The Ian Fleming Files (41 page)

“As you get closer to shore,” said Archibald Lund, “be careful of rip
currents. If it happens remain calm, conserve energy. A riptide is like a giant
water treadmill that you can't turn off, so it does no good to try and swim
against it. Stay parallel to the shore and out of the current. If it is too
difficult to swim sideways, try floating or treading water and let nature do
its thing. You'll wash out of the current at some point and can then make your
way to shore.”

“Anything else?” said Fleming with a touch of grim irony.

“Just make your strokes as efficient as possible,” said the swim
instructor. “Go for smoothness in execution. Pay close attention to how much
water you are moving with your arms and feet varying the angle of attack until
you get the most power from your moves.”

Godfrey tipped brandy from a canteen into a tin mug and gave it to
Fleming who poured it down his throat without a swallow. The alcohol coursed
through his system and provided a warm shiver of relief.

Godfrey touched Fleming’s shoulder. “Good luck, son. God alone knows
you’re going to need it.”

Fleming slapped the goggles over his eyes, nodded and slipped silently
into the frigid black water.

Godfrey, Archie et al observed 17F steadily glide forward through the
sable sea. The wind flapped their ponchos like shrouds around them as they
watched the sleek figure surface and swim away until his grey bobbing head
vanished in the black immensity.

Ian Fleming swam a choppy crawl, breathing either with every stroke or
every fourth stroke and counting somewhere well in the back of his mind the
one-two one-two of a flutter kick. It was not a serviceable stroke for long
distances but he was too anxious and needed to relax into the swim before
trying something more advanced.

The water buoyed him and broke for him like a knife through butter. His
lower mandible was ice, rising and falling, walloping the surface like a steel
hammer; his lungs, swelled to capacity, were a pair of billows fanning the
piston-like forward movement of the man-fish through the starlit sea.

He glanced at the big luminous figures on the dial of his Italian diving
watch: 00:35 A.M.

He slowed and tilted his head up to take in the coruscating firmament but
the constellations were a blur of blue light. He snapped his goggles off and
broke water, spun his head in the rolling, sloshing darkness but was
disoriented, his mental faculties failing him as he looked up at a speckled
band of Milky Way and scanned the smudged pinpricks praying for a cluster to
coalesce into something familiar. He widened his eyes, straining to make sense
of the pulsating pointillism as a frisson of fear gripped him and he suddenly
felt more lost than he ever had in his entire life. The water lapped and was
still, almost preternaturally as though nature was lulling him to a gentle
death here, alone.

The full throttled roar of the German torpedo boat shook him from
despair. Stars vanished when the brightness spilled onto him from the
schnellboot
’s
searchlight. The long hull of the ship grew out of the shadows and took shape,
a great Zeppelin in the water, its sharp prow slicing through the black sea.
Using every muscle fiber Fleming tore through the drink, scrambling to make
space between his flank and the curved steel bow bearing down.

The fast attack craft thundered by at 40 knots, ripping water in its
wake. Waves buffeted Fleming and moved him fast along, planing him towards the
slimy clumps of a seaweed bed. The S-boat’s Daimler MB 502 engines roared as he
clung to the sodden vegetation. The tremendous water impact had knocked the
wind out of him but the will to live was revived. Adrenaline surged with the
realization that if the coastal defenders had spied him they would have either
opened fire, slowed or both.

He set off with a backward leg-stroke. The S-boat had left a slight swell
that floated him and pulled him along. He swam until the natural current took
over and the last thrust of the Daimler engines sputtered out and their roar
was replaced by the gentle lapping of the sea.

The encounter had sapped Fleming’s bleariness and brought clarity to his
vision. He gazed up to see a star map spread like a diorama; nebulae, globular
clusters, galaxies, open star clusters, planets, asteroids, comets, satellites,
meteors. He located the cross-shaped asterism Crux, a circumpolar constellation
that he knew was a fixture of any night sky. From there it was an easy
vectoring to Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament.

Be determined. Determination means the bulldog stick-to-it-iveness to
win at all costs. During your training keep ever lastingly at the most
difficult tasks and never give up until you have mastered them. Determination
to win means success in battle.

He swam, glancing up at his celestial beacon on every fourth or fifth
stroke, straining to see the amorphous mass of granite ahead.

The pale indigo sky seen from
The Walrus
was a blue-black
simulacrum of space that was too corrugated with shadow for him to distinguish
shapes on the non-existent horizon. The patrol boat had saved him, snapped him
from the jaws of death, but the sudden despair, the feeling of being utterly alone
in the universe gripped him still.

His eyes cast about for Corbet Rock. Was he in The Swinge yet? How could
he tell? Everything looked the same. He tried to stifle his concern.

With his astral guide to steer him, he fell into a steady rhythm and
monotony settled in. He concentrated on breathing but images invaded his
consciousness. He thought about the mission but he kept seeing Ann’s face. They
were back in the darkened hotel room discussing names. He heard ‘Curtis’ until
his ears rang and for the first time he thought about the situation. Out here
in the middle of the English Channel, with nothing but the same navigation
tools used by primitive seafarers to anchor his peregrination, here he had
chosen to decide.

He loved Ann. There was no doubt. When faced with his own mortality only
moments ago he thought of her. Not Maria. Not the job. Not what his obituary
might say. He loved her and she would make a good mother. She was forgiving of
his failings, grateful for his love. Most of all, she needed him as much as he
needed her. There would always be more Marias.

Or would there? He was 37. He had been blessed with height and reasonably
good looks. In his youth, he could afford to be aloof and wait until a girl had
made it plain enough what she wanted that the possibility of rejection was
taken out of the equation. Now he would have to be the aggressor. Thirty-seven!
Too old to change. Too old to trawl the bars and bistros of Mayfair lusting for
contact. It was unseemly and beneath him. He saw an aging blade escorting
trollops to dinner at Scott’s on Saturday nights and shuddered.

Ann was right. He did prize his freedom above all. Otherwise he would be
married like his brothers.

His arms ached. He swam and swam and the view ahead remained obstinately
the same, still that same diamantine mass looming out of and vanishing into
that greyly impenetrable opacity. He broke water, slapped off his goggles and
stared unblinkingly into the swirling gloom. His numbed skin had the hard rough
texture of pumice. His face was full of porcupine quills.

A meadow of soft sea grass showed up ahead. In the deep, slow currents it
waved languidly, like deep fur. The hypnotic motion made him sick. Dotted
sparsely in the grass were the big black footballs of dead sponges and other
flotsam from the frothy sea.

He looked up at his twinkling marker and searched the dusty darkness
ahead for any signs of land. There was something ahead, too low to be a
cloudbank. It was the uneven mass of Alderney, sharply-limned as if in full
daylight, outlined against the sky that had grown grey with the coming dawn.

He went to smile but his rigid jaw would not permit it. His lungs ached.
He could feel every swollen oxygen-starved capillary. Spurred by the sighting
of land, oblivious to the irony that he was less intimidated by infiltrating
Nazi territory than he was by contemplating matrimony and fatherhood, he went
all out in the direction of the south shore.

The current shifted, tugging him in its force, as the offshore eddies
streamed in and demanded more effort of his enervated muscles.

He felt a twinge of panic, swam a bobbled sidestroke, fighting the
weariness of exhaustion. He knew there would be sand bars just off the beach
and planned to swim in one of those channels. The water grew cloudy and shallow.
Mud shelved steeply and he kept on going until, at about forty feet, he was
only a few inches above the bottom.

Struggling against the undertow, he butterflied until the shelf touched
his knees and he could see the remnants of a rotten jetty. He paddled to it,
held onto a heavily barnacled erosion pillar for support and hauled himself to
land.

Starlight reflected off the small strip of sandy beach which was
half-shadowed by the penumbra of a looming cliff-face.

On the edge of delirium, stupefied with exhaustion, Fleming slid over the
shelving sand, heaved forward and trudged through thick silt that pulled him
down like quicksand. He collapsed in the wet beach, lay there panting up at the
heavens as the water washed over him. He got to his feet staggering with
fatigue, stooped and shucked out of his dry-suit, shivering like a limp and
sodden ragdoll by a rock as he changed into dry clothes from his backpack.

Moving with a mechanical, awful tiredness, he surveyed the deserted beach
which was at the base of a scrub plain sloping sharply upward to Fortress
Alderney. The exquisite pain of returning circulation spurred him on as he
scoured the terrain for any signs of life and hastened surreptitiously through
the shadows toward the next cove.

In precisely thirty minutes, his pistol removed from its waterproof
compartment and now shoulder-holstered, Fleming moved swiftly but very quietly
from shadow to shadow across the sands and rock strata in black burglar shirt
and slacks. He had swum too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose
and his throat were sore from the water. What he needed was a drink and a hot
meal. Brandy and cigars at Frascati’s or a glass of Chianti and a steak at
White Tower.

He had covered the length of the beach twice and explored the crannies of
its coves and was now venturing beyond it into a brush-choked field. He slogged
through knotted undergrowth as a keen wind sprang up from the east, steadily
increased in strength and became bitingly cold.

The rackety whir of a helicopter engine ripped the stillness. It was a
big black military bird with swastika markings on its belly.

Fleming darted back into the shadows. The copter swept up the coast and
banked toward the water before it began to circle back around. It was a
liaison-observation craft, noted Fleming. A Flettner Fl 265 with two
intermeshing rotors 12 meters in diameter, powered by a 160 horsepower
BMW-Bramo Sh 14 A radial engine in the nose of the fuselage. About twice the
size of the one he took to the deck of the
Tantalus
which was really
nothing more than a glorified autogyro.

Fleming waited until the whirlybird had finished its loop which he
decided had the characteristics of a routine survey. He shivered in the cold as
he listened to the thumping rotor of the Flettner peter out. A prickly mist
began to descend. Fleming waited until it was perfectly still and then set out
again on his quest.

Almost an hour passed and he had seen more of the south coast of Alderney
than he felt any man should. He was considering signaling to
The Walrus
with the torch in his Mont Blanc pen when there was movement in his periphery.
A slight flicker in the brush that was more than just the swaying of sumac. He
crouched behind a boulder and withdrew his Browning, hurried backwards to the
edge of a small cluster of pines. His nostrils perked. There was a familiar
scent in the air, a concentrate of rose, Dutch jonquil, musk and patchouli.
 

Fleming peered out with his Browning cocked to see a skinny silhouette
ambling unhurriedly toward him. He kept his finger on the trigger and scanned
the bleak windswept terrain and even the water for signs of hidden accomplices.

Maria emerged into the pale light of the beach and looked furtively
around. She was wearing a heavy woolen coat and Cossack fur hat.

Fleming watched her movements, trying to divine her body language. Her
strides were hesitant and she faltered once or twice in the uneven ground.
Satisfied that he was unobserved, he announced his presence by treading
purposefully on a dry twig which broke loudly.

Maria spun round, sagged as if relieved and came bounding over,
 wrapped herself around him.

“Darling,” she said, “you came. It’s like a dream.”

“We’ll have less of the darlings. Uncle John is waiting. Tell me what
you’ve learned.”

“Darling,” she continued as though he hadn’t uttered a word, “I can’t
believe it. You got my message? Of course you did, how else would you know to
be here.” She staggered as if intoxicated.

Fleming knitted his brow. Her honey-toned voice sounded automatic, like a
broken gramophone, and her eyes seemed far away. He held her at arm’s length
and looked at her in the half-light. She laughed and nearly lost balance.

“Commander Fleming…” she said in a ghostly whisper. “My hero…”

“Maria?” He shook her. “What’s wrong with you?”

His inner alarm bells triggered even before his conscious mind processed
it. By the time he reached into his shirt and flipped the manual safety switch
above the Hi Power’s grip he heard the carbines rack behind him and it was too
late.

Maria smiled woozily. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said dreamily. Her voice
was an unconscious whisper. “I… had no choice. They made me… Please forgive me.
I love…” She began then broke off. Her eyes drooped and she slumped to the
ground.