‘Get in there!’ roared Bond.
Massoud managed to find a foothold long enough to fire at Bond, but the buffeting of the turbulence as the plane continued to dive caused the bullet to go upwards into the ceiling.
Further back in the plane, Scarlett had taken a handhold on a seat leg. But it was evident she had no clear view of Massoud and was holding her fire.
Mitchell staggered towards the flight deck as the other three held on to the sides of the seats. Bond could see Massoud’s legs about five rows back, but hesitated to fire in case, even with the under-powered Luger, he caused further decompression.
The next thing he knew, the plane took another gigantic buffet, and pitched downwards. Mitchell crashed against the bulkhead and fell to the floor. Scarlett screamed and Bond saw her body sliding down the aisle. Massoud caught her as she went past and held on to her arm. Bond watched as he drew her into his row, with his arm round her throat. She had lost her gun.
Somehow in the yawing and pitching aircraft, Massoud managed to get to his knees, dragging Scarlett with him for cover. His strength was extraordinary, thought Bond. He was like a caveman dragging off his woman by the hair as he manoeuvred them both towards the front of the plane with one free hand. As he went past Bond, their eyes met and Bond saw the muzzle of his gun in Scarlett’s ear. There was no need for words. Once Massoud hit the blood, he was almost able to slide down to the flight deck – where he took the empty pilot’s seat.
The plane levelled out, and Bond surveyed the damage. The holed window was continuing to cause decompression, and it was hard to move against the sucking force. Some of the seats had been shaken free of the floor, and Bond knew that if the guard’s body finally succumbed to the pressure and broke through the Perspex, the situation would worsen dramatically.
Mitchell seemed to be unconscious, and his body lay where it had fallen across the aisle just short of the flight deck.
Bond made his way down, stepped over Mitchell and opened the door. Scarlett sat at the controls with Massoud’s gun against her head.
Massoud looked at Bond calmly. ‘Drop your gun. Or I kill her.’
‘You wouldn’t risk firing again,’ said Bond. ‘Not with that big thing.’
Massoud dropped his arm and pulled hard across Scarlett’s windpipe. ‘This what we do in bazaar,’ he said. ‘To traders who don’t pay. No need to fire.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Bond.
‘Sit down.’ Massoud pointed to the co-pilot’s seat. ‘Give me gun.’
Bond saw Scarlett’s wide and frightened eyes pleading silently with him and did as he was told.
Massoud glanced rapidly at a chart he had taken from the central console and, more carefully, at the forest of dials in front of Scarlett. ‘Six minutes,’ he said. ‘Take plane down.’ And he demonstrated to Scarlett how, when he moved the control arm forward, the plane lost height.
Beside him, beneath his right hand, was the switch that Gorner’s engineers had installed. It connected to the bomb rack and the door-release mechanism in the adapted cargo bay. Massoud was fingering it impatiently.
At the same moment, the Ekranoplan was taking on fuel from a tanker at a prearranged stop off Fort Shevchenko on the westernmost tip of Kazakhstan.
The target was thus a static one for the pilots of the three RAF Vulcan B.2s coming in at five thousand feet at just below the speed of sound – a velocity they had maintained since departing from their secret location in the Gulf, scrambled by an emergency order from Northolt, based on information from a Noshahr call box via Tehran and Regent’s Park.
One of the planes was loaded with a Blue Steel missile, a rocket-powered stand-off bomb armed with the 1.1 megaton yield Red Snow warhead. The other two carried 21 one-thousand-pound conventional bombs.
The nuclear-armed aircraft was instructed to attack only if the first two planes were unsuccessful and stood off at a distance of some twenty miles. As the British pilots closed in for the kill, the airwaves crackled with anticipation. They began the operation with both leading Vulcans on a classic ‘lay-down’ attack, releasing ten bombs each in a long, wavering trail.
The sea around the Ekranoplan rose up in towering sheets of salt water that swamped the tanker as well as the hybrid craft herself, which shook to the limit of her stress equations. But she remained intact as the bombers climbed up into the sun, banked and regrouped.
Neither pilot was trained for a second pass, as the slow delivery speed of the aircraft made it vulnerable to Triple ‘A’ and surface-to-air missiles. ‘The kitchen sink first time’ was the pilots’ rule of thumb, but these were no ordinary circumstances.
After brief radio contact, both planes came round for a second attempt, but this time the Ekranoplan was ready for them and fired one of its missiles directly into the flight-path. Seeing its approaching white vapour trail, the pilot of the first plane fired chaff and went into a sharp emergency climb. The second plane was slower to react, and the missile, rising like a lethal white firework, tore a section from the starboard wing. Unable to control the plane, the pilot was forced to climb as high as he could before ejecting, his co-pilot following suit, their parachutes opening five thousand feet above Fort Shevchenko. The stricken plane spiralled back into the sea with three crewmen still on board.
The first Vulcan, meanwhile, levelled off, and, after a steep banking manoeuvre, ran in at nine hundred feet for a seemingly suicidal third pass. This time, however, its angle and low altitude were too much for the stranded amphibian’s defences, and the plane dumped its remaining bombs with geometric precision. As they hit the side of the fuel tanker there was a calculated delay before detonation to allow the aircraft to escape the blast.
The astonished Vulcan pilot looked down from his climb to see the Ekranoplan lifted clear of the water and disintegrating into a million particles as the giant explosion shook the Caspian Sea to its bedrock.
18. Zlatoust-36
‘One minute,’ said Massoud.
Below them, the Ural mountains towered grey and jagged. They could make out the sprawling city of Chelyabinsk in the eastern foothills to their right. Away to the left a large expanse of water stretched to the western horizon. The bright sun and clear, sparkling air made navigation childishly simple.
Under Massoud’s instruction, Scarlett continued to move the control arm forward so the needle in the altimeter whirled anticlockwise and the big plane tilted steeply down towards the nuclear city of Zlatoust, cradled in its secret folds of rock.
The door of the flight deck burst open, and a Luger pistol pointed at Massoud’s head. It was all that Bond needed. As Massoud turned his gun away from Scarlett, Bond threw himself across the cabin and grabbed his arm.
The roaring sound of a shot reverberated round the small area, and Ken Mitchell pitched forward, the Luger falling from his hand. Bond and Massoud were now locked in a struggle to the death, with Scarlett tangled between them.
The combined weight of their bodies on the control arm had sent the plane into a nose dive, and Bond’s knee was jammed against the throttle levers, making the Rolls-Royce Conway engines howl.
Bond felt Massoud’s fingers on his neck, digging down for the arteries. He thought of the slave workers in Gorner’s plant and of the girls paraded for them. He smashed his forehead into Massoud’s face, and, as the thick-neck reeled back against the side of the cockpit, Bond drove his knee into the unprotected groin.
Scarlett freed herself from the seat and grabbed the Luger from where it had rolled against the co-pilot’s seat. She handed it to Bond, who whipped it across Massoud’s temples. Massoud lashed up at Bond with his foot, but Bond had anticipated the move. He caught Massoud’s ankle in two hands, stamped his foot down into the groin for leverage and gave a sudden twist. He felt the ligaments tear and heard the scream.
‘Get the controls!’ he shouted to Scarlett, who pulled back hard to try to stop the dive.
Bond climbed on top of the disabled Massoud, turned him face do
wn and smacked his head repeatedly into the floor of the flight deck until he stopped moving. Then he grabbed the throttle levers and eased them back, before trying to help Scarlett level out the airliner. The man who might have managed the manoeuvre, Mitchell, lay dead at their feet.
‘I can’t do it!’ Scarlett was screaming. ‘It’s too heavy. It won’t respond.’
‘The controls are shot to hell,’ shouted Bond, wiping Massoud’s blood from his face. ‘And we’re decompressing. The guard must have gone through the window. Let’s go. Where’s the parachute?’
He pulled open the crew locker and found what he wanted.
‘Strap it on!’ he said, handing the parachute to Scarlett.
‘But what about you?’
‘Do it!’ Bond yelled.
Scarlett did as she was told, feeding the straps up through her legs and round her waist into the central lock, leaving the packed parachute itself hanging and bulging from behind.
Bond climbed up the sloping aisle to the passenger door, with Scarlett clinging on to him.
‘Put it to manual,’ she said.
With shaking hands, they tried to wrestle the door open.
‘We’re still too high,’ said Bond. ‘The pressure’s too great.’
In her torn uniform Scarlett looked at him with desperate eyes.
‘We need water to land in,’ said Bond. ‘Stay there.’
Back on the flight deck, he throttled back to minimum, just above stalling speed. He picked up the Luger from the floor, put the safety catch on and stuck it in his waistband. As an afterthought, he slipped off Ken Mitchell’s shoes and buttoned them inside his own shirt. Then he gave one last heave to the controls, to set the plane on a course over the long expanse of water to the west. It levelled out enough to allow him to climb back to the door, where Scarlett was clinging on.
‘Try again,’ he shouted.
They fought the door release, and as it began to give, Bond said, ‘I’m going to hold on to you.’
He put his arms through the harness and locked his hands together under Scarlett’s breasts.
‘Don’t do anything. Let me pull the cord,’ said Bond, and at the same moment kicked the door.
Scarlett was sucked out at once into the slipstream, with Bond on her back. The plane was at such an angle that the engines and the tail passed above their heads as they rolled and rolled through the thin air above Russia, Bond half crushing Scarlett’s ribs with the strength of his embrace, she digging nails and fingers into his wrists to keep him with her. The air rocketed into their lungs as they tumbled in freefall.
Bond waited as long as he dared until, gripping Scarlett still harder with his left hand, he slid his right over to the rip-cord lever and pulled. There was a short delay, then a bang and flap and Scarlett’s body was jerked upright with such violence that Bond was almost shaken from her back. She screamed as she felt his grip slipping, and grasped his wrists. But his elbows were caught in her harness, and, as the parachute filled and their speed decreased, he was able to lock his arms round her again.
Bond tried to manoeuvre them towards the water he could see about two thousand feet below. The maximum weight allowed on a military parachute was somewhere near two hundred pounds. He calculated rapidly that even though Scarlett was a slender girl, they were nearer three hundred pounds between them. For a moment there was a kind of peace as they floated down. Then they heard a sound like an earthquake and twisted to look away behind them.
The Vickers VC-10 had veered right in its descent and had exploded on the face of a mountain.
‘The Urals have lost a peak,’ Bond shouted into Scarlett’s ear.
He looked down at the water, now no more than five hundred feet below.
‘The second you hit the water, smack the release. Got it? Otherwise the chute’ll drown you.’
‘Okay,’ Scarlett shouted back.
The water, Bond could now see, was not a lake but part of a wide river. It didn’t matter, he thought – so long as it was deep enough.
Fifty feet above the surface he disentangled his arms from the harness and kissed Scarlett on the ear. At twenty feet, he pushed back and let go.
With his hands placed protectively over his groin, Bond sliced the surface of the water like a dead duck and sank to the depths of the Volga. For a few moments, he saw weed and cold darkness reeling up past him. Then, with a shock that jarred his spine, he felt the riverbed beneath his feet and on his knees and hands, as he bent double with the impact. He pushed up hard, and saw reed and fish and water rewind past his thrashing feet and hands until he broke through into sunlight.
At first he saw only a floating canopy on the surface of the river. Then he saw a dark, wet head coming through the water to meet him.
Scarlett climbed into his arms and covered his dripping face with kisses. ‘My God,’ she said, laughing as she spluttered and coughed the water from her mouth. ‘You are quite something.’
‘Thank you for the lift,’ said Bond.
On the riverbank, they sat for a while to gather themselves and check their injuries.
‘Poor Ken,’ said Scarlett.
‘He was a better man than I gave him credit for,’ said Bond. ‘What happened to you after I last saw you?’
‘The door code worked fine. There were quite a few guards but they were all running to Gorner’s office.’
‘And outside?’
‘Nothing much. Gorner’s lair is just a lump in the desert. I suppose they didn’t want to draw attention to it, so there’s not much in the way of lights. But I thought I should move fast, while they were still concentrating on you. I got round to the airliner. The cargo doors were open because they hadn’t finished working on the modifications. I was able to climb up into the hold from a sort of baggage-handling truck alongside and, once I was in there, I saw a flap that led up into the main part of the plane. They’d had to cut it out to feed all the cables for the bomb release. It was big enough for me to crawl up through. It came out just behind the flight deck. Then I found this uniform in the crew locker, changed in the lavatory between first and economy and just waited for you. Not a very comfortable night.’
‘Didn’t they search the plane?’
‘I heard someone sniffing about in the hold later on. But I suppose once they were satisfied the bombs were in position they left it at that. They probably forgot about the flap they’d cut or didn’t think it was big enough. And there were no passenger steps in place outside, so I suppose they thought no one could be in the main part of the plane.’
‘Well, you did a good job,’ said Bond. ‘I knew you had it in you.’
‘Yes,’ said Scarlett. ‘My professional expertise.’
‘I was banking on it.’
‘Now what do we do?’
‘Try and get help to Poppy. We’ll need to find a telephone. I suggest you do the talking. Then when we get a connection I’ll speak to my people in London. I’ll give them all the information we have.’
‘All right. And what do we do in the meantime?’
‘Go home,’ said Bond.
‘How?’
‘I reckon we’re due east of Moscow. Probably seven or eight hundred miles. In view of what’s been going on, it’s too risky to take a train. They won’t expect survivors from the plane, but they’ll be jumpy. We’ll drive. You can navigate. I’m sure your Russian’s up to asking the way.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Scarlett, ‘though my accent may be a bit old-fashioned. Pre-revolutionary. I learned from White Russians.’
‘Well, even Communists respect a lady, don’t they? First we need clothes, money and a car. You may need to avert your eyes for the next few hours, Scarlett. Sometimes a secret agent has to do undignified things.’
‘To tell the truth, James, I don’t mind what you do, so long as I can have something to eat soon. Anything else I see, I shall forget at once.’
‘First, you need shoes,’ he said, as he pulled Ken Mitchell’s wet loafers on to
his own feet.
‘Yes. There were no shoes or stockings with the uniform. The hostesses supply their own. Poppy told me. And – another thing – I have no underwear.’
‘I know,’ said Bond. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’
He held out his hand and pulled the weary girl to her feet.
They walked over the plain until they found a small road and, after half an hour of trudging, a village. At a farmhouse, Scarlett secured them water, bread and something half-way between curd and cheese.
The puzzled peasant woman who fed them couldn’t keep her eyes off Scarlett’s bare feet. She warned them they would need to walk for another half an hour before they came to a road of any size. She gave them more bread and two wrinkled apples from a store.
At the roadside, Scarlett waved down an agricultural lorry. By the time the driver realized there was a male hitch-hiker as well, it was too late and they were on their way west. He took them to a market town and pointed out where they could find a junction with a main east–west road to Kazan, the Tatar capital, then on to Gorky, the industrial city at the centre of the Volga-Vyatka region. From Gorky, he said, it was only five hours by road to Moscow.
When the driver had dropped them off, Bond helped Scarlett to tidy up as best she could. Their clothes had dried, but the jacket of her BOAC tunic was torn, and in any case looked suspicious with its braid and insignia, so they discarded it. Barefoot, in the navy skirt, which they pinned up with a hair grip to make it look short enough to catch the eye of passing drivers, and with her hair tied back as neatly as possible, Scarlett looked like a beautiful but dishevelled schoolmistress, Bond told her – just the sort of woman men would want to stop and help.
More than a dozen vehicles of varying kinds slowed and pulled over for her, but none met Bond’s requirements. From his concealed position behind a fir tree, he shook his head in answer to Scarlett’s interrogative glances.
Bond was beginning to wonder if there were any decent cars in this totalitarian country when at last he heard the sound of a 2.5-litre, four-cylinder engine and saw a black Volga M21, the ‘Russian Mercedes’, approaching down the avenue of birches. It was the vehicle favoured by the KGB and thus the car most Russians least wanted to see outside their door at night. So much the better, thought Bond, for his purposes.