John Gardner: Seafire

It was an automatic weapon being used from the far right-hand corner. One sudden and noisy burst that went wide, some of the bullets slapping into the swimming pool, only feet away from the last man who had landed.

A rip of fire from Dodd silenced the shooter, who died without even shouting. Bond followed the SAS officer to the right-hand cloister, while the other two troopers took the left side. He had worked in pairs with the SAS before, during training exercises, so knew what was expected.

There were four sets of double windows, each pair with a door between them on the ground floor. As they moved along the cloister they hurled stun grenades through the windows. On the farside, the grenades brought out only two men, who died as they came into view at the end of the cloister.

Nobody was flushed out from Dodd and Bond's side. "Let's do a pincer on the next floor up," Dodd said, as though this were a simple Sunday-afternoon stroll. He turned back and jogged to the stairwell, while Bond went ahead, taking the stairs in front of him two at a time. He reached the top to see a similar cloistered area with four more doors and pairs of windows, but this time, just as he reached the first door, a figure stepped from one of the doorways ahead yelling:

"You broke my jaw, you bastard." It was Heidi, though he had to interpret the words, as they were squashed and came from the back of her throat. For a split second he was back in the offices of Saal, Saal u. Rollen, where he had last seen her sprawled on the floor.

Then her arms came up and he caught the glint of the weapon in her hand. He dodged to the right, in through the door, as the pistol rapped out twice and he heard the bullets whip past him. Two more shots followed from farther away. There was a sound like a sack of potatoes being dropped on the stone under the cloister. Dodd had taken out Heidi.

For less than a minute, there was the sound of a brisk firefight from the opposite side of the villa. Bond was about to move out from the doorway when an arm slid, like a snake, around his throat. He felt a hand on the back of his head and the pressure on his windpipe. Whoever had him was using a well-tried method – the right forearm across the throat, the hand grasping the left biceps while the left hand held the back of the victim's head. It usually took only seconds to either strangle or render a victim unconscious. There was only one possible response, and he knew this must be taken very quickly, before the gray-out as the blood supply to the brain was slowed by the pressure.

He gave a violent kick with his feet, leaning and putting all his weight into falling backward, at the same time attempting to stamp on his assailant's shins and feet.

The two of them went toppling over. He felt the softness of the body under him, the gasp and oath, then the crack as Beth's head hit hard against the stone floor. The arms immediately relaxed and Bond rolled away, back onto his feet, reaching for the pistol on his belt.

"So you want your pretty lady back, huh?" Beth gasped. "You want…"

He did not even have to pull the trigger. The heavy fall had cracked her skull. Her eyes turned up as though in horror, and a stream of blood flooded from her nose and ears as she flopped, like some terrible beached animal, her body unnaturally spread out on the floor.

Then he heard Dodd calling to him.

Two doors along, Dodd had found Felix Leiter attempting to crawl across a room to get at his prosthetic arm and leg. He looked dog tired and frantic, but he smiled as Bond entered, then pointed to the far corner of the room, where Flicka lay, covered with a sheet, her face broken and bleeding.

"It's me, Flick," he whispered softly. "Me. You'll be okay now."

She tried to smile through the pain, then with great effort: "Will you still love me tomorrow, James?"

"Tomorrow and for all time, my darling girl," he said.

Later, in the SAS Officers' Mess at Stirling Lines in Herefordshire, when Captain Dodd related his version of the business in Puerto Rico, he used to say, "You know, I could have sworn that chap Bond was crying… Couldn't have been. Not that kind of officer. But I could have sworn… Even thought I saw tears on his cheeks. Couldn't have been though, could it?"