James Bond Anthology (210 page)

Bond laid the photostat quietly down on top of the others. He reached into his hip-pocket for the gunmetal cigarette case that now contained only nine cigarettes, took one and lit it, drawing the smoke deep down into his lungs and letting it out with a long, reflective hiss.

M. swivelled his chair round so they were facing each other. ‘Well?’

Bond noticed that M.’s eyes, three weeks before so clear and vital, were now bloodshot and strained. No wonder! He said: ‘If this plane, and the weapons, really are missing, I think it stands up, sir. I think they mean it. I think it’s a true bill.’

M. said, ‘So does the War Cabinet. So do I.’ He paused. ‘Yes, the plane with the bombs is missing. And the stock numbers on the bombs are correct.’

8 |
‘
BIG FLEAS HAVE LITTLE FLEAS
…’

Bond said, ‘What is there to go on, sir?’

‘Damned little, practically speaking nothing. Nobody’s ever heard of these SPECTRE people. We know there’s some kind of independent unit working in Europe – we’ve bought some stuff from them, so have the Americans, and Mathis admits now that Goltz, that French heavy-water scientist who went over last year, was assassinated by them, for big money, as a result of an offer he got out of the blue. No names were mentioned. It was all done on the radio, the same 16 megacycles that’s mentioned in the letter. To the Deuxième Communications section. Mathis accepted on the off-chance. They did a neat job. Mathis paid up – a suitcase full of money left at a Michelin road sign on N1. But no one can tie them in with these SPECTRE people. When we and the Americans dealt, there were endless cutouts, really professional ones, and anyway we were more interested in the end product than the people involved. We both paid a lot of money, but it was worth it. If it’s the same group working this, they’re a serious outfit and I’ve told the P.M. so. But that’s not the point. The plane is missing and the two bombs, just as the letter says. All details exactly correct. The Vindicator was on a N.A.T.O. training flight south of Ireland and out into the Atlantic.’ M. reached for a bulky folder and turned over some pages. He found what he wanted. ‘Yes, it was to be a six-hour flight leaving Boscombe Down at eight p.m. and due back at two a.m. There was an R.A.F. crew of five and a N.A.T.O. observer, an Italian, man called Petacchi, Giuseppi Petacchi, squadron leader in the Italian Air Force, seconded to N.A.T.O. Fine flyer, apparently, but they’re checking on his background now. He was sent over here on a normal tour of duty. The top pilots from N.A.T.O. have been coming over for months to get used to the Vindicator and the bomb-release routines. This plane’s apparently going to be used for the N.A.T.O. long range striking force. Anyway,’ M. turned over a page, ‘the plane was watched on the screen as usual and all went well until it was west of Ireland at about 40,000 feet. Then, contrary to the drill, it came down to around 30,000 and got lost in the transatlantic air traffic. Bomber Command tried to get in touch, but the radio couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. The immediate reaction was that the Vindicator had hit one of the transatlantic planes and there was something of a panic. But none of the companies reported any trouble or even a sighting.’ M. looked across at Bond. ‘And that was the end of it. The plane just vanished.’

Bond said, ‘Did the American D.E.W. line pick it up – their Defence Early Warning system?’

‘There’s a query on that. The only grain of evidence we’ve got. Apparently about five hundred miles east of Boston there was some evidence that a plane had peeled off the inward route to Idlewild and turned south. But that’s another big traffic lane – for the northern traffic from Montreal and Gander down to Bermuda and the Bahamas and South America. So these D.E.W. operators just put it down as a B.O.A.C. or Trans-Canada plane.’

‘It certainly sounds as if they’ve got the whole thing worked out pretty well, hiding in these traffic lanes. Could the plane have turned northwards in the middle of the Atlantic and made for Russia?’

‘Yes, or southwards. There’s a big block of space about 500 miles out from both shores that’s out of radar range. Better still, it could have turned on its tracks and come back in to Europe on any of two or three air-lanes. In fact it could be almost anywhere in the world by now. That’s the point.’

‘But it’s a huge plane. It must need special runways and so on. It must have come down somewhere. You can’t hide a plane of that size.’

‘Just so. All these things are obvious. By midnight last night the R.A.F. had checked with every single airport, every one in the world, that could have taken it. Negative. But the C.A.S. says of course it could be crash-landed in the Sahara for instance, or on some other desert, or in the sea, in shallow water.’

‘Wouldn’t that explode the bombs?’

‘No. They’re absolutely safe until they’re armed. Apparently even a direct drop, like that one from the B-47 over North Carolina in 1958, would only explode the T.N.T. trigger to the thing. Not the plutonium.’

‘How are these SPECTRE people going to explode them then?’

M. spread his hands. ‘They explained all this at the War Cabinet meeting. I don’t understand it all, but apparently an atomic bomb looks just like any other bomb. The way it works is that the nose is full of ordinary T.N.T. with the plutonium in the tail. Between the two there’s a hole into which you screw some sort of detonator, a kind of plug. When the bomb hits, the T.N.T. ignites the detonator and the detonator sets off the plutonium.’

‘So these people would have to drop the bomb to set it off?’

‘Apparently not. They would need a man with good physics knowledge who understood the thing, but then all he’d have to do would be to unscrew the nose cone on the bomb – the ordinary detonator that sets off the T.N.T. – and fix on some kind of time fuse that would ignite the T.N.T. without it being dropped. That would set the thing off. And it’s not a very bulky affair. You could get the whole thing into something only about twice the size of a big golf-bag. Very heavy, of course. But you could put it into the back of a big car, for instance, and just run the car into a town and leave it parked with the time fuse switched on. Give yourself a couple of hours’ start to get out of range – at least 100 miles away – and that would be that.’

Bond reached in his pocket for another cigarette. It couldn’t be, yet it was so. Just what his Service and all the other intelligence services in the world had been expecting to happen. The anonymous little man in the raincoat with a heavy suitcase – or golf-bag, if you like. The left luggage office, the parked car, the clump of bushes in a park in the centre of a big town. And there was no answer to it. In a few years’ time, if the experts were right, there would be even less answer to it. Every tin-pot little nation would be making atomic bombs in their backyards, so to speak. Apparently there was no secret now about the things. It had only been the prototypes that had been difficult – like the first gunpowder weapons for instance, or machine-guns or tanks. Today these were everybody’s bows and arrows. Tomorrow, or the day after, the bows and arrows would be atomic bombs. And this was the first blackmail case. Unless SPECTRE was stopped, the word would get round and soon every criminal scientist with a chemical set and some scrap iron would be doing it. If they couldn’t be stopped in time there would be nothing for it but to pay up. Bond said so.

‘That’s about it,’ commented M. ‘From every point of view, including politics, not that they matter all that much. But neither the P.M. nor the President would last five minutes if anything went wrong. But whether we pay or don’t pay, the consequences will be endless – and all bad. That’s why absolutely everything has got to be done to find these people and the plane and stop the thing in time. The P.M. and the President are entirely agreed. Every intelligence man all over the world who’s on our side is being put on to this operation – Operation
Thunderball
they’re calling it. Planes, ships, submarines – and of course money’s no object. We can have everything, whenever we want it. The Cabinet have already set up a special staff and a war-room. Every scrap of information will be fed into it. The Americans have done the same. Some kind of a leak can’t be helped. It’s being put about that all the panic, and it is panic, is because of the loss of the Vindicator – bombs included, whatever fuss that may cause politically. Only the letter will be absolutely secret. All the usual detective work – finger-prints, Brighton, writing paper – these’ll be looked after by Scotland Yard with the F.B.I., Interpol, and all the N.A.T.O. intelligence organizations helping where they can. Only a segment of the paper and the typing will be used – a few innocent words. This will all be quite separate from the search for the plane. That’ll be handled as a top espionage matter. No one should be able to connect the two investigations. M.I.5 will handle the background to all the crew members and the Italian observer. That will be a natural part of the search for the plane. As for the Service, we’ve teamed up with the C.I.A. to cover the world. Allen Dulles is putting every man he’s got on to it and so am I. Just sent out a General Call. Now all we can do is sit back and wait.’

Bond lit another cigarette, his sinful third in one hour. He said, putting unconcern into his voice, ‘Where do I come in, sir?’

M. looked vaguely at Bond, as if seeing him for the first time. Then he swivelled his chair and gazed again through the window at nothing. Finally he said, in a conversational tone of voice, ‘I have committed a breach of faith with the P.M. in telling you all this, 007. I was under oath to tell no one what I have just told you. I decided to do what I have done because I have an idea, a hunch, and I wish this idea to be pursued by a’ – he hesitated – ‘by a reliable man. It seemed to me that the only grain of possible evidence in this case was the D.E.W. radar plot, a doubtful one I admit, of the plane that left the East–West air channel over the Atlantic and turned south towards Bermuda and the Bahamas. I decided to accept this evidence, although it has not aroused much interest elsewhere. I then spent some time studying a map and charts of the Western Atlantic and I endeavoured to put myself in the minds of SPECTRE – or rather, for there is certainly a master mind behind all this, in the mind of the chief of SPECTRE: my opposite number, so to speak. And I came to certain conclusions. I decided that a favourable target for Bomb No. 1, and for Bomb No. 2, if it comes to that, would be in America rather than in Europe. To begin with, the Americans are more bomb-conscious than we in Europe and therefore more susceptible to persuasion if it came to using Bomb No. 2. Installations worth more than £100,000,000, and thus targets for Bomb No. 1, are more numerous in America than in Europe, and finally, guessing that SPECTRE is a European organization, from the style of the letter and from the paper, which is Dutch by the way, and also from the ruthlessness of the plot, it seemed to me at least possible that an American rather than a European target might have been chosen. Anyway, going on these assumptions, and assuming that the plane could not have landed in America itself or off American shores – the coastal radar network is too good – I looked for a neighbouring area which might be suitable. And,’ M. glanced round at Bond and away again, ‘I decided on the Bahamas, the group of islands, many of them uninhabited, surrounded mostly by shoal water over sand and possessing only one simple radar station – and that one concerned only with civilian air traffic and manned by local civilian personnel. South, towards Cuba, Jamaica, and the Caribbean, offers no worthwhile targets. Anyway, it is too far from the American coastline. Northwards towards Bermuda has the same disadvantages. But the nearest of the Bahama group is only 200 miles – only six or seven hours in a fast motor-boat or yacht – from the American coastline.’

Bond interrupted. ‘If you’re right, sir, why didn’t SPECTRE send their letter to the President instead of the P.M.?’

‘For the sake of obscurity. To make us do what we are doing – hunting all round the world instead of only in one part of it. And for maximum impact. SPECTRE would realize that the arrival of the letter right on top of the loss of the bomber would hit us in the solar plexus. It might, they would reason, even shake the money out of us without any further effort. The next stage of their operation, attacking target No. 1, is going to be a nasty business for them. It’s going to expose their whereabouts to a considerable extent. They’d like to collect the money and close the operation as quickly as possible. That’s what we’ve got to gamble on. We’ve got to push them as close to the use of No. 1 bomb as we dare in the hope that something will betray them in the next six and three-quarter days. It’s a slim chance. I’m pinning my hopes on my guess’ – M. swung his chair round to the desk – ‘and on you. Well,’ he looked hard at Bond. ‘Any comments? If not you’d better get started. You’re booked on all New York planes from now until midnight. Then on by B.O.A.C. I thought of using an R.A.F. Canberra, but I don’t want your arrival to make any noise. You’re a rich young man looking for some property in the islands. That’ll give you an excuse to do as much prospecting as you want. Well?’

‘All right, sir.’ Bond got to his feet. ‘I’d rather have had some-where more interesting – the Iron Curtain beat for instance. I can’t help feeling this is a bigger operation than a small unit could take on. For my money this looks more like a Russian job. They get the experimental plane and the bombs – they obviously want them – and throw dust in our eyes with all this SPECTRE ballyhoo. If SMERSH was still in business, I’d say they’d got a finger in it somewhere. Just their style. But the Eastern Stations may pick up something on that if there’s anything in the idea. Anything else, sir? Who do I co-operate with in Nassau?’