‘Oh?’
‘Yep. Me they’re giving the Rivke treatment – right on the border, to make it look like a land mine. I even know the exact spot.’
‘The exact spot?’ Bond queried.
‘Not dead ground – if you’ll excuse the expression – but right in the open. I’ll show you.’ Tirpitz held out his hand for Bond’s map.
‘Just give me the co-ordinates.’ Nobody, trusted or not, was going to see Bond’s map, particularly now that he had put in the possible true location of the Ice Palace.
‘You’re a suspicious bastard, Bond.’ Tirpitz’s face changed back to the hard granite, chipped, sharp, and dangerous.
‘Just give me the co-ordinates.’
Tirpitz rattled off the figures, and, in his head, Bond worked out roughly where the point came in relation to the whole area of operations. It made sense – a remote-controlled land mine at a spot where they would be travelling a few metres away from real minefields anyway.
‘As for you,’ Tirpitz growled, ‘you ain’t heard nothing yet. They’ve got a spectacular exit organised for our Mr Bond.’
‘I wonder what’s in store for Kolya Mosolov?’ Bond said, with an almost innocent look.
‘Yeah, my own thoughts too. We think alike, friend. This is a dead-men-tell-no-tales job.’
Bond nodded, paused, took a sip of his martini and lit a cigarette. ‘Then you’d better tell me what’s in store for me. It looks as if it’s going to be a long, cold night.’
11
SNOW SAFARI
Every few minutes, James Bond had to reduce speed to wipe the rime of frost from his goggles. They could not have chosen a worse night. Even a blizzard, he thought, would have been preferable. ‘A snow safari,’ Kolya had laughingly called it.
The darkness seemed to cling to them, occasionally blowing free to give a glimmer of visibility, then descending again as though blindfolds had blown over their faces. It took every ounce of concentration to follow the man in front, and the only comfort was that Kolya, leading the column of three, had his small spotlight on, dipped low. Bond and Tirpitz followed without lights, chasing this rapid winter will o’ the wisp with difficulty. The three big Yamaha snow scooters roared on through the night making enough noise, Bond thought, to draw any patrols within a ten mile radius.
After his lengthy talk with Brad Tirpitz, Bond had prepared himself with even greater care than usual. First there was the job of clearing up – packing away anything that would not be required and taking it out to the Saab, from which other items had to be collected. Having locked the briefcase and overnight bag in the boot, Bond slipped into the driving seat. Once there, he had reason to thank whatever saint watched over agents in the field.
He had just replaced the telephone base unit in its hiding place behind the glove compartment when the tiny pinprick of red light started to blink rapidly beside the car phone. Bond immediately pressed the chunky button which gave access to the scrambler computer and its screen. The winking pinhead light indicated that a message from London was stored within the system.
He ran quickly through all the activating procedures, then tapped out the incoming cipher code. Within seconds the small screen – no larger than the jacket of a paperback novel – was filled with groups of letters. Another few deft movements of Bond’s fingers on the keys brought the groups into a further jumble, then removed them completely. The instrument whirred and clicked as its electronic brain started to solve the problem. A running line of clear print ribboned out on the screen. The message read:
FROM HEAD OF SERVICE TO 007 MESSAGE RECEIVED MUST WARN YOU TO APPROACH SUBJECT VON GLÖDA WITH UTMOST CAUTION REPEAT UTMOST CAUTION AS THERE IS NOW POSITIVE REPEAT POSITIVE ID VON GLÖDA IS CERTAINLY WANTED NAZI WAR CRIMINAL AARNE TUDEER STRONG POSSIBILITY THAT YOUR THEORY IS CORRECT SO IF CONTACT IS MADE ALERT ME IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN FROM FIELD THIS IS AN ORDER LUCK M
So, Bond thought, M was concerned enough to haul in the line if he went too close. The word ‘line’ brought other expressions to his mind – ‘the end of the line’; ‘line of fire’; being ‘sold down the line’. All these could well be applicable now.
Having secured the car, Bond returned to the hotel, where he rang down for food and a fresh supply of vodka. The agreement was that all three would stay in their rooms until it was time to RV at the snow scooters.
An elderly waiter brought in a small trolley-table with Bond’s dinner order – a simple meal of thick pea soup laced with lean chunks of meat, and excellent reindeer sausages.
As he ate, Bond slowly realised that his edginess over this assignment, Icebreaker, was not entirely due to the mental excuses he had made about his operational attitudes, working on his own, relying on his professionalism and intuition. There was another element – one that had appeared with the name Aarne Tudeer, and the linking of that name with the Count von Glöda.
Bond pondered on other powerful individuals with whom he had fought dangerous, often lonely, battles. At random he thought of people like Sir Hugo Drax, a liar and cheat, whom he had beaten, by exposing him as a card sharp, before taking the man on in another kind of battle. Auric Goldfinger was of the same breed, a Midas man, whom Bond had challenged on the field of sport as well as the deeper, dangerous zone of battle. Blofeld – well, there were many things about Blofeld which still chilled Bond’s blood: thoughts about Blofeld, and his relative, with whom Bond had only recently come face to face.
But Konrad von Glöda – Aarne Tudeer as he really was – seemed to have cast a depressing gloom over this whole business. A massive question mark. ‘Glöda equals Glow,’ Bond said aloud.
He wondered if the man had a strange sense of humour, if this pseudonym contained a message. A key to his personality? Glöda was a cipher, a ghost, glimpsed once in the dining room of the Hotel Revontuli – a fit, elderly weather-bronzed, iron-haired, military-looking man. If Bond had met him in a London club he would not have given him a second thought – ex-army written all over him. There was no aura of evil around the person. No way of telling.
For a flitting second, Bond experienced the strange sensation of a clammy hand running down his spine. Because he had not really met von Glöda face to face, or even read a full dossier on the man, Bond felt an unusual unease. In that fraction of time, he even wondered if, at long last, he might have met his match.
He inhaled sharply, mentally shaking himself. No, Konrad von Glöda was not going to beat him. What was more, if contact came with the phony Count, 007 would turn a blind eye to M’s instructions. James Bond could certainly not leave the field and run from von Glöda, or Tudeer, if he really was responsible for the terrorist activities of the NSAA. If there was any chance of wiping out that organisation, Bond would not let it slip through his fingers.
He felt confidence leap back into his system – a loner again, with no one to trust out here in the crushing cold of the Arctic. Rivke had vanished, and he cursed the fact there had been no time to search for her. Kolya Mosolov was about as credible as a starved and injured tiger. Brad Tirpitz? Well, even though they were allies on paper, Bond could not bring himself to a state of complete faith in the American. Certainly, in the emergency they had worked on a contingency plan to cover the attempt which, according to Tirpitz, was to be made on his life. But that was all. The chains of trust between them were not yet welded.
At that moment, before the night even got under way, Bond made a vow. He would play it alone, by his rules. He would bend his will to nobody.
So now they proceeded, at somewhere between sixty and seventy kph, swerving and bucketing along a rough track between the trees, about a kilometre from the Russian border and parallel to it.
Snow scooters – known by tourists as ‘Skidoos’ – can rip across snow and ice at a terrifying speed. They are to be handled with care. Unique in design, with their wicked-looking, blunt bonnets and long strutting skis protruding forward, the scooters have revolving tracks studded with great pointed spikes which thrust the machin
e along, giving initial momentum which builds up very quickly as the skis glide across the surface below. There is little protection for the driver – or any passenger – apart from short deflector windshields. On their first ride, people tend to handle snow scooters wrongly, like motorcycles. A motorcycle can turn at acute angles, while a snow scooter has a much wider turning circle. There is also a tendency for a tyro rider to stick out a leg on the turn. He does it once only and probably ends up in hospital with a fracture, for the leg merely buries itself in the snow, dragged back by the speed of the scooter.
Ecologists curse the arrival of this particular machine, claiming that the spikes have already rutted and destroyed the texture of land under the snow; but it has certainly altered the pattern of life in the Arctic – particularly for the nomadic natives of Lapland.
Bond kept his head down, and was quick in his reactions. A turn needed considerable energy, especially in deep, hard snow, as you had to pull the skis around with the handlebars, then hold them, juddering, as they tried to resume their normal forward direction. Following someone like Kolya presented other difficulties. You could easily get caught in the ruts made by the leader’s scooter, which gave problems of manoeuvrability, for it was like being trapped on tram lines. Then, if the leader made an error, you could almost certainly end up by screaming into him.
Bond tried to weave behind Kolya, slewing from side to side, glancing up continually, trying to glimpse the way ahead from the tiny glow of Kolya’s light. Occasionally he pulled out too far, sending the scooter rearing up like some fairground ride, producing a roll first to the right, then left, slipping upwards almost to the point of losing control, then sliding back again and up the other side until, wrestling with the handlebars, he recovered.
Even with face and head completely covered, the cold and wind sliced into Bond like razor cuts and he was constantly flexing his fingers in the fear that they would go numb on him.
In fact, Bond had done everything within his power to come prepared. The P7 automatic was in its holster across his chest, inside the quilted jacket. There was no chance of getting at it quickly, but at least it was there, with plenty of spare ammunition. The compass hung from a lanyard around his neck, the instrument tucked safely inside the jacket. Some of the smaller pieces of electronics were scattered about his person, and the maps were accessible in a thigh pocket of his quilted ski pants. One of the long Sykes Fairburn commando daggers lay strapped inside his left boot, and a shorter Lapp reindeer knife hung from his belt.
On his back, Bond carried a small pack containing other items – a white coverall, complete with hood, in case there should be need for snow camouflage, three of the stun grenades, and two L2A2 fragmentation bombs.
The trees seemed to be getting thicker, but Kolya twisted in and out with ease, obviously knowing the exact route. Palm of his hand stuff, Bond thought, holding position a couple of metres from the Russian’s tail, and aware of Brad Tirpitz somewhere behind him.
They were turning. He could sense it even though the move was not immediately obvious. Kolya took them through gaps in the trees, twisting to left and right, but Bond could feel them pulling ever farther right – to the east. Soon now they would break cover. Then it would be a kilometre of open country, into the woods again, and the long dip into the valley, where a great swathe was cut through the forests to mark the frontier and deter people from attempting a crossing.
Quite suddenly they shot out of the trees, and even in the darkness the transition was unnerving. Within the forest there had been a kind of safety. Now the blackness lifted slightly as the open snow, showing grey around them, took over. Their speed increased – a straight run with no dodging or sudden swerving in a change of direction. Kolya seemed to have set his course, opened the throttle and given his machine its head. Bond followed, straying slightly to the right, dropping back a little now that they were in open country.
The cold became worse, either from lack of shelter or just because they were making more speed across open country. Maybe it was also because they had been on the trail for the best part of an hour, and the cold had begun to penetrate their bones, even through the layers of warm clothing.
Ahead, Bond caught sight of the next belt of trees. If Kolya took them through that short line of forest at speed, they would be in the long open dip in a matter of ten minutes.
The valley of death, Bond thought; for it was down in the open valley floor, which made up the border protection zone, that the trap was to be sprung on Brad Tirpitz. They had worked out the theory in Bond’s hotel room. Now the moment drew closer as the three scooters sent snow flying around them. When it came, there could be no stopping or turning back for Bond to see if their planned counter-measures worked. He simply had to trust Tirpitz’s own timing, and abilityto survive.
Into the trees again – like going from relative light into the instant darkness of a gloomy cathedral. Fir branches whipped around Bond’s body, stinging his face, as he hauled on the handlebars: left; then right; straight; left again. There was a moment when he almost misjudged the wide turn, feeling the forward ski touch the base of a tree hidden by snow; another when he thought he would be thrown off as the scooter crunched over thick roots covered with ice, slewing the machine into the start of a skid. But Bond held on, heaving at the controls, straightening the machine.
This time, when they broke cover, the landscape ahead seemed clearer, even through the frost-grimed goggles. The white valley stretched away on either side, the slope angling gently downwards to flatten, then climbing up the far side into a regiment of trees lined up in battle order.
In the open again, their speed increased. Bond felt his scooter nose down as the strain came off the engine. Now the struggle was to prevent the machine from going into a slide.
As they descended, the feeling of vulnerability became more intense. Kolya had told them this route was used constantly by border-crossers, for there were no frontier units within fifteen kilometres on either side, and they rarely made any night patrols. Bond hoped Kolya was right. Soon they would sweep into the bottom of the valley – half a kilometre of straight ice – before climbing up the far side and into the trees of Mother Russia. Before then, Brad Tirpitz would be dead – at least that was what had been planned.
Bond’s mind flitted back to a drive he had made in winter, a fair time ago now, through the Eastern Zone to West Berlin. The ice and snow were not as raw or killing as this, but he recalled going through the checkpoint from the West at Helmstedt, where they cautioned him to follow the wide freeway through the Eastern Zone without deviation. For the first few kilometres the road had been flanked by woods, and he clearly saw the high wooden towers with their spotlights, and Red Army soldiers in white winter garb, crouching in the woods and by the side of the road. Was that what awaited them in the trees at the top of the slope?
They flattened out, beginning the straight run. If Brad had got it right, the whole thing would happen in a matter of minutes – two, three minutes at the most.
Kolya increased his speed, as though racing ahead to get well up front. Bond followed, allowing himself to drop back slightly, praying that Tirpitz was ready. Moving himself in the tough saddle, Bond glanced behind. To his relief, Brad’s scooter had dropped far behind, just as they planned. He could not see if Tirpitz was still there: only the blur and black shape as the scooter slowed.
As Bond turned his head, it happened. It was as though he had been counting the seconds: working out the exact point. Maybe intuition?
The explosion came later. All he saw was the violent flash from where the dull black shape sped behind him – the crimson heart of flame and a great white phosphorescent outline, lighting the column of snow which soared into the night.
Then the noise, the heavy double clump, stunning the ear-drums. The shock waves struck Bond’s scooter, hammering him in the back, propelling him off course.
12
BLUE HARE
At the moment of explosion, Bond??
?s reflexes came automatically into play. He hauled on the controls, throttling back so that his scooter slewed sideways into a long skid, then slowed towards its inevitable halt. Almost before he knew it, Bond came alongside Kolya’s scooter.
‘Tirpitz!’ Bond yelled, not really hearing his own voice, ears tingling from the cold and deadened by the passing shock waves. Strangely, he knew what Kolya was shouting back at him, though he was uncertain of Kolya’s actual words.
‘For God’s sake don’t come alongside!’ Kolya shrieked, his voice rising like the wind within a blizzard. ‘Tirpitz is finished. He must’ve strayed off course and hit a mine. We can’t stop. Death to stop. Keep directly behind me, Bond. It’s the only way.’ He repeated, ‘Directly behind me!’ and this time Bond knew he had heard the words clearly.
It was over. A glance back showed a faint glow as pieces of Tirpitz’s scooter burned out in the snow. Then came the whine of Kolya’s scooter, zipping away over the ice. Bond gunned his motor and followed, keeping close now and well in line behind the Russian.
If the plan had worked, Tirpitz would already be on the skis which he had smuggled out to the scooters a good hour before they were due to leave.
The idea had been to drop skis, sticks, and pack about three minutes from the point where Kolya had planned to have him taken out. A minute later, Tirpitz was to set and lock his handlebars; then make a slow roll-off, low into the snow, opening the throttle at the last moment. With good timing and luck, he could lie well clear of the explosion, then take to the skis almost at leisure. There was time enough for him to reach the point arranged with Bond.
Put him from your mind, Bond thought, in any event. Consider Tirpitz dead. It’s yourself and nobody else.
The far slope was not easy, and Kolya maintained a cracking pace, as though anxious to reach the relative cover of the trees. Half-way up the first flurries of fresh, falling snow started to eddy around them.