The Ian Fleming Files (23 page)

A few hundred feet
above him, Denise hung up a radio phone and turned to Darlan. “Reports coming
in of multiple fires in the Tahat District.”

“Why are you
bothering me about it? Call the fire department.”

The dials on the
control panel bounced to zero.

“What’s
happening?” asked Darlan in dismay. “Why have we stopped? What’s wrong?”

The chief engineer
went to the controls.

An alarm whined.

In the canal,
Fleming appeared behind his men from the water and pulled himself out. There
was a commotion above as Darlan’s guards ran out, yelling, and fanned out past
the wall above their heads, sweeping the area. The small unit of commandos
pressed against the wall.

Fleming fixed wire
to a mortar launcher while the others aimed their guns upward in anticipation
of discovery. Fleming depressed the plunger. Everyone crouched, fingers in
ears. They waited. Nothing.

“Something’s
wrong,” Fleming said. He took a gulp of air and slipped into the canal.

He swam through
the lock and into the adjoining dock, spied the SPD on the basin floor. He went
to retrieve it and finish re-attaching the bomb just as two frogmen armed with
harpoon guns headed his way to investigate the engine trouble. Fleming had to
wait until his lungs nearly burst before swimming away unseen.

Remy was pacing
about at the base of the dividing wall. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We better
go help.”

“Calm down,
Frenchie!” said Grant. “The boss will be back in a jiff.”

Pop! A bullet
grazed the wall by their heads. Pop! Pop! Two guards were blasting at them from
an opposite ledge. Pfft! Pfft! One of the guards tumbled over, dead, shot by a
silenced bullet, courtesy of Grant. A bullet grazed the back of Grant’s helmet.
He ducked down as someone nearby pumped a shotgun. Grant looked up as Remy let
his sawn-off rip and blew the other guard away. The report was loud.

Grant was livid.
“You French moron! Now they’ll all be after us!” he turned to the other four
grunts. “You lot! Hurry up and get that machine gun mounted!”

Darlan’s scuba
divers presented Darlan and Denise with the twisted breathing apparatus pried
from the engines.

“Fleming!” said
Darlan, fuming. “Engineer, how long until we are up and running again?”

“The propeller
shaft has sustained serious damage, sir,” said Hasni anxiously. “It needs to be
replaced.”

“Can it launch?”

“Yes, but...”

“Launch her now!”

Fleming surfaced
to find his men in a gunfight and pulled himself out just as Grant got behind
the mounted machine gun and unleashed it on the Vichy Guards, mowing them down
like skittles.

Darlan unlocked a
sizable cache of weapons and handed out the hardware to his numerous minions,
shouting orders to them.

Jodl and his two
stormtroopers watched inertly.

“Don’t stand on
ceremony, Lieutenant,” said Darlan.

“This is not our
problem,” said Jodl.

“It will be if he
blows that gun-ship up and we’re within five miles of here.”

Jodl’s face paled.

On the gun-deck of
The Nautilus
, Denise employed the anti-torpedo boat guns, swiveling the
sights until she spied a cluster of shadows over by the connecting dock wall.
Behind her, Jodl and his men spilled out of the tower with other guards.

Bullets flew as
Fleming focused on his SPD launcher, re-wiring it and pulling up the plunger.

KA-BOOM! A shell
blasted through the wall, sending the launcher flying from Fleming’s hand and
killing two of his men.

More jumbo shells
crashed through the bricks.

The smoke cleared
to reveal Denise manning the guns of
The Nautilus
.

Fleming, Remy and
Grant crouched behind a cluster of fifty-gallon fuel drums.
RAT-A-TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT!!! Bullets ricocheted off the barrels.

Fleming and Grant
exchanged fire with Denise while Jodl’s men tried to pick them off from the
sides.

There was another
deafening volley of ammunition from Grant as he unleashed his tripod mounted
machine-gun.

The spent magazine
wheel in the carbine reeled.

One of the
commandos jacked a fresh ammo belt in and was shot in the head and killed
instantly.

Grant finished the
reloading and resumed spraying lead in the direction of where the last bullet
came from.

One by one, Vichy
thugs took a slug and fell screaming into the dock. It was deafening, a total
clangor. Empty bullet casings flew.

Darlan spied Fleming
in the fight below through the windows.

“Launch this
instant!” he screamed at the engineer then cocked a pistol and shot at Fleming
through the glass of the windows. One of his workers obscured his view so
Darlan shot him to get an unimpeded look. Fleming was now in his line of fire.
Darlan squeezed the trigger when his engineer rushed him from behind causing
the bullet to go blasting into the ceiling. The Admiral swiveled as Hasni
charged and bashed Hasni hard on the head with the butt of his gun. Then he
shoved the little man out the door and kicked him down the platform stairs.

Fleming and Grant
waited for the smoke to clear which revealed that Denise was no longer sitting
pretty atop
The Nautilus
.

A guard appeared
before Fleming, rifle leveled. Behind Fleming came the sound of a pump action.
He stepped aside and the guard was blasted away by Remy’s shotgun. Remy went to
reload when he was shot and collapsed. Gasping, he touched his hand to his neck
and it came back red.

Fleming turned to
see Jodl wielding a smoking pistol. Denise beside him.

“Just can’t stay
away, can you?” she said.

Jodl shot Grant in
the stomach, blowing him off the ground.

Denise aimed her
pistol at Fleming and unloaded just as Fleming ducked and scooped up Remy’s
shotgun, managed to get a shot off and blasted Jodl with a spray of pellets.

Denise whirled and
snatched the wrench from the floor and walloped Fleming in the back. He reeled,
almost lost his balance, turned back to face her. She kicked at him. Fleming
grabbed her leg and twisted it. Remy, still breathing, crawled toward a dead
guard.

Denise squirmed
free and they tussled closer to a work station where various industrial
equipment was stashed. Denise grabbed a flame-thrower and sent a curtain of
fire at Fleming. He leaped back before getting torched. She swept another arc
of fire. He dived.

“A flame for an
old flame!” she said as she doused him.

Fleming darted his
eyes about for a weapon, spied a pistol dropped by one of the fallen guards --
but it was just out of reach.

Denise raised her
arm to fire off more sheets of flame when... POP! POP! POP! She slumped
forward. Remy, one hand clutching his grazed throat, had shot her with the dead
guard’s gun. The blasts caused Denise to stagger back, dropping the
flame-thrower in shock. She pitched backwards into the water. Fleming went to
her and tried to fish her out. He pulled her to the edge of the embankment but
it was too late. A slight shadow of regret darkened his eyes. She looked at him
as she slipped away. Something unspoken passed between them and then she was
gone.

Fleming looked
feverishly about, spied Darlan in the control room on the opposite side of the
dock.

He hurtled off the
platform into the water and swam. The water around him churned as
The
Nautilus
’s engines roared to life. It was about to launch.

Darlan watched as
his awesome gunboat pulled out from the docks into the canal leading to the
bay. He heard the sound of footfalls behind him and spun round to see his old
English friend.

“You’re too late,
Fleming!” Darlan said.

WHUMPF! Fleming
clobbered him in the head with a roundhouse kick.

Darlan staggered,
toppled backwards.

“Actually, I’m
right on time,” said the secret agent.

Darlan bounced
back and twisted the end of his walking cane, revealing a sharp rapier tip
which he thrashed at Fleming with.

The massive war
machine that was
The Nautilus
ground past them to the bay.

SWISH! Darlan’s
blade just missed Fleming’s throat. Fleming spun and slammed his fist into
Darlan’s ribs, sending him reeling, gasping for air.

Darlan whipped his
cane in a whistling backhand, swatting Fleming square in the stomach. Fleming
doubled over.

Darlan clawed off
a ring and withdrew a wire from inside it, turned and slung the garrote around
Fleming’s throat. Fleming slipped his sleeved arm between the wire and his
throat. Darlan tugged hard.

The wire sliced
through Fleming’s wet suit and began to cut into his forearm. Fleming moved
forward toward a wall and put his right foot flat against it and shoved off it,
pushing backwards at Darlan, somersaulted over him and untangled himself from
the garrote which rapidly whipped back into its ring.

Fleming whirled
around, pulling his pen from his pocket, quickly depressed the lid, sending a
jet of acid into Darlan’s face.

Darlan screamed,
his cheeks sizzling from the acid.

He crumpled over
the railing into the water, howling as his flesh burned, and tumbled into the
dock.

Fleming dashed to
the edge of the platform, searching, saw Darlan flailing toward an open lock
leading to the canal. A current caught the Admiral and buoyed him to the
opening. Torrents of water blasted Darlan through the lock and he vanished.

Fleming scanned
the water for him, looked down at the water from the observation platform and
dived in. He surfaced with a splash and swam to the lock Darlan had passed
through which was closed. He jacked the vent open, continued on toward the
canal that led out to sea, his head narrowly touching the ceiling as massive
blasts of water rapidly poured.

The rushing water
forced him out of the canal like a drowning rat. He spied Darlan climb out of
the canals and hurry to Bock’s moored airship. He slammed his fist in
frustration against the vent.

The Nautilus
began to pick up speed as it pressed on toward the open sea.

Fleming surfaced at
the reservoir and was joined by Leeds and other team members. Darlan could be
seen in the distance stumbling in agony toward Bock’s airship as it got ready
to ascend.

More choppers
hovered over and spewed out soldiers. Grant was being evacuated on a gurney,
heavy bandages wrapped around his middle.

Leeds handed
Fleming the wired charge box, the plunger of which Fleming pressed down on with
all his weight.

Two of Bock’s
retinue approached Darlan as he barreled toward them clutching his grotesque
smoldering face, straining to remain conscious through the agonizing pain.

“Don’t just stand
there! Get me a medic!” He barged past, staggering inside as the airship took
off.

There was a sudden
reverberation in the atmosphere. Shockwaves shook the Zeppelin as
The
Nautilus
was ripped apart in an incredible explosion. A mushroom cloud
billowed, pluming toward the airship. Everything turned dark as the sooty black
smoke enveloped the craft.

Darlan sat down at
the oval conference table opposite Bock and his beautiful secretary Masha.
There were other uniformed officers present and several stormtroopers. No one
was smiling.

“If it isn’t our
old friend, the Admiral,” said General Bock.

Bock fastened his
seatbelt, as did Masha and all the officers and henchmen. Bock nodded to a
medic who knelt before Darlan and tended to his ravaged face.

“Perhaps, Herr
Bock, I was a little... hasty in our meeting earlier,” said Darlan. “I’m a …
what’s the American word? ‘Maverick,’ yes that’s it. I’m too independent,
always have been! I shall have to be more responsible from now on.”

POP! Bock uncorked
a bottle of Claret and inhaled its aroma.

“Sorry. Your word
doesn’t have much currency in Berlin these days,” he said.

Darlan sneered.
“I’ll go above your head.”

Bock scoffed. “To
whom? You’re out of ships and out of friends.”

“This isn’t over
yet,” said a defiant Darlan.

Bock poured
himself a glass of wine and smiled wickedly. He nodded to the medic who was now
seated and strapped in.

“That’s where
you’re mistaken, Admiral.”

Bock cranked a
lever down, causing the floor beneath Darlan’s chair to collapse, sucking him
out of the cabin in a roaring downpour.

Darlan tumbled
through the sky toward the water, screaming.

Fleming, Leeds and
the other men witnessed Darlan’s demise.

“How the mighty
have fallen,” Fleming quipped.

Everyone burst
into laughter. One of the lads pointed toward the east side of the bay and
shouted. A British destroyer was sailing into shore, shimmering like a vision
in the heat. Vichy patrol Raptor boat units roared territorially into the bay
to greet the vessel and were promptly obliterated by the almighty guns of the
incoming ship. Fleming pivoted right to the foothills where the coastal cannons
lay smoldering. All in all, a good day.

It was a week
later. London was enjoying a rare wave of sunny weather. Big Ben chimed twelve
times indicating noon. Children were playing in Hyde Park. It felt like the
London of a year ago.

Over in St. Mary’s
Hospital in the West End, Fleming, wearing an untied hospital smock and no
socks, turned his gaze from the bay window view of the park. He was perched on
the edge of a hospital bed while Ann, in her volunteer nurse’s uniform, wrapped
an inflatable blood pressure cuff around his extended forearm and pumped it.

“What’s this?” he
asked.

“Sphygmonometer,
checks your pulse.”

He pulled her
close. “What happened to good-old holding hands?”

Ann wriggled away
and deflated the cuff which hissed as it sagged. “Tell me more about The
Azores. Was it beautiful and sunny?”

Fleming looked at
her guiltily. “Not much to tell. Another conference about shipping lanes.
Didn’t notice the weather I was indoors all the time.”

Ann looked at him,
scrutinizing his demeanor. He leaned towards her, but she slithered away,
making notes. He winced as he stretched his arm to grab her. She felt his arm.
“Oh... Ian. You may have a fracture. How did you do this at a conference?”

“Fracture?
Impossible. I need you to pass me fit, Ann. Otherwise Godfrey will keep me
locked to my desk for the rest of the war. Wouldn’t you say I’m healthy?” He
tried kissing her neck but she demurred. “Too healthy, if you ask me. What
happened to my exclusive? I don’t want to be a nurse after the war. I want my
own column. Can’t you… I don’t know go on a mission like — ”

He cut her off.
“Don’t say like my brother Peter!”

“I was going to
say like ‘Dick Tracy.’ Something exciting that I can write about.”

“You know the
drill, Ann, I know too much to be allowed into the field. If I was captured,
the enemy would go to town. Besides, why should I risk my neck just so you can
land an exclusive? We’re fighting a war. This isn’t about our careers.”

“Very well, looks
like I’m going to have to insist on six months convalescence. Maybe longer...”
Her pen hovered over her clipboard.

Fleming pulled the
side zip on her short skirt, revealing her stockinged thigh.

“Am I utterly
beyond hope?” he asked.

“I suppose if you
showed sufficient willpower, promised to slow down. Cut out all kinds of...”

“Strenuous activity?”

She sighed with
surrender. They fell laughing to the bed.

All of Room 39 was
gathered as Miss Hayes sat on Fleming’s desk reading a newspaper with the
headline “FRANCE FALLS, REFUGEES FLEE TO THE AMERICAS.”

“Listen to this!”
she said breathlessly. “The evacuation at the mouth of the River Garonne was
masterminded by -- ”

She trailed off
and looked at Fleming who was standing over her with a neutral expression.

“Read it, Miss
Hayes,” he said.

She swallowed and
continued. “Masterminded by Britain’s ambassador to France, Sir Joseph Peters,
who is responsible for saving thousands of lives.” She put the paper down. “But
we all know who’s really responsible,” she said with a smile. The room
applauded.

Godfrey buzzed
about Fleming like a gadfly, proud of his protégé. “Bravo! The total haul from
Algiers was impressive -- a mass of intelligence sufficient to keep us busy for
some time!” Fleming was a little stunned to see the usually phlegmatic Chief
smiling for once.

He put his arm
around Fleming and continued to gab. The dynamic between the two of them had
definitely changed.

“You and I are
flying to America next month to meet with Hoover.”

“A diplomatic
mission?”

“We’ve just been
given the task of convincing the Yanks to form a foreign intelligence gathering
unit of their own. You game?”

Later, Fleming was
in his office, smoking a cigarette with
Life
magazine open on his desk
to Betty Grable as he sorted through a backlog of dockets and enemy sightings
from responsible citizens.

Miss Hayes rapped
gently on the door. She was clutching an envelope.

“This arrived for
you,” she said. “It’s post-dated. The sender is unknown but it came through the
F.O. Diplomatic papers? Anyway, here it is, I signed for it.”

She delivered her
package and left. Fleming took the letter and opened it. Something spilled out.
He picked it up.

His father’s
medal. His heart skipped a beat. He read the letter.

“Dear Ian, by the
time you receive this it will all be over.”

He stopped, took a
deep breath, then continued in disbelief.

“I know that you
will come for me and that your coming will mean my demise. I warned you that I
never mix business with pleasure and the result is that I have fallen in love
with you.”

Fleming’s face
registered his incredulity.

“I love you, Ian.
I am destroyed over what I have done. I am returning your medal. It is too
painful a reminder for me. I hope in the next life you will forgive me. Forever
yours, Denise.”

He held the letter
in his hand and stared into space. An almost intolerable bitterness welled
through his mind. For a moment it looked like his eyes might soften and then
they blazed with a flush of adrenaline, his jaw clenched and all the coldness
returned. He took out his cigarette lighter and snapped it, held the flickering
flame to the letter and dropped it burning into a rubbish bin. He stuffed the
medal into the dark recesses of a desk drawer and slammed the drawer shut.

Miss Hayes walked
in and saw the letter curling into black ashes. “Nothing important?” she said.

“No, nothing
important.”

THE END.

 DEAR READER,

I hope you enjoyed this installment of
The Ian Fleming Files
.
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Damian Stevenson

IT WAS bright and early on the first day of the New Year but there were
no signs of celebration from the night before on the pavements of Oxford Circus
and Piccadilly. The shell-pocked lanes of Croyden and Camden were not festooned
with ticker-tape. There was no bunting on the bombed-out buildings in
Kensington and Kew. No stragglers in the East End stumbling home half-drunk
kicking empty bottles down the gutter.

Fires smoldered on the horizon. Big Ben was splintered and Whitehall
half-shrouded in tarp. Dirigibles dotted the air and impact craters with safety
ropes around them ate up the middles of roads. Derricks and fork-lift trucks
cleared rubble into giant skips while scrawny pigeons and starving rats foraged
for food in the rotten muck.

The dome of St. Paul’s remained miraculously intact, cocooned in a
skeleton of scaffolding but still standing, proudly and improbably, as it had
for two centuries. It was a powerful symbol of hope for a nation near the end
of its rope. The final curtain was closing on the war but Londoners didn’t know
it yet and the yearning for this end to come was as thick as the Thames fog. It
was January 1, 1944.

22B Ebury Street had gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah when a V1
“Doodlebug” streaked through the unit just as its occupant was pulling up
outside in his dependable two-seater Buick with a fetching Wren girl in the
passenger seat freshly corralled from Scott’s. “The sight of a German rocket
streaking through one’s window at two in the morning is quite sobering,” Ian
Fleming would later write in his diary neglecting to record that his first
thought upon seeing the blazing missile was where else he might take the young
lady. 

As a result of his being inconvenienced by the Waffen-sent projectile,
17F had been thrust into domesticity with his longtime steady Ann O’Neill (née
Charteris) who had recently been widowed but retained her dead husband’s last
name, as well as his lavish suite at The Dorchester. Ann had spent the majority
of the war years at the storied hotel waiting for Shane O’Neill to return from
Italy and in that time had made enough adjustments to the decor to make it feel
like home. Salmon linen, pale pink wallpaper and fuchsia stationary enhanced
the feminine ambiance and contributed to Fleming’s uneasy feeling that he was
living in her place rather than their place. They agreed to find a flat
together soon. Like a lot of Londoners, they were waiting for the war to end to
move forward with their lives.

It was just after 7 A.M. and they had been up for over an hour. Ian
Fleming’s chin was nicked and patched from a cold water shave with the rusting
Hoffritz safety razor he had been using for a month. His rusty trusty Hoffritz,
a heavy-toothed Gillette type, was one step up from a sharpened flint edge.
Dabbing a cloth against his blood-dappled throat, Fleming puttered to the
kitchen area where he examined squished remnants in an ashtray, fished out a
butt, straightened it and with the stubby smoke clenched between his teeth lit
up from the stove, almost singeing his eyebrows as he bent down and puffed. He
put the kettle on, tightened the fraying sash on his tattered dressing gown and
sauntered over to the large bay window where he gazed out moodily at the jagged
skyline of London and smoked.

“What’s for breakfast?” purred the silky voice from the lounge. Ann
O’Neill was sitting before her typewriter amid a disorderly mess of yellow
papers. She was wearing a mustard rayon blouse and an altered pair of Fleming’s
navy blue trousers. Fleming was not a fan of women wearing slacks, let alone
his slacks, but he had about as much power to stop this worrying fashion trend
as he did to end the war.

“The last of the eggs,” he grumbled as he shuffled back to the kitchen
area, extracted said item from a drawer and smashed it into the edge of a mug,
dribbling yolk down the side onto his fingers. “Blast,” he cried as he scraped
the precious goo off his digits into a bowl. How he longed for his pre-war
routine of half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon and
a big mug of coffee without sugar. Did he really breakfast like that daily? It
seemed so decadent.

He started to doubt the memory as he rummaged for a butter substitute,
spied a greenish coagulation of lard on a skillet and placed the skillet on the
stove top. He added powdered milk to the scramble. “I wish we had some pepper,”
he muttered as he fluffed the egg and poured it sizzling into the pan. His mind
wandered to the half-forgotten paradise that was London before the war. He felt
shallow for thinking it but he was tired of the deprivation. Even though he had
it better than most it was still a wretched way to go through life. A man
should work hard and play hard. All work and no play was making him dull.

The faint odor of burnt egg snapped him from his self-pity. He scraped
the singed offering onto a cracked plate, halved it with the side of a spoon
and presented the slightly smaller portion to Ann who was staring at a blank
sheet of paper with an inscrutable expression.

“Merci beaucoup,” she said without breaking her gaze.

Fleming shoveled in his breakfast in a few hurried heaves. He noticed
that Ann looked tired and unslept. It might have been the brightness of the
morning light but the lines in her face seemed more prominent.

“What’s wrong, Ann?”

She hesitated, took a bite of egg. “I need to finish this assignment.”

He looked at her but she didn’t meet his gaze as she reached for her
carton of Chelsea cigarettes which were empty. “Damn,” she muttered and crushed
the box in her hand, hurled it into a rubbish bin.

Fleming’s face registered concern. “Something else is going on, Ann. What
is it? Why aren’t you telling me?”

Ann paused. “Ian, do you think you’ll ever marry? When this war ends I
mean.”

His stomach fell. So that was it. “Did Teddy propose again?”

Ann scowled. “He owns his own newspaper, Ian. I’d be
Countess
Rothermere.”

“He’s a viscount, Ann. You’d be
Lady
Rothermere.”

Her hazel eyes flashed with anger. “You’ll never marry, Ian, admit it.
You just want to be free. No responsibilities.”

“The war’s not over yet,” he said. “As for responsibilities, I work seven
days a week. My life is nothing but responsibilities.” He was annoyed. This
wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. But her tone was frostier
this time round, he reflected, and there was a ring of finality to her words,
like a researcher’s conclusions at the end of a clinical trial. “It is the
findings of this test committee that the subject
will never marry
.”

A look of smiling obstinacy had come into Ann’s face. “War or no war,
Ian, are you saying there’s no time in your life for a meaningful commitment?”

“What do you call this?” he parried.

She didn’t have to think about an answer. “Forced intimacy,” she snapped.
“You wouldn’t be here if your flat was still standing.”

“I don’t understand you, Ann. Complaining about wanting something when
you already have it. We live together. We don’t see other people, not
habitually anyway, we both work hard and are focused on the day this blasted
war ends. Why complicate matters now?”

“I’m tired of you using the war as an excuse for not making a firm
commitment to me.”

“I have made a commitment to you. I’m committed, OK?”

Fleming thought: “When this war is over I will leave her.”