James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me

by Christopher Wood

  On the first throw, the ivory ball had dropped into the twenty-five. The second throw was thirty-two. Bond had made no sign but merely marked his card. The third throw was another twenty-five. Bond had stayed with the first dozens and increased his stake to the maximum.

  As he did every time, the croupier had picked up the ball with his right hand, given one of the four spokes of the wheel a controlled clockwise twist with the same hand, and flicked the ball round the outer rim of the wheel anti-clockwise against the spin. The ball had run smoothly at first and then jiggled and joggled happily over the slots as the wheel began to lose momentum. Its carefree progress contrasted with the drawn faces round the table, some of them trying to keep pace with its movement like spectators at a tennis match.

  ‘Zero!’ Had there been a hint of triumph in that cry? Nobody had been on zero and the table had been cleared in favour of the bank.

  So opened one of the least successful gaming sessions Bond had ever known. He had limped away from the tables with Marline Blanchaud in exchange for a total loss of eight thousand francs. Perhaps now was the moment to discover if Mademoiselle Blanchaud could provide adequate recompense for such a loss.

  The inside of the hut was sparsely furnished with a few solid wooden chairs and a hewn table. There was a large woodframed fireplace with a fire laid and waiting to be lit, and a two-tier bunk bed, each compartment being of strictly single dimensions. Panicles of dust hung in the descending shaft of sunlight that penetrated one of the small, thick-paned windows, and there was a thick coating of dust on most surfaces. Two tall doors flanked the fireplace and were presumably cupboards.

  ‘It needs a little money spent on it,' said Bond. ‘Kind of someone to leave us a fire.’

  'Tu as du feu?'

  Bond proffered his battered Ronson and enjoyed the line of the girl’s behind as she sat on her haunches to light the fire. Nobody has yet managed to design a ski outfit that enhances the work God put into the female body, but this concealed less than most.

  There was a crackle, a flame, a thin, determined column of smoke and then the fire began to draw lustily. The girl rose to him triumphantly. ‘Voilà!’

  ‘Do they have girl guides in France?'

  Again the look of puzzlement. ‘You mean, on the mountains?’

  Bond took the girl into his arms and felt her warm, soft breasts against his chest. Soon he would kiss her and make the nipples hard.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean something completely different. Girl guides are-' He broke off, staring through the fragment of window not obscured by drifts. He was looking at a perfect field of snow traversed by distant ski tracks weaving down the side of the mountain. Three pairs of ski tracks. Bond’s heart raced. The tracks had not been there when they came. Somebody was coming towards the hut.

  Bond pushed the girl away and immediately saw fear in her eyes. She knew. What the hell was he going to do? Certainly not stay here. He looked into the frightened, betraying eyes and threw his arm roughly round the girl’s waist. He snatched her to him so that her lips trembled an inch from his.

  ‘Might as well find out what you taste like! ’ He kissed her hard and cruelly and hurled her back across the room so that she sprawled dangerously close to the fire she had just lit. Turning his back contemptuously Bond stooped to gaze through the window. The path of the ski tracks was obscured by an outcrop of rock in the foreground. For two hundred yards in front of him there was no sign of movement. The men must be in the hollow behind the rock. He could imagine them briskly side-stepping up the slope, the locomotive spurts of breath escaping from their lips. He turned towards the girl, who was still squatting in the fireplace watching him warily. Get going!

  He had taken two steps towards the door when an impulse made him spin round and examine the two cupboards. The first yielded nothing of interest - two folded duvets, tins of cassoulet and candles.

  The second was locked.

  Bond took his knee to it and then followed through with the whole weight of his foot encased in its Handson ski boot. Splinters of wood burst from the area of the lock and the door crashed open. What Bond saw made him want to be sick. A pretty girl in a transparent laundry bag. Naked. Dead. Her hands tied behind her back. Her body mutilated. Disgusting smears of blood on the thick polythene. Her flesh bruised and swollen.

  Bond spun round towards Martine Blanchaud. The expression of stupefied horror on her face saved her life. This was one turn of the wheel she did not know about.

  Bond clattered clumsily across the room and threw open the door. The mid-day sun had been strong enough to start the icicles dripping, and a ragged trench mark followed the line of the eaves. Bond snatched his skis, which were propped up against the wall, and threw them down in the snow. Damn! There was ice on one of his boots. He tried to force it into the binding and then hacked savagely with the tip of his stick. The black, hard rime fell away parsimoniously as if being sculpted.

  The men must be near now. Bond scraped again and drove his foot down savagely.

  Click!

  It was not the sound of the binding gripping but of a carbine being cocked. Bond ducked instinctively and the shot sprayed him with splinters of wood from the spot where his head had been. One ski was now secure and Bond kicked the other forward and hopped after it so that he did not present a sitting target. He glided on one ski and, catching up with the second, brought his foot down until it made contact with the binding. A second bullet kicked up snow a couple of feet behind him. Bond felt the desperate electricity of fear circulating his body. If he could not get his boot in the binding ... bending forward with his weight agonizingly poised on his right knee, Bond steadied the errant ski and slid the toe of his boot under the expanded C of metal that manipulated the front release mechanism. His heel wavered and then steadied momentarily between the sprung platform of the back restraint. He sucked in his breath and pressed down. The automatic stop resisted and then clicked down. The boot was held.

  Bond skate-skied behind a pile of logs buried by the snow and surveyed the open ground before him. There were two men on skis wearing white military-type one-piece suits with hoods. They were both armed with carbines and one of the men was kneeling to take up a better firing position. Even as he ducked back behind the logs a bullet screamed into them, kicking up a flurry of snow. Bond jump-turned and headed for the slope, running at a reverse angle to the one by which he and the girl had reached the hut. He drove his skis against the snow as if they were ice-skates and dropped to the schuss position as soon as he began to pick up speed. That way he made a smaller target and moved faster. There was a pause in which he could hear his heart bearing and then another shot that whistled over his right shoulder. He rose just long enough to turn and then took the steepest line.

  Within a second he knew that he had made a mistake.

  The shot that sang off his boot buckles had come from below him. The first two men had been beaters driving him towards the third. They must have realized that there was a good chance of them being seen approaching the hut, and had laid their plans accordingly. Once again he, James Bond, had been found wanting. He was skiing into a trap.

  He could see the third man now, fifty yards below him and to the right. The man was holding his rifle but not bothering to take aim. He was waiting to see what Bond did. Whether he stopped or came into closer range.

  Bond glanced behind him. There was no sign of the other men over the brow of the slope. Below, steep crags rose up on both sides, funnelling him towards a narrow, precipitous corridor. It was this that the third man was guarding. A cold sweat prickled Bond’s armpits. Think fast, damn you! You got yourself into this, now get yourself out. The soft life has caught up with you, Bond. The next comfortable, plush-lined boîte you find yourself in will not be a boîte de nuit but a boîte de la longue nuit - a coffin.

  Bond stopped in a flurry of snow and slid his right hand from beneath the restraining strap of his stick. Holding it freely and, like its fellow, away from his body, h
e skied slowly towards the man, trying to look as innocuous as possible.

  Immediately, the man half raised his rifle and then lowered it. Clearly, he was puzzled. Was Bond giving himself up? Should he shoot or should he wait?

  'Qu’est-ce qui se passe?' shouted Bond. ‘C’est une zone limitée?' He was thirty yards from the man and could make out his cold, hard, death’s-head features. The rifle swung up. The man had decided to kill.

  Bond raised the stick in his right hand in a gesture that must have seemed like admonishment. His fingers fumbled and twisted at the point where the zicral shaft met the grip. Something gave and Bond could feel a pressure against the glove- clad pad of his thumb. The barrel of the machine carbine was on a direct line for his heart and the man's shoulder hunched forward. Bond squeezed the metal nerve with a desperation born of fear. There was a violent yellow flash and a pall of blood and guts was thrown twenty feet behind the man with a noise like a whipcrack. Through the smoking end of his now pointless ski stick Bond watched the rifle drop, the hands involuntarily fall to the obscene, pumping hole, the look of unbelieving amazement on the face, the ghastly recognition, the two steps back taken in death, and the final collapse into the bloody shroud of snow. It was over in seconds but Bond knew that the picture of that death would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  Another shot from behind, no better directed than the rest. Farewell to obsequies. Bond dropped to his now familiar crouch and skated for the corridor between the rocks. Sufficient momentum attained, he dropped to the egg-shell position and hugged his knees.

  Behind him, the eyes of the two men were not for their stricken comrade but for the departing Bond. One of them quickly snapped into a firing position and spun round angrily as his comrade knocked aside the barrel of his rifle. The second man smiled and nodded towards the corridor. ‘Aiguille du Mort.’

  Bond was moving faster than he knew how to ski. The descent was precipitous and below him a sheer edge. His skis were flat against the snow and slapping like a motor boat travelling at high speed across a choppy sea. His heart was pounding and the mounting acceleration of his stone-like fall threatening to tear the goggles from his face. What was beyond the wide, leering mouth that stretched below him? In five seconds he would know, if he did not catch an edge and catapult himself against the jagged rocks that menaced the narrow corridor. He coiled himself like a spring and then - and then ... nothing. The snow disappeared from beneath his feet and he was launched into space. Thousands of feet below him a criss-cross of man-made lines - the town of Chamonix. He had skied of the edge of the Aiguille du Mort.

  Bond began to turn in the air like a rag doll dropped from a window. The force of descent ripped a ski from his boot and he felt a sharp pain in his knee as it was twisted savagely by the motion. His widespread arms clawed at the air trying to achieve some balance, but the world spun past - granite, sky, snow. The wind screamed. It had been like this in dreams. The sudden jolt and the falling, falling, falling. But in dreams you woke up before you were spattered against the rocks like a bird’s dropping. Bond fought to reach his right arm behind his left shoulder. The second ski had gone and there was now some pattern to his descent. His fingers closed against the edge of the haversack and then lost contact. It seemed that he had been kicking in space for minutes. He clamped his hand to his shoulder and fumbled desperately. This time his fingers felt something. A semi-circle of metal. He pulled and closed his eyes.

  Suddenly something behind him crackled like machine-gun fire and there was a billowing glimpse of red, white and blue. A giant hand seized him by the scruff of the neck and pulled the world into focus. His speed of descent slackened magically and suddenly he could see his boots dangling below him. He had time to breathe, to look up at the bulging panels of silk above his head, to realize that he was alive.

  In the town of Chamonix an old man shaded his eyes against the sun and looked up into the mountains. A man had just parachuted off the Aiguille du Mort. He must be an Englishman because it was possible to see the reverse side of the Union Jack emblem on his parachute and because only an Englishman would do a thing like that. 'Ils sont fous, les anglais,’ he said, not without a trace of grudging admiration, and hurried on down the Avenue du Bouchet.

  Nearly nine thousand feet above the town, Sergei Borzov of SMERSH Otdyel II, the Operations and Executions branch of the murder apparat of the Russian KGB, lay with his mouth open and watched his blood melting a hole in the snow. It would not be melting it for much longer. Already a long shadow was falling across the slope and the cold reached out ahead of it. He would never see her again, or the hotel on the Black Sea, or the children playing on the beach. All that he had consigned to memory before turning and funnelling his soul into her eyes. The room had been cool and dark and deep like a grave. The curtains stirring in a dying wind. The sheet above her breasts white as snow. White as snow.

  The black shadow passed over the man and he closed his eyes and died.

  Death to Spies

  Anya Amasova felt uneasy as the nondescript ZIS saloon approached the familiar drabness of the Sretenka Ulitsa. Why did they want her at such short notice? Why had no reasons been given? What had she done wrong? The last was the most persistent and worrying consideration. Nobody who worked for the KGB or any other branch of the Soviet bureaucracy could afford to believe that they were beyond blame. Original sin was as much a tenet of the Communist faith as of the Christian. Perhaps they had found out about her affair with Sergei - she interrupted her train of thought to scold herself. Not affair, that was one of their words. Cheap and shoddy. Transitory. She must find a better way to describe what had happened. Perhaps they had found out that she and Sergei had fallen in love. The room was almost certainly bugged and there might even have been a concealed camera. Such things were not unknown.

  But could they object to her falling in love? Yes, they could object to anything. The state was your only lover and the penalties for unfaithfulness were severe.

  ‘Comrade-Major.’ The driver had turned round and was looking at her with deadpan eyes. They had arrived. Number 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, headquarters of SMERSH.

  Anya glanced up and caught a glimpse of her eyes in the driver’s mirror. It is at such offguard moments that you really see yourself and Anya was disturbed by the look of fear in her eyes. The open, vulnerable wariness. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was cut out for the work the state had chosen for her. Perhaps her superiors at Otdyel 4 had come to the same conclusion.

  SMERSH is a contraction of Smiert Spionam, which means ‘Death to Spies’. The organization currently employs a total of 60,000 men, women and transvestites, although the number changes continuously as a result of operational losses and the elimination of weak and unreliable elements.

  Anya Amasova’s progress within Otdyel 4 of SMERSH - the section responsible for internal security in the armed forces - had been steady rather than spectacular. She had been the youngest of four children born to the wife of a country doctor. With his death in a car accident, Anya’s mother had been grateful for the suggestion from the headmistress of the local school that Anya was a bright girl who might qualify for training at a special ‘Technical College’ near Leningrad. Anya had passed the examination with flying colours and was soon attending classes in ‘General Political Knowledge’ and ‘Tactics, Agitation and Propaganda’. In her third year she moved on to ‘Technical Subjects’ and became proficient in the use of codes and ciphers. She was marked ‘satisfactory’ in Communications and became conversant with the intricacies of Contacts, Cutouts, Couriers and Post Boxes. Her Fieldwork was also deemed satisfactory. In tests she received high marks for Vigilance, Presence of Mind, Courage and Coolness. Her mark for Discretion was average.

  After Leningrad came the School for Terror and Diversion at Kuchino, outside Moscow. Anya’s marks in judo and athletics were high and she became a capable wireless operator and excellent photographer. She also had her first lover, her small-arms instructor who wa
s runner up in the Soviet Rifle Championships. Anya became an excellent pistol shot.

  Up to now, all her training had been in the Soviet Union. But with the termination of her course at STD she was sent to work at an Avanpost in Czechoslovakia. These mobile operation groups were engaged in surveying and, where necessary, liquidating Russian spies and party workers in the satellite countries. Anya’s work in this sector had been beyond reproach although it was noted on her zapiska that she had always delegated the act of execution.

  Upon recall to Moscow, Anya had been given the rank of Major and assigned to Military Records where she was granted access to the files on all military personnel below the rank of General or equivalent. In conjunction with other departments of SMERSH she was responsible for the vital character assessment that preceded any promotion or demotion. She had written copious and highly detailed reports and as a result of her conscientiousness - although she was unaware of it - three men and a woman had been hanged with fine wire. A death for traitors that Stalin had borrowed from Hitler.

  The bizarre course from which she had just been summoned was one that united several branches of the ever-expanding octopus of SMERSH, and it was here that she had met Sergei Borzov for the first time. He had been reticent about his role in the organization, as had she. It was never wise to talk too much) and dangerous to ask questions.

  One of the two sentries outside Number 13 bent down to open the door of the car and his sub-machine gun banged against it clumsily. The driver began to protest about his paintwork and then stopped abruptly when the sentry looked at him. Anybody involved with SMERSH was to be feared. Anya left the car and walked up the broad flight of steps leading to the big iron double door. She continued to feel uneasy.