John Gardner: Win, Lose Or Die

The hang-gliders fell away, dropping for 1,000 feet or so until the wings bit into the air, and their pilots shifted their bodies so that they slowed, made contact with other members of their particular stick, then, in a loose formation, began to glide towards the first streaks of dawn below. The men’s bodies seemed to hang motionless in the thin air, and, during the early stages of the descent they were all forced to bring up their gloved hands to wipe the ice and rime from their goggles, altimeters and compasses. It was an exhilarating business, but they were hardly aware of the motion until they passed through the 10,000-feet level. There, the air thickened and they all had greater control of their flimsy craft.

The Son of Takashani had no warning. True, the radar operator caught a sprinkle of minute blips on his screen, but they meant nothing to him. Birds possibly, or specks of dust or static on the screen.

At exactly 10,000 feet above the tanker, the three groups brought their hang-gliders into the attack position. The two men armed with grenade launchers were well to the rear of the tanker, hanging in their harnesses, hands free to manipulate weapons.

Two grenades arched from the air, one smashing its way into the bridge, the other exploding further down the superstructure, leaving a gaping hole.

The explosion on the bridge was like a sudden blast of white hot flame. Everyone died instantly.

Seaman Ogawa, one of the gunners on the superstructure, could not believe his eyes and ears. He heard the double explosion, felt the ship quake under him, then saw, forward, two creatures that looked like prehistoric birds approaching the bows.

Flame leaped from them and he saw one of the deck gun crews scattered like a nest of mice hit by a shotgun blast. He squeezed the Browning’s trigger almost as a reflex action, and his mind registered surprise as he watched the two incoming birds turn into mangled flesh, blood and shattered canvas as the heavy bullets tore them apart.

The two men who had started everything, exactly as planned, by releasing the grenades had also come to grief. Once they had established hits on the superstructure, both men dropped the launchers into the sea and, swinging violently, unclipped Skorpion sub-machine-guns from their chests. In a matter of seconds they were streaking down towards the Son of Takashani’s stern, manoeuvring their gliders, pulling them into a more shallow and slower descent, ready to release their harness the moment their rubber-soled boots struck the deck. They were only some fifty feet away from landing when a short burst of fire from another part of the superstructure took off the legs of the man on the right. He sagged in his harness and the wings above him tilted so that the entire glider side-slipped into his partner.

This second man was thrown to one side, knocked unconscious, swinging out of control so that the angle of attack of his wings increased sharply, and he smashed into the stern of the tanker.

The initial shock and surprise were gone in less than two minutes.

The gunners who were left, both on deck and in the battered superstructure, were now assessing the situation. The drills that the Master had insisted on paid off. None of the crew of the Son of Takashani showed regard for his own safety. Several big hang-gliders, spitting flame and death, circled the ship, looking for openings to land on the main deck while desperately trying to maintain height. Two swooped in from starboard, knocking out another heavy machine-gun crew as they came, only to be mangled and ripped apart from fire directed from the superstructure. Four men actually managed to land safely on the stern, seeking what cover they could abaft the superstructure, unhooking grenades from their webbing equipment. Three more died as they rode the air down onto the port side.

Both the gun crews forward on the deck were now out of action, and, with a withering fire, another pair of hang-gliders reached the deck. The remainder were now either blasted out of the sky, or killed by smashing into the ship’s hull. The seven who remained fought on.

Smoke grenades gave some cover to the trio who had landed on the forward part of the deck, while the four men who were attacking from the stern managed, with grenade and gun, to gain a foothold in the superstructure itself.

The fighting lasted for almost half an hour. At the end of that bloody dawn there were several bodies of the glider-borne force strewn around the tanker; eighteen officers and men of the Son of Takashani were dead, and a further seven wounded.

The radio officer had continued to put out a distress signal throughout the whole battle, but it was an hour later before a US Navy frigate arrived at the scene, and by then, the Japanese, being an orderly people, had tipped the bodies of the attackers overboard, washed down the deck, seen to their own dead and wounded, and reorganised the tanker so that it could continue on its way.

The most senior officer, twenty-two year old Zenzo Yamada, who had taken the place of the dead Master, was able to give the American frigate’s captain a graphic, blow by blow account of the action. The American officer was perturbed by the lack of evidence left by the Japanese crew, but Yamada did not appear to be worried. “I helped one of them die,” he told the frigate’s captain.

“How?” The US officer was thirty years of age, a Lieutenant Commander called Ed Potts, and a man who appreciated order himself.

“He was dying. I finish him off.”

The American nodded. “He say anything?”

“One word, only.’ “Yeah?”

“He say, win.” The Japanese officer laughed at the thought.

“Win, huh? Well, he didn’t, did he?”

“Man not win. He lost, and died.” The Japanese officer laughed again, as though it was the funniest thing he had heard in a long time.

Later, others did not find it so amusing.

The repercussions which sprang from the strange attack on the tanker, Son of Takashani, were predictable. Japan accused first Iran, then Iraq. Both countries denied complicity. No terrorist organisation owned up, though the Intelligence communities of the West kept their eyes and ears open.

Much of the traffic concerning the Japanese tanker passed across James Bond’s desk in that faceless building overlooking Regent’s Park where he was, to his frustration, chained to an administrative job. He could not know that he would, eventually, become deeply involved in the business.

In these days of high-tech electronics, it is not unusual for people, who should know better, to claim that HUMINT - the gathering of intelligence by human agents in the field - is either dead, or lives only on borrowed time. Bond had recently laughed aloud when hearing a writer of adventure stories claim that the spy novel was dead, because: “These days, it’s all done by satellites.”

Certainly those electronic wizards girdling the earth can pluck photographs, and even military transmissions, from the air, but there was far more to it than that. The satellite in war can give armies, navies and air forces the edge, but in peace, when there is more time at the disposal of intelligence agencies, the back-up analysis of photographs and spoken information can only be achieved by the man or woman in the field. Apart from that, there are often delicate covert operations which cannot be accomplished by whole echelons of electronics, only by humans.

In one area, that of ELINT, the collection of intelligence by electronic means, both the human agent, the COMSATS (Communications Satellites), and ELINT itself were welded together as a team. In recent years the micro bug, used so successfully to tap into telephone and other conversations, was sparingly taken into the field, usually only on close-quarter covert operations.