Live and Let Die: A James Bond Novel (17 page)

His ships always anchored in

Shark

Bay

and he careened them in the lee of the Isle of Surprise, a precipitous lump of coral and limestone that surges straight up out of the centre of the bay and is surmounted by a jungly plateau of about an acre.

When, in 1683, he left

Jamaica

for the last time, it was under open arrest to be tried by his peers for flouting the Crown. His treasure was left behind somewhere in

Jamaica

and he died in penury without revealing its whereabouts. It must have been a vast hoard, the fruits of countless raids on

Hispaniola

, of the capture of innumerable treasure-ships sailing for The Plate, of the sacking of

Panama

and the looting of

Maracaibo

. But it vanished without trace.

It was always thought that the secret lay somewhere on the Isle of Surprise, but for two hundred years the diving and digging of treasure-hunters yielded nothing. Then, said Strangways, just six months before, two things had happened within a few weeks. A young fisherman disappeared from the

village

of

Shark

Bay, and had not been heard of since, and an anonymous

New York

syndicate purchased the island for a thousand pounds from the present owner of the Llanrumney Estate, which was now a rich banana and cattle property.

A few weeks after the sale, the yacht Secatur put in to

Shark

Bay

and dropped anchor in Morgan’s old anchorage in the lee of the island. It was manned entirely by negroes. They went to work and cut a stairway in the rock face of the island and erected on the summit a number of low-lying shacks in the fashion known in

Jamaica

as ‘wattle-and-daub’.

They appeared to be completely equipped with provisions, and all they purchased from the fishermen of the bay was fresh fruit and water.

They were a taciturn and orderly lot who gave no trouble. They explained to the Customs which they had cleared in the neighbouring Port Maria that they were there to catch tropical fish, especially the poisonous varieties, and collect rare shells for Ourobouros Inc. in

St. Petersburg

. When they had established themselves they purchased large quantities of these from the

Shark

Bay

, Port Maria and Oracabessa fishermen.

For a week they carried out blasting operations on the island and it was given out that these were for the purpose of excavating a large fish-tank.

The Secatur began a fortnightly shuttle-service with the

Gulf of Mexico

and watchers with binoculars confirmed that, before each sailing, consignments of portable fish-tanks were taken aboard. Always half a dozen men were left behind. Canoes approaching the island were warned off by a watchman, at the base of the steps in the cliff, who fished all day from a narrow jetty alongside which the Secatur on her visits moored with two anchors out, well sheltered from the prevailing north-easterly winds.

No one succeeded in landing on the island by daylight and, after two tragic attempts, nobody tried to gain access by night.

The first attempt was made by a local fisherman spurred on by the rumours of buried treasure that no talk of tropical fish could suppress. He had swum out one dark night and his body had been washed back over the reef next day. Sharks and barracuda had left nothing but the trunk and the remains of a thigh.

At about the time he should have reached the island the whole

village

of

Shark

Bay was awakened by the most horrible drumming noise. It seemed to come from inside the island. It was recognized as the beating of Voodoo drums. It started softly and rose slowly to a thunderous crescendo. Then it died down again and stopped. It lasted about five minutes. j

From that moment the island was ju-ju, or obeah, as it is called hi

Jamaica

, and even in daylight canoes kept at a safe distance.

By this time Strangways was interested and he made a full report to

London

. Since 1950

Jamaica

had become an important strategic target, thanks to the development by Reynolds Metal and the Kaiser Corporation of huge bauxite deposits found on the island. So far as Strangways was concerned, the activities on Surprise might easily be the erection of a base for one-man submarines in the event of war, particularly since

Shark

Bay

was within range of the route followed by the Reynolds ships to the new bauxite harbour at Ocho Rios, a few miles down the coast.

London

followed the report up with

Washington

and it came to light that the

New York

syndicate that had purchased the island was wholly owned by Mr. Big.

This was three months ago. Strangways was ordered to penetrate the island at all costs and find out what was going on. He mounted quite an operation. He rented a property on the western arm of

Shark

Bay

called

Beau

Desert

. It contained the ruins of one of the famous Jamaican Great Houses of the early nineteenth century and also a modern beach-house directly across from the Secatur’s anchorage up against Surprise.

He brought down two very fine swimmers from the naval base at

Bermuda

and set up a permanent watch on the island through day- and night-glasses. Nothing of a suspicious nature was seen and on a dark calm night he sent out the two swimmers with instructions to make an underwater survey of the foundations of the island.

Strangways described his horror when, an hour after they had left to swim across the three hundred yards of water, the terrible drumming had started up somewhere inside the cliffs of the island.

That night the two men did not return.

On the next day they were both washed up at different parts of the bay. Or rather, the remains left by the shark and barracuda.

At this point in Strangeways’s narrative, Bond interrupted him.

‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about shark and barracuda? They’re not generally savage in these waters. There aren’t very many of them round

Jamaica

and they don’t often feed at night. Anyway, I don’t believe either of them attack humans unless there’s blood in the water. Occasionally they might snap at a white foot out of curiosity. Have they ever behaved like this round

Jamaica

before?’

‘Never been a case since a girl got a foot bitten off in

Kingston

harbour in 1942,’ said Strangways. ‘She was being towed by a speedboat, flipping her feet up and down. The white feet must have looked particularly appetising. Travelling at just the right speed too. Everyone agrees with your theory. And my men had harpoons and knives. I thought I’d done everything to protect them. Dreadful business. You can imagine how I felt about it. Since then we’ve done nothing except try to get legitimate access to the island via the Colonial Office and Washington. You see, it belongs to an American now. Damn slow business, particularly as there’s nothing against these people. They seem to have pretty good protection in Washington and some smart international lawyers. We’re absolutely stuck.

London

told me to hang on until you came.’ Strangways took a pull at his whisky and looked expectantly at Bond.

‘What are the Secatur’s movements ?’ asked Bond.

‘Still in

Cuba

. Sailing in about a week, according to the CIA.’

‘How many trips has she done?’

‘About twenty.’

Bond multiplied one hundred and fifty thousand dollars by twenty. If his guess was right, Mr. Big had already taken a million pounds in gold out of the island.

‘I’ve made some provisional arrangements for you,’ said Strangways. ‘There’s the house at

Beau

Desert

. I’ve got you a car, Sunbeam Talbot coupe. New tyres. Fast. Right car for these roads. I’ve got a good man to act as your factotum. A Cayman Islander called Quarrel. Best swimmer and fisherman in the

Caribbean

. Terribly keen. Nice chap. And I’ve borrowed the West Indian Citrus Company’s rest-house at

Manatee

Bay

. It’s the other end of the island. You could rest up there for a week and get in a bit of training until the Secatur comes in. You’ll need to be fit if you’re going to try to get over to Surprise, and I honestly believe that’s the only answer. Anything else I can do? I’ll be about, of course, but I’ll have to stay around

Kingston

to keep up communications with

London

and

Washington

. They’ll want to know everything we do. Anything else you’d like me to fix up?’

Bond had been making up his mind.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You might ask

London

to get the Admiralty to lend us one of their frogmen suits complete with compressed-air bottles. Plenty of spares. And a couple of good underwater harpoon guns. The French ones called ”Champion” are the best. Good underwater torch. A commando dagger. All the dope they can get from the Natural History Museum on barracuda and shark. And some of that shark-repellent stuff the Americans used in the Pacific. Ask B o A c to fly it all out on their direct service.’

Bond paused. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And one of those things our saboteurs used against ships in the war. Limpet mine, with assorted fuses.’

Live and Let Die

CHAPTER XVII

THE UNDERTAKER’S WIND

PAW-PAW with a slice of green lime, a dish piled with red bananas, purple star-apples and tangerines, scrambled eggs and bacon,

Blue

Mountain

coffee - the most delicious in the world — Jamaican marmalade, almost black, and guava jelly.

As Bond, wearing shorts and sandals, had his breakfast on the veranda and gazed down on the sunlit panorama of

Kingston

and

Port Royal

, he thought how lucky he was and what wonderful moments of consolation there were for the darkness and danger of his profession.

Bond knew

Jamaica

well. He had been there on a long assignment just after the war when the Communist headquarters in

Cuba

was trying to infiltrate the Jamaican labour unions. It had been an untidy and inconclusive job but he had grown to love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people. Now he was glad to be back and to have a whole week of respite before the grim work began again.

After breakfast, Strangways appeared on the veranda with a tall brown-skinned man in a faded blue shirt and old brown twill trousers.

This was Quarrel, the Cayman Islander, and Bond liked him immediately. There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him and his face was strong and angular and his mouth was almost severe. His eyes were

grey. It was only the spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands that were negroid.

Bond shook him by the hand.

‘Good morning, Captain,’ said Quarrel. Coming from the most famous race of seamen in the world, this was the highest title he knew. But there was no desire to please, or humility, in his voice. He was speaking as mate of the ship and his manner was straightforward and candid.

That moment defined their relationship. It remained that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility.

After discussing their plans, Bond took the wheel of the little car Quarrel had brought up from

Kingston

and they started on up the

Junction Road

, leaving Strangways to busy himself with Bond’s requirements.

They had got off before nine and it was still cool as they crossed the mountains that run along

Jamaica

’s back like the central ridges of a crocodile’s armour. The road wound down towards the northern plains through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, the tropical vegetation changing with the altitude. The green flanks of the uplands, all feathered with bamboo interspersed with the dark, glinting green of breadfruit and the sudden

Bengal

fire of Flame of the

Forest

, gave way to the lower forests of ebony, mahogany, mahoe and logwood. And when they reached the plains of Agualta Vale the green sea of sugar-cane and bananas stretched away to where the distant fringe of glittering shrapnel bursts marked the palm-groves along the north coast.

Quarrel was a good companion on the drive and a wonderful guide. He talked about the trap-door spiders as they passed through the famous palm-gardens of Castle-ton, he told abovit a fight he had witnessed between a giant centipede and a scorpion and he explained the difference between the male and female paw-paw. He described the poisons of the forest and the healing properties of tropical herbs, the pressure the palm kernel develops to break open its coconut, the length of a humming-bird’s tongue, and how crocodiles carry their young in their mouths laid lengthways like sardines in a tin.

He spoke exactly but without expertise, using Jamaican language in which plants’strive’ or ‘quail’, moths are ‘bats’, and ‘love’ is used instead of ‘like’. As he talked he would raise his hand in greeting to the people on the road and they would wave back and shout his name.

‘You seem to know a lot of people,’ said Bond as the driver of a bulging bus with ROMANCE in large letters over the windshield gave him a couple of welcoming blasts on his wind-horn.

‘I bin watching Surprise for tree muns, Cap’n,’ answered Quarrel, ‘ ‘n I been travelling this road twice a week. Everyone soon know you in

Jamaica

. They got good eyes.’

By half-past ten they had passed through Port Maria and branched off along the little parochial road that runs down to Shark Bay. Round a turning they suddenly came on it below them and Bond stopped the car and they got out.

The bay was crescent shaped, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide at its arms. Its blue surface was ruffled by a light breeze blowing from the north-east, the edge of the Trade Winds that are born five hundred miles away in the

Gulf of Mexico

and then go on their long journey round the world.

A mile from where they stood, a long line of breakers showed the reef just outside the bay and the narrow untroubled waters of the passage which was the only entrance to the anchorage. In the centre of the crescent, the Isle of Surprise rose a hundred feet sheer out of the water, small waves creaming against its easterly base, calm waters in its lee.

It was nearly round, and it looked like a tall grey cake topped with green icing on a blue china plate.

They had stopped about a hundred feet above the little cluster of fishermen’s huts behind the palm-fringed beach of the bay and they were level with the flat green top of the island, half a mile away. Quarrel pointed out the thatched roofs of the wattle-and-daub shanties among the trees in the centre of the island. Bond examined them through Quarrel’s binoculars. There was no sign of life except a thin wisp of smoke blowing away with the breeze.

Below them, the water of the bay was pale green on the white sand. Then it deepened to dark blue just before the broken brown of a submerged fringe of inner reef that made a wide semicircle a hundred yards from the island. Then it was dark blue again with patches of lighter blue and aquamarine. Quarrel said that the depth of the Secatur’s anchorage was about thirty feet.

To their left, in the middle of the western arms of the bay, deep among the trees behind a tiny white sand beach, was their base of operations,

Beau

Desert

. Quarrel described its layout and Bond stood for ten minutes examining the three-hundred-yard stretch of sea between it and the Secatur’s anchorage up against the island.

In all, Bond spent an hour reconnoitring the place, then, without going near their house or the village, they turned the car and got back on the main coast road.

They drove on through the beautiful little banana port of Oracabessa and Ocho Rios with its huge new bauxite plant, along the north shore to

Montego Bay

, two hours away. It was now February and the season was in full swing. The little village and the straggle of large hotels were bathed in the four months gold-rush that sees them through the whole year. They stopped at a rest-house on the other side of the wide bay and had lunch and then drove on through the heat of the afternoon to the western tip of the island, two hours further on.

Here, because of the huge coastal swamps, nothing has happened since

Columbus

used

Manatee

Bay

as a casual anchorage. Jamaican fishermen have taken the place of the Arawak Indians, but otherwise there is the impression that time has stood still.

Bond thought it the most beautiful beach he had ever seen, five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon. Under them, the grey canoes were pulled up beside pink mounds of discarded conch shells, and among them smoke rose from the palm thatch cabins of the fishermen in the shade between the swamp-lands and the sea.

In a clearing among the cabins, set on a rough lawn of Bahama grass, was the house on stilts built as a weekend cottage for the employees of the West Indian Citrus Company. It was built on stilts to keep the termites at bay and it was closely wired against mosquito and sand-fly. Bond drove off the rough track and parked under the house. While Quarrel chose two rooms and made them comfortable Bond put a towel round his waist and walked through the palm trees to the sea, twenty yards away.

For an hour he swam and lazed in the warm buoyant water, thinking of Surprise and its secret, fixing these three hundred yards in his mind, wondering about the shark and barracuda and the other hazards of the sea, that great library of books one cannot read.

Walking back to the little wooden bungalow, Bond picked up his first sandfly bites. Quarrel chuckled when he saw the flat bumps on his back that would soon start to itch maddeningly.

‘Can’t do nuthen to keep them away, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘But Ah kin stop them ticklin’. You best take a shower first to git the salt off. They only bites hard for an hour in the evenin’ and then they likes salt with their dinner.’

When Bond came out of the shower Quarrel produced an old medicine bottle and swabbed the bites with a brown liquid that smelled of creosote.

‘We get more skeeters and sandfly in the Caymans than anywheres else in the world,’ he said, ‘but we gives them no attention so long as we got this medicine.’

The ten minutes of tropical twilight brought its quick melancholy and then the stars and the three-quarter moon blazed down and the sea died to a whisper. There was the short lull between the two great winds of

Jamaica

, and then the palms began to whisper again.

Quarrel jerked his head towards the window.

‘De “Undertaker’s Wind”,’ he commented.

‘How’s that?’ asked Bond, startled.

‘On-and-off shore breeze de sailors call it,’ said Quarrel.

‘De Undertaker blow de bad air out of de

Island

nighttimes from six. till six. Then every morning de “Doctor’s Wind” come and blow de sweet air in from de sea. Leastwise dat’s what we calls dem in

Jamaica

.’

Quarrel looked quizzically at Bond.

‘Guess you and de Undertaker’s Wind got much de same job, Cap’n,’ he said half-seriously.

Bond laughed shortly. ‘Glad I don’t have to keep the same hours,’ he said.

Outside, the crickets and the tree-frogs started to zing and tinkle and the great hawkmoths came to the wire-netting across the windows and clutched it, gazing with trembling ecstasy at the two oil lamps that hung from the cross-beams inside.

Occasionally a pair of fishermen, or a group of giggling girls, would walk by down the beach on their way to the single tiny rum-shop at the point of the bay. No man walked alone for fear of the duppies under the trees, or the rolling calf, the ghastly animal that comes rolling towards you along the ground, its legs in chains and flames coming out of its nostrils.

While Quarrel prepared one of the succulent meals of fish and eggs and vegetables that were to be their staple diet, Bond sat under the light and pored over the books that Strangways had borrowed from the Jamaica Institute, books on the tropical sea and its denizens by Beebe and Allyn and others, and on sub-marine hunting by Gousteau and Hass. When he set out to cross those three hundred yards of sea, he was determined to do it expertly and to leave nothing to chance. He knew the calibre of Mr. Big and he guessed that the defences of Surprise would be technically brilliant. He thought they would not involve simple weapons like guns and high explosives. Mr. Big needed to work undisturbed by the police. He had to keep out of reach of the law. He guessed that somehow the forces of the sea had been harnessed to do The Big Man’s work for him and it was on these that he concentrated, on murder by shark and barracuda, perhaps by Manta Ray and octopus.

The facts set out by the naturalists were chilling and awe-inspiring, but the experiences of Cousteau in the

Mediterranean

and of Hass in the

Red Sea

and

Caribbean

were more encouraging.

That night Bond’s dreams were full of terrifying encounters with giant squids and sting rays, hammerheads and the saw-teeth of barracuda, so that he whimpered and sweated in his sleep.

On the next day he started his training under the critical, appraising eyes of Quarrel. Every morning he swam a mile up the beach before breakfast and then ran back along the firm sand to the bungalow. At about nine they would set out in a canoe, the single triangular sail taking them fast through the water up the coast to

Bloody

Bay

and

Orange