Thunderball (10 page)

Largo went into the cockpit bridge. The captain was sitting at the wheel, a light aluminum affair consisting only of the bottom half of a circle. Largo said, "Okay. Let's go.'' The captain reached out his hand to the bank of buttons at his side and pressed the one that said Start Both.'' There came a low, hollow rumble from amidships.

A light blinked on the panel to show that both engines were firing properly. The captain pulled the electromagnetic gear shift to " Slow Ahead Both '' and the yacht began to move. The captain made it " Full Ahead Both '' and the yacht trembled and settled a little in the stern. The captain watched the revolution counter, his hand on a squat lever at his side. At twenty knots the counter showed 5000. The captain inched back the lever that depressed the great steel scoop below the hull. The revolutions remained the same, but the finger of the speedometer crawled on round the dial until it said forty knots. Now the yacht was half flying, half planing across the glittering sheet of still water, the hull supported four feet above the surface on the broad, slightly uptilted metal skid and with only a few feet of the stern and the two big screws submerged. It was a glorious sensation and Largo, as he always did, thrilled to it.

The motor yacht, Disco Volante, was a hydrofoil craft, built for Largo with SPECTRE funds by the Italian constructors Leopoldo Rodrigues of Messina, the only firm in the world to have successfully adapted the Shertel-Sachsenberg system to commercial use. With a hull of aluminum and magnesium alloy, two Daimler-Benz four-stroke Diesels supercharged by twin Brown-Boveri turbo superchargers, the Disco Volante could move her hundred tons at around fifty knots, with a cruising range at that speed of around four hundred miles. She had cost £200,000, but she had been the only craft in the world with the speed, cargo-, and passenger-space, and with the essential shallow draft for the job required of her in Bahamian waters.

The constructors claim of this type of craft that it has a particular refinement that SPECTRE had appreciated. Having high stability and a shallow draft, Aliscafos, as they are called in Italy, do not determine magnetic field variation, nor do they cause pressure waves--both desirable characteristics, in case the Disco Volante might wish, some time in her career, to escape detection.

Six months before, the Disco had been shipped out to the Florida Keys by the South Atlantic route. She had been a sensation in Florida waters and among the Bahamas, and had vastly helped to make Largo the most popular "millionaire'' in a corner of the world that crawls with millionaires who "have everything.'' And the fast and mysterious voyages he made in the Disco, with all those underwater swimmers and occasionally with a two seater Lycoming-engined folding-wing amphibian mounted on the roof of the streamlined superstructure had aroused just the right amount of excited comment. Slowly, Largo had let the secret leak out--through his own indiscretions at dinners and cocktail parties, through carefully primed members of the crew in the Bay Street bars. This was a treasure hunt, an important one. There was a pirates' map, a sunken galleon thickly overgrown with coral. The wreck had been located. Largo was only waiting for the end of the winter tourist season and for the calms of early summer and then his shareholders would be coming out from Europe and work would begin in earnest. And two days before, the shareholders, nineteen of them, had duly come trickling in to Nassau by different routes--from Bermuda, from New York, from Miami. Rather dull-looking people to be sure, just the sort of hard-headed, hard-working businessmen who would be amused by a gamble like this, a pleasant sunshine gamble with a couple of weeks' holiday in Nassau to make up for it if the doubloons were after all not in the wreck. And that evening, with all the visitors on board, the engines of the Disco had begun to murmur, just when they should have, the harbor folk agreed, just when it was getting dark, and the beautiful dark blue and white yacht had slid out of harbor. Once in the open sea, the engines had started up their deep booming that had gradually diminished to the southeast, toward, the listeners agreed, an entirely appropriate hunting ground.

The southerly course was considered appropriate because it is among the Southern Bahamas that the great local treasure troves are expected to be found. It was through the southerly passages through these islands--the Crooked Island, the Mayaguana and the Caicos passages--that the Spanish treasure ships would try to dodge the pirates and the French and British fleets as they made for home. Here, it is believed, lie the remains of the Porto Pedro, sunk in 1668, with a million pounds of bullion on board. The Santa Cruz, lost in 1694, carried twice as much, and the El Capitan and San Pedro, Both sunk in 1719, carried a million, and half a million, pounds of treasure respectively.

Every year, treasure hunts for these and other ships are carried out among the Southern Bahamas. No one can guess how much, if anything, has been recovered, but everyone in Nassau knows of the 72-lb. silver bar recovered by two Nassau businessmen off Gorda Cay in 1950, and since presented to the Nassau Development Board, in whose offices it is permanently on view. So all Bahamians know that treasure is there for the finding, and when the harbor folk of Nassau heard the deep boom of the Disco's engines dying away to the south, they nodded wisely.

But once the Disco was well away and the moon had not yet risen, with all lights doused, she swung away in a wide circle toward the west and toward the rendezvous point she was now leaving. Now she was a hundred miles, two hours, away from Nassau. But it would be almost dawn when, after one more vital call, Nassau would again hear the boom of her engines coming in from the false southern trail.

Largo got up and bent over the chart table. They had covered the course many times and in all weathers. It was really no problem. But Phases I and II had gone so well that double care must be taken over Phase III. Yes, all was well. They were dead on course. Fifty miles. They would be there in an hour. He told the captain to keep the yacht as she was, and went below to the radio room. Eleven-fifteen was just coming up. It was call time.

The small island, Dog Island, was no bigger than two tennis courts. It was a hunk of dead coral with a smattering of seagrape and battered screw palm that grew on nothing but pockets of brackish rainwater and sand. It was the point where the Dog Shoal broke the surface, a well-known navigational hazard that even the fishing boats kept well away from. In daylight, Andros Island showed to eastward, but at night it was as safe as houses.

The Disco came up fast and then slowly lowered herself back into the water and slid up to within a cable's length of the rock. Her arrival brought small waves that lapped and sucked at the rock and then were still. The anchor slipped silently down forty feet and held. Down in the hold, Largo and the disposal team of four waited for the underwater hatch to be opened.

The five men wore aqualungs. Largo held nothing but a powerful underwater electric torch. The four others were divided into two pairs. They wore webbing slung between them and they sat on the edge of the iron grating with their frogman's feet dangling, waiting for the water to swirl in and give them buoyancy. On the webbing, between each pair, rested a six-foot-long tapering object in an obscene gray rubber envelope.

The water seeped, rushed, and then burst into the hold, submerging the five men. They slipped off their seats and trudged out through the hatchway, Largo in the lead and the two pairs behind him at precisely tested intervals.

Largo did not at first switch on his torch. It was not necessary and it would bring stupid, dazed fish that were a distraction. It might even bring shark or barracuda, and, though they would be no more than a nuisance, one of the team, despite Largo's assurances, might lose his nerve.

They swam on in the soft moonlit mist of the sea. At first there was nothing but a milky void below them, but then the coral shelf of the island showed up, climbing steeply toward the surface. Sea fans, like small shrouds in the moonlight, waved softly, beckoning, and the clumps and trees of coral were gray and enigmatic. It was because of these things, the harmless underwater mysteries that make the skin crawl on the inexperienced, that Largo had decided to lead the disposal teams himself. Out in the open, where the plane had foundered, the eye of the big searchlight made, with the known object of the plane itself, the underwater world into the semblance of a big room. But this was different. This gray-white world needed the contempt of a swimmer who had experienced these phantom dangers a thousand times before. That was the main reason why Largo led the teams. He also wanted to know exactly how the two gray sausages were stored away. It could happen, if things went wrong, that he would have to salvage them himself.

The underpart of the small island had been eroded by the waves so that, seen from below, it resembled a thick mushroom. Under the umbrella of coral there was a wide fissure, a dark wound in the side of the stem. Largo made for it and, when he was close, switched on his torch. Beneath the umbrella of coral it was dark. The yellow light of the torch showed up the minute life of an inshore coral community--the pale sea urchins and the fierce black spines of sea eggs, the shifting underbrush of seaweeds, the yellow and blue seeking antennae of a langouste, the butterfly and angel fish, fluttering like moths in the light, a coiled bêche de mer, a couple of meandering sea caterpillars and the black and green jelly of a sea hare.

Largo lowered the black fins on his feet, got his balance on a ledge, and looked round, shining his torch on the rock so that the two teams could get a foothold. Then he waved them on and into the smooth broad fissure that showed a glimmer of moonlight at its far end inside the center of the rock. The underwater cave was only about ten yards long. Largo led the teams one after the other through and into the small chamber that might once perhaps have been a wonderful repository for a different kind of treasure. From the chamber a narrow fissure led to the upper air, and this would certainly become a fine blow-hole in a storm, though it would be unlikely that fishermen would be close enough to the Dog Shoal in a storm to see the water fountaining out of the center of the island. Above the present water line in the chamber, Largo's men had hammered stanchions into the rock to form cradles for the two atomic weapons with leather straps to hold them secure against any weather. Now, one by one, the two teams lifted the rubber packages up onto the iron bars and made them secure. Largo examined the result and was satisfied. The weapons would be ready for him when he needed them. In the meantime such radiation as there was would be quarantined within this tiny rock a hundred miles from Nassau and his men and his ship would be clean and innocent as snow.

The five men trudged calmly back to the ship and into the hold through the hatch. To the boom of the engines the bows of the Disco lifted slowly out of the water and the beautiful ship, streamlined like the gondola of some machine of the air rather than of the sea, skimmed off on the homeward journey.

Largo stripped off his equipment and, with a towel round his slim waist, went forward to the radio cabin. He had missed the midnight call. It was now one-fifteen--seven-fifteen in the morning for Blofeld. Largo thought of this while contact was being made. Blofeld would be sitting there, haggard perhaps, probably unshaven. There would be coffee beside him, the last of an endless chain of cups. Largo could smell it. Now Blofeld would be able to take a taxi to the Turkish baths in the Rue Aubert, his resort when there were tensions to be dissipated. And there, at last, he would sleep. "Number 1 speaking.'' "Number 2 listening.''

"Phase III completed. Phase III completed. Successful. One a.m. here. Closing down.'' "I am satisfied.''

Largo stripped off the earphones. He thought to himself, "So am I! We are more than three-quarters home. Now only the devil can stop us.''

He went into the stateroom and carefully made himself a tall of his favorite drink--crème de menthe frappé with a maraschino cherry on top.

He sipped it delicately to the end and ate the cherry. Then he took one more cherry out of the bottle, slipped it into his mouth, and went up on the bridge.

11.

Domino

The girl in the sapphire blue MG two-seater shot down the slope of Parliament Street and at the junction with Bay Street executed an admirable racing change through third into second. She gave a quick glance to the right, correctly estimated the trot of the straw-hatted horse in the shafts of the rickety cab with the gay fringe, and swerved out of the side street left-handed. The horse jerked back his head indignantly and the coachman stamped his foot up and down on the big Bermuda bell. The disadvantage of the beautiful deep ting-tong, ting-tong of the Bermuda carriage bell is that it cannot possibly sound angry, however angrily you may sound it. The girl gave a cheerful wave of a sunburned hand, raced up the street in second, and stopped in front of the Pipe of Peace, the Dunhills of Nassau.

Not bothering to open the low door of the MG, the girl swung one brown leg and then the other over the side of the car, showing her thighs under the pleated cream cotton skirt almost to her waist, and slipped to the pavement. By now the cab was alongside. The cabby reined in. He was mollified by the gaiety and beauty of the girl. He said, "Missy, you done almost shaved de whiskers off of Old Dreamy here. You wanna be more careful.''

The girl put her hands on her hips. She didn't like being told anything by anyone. She said sharply, "Old Dreamy yourself. Some people have got work to do. Both of you ought to be put out to grass instead of cluttering up the streets getting in everyone's way.''

The ancient Negro opened his mouth, thought better of it, said a pacifying "Hokay, Missy. Hokay,'' flicked at his horse, and moved on, muttering to himself. He turned on his seat to get another look at the she-devil, but she had already disappeared into the shop. "Dat's a fine piece of gal,'' he said inconsequentially, and put his horse into an ambling trot.

Twenty yards away, James Bond had witnessed the whole scene. He felt the same way about the girl as the cabby did. He also knew who she was. He quickened his step and pushed through the striped sun blinds into the blessed cool of the tobacconist's.

The girl was standing at a counter arguing with one of the assistants. "But I tell you I don't want Senior Service. I tell you I want a cigarette that's so disgusting that I shan't want to smoke it. Haven't you got a cigarette that stops people smoking? Look at all that.'' She waved a hand toward the stacked shelves. "Don't tell me some of those don't taste horrible.''

The man was used to crazy tourists, and anyway the Nassavian doesn't get excited. He said, "Well, Ma'am…'' and turned and languidly looked along the shelves.

Bond said sternly to the girl, "You can choose between two kinds of cigarette if you want to smoke less.''

She looked sharply up at him. "And who might you be?'' "My name's Bond, James Bond. I'm the world's authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly. You're lucky I happen to be handy.''

The girl looked him up and down. He was a man she hadn't seen before in Nassau. He was about six feet tall and somewhere in his middle thirties. He had dark, rather cruel good looks and very clear blue-gray eyes that were now observing her inspection sardonically. A scar down his right cheek showed pale against a tan so mild that he must have only recently come to the island. He was wearing a very dark blue lightweight single-breasted suit over a cream silk shirt and a black knitted silk tie. Despite the heat, he looked cool and clean, and his only concession to the tropics appeared to be the black saddle-stitched sandals on his bare feet. It was an obvious attempt at a pick-up. He had an exciting face, and authority. She decided to go along. But she wasn't going to make it easy. She said coldly, "All right. Tell me.''

"The only way to stop smoking is to stop it and not start again. If you want to pretend to stop for a week or two, it's no good trying to ration yourself. You'll become a bore and think about nothing else. And you'll snatch at a cigarette every time the hour strikes or whatever the intervals may be. You'll behave greedily. That's unattractive. The other way is to have cigarettes that are either too mild or too strong. The mild ones are probably the best for you.'' Bond said to the attendant, "A carton of Dukes, king-size with filter.'' Bond handed them to the girl. "Here, try these. With the compliments of Faust.''

"Oh, but I can't. I mean…''

But Bond had already paid for the carton and for a packet of Chesterfields for himself. He took the change and followed her out of the shop. They stood together under the striped awning. The heat was terrific. The white light on the dusty street, the glare reflected back off the shop fronts opposite and off the dazzling limestone of the houses made them both screw up their eyes. Bond said, "I'm afraid smoking goes with drinking. Are you going to give them both up or one by one?''

She looked at him quizzically. "This is very sudden, Mr.--er--Bond. Well, all right. But somewhere out of the town. It's too hot here. Do you know the Wharf out beyond the Fort Montague?'' Bond noticed that she looked quickly up and down the street. "It's not bad. Come on. I'll take you there. Mind the metal. It'll raise blisters on you.''

Even the white leather of the upholstery burned through to Bond's thighs. But he wouldn't have minded if his suit had caught fire. This was his first sniff at the town and already he had got hold of the girl. And she was a fine girl at that. Bond caught hold of the leather-bound safety grip on the dashboard as the girl did a sharp turn up Frederick Street and another one onto Shirley.

Bond settled himself sideways so that he could look at her. She wore a gondolier's broadrimmed straw hat, tilted impudently down over her nose. The pale blue tails of its ribbon streamed out behind. On the front of the ribbon was printed in gold " M/Y DISCO VOLANTE.'' Her short-sleeved silk shirt was in half-inch vertical stripes of pale blue and white and, with the pleated cream skirt, the whole get-up reminded Bond vaguely of a sunny day at Henley Regatta. She wore no rings and no jewelery except for a rather masculine square gold wristwatch with a black face. Her flat-heeled sandals were of white doeskin. They matched her broad white doeskin belt and the sensible handbag that lay, with a black and white striped silk scarf, on the seat between them. Bond knew a good deal about her from the immigration form, one among a hundred, which he had been studying that morning. Her name was Dominetta Vitali. She had been born in Bolzano in the Italian Tyrol and therefore probably had as much Austrian as Italian blood in her. She was twenty-nine and gave her profession as "actress.'' She had arrived six months before in the Disco and it was entirely understood that she was mistress to the owner of the yacht, an Italian called Emilio Largo. "Whore,'' "tart,'' "prostitute'' were not words Bond used about women unless they were professional streetwalkers or the inmates of a brothel, and when Harling, the Commissioner of Police, and Pitman, Chief of Immigration and Customs, had described her as an "Italian tart'' Bond had reserved judgment. Now he knew he had been right. This was an independent, a girl of authority and character. She might like the rich, gay life but, so far as Bond was concerned, that was the right kind of girl. She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not on theirs.

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest danger potential, and two women as nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other's faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person's expression, perhaps in order to read behind the other's words or to analyze the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other's attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver has to hear, and see, not only what her companion is saying but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.

But this girl drove like a man. She was entirely focused on the road ahead and on what was going on in her driving mirror, an accessory rarely used by women except for making up their faces. And, equally rare in a woman, she took a man's pleasure in the feel of her machine, in the timing of her gear changes, and the use of her brakes.

She didn't talk to Bond or seem to be aware of him, and this allowed him to continue his inspection without inhibition. She had a gay, to-hell-with-you face that, Bond thought, would become animal in passion. In bed she would fight and bite and then suddenly melt into hot surrender. He could almost see the proud, sensual mouth bare away from the even white teeth in a snarl of desire and then, afterward, soften into a half-pout of loving slavery. In profile the eyes were soft charcoal slits such as you see on some birds.but in the shop Bond had seen them full face. Then they had been fierce and direct with a golden flicker in the dark brown that held much the same message as the mouth. The profile, the straight, small uptilted nose, the determined set of the chin, and the clean-cut sweep of the jaw line were as decisive as a royal command, and the way the head was set on the neck had the same authority--the poise one associates with imaginary princesses. Two features modified the clean-cut purity of line--a soft, muddled Brigitte Bardot haircut that escaped from under the straw hat in an endearing disarray, and two deeply cut but soft dimples which could only have been etched by a sweet if rather ironic smile that Bond had not yet seen. The sunburn was not overdone and her skin had none of that dried, exhausted sheen that can turn the texture of even the youngest skin into something more like parchment. Beneath the gold, there was an earthy warmth in the cheeks that suggested a good healthy peasant strain from the Italian Alps, and her breasts, high riding and deeply V-ed, were from the same stock. The general impression, Bond decided, was of a willful, high-tempered, sensual girl--a beautiful Arab mare who would only allow herself to be ridden by a horseman with steel thighs and velvet hands, and then only with curb and saw bit--and then only when he had broken her to bridle and saddle. Bond thought that he would like to try his strength against hers. But that must be for some other time. For the moment another man was in the saddle. He would first have to be unhorsed. And anyway, what the hell was he doing fooling with these things? There was a job to be done. The devil of a job.

The MG swept out of Shirley Street on to Eastern Road and followed the coast. Across the wide harbor entrance were the emerald and turquoise shoals of Athol Island. A deep-sea fishing boat was passing over them, the. two tall antennae of her twelve-foot rods streaming their lines astern. A fast motorboat came hammering by dose inshore, the water-skier on the line behind her executing tight slaloms across the waves of her wake. It was a sparkling, beautiful day and Bond's heart lifted momentarily from the trough of indecision and despondency created by an assignment that, particularly since his arrival at dawn that day, seemed increasingly time-wasting and futile.

The Bahamas, the string of a thousand islands that straggle five hundred miles southeast from just east of the coast of Florida to just north of Cuba, from latitude 27º down to latitude 21º, were, for most of three hundred years, the haunt of every famous pirate of the western Atlantic, and today tourism makes full use of the romantic mythology. A road-sign said " Blackbeard's Tower 1 mile '' and another " Gunpowder Wharf. Sea Food. Native Drinks. Shady Garden. First Left.''

A sand track showed on their left. The girl took it and pulled up in front of a ruined stone warehouse against which leaned a pink clapboard house with white window frames and a white Adam-style doorway over which hung a brightly painted inn sign of a powder keg with a skull and crossbones on it. The girl drove the MG into the shade of a clump of casuarinas and they got out and went through the door and through a small dining room with red and white checked covers and out onto a terrace built on the remains of a stone wharf. The terrace was shaded by sea-almond trees trimmed into umbrellas. Trailed by a shuffling colored waiter with soup stains down his white coat, they chose a cool table on the edge of the terrace looking over the water. Bond glanced at his watch. He said to the girl, "It's exactly midday. Do you want to drink solid or soft?''

The girl said, "Soft. I'll have a double Bloody Mary with plenty of Worcester sauce.''

Bond said, "What do you call hard? I'll have a vodka and tonic with a dash of bitters.'' The waiter said, "Yassuh'' and mooched away.

"I call vodka-on-the-rocks hard. All that tomato juice makes it soft.'' She hooked a chair toward her with one foot and stretched out her legs on it so that they were in the sun. The position wasn't comfortable enough. She kicked off her sandals and sat back, satisfied. She said, "When did you arrive? I haven't seen you about. When it's like this, at the end of the season, one expects to know most of the faces.''

"I got in this morning. From New York. I've come to look for a property. It struck me that now would be better than in the season. When all the millionaires are here the prices are hopeless. They may come down a bit now they're gone. How long have you been here?

"About six months. I came out in a yacht, the Disco Volante. You may have seen her. She's anchored up the coast. You probably flew right over her coming in to land at Windsor Field.''

"A long low streamlined affair? Is she yours? She's got beautiful lines.''

"She belongs to a relative of mine.'' The eyes watched Bond's face.

"Do you stay on board?''

"Oh, no. We've got a beach property. Or rather we've taken it. It's a place called Palmyra. Just opposite where the yacht is. It belongs to an Englishman. I believe he wants to sell it. It's very beautiful. And it's a long way away from the tourists. It's at a place called Lyford Key.''

"That sounds the sort of place I'm looking for.''

"Well, we'll be gone in about a week.''

"Oh.'' Bond looked into her eyes. "I'm sorry.''

"If you've got to flirt, don't be obvious.'' Suddenly the girl laughed. She looked contrite. The dimples remained. "I mean, I didn't really mean that--not the way it sounded. But I've spent six months listening to that kind of thing from these silly old rich goats and the only way to shut them up is to be rude. I'm not being conceited. There's no one under sixty in this place. Young people can't afford it. So any woman who hasn't got a harelip or a mustache--well not even a mustache would put them off. They'd probably like it. Well, I mean absolutely any girl makes these old goats get their bifocals all steamed up.'' She laughed again. She was getting friendly. "I expect you'll have just the same effect on the old women with pince-nez and blue rinses.''