The James Bond MEGAPACK®

by Ian Fleming

  Largo was an adventurer, a predator on the herd. Two hundred years before, he would have been a pirate — not one of the jolly ones of the story books, but a man like Blackbeard, a bloodstained cut-throat who scythed his way through people towards gold. But Blackbeard had been too much of a bully and a roughneck and wherever he went in the world he left behind a tell-tale shambles. Largo was different. There was a cool brain and an exquisite finesse behind his actions that had always saved him from the herd’s revenge — from his post-war debut as head of the black market in Naples, through five lucrative years smuggling from Tangier, five more masterminding the wave of big jewel robberies on the French Riviera, down to his last five with SPECTRE. Always he got away with it. Always he had seen the essential step ahead that would have been hidden from lesser men. He was the epitome of the gentleman crook — a man of the world, a great womanizer, a high liver, with the entrée to café society in four continents, and the last survivor, conveniently enough, of a once famous Roman family whose fortune, so he said, he had inherited. He also benefited from having no wife, a spotless police record, nerves of steel, a heart of ice, and the ruthlessness of a Himmler. He was the perfect man for SPECTRE, and the perfect man, rich Nassau playboy and all, to be Supreme Commander of Plan Omega.

  One of the crew knocked on the hatch and came in. ‘They have signalled. The chariot and sled are on the way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ In the heat and excitement of any operation, Largo always created calm. However much was at stake, however great the dangers and however urgent the need for speed and quick decisions, he made a fetish of calm, of the pause, of an almost judolike inertia. This was an act of will to which he had trained himself. He found it had an extraordinary effect on his accomplices. It tied them to him and invoked their obedience and loyalty more than any other factor in leadership. That he, a clever and cunning man, should show unconcern at particularly bad, or, as in this case, particularly good news, meant that he had already known that what had happened would happen. With Largo, consequences were foreseen. One could depend on him. He never lost balance. So now, at this splendid news, Largo deliberately picked up his dividers again and made a trace, an imaginary trace, on the chart for the sake of the crew member. He then put down the dividers and strolled out of the air-conditioning into the warm night.

  A tiny worm of underwater light was creeping out towards the jolly-boat. It was a two-man underwater chariot identical with those used by the Italians during the war and bought, with improvements, from Ansaldo, the firm that had originally invented the one-man submarine. It was towing an underwater sled, a sharp-prowed tray with negative buoyancy used for the recovery and transport of heavy objects under the sea. The worm of light merged with the luminescence from the searchlight and, minutes later, re-emerged on its way back to the ship. It would have been natural for Largo to have gone down to the hold to witness the arrival of the two atomic weapons. Typically, he did nothing of the sort. In due course the little headlight reappeared, going back over its previous course. Now the sled would be loaded with the huge tarpaulin, camouflaged to merge in with just this piece of underwater terrain, with its white sand and patches of coral outcrop, that would be spread so as to cover every inch of the wrecked plane and pegged all round with corkscrew iron stanchions that would not be shifted by the heaviest surface storm or groundswell. In his imagination, Largo saw every move of the eight men who would now be working far below the surface on the reality for which there had been so much training, so many dummy exercises. He marvelled at the effort, the incredible ingenuity, that had gone into Plan Omega. Now all the months of preparation, of sweat and tears, were being repaid.

  There came a bright blink of light on the surface of the water not far from the jolly-boat — then another and another. The men were surfacing. As they did so, the moon caught the glass of their masks. They swam to the boat — Largo verified that all eight were there — and clumsily heaved up the short ladder and over the side. The mechanic and Brandt, the German killer, helped them off with their gear, the underwater light was switched off and hauled inboard and, instead of the rattle of the generator, there came the muffled roar of the twin Johnstons. The boat sped back to the yacht and to the waiting arms of the derricks. The couplings were made firm and verified, and with a shrill electric whine, the boat, complete with passengers, was swung up and inboard.

  The captain came and stood at Largo’s side. He was a big, sullen, rawboned man who had been cashiered from the Canadian Navy for drunkenness and insubordination. He had been a slave to Largo ever since Largo had called him to the stateroom one day and broken a chair over his head on account of a questioned command. That was the kind of discipline he understood. Now he said, ‘The hold’s clear. Okay to sail?’

  ‘Are both the teams satisfied?’

  ‘They say so. Not a hitch.’

  ‘First see they all get one full jigger of whisky. Then tell them to rest. They will be going out again in just about an hour. Ask Kotze to have a word with me. Be ready to sail in five minutes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The eyes of the physicist, Kotze, were bright under the moon. Largo noticed that he was trembling slightly as if with fever. He tried to instil calm into the man. He said cheerfully, ‘Well, my friend. Are you pleased with your toys? The toyshop has sent you everything you want?’

  Kotze’s lips trembled. He was on the verge of excited tears. He said, his voice high, ‘It is tremendous! You have no idea. Weapons such as I had never dreamed of. And of a simplicity — a safety! Even a child could handle these things without danger.’

  ‘The cradles were big enough for them? You have room to do your work?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Kotze almost flapped his hands with enthusiasm. ‘There are no problems, none at all. The fuses will be off in no time. It will be a simple matter to replace them with the time mechanism. Maslov is already at work correcting the threads. I am using lead screws. They are more easy to machine.’

  ‘And the two plugs — these ignitors you were telling me about? They are safe? Where did the divers find them?’

  ‘They were in a leaden box under the pilot’s seat. I have verified them. Perfectly simple when the time comes. They will of course be kept apart in the hiding place. The rubber bags are splendid. Just what was needed. I have verified that they seal completely watertight.’

  ‘No danger from radiation?’

  ‘Not now. Everything is in the leaden cases.’ Kotze shrugged. ‘I may have picked up a little while I was working on the monsters but I wore the harness. I will watch for signs. I know what to do.’

  ‘You are a brave man, Kotze. I won’t go near the damned things until I have to. I value my sex-life too much. So you are satisfied with everything? You have no problems? Nothing has been left on the plane?’

  Kotze had got himself under control. He had been bursting with the news, with his relief that the technical problems were within his power. Now he felt empty, tired. He had voided himself of the tensions that had been with him for weeks. After all this planning, all these dangers, supposing his knowledge had not been enough! Supposing the bloody English had invented some new safety device, some secret control, of which he knew nothing! But when the time came, when he unwrapped the protective webbing and got to work with his jeweller’s tools, then triumph and gratitude had flooded into him. No, now there were no problems. Everything was all right. Now there was only routine. Kotze said dully, ‘No. There are no problems. Everything is there. I will go and get the job finished.’

  Largo watched the thin figure shamble off along the deck. Scientists were queer fish. They saw nothing but science. Kotze couldn’t visualize the risks that still had to be run. For him the turning of a few screws was the end of the job. For the rest of the time he would be a useless supercargo. It would be easier to get rid of him. But that couldn’t be done yet. He would have to be kept on just in case the weapons had to be used. But he was a depressing little man and a near hysteric. Largo didn’t lik
e such people near him. They lowered his spirits. They smelled of bad luck. Kotze would have to be found some job in the engine room where he could be kept busy and, above all, out of sight.

  Largo went into the cockpit bridge. The captain was sitting at the wheel, a light aluminium affair consisting only of the bottom half of a circle. Largo said, ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ The captain reached out his hand to the bank of buttons at his side and pressed the one that said ‘Start Both.’ There came a low, hollow rumble from amidships. A light blinked on the panel to show that both engines were firing properly. The captain pulled the electromagnetic gear shift to ‘Slow Ahead Both’ and the yacht began to move. The captain made it ‘Full Ahead Both’ and the yacht trembled and settled a little in the stern. The captain watched the revolution counter, his hand on a squat lever at his side. At twenty knots the counter showed 5,000. The captain inched back the lever that depressed the great steel scoop below the hull. The revolutions remained the same, but the finger of the speedometer crawled on round the dial until it said forty knots. Now the yacht was half-flying, half-planing across the glittering sheet of still water, the hull supported four feet above the surface on the broad, slightly uptilted metal skid and with only a few feet of the stern and the two big screws submerged. It was a glorious sensation and Largo, as he always did, thrilled to it.

  The motor yacht, Disco Volante, was a hydrofoil craft, built for Largo with SPECTRE funds by the Italian constructors, Leopoldo Rodrigues, of Messina, the only firm in the world to have successfully adapted the Shertel—Sachsenberg system to commercial use. With a hull of aluminium and magnesium alloy, two Daimler-Benz four-stroke diesels supercharged by twin Brown-Boveri turbo superchargers, the Disco Volante could move her 100 tons at around fifty knots, with a cruising range at that speed of around four hundred miles. She had cost £200,000, but she had been the only craft in the world with the speed, cargo- and passenger-space, and with the essential shallow draft for the job required of her in Bahamian waters.

  The constructors claim of this type of craft that it has a particular refinement that SPECTRE had appreciated. Having high stability and a shallow draft, Aliscafos, as they are called in Italy, do not determine magnetic field variation, nor do they cause pressure waves — both desirable characteristics, in case the Disco Volante might wish, some time in her career, to escape detection.

  Six months before, the Disco had been shipped out to the Florida Keys by the South Atlantic route. She had been a sensation in Florida waters and among the Bahamas, and had vastly helped to make Largo the most popular ‘millionaire’ in a corner of the world that crawls with millionaires who ‘have everything.’ And the fast and mysterious voyages he made in the Disco, with all those underwater swimmers and occasionally with a two-seater Lycoming-engined folding-wing amphibian mounted on the roof of the streamlined superstructure had aroused just the right amount of excited comment. Slowly, Largo had let the secret leak out — through his own indiscretions at dinners and cocktail parties, through carefully primed members of the crew in the Bay Street bars. This was a treasure hunt, an important one. There was a pirates’ map, a sunken galleon thickly overgrown with coral. The wreck had been located. Largo was only waiting for the end of the winter tourist season and for the calms of early summer and then his shareholders would be coming out from Europe and work would begin in earnest. And two days before, the shareholders, nineteen of them, had duly come trickling in to Nassau by different routes — from Bermuda, from New York, from Miami. Rather dull looking people to be sure, just the sort of hard-headed, hard-working businessmen who would be amused by a gamble like this, a pleasant sunshine gamble with a couple of weeks’ holiday in Nassau to make up for it if the doubloons were after all not in the wreck. And that evening, with all the visitors on board, the engines of the Disco had begun to murmur, just when they should have, the harbour folk agreed, just when it was getting dark, and the beautiful dark blue and white yacht had slid out of harbour. Once in the open sea, the engines had started up their deep booming that had gradually diminished to the south-east, towards, the listeners agreed, an entirely appropriate hunting ground.

  The southerly course was considered appropriate because it is among the Southern Bahamas that the great local treasure troves are expected to be found. It was through the southerly passages through these islands — the Crooked Island, the Mayaguana and the Caicos passages — that the Spanish treasure ships would try to dodge the pirates and the French and British fleets as they made for home. Here, it is believed, lie the remains of the Porto Pedro, sunk in 1668, with a million pounds of bullion on board. The Santa Cruz, lost in 1694, carried twice as much, and the El Capitan and San Pedro, both sunk in 1719, carried a million, and half a million, pounds of treasure respectively.

  Every year, treasure hunts for these and other ships are carried out among the Southern Bahamas. No one can guess how much, if anything, has been recovered, but everyone in Nassau knows of the 72-lb. silver bar recovered by two Nassau businessmen off Gorda Cay in 1950, and since presented to the Nassau Development Board, in whose offices it is permanently on view. So all Bahamians know that treasure is there for the finding, and when the harbour folk of Nassau heard the deep boom of the Disco’s engines dying away to the south, they nodded wisely.

  But once the Disco was well away and the moon had not yet risen, with all lights dowsed, she swung away in a wide circle towards the west and towards the rendezvous point she was now leaving. Now she was a hundred miles, two hours, away from Nassau. But it would be almost dawn when, after one more vital call, Nassau would again hear the boom of her engines coming in from the false southern trail.

  Largo got up and bent over the chart table. They had covered the course many times and in all weathers. It was really no problem. But Phases I and II had gone so well that double care must be taken over Phase III. Yes, all was well. They were dead on course. Fifty miles. They would be there in an hour. He told the captain to keep the yacht as she was, and went below to the radio room. Eleven fifteen was just coming up. It was call time.

  The small island, Dog Island, was no bigger than two tennis courts. It was a hunk of dead coral with a smattering of seagrape and battered screw palm that grew on nothing but pockets of brackish rainwater and sand. It was the point where the Dog Shoal broke the surface, a well-known navigational hazard that even the fishing boats kept well away from. In daylight, Andros Island showed to eastwards, but at night it was as safe as houses.

  The Disco came up fast and then slowly lowered herself back into the water and slid up within a cable’s length of the rock. Her arrival brought small waves that lapped and sucked at the rock and then were still. The anchor slipped silently down forty feet and held. Down in the hold, Largo and the disposal team of four waited for the underwater hatch to be opened.

  The five men wore aqualungs. Largo held nothing but a powerful underwater electric torch. The four others were divided into two pairs. They wore webbing slung between them and they sat on the edge of the iron grating with their frogman’s feet dangling, waiting for the water to swirl in and give them buoyancy. On the webbing, between each pair, rested a six-foot-long tapering object in an obscene grey rubber envelope.

  The water seeped, rushed, and then burst into the hold, submerging the five men. They slipped off their seats and trudged out through the hatchway, Largo in the lead and the two pairs behind him at precisely tested intervals.

  Largo did not at first switch on his torch. It was not necessary and it would bring stupid, dazed fish that were a distraction. It might even bring shark or barracuda and, though they would be no more than a nuisance, one of the team, despite Largo’s assurances, might lose his nerve.

  They swam on in the soft moonlit mist of the sea. At first there was nothing but a milky void below them, but then the coral shelf of the island showed up, climbing steeply towards the surface. Sea fans, like small shrouds in the moonlight, waved softly, beckoning, and the clumps and trees of coral were grey and enigmatic. It was
because of these things, the harmless underwater mysteries that make the skin crawl on the inexperienced, that Largo had decided to lead the disposal teams himself. Out in the open, where the plane had foundered, the eye of the big searchlight made, with the known object of the plane itself, the underwater world into the semblance of a big room. But this was different. This grey-white world needed the contempt of a swimmer who had experienced these phantom dangers a thousand times before. That was the main reason why Largo led the teams. He also wanted to know exactly how the two grey sausages were stored away. It could happen, if things went wrong, that he would have to salvage them himself.

  The underpart of the small island had been eroded by the waves so that, seen from below, it resembled a thick mushroom. Under the umbrella of coral there was a wide fissure, a dark wound in the side of the stem. Largo made for it and, when he was close, switched on his torch. Beneath the umbrella of coral it was dark. The yellow light of the torch showed up the minute life of an inshore coral community — the pale sea urchins and the fierce black spines of sea-eggs, the shifting under-brush of seaweeds, the yellow and blue seeking antennae of a langouste, the butterfly and angel fish, fluttering like moths in the light, a coiled bêche de mer, a couple of meandering sea-caterpillars and the black and green jelly of a sea-hare.