The James Bond Anthology полностью

A mile down the coast, at the two white obelisks that marked the entrance to Palmyra, dust still hung in the driveway. Bond sneered at his impulse to drive in after her and stop her from going out to the yacht. What in hell was he thinking of? He drove on fast down the road to Old Fort Point, where the police watchers were housed in the garage of a deserted villa. They were there, one man reading a paperback in a canvas chair while the other sat before tripod binoculars that were trained on the Disco through a gap in the blinds of a side window. The khaki walkie-talkie set was beside them on the floor. Bond gave them the new briefing and got on the radio to the Police Commissioner and confirmed it to him. The Commissioner passed two messages to him from Leiter. One was to the effect that the visit to Palmyra had been negative except that a servant had said the girl’s baggage had gone on board the Disco that afternoon. The boathouse was completely innocent. It contained a glass-bottomed boat and a pedallo. The pedallo would have made the tracks they had seen from the air. The second message said that the Manta was expected in twenty minutes. Would Bond meet Leiter at the Prince George Wharf, where she would dock.

The Manta, coming with infinite caution up-channel, had none of the greyhound elegance of the conventional submarine. She was blunt and thick and ugly. The bulbous metal cucumber, her rounded nose shrouded with tarpaulin to hide the secrets of her radar scanner from the Nassavians, held no suggestion of her speed, which Leiter said was around forty knots submerged. ‘But they won’t tell you that, James. That’s Classified. I guess we’re going to find that even the paper in the can is Classified when we go aboard. Watch out for these Navy guys. Nowadays they’re so tight-lipped they think even a belch is a security risk.’

‘What else do you know about her?’

‘Well, we won’t tell this to the captain, but of course in C.I.A. we had to be taught the basic things about these atom subs, so as we could brief agents on what to look for and recognize clues in their reports. She’s one of the George Washington Class, about 4,000 tons, crew of around a hundred, cost about a hundred million dollars. Range, anything you want until the chow runs out or until the nuclear reactor needs topping up – say every 100,000 miles or so. If she has the same armament as the George Washington, she’ll have sixteen vertical launching tubes, two banks of eight, for the Polaris solid fuel missile. These have a range of around 1,200 miles. The crews call the tubes “the Sherwood Forest” because they’re painted green and the missile compartment looks like rows of great big tree trunks. These Polaris jobs are fired from way down below the surface. The sub stops and holds dead steady. They have the ship’s exact position at all times through radio fixes and star sights through a tricky affair called a star-tracker periscope. All this dope is fed into the missiles automatically. Then the chief gunner presses a button and a missile shoots up through the water by compressed air. When it breaks surface the solid fuel rockets ignite and take the missile the rest of the way. Hell of a weapon really when you come to think of it. Imagine these damned things shooting up out of the sea anywhere in the world and blowing some capital city to smithereens. We’ve got six of them already and we’re going to have more. Good deterrent when you come to think of it. You don’t know where they are or when. Not like bomber bases and firing pads and so on you can track down and put out of action with your first rocket wave.’

Bond commented drily, ‘They’ll find some way of spotting them. And presumably an atomic depth charge set deep would send a shock-wave through hundreds of miles of water and blow anything to pieces over a huge area. But has she got anything smaller than these missiles? If we’re going to do a job on the Disco what are we going to use?’

‘She’s got six torpedo tubes up front and I dare say she’s got some smaller stuff – machine-guns and so forth. The trouble’s going to be to get the commander to fire them. He’s not going to like firing on an unarmed civilian yacht on the orders of a couple of plain-clothes guys, and one of them a Limey at that. Hope his orders from the Navy Department are as solid as mine and yours.’

The huge submarine bumped gently against the wharf. Lines were thrown and an aluminium gangplank was run ashore. There was a ragged cheer from the crowd of watchers being held back by a cordon of police. Leiter said, ‘Well, here we go. And to one hell of a bad start. Not a hat between us to salute the quarter deck with. You curtsy, I’ll bow.’

20 | TIME FOR DECISION