John Gardner (6 page)

Let me introduce you to Lieutenant-Commander Bernard Jaubert and Lieutenant Fran~ois Brouse.” The band struck up “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’, and two figures appeared from the crew room which was obviously situated somewhere to their right on the port side.

They were already in flight coveralls, with helmets in place, and when they came into Bond’s line of vision as they reached the helicopter, he felt a lurch of recognition.

The pilot was slightly built, but he could identify the walk anywhere: the cat-like tread of Xenia Onatopp.

There was a pause of maybe three seconds as the two figures swarmed up the ladder taking them to the long domed canopy. They were about to settle into the cockpit and electronics station when Bond leaped to his feet and lunged forward, heading straight towards the helicopter.

There were a couple of screams and some shouts.

Bandsmen were scattered, and he had almost reached the edge of the pad before several brawny Naval Police grabbed him.

“Stop them!” he yelled. “They’re not your crew!

Stop !” He was thrown to the deck struggling, while the police held him down. He sucked in air and began to shout again, but was drowned out by the Tigre’s engines.

An officer had joined them and was mouthing something at him, but his hearing was blanked off by the thunder from the chopper.

He threw one of his captors off and battled his way to his feet, still restrained by the other three as he watched the machine take off, lifting very fast and then going into an almost impossible Rate Fiv turn, something you did not see helicopters do as a rule. There was a scatter of applause from the assembled dignitaries as the helicopter pointed its nose towards the sky and climbed with a speed that seemed to match some jet fighters, then it fell away, doing a perfect Immelman Turn, and at that moment a white-faced naval policeman came running up, almost babbling at the officer -“They’re dead.” He was breathless.

“In the crew room, sir. The flight crew’re dead. The Lieutenant Commander’s been shot. Lieutenant Brouse has had his throat cut!” The officer looked around him, as though he were searching for some way to reverse the facts he was hearing.

In the distance the engine noise of the Tigre was getting fainter.

“You are part of some plot.” He stubbed a finger into Bond’s chest “Who are you?”

“Commander Bond, Royal Navy. Intelligence. I was trying to warn you.

“But who the hell.. ?”

“Janus,’ Bond mouthed, his eyes hard and his face set as though carved in hard stone. “The Russian Janus Crime Syndicate.”

“So, the Janus Crime Syndicate?” M raised an eyebrow and looked across her desk at Bond.

M’s office had changed beyond belief since Bond’s old Chief had retired. There was no rich smell of his pipe, no soft leather chairs, no hint of the Old Man’s brilliant career in the Royal Navy. The new M had brought with her the sterility of the current technocracy. The furniture was almost a parody of high tech office fittings. There was a Scandinavian influence: posture improving chairs, her own chair which was not a chair but something into which you appeared to contort your body.

The black desk held no clutter but for the very large computer monitor and a moveable lamp plus, naturally, several colour coded telephones. M glanced up at Bond and fixed him with a long serious look. She wore a severe black business suit, her hair was styled very short, almost a thin cap on her scalp, at her neck was one piece of jewellery: a single white on blue cameo brooch, clasped high on her blouse.

Looking at her eyes, Bond thought of the old joke about the bank manager with one glass eye. People could always tell which was the glass one because it was the eye that showed compassion.

“So, you say Janus?” She was all business, even brusque.

“I think it follows, ma’am. A known Janus confidante, Ms Onatopp; a yacht belonging to a known Janus front.

A disappearing American admiral. —“Who you say is dead.”

“I saw the body. He was very dead.”

“It’s a shade too pat for my liking.”

“You mean Janus is a little ham-fisted, leaving their pawmarks all over the place?”

“Precisely. The yacht had long gone before any authorities could get near. Gone, Bond. Vanished, Bond, as though it had never been…. “But there is a harbour record that it was there. The criminal organisations of the new Russia are not known for their subtlety, Ma’am.” She looked up at him to see if he was being frivolous, but his face did not betray his thoughts. The woman could take nothing at face value. He found her constantly querying undeniable facts. Perhaps this was her background, for she was an analyst at heart; a wrangler; a detector of deceit through columns of figures. Since she had taken over, almost everyone within the Service spoke of her as the Evil Queen of Numbers and many said she should really have been assigned to the Inland Revenue Service’s Special Office. Within two days of her appointment, Bill Tanner the old M’s faithful Chief of Staff - had almost resigned when his title was changed to Senior Analyst

“Yes, indeed, the Tigre its a wonderful thing; and it also vanished from the face of the earth. Any ideas on that, Commander Bond?”

“That’s its function in life, Ma’am. The Tigre’s entire purpose is to be invisible. “Yes, but..

“But half the French airforce were scrambled, every tracking station was put on alert? Yes, about twenty minutes after it was stolen. I have my theory on how that little trick was accomplished.”

“How?”

“With what that thing carries, it can remain invisible, except to the naked eye, for up to twenty-four hours. I think the thieves simply put the chopper down in some deserted area - not difficult in the Alps - and camouflaged it, waiting until nightfall and for the search to go cold.

Then they simply took off again and did the trip in easy stages.

M thought about this for some time, her brow wrinkled, fingers drumming on the desk. “We’ve done all we can to track the thing.

Every last piece of electronic listening and satellite surveillance has the profile. It can’t hide for ever.

Bond wanted to say something like, “You want to bet?” but controlled his urge as she nodded - a gesture of terse dismissal.

He was almost at the door when a sudden buzz on M’s intercom slowed him down.

“They’ve found the helicopter, the Tigre.” Moneypenny sounded breathless. “They would like you to come down to the Operations Room as soon as possible. Mr. Tanner says it is somewhat urgent.”

“You go ahead, 007.” M had already begun to busy herself at the desk. “I’ll be down shortly.”

“Typical,’ he thought, but acknowledged the instruction calmly. “Where have they found the damned thing?” he asked himself.

His intuition told him that the Operations Room had unpleasant news in store, but he had no idea of how serious the situation would really turn out to be.

Some fifty miles inland from the furthest tip of northern Russia where the land spits out into the Arctic Ocean, there is a ruin that was once Severnaya Station, an operational control post for some of the Soviet Union’s most terrifying weapons of mass destruction. The ground around the area is for the most part flat, and usually strewn with ice and snow for most of the year.

About half-an-hour before Bond was summoned to the Operations Room at the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service in London, a sled, drawn by four dogs, bounced and rolled its way towards the little parcel of ruined buildings. The man who stood at the back of the sled was a Yuit Eskimo, and he came from the small settlement close to what had once been a whole village, some two miles from Severnaya Station.

After the people had come to build the now ruined station, many of the Yuit had died from diseases brought by the strangers. Only the hardy ones remained, now four families were left in the settlement.

They merely wanted to live as their people had always lived, so they had made themselves useful to the strangers just as he was doing by travelling to the nearest township and collecting artifacts which he could sell when the troglodytes came up from under the ground, which they did every six months or so.

The Yuit was very tired: anxious to see his family again for the entire trip had taken the best part of a week.

Though he would never know it, the accident occurred because of his fatigue and the pace at which he ran the dogs. He did not even see the boulder peeping from the slick ground. The lead dog saw the danger a fraction too late, swerved to avoid the obstacle and swung the sled into an impossible turn. The runners hit the boulder off centre and the driver was thrown hard against a cluster of rocks and ice.

Even with the layers of fur and the big hood he wore, the man broke several bones including his neck. He tried to move but could not even stir for the pain. He lay there in the snow, with the dogs whining and-clustering around him. He made a supreme effort, one last great push through the agony, attempting to get up. This last action killed him and he dropped back onto the ground, a little bundle of fur.

The dogs gathered around him for a while, as though trying to give their master some warmth to revive him.

After ten minutes or so they sat down and waited. Eventually the lead dog would guide them back to the tiny settlement, but for the moment they kept a vigil over their dead master. Nobody could know how this accident and the unsupervised dog team would save another life in the next few hours.

It was quite soon after the sled accident that the Tigre helicopter arrived, bearing its two uninvited guests.

Both British and American analysts had shown an interest in the seemingly defunct Severnaya Station. From the big satellites they had many pictures of the area which the Russians claimed had been taken off the operational list for the past two years. The pictures showed ruin and decay, except for one thing - the huge radio telescope dish that appeared to grow from the ground. The dish had been there for some years, but the pictures seemed to show that it occasionally changed.

The analysts maintained that over a very short period of time the dish had become larger and that it moved now and then. There were sceptics, of course, some of them with a great deal of experience and knowledge.

The latter pointed out that the dish might well move with the wind, and the idea that it had become larger was an optical illusion caused by changes in the weather, and different angles of the sun.

In fact the dish was larger, and it did move at the command of men and women hidden deep in the earth, some thirty feet below the surface, for the Severnaya Station was far from dormant.

The dish, at this very moment, was locked onto a forgotten piece of former Soviet space junk - in reality a fully operational satellite - over the Middle East It was being controlled by a young woman sitting at a work-station in a well-lit, windowless, scrupulously clean, spacious computer room.

There were roughly a dozen such men and women, all working in this section of the complex. Not one of them was over forty years of age and they had been chosen from a list of hundreds of potential computer scientists throughout the Federation of Russian States.

Doors to kitchens, rest rooms, dining and sleeping facilities led off from this technical area, and a thick glass wall divided the scientists from a control room, manned by several men and women in uniform. This second section
J’J
U
y ~ contained a long console replete with digital electronic instruments and switches topped by a vast screen, blank at this moment. Sunk into the wall behind this complex control area, was a brilliant red safe. Next to the safe in scarlet lettering was a notice in Russian which said Locked.

Authorization Code Required, and as an extra precaution, a steel electronic gate secured by steel plates directly in front of the safe.

Out among the lines of computers, the girl manipulating the satellite was tall, slender and dark with high cheek bones and clear brown eyes. What marked this girl, Natalya Simonova, from the other technicians was her neatness and the clothes she wore - a long black skirt and a ~bite shirt covered by a patterned waistcoat. Many of her colleagues wore the untidy, shapeless grunge look, or worse. The man to her right was clad in dirty jeans, a Whited magazine T-shirt and a black leather motorbike jacKet. His hair looked as though it had seen neither shampoo nor comb in a week and his attitude was one of an edgY~ spaced-out cyberpunk. Boris Grishenko was indeed all of these things and tolerated by those who controlled the establishment because he was undoubtedly the most brilliant scientist in the entire complex.

Natalya spoke quietly into the small mike attached to a headset “Rotate right sixty degrees, ascend to one hundred kilometres.

The blinking satellite symbol on her monitor moved at bet bidding.

She smiled as though she had just taught a clever trick to a pet. Her delight was interrupted by a miniacal scream of laughter from Boris.

“I’ve done it.

Defle it..

natalya glanced at her friend, Anna, who was seated at the terminal on her left. Anna rolled her eyes and made a gesture with her hand which meant to show that he was unhinged.

“Natalya, come and see what I’ve done.” He had gone into hyper crazy mode, so she walked over and looked at his set-up. Boris, being Boris, had several screens set up in front of him. “I’m in!” he laughed, a tuneless cackle.

On one screen she saw the Seal of the US Department of Justice.

“Christ, Boris, you’ve hacked into the US Department of Justice?

Do you know what will happen if they trace it? If they trace it to here?”

“Sure, the Chief of Computers’ll call me a genius, move me back to Moscow and give me a million bucks - which is never going to happen..

“They pay us in good hard currency anyway, and to hear you talk sometimes that’s what you get - a million.”

“Ach, we all get the same.

I’d like a chance to spend it sometime instead of being here, living like a ground hog.

“A worm more likely.

“Anyway, the Americans are too stupid to catch me.

They can’t detect viruses on a hard drive, let alone His computer gave a warning beep and the seal dissolved, leaving a message flashing on the screen - UNAUTHORISED ENTRY DETECTED.