He could see the third man now, fifty yards below him and to the right. The man was holding his rifle but not bothering to take aim. He was waiting to see what Bond did. Whether he stopped or came into closer range.
Bond glanced behind him. There was no sign of the other men over the brow of the slope. Below, steep crags rose up on both sides, funnelling him towards a narrow, precipitous corridor. It was this that the third man was guarding. A cold sweat prickled Bond’s armpits. Think fast, damn you! You got yourself into this, now get yourself out. The soft life has caught up with you, Bond. The next comfortable, plush-lined
Bond stopped in a flurry of snow and slid his right hand from beneath the restraining strap of his stick. Holding it freely and, like its fellow, away from his body, he skied slowly towards the man, trying to look as innocuous as possible.
Immediately, the man half raised his rifle and then lowered it. Clearly, he was puzzled. Was Bond giving himself up? Should he shoot or should he wait?
'
Bond raised the stick in his right hand in a gesture that must have seemed like admonishment. His fingers fumbled and twisted at the point where the zicral shaft met the grip. Something gave and Bond could feel a pressure against the glove- clad pad of his thumb. The barrel of the machine carbine was on a direct line for his heart and the man's shoulder hunched forward. Bond squeezed the metal nerve with a desperation born of fear. There was a violent yellow flash and a pall of blood and guts was thrown twenty feet behind the man with a noise like a whipcrack. Through the smoking end of his now pointless ski stick Bond watched the rifle drop, the hands involuntarily fall to the obscene, pumping hole, the look of unbelieving amazement on the face, the ghastly recognition, the two steps back taken in death, and the final collapse into the bloody shroud of snow. It was over in seconds but Bond knew that the picture of that death would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Another shot from behind, no better directed than the rest. Farewell to obsequies. Bond dropped to his now familiar crouch and skated for the corridor between the rocks. Sufficient momentum attained, he dropped to the egg-shell position and hugged his knees.
Behind him, the eyes of the two men were not for their stricken comrade but for the departing Bond. One of them quickly snapped into a firing position and spun round angrily as his comrade knocked aside the barrel of his rifle. The second man smiled and nodded towards the corridor. ‘Aiguille du Mort.’
Bond was moving faster than he knew how to ski. The descent was precipitous and below him a sheer edge. His skis were flat against the snow and slapping like a motor boat travelling at high speed across a choppy sea. His heart was pounding and the mounting acceleration of his stone-like fall threatening to tear the goggles from his face. What was beyond the wide, leering mouth that stretched below him? In five seconds he would know, if he did not catch an edge and catapult himself against the jagged rocks that menaced the narrow corridor. He coiled himself like a spring and then - and then ... nothing. The snow disappeared from beneath his feet and he was launched into space. Thousands of feet below him a criss-cross of man-made lines - the town of Chamonix. He had skied of the edge of the Aiguille du Mort.
Bond began to turn in the air like a rag doll dropped from a window. The force of descent ripped a ski from his boot and he felt a sharp pain in his knee as it was twisted savagely by the motion. His widespread arms clawed at the air trying to achieve some balance, but the world spun past - granite, sky, snow. The wind screamed. It had been like this in dreams. The sudden jolt and the falling, falling, falling. But in dreams you woke up before you were spattered against the rocks like a bird’s dropping. Bond fought to reach his right arm behind his left shoulder. The second ski had gone and there was now some pattern to his descent. His fingers closed against the edge of the haversack and then lost contact. It seemed that he had been kicking in space for minutes. He clamped his hand to his shoulder and fumbled desperately. This time his fingers felt something. A semi-circle of metal. He pulled and closed his eyes.
Suddenly something behind him crackled like machine-gun fire and there was a billowing glimpse of red, white and blue. A giant hand seized him by the scruff of the neck and pulled the world into focus. His speed of descent slackened magically and suddenly he could see his boots dangling below him. He had time to breathe, to look up at the bulging panels of silk above his head, to realize that he was alive.
In the town of Chamonix an old man shaded his eyes against the sun and looked up into the mountains. A man had just parachuted off the Aiguille du Mort. He must be an Englishman because it was possible to see the reverse side of the Union Jack emblem on his parachute and because only an Englishman would do a thing like that. '
Nearly nine thousand feet above the town, Sergei Borzov of SMERSH Otdyel II, the Operations and Executions branch of the murder apparat of the Russian KGB, lay with his mouth open and watched his blood melting a hole in the snow. It would not be melting it for much longer. Already a long shadow was falling across the slope and the cold reached out ahead of it. He would never see her again, or the hotel on the Black Sea, or the children playing on the beach. All that he had consigned to memory before turning and funnelling his soul into her eyes. The room had been cool and dark and deep like a grave. The curtains stirring in a dying wind. The sheet above her breasts white as snow. White as snow.
The black shadow passed over the man and he closed his eyes and died.
Death to Spies
Anya Amasova felt uneasy as the nondescript ZIS saloon approached the familiar drabness of the Sretenka Ulitsa. Why did they want her at such short notice? Why had no reasons been given? What had she done wrong? The last was the most persistent and worrying consideration. Nobody who worked for the KGB or any other branch of the Soviet bureaucracy could afford to believe that they were beyond blame. Original sin was as much a tenet of the Communist faith as of the Christian. Perhaps they had found out about her affair with Sergei - she interrupted her train of thought to scold herself. Not affair, that was one of their words. Cheap and shoddy. Transitory. She must find a better way to describe what had happened. Perhaps they had found out that she and Sergei had fallen in love. The room was almost certainly bugged and there might even have been a concealed camera. Such things were not unknown.
But could they object to her falling in love? Yes, they could object to anything. The state was your only lover and the penalties for unfaithfulness were severe.
‘Comrade-Major.’ The driver had turned round and was looking at her with deadpan eyes. They had arrived. Number 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, headquarters of SMERSH.
Anya glanced up and caught a glimpse of her eyes in the driver’s mirror. It is at such offguard moments that you really see yourself and Anya was disturbed by the look of fear in her eyes. The open, vulnerable wariness. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was cut out for the work the state had chosen for her. Perhaps her superiors at Otdyel 4 had come to the same conclusion.
SMERSH is a contraction of
Anya Amasova’s progress within Otdyel 4 of SMERSH - the section responsible for internal security in the armed forces - had been steady rather than spectacular. She had been the youngest of four children born to the wife of a country doctor. With his death in a car accident, Anya’s mother had been grateful for the suggestion from the headmistress of the local school that Anya was a bright girl who might qualify for training at a special ‘Technical College’ near Leningrad. Anya had passed the examination with flying colours and was soon attending classes in ‘General Political Knowledge’ and ‘Tactics, Agitation and Propaganda’. In her third year she moved on to ‘Technical Subjects’ and became proficient in the use of codes and ciphers. She was marked ‘satisfactory’ in Communications and became conversant with the intricacies of Contacts, Cutouts, Couriers and Post Boxes. Her Fieldwork was also deemed satisfactory. In tests she received high marks for Vigilance, Presence of Mind, Courage and Coolness. Her mark for Discretion was average.
After Leningrad came the School for Terror and Diversion at Kuchino, outside Moscow. Anya’s marks in judo
