Then he began emptying his pouches and pockets of the neatly packaged timers and charges which he had carried in with him.
Together they set about placing the explosives behind the vats and on the connecting tubing.
“I’ll do the last one,’ he called to Trevelyan. “If I set it for three minutes or so that should give us plenty of time to get out. The rest’ll go up by spontaneous combustion.
The device on the door gave its final little beep, signifying that it had unlocked the electronic password, and as it did so a piercing, shrieking warning klaxon went off.
Bond swore. “Get behind this stuff, Alec. No time to…” He was cut off by the sound of a voice, magnified by an electric loud hailer “This is Colonel Ourumov, the disembodied voice grated. “You are surrounded and there is no way you can escape. Just drop any weapons and come out with your hands on your heads. Now!”
“No way,’ Bond muttered, continuing down the line of steel vats that towered above him. Aloud he called, “Alec, put that bit of high-tech gadgetry into reverse. Just hit the switch on the left side.” He had almost reached the final high pressure cooker device. “Alec?” He ducked down and peered around the corner of the drum.
His old friend 006, Alec Trevelyan, knelt on the floor. Behind him, with the muzzle of a pistol against Trevelyan’s cheek, stood a tall, sinister Soviet officer wearing the shoulder boards of a colonel.
He was backed by half-a-dozen heavily armed troops, one of whom loosed off a round in Bond’s direction.
“Fool. Stop that,’ yelled Ourumov. “If you hit any of the hardware, you’ll blow us all to hell and gone.
Bond drew back, and looked at the timer he was about to insert into the final charge, the one that would bring about a chain reaction and blow most of the place to pieces. He glanced across to the other side of the factory floor towards the conveyor belt. The start button was set into a metal post near the fringed rubber flap.
“I give you a count of ten,’ Ourumov shouted. “If you’re not out by then, I will shoot your coMr.ade.”
“And set off an inferno?” Bond set the timer for one minute and plugged it into the explosive charge.
Then he removed a grenade from the belt pouch that contained four of these lethal little bombs.
“One Two…” Ourumov began counting.
Bond pulled the pin from the grenade, holding down the safety lever.
“Three… Four..
Bond stepped from behind the massive steel pressure cooker. His arms were wide apart, the grenade in his left hand, pistol in the right.
“Five..
at was pretty near the truth. Apart from the grenade, the main charge would blow in about thirty seconds.
“You think I’m not afraid to die for my country?” Ourumov snapped.
Then he pulled the trigger and Bond saw his old friend topple over.
Without a second thought he dropped the grenade, leaped to his right onto the conveyor belt, his free hand smacking the start button on the metal upright.
He heard Ourumov yell at his men to hold their fire, and thought he saw him backing away, dragging Trevelyan’s body with him.
The conveyor belt started to move with a jerk and, now that he was away from the vats and cylinders filled with inflammable cleaning fluids, the Russian colonel fired two shots. The bullets smacked into the woodwork above the rubber skirt just as the belt carried Bond out of the processing room, angling upwards and moving fast
The grenade exploded with an ear shattering blast He thought he could hear screams, then, suddenly, he found himself being deposited onto a loading bay, outside the facility, only some fifty yards from the runway where the little Fiesler Storch was slowly taxiing, its tail towards him, ready to make the ninety-degree turn onto the threshold for take off.
The first explosion came from deep within the earth behind him, almost throwing him forward onto the unfriendly ground. Nobody was going to get out of the complex alive, that was a sure bet, so he began to run, heading towards the aircraft.
With bursting lungs, Bond reached it just as it started to turn and begin rolling. Behind him another explosion.
This time a blossom of flame, smoke and debris seemed to erupt from the ground. He leaped forward, catching the wing strut on the right hand side of the Storch. The pilot, concentrating on keeping the aircraft straight as it began to gather speed, glanced towards him and retarded the power, trying to abort the take off, as Bond reached out to the handle on the cockpit door.
The pilot, hitting the brakes to slow the plane, banged the rudder to the left, making the Storch yaw violently in an attempt to throw Bond from the wing strut, but when that did not work, he opened the door on his side and rolled from the cockpit, pushing the throttle to full power as he went.
With a push, Bond catapulted himself from the strut to the right hand seat, then leaned over to ease back on the throttle as he pulled himself across to get behind the controls.
The aircraft was turning in a wide circle, out of control, bumping along the rough ground, lurching and dipping first one wing and then the other, leaving Bond in no doubt that it would cartwheel any second.
He snatched back on the throttle, pressed the rudder pedals to gain control and, as another explosion fountained behind him, he swung the nose onto the runway, fishtailing violently until the Storch pointed down the centre line.
He was almost two thirds of the way down the runway and at a standstill, desperately looking around the cockpit to acclimatise himself with the controls when he felt the plane being rocked violently by another explosion.
Bond pulled down on the flaps lever and saw that the wide extensions to the trailing edge of the wings became fully extended. As they did so, he opened the throttle to full power and moved his feet back, easing off the brakes on the rudder pedals.
The Storch leaped forward, gathering speed, and eating up what was left of the runway. He felt the tail come up as the machine reached the end of the metalled section and bounced over the twenty odd yards of turf, heading straight for the long wide crevasse. Even with flaps fully extended, Bond knew he had not quite made enough speed to lift the Storch into the air. He eased back on the stick and felt the aircraft claw for its natural element. It rolled off the end of the solid ground, hung in midair for a second, before the nose dropped as she stalled and began to lose height, falling into the deep fissure.
He saw the rock face rising on both sides, great boulders and a stream less than two hundred feet below, getting closer with each second. Gently he eased off on the power, tilted the straining aircraft to the left, lifting the nose slightly so that he could gain enough airspeed for the plane’s wings to take over the weight.
It seemed an eternity before he could ease back, and feel the nose come right up, the whole machine stabilising.
Slowly he began to climb from the gorge and turn back over the facility which was now rubble and fire leaping from under the ground.
As he climbed away, Bond thought he saw the dam begin to split and crack, spilling water across the entire valley. It was no time to feel any sentiment. Alec Trevelyan had taken the same risks as anyone else in the Double-O Section. If not for a twist of fate, it could have been himself down there, shot through the head, his body being slowly covered by the water that was now crashing white from the lake.
Flying as low as he dared, Bond began to play tag with the mountains as he steadily made his way back to the area where in a matter of hours a submarine would take him back to England with Operation Cowslip successfully accomplished. On reflection, the one thing that pleased him was the fact that there had been no biological or chemical weapons actually in the complex. If there had been, the idea of blowing the place up was just about as foolish a concept as you could have. So, he presumed, M had already known there was little likelihood of deadly germs or toxic chemicals at the plant.
There was no way he could know that, in less than a decade, Colonel Ourumov would rise from the dead to become a thorn in his side and place him in even greater danger.
High Stakes The south of France, Bond often reflected, was not what it used to be. That coastline which runs from Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, just to the east of Menton, was packed to capacity during the season. The once leisurely Promenade des Anglais in Nice was even more leisurely, but today it was because of the steady, slow-moving stream of traffic - cars and an abundance of tour buses which made it more like Paris in the late
