Moonraker (James Bond #3)

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 again 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 semi-circles 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,” Kreb’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.

CHAPTER XXIV

ZERO

“THEN WE’RE all agreed?”

“Yes, Sir Hugo,” it was the Minister of Supply speaking. Bond recognized the dapper, assured figure. “Those are the settings. My people have checked them independently with the Air Ministry this morning.”

“Then if you’ll allow me the privilage,” Drax held up the slip of paper and made to turn towards the launching-dome.

“Hold it, Sir Hugo. Just like that, please. Arm in the air.” The bulbs flashed and the bank of cameras whirred and clicked for the last time and Drax turned and walked the few yards towards the dome, almost, it seemed to Bond, looking him straight in the eye through the grating above the door of the site.