into first and dropped the clutch. The four drive-wheels screeched, then gripped the desert earth. The Jeep went forward with such leaping eagerness that Bond was almost thrown from his seat. He battled with the steering-wheel and regained control as he put his right foot down and worked up through the gears. He felt the weight of the two tea chests in the back shifting from side to side on the ruts and potholes of the sanded track. He saw a flash of rifle fire from the hillside on his left, glanced up to where Afghan tribesmen were firing from behind rocks. He heard a bullet whine off the Jeep’s bonnet and wrenched the wheel from side to side to make himself a harder target. Then came the heavier wheeze of a hand-launched rocket, and the road in front of him exploded into a ball of spitting rock and sand, shattering the Jeep’s windshield and filling his eyes with dust. Bond dashed his sleeve across his eyes to clear his vision. A long shard of glass had cut through his cheek and impaled itself there, with the sharp end in his gum.
Gunfire started from the hill to his right, and he became aware that another vehicle was close behind, though he had no time to check if it was the next of Gorner’s Jeep convoy or an enemy bandit pursuing him. He knew only that he had to keep going. Automatic fire intensified from the hills to his right, and ripped through the flimsy passenger seat-back, ricocheting from the steel frame. It seemed the whole landscape had come alive in its insane hunger for the drugs he was carrying. Bond’s knuckles stood white on the wheel and blood ran down his cheek on to his sweat-drenched workshirt. He thought of Gorner’s face, of Scarlett on the walkway and Poppy held captive in the belly of the desert. He roared loud in anger and defiance, then rammed his right foot flat down against the floorboards while the dense gunfire hit the body of the Jeep like mad sticks clattering on a snaredrum.
Suddenly Bond was in the air, catapulted from his seat by a grenade explosion beneath the axle. He landed on his left shoulder, agonizingly, rolled over and made for the cover of a rock. He glanced back to see his Jeep upside down on the road, the wheels turning frantically under the command of the trapped accelerator. As a bullet embedded itself in a crevice of the rock behind him, Bond looked round and saw the raised molehill of an access point to a quanat, the underground water system that must run to Zabol. Sprinting zigzag across the stony ground, he ducked down behind the raised earth, and found a sheet of corrugated iron across an entrance. Hurling the sheet aside, he lowered himself in and dropped fifteen feet into cold water.
For a moment, he had time to think. It was possible that no one had seen him, though he doubted it, since Hellfire Pass seemed at that moment to be the most populated part of Persia. He guessed that he had been sent as a decoy while the other Jeeps went through a safer route, north of the narrow defile, to regroup at the main transport lorry. The important thing was somehow to get back to Gorner’s lair. Stranded in the desert, he was no use to Scarlett, or to Poppy, or to the Service. Somehow he had to find a way back to Chagrin’s men.
The water was waist-high and cold. Bond lowered his face into it and carefully withdrew the piece of glass from his cheek. Then he snapped it into two jagged pieces of about two inches each and stowed them carefully in the buttoned breast pocket of his shirt.
A pistol shot disturbed the surface of the water. Someone was at the quanat access point, firing down. Bond began to make his way upstream, fording through the water from the distant mountains. The current was such that it was hard to make progress. He ducked beneath the surface and swam for as many strokes as his lungs permitted, but when he surfaced he could see that he had managed only a few yards. Another shot went past him. They were in the water with him. Bond pushed on with all his strength, but soon noticed something else was happening: the water was rising. This could only have happened by human intervention, he thought. There could not have been a sudden extra burst of snowmelt in a far-off mountain gully, so there had to be some sort of sluice that someone had closed downstream or a gate upstream that had been operated to divert more water. But he could see nothing in the darkness of the torrent.
He put his hand above his head and felt the roof of the narrow channel only a few inches above him. If the flow increased much more, he would drown. He couldn’t turn back, into the teeth of his armed pursuers, so he had no choice but to continue.
Forging onwards, with his hands ahead of him, Bond felt the water rising to the level of his mouth. He dipped his head beneath the flow and swam again, hoping to find a place where the uneven passage would be higher and so give him air above the surface. But when he came up, the headroom was so tight that he had to bend his neck sideways to breathe. Thrashing desperately now, Bond made one last push forward with his arms in the torrential darkness. His left hand encountered something different: air. There was a hole in the roof of the quanat, and against the rush of water he managed to grip its rocky side and get his head high enough up into it to breathe. A little further up, there was another handhold of rock, and as the rising water swirled round his waist, Bond knew that upwards was now the only way he could go.
He cursed the width of his shoulders as he pulled himself up the narrow funnel, the jutting desert rocks slicing through the skin of his palms. Eventually, his feet were clear of the water, and he was alone, wedged in the skintight tube of earth.
He made a fraction of an inch, and then another fraction. With bleeding feet and hands, he rose by almost imperceptible degrees through the narrow chimney. What, he thought, could be the point of this – when for all he knew there might be thirty feet of solid earth above him? He could hear the water below, and decided that when he was no longer able to move, he would try to drop down and die in its cold depths. His left shoulder, on which he’d landed when thrown from the Jeep, allowed little movement from his left arm, so it was with one functioning hand only that he tried to fight his way up.
Half-inch by half-inch, with his lacerated and bleeding hands, he shoved himself up into the blind, tight funnel that held his shoulders. His hip was seizing with cramp, but he couldn’t move it to free the muscle. Above him, the shaft seemed to grow narrower, the air less plentiful.
Bond had always known that death would come sooner or later in the service of his country and had remained indifferent to the thought. He was not, he thought, going to change his attitude now. Then his exhausted mind flashed back unaccountably to an evening in Rome and to the bar of a hotel where Mrs Larissa Rossi had raised an eyebrow as she crossed her legs. He could see them now – and her mouth, whose upper lip occasionally stiffened into something like a pout. The light honey glow of her skin … the unrepentant wildness in her eyes.
Bond squeezed himself another inch through the constricting earth. He thought he must be hallucinating. He was dying, but he could think of nothing but Scarlett. The way she had glanced down a little nervously as she said, ‘My husband has had to go to Naples for the night … You could come up to our suite for a drink if you like.’
Bond felt his breath failing in his lungs. Did he love this woman? Had he discovered too late? Stinging tears of frustration mingled with the sweat and blood on his face.
He gave no thought to his approaching death, only to Scarlett in the gilded armchair in his Paris hotel room, her long legs demurely crossed and her empty hands folded in front of her breasts …
Turning the last of his brea
th into a groan, Bond thrust himself upward with all his might in one final, dying effort. His hands went through packed sand and earth, then encountered air. He scrabbled frantically for a grip.
15. ‘Do You Want Me?’
A ray of light broke the surface above him, then came a draught of dry, burning air. With a low growl Bond rammed his uninjured shoulder against the hard rim of earth above him till he was able to push himself up and his head at last was clear. With almost unendurable pain, he worked his shoulders, then his torso through the hole. Finally, he levered his waist and legs out and collapsed on to the sand, gasping and moaning as he fought the fog of unconsciousness.
When vision returned to him, he found he was looking at a pair of polished brown leather toecaps and the turn-ups of a cream linen suit. As he lifted his head, the sole of the shoe came on to his cheek and pushed his face into the dirt.
‘ “The Cigar Tube”,’ said Gorner’s voice. ‘A test of endurance invented by the public-school officers of your finest regiments in the Malayan Emergency. I thought you might enjoy it. And I thought I might, too. So on a whim I made a special journey on my own to watch you.’
Gorner kept his foot on Bond’s face. ‘It was meant to weed out informers among the locals, but your officers enjoyed it so much that they ended up doing it just for fun.’ He turned to an unseen assistant. ‘Take the dirty English mole away.’
The foot came off Bond’s face and he rolled over to see Gorner make the short walk to the small helicopter that had brought him. Bond felt himself being lifted under the arms and put into a Jeep for the drive back to the main lorry. He cried out at the pressure under his left shoulder. Gorner’s helicopter was already airborne above them.
The crates of opium from the Jeeps, less the two from Bond’s abandoned vehicle, had been loaded into the all-terrain transport. As he lay on the floor of the lorry, heading for the distant caravanserai where they would rejoin the Mi-8 Hip transport helicopter, Bond took advantage of the fact of his presumed unconsciousness to work the two pieces of glass from his shirt pocket and slide them beneath his tongue.
The journey back passed in a delirium of pain and fatigue, through some of which he slept. He was alert enough to take water when they transferred to the helicopter, where his hands were once more tied. He was aware of their descent and return to Gorner’s fortress and of being stripped to his underwear and thoroughly searched. His torn clothes were returned to him.
When he next came to fully, he was back in the rock cell with Scarlett asleep next to him. He ached in the fibres of each muscle, and shifted on the sand to try to find a position that hurt less. He slid the pieces of glass from his mouth and used his tongue to cover them with sand, while his head remained motionless so no hidden camera could detect the movement.
The bolts on the door slid back and a guard entered. He delivered the usual reveille – a boot to the ribs – and told them both to stand up. Scarlett was wearing a grey workshirt and trousers. Her lower lip was swollen from where Gorner had hit her with the back of his hand. She looked pale and frightened, thought Bond, as he tried to reassure her with a smile and a nod. They were taken at gunpoint to the washroom, then given water and marched to Gorner’s office.
Gorner, in a tropical suit with a carnation, looked, Bond thought, less like a global terrorist than a gambler come to break the bank at Cannes. He also seemed in dangerously high spirits. He made no reference to the events at Zabol or the ‘Cigar Tube’. He seemed excited only by the future.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, when Bond and Scarlett were kneeling at gunpoint before him, hands behind their backs, ‘is a day I have waited for all my life. Tomorrow I shall launch an attack that will finally bring Britain to its knees. Like many of the best military plans, it will have two prongs – a diversion and a main thrust.’
This was the man from the dock at Marseille, Bond thought, the supercilious impatience checked only by the unrelenting sense of purpose. For a moment, the arrogance had the upper hand. So delighted was Gorner by his own cleverness that any caution he might have had about divulging the detail of his plans had gone.
He went to sit at his desk and consulted a clipboard. ‘I had hoped to bring Britain down to its proper level by the use of narcotics alone. And I have high hopes of success in the long term. I think I can change most of your cities into drug slums by the end of the century. But I am an impatient man. I crave success. I need action. I need to see results now!’
Gorner smacked the desk with his gloved left hand. There was a dense silence in the room, in which only the low pulse of the air-conditioning could be heard.
‘So,’ he said, ‘at ten o’clock precisely an Ekranoplan will leave its base in Noshahr and head north by north-west towards the Soviet Union. I think you are familiar with the craft, Bond, having spent a rather unwise amount of time trying to photograph it. It has been modified to carry six rockets, of which three are armed with nuclear warheads. It also has the latest Soviet surface-to-air missiles in case anyone gets nosy. The Volga river delta provides an ideal entry, leading straight to Stalingrad, the underbelly of Russia. Not every channel is sufficiently wide for our purpose, but we have now established the perfect route into the main river – the very one, in fact, down which the Ekranoplan was launched. From Noshahr to Astrakhan is a little over six hundred miles and from there it is a further two hundred miles to Stalingrad. Even allowing for possible refuelling stops from a tanker, the immense speed of the Ekranoplan means it can make the entire journey, beneath the radar, in four hours.
‘As it comes to the outskirts of the city, the Ekranoplan will open fire as a hostile act against the Soviet Union. The craft herself will sail under the colours of the United Kingdom. All the crew will be carrying British passports. They will, however, be disposed of by two of my people on board as soon as the job is done. The Russians will find only dead British citizens responsible for the attack. My two men will make their own way back.’
Bond looked up from where he knelt. ‘And where did you get the warheads?’ he said.
‘I bought them,’ said Gorner. ‘They are of American manufacture. There is a market in such things. Of course, they’re relatively small … much smaller than those with which your friends the Americans burned alive the civilians of Japan in their wood-and-paper houses. But three together … I have high hopes. Our tests predict devastation of the city. The Ekranoplan, incidentally, was modified for me in Noshahr by Soviet technicians who had defected at my invitation.’
A look of self-satisfaction flickered briefly over the Slavic features. ‘I’ve previously used the Ekranoplan only as a cargo transport and there’s no reason for the Soviet authorities to suspect anything else tomorrow. On the contrary, I have many friends in the Soviet Union. The gentlemen in SMERSH have been kind enough to facilitate the passage of heroin through their country to the West. They understand its strategic importance.’
Bond winced at the name. SMERSH, a contraction of ‘Smiert Spionam’ – Death to Spies – was the most secret and feared department of the Soviet government. Even its existence was known only to those who worked for it – or, like Bond, had crossed its path.
Gorner stood up and walked round the desk so that he towered over the kneeling Bond and Scarlett. He lowered his white-gloved hand to Scarlett’s chin and jerked her head up. ‘Pretty little thing, aren’t you? The early shift is in for a rare treat tomorrow evening.’
He sat down again behind the desk. ‘So much,’ he said, ‘for the diversion. Now, perhaps, you’d like to know where the main thrust of the attack will fall. Come with me.’
He nodded to the guards, who pulled Bond and Scarlett to their feet and followed Gorner down the corridor. They went to the circular open elevator and rose to the ground-floor level, where an electric cart took them to a steel side door. At the command of a laser beam fired from a remote control in the cart, it rose vertically into the roof to reveal the blinding desert sun.
In front of them, however, not all wa
s sand. Shimmering in the heat haze was a mile of tarmac runway, marked with yellow grids and flanked by electric landing lights. To one side of it were the two helicopters Bond had seen the day before. On the other side was a small unmarked Learjet and a twin-engine Cessna 150E.
And next to them, glistening brightly in the morning sun – huge, white and out of place – stood a brand new British airliner: a Vickers VC-10 painted with the BOAC livery and with extra Union flag markings on the tail. Several mechanics were working on its cargo bay with welding machinery.
‘Aviation,’ said Gorner. ‘A little hobby of mine. And in a big country like this, you need to be able to get around fast. The VC-10 is a new acquisition. It was headed for life in Bahrain with a commercial airline flying oil men and their families on holiday. But on its maiden flight from Britain it turned out that two of the executives from Vickers were not what they seemed. They were working for me. The pilot was “persuaded” to make a detour. He put the plane down here three days ago. I must say, for a man under pressure, it was a textbook landing.’
Bond glanced at Scarlett to see how she was managing. She was looking round the airstrip and its small hangar, and beyond it to the desert. She had rallied a little, he thought.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Gorner, ‘the flight of the VC-10 will take it seventeen hundred miles due north to the heart of the Ural mountains. To Zlatoust-36. The plane will have only just enough fuel to reach the destination, where the adapted cargo bay will open and she will drop a bomb. Together with the fissile material on the ground, it will generate enough power to obliterate the site and much of the surrounding countryside. The total destruction will be as great as that inflicted by the RAF on the civilians of Dresden. I presume, incidentally, Bond, that you know what happens in Zlatoust-36.’
Bond knew only too well. Zlatoust-36 was the code-name given to the Holy Grail of Soviet nuclear weapons: the ‘closed city’ of Trekhgorniy, established in the 1950s to serve as the principal site for Russia’s nuclear-warhead assembly and as a warhead-stockpile facility. It was no exaggeration to say that it was the engine room of the Soviet Cold War effort.