Golden Eye
by John Gardner
She is beautiful. She is Russian. And she is very dangerous. Once Exania worked for the KGB. But her new master is Janus, a powerful and ambitious Russian leader who no longer cares about ideology. Janus’s ambitions are money and power:his normal business methods include theft and murder. And he has just acquired Golden eye, a piece of hi-tech space technology with the power to destroy or corrupt the West’s financial markets. But Janus has underestimated his most determined enemy.
Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Golden Eye
Photograph by Terry O’Neil!
C 1995 Danjaq, Inc and United Artists Corporation All Rights Reserved
Sean Bean as Trevelyan
Famke Janssen as Xenia
Izabella Scorupco as Natalya
Photographs by Keith Hamshere
© 1995 Danjaq, Inc and United Artists Corporation All Rights Reserved GoldenEye ©1995 Danjaq, Inc and United Artists Corporation All Rights Reserved 1962
Cowslip -1986 His head seemed to explode. He felt the great roar in his ears, the pounding of blood, then the sensation that his skull was riddled with holes. Fire poured through the holes, from his ears and nostrils, then his mouth. James Bond jerked awake, realising several things at once. The roar came from two Soviet jets, afterburners guzzling fuel as they passed overhead.
He recalled that, at the briefing, they had said military jets often flew low over the mountains heading back to their base near Russia’s oldest sea port, Archangel.
He also cursed himself for falling from a doze into a deep sleep.
He stretched, trying to ease his aching muscles, then moved very slowly to glance at his watch.
It was nearly time to go and he was cold and suffering from cramps. He listened and could still hear the jets receding but no sound of the spotter aircraft which used the airfield far below.
The spotter plane was over sixty years old - a Fiesler Storch captured at Stalingrad from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. To watch it would be like seeing an old Roman ballista on the electronic battlefield of the 1980’s.
Wide awake now, Bond looked around, alert, becoming orientated.
He lay at the top of a high ridge within the bowl surrounded by dark hostile mountains. To his right was the long man-made lake and in front of him the squat concrete guardhouse blocking entry to the top of the vast dam which rose some eight hundred feet from the valley floor.
Below the dam, the ground was a mass of boulders and rocks, but he knew these were only camouflage for they were cemented into almost twenty feet of bomb proof stressed concrete and steel. Beneath those rocks lay the target: BioChemical Processing Plant Number One.
In spite of the 1972 convention, the Soviets had gone on making biological and chemical warheads deep under the earth in this bleak place.
Until now, M had told them, the manufacture was confined to known horrors: anthrax and a number of nerve and more conventional gases, but now the place was being retooled to produce something far more deadly one of the many viruses which were being isolated as man slowly destroyed the world’s rain forests. Within a couple of weeks, the underground factory would be capable of producing a biological agent which was the stuff of nightmares: a fast-spreading virus capable of thinning the blood of its victims, rapidly breaking down the human body so that one by one the main organs would shut down. This was a quick, though terrifying, death.
The Soviets at least had to be slowed down, if not stopped altogether from producing warheads and bomblets containing this catastrophic agent. M had been clear about the urgency. The West needed time to work on some form of immunisation, and it was down to James Bond, 007, and his old friend Alec Trevelyan, 006, to get the job done.
You are my two best men,’ the Old Man had said, and we’re all aware that this operation gives you only a fifty-fifty chance of return. But I have no other option.
The place must be destroyed now. Another few weeks and it’ll be too late.” In the here and now, Bond turned his head and looked down into the valley, reflecting on the repulsive nature of the work going on beneath the brutal earth in this godforsaken bleak area in the far north of the Soviet empire.
The only visible sign of life below him was the rough runway which scarred the ground, like an open wound, ending only about thirty feet from the edge of a long gorge which ran parallel to the dam, at the far end of the plateau above the valley floor. The gorge was around a mile wide and very deep, with its own valley floor.
The runway, they had been told, was one of the two ways in and out of the processing plant. Workers, security troops and scientists were flown in and out using an old Antonov An-14 Bee which had been modified and given a VSTOL (Very Short Take Off and Landing) capability.
The other entrance and exit was by a crude underground railway, cut in the late 1960s through earth and rock, enabling personnel and product to be linked with the port of Archangel. The rolling stock of this unsophisticated transport system consisted mainly of flatbed cars to carry products, and open carriages with hardwood seats for staff and troops. The journey from Archangel to the processing plant took almost twenty-four hours - a day of intense discomfort.
Alec Trevelyan had been inserted three days before into Archangel itself, and, if all the documents were in order and nobody had questioned his cover, he should by now have made the long underground journey into the processing plant itself.
M had seen it as a two-handed job. Trevelyan was to get in and provide an entrance through one of the grilles set into the thick roof, close to an air conditioning unit.
Inside he was also charged with preparing a safe zone from which he and Bond could operate.
Bond’s task was to take out the two guards at their post on top of the dam, then to carry the arms and explosives down to Trevelyan. They were then to blast the secret facility to hell and make their way back to an extraction point some twenty miles east of Archangel. Nobody concerned had any doubts as to the near suicidal nature of the operation. Operation Cowslip. Bond gave a wry smile at the code name, thinking it singularly inappropriate for what they were to do. There’s many a slip twixt cow and lip, he thought, his smile broadening.
Again he stretched his legs and arms. He had been lying in this position, less than fifty yards from the guard post, for over seven hours after being parachuted - using the High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) technique, from a stealth equipped aircraft - eight hours before. He had landed short of his DZ and it had taken an hour to climb the quarter of a mile up the rocky incline leading to the small outcrop of rock which would give him access to the guard post
The post was simply a square, concrete and steel structure perched on the edge of the dam’s top. There was a window and door on Bond’s side of the building, and he knew from the briefing photographs that inside there was room for the two permanent guards to eat, relax and sleep.
He also knew that on the far side was a kind of enclosed dog pen constructed of high steel bars, with a sliding electronic gate at the end which led out to the walkway on top of the dam itself.
The soldiers who manned this post were part of the security detail on permanent assignment to BioChemical Processing Plant Number One.
These were troops drawn from the KGB Border Guards Department, all of whom had undergone special extra training with the elite Spetsnaz troops. The other end of the dam needed no such guards as it abutted straight onto a sheer rock face.
The pair of guards were changed weekly, making a tough and unpleasant climb up a set of wide D-shaped rungs set firmly into the dam’s vertical wall. For a second, he wondered what that climb would be like in the bleakest midwinter. Even Bond shuddered at the thought, then, knowing that the time for his own descent was nearing, he mentally checked off the equipment he carried.
He wore a specially designed wet suit, climbing boots and a long parka. The wet suit and parka were both a stone grey colour and contained more zippered and buttoned pockets than you would find in a poacher’s greatcoat.
