As he approached the bottom, he could hear the steady drumming of automatic fire. The battle was not over. He waited behind the heavy metal door and listened to his heart pounding. The blood was coagulating about his wrist and the arm was stiffening up. He could not afford to stop moving. Taking several deep breaths, he twisted the handle and leant against the door sufficiently to push it open a couple of inches. The murky water glimmered in front of him. As he had imagined, he was further down towards the bows than when he had entered the port companion ways. Above him and towards the stern was the central catwalk that traversed the dock area. In its middle was a revolving gun-platform now facing towards the brig. Bond could see the backs of the three gunners as they crouched behind the shield. He looked towards the control room and his heart fell. The louvres were shut tight to form an impenetrable wall. Half a dozen bodies lay scattered on the balcony in front of them.
It was brutally clear that there was no easy way through to the nerve centre of the Stromberg empire. And there were less than four hours to Armageddon.
Drowned, Buried and Cremated
Bond fought off weariness and despondency and edged his way out on to the quayside. There had never been any doubt that it was going to be difficult. Once you started feeling sorry for yourself you were finished. Maybe the same was true about feeling sorry for other people.
He shrank back against the iron plating and reviewed the situation. From what he could see, Carter and the rest of the escaped prisoners were spread out round the berths. Some of them had got into the side galleries; occasional shots were winging from that direction. A number of them had perished in an unsuccessful attack on the control room. From the spread of their fire it sounded as if they had laid their hands on some more weapons. But wherever they moved they were within range of the central gun emplacement on the catwalk. That had to be knocked out. Bond’s eye swung on a closer orbit. The hovercar track and its protective tube ran within six feet. One of the hovercraft was conveniently placed in the nearest opening. That was twenty feet away. Bond looked around him and emerged from the shadow.
He had taken two steps when there was an ear-splitting screech above his head. He threw himself full length and screwed his eyes shut, waiting for the bullets to skewer into his flesh. Nothing happened. The siren continued to wail and he relaxed fractionally. It must be an alarm signal announcing the fire on deck. No help likely from down here, chums. Everybody has got their hands full. He raised his head and crawled towards the hovercar. It was a simple six-seater shell with a dead-man’s handle connecting to the electrified monorail. Lift it and you got the juice to propel the hovercar. The wailing of the siren stopped and there was an eerie silence
broken by the groans of a wounded man lying near the brig. There was a short burst of fire from the central catwalk and the groans stopped. Bond’s teeth ground together with a sound that was almost audible. He didn’t like shooting people in the back but sometimes they made it easier for you.
Looking carefully along the gallery that ran above his head, he straightened up and peered across to the far gallery. There was no sign of movement. Now he had to move fast before his own side picked him out as one of the enemy and started shooting. He unslung his empty weapon and placed it in the cockpit of the hovercar. Then he scrambled on to the roof of the track cover and moved towards the bows. Ten paces and he was beyond the gun crew. Looking up, he could see their shoulders hunched behind the square metal plate with the observation slits. He raised his gun and there was a warning shout followed by a burst of automatic fire from the shadows opposite. Bond concentrated on the gun crew. As they spun round he unleashed a long burst and saw two of the men buckle and slump. The third was struggling with the handle that turned the gun. Bond fired again but the defensive shield continued to swing round. He could see the sparks as his bullets screamed off it. The gun barrels were depressing towards him when the third man suddenly slid sideways and lay still with his arm draped over one of the gantry rails.
Bond could feel his body awash with sweat. The tunnel beneath his feet was raked by bullets and he started to run towards the hovercar. He sprang through the opening and snatched at the lever. There was a high-pitched whine and the hovercar lifted and began to glide forward. Bullets drummed against the tunnel housing like tropical rain. Bond kept his head down and the handle up. Two more openings flashed by and he was at the quayside on the port side of the brig. He saw the startled faces of Carter’s men bringing their weapons to bear. ‘Hold your fire men! ’ Bond felt a surge of gratitude for Carter’s quick reading of the situation and scrambled out to shelter behind the stairs leading up to the control room. Carter ducked down beside him. ‘Did you get him?’
‘No.’
Carter noticed from the expression on Bond’s face that something was wrong but he did not pursue it. ‘Tough.
Thanks for knocking out that machine-gun. We got the guy who was trying to nail you. I think we’ve just about cleaned them up out here but they’re thick as ticks on a hog’s back in the control room.’
Bond saw that Carter was holding an FN automatic rifle. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘We got into the magazine. We’ve got no problem about arms.’
‘Excellent.’ Bond looked through the door of the brig where he could see ‘Chuck’ Coyle supervising the treatment of a line of injured men. Dead bodies lay where they had dropped. The ghastly stench of death already filled the air, ‘What about losses?’
Carter’s face clouded. ‘Heavy. They really poured it into us coming out of the brig. About thirty dead and half as many again injured. The Russian captain bought it in the assault on the magazine.’ Carter shook his head in admiration. ‘Those guys fought like wildcats.’
‘What about Talbot, your opposite number on Ranger?’ ‘He’s over there behind the other stairway. He’s itching to have a go at the control room. He thinks he can blast his way in with hand-grenades.’
Bond thought about the four-inch-thick steel louvres and was sceptical. He looked at his watch. Three and a half hours to go. ‘Let’s have a talk to him.*
Talbot was in his mid-thirties, blond-haired and handsome in a typically English way which made his face seem unmarked by any contact with the unpleasant realities of life. Bond could imagine the teacups at the vicarage trembling when he returned on leave.
‘Absolutely. My chaps are rearing at the bit. Give us some covering fire and we’ll be in there like a dose of salts.’
Bond felt uneasy, but with every second that passed the two nuclear submarines were drawing closer to their firing positions. Something had to be done. He turned from Talbots eager, shiny face and read the resignation in Carter’s tired, red- veined eyes.
‘All right.’
Five minutes later, Talbot was poised beneath the shelter of the gallery with twenty men. They were armed with Sch- meisser sub-machine guns found in the magazine and four hand-grenades wrapped in cloth so that they could be lobbed against the foot of the metal screen without rolling away.
The assault party was divided into two groups of ten. They would attack simultaneously up the two stairways, under covering fire from the side of the quay. Covering fire against what? thought Bond as he looked towards the blank wall of steel. He had a terrible sense of foreboding but tried to shut it out of his mind.
Talbot swung his arm from side to side to show that he was ready and machine gun fire began to rake the steel louvres. There was the nerve-torturing screech of bullets glancing off metal but no suggestion that any impression was being made. The louvres remained bland and impervious as closed eyes. Then, suddenly, the eyes opened. Talbot’s shouting men had reached the top of the stairways when four vertical slits appeared in the steel curtains and the cheese-grater barrels of heavy machine-guns poked into view.
Bond winced and prepared for the inevitable. The barrels shuddered and a hail of bullets cut a swathe through the attackers. The muzzle velocity was so great that men seemed to be wiped away like figures
from a blackboard. One, more in advance of the others, was held in the air by the weight of bullets pouring into him. He trembled as if a powerful hosepipe was playing on his chest and then pitched full length. Bond felt like weeping as he watched his countrymen being butchered. Only Talbot remained to charge on, firing from the hip. He lobbed his hand grenade and then staggered after it like a bowler following through his delivery. Two faltering steps and a thin column of flame burst from an opening in the louvres and engulfed him. Within seconds he was a blazing torch collapsing on his own grenade. There was an explosion and he was tossed in the air like a theatrical prop. Pieces of burning uniform lay scattered across the deck. The steel louvres were unscathed. As if performing a drill movement, the gun-barrels withdrew at the same instant and the slits closed. Dying men twitched and the disgusting roast pork smell of burning flesh began to waft down from the gallery. Bond felt sick in mind and body.
‘Oh my God! ’ Carter’s eyes were closed.
‘Right.’ Bond fought to retain his composure and do something positive. ‘That taught us a lesson. No conventional small-arm is going to get us into that place. What else is there in the magazine?*
Carter wiped his grimy forehead across his sleeve and blinked. He was like a boxer shaking off a painful blow and knowing that the fight had to continue. ‘Torpedoes. They took them all out and checked them over. Nuclear and conventional.’ Bond found the grain of an idea beginning to form itself at the back of his mind. ‘Can you lay your hands on an armourer?’ Carter looked around the men huddled disconsolately behind any protection that presented itself. ‘I sure hope so. Why?’
Bond squared his jaw. ‘I want to build a bomb.*
One and a half hours later, Bond stood in the magazine feeling like a surgeon presiding over a life-and-death operation. On the armourer’s table was the dismembered shell of a conventional torpedo and around it a complicated mass of coloured wires and electrical circuits. Two men bent over the ‘patient* and another stood by to wipe the sweat from their foreheads. It was not only the sweat of fear but a result of the intense heat that was building up in the magazine. Three explosions of increasing severity had rocked the tanker in the last hour and Bond assumed that these were as a result of the fire he had left blazing on deck. The bulkheads were becoming hot to the touch and it was possible that the fire was spreading through the ship. Drowned, buried and cremated. That would add colour to his discreet obituary in the Times.
‘How’s it going?’ Bond found it agonizing to be denied physical involvement.
‘Nearly there, sir.’ The voice was calm, controlled and comforting. *We just want to make sure we don’t touch the impulse conductor circuit.’
Bond swallowed the vacuum in his throat. ‘Supposing you do?’
‘Well, sir’ - the voice was apologetic - ‘it might go off.*
Bond cursed himself for asking and tried to think of something else. What, for instance - it was of course purely by accident that she had swum so readily to his mind - what was happening to Anya?
*1 am sorry.’ Nobody hearing Stromberg’s voice could have doubted its sincerity. ‘But you do have a distressing tendency towards violence that must be controlled. The manacles will be removed when you demonstrate a more rational attitude towards your new situation. I wish you could be reasonable. You are exceptionally favoured. You, above all others, have been selected as the initiator of a new civilization. You are akin to Mary in the Christian dogma. Does not the significance of that mean something to you? Plucked from nothing to be the womb that furnishes an original species?’ His gaze drifted sideways to light upon the nail-raked cheek of Jaws, the dark blood wrinkling as it dried in its short-run tributaries.
Anya looked up and saw the fires stoking behind the glazed, pig eyes. The lips beginning to furl back from the ghastly, robot mouth. Oh God, she prayed, do not let him kiss me again.
‘We’re there, sir.’
Bond stepped forward to see the detonator being drawn away gently from its wires. He breathed an audible sigh of relief. ‘I’d clap you on the back if I wasn’t frightened of blowing us all to kingdom come. What fuses have we got?’
‘Twelve seconds, sir.’
Bond watched the small bags of explosive being packed tightly round the detonator and raised his eyes to Carter on the other side of the table. If he read the expression right, it said; if this doesn’t work, we’re done for.
Five Minutes to Armageddon
Bond clung to the steel girder and fought the waves of tiredness and nausea that passed through him. His shoulder was throbbing painfully. Sixty feet below, the water of the dock glinted dully. If he fell he would land on the starboard diving plane of the Wayne. Pray God that his arm held out. He raised himself so that he straddled the girder and winced as the metal cut into his thighs. Another wave of dizziness made him close his eyes and cling like a limpet until he was sure that he had his balance. He breathed naturally until his heart stopped thumping and then began to ease the straps of the haversack off his shoulders. More balancing problems. The pack was heavy. Eventually, he was able to swing it round with both hands and place it on the girder in front of him. A corner of the flap gaped open and revealed the thin pencil fuse. He conquered his vertigo and looked back towards the central catwalk. Running on its rail beneath the girder, the TV scanner was gliding towards him. It turned slowly from side to side like some ugly, all-seeing insect.
Bond let it pass beneath him and judged the distance to the heavy metal arm that held it to the rail. It moved on with a slight clanking noise and approached the centre point of the louvred screen of the control room. Bond raised his left wrist and looked at his watch. One ... two ... three ... the seconds ticked by and Bond measured the progress of the scanner on its return journey. When twelve seconds had passed he knew exactly where the scanner would be on its rail; approximately fifteen feet from the louvres. He let the scanner pass beneath him and began to edge forward along the girder. Now his heart was thumping uncontrollably and the palms of his hands were wet. If anyone peered through the weapon slits in the
louvres they must see him. He was, literally, a sitting target.
He reached the point he had marked with his eye and leaned forward to seize the haversack by the crudely fashioned S-shape hook that had been attached to its back. Another wave of nausea swept over him. Behind, the scanner reached the end of its track and obediently swung round with the now familiar clanking noise. Half a minute and it would be beneath him. He was now nearly over the balcony and he could see Carter and his men crouching at the foot of the stairways. God lend him strength to provide them with a better chance than poor Talbot had been given. He turned his head with difficulty and saw that the scanner was now twenty feet away. Gritting his teeth, he lay at full stretch with his head turned to one side and his cheek pressed against the girder. His arms stretched down on either side and he clutched the haversack with both hands and waited.
Boom!
The force of the explosion rocked the ship, the lights flickered and the scanner stopped. Bond clung to his perch by his toe nails and nearly cried out in pain and exasperation. The scanner was four feet from his reach. The weight of the bomb was tearing his injured arm out of its socket. He could not hold it for more than a few seconds. If the latest explosion had affected the power supply they were finished. Come on, damn you! He bit his lip and tasted blood. His fingers slowly started to open. If he dropped the bomb on the quayside and it went off ... the thought gave him the strength to lock his fingers. He could feel the sinews of his arms being systematically torn away from their moorings. And then the lights flickered and the scanner clanked into action. Bond forced his head away from the girder and closed a numb finger and thumb around the fuse. He pressed without feeling anything and aimed the hook at the scanner arm. His first thrust was brushed aside but he launched himself forward and nearly rolled off the girder in a desperate effort to keep up with it. The hook scored the flesh on the back of his hand and then twisted round the
scanner arm. The haversack dropped and then hung trembling behind the scanner as it joggled away.
As if hypnotized, Bond watched it narrowing the distance to the steel wall And then the voice of self-preservation shouted in his ear. He thrust himself backwards in a series of untidy leapfrogs and when the scanner seemed to be almost against the louvres, twisted round and threw himself in a despairing leap towards the dock. He missed the quayside by inches and hit the water as a blinding flash and a thunderclap of noise reverberated through the ship. The water closed above his head and when he came up it was to see a thick pall of smoke spilling over the balcony and hear the rattle of small-arms fire.
Willing hands pulled him from the water and he snatched up an automatic and drove his legs towards the starboard staircase. His head rose above the level of the gallery and he saw that the central louvres had been blasted out of true. They looked like blackened, crooked teeth. A giant hole had been torn in the metal screen.
Bond ran through the smoke to find that the battle was over. Those of Stromberg’s men that had not been killed were being herded into a corner and made to he face down with their hands behind their heads. A few technicians still cowered beside their machines. With a certain grim satisfaction, Bond saw that no quarter had been given. Each of the machine-gunners was dead at his post. He was relieved to find Carter striding towards him.
The Spy Who Loved Me Page 17