John Gardner - Seafire

"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.