travelling a few metres away from real minefields anyway.
‘As for you,’ Tirpitz growled, ‘you ain’t heard nothing yet. They’ve got a spectacular exit organised for our Mr Bond.’
‘I wonder what’s in store for Kolya Mosolov?’ Bond said, with an almost innocent look.
‘Yeah, my own thoughts too. We think alike, friend. This is a dead-men-tell-no-tales job.’
Bond nodded, paused, took a sip of his martini and lit a cigarette. ‘Then you’d better tell me what’s in store for me. It looks as if it’s going to be a long, cold night.’
11
SNOW SAFARI
Every few minutes, James Bond had to reduce speed to wipe the rime of frost from his goggles. They could not have chosen a worse night. Even a blizzard, he thought, would have been preferable. ‘A snow safari,’ Kolya had laughingly called it.
The darkness seemed to cling to them, occasionally blowing free to give a glimmer of visibility, then descending again as though blindfolds had blown over their faces. It took every ounce of concentration to follow the man in front, and the only comfort was that Kolya, leading the column of three, had his small spotlight on, dipped low. Bond and Tirpitz followed without lights, chasing this rapid winter will o’ the wisp with difficulty. The three big Yamaha snow scooters roared on through the night making enough noise, Bond thought, to draw any patrols within a ten mile radius.
After his lengthy talk with Brad Tirpitz, Bond had prepared himself with even greater care than usual. First there was the job of clearing up – packing away anything that would not be required and taking it out to the Saab, from which other items had to be collected. Having locked the briefcase and overnight bag in the boot, Bond slipped into the driving seat. Once there, he had reason to thank whatever saint watched over agents in the field.
He had just replaced the telephone base unit in its hiding place behind the glove compartment when the tiny pinprick of red light started to blink rapidly beside the car phone. Bond immediately pressed the chunky button which gave access to the scrambler computer and its screen. The winking pinhead light indicated that a message from London was stored within the system.
He ran quickly through all the activating procedures, then tapped out the incoming cipher code. Within seconds the small screen – no larger than the jacket of a paperback novel – was filled with groups of letters. Another few deft movements of Bond’s fingers on the keys brought the groups into a further jumble, then removed them completely. The instrument whirred and clicked as its electronic brain started to solve the problem. A running line of clear print ribboned out on the screen. The message read:
FROM HEAD OF SERVICE TO 007 MESSAGE RECEIVED MUST WARN YOU TO APPROACH SUBJECT VON GLODA WITH UTMOST CAUTION REPEAT UTMOST CAUTION AS THERE IS NOW POSITIVE REPEAT POSITIVE ID VON GLODA IS CERTAINLY WANTED NAZI WAR CRIMINAL AARNE TUDEER STRONG POSSIBILITY THAT YOUR THEORY IS CORRECT SO IF CONTACT IS MADE ALERT ME IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN FROM FIELD THIS IS AN ORDER LUCK M
So, Bond thought, M was concerned enough to haul in the line if he went too close. The word ‘line’ brought other expressions to his mind – ‘the end of the line’; ‘line of fire’; being ‘sold down the line’. All these could well be applicable now.
Having secured the car, Bond returned to the hotel, where he rang down for food and a fresh supply of vodka. The agreement was that all three would stay in their rooms until it was time to RV at the snow scooters.
An elderly waiter brought in a small trolley-table with Bond’s dinner order – a simple meal of thick pea soup laced with lean chunks of meat, and excellent reindeer sausages.
As he ate, Bond slowly realised that his edginess over this assignment, Icebreaker, was not entirely due to the mental excuses he had made about his operational attitudes, working on his own, relying on his professionalism and intuition. There was another element – one that had appeared with the name Aarne Tudeer, and the linking of that name with the Count von Gloda.
Bond pondered on other powerful individuals with whom he had fought dangerous, often lonely, battles. At random he thought of people like Sir Hugo Drax, a liar and cheat, whom he had beaten, by exposing him as a card sharp, before taking the man on in another kind of battle. Auric Goldfinger was of the same breed, a Midas man, whom Bond had challenged on the field of sport as well as the deeper, dangerous zone of battle. Blofeld – well, there were many things about Blofeld which still chilled Bond’s blood: thoughts about Blofeld, and his relative, with whom Bond had only recently come face to face.
But Konrad von Gloda – Aarne Tudeer as he really was – seemed to have cast a depressing gloom over this whole business. A massive question mark. ‘Gloda equals Glow,’ Bond said aloud.
He wondered if the man had a strange sense of humour, if this pseudonym contained a message. A key to his personality? Gloda was a cipher, a ghost, glimpsed once in the dining room of the Hotel Revontuli – a fit, elderly weather-bronzed, iron-haired, military-looking man. If Bond had met him in a London club he would not have given him a second thought – ex-army written all over him. There was no aura of evil around the person. No way of telling.
For a flitting second, Bond experienced the strange sensation of a clammy hand running down his spine. Because he had not really met von Gloda face to face, or even read a full dossier on the man, Bond felt an unusual unease. In that fraction of time, he even wondered if, at long last, he might have met his match.
He inhaled sharply, mentally shaking himself. No, Konrad von Gloda was not going to beat him. What was more, if contact came with the phony Count, 007 would turn a blind eye to M’s instructions. James Bond could certainly not leave the field and run from von Gloda, or Tudeer, if he really was responsible for the terrorist activities of the NSAA. If there was any chance of wiping out that organisation, Bond would not let it slip through his fingers.
He felt confidence leap back into his system – a loner again, with no one to trust out here in the crushing cold of the Arctic. Rivke had vanished, and he cursed the fact there had been no time to search for her. Kolya Mosolov was about as credible as a starved and injured tiger. Brad Tirpitz? Well, even though they were allies on paper, Bond could not bring himself to a state of complete faith in the American. Certainly, in the emergency they had worked on a contingency plan to cover the attempt which, according to Tirpitz, was to be made on his life. But that was all. The chains of trust between them were not yet welded.
At that moment, before the night even got under way, Bond made a vow. He would play it alone, by his rules. He would bend his will to nobody.
So now they proceeded, at somewhere between sixty and seventy kph, swerving and bucketing along a rough track between the trees, about a kilometre from the Russian border and parallel to it.
Snow scooters – known by tourists as ‘Skidoos’ – can rip across snow and ice at a terrifying speed. They are to be handled with care. Unique in design, with their wicked-looking, blunt bonnets and long strutting skis protruding forward, the scooters have revolving tracks studded with great pointed spikes which thrust the machine along, giving initial momentum which builds up very quickly as the skis glide across the surface below. There is little protection for the driver – or any passenger – apart from short deflector windshields. On their first ride, people tend to handle snow scooters wrongly, like motorcycles. A motorcycle can turn at acute angles, while a snow scooter has a much wider turning circle. There is also a tendency for a tyro rider to stick out a leg on the turn. He does it once only and probably ends up in hospital with a fracture, for the leg merely buries itself in the snow, dragged back by the speed of the scooter.
Ecologists curse the arrival of this particular machine, claiming that the spikes have already rutted and destroyed the texture of land under the snow; but it has certainly altered the pattern of life in the Arctic – particularly for the nomadic natives of Lapland.
Bond kept his head down, and was quick in his reactions. A turn needed considerable energy, especially in deep, hard snow, as you had to pull the skis around with the handlebars, then hold them, juddering, as they tried to resume their normal forward direction. Following someone like Kolya presented other difficulties. You could easily get caught in the ruts made by the leader’s scooter, which gave problems of manoeuvrability, for it was like being trapped on tram lines. Then, if the leader made an error, you could almost certainly end up by screaming into him.
