Icebreaker

15

DEAD COLD

They unlocked the handcuffs. By that time, James Bond was too cold to resist. The removal of the top half of his clothing, which followed, did not seem to make any appreciable difference. He could hardly move, and it seemed that even his desire to shiver was denied him.

One of the uniformed men pulled Bond’s arms in front of his stark naked body, then clasped the handcuffs into place again. The metal on his wrists felt as though it burned.

Bond began to concentrate. Try to remember something . . . Forget the cold . . . Close your eyes . . . See just one spot in the universe, let the spot swell.

The rattle of chains, and Bond heard rather than felt that his handcuffed wrists were being clipped over the hook. Then, disorientation for a moment, as they hoisted the block and tackle. His feet left the ground and he spun and swung as the chain lifted. Acute pain, now, as the handcuffed wrists took the strain. Arms stretched, pulled from their sockets. Then numbness again. It did not matter about the weight on his arms, shoulders, and wrists, for the freezing temperature acted almost as an anaesthetic.

Strangely, the thing that did matter was the swinging and spinning. Bond did not normally react to disorientation, while flying, doing high-speed aerobatics, or the many other stress tests included in his yearly checkout. Now, however, he felt the bile rise in his throat as the swinging became more regular – pendulum-like – and the spinning slowed, first one way, then the next.

Opening his eyes was as painful as anything else. A struggle against light frost forming on the lids. Necessary though, for he desperately needed some fixed point on which to focus. The ice-streaked sides of the cave turned in front of him, the hard light from above throwing off colour – yellows, reds and blues. It was impossible to keep his head up, with arms stretched above him, taking all the body weight.

Bond’s head slumped forward. Below him a wide, dark eye, figures moving on the periphery, the eye turning lazily, squinting, slanting. It was a moment before his numbed brain took in the fact that the eye was not moving. The illusion came from his own swinging motion, at the end of the chain. The needles continued to assault his body. They seemed to be everywhere at once, then localised – clawing at his scalp, moving to a thigh, or rasping against his genitals.

Concentrate: he fought to get a proper perspective, but the cold was like a barrier, a chill wall preventing his brain from working. Harder; concentrate harder.

Finally Bond took in the eye, as the swaying and spinning motion settled. The eye was a circle cut in the ice. Its darkness was the frozen water below. Slowly they were letting out the chain, so that his feet seemed poised directly over the water.

Now a voice. Tirpitz – Buchtman: ‘James, buddy, this is going to be dirty. You should tell us now before we go on. You know what we want? Just answer yes or no.’

What did they want? Why was this happening? Bond’s very brain felt as though it were freezing. What? ‘No,’ he heard his voice croak.

‘Your people have one of our men. Two questions: where is he being held in London? What has he told your interrogators?’

A man? Held in London? Who? When? What had he told? For a few seconds Bond’s mind cleared. The NSAA soldier, being held at the Regent’s Park HQ. What had he told? No idea, but hadn’t he worked it out? Yes, the man must have said a great deal. Tell nothing.

Aloud he said, ‘I know nothing about anyone being held prisoner. Nothing about any interrogations.’ His voice was unrecognisable, echoing against the walls of the natural cavern.

The other voice floated up to him, each word a struggle for Bond to recognise or comprehend. ‘Okay, Jim, have it your way. I’ll ask you again in a minute.’

From above, the rattle of something. The chain. His body moving down towards the black eye. For no reason, Bond suddenly thought he had lost all sense of smell. Odd; why no sense of smell? Concentrate on something else. He struggled, setting his mind on a new course. A summer day. The countryside. Trees in full leaf. A bee hovered above his face, and he could smell – the sense of smell was back: a mixture of grass and hay. Far in the distance the sound of some farm machinery peacefully purring. Don’t say anything. You know nothing except this – the hay and grass. Nothing. You know nothing.

Bond heard the final rattle of the chain just as he hit the middle of the black eye. His brain even registered that a scum of ice had already re-formed over the water. Then the slack of the chain dropped him into the centre. He must have cried out, for his mouth filled with water. Sunlight. The oak tree. Arms being dragged down by the chain. He could not breathe.

The sensation was not one of biting cold, simply an extreme change. It could have been boiling water just as easily as freezing. Bond’s only conscious feeling, after the first shock, was of his body enveloped by a blinding pain, as though his eyes – windows to the brain – had been scorched by white light.

He still lived, though he was aware of it only because of the pain. His heart pumped in his chest and head like tympani.

There was no way of telling how long they had held him under the ice. He gulped and spluttered for air, the whole of his body jerking in spasms, like a puppet controlled by a convulsive master.

Opening his eyes, Bond saw that he was, once more, suspended over the eye cut in the ice. Then the real cold set in – the shaking as he swung to and fro, while the needle-points turned into barbs, excoriating his skin.

No. His brain broke through the pain of cold. No, this was not happening. The grass; smells of summer; sounds of summer; the tractor drawing near, and the soughing of a breeze in the oak tree’s branches.

‘Okay, Bond. That was just a taste. You hear me?’

He was breathing normally, but his vocal chords did not seem to be working properly. At last: ‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘We know just how far to go, but don’t kid yourself, we’ll go further. The limit. Where is our man being held in England?’

Bond heard his own voice, again as though it did not belong to him: ‘I don’t know of any man being held.’

‘What has he told your people? How much?’

‘I know of no man being held.’

‘Have it your own way.’ The chain sounded its death rattle.

They let him stay under, weighted down by the chain, for a long time – or else he remained conscious for longer than before. He fought for breath, the red mist mingling with a white light which seemed to fuse every muscle, each vein and organ. Then the blessed relief of darkness, soon to be blasted apart by the pain as his naked body swung gently, pulled clear again of the ice pool.

The cold air of the dungeon made the second time worse. Not just needles, but tiny animals, gnawing and biting into the numbed flesh; the more sensitive organs alive with agony, so that Bond wrestled with the handcuffs and hook, wanting to get his hands down to cover his loins.

‘There is a National Socialist Action Army man being held prisoner in England. Where is he?’

The summer. Try . . . Try for the summer. But this was not summer, only the terrible teeth, small and sharp, biting through the skin into the muscle and flesh.

The NSAA man was at the Regent’s Park HQ. Was there harm in telling them? Summer. The green leaves of summer.

‘You hear me, Bond? Tell us and things will get easier.’

Sumer is icumen in,

Sing, cuckoo . . .

‘Don’t know. Don’t know about prisoner . . . Nobody . . .’ This time the voice came from right inside his head, the sentence cut short as the chain clattered down, plunging him into the gelid mass.

He struggled, not reasoning what he would, or could, do if the handcuffs became unhooked. This was pure reflex: the body automatically fighting for life, trapped by an element in which it could not possibly survive for long. He was conscious of the muscles not responding, the brain ceasing to operate rationally. Streaking pain. Darkness.

Alive and swinging once more. Bond wondered how near he hovered between life and the unknowing, for the white pain was now centred in his head – a blinding, searing, flashing explosion within the skull.

The voice was shouting, as if trying to get through to him from a distance. ‘The prisoner, Bond. Where are they keeping him? Don’t be a fool; we know he’s somewhere in England. Just give us the place. The name. Where is he?’

My Service Headquarters. Building near Regent’s Park. Transworld Export. Had he said it? No, there had been nothing, even though the words were clearly formed in his brain, waiting to leap out.

The green leaves of summer, Sumer is icumen in; Summertime; The last rose of summer, Indian summer . . .

Vipers lashed at his brain. Then the words: Bond’s voice aloud, ‘No prisoner. I don’t know about a prison . . .’

The crash of ice around him, the red-hot, blinding liquid, then agony, as the body became aware again. Out, swinging and dripping, gasping, every centimetre of him torn to shreds. The brain which, so far, had computed extremes of temperature, pain like nibbling animals, snakes and needles, had, finally, hit on the real source of pain. Cold. Dead cold. A death by slow freezing.

The sun was dazzling. So hot that the perspiration dripped from Bond’s forehead and into his eyes. He could not even open his eyes, and he knew he’d had too much to drink. Drunk as a lord. Why drunk as a lord? Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence.

Balance gone. Laughter: Bond’s laughter. He did not usually get drunk, but this was something else. High as a . . . high as something . . . When? On the Fourth of July? At least it made you feel good. Let the world go by. Lightheaded . . . light-hearted . . . darkness. Lord, he was going to pass out. Be sick. No, he felt too good for that. Happiness . . . very happy . . . The darkness coming in, closing around him. Just a hint of what it really was as the night swallowed him. Dead cold.

‘James . . . James . . .’ The voice familiar. Far, far away, from another planet. ‘James . . .’ A woman. A woman’s voice. Then he recognised it.

Warmth. He was lying down and warm. A bed? Was it a bed?

Bond tried to move, and the voice repeated his name. Yes, he was wrapped in blankets, lying on a bed, and the room was warm.

‘James . . .’

With care, Bond opened his eyes – with a stinging of the lids. Then he stirred, slowly because each movement was painful. Finally he turned his head towards the voice. His eyes took a few seconds to focus.

‘Oh, James, you’re all right. They gave you artificial respiration. I’ve pressed the bell. They said to get someone in quickly when you came to.’ The room was like any other hospital room, but there were no windows. In the other bed, her legs raised in traction and encased in plaster, lay Rivke Ingber, her face alive and happy.

Then the nightmare returned, and Bond realised what he had come through. He closed his eyes, but saw only the dark, cold, circular eye of freezing water. He moved his wrists, and the pain returned where the steel handcuffs had bitten into his flesh.

‘Rivke,’ was all he could manage, for his mind was assaulted by other demons. Had he told them? What had he told them? He could remember the questions, but not his answers. A summer scene flitted through his mind – grass, hay, an oak tree, a buzzing in the distance.

‘Drink this, Mr Bond.’ He had not seen the girl before, but she was correctly dressed in a nurse’s uniform and held a cup of steaming hot liquid to his lips. ‘Beef tea. Hot, but you’ve got to have hot drinks. You’re going to be fine. Don’t worry about anything now.’

Bond, propped on pillows, had neither the strength nor inclination to resist. The first sip of the beef tea rolled back the years. The taste reminded him of a far distant past – just as a piece of music will recall a long-forgotten memory. Bond recalled a long-lost childhood: the hygienic smell of school sanatoria, the bouts of winter ‘flu at home. He swallowed more, feeling the warmth creeping into his belly. With the inner heat, the horrors also returned: the ice dungeon, and the terrible, terrible cold as he was dunked into the freezing water.

Had he talked? As hard as Bond cudgelled his brains, he could not tell. In the midst of the sharp, satanic pictures of torture, there was no memory of what else had passed between him and his interrogators.

Depressed, he looked at Rivke. She was staring at him, her eyes soft and gentle, just as they had been in that hotel in the early morning. Her lips moved, soundlessly, but Bond could easily read what she was mouthing: ‘James, I love you.’

He smiled, and gave her a little nod as the nurse tipped the cup of beef tea so that he could swallow more.

He was alive. Rivke was there. While he lived there was still a chance that the National Socialist Action Army could be stopped and their Führer wiped from the new world map he wanted so badly to draw.