James Bond Anthology (61 page)

Both men wore spotless white overalls with plastic zip fasteners at the sleeves and ankles and down the back. Their hair was close-cropped so that the skin shone through and they would have looked like people from another planet but for the untidy black moustache and imperial of Dr. Walter and the pale wispy moustache of Krebs. They were both caricatures – a mad scientist and a youthful version of Peter Lorre.

The colourful ogreish figure of Drax was a pleasant contrast in this chilly company and Bond was grateful to him for the cheerful roughness of his welcome and for his apparent wish to bury the hatchet and make the best of his new security officer.

Drax was very much the host. He rubbed his hands together. ‘Now, Willy,’ he said, ‘how about making one of your excellent dry Martinis for us? Except, of course, for the Doctor. Doesn’t drink or smoke,’ he explained to Bond, returning to his place by the mantelpiece. ‘Hardly breathes.’ He barked out a short laugh. ‘Thinks of nothing but the rocket. Do you, my friend?’

The Doctor looked stonily in front of him. ‘You are pleased to joke,’ he said.

‘Now, now,’ said Drax, as if to a child. ‘We will go back to those leading edges later. Everybody’s quite happy about them except you.’ He turned to Bond. ‘The good Doctor is always frightening us,’ he explained indulgently. ‘He’s always having nightmares about something. Now it’s the leading edges of the fins. They’re already as sharp as razor blades – hardly any wind resistance at all. And he suddenly gets it into his head that they’re going to melt. Friction of the air. Of course everything’s possible, but they’ve been tested at over 3,000 degrees and, as I tell him, if they’re going to melt then the whole rocket will melt. And that’s just not going to happen,’ he added with a grim smile.

Krebs came up with a silver tray with four full glasses and a frosted shaker. The Martini was excellent and Bond said so.

‘You are ferry kind,’ said Krebs with a smirk of satisfaction. ‘Sir Hugo is ferry exacting.’

‘Fill up his glass,’ said Drax, ‘and then perhaps our friend would like to wash. We dine at eight sharp.’

As he spoke there came the muffled wail of a siren and almost immediately the sound of a body of men running in strict unison across the concrete apron outside.

‘That’s the first night shift,’ explained Drax. ‘Barracks are just behind the house. Must be eight o’clock. We do everything at the double here,’ he added with a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. ‘Precision. Lot of scientists about, but we try to run the place like a military establishment. Willy, look after the Commander. We’ll go ahead. Come along, my dear.’

As Bond followed Krebs to the door through which he had entered, he saw the other two with Drax in the lead make for the double doors at the end of the room which had opened as Drax finished speaking. The manservant in the white coat stood in the entrance. As Bond went out into the hall it crossed his mind that Drax would certainly go into the dining-room ahead of Miss Brand. Forceful personality. Treated his staff like children. Obviously a born leader. Where had he got it from? The Army? Or did it grow on one with millions of money? Bond followed the slug-like neck of Krebs and wondered.

The dinner was excellent. Drax was a genial host and at his own table his manners were faultless. Most of his conversation consisted in drawing out Dr. Walter for the benefit of Bond, and it covered a wide range of technical matters which Drax took pains to explain briefly after each topic had been exhausted. Bond was impressed by the confidence with which Drax handled each abstruse problem as it was raised, and by his immense grasp of detail. A genuine admiration for the man gradually developed in him and overshadowed much of his previous dislike. He felt more than ever inclined to forget the Blades affair now that he was faced with the other Drax, the creator and inspired leader of a remarkable enterprise.

Bond sat between his host and Miss Brand. He made several attempts to engage her in conversation. He failed completely. She answered with polite monosyllables and would hardly meet his eye. Bond became mildly irritated. He found her physically very attractive and it annoyed him to be unable to extract the smallest response. He felt that her frigid indifference was overacted and that security would have been far better met with an easy, friendly approach instead of this exaggerated reticence. He felt a strong urge to give her a sharp kick on the ankle. The idea entertained him and he found himself observing her with a fresh eye – as a girl and not as an official colleague. As a start, and under cover of a long argument between Drax and Walter, in which she was required to join, about the collation of weather reports from the Air Ministry and from Europe, he began to add up his impressions of her.

She was far more attractive than her photograph had suggested and it was difficult to see traces of the severe competence of a policewoman in the seductive girl beside him. There was authority in the definite line of the profile, but the long black eyelashes over the dark blue eyes and the rather wide mouth might have been painted by Marie Laurencin. Yet the lips were too full for a Laurencin and the dark brown hair that curved inwards at the base of the neck was of a different fashion. There was a hint of northern blood in the high cheekbones and in the very slight upward slant of the eyes, but the warmth of her skin was entirely English. There was too much poise and authority in her gestures and in the carriage of her head for her to be a very convincing portrait of a secretary. In fact she seemed almost a member of Drax’s team, and Bond noticed that the men listened with attention as she answered Drax’s questions.

Her rather severe evening dress was in charcoal black grosgrain with full sleeves that came below the elbow. The wrap-over bodice just showed the swell of her breasts, which were as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record-sheet. At the point of the vee there was a bright blue cameo brooch, a Tassie intaglio, Bond guessed, cheap but imaginative. She wore no other jewellery except a half-hoop of small diamonds on her engagement finger. Apart from the warm rouge on her lips, she wore no make-up and her nails were square-cut with a natural polish.

Altogether, Bond decided, she was a very lovely girl and beneath her reserve, a very passionate one. And, he reflected, she might be a policewoman and an expert at jujitsu, but she also had a mole on her right breast.

With this comforting thought Bond turned the whole of his attention to the conversation between Drax and Walter and made no further attempts to make friends with the girl.

Dinner ended at nine. ‘Now we will go over and introduce you to the Moonraker,’ said Drax, rising abruptly from the table. ‘Walter will accompany us. He has much to do. Come along, my dear Bond.’

Without a word to Krebs or the girl he strode out of the room. Bond and Walter followed him.

They left the house and walked across the concrete towards the distant shape on the edge of the cliff. The moon had risen and in the distance the squat dome shone palely in its light.

A hundred yards from the site Drax stopped. ‘I will explain the geography,’ he said. ‘Walter, you go ahead. They will be waiting for you to have another look at those fins. Don’t worry about them, my dear fellow. Those people at High Duty Alloys know what they’re doing. Now,’ he turned to Bond and gestured towards the milk-white dome, ‘in there is the Moonraker. What you see is the lid of a wide shaft that has been cut about forty foot down into the chalk. The two halves of the dome are opened hydraulically and folded back flush with that twenty-foot wall. If they were open now, you would see the nose of the Moonraker just protruding above the level of the wall. Over there,’ he pointed to a square shape that was almost out of sight in the direction of Deal, ‘is the firing point. Concrete blockhouse. Full of radar tracking gadgets – Doppler velocity radar and flight-path radar, for instance. Information is fed to them by twenty telemetering channels in the nose of the rocket. There’s a big television screen in there too so that you can watch the behaviour of the rocket inside the shaft after the pumps have been started. Another television set to follow the beginning of its climb. Alongside the blockhouse there’s a hoist down the face of the cliff. Quite a lot of gear has been brought to the site by sea and then sent up on the hoist. That whine you hear is from the power house over there,’ he gestured vaguely in the direction of Dover. ‘The men’s barracks and the house are protected by the blast-wall, but when we fire there won’t be anyone within a mile of the site, except the Ministry experts and the BBC team who are going to be in the firing point. Hope it’ll stand up to the blast. Walter says that the site and a lot of the concrete apron will be melted by the heat. That’s all. Nothing else you need to know about until we get inside. Come along.’

Bond noted again the abrupt tone of command. He followed in silence across the moonlit expanse until they came to the supporting wall of the dome. A naked red bulb glowed over a steel-plated door in the wall. It illuminated a bold sign which said in English and German: mortal danger. ENTRY FORBIDDEN WHEN RED LAMP SHOWS. RING AND WAIT.

Drax pressed the button beneath the notice and there was the muffled clang of an alarm bell. ‘Might be somebody working with oxy-acetylene or doing some other delicate job,’ he explained. ‘Take his mind off his job for a split second as somebody comes in and you could have an expensive mistake. Everybody downs tools when the bell rings and then starts up again when they see what it is.’ Drax stood away from the door and pointed upwards to a row of four-foot-wide gratings just below the top of the wall. ‘Ventilator shafts,’ he explained. ‘Air-conditioned inside to 70 degrees.’

The door was opened by a man with a truncheon in his hand and a revolver at his hip. Bond followed Drax through into a small anteroom. It contained nothing but a bench and a neat row of felt slippers.

‘Have to put these on,’ said Drax sitting down and kicking off his shoes. ‘Might slip up and knock into someone. Better leave your coat here, too. Seventy degrees is quite warm.’

‘Thanks,’ said Bond remembering the Beretta at his armpit. ‘As a matter of fact I don’t feel the heat.’

Feeling like a visitor to an operating theatre, Bond followed Drax through a communicating door out on to an iron catwalk and into a blaze of spotlights that made him automatically put a hand up to his eyes as he grasped the guard-rail in front of him.

When he took his hand away he was greeted by a scene of such splendour that for several minutes he stood speechless, his eyes dazzled by the terrible beauty of the greatest weapon on earth.

12 | THE MOONRAKER

It was like being inside the polished barrel of a huge gun. From the floor, forty feet below, rose circular walls of polished metal near the top of which he and Drax clung like two flies. Up through the centre of the shaft, which was about thirty feet wide, soared a pencil of glistening chromium, whose point, tapering to a needle-sharp antenna, seemed to graze the roof twenty feet above their heads.

The shimmering projectile rested on a blunt cone of latticed steel which rose from the floor between the tips of three severely back-swept delta fins that looked as sharp as surgeons’ scalpels. But otherwise nothing marred the silken sheen of the fifty feet of polished chrome steel except the spidery fingers of two light gantries which stood out from the walls and clasped the waist of the rocket between thick pads of foam-rubber.

Where they touched the rocket, small access doors stood open in the steel skin and, as Bond looked down, a man crawled out of one door on to the narrow platform of the gantry and closed the door behind him with a gloved hand. He walked gingerly along the narrow bridge to the wall and turned a handle. There was a sharp whine of machinery and the gantry took its padded hand off the rocket and held it poised in the air like the forelegs of a praying mantis. The whine altered to a deeper tone and the gantry slowly telescoped in on itself. Then it reached out again and seized the rocket ten feet lower down. Its operator crawled out along its arm and opened another small access door and disappeared inside.

‘Probably checking the fuel-feed from the after tanks,’ said Drax. ‘Gravity feed. Tricky bit of design. What do you think of her?’ He looked with pleasure at Bond’s rapt expression.

‘One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,’ said Bond. It was easy to talk. There was hardly a sound in the great steel shaft and the voices of the men clustered below under the tail of the rocket were no more than a murmur.

Drax pointed upwards. ‘Warhead,’ he explained. ‘Experimental one now. Full of instruments. Telemeters and so forth. Then the gyros just opposite us here. Then mostly fuel tanks all the way down until you get to the turbines near the tail. Driven by superheated steam, made by decomposing hydrogen peroxide. The fuel, fluorine and hydrogen’ (he glanced sharply at Bond. ‘That’s top-secret by the way’) ‘falls down the feed tubes and gets ignited as soon as it’s forced into the motor. Sort of controlled explosion which shoots the rocket into the air. That steel floor under the rocket slides away. There’s a big exhaust pit underneath. Comes out at the base of the cliff. You’ll see it tomorrow. Looks like a huge cave. When we ran a static test the other day the chalk melted and ran out into the sea like water. Hope we don’t burn down the famous white cliffs when we come to the real thing. Like to come and have a look at the works?’

Bond followed silently as Drax led the way down the steep iron ladder that curved down the side of the steel wall. He felt a glow of admiration and almost of reverence for this man and his majestic achievement. How could he ever have been put off by Drax’s childish behaviour at the card-table? Even the greatest men have their weaknesses. Drax must need an outlet for the tension of the fantastic responsibility he was carrying. It was clear from the conversation at dinner that he couldn’t shed much on to the shoulders of his highly-strung deputy. From him alone had to spring the vitality and confidence to buoy up his whole team. Even in such a small thing as winning at cards it must be important to him to be constantly reassuring himself, constantly searching out omens of good fortune and success, even to the point of creating these omens for himself. Who, Bond asked himself, wouldn’t sweat and bite his nails when so much had been dared, when so much was at stake?