Christopher Wood: The Spy Who Loved Me

familiar and unbeautiful so the smile that Bond bestowed upon her was dutiful rather than anticipatory. She bent forward and pressed the switch of the intercom.

‘007 is here, sir.’

‘Send him in,’ said the metallic voice, and the red light which meant ‘on no account must I be disturbed' glowed above the door.

That had been ten minutes ago and Bond was still listening to the rasping and sucking noises. At last they stopped and M dropped the still smoking husk of a match in the big copper ashtray.

‘So you found Q’s gadgets useful did you, James?’

‘Very efficacious, sir.’

'I thought you were going to fire them into the side of mountains. That sort of thing.’

‘That was my intention, sir.’

M attacked his pipe with a small pick and turned away to billow clouds of smoke towards the ceiling. There was a dry twinkle in his eye as he turned back towards Bond. will be very impressed when you submit your report. I don’t think he had any idea that you were going to be so zealous in your testing of his new toys.’

‘It came as a surprise to me, sir.’

M looked at Bond, not without affection. ‘While we’re on the subject. We had a signal from the French DST.’

‘What are they going to do?’

‘Nothing.’ M registered the sharp rise of Bond’s right eyebrow and continued. ‘They’re leaving the matter in the hands of the local gendarmerie. A chalet fire of this description is not uncommon.’ Bond was now sitting forward in his chair. ‘Perhaps you did not notice that there was petrol stored by the hut - for the Snowcats. The young people must have tried to start a fire and - well you know how dangerous it can be with petrol.’

‘A man and a girl.’ Bond nodded. A sensible way for them to have covered their traces. The man he had shot and the girl in the cupboard consigned to flames.

‘There appear to have been two women and one man,’ said M. ‘The bodies burned almost beyond recognition. Any identification will have to wait for the next of kin to come forward.’

Which could take a long, long time, thought Bond. So, Martine Blanchaud, or whatever her real name was, had paid the ultimate price for incompetence. There was only one organization capable of that combination of brutality, guile and casual disregard for human life. Bond decided to express his feelings to M.

‘I think it was SMERSH, sir. They were after me. But, like last time, they wanted to make me stink even before I was rotting in my coffin. There was a dead girl in the hut - some drugged little tart from the back streets of Lyon, most probably. They’d hacked her up like shark bait.’

‘And you were the shark.’ M nodded grimly. He could see the newspaper headlines (‘DRUG-CRAZED BRITISH AGENT SLAYS IN MOUNTAIN LOVE NEST!), the Home Secretary on the telephone, the official denials, the snide questions from the fellow- travellers in the House of Commons, the satisfied smiles round the table of the High Praesidium in the Kremlin. Yes, once again 007 had been fortunate. Was it Napoleon who had always supported one of his marshals because he was lucky? ‘Strange that this should happen now, James.’

Bond looked at M inquiringly and reached for the flat, light gunmetal case containing fifty Balkan and Turkish mixture cigarettes, specially made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street. He extracted one and ran a finger over the triple gold band before placing it between his lips. ‘What’s up, sir?’

M’s tranquil, lined sailor’s face suddenly became tense. ‘What does HMS Ranger mean to you, James?’

Bond flicked through the card index in his mind. ‘One of our Resolution Class nuclcar-powered ballistic-missile submarines, sir.’ M’s approving silence told him to continue. ‘Laid down by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness in 1967. Operational in 1971. Length approximately three- hundred and seventy feet. Beam thirty-three feet. Surface displacement seven thousand five hundred tons - submerged eight thousand four hundred. Speed reputed to be twenty knots on the surface and twenty-five submerged - although the submerged figure may be on the slow side. Ship’s complement, a hundred and fifty-one men; sixteen officers and one hundred and thirty-five ratings - they operate on a two-crew basis to get maximum time at sea.’ Bond broke off and put the battered, oxidized Ronson to work on his cigarette. M’s demanding eyes bored into him as he directed a thin stream of smoke towards the ceiling.

‘And the armament?’

‘Six conventional 533 mm torpedo homing tubes placed forward and sixteen Polaris surface-to-surface intercontinental missiles with a range in excess of two thousand five hundred miles.’

M continued to stare levelly. Bond noticed that his pipe had gone out. ‘HMS Ranger has disappeared.’

The rain persisted in its attack on the windows and for long seconds its angry patter was the only sound heard in the cool* dark room.

‘You mean, there’s been an accident?’

M shook his head. ‘We don’t know. Radio contact is intermittent. The Admiralty first became alarmed when there was no Sitrep from the last reporting point.’

‘They sail on a predetermined course?’

‘Yes.’

‘So that if something had gone wrong and wireless communication had failed they could be lying on the bottom anywhere over a distance of, say, two thousand miles?’

‘Correct.’

So why is the department being involved? thought Bond. Wc have no expertise in raising nuclear submarines from the bottom of the ocean. Especially if we have no idea where they are. He looked at M, expecting more.

‘We don’t necessarily believe that it’s a question of mechanical failure. We have enjoyed the full co-operation of the United States Navy, whose tactical experience of this kind of situation is second to none, and we have found no trace of the Ranger .’

‘Are you suggesting that she’s been destroyed by enemy action, sir?’

The lines on M’s face suddenly seemed to be etched deeper. ‘Come here, James. I want you to look at something that arrived in the diplomatic bag from Cairo.’

M produced a scuffed leather map-case and drew out a cylinder of tightly rolled, translucent parchment. Bond moved to his side and looked down at the surface of the desk that had been specially prepared for his interview. Under a sheet of glass lay a chart of the Southern Atlantic revealing the tell-tale bulge of the West African coast line. A thin black line zigzagged from north to south like the sales curve of a unsuccessful company.

‘This is the course that Captain Talbot, commander of the Ranger , was following,’ said M, following Bond’s glance.

‘How many people knew it?'

‘The Head of Operations at Holy Loch and Captain Talbot. A copy would be “posted” to Supreme Defence HQ.’

‘So there’s little chance of a leak.’

‘I would say none.’

M struggled with the parchment and eventually anchored it with his ashtray and an imposing heavy leather pen-holder and inkwell set that Bond had never seen him use before. Bond knew better than to try and help. Once the parchment was in what M considered to be a satisfactory position, he began to unfurl it laboriously. Bond watched patiently and saw a pattern beginning to emerge, identical to that on the chart but out of true, like the four-colour reproduction in a cheaply produced magazine. M extended the parchment to its fullest extent and edged it to the left until the two lines mated, one on top of the other. The line on the parchment stopped at a point where there was a cross on the chart and the submarine’s course had changed to the next, unfinished leg of its voyage.

‘Interesting,’ said Bond.

‘You realize what it means?’