Christopher Wood - The Spy Who Loved Me

Looking carefully along the gallery that ran above his head, he straightened up and peered across to the far gallery. There was no sign of movement. Now he had to move fast before his own side picked him out as one of the enemy and started shooting. He unslung his empty weapon and placed it in the cockpit of the hovercar. Then he scrambled on to the roof of the track cover and moved towards the bows. Ten paces and he was beyond the gun crew. Looking up, he could see their shoulders hunched behind the square metal plate with the observation slits. He raised his gun and there was a warning shout followed by a burst of automatic fire from the shadows opposite. Bond concentrated on the gun crew. As they spun round he unleashed a long burst and saw two of the men buckle and slump. The third was struggling with the handle that turned the gun. Bond fired again but the defensive shield continued to swing round. He could see the sparks as his bullets screamed off it. The gun barrels were depressing towards him when the third man suddenly slid sideways and lay still with his arm draped over one of the gantry rails.

Bond could feel his body awash with sweat. The tunnel beneath his feet was raked by bullets and he started to run towards the hovercar. He sprang through the opening and snatched at the lever. There was a high-pitched whine and the hovercar lifted and began to glide forward. Bullets drummed against the tunnel housing like tropical rain. Bond kept his head down and the handle up. Two more openings flashed by and he was at the quayside on the port side of the brig. He saw the startled faces of Carter’s men bringing their weapons to bear. ‘Hold your fire men! ’ Bond felt a surge of gratitude for Carter’s quick reading of the situation and scrambled out to shelter behind the stairs leading up to the control room. Carter ducked down beside him. ‘Did you get him?’

‘No.’

Carter noticed from the expression on Bond’s face that something was wrong but he did not pursue it. ‘Tough.

Thanks for knocking out that machine-gun. We got the guy who was trying to nail you. I think we’ve just about cleaned them up out here but they’re thick as ticks on a hog’s back in the control room.’

Bond saw that Carter was holding an FN automatic rifle. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘We got into the magazine. We’ve got no problem about arms.’

‘Excellent.’ Bond looked through the door of the brig where he could see ‘Chuck’ Coyle supervising the treatment of a line of injured men. Dead bodies lay where they had dropped. The ghastly stench of death already filled the air, ‘What about losses?’

Carter’s face clouded. ‘Heavy. They really poured it into us coming out of the brig. About thirty dead and half as many again injured. The Russian captain bought it in the assault on the magazine.’ Carter shook his head in admiration. ‘Those guys fought like wildcats.’

‘What about Talbot, your opposite number on Ranger ?’ ‘He’s over there behind the other stairway. He’s itching to have a go at the control room. He thinks he can blast his way in with hand-grenades.’

Bond thought about the four-inch-thick steel louvres and was sceptical. He looked at his watch. Three and a half hours to go. ‘Let’s have a talk to him.*

Talbot was in his mid-thirties, blond-haired and handsome in a typically English way which made his face seem unmarked by any contact with the unpleasant realities of life. Bond could imagine the teacups at the vicarage trembling when he returned on leave.

‘Absolutely. My chaps are rearing at the bit. Give us some covering fire and we’ll be in there like a dose of salts.’

Bond felt uneasy, but with every second that passed the two nuclear submarines were drawing closer to their firing positions. Something had to be done. He turned from Talbots eager, shiny face and read the resignation in Carter’s tired, red- veined eyes.

‘All right.’

Five minutes later, Talbot was poised beneath the shelter of the gallery with twenty men. They were armed with Sch- meisser sub-machine guns found in the magazine and four hand-grenades wrapped in cloth so that they could be lobbed against the foot of the metal screen without rolling away.

The assault party was divided into two groups of ten. They would attack simultaneously up the two stairways, under covering fire from the side of the quay. Covering fire against what? thought Bond as he looked towards the blank wall of steel. He had a terrible sense of foreboding but tried to shut it out of his mind.

Talbot swung his arm from side to side to show that he was ready and machine gun fire began to rake the steel louvres. There was the nerve-torturing screech of bullets glancing off metal but no suggestion that any impression was being made. The louvres remained bland and impervious as closed eyes. Then, suddenly, the eyes opened. Talbot’s shouting men had reached the top of the stairways when four vertical slits appeared in the steel curtains and the cheese-grater barrels of heavy machine-guns poked into view.

Bond winced and prepared for the inevitable. The barrels shuddered and a hail of bullets cut a swathe through the attackers. The muzzle velocity was so great that men seemed to be wiped away like figures from a blackboard. One, more in advance of the others, was held in the air by the weight of bullets pouring into him. He trembled as if a powerful hosepipe was playing on his chest and then pitched full length. Bond felt like weeping as he watched his countrymen being butchered. Only Talbot remained to charge on, firing from the hip. He lobbed his hand grenade and then staggered after it like a bowler following through his delivery. Two faltering steps and a thin column of flame burst from an opening in the louvres and engulfed him. Within seconds he was a blazing torch collapsing on his own grenade. There was an explosion and he was tossed in the air like a theatrical prop. Pieces of burning uniform lay scattered across the deck. The steel louvres were unscathed. As if performing a drill movement, the gun-barrels withdrew at the same instant and the slits closed. Dying men twitched and the disgusting roast pork smell of burning flesh began to waft down from the gallery. Bond felt sick in mind and body.

‘Oh my God! ’ Carter’s eyes were closed.

‘Right.’ Bond fought to retain his composure and do something positive. ‘That taught us a lesson. No conventional small-arm is going to get us into that place. What else is there in the magazine?*

Carter wiped his grimy forehead across his sleeve and blinked. He was like a boxer shaking off a painful blow and knowing that the fight had to continue. ‘Torpedoes. They took them all out and checked them over. Nuclear and conventional.’ Bond found the grain of an idea beginning to form itself at the back of his mind. ‘Can you lay your hands on an armourer?’ Carter looked around the men huddled disconsolately behind any protection that presented itself. ‘I sure hope so. Why?’

Bond squared his jaw. ‘I want to build a bomb.*

One and a half hours later, Bond stood in the magazine feeling like a surgeon presiding over a life-and-death operation. On the armourer’s table was the dismembered shell of a conventional torpedo and around it a complicated mass of coloured wires and electrical circuits. Two men bent over the ‘patient* and another stood by to wipe the sweat from their foreheads. It was not only the sweat of fear but a result of the intense heat that was building up in the magazine. Three explosions of increasing severity had rocked the tanker in the last hour and Bond assumed that these were as a result of the fire he had left blazing on deck. The bulkheads were becoming hot to the touch and it was possible that the fire was spreading through the ship. Drowned, buried and cremated. That would add colour to his discreet obituary in the Times.