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A big jet from Pensacola swept by, well to port, leaving four trails of vapour that hung almost motionless in the still air.
Truman shirts.
Eldollarado.
They were flying at fifteen thousand feet when, just after crossing Cuba, they ran into one of those violent tropical storms that suddenly turn aircraft from comfortable drawing-rooms into bucketing deathtraps. The great plane staggered and plunged, its screws now roaring in vacuum and now biting harshly into walls of solid air. The thin tube shuddered and swung. Crockery crashed in the pantry and huge rain hammered on the perspex windows.
when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane’s fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is
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Remember that hot stitch of time when you faced death from The Robber’s gun last night. You’re still alive, aren’t you? There, we’re out of it already. It was just to remind you that being quick with a gun doesn’t mean you’re really tough. Just don’t forget it.
The great buccaneer had made Shark Bay his headquarters. He liked to have the whole width of the island between himself and the Governor at Port Royal so that he could slip in and out of Jamaican waters in complete secrecy. The Governor also liked the arrangement. The Crown wished a blind eye to be turned on Morgan’s piracy until the Spaniards had been cleared out of the Caribbean. When this was accomplished, Morgan was rewarded with a Knighthood and the Governorship of Jamaica. Till then, his actions had to be disavowed to avoid a European war with Spain.
obeah,
factotum.
Outside, the crickets and the tree-frogs started to zing and tinkle and the great hawkmoths came to the wire-netting across the windows and clutched it, gazing with trembling ecstasy at the two oil lamps that hung from the cross-beams inside.
Bond sat under the light and pored over the books that Strangways had borrowed from the Jamaica Institute, books on the tropical sea and its denizens by Beebe and Allyn and others, and on sub-marine hunting by Cousteau and Hass.
That night Bond’s dreams were full of terrifying encounters with giant squids and sting rays, hammer heads and the saw-teeth of barracuda, so that he whimpered and sweated in his sleep.
Quarrel moving effortlessly in an element in which he was almost at home. Soon Bond too learned not to fight the sea but always to give and take with the currents and eddies and not to struggle against them, to use judo tactics in the water.
the barracuda. ‘Mean fish,’ he called them, fearless since they knew no enemy except disease, capable of fifty miles an hour over short distances, and with the worst battery of teeth of any fish in the sea. One day they shot a ten-pounder that had been hanging round them, melting into the grey distances and then reappearing, silent, motionless in the upper water, its angry tiger’s eyes glaring at them so close that they could see its gills working softly and the teeth glinting like a wolf’s along its cruel underslung jaw.
By the end of the week, Bond was sunburned and hard. He had cut his cigarettes down to ten a day and had not had a single drink. He could swim two miles without tiring, his hand was completely healed and all the scales of big city life had fallen from him.
corker.’
The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.
they could sometimes be frightened off, he read, by loud noises in the water – even by shouting below the surface, and they would often flee if a swimmer chased them.
The romantic name was in the fashion of the eighteenth century, when Jamaican properties were called Bellair, Bellevue, Boscobel, Harmony, Nymphenburg or had names like Prospect, Content or Repose.
He sat on the arm of a chair and let his eyes go on, inch by inch, across the different blues and browns of sea and reef until they met the base of the island.
There was even a box of benzedrine tablets to give endurance and heightened perception
during the operation
Bond was worried and puzzled and he felt a tightening of the heart at her nearness.
It was crazy, unthinkable. Bond’s flesh cringed and his fingers dug into his wet palms.
Bond looked at the whisky bottle, then he made up his mind and poured half a glass on top of three ice cubes. He took the box of benzedrine tablets out of his pocket and slipped a tablet between his teeth.
Above him the surface of the sea was a canopy of quicksilver. It crackled softly like fat frying in a saucepan.
niggerhead,
He still felt perfectly fresh and the elation and clarity of mind produced by the benzedrine were still with him,
They righted themselves and shot off with streamlined jet propulsion.
he extracted from a zipped side-pocket and inserted it in the fuse pocket of the mine and pushed it home.
He reached the two big copper screws and clung to one of them, panting, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl of fear, his eyes distended as he faced the frenzy of the boiling sea around him.
When his helmet came off Bond was almost deafened by the shattering boom and stutter of the drums. The noise was in him and all around him. The hastening syncopated rhythm galloped and throbbed in his blood. It seemed enough to wake all Jamaica. Bond grimaced and clenched his senses against the buffeting tempest of noise.
Only the remains of the benzedrine in his system kept him from fainting.
The great grey football of a head under the hurricane lamp looked like an elemental, a malignant spectre from the centre of the earth, as it hung in mid air, the golden eyes blazing steadily, the great body in shadow.
It was only a man, of the same species as himself, a big man, with a brilliant brain, but still a man who walked and defecated, a mortal man with a diseased heart.
‘In the history of negro emancipation,’ Mr Big continued in an easy conversational tone, ‘there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in every other walk of life.’ He paused. ‘It is unfortunate for you, Mister Bond, and for this girl, that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals.
You have doubtless read Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, Mister Bond. Well, I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a “criminal”.
She looked back at him opaquely, her eyes not seeing him.
There was an angry bite in his voice.
Her eyes cleared. She looked dumbly at him, without comprehension.
will leave you now,’ he said, ‘to reflect on the excellence of the method I have invented for your death together. Two necessary deaths are achieved. No evidence is left behind. Superstition is satisfied. My followers pleased. The bodies are used for scientific research.
jippa-jappa
holdalls,
If he was right, they would be hauled over the outer reef about fifty yards after the Secatur had cleared the passage. She would probably approach the passage at about three knots and then put on speed to ten or even twenty. At first their bodies would be swept away from the island in a slow arc, twisting and turning at the end of the tow-rope. Then the paravane would straighten out and when the ship had got through the reef, they
would still be approaching it. The paravane would then cross the reef when the ship was about forty yards outside it and they would follow.
Once over the reef they would be just a huge bleeding bait and it would be only a matter of minutes before the first shark or barracuda was on to them.
Then the paravane would be hoisted inboard and the yacht would plough gracefully on towards the distant Florida Keys, Cape Sable and the sun-soaked wharf in St Petersburg Harbour.
All this, and a hundred other details and plans went through Bond’s mind in the last hour before they were brought up the shaft to the surface.
She had lain opposite him, her tired blue eyes fixed on him, obedient, trusting, drinking in his face and his words, pliant, loving.
‘Giddap,’
