John Gardner: Win, Lose Or Die

“Quite, sir.”

“I’ve been very outspoken with the Joint Intelligence Committee, though a fat lot of good it did me. All friends together, now - so they say. One idiot even quoted Kipling at me: Sisters under their skins and that kind of stuff. No, we have to do something positive.

Tanner had walked to the window, and stood looking out at the rain beating down on Regent’s Park. “Bodyguards, sir?

Well-briefed bodyguards?”

M made a grumbling noise. Then - “We know what these people’re after, Tanner, but we don’t want to tell the world, if only because we don’t know the reason why. Bodyguards would mean widening the circle of knowledge, and as you very well know that’s the first rule in our business - keep the circle small.” He stopped suddenly, as though struck by a new thought, then said, “No!” loudly, and not to anyone in particular.

The rain continued to fall on the grass, trees and umbrellas below. In his head Tanner had started to try and recite a piece of doggerel somebody had told him. It was a common theme about security and rumour dating back to the Second World War and it always made him smile “Actual evidence I have none But my aunt’s charwoman’s sister’s son, Heard a policeman on his beat, Say to a nursemaid in Downing Street, That he had a cousin, who had a friend, who knows when the war is going to end.”

It was not until he reached the last line, that Bill Tanner realised he had quoted the lines aloud.

“That’s it!” M almost bellowed.

“What, sir?”

“Nursemaid, Chief of Staff. We’ll give them a nursemaid. A good Naval man. Sound as a bell. A man willing to put his life before the lives of his charges.” M’s hand reached for the internal telephone which put him directly in touch with his devoted, though long-suffering private secretary. “Moneypenny,” he all but shouted loud enough for her to hear on the other side of the padded door. “Get Double-O Seven up here fast.”

Within ten minutes, James Bond was sitting in M’s holy of holies with his old Chief giving him what he thought of as the “fish eye”, and Bill Tanner looking a little uneasy.

“It’s a job,” M announced. “An operation that calls for more than the usual discretion; and certainly one that’ll require you to alter your circumstances a great deal.”

“I’ve worked undercover before, sir.”

Bond leaned back in the armchair in which M had invited him to sit.

It was a chair Bond knew well. If you were asked to sit in this, the most comfortable chair in M’s office, the news could only be bad.

“Undercover’s one thing, 007, but how would you feel about going back into the Royal Navy?”

“With respect, sir, I’ve never left the RNVR.”

M growled again, and James Bond thought he saw a gleam of unusual malice in the old Chief’s eyes. “Really?” M raised his eyes towards the ceiling. “How long is it since you stood a Duty Watch, 007? Or had to deal with defaulters; live day and night with the routine and discipline within a capital ship; or even felt a quarterdeck rise and fall sixty feet in a gale?”

“Well, sir .

“The job, 007, will require you to go back to active duty. In turn that’ll mean you’ll have to go on a course, several courses in fact, to bring you up to date with life and warfare in our present-day Royal Navy.”

The thought struck home. Bond’s life in the Service had, many times, caused him to work at full-stretch, but on the whole there were long periods of relaxation. To go back to active service in the Royal Navy would be a return to the old disciplines, and a re-honing of skills almost forgotten. A series of pictures flickered through his head. They were rather what he had always imagined a dying man saw: his life many years ago, in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve on active service. The images in his brain did not attract him as much as they had done when he was a young midshipman. “Why?” he asked lamely. “I mean why should I go back to active service, sir?”

M smiled and nodded, “Because, 007, in the late winter of next year, the Royal Navy, together with elite troops, air forces, and the navies of all the NATO powers, including the United States Navy, will be carrying out an exercise: Landsea “89. There will be observers: Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Geoffrey Gould; Admiral Gudeon, United States Navy; and Admiral Sergei Yevgennevich Pauker, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy - a post unknown in any other navy in the world.” M took a deep breath. “The latter has been invited because of the current thawing in relationships between East and West. Glasnost, perestroika, that kind of thing.”

“They will be Bond began.

“They will be in Invincible. Theywill have with them, like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Sir Joseph Porter, all their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. They will also be in danger. Almost certainly attempted abduction. At worst, murder. You will be there, in Invincible, to see it does not happen.”

“Can you explain about the danger, sir?” The trigger of magnetic interest had been squeezed deep in Bond’s mind.

M smiled like a man who has just hooked the biggest fish in the river. “Certainly, James. Bill and I will a tale unfold. It begins with that little problem in the Straits of Hormuz - the Japanese tanker, Son of Hitachi, or whatever it’s called . .

The Chief of Staff corrected the tanker’s name, and for his pains received a venomous glare from M, who barked, “You want to tell it, Tanner?”

“No, sir, you carry on, sir.”

“Good of you, Tanner. Thank you.” M’s mood was not only bellicose this morning, but sarcastic. He fixed Bond with the same, cold fish-eye look. “Ever heard of BAST?”

“Anagram for stab, sir?”

“No, 007, I mean BAST. B-A-S-T, and this is no laughing matter.”

The smile on Bond’s face disappeared quickly. M was being too serious and prickly for jokes. “No, sir. BAST is news to me.

What is it?”

With a wave of his hand and a vocal sound meant to signify deep displeasure, M motioned to his Chief of Staff to explain.

“James,” Tanner came over and. leaned against the desk, “this really is a very serious and alarming business. BAST is a group; an organisation. The name hasn’t been circulated as yet, simply because we didn’t have many leads or details at first. The name’s pretty puerile, that’s why nobody took it very seriously to begin with. But BAST appears to be an acronym for Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror.”

“Sounds like a poor man’s SPECTRE to me.” Bond’s brow wrinkled and there was concern in his eyes.

“At first we thought it might be a splinter group of the old SPECTRE, but it appears this is something new, and oddly unpleasant,” Tanner continued. “You recall the small bomb incidents in October of “87? All on one day; all coordinated?

There were fire bombs in a couple of London stores .

“The ones put down to animal rights activists?”

Tanner nodded, “But the others were not so easily explained.

One small plastique near the Vatican; another one which destroyed an American military transport - on the ground at Edwards Airforce Base: no casualties; one in Madrid; another, a car bomb, premature, shattering the French Minister of Defence’s car; and a large one in Moscow: near the Kremlin Gate, and not generally reported.”

“Yes, I saw the file.”

“Then you know the file said it was coordinated, but nobody had taken responsibility.”

Bond nodded.

“The file was lying by omission,” Tanner sounded grave now.

“There was a long letter, circulated to all the countries concerned.

In brief it said the incidents had been coordinated by the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror, to be referred to as BAST.