Seafire

22 – U-boat

"No, Fredericka, can't you see the folly of you coming with me?"

"If you're going to be back here by dawn, it makes no difference. I can cover you, and it'll be safer. We've always worked together – well, ever since…"

"Flick, what if I'm not back by the morning?"

"Then I'll be with you. I don't think I want it any other way. If I'm to hang around here, I'll go crazy."

He sighed in irritation. They had been arguing for the best part of twenty minutes in their room at the hotel. "Flick, listen. If I don't get back by early morning, it'll mean one of three things. One, I'm dead meat…"

"James, don't. Don't talk like that."

"Face it, Flicka, we've got ourselves in a damned dangerous situation. Now, one, I shall be dead; two, I shall have done it, spiked the sub and gone in to rescue Felix – he can't be anywhere else but in Tarn's compound, and I didn't like the sound of the girl, Beth. We've only been near her once – at Hall's Manor – and she doesn't seem exactly the kind of playmate you'd take on a picnic. So, if they aren't putting the crew on board the sub until they sail, I'll probably have time to get rid of the damned boat and get Felix out."

"What's the third possibility?"

"That they've caught me in the sub. There's one more that I've just thought about. It is quite possible that I'll not even get into the submarine."

"And what happens then?"

"I probably come hightailing it back here, and we do something else. As it is, there's plenty for you to get on with. Just think about it. If you'd come to Germany with me, we'd both be dead by now. Like Germany, the sub's a one-person job." He was dressed in the black jeans, rollneck, and sneakers. The two aluminum cases lay open on the bed, with his wet suit lying between them, and beside it the other item that had been in the case: a wide leather belt, with fixed pouches into which he could place everything he needed. The belt also had clips for a holster, a long, vicious-looking knife, and a flashlight. "There is no other way, Flicka. In fact, you'll have to do several things. A call to the harbormaster and the local police, to begin with."

"You said that was last-resort stuff. You were adamant about it."

He knew she was right. Someone calling or going to the authorities here in San Juan would probably be shipped into the nearest mental hospital. Tales about prowling submarines bent on torpedoing a supertanker would almost certainly be regarded as the ravings of a lunatic. He re-locked the two cases and stowed them away in the fitted wardrobe.

"Then call the States. Call Langley, or even London. They'll see things are dealt with."

"Why can't we just do that now, and quietly bow out? Leave it to the authorities."

"You know why we can't do that. It's a question of time."

"Balls, James, it's a question of your pride. You have a personal vendetta with Tarn and you want to finish it by yourself."

Deep down he knew she was perfectly correct, but he was concerned about the time factor. He knew exactly how things might go if they called London. The Committee could sit around for most of the day deciding if it were wise to give the whole story to the American service. Anyway, his own motivation had taken over. There was no turning back from the way he had planned.

"James, we got the all clear to do this because the Americans wanted to get Tarn – Apocalypse, as they called him. Nobody'll hold up any signals we send. Not now that we've eliminated Tarn's man, Christopher, and are operating here with the okay from the Americans."

He sighed. "I'm not even convinced that we do have the okay from them."

"What do you mean, James? You're getting paranoid about this."

"Give me a little time. If I'm not back by noon, make all the telephone calls you want. At least let me have a shot at the submarine. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we should report to everyone and pray for the marines to arrive to put an end to this madness. But will you just give me a little time to set them up?"

She was very unhappy, but in the short time they had been together, Flicka von Grüsse had discovered that James Bond could be more than stubborn.

"Okay." She glared at him. "You have your moment of glory, James. Go and deal with the submarine, but if you're not back by nine, I'm going to alert London. Not a minute too soon, either. You've got until nine in the morning. Right?"

He gave her a bleak smile, signaling agreement to the compromise. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was just after nine now. "I've got less than twelve hours."

"Well, you'd better get cracking, James, because I'm not going to be responsible for any cock-up that leaves this harbor in flames and half the Caribbean polluted for all time. So get going."

He distributed the items he needed around the belt. Pistol, knife, the small high-powered flashlight, compact tool kit, and the five oblong boxes from the bottom of the second case. The boxes he had called his "little jewels." He slung the wet suit over one arm and went over to Flicka, who still looked angry. "Don't worry. Flick. I'll be back. This is just a safeguard. The minute I'm back we'll both call London and Washington. You're basically right, but I want to cover all the bases."

She clung to him as though saying goodbye for the last time. "Be careful, darling James. I want you around for the wedding, remember?"

"I'll be there, with a smile on my face and everything intact."

"I'm not so worried about the smile. Just make sure everything's in working order. I'd hate you to be encumbered with prosthetic body parts like Felix."

Minutes later he retrieved the car from El Convento's parking place and was heading out of San Juan, taking the most direct road across the island to Ponce.

Flicka pulled herself together once he had left the hotel. She even cursed herself. During the years she had spent with Swiss Intelligence and security services she had been known for her cool and decisive courage. Now that Bond was in her life she seemed to have lost some of that calm reserve, and she was not overjoyed by the lapse. She presumed that it had something to do with her body chemistry, for Fredericka von Grüsse had to admit she had never, in her entire life, loved a man with this kind of intensity.

Well, she thought as she began to undress, he really only has until nine in the morning. Then I'll make such a fuss that London and the Americans will have to send an entire battle group if necessary.

She went into the bathroom, pulled a shower cap over her hair, and surrendered to the soothing warm water. When she eventually turned off the shower, she reached from behind the curtain and grabbed a towel before stepping out.

She screamed when she saw them, Maurice Goodwin and the black girl called Beth. They stood just inside the bathroom door, and Beth held the Beretta that Flicka had left with her clothes on the bed.

"Honey, you're all alone here. Thought we'd keep you company." Beth was eyeing her unpleasantly. "It's okay," she continued. "Maurice has to go out, but I can keep you company until your friend comes back."

Flicka took in a lungful of air. "He isn't coming back." She kept her voice level.

"A likely tale. If I was a man, there's no way I'd leave a sweet piece like you on your own."

"Please yourself. But he's not coming back and there's an end to it."

"So where's he gone?" Goodwin eyed her lecherously. "I need to know, Fräulein von Grüsse, and I need to know fast. Beth here is clever at inflicting pain. She's made a kind of art form of it. So tell me now. Where's he gone?"

"Off the island. If you want to know, we've had what you might call a falling-out. He stormed out of the hotel and said he wouldn't be back."

"You tellin' the truth, honey?" Beth came toward her. Close up she was a little older than Flicka had thought. Late thirties. Her fingers were heavy with rings and her eyes looked red and sore, like someone with conjunctivitis, but they did not stop moving, flicking from side to side as though she had the extraordinary vision of a chameleon.

"You tellin' the truth, honey?" she repeated, and before Flicka had a chance to reply, Beth's right hand whipped back and slapped her full and hard on the cheek, the heavy rings scraping at her flesh and knocking her head sideways.

She fell against the wall, steadied herself, and tried not to show how much the blow had hurt her. "Talk to me, bitch." Beth's voice had a slightly slurred note, and it crossed Flicka's mind that the woman was on some kind of drug.

"I've told you -" Her words were cut off by another stinging, pain-drenched slap. This time harder, and followed by an even heavier backhander to her other cheek.

Taken by surprise, and stark naked from the shower, there was little she could do, but she had to fight back. Turning her body to present a smaller target, she launched herself toward the woman, one hand chopping at her assailant's neck. It was like hitting a solid punching bag and only seemed to enrage Beth even more, for out of nowhere a ringed hand caught her hard with two heavy blows to the breasts.

"Talk to me, bitch. Where's he gone?"

"I don't… Truly, I don't know."

"The truth, honey. The truth shall set you free, that's what's in the Good Book. Now, set yourself free." The hand rose again, and this time Flicka could hardly see from the pain that saturated her face. The backhander that followed almost made her black out, but she could still hear the voice, intimidating and relentless. "The truth, honey, just tell me the truth, then we can all have some real fun."

She heard her own voice from what seemed to be a long way off. "I've told you the truth. I don't -"

The pain again. Now it was as if she were living in her own private world of agony, though the voice of her conscience repeated to her again and again: Don't tell them anything. Keep James safe.

She felt for the corner of the wall with her feet and tried to push herself toward Beth, hands bunched into fists, striking out for the woman's throat. Before her hands got anywhere near their target, another blow sent her sprawling back onto the floor.

"Talk to me, bitch."

"I really don't know. Stop. I don't…"

She prayed for the darkness of unconsciousness or even death, and knew that at least one of her cheekbones was almost certainly broken. The hands of this black horror, reinforced by the heavy rings, were like pieces of steel. The hurt filling her life.

Again: "The truth shall set you free, honey. Where's he gone?"

Then one more time, to the left cheek and then the right. She felt blood wet on her cheek and running down her nose, while Beth's voice sounded distorted. "Tell me the truth, bitch." Crack. A whole avalanche of torment. A numbness as she cannoned off the wall, and voices coming from miles away, from the end of a long dark tunnel.

"You've done it again, Beth. She's out."

Flicka could hardly make out the words.

"Then I guess she tellin' the truth. You've seen this before, Mo -"

"Don't call me Mo. The name's Maurice."

"She don't know where he is, that's for sure."

"Then we'd better get her out of here. Take her to Max's place. You can work on her quietly there, just in case you're wrong."

"I'm seldom wrong, baby. You know that. She tellin' the truth, so why don' I just set her free here and now?"

"No. Let's get her across the island. You've got the white coats in the car. Let's do it. Let's…"

The voices faded as Flicka slipped deeper into the comfort of oblivion. She could feel nothing, nor could she understand anything.

Bond drove fast, but with great concentration. His conscience was already pricking him, because of course he knew Flicka had been right. They should have called in. Passed the whole business over to their superiors and got out, knowing that Tarn and his mad, obsessive plan would come to nothing with the deployment of the right forces.

Yet a part of him wanted to see it through. Was it a question of glory? A reluctance to give up the life of danger for a desk and the boredom of assigning other people to this kind of work?

Then he switched his mind away from those questions. He glanced at the dashboard digital clock. Ten P.M.; he had eleven hours, and if nobody was guarding the submarine he could set his little jewels. For a couple of seconds he wondered what intuition had made him ask Ann Reilly for these particular items. Each consisted of two pounds of plastique explosive, a recently developed substance with three times the effect of Semtex. Two pounds of this stuff would do a lot of damage, especially if it were placed in the right spots. The heat it generated, for one thing, had the power of a thermal lance and it could blow through steel as though it were butter.

Pushed into the two-pound blocks of plastique was a fuse with the latest in electronic timing devices. Small, with tiny powerful batteries, the fuse could be set like the mechanism on a miniature alarm clock. The dial on each was no bigger than an American 25-cent piece, and could be activated, using a tiny screwdriver, over a twenty-four-hour period. Now, he had plans for these deadly devices, and once they were set, the military would not have to waste time trying to find the submarine. All he could do was hope and pray that the sub had been left unguarded that night.

He turned his thoughts to Q'ute's ingenuity. Not only had she got the explosive devices to him, but her note had been very specific concerning the other item – large and cumbersome. It would have to be somewhere out in the open, and just where he needed it. She had been very definite about that, and considering the lack of hiding places and the number of people who – during the day – would be passing near anywhere in San Juan, the task of dumping it for him really would have to be left until the last moment. How would Q'ute know when the last moment had arrived? He had missed something all the way, and now logic told him one new significant truth. The drop-off for this equipment led to the indisputable fact that there were other active Service people on the island, ready to move in should he need them.

What was it Q'ute had written? Some of our friends will see to it that you get the thing if you really need it.

With a sudden feeling of elation, he knew what this meant, and felt a fool for not envisaging it until now. Only one kind of operative was up to hiding and waiting for the right moment to leave the piece of equipment he had in mind. He cursed himself. Of course; and of course they should have called London. He would put money on there being members of both the SAS and the American elite Delta Force waiting it out, watching him, ready to move in as soon as they received signals. Flicka was right, he told himself. They could have left it to London and Washington. Everything was already in place, and if the elite forces had done their job properly, they would know by now that something was about to go down.

It flashed through his mind that perhaps he should drive into Ponce and make a call from some public telephone booth, but he stubbornly dismissed the idea. He would try to set the explosives, get away, and call Flicka to put things in motion.

He turned off at Ponce, taking the road along the coast, eventually finding the narrow trail that led to the clump of trees from which they had observed the Tarn mansion.

Before leaving the car, he pulled on the wet suit and snapped the belt into place, checking the equipment in the pouches and clips. He then walked up into the trees and looked down on the Tarn compound. There was no sign of life below, save for one lighted window. The submarine crew were either sleeping until dawn or already down in the cave, readying the boat for sea.

Finally, he turned to set off back down the track and narrow road up which he had come. He paused on reaching the main road, his eyes fully adjusted to the night blackness. There was no sign of life, and no noise coming up from the rock face across the road but for the sound of the sea. He ran, crouching low, toward the warning notice and began to descend the steps, his ears hearing only the hush and crush of the surf. No voices, and still no human sounds as he reached the bottom of the steps.

As on the previous day, he inched along the rocks toward the netting that covered the entrance to the cave. Silence, and no lights from within the makeshift submarine pen. He lifted the edge of the netting and stepped inside, standing perfectly still, all his senses attuned like radar to pick up any hint of another human being.

Nothing.

Smiling to himself, he unclipped the flashlight and switched it on, allowing the beam to play along the whale-like metal structure as he moved forward. His first suspicion was that this was no Victor-class Russian sub, as he had been led to believe. Its size and shape suggested something much older. Even a World War II German U-boat. As he got closer and was able to reveal more of the submarine in the light from the flashlight, the more certain he became of what this really was: a Type VII C U-boat.

He crossed the small makeshift gangway and climbed up the ladder to the top of the sail, realizing that when this boat first entered the water, it was not called the sail but the conning tower – the Kommandoturm. The hatch was up, and he played the beam of his light down into the bowels of the boat. Silence. Nothing there but the narrow space of the tube that ran straight down into the control room. The interior smelted of a mixture of oil, polish, and human bodies. The crew of this boat had been working down here until quite recently. They would be back, at the latest, for a dawn departure, but he did not allow this to worry him. If he were to do the job properly, he had to take his time and make certain of the layout of the submarine.

He stayed for some time in the control room, looking at the periscope, the steering and dive controls, and the dials that went with them. Part of the mystery was now explained. All the controls and instruments were labeled with neat stick-on metal tags, stating their use in English, though these same essentials had been originally marked up in German. The German had been either partly scraped off or covered with notices in Russian, even inside the dials relating to pressure and depth. The glass fronts had been removed so that Russian labels could be stuck on to the clocklike instruments before the glass was replaced.

It was a former German U-boat, probably captured by the Russians and converted for their own use until they began building their giant nuclear, missile-carrying fleet.

Bond moved aft, along the narrow catwalks and corridors, wondering what it must have been like to serve in these extraordinarily cramped conditions for months at a time. He spotted several improvements that he presumed had been made by the Russians, including more-modern escape equipment – a state-of-the-art escape trunk, with a hatch hidden from the companionway below. He pulled himself up into the boxlike hatch and saw that a number of the latest Steinke hoods were lined up in a container that ran around three sides of the hatch. Above was the cylinder of the escape trunk, with its wheels to open and close the trunk.

Easing himself down onto the companionway, he traversed right to the stern of the boat, then back, moving forward through the control room again, and so for'ard toward the bows. He brushed the small curtained-off sections that served as crew and officer mess decks, and on toward the torpedo tubes in the bow, noting as he went that the Russians – or its present owner – had provided an escape trunk almost identical to the one aft.

There were red tags wired to the wheels of the torpedo tubes with the words "Tube Full. Loaded" scrawled on them. Behind, to both port and starboard, were the racks that would normally hold other torpedoes. They were empty, and he remembered Tarn aboard Mare Nostrum saying they had only two torpedoes with which to do the job.

Bond began to take out the deadly little jewels of plastique from the pouches on his belt. He placed them in a neat row and removed the small screwdriver with which he would arm the fuses. Holding his flashlight under his chin, he picked up each device in turn and worked with the screwdriver until all five fuses were set for nineteen-fifty – ten minutes to eight on the following evening. He left the final arming, the moving of a small button in the center of each dial, until last, then moved to the port torpedo tube, spinning the wheel that allowed the breech door to swing back.

Years ago he had spent some time being spirited onto the shore of another country in an old British submarine, and recalled the hours spent waiting. Some of that time had been passed with an old submariner who had showed him the comparatively simple mechanism they had used on these World War II boats. In memory, the German U-boat was not much different. A lever on one side of the tube lifted a curved metal stretcher on which the torpedo could be slid into, or out of, the tube. The mechanism here was very similar, and had been well oiled and maintained. The long and deadly fish came sliding back on the stretcher until the tube was empty.

Carefully, he took the first of the plastique devices and unwrapped the actual explosive, which he molded, like a big lump of plasticine, as far forward as he could on the top side of the torpedo. The second bomb he stuck firmly around the center of the weapon; then he reversed the steps with the levers and stretcher, feeling an enormous pleasure as the torpedo went back into its tube and he turned the wheel, which would make the whole thing watertight.

Then he went through the whole business again on the starboard side. In all, the process took him the best part of two hours, and there was one plastique bomb left. He had kept this for another vulnerable spot, and began to make his way aft again, knowing that at ten minutes to eight on the following evening the plastique would explode, probably also igniting the two torpedoes. This alone, almost certainly, would blow off the entire bow section of the boat.

He reached the far end of the sub and searched for the main pipe, which carried diesel fuel to the engines when the boat was on the surface. While submerged the craft ran wholly on the huge batteries, which had to be recharged by running on the surface under me diesel. But submerged or not, there was always fuel in the pipeline, and he molded the last bomb around the pipe so that it was completely hidden from view – high up and out of sight among the other pipes and cables that traversed almost the entire length of the boat. When the time came, the bow would be blown away and, with any luck, a secondary explosion would ignite the diesel fuel and rip through the rest of the old craft.

Bond sighed with some relief as he finished the job, and making certain he had left no traces of his visit, he began to move forward. He had gone halfway toward the control room when he stopped, stock-still, listening. There was a clanking sound from above him and then the unmistakable noise of men climbing the ladder up the outside of the conning tower. He heard the first one come down inside the control room and a broad Scottish accent shouting, "Wall, there'll be nay turnin' back now, lads, so let's be having you down here."

He was trapped inside the old U-boat.