John Gardner - Win, Lose Or Die

Bond took less than a minute. There was a long silence, then Walmsley said, “Get up here. You’d best break the bad news to Admiral Gudeon himself. Get up here now.

“Aye-Aye, sir.” Bond stowed away the late Ed Morgan’s ID and the dictating-machine, grabbed his cap and left the cabin at a run.

“I am not pulling out of this exercise, Bond. Not for you, not for anyone. It’s all far too important. Particularly what’s due to happen tomorrow night when we should be in the Bay of Biscay.

That’s too important, politically.” Sir John Walmsley’s bearded jaw stuck forward, giving him an awesomely stubborn look. They were in the Rear-Admiral’s night cabin.

Bond shrugged. “At least the Stewards’ Meeting team has to be informed.”

“As security liaison are you telling me to do this? Or is it merely a suggestion?”

“I think you should do it, sir.”

“I wouldn’t need to make any fuss if you nailed whoever did this.”

“And, with respect, sir, I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”

“I thought you people could be all things to all men - and women.

“Then I’ll try to be a Sherlock, sir. I suppose I’d better break the news to Admiral Gudeon, and his man .

“Mr. Israel the Rear-Admiral filled in for him.

“Yes. Joe Israel. Both of them together, I think, sir.”

Walmsley paused by the door. “Cantankerous old bugger, Gudeon.

Even tried to tell me how to run my own ship.

“Doesn’t surprise me in the least, sir.” Bond gave him a bland smile, and Walmsley did not catch on to the fact that he had been mildly insulted by this officer who was a “funny”.

Five minutes later, Admiral Gudeon and Joe Israel arrived at Bond’s cabin. Israel was tall, somewhere around six-four, Bond guessed. He had a shock of greying hair and that lazy, cultivated walk and stance so often used by bullet-catchers to disguise their constant alertness. When he came in, leading the way for Admiral Gudeon, he gave one of his special smiles. Joe Israel smiled a lot; a kind of overbite smile which lit up his eyes. He also had a spontaneous laugh: loud, open-mouthed and infectious.Joe Israel did not laugh during the first part of the interview.

“John Walmsley said you needed to see both of us, Bond.”

Gudeon sounded disgruntled, like a child called away from playing with his train set - which in some ways he had been as all hell was breaking loose on the bridge as Invincible went through fast turns and changes of course. The submarines were still positioning themselves around the Task Force, warning but not firing.

“I suggest you sit down, sir. I have some pretty serious, and bad, news for both of you.”

“Oh?” Gudeon sounded as though all news to him was bad news.

“The senior officer in your bodyguard .

“Morgan?” Gudeon dropped into a chair. Joe Israel stood directly behind him.

“Ed Morgan,” Bond nodded, “I’m afraid Ed Morgan is dead.”

He noted that Joe Israel looked shocked. Gudeon’s mouth opened.

“Oh, my God,” he said, this time sounding genuinely concerned. “How, in heaven’s name?”

“He was murdered.”

“Murdered?” They both spoke together, Israel a touch before his boss. Then Gudeon spoke alone. “How murdered? People don’t get murdered on one of Her Majesty’s capital ships.”

“This one did.”

“How?”

“He got his throat cut. In the Wrens’ heads. Very unpleasant.”

Gudeon just stared ahead. Israel made a sound like the word “But!”

“I have a couple of questions for Mr. Israel, here. Then I’d like to talk alone with you, sir.” The Admiral just nodded an okay. He suddenly looked older and shocked.

“Joe? I can call you Joe?”

“Sure, sir.

“Okay. Had you ever worked with Ed Morgan before?”

“Never. He was very new to me. Never even met him before this assignment. But he was sharp.” The way he said it, Israel sounded as though he meant Ed Morgan was too sharp.

“And he came to a sharp end, I fear.”

Israel shook his head. There was just a mite of sadness, or shock. “It’s tough.” Then he looked down at the Admiral, “Who takes charge, sir?”

Gudeon cleared his throat. “Well. Well, you’re senior aren’t you?”

“It’s why I asked, sir.”

“Okay, you take over until we clear it all with Dancer’s people.” His eyes flicked up to Bond, as though he had said something wrong.

“It’s okay, Admiral Gudeon. I am in overall charge of security.

I know who Dancer is, and I know he’s not one of Santa’s reindeer.

Now, I just want to check times with Mr. Israel.” He looked up at the big man. “You were minding the Admiral tonight.”

“With him all the time?”

“Had dinner with him, sir. Yes. Then we both changed and I accompanied him to the bridge.”

“What time was that?”

“23.40, around twenty minutes before the war started.”

“And you’ve been with him all the time, since then?”

“Up there until we were asked to get down here.”

“Is there anything we should do about getting details back to Washington? You have special procedures?”

“Yes. I’ll deal with all that.”

“Okay.” Bond pretended to be lost in thought for a couple of seconds. “Not straight away, though, if you don’t mind. I want you to wait outside with the marine guard. I need a little time with the Admiral. Then we’ll get the whole of this done officially.

Excuse me.” This last to Gudeon as Bond went to the cabin door and spoke to the marine guard, telling him that Mr. Israel would wait outside, and go nowhere else until the Admiral came out.

“Ed Morgan?” Bond phrased it as a question, back again behind his desk. Gudeon looked worried, and he did not seem to be the kind of man who got worried easily.

“What about him?”

“I need some answers, sir. I’m entitled to answers, particularly as I’m going to be handling all this security for Stewards’ Meeting.

I’m not altogether happy about dealing with personal bodyguards on an international scale. Now, Ed Morgan wasn’t a Secret Service bodyguard in the true sense of the word, was he?”

“How in hell do you know that?”

“It’s my job to know it, sir.”

“Nobody was supposed to have wind of it.”

“I’ve been in the business some time. You like to tell me about him?”

Gudeon sighed. “Guess so.” He now looked truly older and greyer.

If it were not for the uniform he could have been just right for some guy sitting in a rocker on the stoop of a house in a Norman Rockwell illustration.

“Ed was my nominee. We’d worked together before, and I figured him as the best man for the job. He was a Commander, by the way. Navy Intelligence-which included some field work.”

“Okay. Do you know how he was handling communications with Washington?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Was it directly through our communications staff on board?”

A lengthy pause. “No. I have a closed channel micro transmitter in my cabin. When Ed wanted to transmit he was to get onto me, and I’d give him the okay.”

“How does it work?”

“How does any of this stuff work? All damned magic to me.

There’s a place for a small tape in the thing. I gather simply inserted a tape with his message encoded, locked on to the FLATSCOM we used, and the message was squirted in cipher to another ship. They would pass it on to Washington. That’s the basics anyhow.”

“FLATSCOM is generic for US Navy satellite communications, right, sir?”

Gudeon gave a tiny nod, like someone had pricked him on the back of the neck.

“Did he use it when you came aboard?”

“No,” a little tight-lipped. “Look, Captain Bond, I’m trying to cooperate, but! have quite a problem on my hands. Morgan wanted to use our communications link around dawn. I said I’d be down to unlock it and put the keys in. He didn’t confide in me, but he was concerned about something, something on board.