Colonel Sun

by Robert Markham

  The colonel watched with a tolerant smile as Luisa was handed a vodka on the rocks and Doni a Fix beer, refused a drink himself, gestured genially for the Russian to take whatever he wanted.

  Hands in pockets, Sun turned away and strolled towards the open doors. Then he halted, stood quite still for a moment, and glanced at his watch, a steel-cased Longines W.D. pattern which he had had for nearly fifteen years. Its former owner, a captain in the Gloucestershire Regiment, had died under interrogation as bravely as anyone Sun had ever met. The watch was a precious possession, a memento, not a trophy. Sun called sharply over his shoulder, ‘Evgeny. The lights. All of them.’

  Ryumin put down the Fix he had just tasted. ‘All?’

  ‘All. What can't be concealed should be flaunted. This is the remainder of our little house-party arriving.’

  Just below the crest of the hillside above the house, the two men from the islet lay under a stunted fig-tree and saw the terrace and anchorage spring into bright illumination. They watched the slow approach of the motor-boat, and waited without moving or speaking while lines were thrown and secured, laughter and cries of greeting were borne faintly to their ears, and three men came ashore, one of them needing some assistance, the other two springing forward to be embraced by the two women from the house. The servant dealt with some suitcases. The party retired indoors. The boat, its engine popping gently, slid out from the shore and turned west, no doubt preparing to circumnavigate the islet and make for the public anchorage in the middle of the inner curve of Vrakonisi.

  On the hillside, one man looked at the other and spread his palms. The two got up and resumed their arduous and ineffective patrol. They had eleven more houses to check on tonight.

  In the house, Sun Liang-tan sat and surveyed the three new arrivals. He said nothing.

  The black-haired gunman, he who had followed James Bond from Sunningdale to Quarterdeck thirty hours earlier, spoke. ‘Bond,’ he started to say, but his throat was dry and he had to clear it. ‘Bond got away from us in England.’

  Sun nodded, perfectly expressionless.

  ‘But steps have been taken to retrieve the error and there is every reason to hope that he will be in our hands within twenty-four hours,’ the man said woodenly, as if repeating what he had learnt by heart.

  Sun nodded again.

  ‘HNC-16 only takes effect at once when administered intravenously,’ put in the second man. ‘He was struggling so much that I could only manage an intramuscular injection, which meant he could – ’

  He stopped with the last word half bitten off at a tiny gesture from Sun, a mere raising of one yellow hand from the wrist.

  ‘He escaped after damaging Doyle's face severely enough to attract attention,’ the first man went on as before. ‘So Doyle was eliminated on the spot. After that everything proceeded according to plan. The double diversionary tactics at the airport were successful in – ’

  Again the hand came up.

  ‘Quantz brilliantly improvised a clue which he left on Doyle's body,’ the recital continued, ‘and which he estimates cannot fail to lure Bond to Athens in search of his chief. The details are in here,’ said the gunman in a hurry, as if to forestall another flick of the hand, and passed Sun a sealed envelope. ‘By now Quantz is in Athens himself. We put the flying-boat down off Cape Souion and he set out for the shore in the rubber dinghy. He will contact our friends in Athens. Should Bond fail to appear after all, Quantz will arrange for the abduction of one of the regular British agents there and will transport him to this island. Quantz estimates that even in that event the operation will succeed in its main object.’

  Sun sat on in silence for half a minute, tapping the envelope gently against his knee. Sweat showing on their faces, the two men stood before him in awkward attitudes. Luisa sat on the day-bed and furtively watched Sun; Doni, at her side, looked from one man to the other.

  At last the colonel looked up, and the purple lips parted in a smile. Tension relaxed; somebody exhaled sharply.

  Turning to the gunman, Sun said, ‘Well, De Graaf, you certainly seem to have had the most damnable bad luck. But I must say it looks as if you've done everything in your power to put things right.’ Sun was a fair-minded man. Further, that obsession of the Chinese secret services, the splitting-up of every team project into independent units directed from the top, had seen to it that his responsibility started and finished with the Vrakonisi end of the plan. And, although bitterly disappointed at the non-arrival of Bond, he could not consider betraying any such emotion in the presence of Westerners.

  ‘But now you'll want to relax,’ he went on. ‘Full discussion in the morning. Help yourselves to a drink. Evgeny will prepare a meal to your requests. These girls are called Doni and Luisa. They've been instructed to please you in every way and at any time. Oh, and finally …’

  Rising unhurriedly to his feet, Sun went over to the third of the newcomers, who had remained slumped in a chair since entering the room.

  ‘Good evening, Admiral. I am Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army. How are you feeling, sir?’

  M raised his head. Some of the old sharpness had returned to his grey eyes. He spoke firmly.

  ‘I shan't be answering any of your other questions, you yellow-faced bandit, so I might as well make a start by not answering that one. Save your breath.’

  ‘The main reason for your presence here, Western filth, is not the answering of questions. But answer them you will when the time comes. Rest assured of that.’

  Sun's tone was as equable as ever. He continued, ‘Now, Lohmann, take your patient away and put him to bed with a shot of something that'll give him a good night's sleep. Evgeny will show you where.’

  The doctor, a bald, under-sized man in his forties, did as he was told.

  Holding a tumbler half-full of vodka, De Graaf sauntered over to the day-bed. He looked each girl up and down in the manner of a farmer at a cattle-market. Finally he pointed at Luisa.

  ‘The colonel said any time,’ he murmured. ‘So now.’

  Luisa glanced at Doni, who talked emphatic Albanian for almost half a minute. At the end of it, Luisa shrugged, then nodded. Doni fixed her eyes on De Graaf.

  ‘I like you to take me also. The other man disgusting. No hairs on his head and too little and hands like a bird. You take me also. We did this before. We do many things for you. You enjoy it.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said De Graaf, draining his glass and grinning. ‘Lead on, my dears.’

  Left alone, Sun Liang-tan strode to the terrace and spat as hard as he could towards the Aegean.

  6

  The Shrine of Athene

  James Bond sat in the bar of the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens and waited for something to happen.

  There was no alternative, no active policy in the least pursuable. Hours of four-cornered discussion between Bond, Bill Tanner, Head of Section G in London and, from time to time, Head of Station G in Athens over the radio link had finally produced something that, for want of a better word, had to be called a plan. Bond ran over the points in his mind as Tanner had scrawled them down on the back of a message-form in the office.

  1. Ideally, 007 should identify the enemy agents entrusted with his abduction, evade capture and tail them to the next higher echelon with a view to locating M.

  2. This can be ruled out as a practical proposition. 007 will be unable to identify these agents in advance, and the degree of practical efficiency displayed in the Quarterdeck operation strongly suggests that they will render evasion of capture impossible.

  3. Therefore, 007 must invite capture and depend on the following safeguards:

  (a) Operatives of Station G will keep 007 under surveillance at all times and trace the movements of the abduction party with a view to intervention in force.

  (b) A midget homing-transmitter will await 007 on arrival in Athens for installation in his clothing.

  (c) Escape devices in clothing.

  (a) and (b) : Head of Stat
ion G for action.

  (b) and (c) : Head of Q Branch for action.

  Bond smiled thinly to himself. Station G was famous throughout the Service; its Head, a mild-looking Welshman called Stuart Thomas, had served long valiantly as 005 before an eye defect had begun to impair his ability with firearms, since when he had run the Athens unit with unsurpassed skill and imagination. But even Thomas could not be expected to produce the kind of supermen demanded by Bill Tanner's 3(a), which the enemy must have taken into account and would surely guard against. While as for 3(b) and (c) …

  A packet containing the midget transmitter had been awaiting Bond when he checked in at the hotel, and he had duly installed it in the compartment Q Branch had made for it in the heel of his left shoe. A miniature picklock was fitted into the right heel, and two wafer-thin tungsten steel hacksaw blades, hardly less pliable than the cloth itself, in the lapels of his charcoal-green mohair suit. Such devices grew more sophisticated every year; their possible hiding-places remained constant. Men like the ones who had planned and carried out the Quarterdeck operation would be unlikely to overlook any of them. Bond realized grimly that, on this assignment as on all his previous ones, the tools he basically had to depend on were invisible, intangible, within himself. They would be tested to the utmost by what lay ahead. Everything else was uncertain.

  He had a look round the crowded, decorously noisy bar. Perhaps, merely for curiosity's sake, he would be able to pick out the local agents whose job it was to keep him under their eye. (Standard Service procedure, aimed at minimizing the possibility of betrayal under torture, dictates that no agent shall have any knowledge of his co-agents that is not absolutely necessary.) The place seemed full of conventional business and professional types and their women, Athenian bankers, ship-owners from the islands, politicians from Salonika, less readily classifiable visitors from Istanbul, Sofia, Bucharest – not forgetting the tourists – all with the appearance of solid respectability.

  Bond had chosen to stay at the Grande Bretagne because it was public in the way he wanted and because he had always responded to its slightly seedy grandeur, inter-war in period with a thin veneer of modernism. He enjoyed the lofty foyer with its stained glass, green marble pillars and handsome Gobelin tapestry, a good copy of the original in the Louvre, depicting Alexander the Great entering Babylon on a fat, crafty-looking horse, a dignified figure at the head of his retinue but gone a bit blowsy, more like Cleopatra than a Macedonian prince. Bond accepted too the rather Frenchified style of the bar, all broken pediments, terracotta friezes and heavy, expensive silk curtains, plus the very un-French sedate courtesy of the waiters.

  It was ten o'clock, the hour when fashionable Athens considers where it will dine. Bond was hungry. Arrival at the hot, crowded little airport under Mount Hymettus early that afternoon had found him too tired to eat. He had dropped his bags at the Grande Bretagne and gone straight to a pavement café in the square. A quick carafe of cheap wine in the sun had been an ideal prelude to seven hours of wallowing sleep in the comfortable bed of the room he always asked for, 706 on the top floor, far from quiet, but with a fine view of the Acropolis and a glimpse of the sea.

  By now the enemy would have confirmed Bond's arrival, finalized his own plans and moved his units into position. Time to go. Bond signalled to the waiter. Almost simultaneously, a man sitting not far away, his back half-turned to Bond, made the same bill-summoning gesture. He looked the most comfortably bourgeois of all the bar's customers, and had been sitting chatting quietly with his companions, a replica of himself and two handsome but unglamorized women. Thomas's sort of people. No pairs of silent toughs in dark suits for him. It would be interesting to see whether …

  Bond's bill came. He was reaching for his money when his eye was caught by a sudden movement at the little table on his other side. A tubby, swarthy man with a thick moustache, a Turk by the look of him, had seized the bare upper arm of the girl next to him, pulled her close and was talking into her ear in something between a whisper and a snarl. She was young and strikingly pretty, with the delicate features, full breast and tobacco-blonde hair of the most attractive physical type in this region. Now she was straining away from the Turk's heavy head and writhing red mouth, trying to undo his hand, her tan-coloured eyes wide with what looked like shock and fright. Their glance fell on Bond, who was only a few yards off and the nearest unattached male.

  ‘Please,’ she called in English, not loudly but urgently. ‘Please do something.’

  Bond weighed it up briefly. He could perfectly well pay and leave. The waiters could deal quite adequately with the man if he persisted. On the other hand, Bond's instinct told him, as just now, that here was something relevant, something that stuck out from the innocently busy social scene round him. And the girl certainly was a beauty … And there was nothing to be lost. He made his decision.

  ‘Bring it to me in a moment, please,’ he told the waiter, walked across and sat down next to the Turk on the corner of the green plush bench. ‘Now what is all this?’

  ‘He's annoying me,’ said the girl with much resentment. ‘He says awful, obscene things to me. I beg you to get rid of him.’

  Bond's Greek was small but well-chosen. He leant close to the man, who was staring at him contemptuously, and said in his deadliest tone, ‘Fíye apo tho, málaka.’

  This, though probably as obscene as anything the man had been saying to the girl, is a standard Greek insult. What made it effective was Bond's air of determination and his sudden grip on the man's nearer arm. There was a pause while the two men stared at each other and Bond tightened his grip, noticing half-consciously that the arm was distinctly harder than its owner's general corpulence would have suggested. Then the Turk quickly and quite calmly let go the girl, waited for his own arm to be released, rose to his feet, adjusted his jacket, and walked out of the bar. His departure did not go unnoticed by the two couples Bond had picked out earlier.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the girl in excellent American English. ‘I'm sorry about that. I could see no other way without a public disturbance. You dealt with him very competently.’ She chuckled suddenly, a warm-hearted, gay sound that showed remarkably quick recovery from the fear she had been displaying. ‘You must have had practice.’

  ‘Shall we have a drink?’ asked Bond, raising his hand. ‘Yes, I rescue girls from obscenity-spouting Turks all the time.’

  ‘Thank you. Tzimas isn't a Turk. He just behaves like one. But he is obscene. My family have been pushing me at him – he has a good carpet-manufacturing business here. After this tonight my mother will talk to my father and there'll be no more pushing in that direction. Are you married?’

  Bond smiled. ‘No. I sometimes think I never will be. What will you have?’

  ‘Ouzo and ice,’ said the girl, glancing up at the waiter. ‘Not that Sans Rival stuff you serve all the time. Have you Boutari?’

  ‘Certainly, madam. And for you sir?’

  ‘The same. Plenty of ice.’

  ‘You know ouzo?’ The girl looked at Bond consideringly. ‘You know Greece well?’

  ‘Greece I know a little and love what I know. Ouzo I know much better: a Greek version of Pernod with a much more sinister smell but similar effects. Love would be too starry-eyed a word to use there.’

  ‘That's a slander. And not accurate. The French took it from us and flavoured it with aniseed and dyed it green. Horrible! My name is Ariadne Alexandrou.’

  ‘Mine is Bond. James Bond. How did you know just now that I spoke English?’

  The girl laughed again. ‘Most people do. And you look English, Mr Bond. Nobody could mistake you, not even for an American.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I'm not strictly English at all. Half Scottish, half Swiss.’

  ‘The English have swallowed you, then. What are you doing in Athens? Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Business, but I hope to get some pleasure in while I'm here.’

  Ariadne Alexandrou returned Bond's gaze for a moment wit
hout reacting to it, then turned away to observe critically as the two small tumblers of cloudy drink – the cloudiness curling whitely outwards from the ice-cubes like liquid smoke – were set in front of them and as much again of water added. Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, ‘classical’ look one associates with old coins, a carefully-finished sculpture overlaid with the softest tints of tan and white and olive and rose. The effect was set off by earrings in an ancient style, small thick hoops of beaten gold.

  No doubt it was for her splendid appearance and obvious quickness of mind that she had been picked by the enemy – of whose presence behind the events of the last five minutes Bond was no longer in the smallest doubt. All the girl's apparent confidence and warmth had not been able to disguise the patness and predictability of the way she had established acquaintance with him. He guessed that, left to herself, she would have stage-managed things with more imagination. Some plodding middle-echelon spymaster had come up with that amorous-Turk routine. Encouraging: the other side were getting lazy. Bond brushed aside the thought that they could afford to.

  The girl Ariadne had raised her glass and was looking at him with a kind of down-turning smile that might have been ugly on anyone else, but in her case only emphasized the marvellously delicate yet firm lines of her lips.

  ‘I know the sort of thing you expect me to say now.’ The smile turned upward. ‘In Greece, when we drink to someone, we say ees iyian, your health, or colloquially yássou. Well sometimes we do, but half the time it's “cheers” and “here's looking at you” these days.’ The smile faded. ‘Greece isn't very Greek any more. Every year less. I'm being a little conservative and sentimental just by asking for ouzo. The newest people want vodka-tini, or Scotch and soda. Are you free for dinner, Mr Bond? Shall we go out somewhere together?’