The James Bond Anthology

23 | ZERO MINUS

Through half-closed eyes Bond looked intently at the torch while for a few precious seconds he sat and let life creep back into his body. His head felt as if it had been used as a football, but there was nothing broken. Drax had hit him unscientifically and with the welter of blows of a drunken man.

Gala watched him anxiously. The eyes in the bloody face were almost shut, but the line of the jaw was taut with concentration and she could feel the effort of will he was making.

He gave his head a shake and when he turned towards her she could see that his eyes were feverish with triumph.

He nodded towards the desk. ‘The lighter,’ he said urgently. ‘I had to try and make him forget it. Follow me. I’ll show you.’ He started to rock the light steel chair inch by inch towards the desk. ‘For God’s sake don’t tip over or we’ve had it. But make it fast or the blowlamp’ll get cold.’

Uncomprehendingly, and feeling almost as if they were playing some ghastly children’s game, Gala carefully rocked her way across the floor in his wake.

Seconds later Bond told her to stop beside the desk while he went rocking on round to Drax’s chair. Then he manoeuvred himself into position opposite his target and with a sudden lurch heaved himself and the chair forward so that his head came down.

There was a painful crack as the Ronson desk lighter connected with his teeth, but his lips held it and the top of it was in his mouth as he heaved the chair back with just enough force to prevent it spilling over. Then he started his patient journey back to where Gala was sitting at the corner of the desk on which Krebs had left the blowlamp.

He rested until his breath was steady again. ‘Now we come to the difficult part,’ he said grimly. ‘While I try to get this torch going, you get your chair round so that your right arm is as close in front of me as possible.’

Obediently she edged herself round while Bond swayed his chair so that it leant against the edge of the desk and allowed his mouth to reach forward and grip the handle of the blowtorch between his teeth.

Then he eased the torch towards him and after minutes of patient work he had the torch and the lighter arranged to his liking at the edge of the desk.

After another rest he bent down, closed the valve of the torch with his teeth, and proceeded to get pressure back by slowly and repeatedly pulling up the plunger with his lips and pressing it back with his chin. His face could feel the warmth in the pre-heater and he could smell the remnants of gas in it. If only it hadn’t cooled off too much.

He straightened up.

‘Last lap, Gala,’ he said, smiling crookedly at her. ‘I may have to hurt you a bit. All right?’

‘Of course,’ said Gala.

‘Then here goes,’ said Bond, and he bent forward and released the safety valve on the left of the canister.

Then he quickly bent forward over the Ronson, which was standing at right angles and just below the neck of the torch, and with his two front teeth pressed down sharply on the ignition lever.

It was a horrible manoeuvre and though he whipped back his head with the speed of a snake he let out a gasp of pain as the jet of blue fire from the torch seared across his bruised cheek and the bridge of his nose.

But the vaporized paraffin was hissing out its vital tongue of flame and he shook the water out of his streaming eyes and bent his head almost at right angles and again got his teeth to the handle of the blowtorch.

He thought his jaw would break with the weight of the thing and the nerves of his front teeth screamed at him, but he swayed his chair carefully upright away from the desk and then strained his bent neck forward until the tip of blue fire from the torch was biting into the flex that bound Gala’s right wrist to the arm of her chair.

He tried desperately to keep the flame steady but the breath rasped through the girl’s teeth as the handle shifted between his jaws and the flame of the torch brushed her forearm.

But then it was over. Melted by the fierce heat, the copper strands parted one by one and suddenly Gala’s right arm was free and she was reaching to take the torch out of Bond’s mouth.

Bond’s head fell back on to his shoulders and he twisted his neck luxuriously to get the blood moving in the aching muscles.

Almost before he knew it, Gala was bending over his arms and legs and he too was free.

As he sat still for a moment, his eyes closed, waiting for the life to come back into his body, he suddenly, delightedly felt Gala’s soft lips on his mouth.

He opened his eyes. She was standing in front of him, her eyes shining. ‘That’s for what you did,’ she said seriously.

‘You’re a wonderful girl,’ he said simply.

But then, knowing what he was going to have to do, knowing that while she might conceivably survive, he had only another few minutes to live, he closed his eyes so that she should not see the hopelessness in them.

Gala saw the expression on his face and she turned away. She thought it was only exhaustion and the cumulative effect of what his body had suffered, and she suddenly remembered the peroxide in the washroom next to her office.

She went through the communicating door. How extraordinary it was to see her familiar things again. It must be someone else who had sat at that desk and typed letters and powdered her nose. She shrugged her shoulders and went into the little washroom. God what a sight and God how tired she felt! But first she took a wet towel and some peroxide and went back and spent ten minutes attending to the battlefield which was Bond’s face.

He sat silent, a hand resting on her waist, and watched her gratefully. Then when she had gone back into her room and he heard her shut the door of the washroom behind her he got up, turned off the still hissing blowtorch, and walked into Drax’s shower, stripped and stood for five minutes under the icy water. ‘Preparing the corpse!’ he reflected ruefully as he surveyed his battered face in the mirror.

He put on his clothes and went back to Drax’s desk which he searched methodically. It yielded only one prize, the ‘office bottle’, a half-full bottle of Haig and Haig. He fetched two glasses and some water and called to Gala.

He heard the door of the washroom open. ‘What is it?’

‘Whisky.’

‘You drink. I’ll be ready in a minute.’

Bond looked at the bottle and poured himself three-quarters of a toothglass and drank it straight down in two gulps. Then he gingerly lit a blessed cigarette and sat on the edge of the desk and felt the liquor burn down through his stomach into his legs.

He picked up the bottle again and looked at it. Plenty for Gala and a whole full glass for himself before he walked out through the door. Better than nothing. It wouldn’t be too bad with that inside him so long as he walked quickly out and shut the doors behind him. No looking back.

Gala came in, a transformed Gala, looking as beautiful as the night he had first seen her, except for the lines of exhaustion under the eyes that the powder could not quite conceal and the angry welts at her wrists and ankles.

Bond gave her a drink and took another one himself and their eyes smiled at each other over the rims of their glasses.

Then Bond stood up.

‘Listen, Gala,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘We’ve got to face it and get it over so I’ll make it short and then we’ll have another drink.’ He heard her catch her breath, but he went on. ‘In ten minutes or so I’m going to shut you into Drax’s bathroom and put you under the shower and turn it full on.’

‘James,’ she cried. She stepped close to him. ‘Don’t go on. I know you’re going to say something dreadful. Please stop, James.’

‘Come on, Gala,’ said Bond roughly. ‘What the hell does it matter. It’s a bloody miracle we have got the chance.’ He moved away from her. He walked to the doors leading out into the shaft.

‘And then,’ he said, and he held up the precious lighter in his right hand, ‘I shall walk out of here and shut the doors and go and light a last cigarette under the tail of the Moonraker.’

‘God,’ she whispered. ‘What are you saying? You’re mad.’ She looked at him through eyes wide with horror.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Bond impatiently. ‘What the hell else is there to do? The explosion will be so terrific that one won’t feel anything. And it’s bound to work with all that fuel vapour hanging around. It’s me or a million people in London. The warhead won’t go off. Atom bombs don’t explode like that. It’ll be melted probably. There’s just a chance you may get away. Most of the explosion will take the line of least resistance through the roof – and down the exhaust pit, if I can work the machinery that opens up the floor.’ He smiled. ‘Cheer up,’ he said, walking over to her and taking one of her hands. ‘The boy stood on the burning deck. I’ve wanted to copy him since I was five.’

Gala pulled her hand away. ‘I don’t care what you say,’ she said angrily. ‘We’ve got to think of something else. You don’t trust me to have any ideas. You just tell me what you think we’ve got to do.’ She walked over to the wall map and pressed down the switch. ‘Of course if we have to use the lighter we have to.’ She gazed at the map of the false flight plan, barely seeing it. ‘But the idea of you walking in there alone and standing in the middle of all those ghastly fumes from the fuel and calmly flicking that thing and then being blown to dust … And anyway, if we have to do it, we’ll do it together. I’d rather that than be burnt to death in here. And anyway,’ she paused, ‘I’d like to go with you. We’re in this together.’

Bond’s eyes were tender as he walked towards her and put an arm round her waist and hugged her to him. ‘Gala, you’re a darling,’ he said simply. ‘And if there’s any other way we’ll take it. But,’ he looked at his watch, ‘it’s past midnight and we’ve got to decide quickly. At any moment it may occur to Drax to send guards down to see that we’re all right, and God knows what time he’ll be coming down to set the gyros.’

Gala twisted her body round like a cat. She gazed at him with her mouth open, her face taut with excitement. ‘The gyros,’ she whispered, ‘to set the gyros.’ She leant weakly back against the wall, her eyes searching Bond’s face. ‘Don’t you SEE?’ her voice was on the edge of hysteria. ‘After he’s gone, we could alter the gyros back, back to the old flight plan, then the rocket will simply fall into the North Sea where it’s supposed to go.’

She stepped away from the wall and seized his shirt in both hands and looked imploringly at him. ‘Can’t we?’ she said. ‘Can’t we?’

‘Do you know the other settings?’ asked Bond sharply.

‘Of course I do,’ she said urgently. ‘I’ve been living with them for a year. We won’t have a weather report but we’ll just have to chance that. The forecast this morning said we would have the same conditions as today.’

‘By God,’ said Bond. ‘We might do it. If only we can hide somewhere and make Drax think we’ve escaped. What about the exhaust pit? If I can work the machine to open the floor.’

‘It’s a straight hundred-foot drop,’ said Gala, shaking her head. ‘And the walls are polished steel. Just like glass. And there’s no rope or anything down here. They cleared everything out of the workshop yesterday. And anyway there are guards on the beach.’

Bond reflected. Then his eyes brightened. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘But first of all what about the radar, the homing device in London? Won’t that pull the rocket off its course and back on to London?’

Gala shook her head. ‘It’s only got a range of about a hundred miles,’ she said. ‘The rocket won’t even pick up its signal. If it’s aimed into the North Sea it will get into the orbit of the transmitter on the raft. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my plans. But where can we hide?’

‘One of the ventilator shafts,’ said Bond. ‘Come on.’ He gave a last look round the room. The lighter was in his pocket. That would still be the last resort. There was nothing else they would want. He followed Gala out into the gleaming shaft and made for the instrument panel which controlled the steel cover to the exhaust pit.

After a quick examination he threw over a heavy lever from ‘Zu’ to ‘Auf’. There was a soft hiss from the hydraulic machinery behind the wall and the two semicircles of steel opened beneath the tail of the rocket and slid back into their grooves. He walked over and looked down.

The arcs in the roof above glinted back at him from the polished walls of the wide steel funnel until they curved away out of sight towards the distant hollow boom of the sea.

Bond went back into Drax’s office and pulled down the shower curtain in the bathroom. Then Gala and he tore it into strips and tied them together. He made a jagged rent at the end of the last strip so as to give an impression that the escape rope had broken. Then he tied the other end firmly round the pointed tip of one of the Moonraker’s three fins and dropped the rest so that it hung down the shaft.

It was not much of a false scent, but it might gain some time.

The big round mouths of the ventilator shafts were spaced about ten yards apart and about four feet off the floor. Bond counted. There were fifty of them. He carefully opened the hinged grating that covered one of them and looked up. Forty feet away there was a faint glimmer from the moonlight outside. He decided that they were tunnelled straight up inside the wall of the site until they turned at right angles towards the gratings in the outside walls.

Bond reached up and ran his hand along the surface. It was unfinished roughcast concrete and he grunted with satisfaction as he felt first one sharp protuberance and then another. They were the jagged ends of the steel rods reinforcing the walls, cut off where the shafts had been bored.

It was going to be a painful business, but there was no doubt they could inch their way up one of these shafts, like mountaineers up a rock chimney, and, in the turn at the top, lie hidden from anything but the sort of painstaking search that would be difficult in the morning with all the officials from London round the site.

Bond knelt down and the girl climbed on to his back and started up.

An hour later, their feet and shoulders bruised and cut, they lay exhausted, squeezed tight in each other’s arms, their heads inches away from the circular grating directly above the outside door, and listened to the guards restlessly shifting their feet in the darkness a hundred yards away.

Five o’clock, six, seven.

Slowly the sun came up behind the dome and the seagulls started to call in the cliffs and then suddenly there were the three figures walking towards them in the distance, passed by a fresh platoon of guards doubling, chins up, knees up, to relieve the night watch.

The figures came nearer and the squinting, exhausted eyes of the hidden couple could see every detail of Drax’s blood-orange face, the lean, pale foxiness of Dr. Walter, the suety, overslept puffiness of Krebs.

The three men walked like executioners, saying nothing. Drax took out his key and they silently filed through the door a few feet below the taut bodies of Bond and Gala.

Then for ten minutes there was silence except for the occasional boom of voices up the ventilator shaft as the three men moved about down on the steel floor round the exhaust pit. Bond smiled to himself at the thought of the rage and consternation on Drax’s face; the miserable Krebs wilting under the lash of Drax’s tongue; the bitter accusation in Walter’s eyes. Then the door burst open beneath him and Krebs was calling urgently to the leader of the guards. A man detached himself from the semi-circle and ran up.

‘Die Engländer,’ Krebs’s voice was almost hysterical. ‘Escaped. The Herr Kapitän thinks they may be in one of the ventilator shafts. We are going to take a chance. The dome will be opened again and we will clear out the fumes from the fuel. And then the Herr Doktor will put the steam hose up each shaft. If they’re there it will finish them. Choose four men. The rubber gloves and firesuits are down there. We’ll take the pressure off the heating. Tell the others to listen for the screams. Verstanden?’

‘Zu Befehl.’ The man doubled smartly back to his troop and Krebs, the sweat of anxiety on his face, turned and disappeared back through the door.

For a moment Bond lay motionless.

There was a heavy rumble above their heads as the dome divided and swung open.

The steam hose!

He had heard of mutinies in ships being fought with it. Rioters in factories. Would it reach forty feet? Would the pressure last? How many boilers fed the heating? Among the fifty ventilator shafts, where would they choose to begin? Had Bond or Gala left any clue to the one they had climbed?

He felt that Gala was waiting for him to explain. To do something. To protect them.

Five men came doubling from the semi-circle of guards. They passed underneath and disappeared.

Bond put his mouth to Gala’s ear. ‘This may hurt,’ he said. ‘Can’t say how much. Can’t be helped. Just have to take it. No noise.’ He felt the answering tentative pressure from her arms. ‘Bring your knees up. Don’t be shy. This is no time to be maidenly.’

‘Shut up,’ whispered Gala angrily. He felt one knee creep up until it was locked between his thighs. His own knee followed suit until it would go no further. She squirmed furiously. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ whispered Bond, pulling her head in close to his chest so that it was half covered by his open shirt.

He overlay her as much as possible. There was nothing to be done about their ankles or his hands. He pulled his shirt collar up as far over their heads as possible. They held tightly to each other.

Hot, cramped, breathless. Waiting, it suddenly occurred to Bond, like two lovers in the undergrowth. Waiting for the footsteps to go by so that they could start again. He smiled grimly to himself and listened.

There was silence down the shaft. They must be in the engine room. Walter would be watching the hose being coupled to the outlet valve. Now there were distant noises. Where would they start?

Somewhere, not far away, there was a soft, long-drawn-out whisper, like the inefficient whistle of a distant train.

He drew his shirt collar back and stole a look out through the grating at the guards. Those he could see were looking straight at the launching-dome, somewhere to his left.

Again the long harsh whisper. And again.

It was getting louder. He could see the heads of the guards pivoting towards the grating in the wall which hid him and Gala. They must be watching, fascinated, as the thick white jets of steam shot out through the gratings high up in the cement wall, wondering if this one, or that one, or that one, would be accompanied by a double scream.

He could feel Gala’s heart beating against his. She didn’t know what was coming. She trusted him.

‘It may hurt,’ he whispered to her again. ‘It may burn. It won’t kill us. Be brave. Don’t make a sound.’

‘I’m all right,’ she whispered angrily. But he could feel her body press closer in to his.

Whoosh. It was getting closer.

Whoosh! Two away.

WHOOSH!! Next door. A suspicion of the wet smell of steam came to him.

Hold tight, Bond said to himself. He smothered her in towards him and held his breath.

Now. Quick. Get it over, damn you.

And suddenly there was a great pressure and heat and a roaring in the ears and a moment of blazing pain.

Then dead silence, a mixture of sharp cold and fire on the ankles and hands, a feeling of soaking wet and a desperate, choking effort to get pure air into the lungs.

Their bodies automatically fought to withdraw from each other, to capture some inches of space and air for the areas of skin that were already blistering. The breath rattled in their throats and the water poured off the cement into their open mouths until they bent sideways and choked the water out to join the trickle that was oozing under their soaking bodies and along past their scalded ankles and then down the vertical walls of the shaft up which they had come.

And the howl of the steam pipe drew away from them until it became a whisper and finally stopped, and there was silence in their narrow cement prison except for their stubborn breathing and the ticking of Bond’s watch.

And the two bodies lay and waited, nursing their pain.

Half an hour – half a year – later, Walter and Krebs and Drax filed out below them.

But, as a precaution, the guards had been left behind in the launching dome.