all the esoteric details of the Special Forces desert survival training course he’d taken many, many years ago. He had not once been called to practise any of the things he had learned when he was much younger and very green.
Bond sat down on a rocky patch of brown dirt and removed his left shoe. He used the prying tool to open it, then took out the miniature microfilm reader and a thin packet of microfiche he had checked out of the Q Branch library before departing from London. He had known he was going to Hong Kong, so picked up as many maps of the surrounding area as he could. Australia had been an afterthought, as the nuclear testing in the outback was on his mind at the time. It was a damned good thing he had done so, he thought.
Although he would have to wait until the stars were out before he could make a reliable estimate of his location, Bond could study the maps and compare them with the navigational charts he had taken from the cockpit. He started with the Kalgoorlie-Boulder area. He examined the maps and determined that the plane must have flown north over the desert. Exactly how far it had flown he didn’t know.
How long had the plane been in the air before Bond woke? He had been unconscious for at least six hours, as the last thing he remembered was an unpleasant breakfast. The navigational chart showed previously marked flight paths to and from Perth, Alice Springs, and Uluru. Alice Springs, or “Alice,” was the legendary town in the heart of Australia famous for its red-baked ground and status as a popular tourist centre for exploring the outback. Uluru was also known as Ayers Rock, one of the natural wonders of the world. It was billed as the largest monolith on the globe, and some people believed it might be the crest of a mountain buried beneath the ground. The Aborigines regard it as a sacred site, and recently the Australian government had given Ayers Rock and the surrounding land back to them. They renamed it Uluru, the proper Aboriginal name for the rock, and managed the tourist business at the site, operating the attraction as a national park.
Bond guessed he was somewhere along a route either to Alice Springs or to Uluru. They weren’t that dissimilar. Alice Springs was a little northeast of Ayers Rock. The plane would eventually have flown over Aboriginal reserve land.
It was starting to get chilly. The desert could become frighteningly cold at night. It was a good thing he had the blanket.
In an hour, the sun had completely disappeared. He had never seen a night sky so clear and so abundantly filled with stars. He spent half an hour studying the constellations and comparing them to southern hemisphere winter sky charts that came with the microfiche. The microfilm reader conveniently provided its own illumination. The bisecting lines of the Southern Cross was the celestial south pole. It was sharp and bright in the sky. Using simple geometry, Bond compared the south pole star to the spot on the horizon where the sun had set. The angle was less than 90 degrees, indicating that the plane had indeed flown northeast. He had two choices—walk back southwest towards Kalgoorlie, or continue northeast. The other small mining towns like Leonora were very far away.
The Aborigines are known for practising something called a “walkabout,” a rite of passage for young and old people alike. They would go out into the bush and stay there for days, weeks, or even months, living off the land, becoming one with the spirits whom they believe live there, and then return. Some say that the spirits act as guides and protect the humans. Bond wasn’t a religious man, but he stood there under the stars and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply several times, concentrating on the silence of the desert.
Following the instincts that had brought him luck and fortune in some of the world’s elite casinos, Bond started walking northeast. He was gambling that the plane had been flying at least two hours, maybe more. He believed he was closer to Uluru than to any other inhabited place.
With the blanket wrapped around him, Bond walked across the flat land. He kept the south pole star in sight, checking his route every half hour. He tried to remember what types of plants indigenous to Australia the Aborigines used for water and food. He knew that the mulga tree had moist roots and seeds and the bottle tree contained water in its trunk, but was damned if he could remember what they looked like. There were others, he knew, but most of them grew in other parts of the continent. Central Australia and most of the Northern Territory were the most barren and arid sections of the country. Some bushes and plants held fruit, but he wasn’t sure which were poisonous and which were safe to eat. There was something called a yellow bush tomato which he thought he might recognize, and another called the ruby saltbush. He might find a desert fig bush if he was lucky. It was difficult at night, so he would just have to wait until the sun came up before he could seriously examine the flora. He was already hungry, but he could wait. The important thing was to travel as far as possible while it was cool.
The minutes turned into hours and Bond kept walking on course. At one point, he heard the howls of wolves. No, they weren’t wolves—they were dingos, the wild dogs of Australia. He saw them, a pack of eight, some twenty metres behind him. They were curious, following him. Were wild dingos dangerous? He couldn’t remember. There was one famous case in which a woman claimed they stole her baby from a camping area, but would they attack a full-grown man? He was certainly in danger if they were rabid.
The dingos moved closer, surrounding him. They resembled small wolves in the moonlight. He didn’t want to waste the few bullets he had in his pistol, but he would if he had to. Perhaps there was another way to get rid of them.
Bond sat down and removed his left shoe. He extracted one of the inflammable shoelaces and two pieces of flint. Then he broke off a three-foot branch from a dried bush nearby. The dingos growled when he did that. Bond rubbed the flint against the steel. A couple of sparks flew, then the shoelace caught fire. He quickly wrapped it around the branch, and eventually he had a torch.
007 jumped up abruptly, shouting at the dingos and waving the torch. A few of them yelped and immediately ran away, but three of the larger dogs stubbornly held their ground. They growled and bared their teeth, then barked fiercely. Bond ran at them, swinging the torch and yelling. Two dingos backed off, but the third, the leader, attacked. Bond swung the torch at the animal, hitting it on the head. It yelped and retreated, having got the message that the human was indeed too much for them to handle. Once the leader moved away, the others followed. In minutes they were gone.
Bond carried the torch until it was extinguished. Then he walked on …
The sun rose over the land, bringing warmth and life to the desolation around him. He folded the blanket and tucked it into his trousers. He sat down to rest a while and removed his right shoe. He took out the tube of sunblock ointment which Major Boothroyd had thoughtfully included in the field shoe and applied some of it to his face, neck, and arms.
He was very hungry and thirsty now. If he was to keep up the same pace in the hot sun, Bond desperately needed water. He looked around him. There was some vegetation here and there, but he didn’t know what it was. It all appeared to be dead. He stopped and dug up a shrub to examine its roots. They were black, dry, and totally useless.
At mid-morning, he saw three kangaroos in the distance. They were feeding off some kind of bush. When they heard him, they scampered away. Bond examined the bushes and found that there were several specimens of a yellow tomato-like fruit still attached. If the kangaroo were eating these things, then the fruit couldn’t possibly be poisonous. He recalled his desert survival instructor’s words: be sure to take notice of the wildlife, for animals are usually good judges of what is nutritious and what is deadly. Bond plucked one of the small yellow tomatos and bit into it. It was sour, but fresh-tasting and full of liquid. He ate two, then picked the remaining five and put them in his pockets.
By midday, Bond was sweating profusely and becoming dehydrated. The sun seemed to fill the entire sky. He wished he had a hat, but the blanket became an asset once again. The fruit provided nourishment and some liquid, but he needed water badly. He kept going, pausing to rest for five minutes every hour. Sometimes he would see an animal. There was an anteater frantically searching the ground for an antbed. A perentie lizard scampered over some rocks. Bond would have liked to catch it, for he had heard that such lizards were edible. The most incongruous sight he saw was a herd of wild camels galloping across the desert. He had no idea where they had come from or where they were going—it was just another surreal occurrence in a land where anything, or nothing, could happen.
He came upon a large graceful tree, probably a she-oak, standing alone on the barren ground. The roots were thick and hard, but probably contained some kind of moisture. Bond removed the file from his shoe and started to dig around the base of the trunk when he saw something that made his heart jump. There, in a patch of soft dirt,
