Devil May Care (24 page)

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The cell door clanged shut. Bond lay down and began to search in the sand with his tongue for the shards of glass.

At the same moment, Darius Alizadeh was woken by a telephone call in his room at Jalal’s Five Star in Noshahr. He was dreaming of Zohreh in the mixed hammam.

‘Hi, Darius. Sorry to wake you. This is Felix Leiter, CIA. Something very big’s going to go off. I need your help.’

‘How did you find me?’ said Darius, reluctantly pushing away the image of Zohreh, hot from the steam.

‘Relations haven’t completely broken down in the old alliance. I’ve spoken to people in London. To hell with the politicos. This is the real thing.’

‘Have you seen J. D. Silver?’ said Darius.

‘Carmen? Yup. Saw him in Tehran. Think he’s on his way here.’

‘Where are you, Felix?’

‘I’m right across the street, Darius.’

‘Are you a friend of James Bond?’

‘
Santiago!
That’s our battle cry. Same as Cortez. James Bond is my blood brother. Shame about his taste in automobiles. Apart from that, he – ’

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‘ That’s good enough for me,’ said Darius. ‘Come up to my room. Number two three four.’

‘You got it.’

Leiter replaced the receiver in the waterfront telephone booth and limped the short distance to Jalal’s. When he got up to room 234, he found Darius Alizadeh already dressed with a tray of coffee and fruit waiting on the table.

Also in the room was a portly man with a bootbrush moustache. ‘ This is Hamid,’ said Darius, as he shook hands with Felix. ‘Driver. Part-time spy. Expert on dead drops and safe-houses.’

Hamid smiled diffidently.

‘Boy, that stuff takes me back,’ said Felix.

‘And Hamid knows where the Monster lives.’

‘Did Bond trust him?’

‘With his life,’ said Darius.

‘All right,’ said Leiter, taking the cup of black coffee Darius held out to him. ‘ Tell me what you know.’

When Darius had finished giving him the details he’d received from London of the modified Ekranoplan, Leiter said, ‘Okay, at least we know where she’s starting from. But the rate that baby moves across the water we’re going to have about two hours from Scramble to Bombs Away. After that our planes will

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be in Soviet airspace. And that’s not a place where a US plane can be for more than five minutes.’

‘Where’s your nearest base?’ said Darius.

‘Officially, it’s miles away. Timbuktu, for all I know. But unofficially we got planes in Dhahran in Saudi, and something in eastern Turkey. Fighterbombers. I don’t know for sure. I’m on a need-toknow ticket here, Darius. I just pass on the good news. It’s going to be tight as hell. And that’s just half the problem.’

‘What’s the other half?’ said Darius.

‘ This is what I got. That British airliner went missing a few days ago, it’s due to reappear any day, heading north.’

‘ Towards the Soviet Union?’

‘Yup. We don’t know where, but we’re sure it’s up to no good. We got some intercepts out of Istanbul. Probably been converted to carry bombs of some kind. The Soviet radar’s pretty good and I think we can rely on a whole bunch of Mig-21s swarming all over this airliner soon after it enters Soviet airspace. Bam. Down she comes.’

‘But the fallout from that,’ said Darius. ‘Politically. If it appears to be part of an orchestrated attack by Britain, or NATO.’

‘You got it, Darius. We gotta get that bird down

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before the Soviets do. And we don’t even know where she’s taking off. All our air-force bases are on full alert – but, hell, the sky’s a big place. Carmen Silver’s got his ears burning off with updates every minute out of Langley.’

‘ That bad?’ said Darius.

‘Yup. The president’s cancelled all engagements. They’re following the protocols they laid down after the Cuban missile thing. They think this is the big one. Any moment.’

‘But what can we do?’

‘Nothing right now. Just await instructions. Silver may have more news.’

Darius sipped his coffee and sighed. ‘ There must be something I can do,’ he said. ‘If it’s Gorner, then Savak had a rough idea where he’s based in the desert.’

‘Yeah, but the plane won’t be coming out of the desert, will it? Must be at some airstrip. Or an airport. It’s a big plane.’

Darius stood up and walked round the room, scratching the back of his head. ‘Mmm . . . Airports. Yazd. Kerman . . . While I’m turning this over in my mind, Felix,’ he said, ‘just tell me one thing. Why do they call him ‘‘Carmen’’?’

‘What d’you hear?’

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‘He told me some story of his first job in Guatemala,’ said Darius, ‘and how he helped to start a mutiny to get the strong man thrown out, and that was what the character Carmen did in the opera –

caused a mutiny.’

Felix Leiter laughed. ‘What a load of bull. JD’s a man doesn’t like women, if you know what I mean. One of those. He fixed some cover with General Motors in his last posting. Forget where. One night he boasted in his cups that he’d seduced three of the General Motors salesforce. Car men are what he likes best. Carmen Silver.’

Darius laughed richly. ‘So long as he keeps us in the picture.’

‘You got to do the same for him. You call this number if I’m not around.’ Felix passed him a card.

‘Now don’t you think we should go down to the docks and keep an eye on the Monster?’

Darius looked hard at Felix, as though summing him up one last time. He made up his mind. ‘We don’t need to go,’ he said. ‘We stay here. I have a man on board.’

‘You what?’ said Leiter.

‘I’ve not been idle,’ said Darius. ‘I couldn’t wait all day for the US cavalry. I got to one of the Russians who defected and made the modifications to the

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Ekranoplan. He’s radioing to my office in Tehran the exact co-ordinates that they’re feeding into the navigation system. Babak, my man in Tehran, is going to telephone through here.’

‘You are one smart guy,’ said Felix. ‘How did you persuade him?’

‘ The usual,’ said Darius. ‘US dollars. Plenty of them.’

‘Okay, so when we hear, I call Langley and they scramble whatever they got.’

There was a bleep from the bedside telephone. It was the desk clerk.

‘Mr Silver here. I send him up?’

Shortly before eight, Bond, shoeless and still in his worker’s clothes, was taken from his cell to the washroom and thence to Gorner’s office. An air of almost palpable excitement was coming from the man in the linen suit. He had a fresh scarlet carnation in his button-hole and wore what looked like a new shirt and blazing crimson tie. The lank fair hair had been combed back from the high forehead. Even the white glove had been freshly laundered. Gorner held up a BOACuniform with the rank of captain. ‘Five minutes before the end,’ he said,

‘you will change into this. It will be stored on board.

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How splendid you will look, Bond, in your captain’s uniform. As swell as an old Etonian. Enjoy your brief moment, won’t you? As the French say, ‘‘
Aujourd’hui
roi, demain rien
.’’ Today a king, tomorrow – ’

‘I know what it means,’ said Bond.

‘Of course you do. Very unusual to speak a foreign language. Most of your fellow countrymen expect the

‘‘lesser races’’ to understand English if they shout it loud enough. But by this time tomorrow their arrogance and duplicity will be crushed. For ever. Your capital will be a smouldering wreck, your charming

‘‘home counties’’ – Kent and Surrey – a radioactive fallout zone.’

Gorner walked round his desk so he was standing next to Bond. ‘I shall watch you take off in a few minutes, then I shall await the inevitable. Do you have any farewell message to your countrymen? Your queen? Your prime minister?’

Bond bit his lip. Poppy’s words went through his head. ‘Kill Gorner.’

‘Very well, then,’ said Gorner. ‘Shall we play?’

The familiar guards took Bond along the corridor and rammed the muzzles of their guns into his ears as they rose on the telescopic elevator. The electric cart was waiting to transport them to the main doors, where the driver operated the laser beam release.

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It was not yet nine o’clock, but the heat of the Persian sun was already intense as they crossed the runway to the brilliantly shining VC-10. The high tail, with the four rear-mounted Rolls-Royce Conway jet engines, gave the aircraft a superbly sleek silhouette, and at any other time the prospect of its ‘hushpower’ ride would have lifted Bond’s spirits. But he knew on this occasion that his only chance of getting out of the plane alive depended on the remote possibility that a slender female investment banker with shining black hair and a Soviet pistol she had not been trained to fire had somehow hidden herself on board.

Bond breathed in deeply and set his foot on the steps up to the main passenger door. Once on board, he was hustled down the gangway and pushed into a window seat towards the back of the first-class section. As he bent his head beneath the overhead locker, he allowed the shard of glass he had secreted in his mouth to drop on to the seat ahead of him. One guard sat next to him, another in the row in front and a third behind. The engines were already turning slowly.

A dark, thick-set man in combat trousers and a white T-shirt leaned over from the aisle. ‘I am Massoud,’ he said. ‘We do checks with pilot. We leave in

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half-hour. You stay where you are. If you move, we kill you.’

‘Worse than Dan Air,’ said Bond. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

‘Be quiet. No smoke. Fasten seat-belt.’

Bond did as he was told. This was the moment in a flight he normally enjoyed, knowing that he would have a few hours to himself, unreachable by the demands of M or any of the women in his life – time in which he could read a few pages of Ben Hogan on
The Modern Fundamentals of Golf
, then watch the sun glinting on the wings as he sipped a Bloody Mary over the Arctic cloudscape.

Bond looked up to see another man staring down at him from the aisle. He wore a grubby BOAC shirt. He looked English, and afraid. ‘My name’s Ken Mitchell,’ he said, in the tones of the Surrey golf course. ‘I’m the pilot of this crate for my sins. I’m just here to tell you not to try anything funny. It’s our only hope. I do the take-off and get us most of the way. Then they’re going to bring you up to the flight deck for the last bit. They’ve promised me that if I play ball with them, they’ll let me go. Don’t muck it up for me, Mr Bond. It’s my little girl’s birthday tomorrow.’

‘All right,’ said Bond. ‘Any tips on how to fly it?’

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‘ To keep her level, don’t look at the instruments. Pick something on the horizon, the edge of a cloud or something. Orientate yourself by that, not by the instruments. But we’ll be on autopilot most of the way. She flies herself.’

‘ Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy your flight, Ken.’

Mitchell gave him one last imploring look as he was grabbed by the arm and pushed back towards the cockpit.

A few minutes later, Bond felt the jolt of the engines engaging as the plane began to taxi. Through his window he could see the green light winking on top of the simple control tower, half a mile distant. At the end of the runway, the big plane turned and stopped.

Bond heard the Rolls-Royce engines roar from the back of the fuselage, and then they were moving forward purposefully, rapidly accelerating. He felt the small of his back pushed against the padded first-class seat as the nose lifted and the rear thrust drove the great plane up through the thin air into the burning desert sky.

In the steel hangar in Noshahr, the last of the camouflage nets was cleared from the nose of the Ekrano

plan and the engines were started. The fourteen-man crew all carried fake British passports, though eight were Persian, two Iraqi, two Turkish, one was a Saudi, and the last, who sat at the radio console wearing headphones, was a Farsi-speaking Russian.

It was the first time the Ekranoplan, modified by the addition of four extra fuel tanks, six rocket launchers and four surface-to-air missiles, had left the hangar, and there was tension among the men as the mighty engines opened up on the calm sea. The drag created by the bow wave meant that more power was necessary to achieve the initial lift-off from the sea than to run at full speed. The maximum drag came well before take-off speed, as the craft needed to climb its own bow wave to get clear of the water. As the screaming of the engines rose and the Ekranoplan remained stuck to the ocean, the Russian looked at the anxious faces around him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in Farsi.

The pilot reached out and pulled down the switch in front of him that activated the PAR – Power Augmentation of Ram – which briefly diverted the engine thrust to force air beneath the wings. Suddenly, there was an upward surge, and they were skimming clear above the water on a cushion of air. The pilot was able to drop the engine revs even as the

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speed increased, and spontaneous applause went round the cramped crew area.

The traffic stopped along the sea-front at Noshahr and Chalus, and hundreds of local people stood and stared at the breathtaking sight.

Oblivious to the spectacle the Ekranoplan was creating, the Russian bent to his radio set.

‘ This is the strangest war room I ever saw,’ said Felix Leiter, looking at the bowls of pomegranates and barberries on the table and the ocean view through the window of Jalal’s Five Star room 234.

J. D. Silver held his cup of tea to his mouth while his eyes swivelled round to take in his surroundings. The bedside telephone bleeped, and Felix picked it up. ‘It’s for you, Darius,’ he said. ‘Your man Babak in Tehran.’

Darius leaped over the bed and grabbed the receiver.

‘Babak? Have you got the details? Good. Let me have them.’

On the pad of paper by the bed his pen scribbled furiously – ‘Latitude 46.34944. Longitude 48.04917. Latitude 48.8047222. Longitude 44.5858333’ – and other words in Farsi illegible to Leiter and Silver, who looked over his shoulder.

After about five minutes, Darius replaced the

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receiver and handed the piece of paper to J. D. Silver.

‘ This is where the Ekranoplan is heading,’ he said.