Ian Fleming - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

“Oh, well,” said Commander Pott cheerfully, “have to take the rough with the smooth. You never get real adventures without a bit of risk somewhere. Come on!” And they all piled back into CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG and crept up the last bit of slope

until they were parked slap in the middle of the huge secret vault.

While the others piled out and began carefully sniffing about round the edge of the bales and barrels and packages, Commander Pott went back and found the switch on their side of the secret door and, with a grind and a hum of machinery, the two halves came together again. Then he came back and they all systematically began to pry and peer into the secret stocks that were piled up round the walls of the big echoing vault.

Jeremy was the first. “Machine guns,” he cried excitedly, “packed in grease paper. They’re in sections ready to be assembled!”

Mimsie said, “Oh, heavens! Boxes and boxes of bombs and hand grenades!”

“Daggers,” called Jemima, “all kinds of them. And bayonets with rifles to go with them!”

“Well, I’m dashed,” said Commander Pott, “dynamite in these cases, and yards and yards of fuse. And gelignite the stuff burglars use to blast open safes and vaults.”

“Revolvers,” called out Jeremy, “automatic pistols. Big ones and small ones—every kind. With boxes and boxes of cartridges.”

Mimsie called out anxiously, “Now don’t touch anything, children. You can look, but not touch. Something might go off.” (Mothers are always thinking something is going to go off—on Guy Fawkes’ day, for instance, with the fireworks. And very often mothers are right about this. I must admit that Jeremy and Jemima knew this through one bitter experience with a box of firecrackers, and they were very careful about the way they peered into the boxes and bales.)

So the search went on. And there was no doubt about it, the family had come upon a great secret arsenal of weapons that certainly hadn’t been hidden down in the vault except for some secret and probably criminal purpose.

Finally they all came together again in the middle of the vault and they looked at their father to see what he was going to say about this extraordinary and rather frightening discovery.

Commander Pott had a scruffy bit of paper in his hand and he said, “You know what I think all this stuff is for? In one of the boxes, full of blackjacks and clubs and brass knuckles, there was this scrap of paper that says ‘SPECIAL ORDER FOR JOE THE MONSTER, 453 BASHERSTREET, SOHO, LONDON.’ Now he’s the man I’ve read about from time to time as being responsible for most of the bank robberies and holdups in England that the papers are always full of. But the police have never been able to catch him and they’ve never even been able to find out where he gets his weapons from. Well, there’s no doubt about it. This is his secret arms dump, and I bet my bottom dollar he smuggles what he wants from time to time over the Channel on foggy nights by speedboat. Now,” Commander Pott scratched his head, “what do we do next?”

“I know, I know, I know!” cried Jeremy excitedly. “BLOW IT ALL UP!!!”

“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Mimsie. “What about us and CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG? Do you want to blow us up too?”

“Well,” said Commander Pott thoughtfully, “it would be rather fun, wouldn’t it? But first of all we must find the way out of here. The cave must go on to the top of the cliff, or Joe the Monster and his gang couldn’t have got all this stuff down here. Now, I’ve noticed that the draft we’ve been feeling all the way up the cave is coming from over there.” He pointed to the back of the vault. “From behind those huge packing cases. Let’s just have a look.”

He went over to the packing cases and hauled on the front one and, instead of weighing a ton as they had all expected, it moved easily aside, and so did the next one and the next one. And when he moved the fourth, with the help of the family all tugging and panting, there was the continuation of their cave sloping upwards and, in the distance, there was a pale glimmer of light.

“By golly!” cried Commander Pott. “That must be the top. Now then, we’ll get CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG through the opening and go on up until we get out of here, and then I’ll run back and lay a fuse down the cave to the dynamite and we’ll get as far away as possible before the fireworks display.” He looked at his watch. “It’s after eight, so it’ll be dark enough to get the most out of our fireworks. But I’m famished and I know all of you must be, so after the big bang, we’ll go off to the nearest town and find somewhere for dinner and bed. We’ll certainly all have earned it after this evening’s work—if all goes well. And I don’t see why it shouldn’t.”

So they piled back into CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG and she started up with her two sneezes and two small explosions and they motored between the packing cases and up the slope and out of the secret vault with its huge hoard of explosives and guns that belonged to the biggest crook in England—JOE THE MONSTER!

Outside the vault, Commander Pott stopped the car and went back while the twins watched through the entrance to see what he did. He took a long roll of fuse out of one of the boxes (it looks like stiff thin rope and it’s stuffed with magnesium powder or some other quick-burning explosive, rather like the fuse you light when you want to set off a firecracker) and he attached one end to the stacks of dynamite (that comes in oblong sticks) and piled all the gelignite (that’s a stiff putty stuff) on top of the dynamite and then he unrolled the length of fuse and came back to the car after blocking up the entrance again with the big crates so that the explosion, when it came, wouldn’t chase them up the cave. Then he gave Jeremy the big roll of fuse to unwind as they. went along and off went CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG up the sloping cave toward the distant glimmer of light that was in the entrance.

The entrance was hidden behind a big clump of bushes in an old unused quarry, but CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG nosed her way through and they bumped and banged across the rough floor of the quarry until they came to a cart track that led away across the fields to one of the French main roads about ten miles away.

It was getting dusky by now, and far away across the fields they could see the side lights of a car that seemed to be coming toward them along the same cart track as they were on. “I expect it’s some farmer,” said Commander Pott. “Come on, we’d better light the fuse and get away quick or we, and perhaps the farmer too, may get a lump of chalk on our heads. There’s a terrific load of explosive down there inside the cave, and heaven knows how much of the cliff we’re going to blow up when the fuse gets to the dynamite.”

Commander Pott got out of the car, took the rest of the roll of fuse from Jeremy, cut off the end, and threw the rest of the coil into the back of the car. Then he knelt down and put a match to the end of the fuse.

Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a real fuse on fire, but the flame runs almost as fast as you can run, and with a tiny bang and a splutter, the little yellow flame darted off across the floor of the quarry back toward the bush which hid the mouth of the cave, and Commander Pott dived for the driver’s seat and got CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG quickly through the gears and racing off along the cart track away from the danger area. When he had gone a good two hundred yards away from lhe edge of the quarry, he stopped the car and they all looked back and waited, and I must confess that Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima all had their hands firmly clamped over their ears.

“It must be close now,” cried Commander Pott excitedly, and even as he said “now” there came a deep rumbling roar from right down inside the cliff, the ground shook, a great yellow jet of flame shot out of the quarry they had just left, and from the edge of the cliff there came a distant flash and a deep boom, and a pillar of smoke rose slowly into the air as the force of the explosion rushed down the long cave and burst out down by the edge of the sea. Then there came a series of smaller underground explosions and crackles as the ammunition boxes blew up one by one and the bombs and cartridges caught fire, and then there came one last terrific roar and whoosh of flame out of the quarry and to seaward and there was a cracking and rumbling noise in the ground and the cliff top above the cave split open and smoke and flame came out, like a mixture between a volcano and an earthquake. And then the smoking crack in the ground closed again leaving a big dent in the grass where the inside of the cliff had collapsed filling in the underground vault and the remains of the cave.