Seafire, page 23
"I've told you -" Her words were cut off by another stinging, pain-drenched slap. This time harder, and followed by an even heavier backhander to her other cheek.
Taken by surprise, and stark naked from the shower, there was little she could do, but she had to fight back. Turning her body to present a smaller target, she launched herself toward the woman, one hand chopping at her assailant's neck. It was like hitting a solid punching bag and only seemed to enrage Beth even more, for out of nowhere a ringed hand caught her hard with two heavy blows to the breasts.
"Talk to me, bitch. Where's he gone?"
"I don't… Truly, I don't know."
"The truth, honey. The truth shall set you free, that's what's in the Good Book. Now, set yourself free." The hand rose again, and this time Flicka could hardly see from the pain that saturated her face. The backhander that followed almost made her black out, but she could still hear the voice, intimidating and relentless. "The truth, honey, just tell me the truth, then we can all have some real fun."
She heard her own voice from what seemed to be a long way off. "I've told you the truth. I don't -"
The pain again. Now it was as if she were living in her own private world of agony, though the voice of her conscience repeated to her again and again: Don't tell them anything. Keep James safe.
She felt for the corner of the wall with her feet and tried to push herself toward Beth, hands bunched into fists, striking out for the woman's throat. Before her hands got anywhere near their target, another blow sent her sprawling back onto the floor.
"Talk to me, bitch."
"I really don't know. Stop. I don't…"
She prayed for the darkness of unconsciousness or even death, and knew that at least one of her cheekbones was almost certainly broken. The hands of this black horror, reinforced by the heavy rings, were like pieces of steel. The hurt filling her life.
Again: "The truth shall set you free, honey. Where's he gone?"
Then one more time, to the left cheek and then the right. She felt blood wet on her cheek and running down her nose, while Beth's voice sounded distorted. "Tell me the truth, bitch." Crack. A whole avalanche of torment. A numbness as she cannoned off the wall, and voices coming from miles away, from the end of a long dark tunnel.
"You've done it again, Beth. She's out."
Flicka could hardly make out the words.
"Then I guess she tellin' the truth. You've seen this before, Mo -"
"Don't call me Mo. The name's Maurice."
"She don't know where he is, that's for sure."
"Then we'd better get her out of here. Take her to Max's place. You can work on her quietly there, just in case you're wrong."
"I'm seldom wrong, baby. You know that. She tellin' the truth, so why don' I just set her free here and now?"
"No. Let's get her across the island. You've got the white coats in the car. Let's do it. Let's…"
The voices faded as Flicka slipped deeper into the comfort of oblivion. She could feel nothing, nor could she understand anything.
Bond drove fast, but with great concentration. His conscience was already pricking him, because of course he knew Flicka had been right. They should have called in. Passed the whole business over to their superiors and got out, knowing that Tarn and his mad, obsessive plan would come to nothing with the deployment of the right forces.
Yet a part of him wanted to see it through. Was it a question of glory? A reluctance to give up the life of danger for a desk and the boredom of assigning other people to this kind of work?
Then he switched his mind away from those questions. He glanced at the dashboard digital clock. Ten P.M.; he had eleven hours, and if nobody was guarding the submarine he could set his little jewels. For a couple of seconds he wondered what intuition had made him ask Ann Reilly for these particular items. Each consisted of two pounds of plastique explosive, a recently developed substance with three times the effect of Semtex. Two pounds of this stuff would do a lot of damage, especially if it were placed in the right spots. The heat it generated, for one thing, had the power of a thermal lance and it could blow through steel as though it were butter.
Pushed into the two-pound blocks of plastique was a fuse with the latest in electronic timing devices. Small, with tiny powerful batteries, the fuse could be set like the mechanism on a miniature alarm clock. The dial on each was no bigger than an American 25-cent piece, and could be activated, using a tiny screwdriver, over a twenty-four-hour period. Now, he had plans for these deadly devices, and once they were set, the military would not have to waste time trying to find the submarine. All he could do was hope and pray that the sub had been left unguarded that night.
He turned his thoughts to Q'ute's ingenuity. Not only had she got the explosive devices to him, but her note had been very specific concerning the other item – large and cumbersome. It would have to be somewhere out in the open, and just where he needed it. She had been very definite about that, and considering the lack of hiding places and the number of people who – during the day – would be passing near anywhere in San Juan, the task of dumping it for him really would have to be left until the last moment. How would Q'ute know when the last moment had arrived? He had missed something all the way, and now logic told him one new significant truth. The drop-off for this equipment led to the indisputable fact that there were other active Service people on the island, ready to move in should he need them.
What was it Q'ute had written? Some of our friends will see to it that you get the thing if you really need it.
With a sudden feeling of elation, he knew what this meant, and felt a fool for not envisaging it until now. Only one kind of operative was up to hiding and waiting for the right moment to leave the piece of equipment he had in mind. He cursed himself. Of course; and of course they should have called London. He would put money on there being members of both the SAS and the American elite Delta Force waiting it out, watching him, ready to move in as soon as they received signals. Flicka was right, he told himself. They could have left it to London and Washington. Everything was already in place, and if the elite forces had done their job properly, they would know by now that something was about to go down.
It flashed through his mind that perhaps he should drive into Ponce and make a call from some public telephone booth, but he stubbornly dismissed the idea. He would try to set the explosives, get away, and call Flicka to put things in motion.
He turned off at Ponce, taking the road along the coast, eventually finding the narrow trail that led to the clump of trees from which they had observed the Tarn mansion.
Before leaving the car, he pulled on the wet suit and snapped the belt into place, checking the equipment in the pouches and clips. He then walked up into the trees and looked down on the Tarn compound. There was no sign of life below, save for one lighted window. The submarine crew were either sleeping until dawn or already down in the cave, readying the boat for sea.
Finally, he turned to set off back down the track and narrow road up which he had come. He paused on reaching the main road, his eyes fully adjusted to the night blackness. There was no sign of life, and no noise coming up from the rock face across the road but for the sound of the sea. He ran, crouching low, toward the warning notice and began to descend the steps, his ears hearing only the hush and crush of the surf. No voices, and still no human sounds as he reached the bottom of the steps.
As on the previous day, he inched along the rocks toward the netting that covered the entrance to the cave. Silence, and no lights from within the makeshift submarine pen. He lifted the edge of the netting and stepped inside, standing perfectly still, all his senses attuned like radar to pick up any hint of another human being.
Nothing.
Smiling to himself, he unclipped the flashlight and switched it on, allowing the beam to play along the whale-like metal structure as he moved forward. His first suspicion was that this was no Victor-class Russian sub, as he had been led to believe. Its size and shape suggested something much older. Even a World War II German U-boat. As he got closer and was able to reveal more of the submarine in the light from the flashlight, the more certain he became of what this really was: a Type VII C U-boat.
He crossed the small makeshift gangway and climbed up the ladder to the top of the sail, realizing that when this boat first entered the water, it was not called the sail but the conning tower – the Kommandoturm. The hatch was up, and he played the beam of his light down into the bowels of the boat. Silence. Nothing there but the narrow space of the tube that ran straight down into the control room. The interior smelted of a mixture of oil, polish, and human bodies. The crew of this boat had been working down here until quite recently. They would be back, at the latest, for a dawn departure, but he did not allow this to worry him. If he were to do the job properly, he had to take his time and make certain of the layout of the submarine.
He stayed for some time in the control room, looking at the periscope, the steering and dive controls, and the dials that went with them. Part of the mystery was now explained. All the controls and instruments were labeled with neat stick-on metal tags, stating their use in English, though these same essentials had been originally marked up in German. The German had been either partly scraped off or covered with notices in Russian, even inside the dials relating to pressure and depth. The glass fronts had been removed so that Russian labels could be stuck on to the clocklike instruments before the glass was replaced.
It was a former German U-boat, probably captured by the Russians and converted for their own use until they began building their giant nuclear, missile-carrying fleet.
Bond moved aft, along the narrow catwalks and corridors, wondering what it must have been like to serve in these extraordinarily cramped conditions for months at a time. He spotted several improvements that he presumed had been made by the Russians, including more-modern escape equipment – a state-of-the-art escape trunk, with a hatch hidden from the companionway below. He pulled himself up into the boxlike hatch and saw that a number of the latest Steinke hoods were lined up in a container that ran around three sides of the hatch. Above was the cylinder of the escape trunk, with its wheels to open and close the trunk.
Easing himself down onto the companionway, he traversed right to the stern of the boat, then back, moving forward through the control room again, and so for'ard toward the bows. He brushed the small curtained-off sections that served as crew and officer mess decks, and on toward the torpedo tubes in the bow, noting as he went that the Russians – or its present owner – had provided an escape trunk almost identical to the one aft.
There were red tags wired to the wheels of the torpedo tubes with the words "Tube Full. Loaded" scrawled on them. Behind, to both port and starboard, were the racks that would normally hold other torpedoes. They were empty, and he remembered Tarn aboard Mare Nostrum saying they had only two torpedoes with which to do the job.
Bond began to take out the deadly little jewels of plastique from the pouches on his belt. He placed them in a neat row and removed the small screwdriver with which he would arm the fuses. Holding his flashlight under his chin, he picked up each device in turn and worked with the screwdriver until all five fuses were set for nineteen-fifty – ten minutes to eight on the following evening. He left the final arming, the moving of a small button in the center of each dial, until last, then moved to the port torpedo tube, spinning the wheel that allowed the breech door to swing back.
Years ago he had spent some time being spirited onto the shore of another country in an old British submarine, and recalled the hours spent waiting. Some of that time had been passed with an old submariner who had showed him the comparatively simple mechanism they had used on these World War II boats. In memory, the German U-boat was not much different. A lever on one side of the tube lifted a curved metal stretcher on which the torpedo could be slid into, or out of, the tube. The mechanism here was very similar, and had been well oiled and maintained. The long and deadly fish came sliding back on the stretcher until the tube was empty.
Carefully, he took the first of the plastique devices and unwrapped the actual explosive, which he molded, like a big lump of plasticine, as far forward as he could on the top side of the torpedo. The second bomb he stuck firmly around the center of the weapon; then he reversed the steps with the levers and stretcher, feeling an enormous pleasure as the torpedo went back into its tube and he turned the wheel, which would make the whole thing watertight.
Then he went through the whole business again on the starboard side. In all, the process took him the best part of two hours, and there was one plastique bomb left. He had kept this for another vulnerable spot, and began to make his way aft again, knowing that at ten minutes to eight on the following evening the plastique would explode, probably also igniting the two torpedoes. This alone, almost certainly, would blow off the entire bow section of the boat.
He reached the far end of the sub and searched for the main pipe, which carried diesel fuel to the engines when the boat was on the surface. While submerged the craft ran wholly on the huge batteries, which had to be recharged by running on the surface under me diesel. But submerged or not, there was always fuel in the pipeline, and he molded the last bomb around the pipe so that it was completely hidden from view – high up and out of sight among the other pipes and cables that traversed almost the entire length of the boat. When the time came, the bow would be blown away and, with any luck, a secondary explosion would ignite the diesel fuel and rip through the rest of the old craft.
Bond sighed with some relief as he finished the job, and making certain he had left no traces of his visit, he began to move forward. He had gone halfway toward the control room when he stopped, stock-still, listening. There was a clanking sound from above him and then the unmistakable noise of men climbing the ladder up the outside of the conning tower. He heard the first one come down inside the control room and a broad Scottish accent shouting, "Wall, there'll be nay turnin' back now, lads, so let's be having you down here."
He was trapped inside the old U-boat.
23 – Between the Devil and the Deep
For a second he seemed to be frozen to the deck below his feet. He was so close to the control room that he could smell the men coming down through the tower. Then he moved, softly backing up until he stood just under the aft escape trunk. As the voices became louder, he swung himself up into the hatch close to the trunk, pressing his body into the small space that would hide him from the men moving about below.
Something crackled from just beneath him and the Scottish voice came clear through the PA system. "D'ye hear there! D'ye hear there! All hands close up for leaving harbor. All watertight doors closed." The captain, he knew from the mode of address, must be a former member of the Royal Navy. His blood boiled with anger at the thought of an officer of his own former service being in charge of Tarn's submarine, bent on causing death, destruction, and a possible ecological disaster the like of which the world had never yet seen. Bond was truly between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
He was crammed into a fetal position within the hatch and moved an arm to get a glimpse of his wristwatch. It was almost two-thirty in the morning. Had he really been that long in setting the plastique explosives? Well, he certainly had not hurried. Now the thought of being confined to this tiny space for at the least seventeen hours was distinctly unappealing. Why were they leaving at this time, in the dead of night? He brushed the question aside, for the answer was obvious.
The submarine would have to work its way quietly around the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic side, then maneuver itself into position in order to catch Golden Bough as she came past the promontory on which El Morro stood, and cripple the supertanker just within the harbor basin. They dared not allow the submarine to be seen from the mainland cruising quietly along the coast, which meant that as soon as the sun began to rise it would be necessary to dive and continue on the journey submerged.
What about radar detection? It was unlikely, unless the search was still active for a submarine, that the signature of this relatively small boat would show as anything more than a small blip, which could be read as a school of large fish.
Someone hurried past, below him, feet thumping on the deck, and for a second his hand moved toward the pistol on his belt in case the crew member was there to check the tube of the escape trunk above him to make certain the locking wheel was tight and closed up.
The footsteps passed directly below him, bent on some job aft. He relaxed again as he felt a quivering in the metal around and below him. The diesel engines were running, and he caught a faint whiff of air being drawn into the hull. Then: "D'ye hear there! D'ye hear there! Engines slow ahead. Cast off for'ard. Cast off aft."
Then he heard another voice, and his stomach turned over. "This is good. Very exciting," the voice said in slow and careful German. Kurt Rollen, the retarded partner of Saal, Saal u. Rollen, was aboard.
He flinched, as the voice seemed to come from very close to him and he heard the thud of feet above him: presumably the two crew members up on the rounded exterior, releasing the boat from its restraining lines.
Seconds later there was movement. A wallowing motion as the submarine edged slowly forward out into the sea, and the distinct tremor that passed through the metal hull, so that the entire boat seemed alive.
Again the voice of the captain. "D'ye hear there! D'ye hear there, all hands at dive stations, close up main hatch."
He thought he could hear the scramble of the two men who had been topside as they came down into the control room, and the squeal of the wheel lock that would seal everyone within the metal coffin, for it would be the final casket for the entire crew when the clock ticked around to seven-fifty that night.
Above him was his own means of escape, the trunk. He had no worries on that score, for only a few years ago he had been through the usual refresher courses that M had made him take regularly. Those courses brushed up his seamanship, allowed him to put a few more hours in his pilot's log and examine the most modern weapons and procedures – including submerged escape. As long as the submarine stayed within about one hundred and twenty meters – roughly four hundred feet – of the surface he would have no problem getting out. If she went deep, there would be severe difficulties.
