John Gardner - Brokenclaw

‘Captain James Bond, I want you to meet Commander Ed Rushia, US Naval Intelligence.’ M smiled quietly as he introduced the two men.

Rushia took a step forward and placed his large hand in Bond’s, giving it a firm shake. ‘My gosh,’ he said, his voice soft, down-home as they say in American. ‘Jiminy, James Bond. Heard a lot about you, Captain Bond. Mind if I call you James?’

‘Be my guest.’ Bond did not usually like the American habit of becoming almost bosom, first-name buddies within thirty seconds of meeting, but as he felt the warm, firm pressure of Rushia’s handshake and looked into the friendly, twinkling eyes, he felt he might have known the man for years. ‘I can call you Ed, yes?’

‘That’s mighty nice a’ you, James. ’Preciate it. Going to enjoy working with you. You just call me anything you darned well please. Most people do.’

M watched the two men, as dissimilar as the proverbial chalk and cheese. From his own first meeting with Commander Rushia he had known they would make a team. ‘Ed, we have to clear Captain Bond here for Lords and Lords Day.’

Rushia took in a deep breath. ‘Gee whizz,’ he said. ‘Gee, that’s going to be tough. I don’t understand the darned thing myself – only that she’s a honey, Lords and Lords Day both. Two sweet and deadly honeys.’ He looked from M to Bond and back again, pursed his lips, blew a couple of short breaths as though testing some imaginary instrument and lowered his long frame into one of the remaining chairs. He then turned to Bond.

‘Well, James, it goes something like this. These coupla doo-hickies, Lords and Lords Day, are two sides of a mighty impressive coin. Lords, if you want the truth, stands for Long Range Deep Sea, and that’s a real humdinger, I can tell you. This thing is state-of-the-art, but don’t tell Art, or he’ll want one.’ His voice dropped into a confiding, almost secretive tone. ‘This thing can detect submarine signatures – even well-shuffled ones – at a phenomenal range, in all weathers and to depths you just wouldn’t believe. I tell you, James, I hardly believe the thing, it does such fantastic tricks. Don’t ask me how it works, ’cos I guess only around half-a-dozen bald-pated superbrains know that. I can tell you it’s a cocktail of micro-tech, lasers and some good things we got out of studying stealth technology.’ He swept his hand in a gesture which made you feel he was signifying an entire ocean. ‘To boil it down, take the mystery out of it as you might say, it’s a box. A box with wires. But if there’s some miracle metal dolphin out there, couple of hundred miles off the port beam and full fathom five down, the box with wires’ll leap up and dance like Bojangles himself. Follow my meaning?’

Bond nodded, smiling. Ed Rushia was a live one, a natural, he thought. That down-home, simple, almost country-boy language must have led many unwary people to their doom. Bond, who knew good cover when he saw it, had already begun to respect Commander Rushia. ‘And Lords Day?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that one’s more perverse. It’s the antidote. Long Range Deep Sea Detector And Yaffler. Yea, I had to ask about the Yaffler thing and it appears that in some parts of the world, the common green woodpecker is known as a Yaffler. Simple, isn’t it? The antidote confuses the Lords box with wires by using a particular pattern of sonic beams. They’re not your run-of-the-mill sonic beams. These are special, they form a pattern that sounds just like a common green woodpecker.’ He clapped his big hands together in an act of finality. ‘Okay, James, consider yourself Lords and Lords Day cleared.’

‘So, what appears to be the problem?’ Bond asked.

‘Oh, the admiral here hasn’t told you? Well, San Francisco is, as you must surely know, the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet, and the United States Pacific Fleet is as leaky as an old kettle. There are things going on around here that make the Walker Brothers look like a Girl Scout convention.’ He frowned. ‘The Walker Brothers were spies, by the by, not some singing rock ’n’ roll outfit.’

‘I had heard,’ Bond said, straight-faced.

‘Well, I like to be sure, James. Some people tell me that there are British officers who don’t even know the difference between Stonewall Jackson and General Sherman. Think they’re baseball players or some such.’

‘And what’s it all got to do with us Brits anyway?’

M stepped in. ‘Us Brits, as you call your own, 007, helped invent the thing, but in the last three months no fewer than three officers and two enlisted men, one Royal Navy and the rest US Navy, have gone missing. They are all fully Lords cleared; they are all highly trained technicians with stratospheric security clearances . . .’

‘Six, not five, if you count Wanda . . .’ Rushia began.

M turned towards the American. ‘We do not count Wanda, because she didn’t go missing, Commander. She’s our asset and she’s here for the night. But you couldn’t have known that.’

‘Who is Wanda?’ Bond asked, his mind already centred on the word Lords. He had heard it before and the picture came back clearly – the huge, hybrid Chinese-Indian and the words that had seemed to pass between him and the nervous man outside the Empress Hotel only yesterday afternoon. The lip-read conversation concerning someone’s death by shooting, and the big man with the twisted hand saying, ‘Tell them incalculable damage may have been done regarding Lords.’

He opened his mouth, but Rushia was already speaking. ‘I might add that if those guys have gone over to any foreign power, even in this time of glasnost and perestroika , then heaven help us, because those guys know things we wouldn’t even share with the Army, Navy and Pentagon combined, leave alone the old folks in East Jaboo.’

‘What is more,’ M continued as though he had never been interrupted, ‘as of yesterday, the founding father of Lords, one Professor Robert Allardyce, went missing. Guess where, James?’

‘Surprise me, sir.’

‘In Victoria, British Columbia. Where you were on holiday.’

‘Then I just might have a connection.’

‘What kind of connection?’ M snapped.

‘I think I have the name of someone possibly mixed up in the business.’

‘Really?’ M sounded almost patronising. ‘Give me the name.’

‘He’s a half-breed, Chinese-Blackfoot Indian by the name of Lee Fu-Chu, also known as Brokenclaw Lee.’

M’s face hardened and his voice took on the sharp tone of suspicion. ‘What do you know of Brokenclaw Lee, Captain Bond?’

‘Very little, sir. But I saw him and listened to him giving a speech yesterday in Victoria, just before I received your orders to come on down here.’

‘Gee whizz,’ said Rushia softly. ‘Gee whizz, is that right?’

‘Tell us about it,’ M said flatly, as though challenging Bond to perform some impossible feat.

5

TROJAN HORSE

As he recounted the facts of yesterday’s unexpected sighting and observation of Brokenclaw Lee, Bond was almost anxiously aware that both M and Commander Rushia listened to him with an intensity which he found disturbing. The two men were very still, never moving a muscle, their faces blank, like a pair of predators waiting for their target to come within range.

When Bond finished speaking there was a long silence. Involuntarily, images came clearly into his mind – smoke from an old steam train, drifting away in a long stream; the view from a powerful telescope, looking into space. Then M spoke.

‘Why did you become so interested in Lee?’ His tone was unusually hostile.

‘I read his lips; death seemed to enter into the conversation, but, above all, he appeared to be an immensely powerful man. There was an aura about him, something different, fascinating, even charismatic.’