Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [48]
Bond could feel his legs weaken as the oxygen in his blood began to run short. It was the construction of the thing that made him sure he was on to something of importance. Determination gave one more thrust to his aching legs as he opened his eyes wide in the murky water. Beside a rock, the steel had been cut to make a fit. Between the rock and the jagged edge there was a space just wide enough, Bond calculated, to wriggle through. He approached on his front, preferring to take steel cuts on his back and to use the handhold of the rock to keep himself down, against natural buoyancy. His lungs were hot and constricted. It was as though his ribs and sternum were being driven outward by a steam-hammer in his chest. He kicked forward and felt the shredding teeth of the cut steel on his spine and the slimy hardness of the rock on his abdomen. With one last, desperate kick, he was through. He swam three or four powerful breast-strokes forward into clear water, then allowed himself to rise, with his head tilted back and his hands ahead of him in self-defence. After a few seconds, his fingers encountered metal. He flipped on to his
back and could see the outline of a huge, slightly rounded hull. His brain, deprived as it was of oxygen, still told him that a hull must lead upward and that he should follow its contour.
As he rose rapidly up the side, his hands met something else that extended at right angles to the hull, like a wing from the fuselage of a plane. A ship, with a wing . . . It wasn’t possible, Bond thought, flailing along the underside of the ‘wing’
with his last vestige of strength. Perhaps this was no ship or plane at all, but simply a floor beneath which he was trapped and would at any second expire. He clawed his way frantically along the underside of the metal, and as numbness crept through his limbs and into his brain, the water cleared and he broke the surface with a tearing gasp.
For a minute he needed all the replenishment of air just to give him strength to tread water. When at last his pulse rate and breathing started to return to normal, he looked about him.
The sight that met his eyes was one of the strangest he had ever seen. The giant steel enclosure was like a hangar, but contained one craft only. What that craft was exactly, he had not the smallest idea. Gingerly, feeling the salt water in the cuts on his back, and quietly, so as to attract no attention, Bond
eased himself away from the monstrous thing so he could get a better picture of it. Taking a handhold on the side of the hangar, he let his eyes absorb the astonishing sight.
It was, he calculated, from its tail, which was at the land end, to its nose, which stuck out beneath camouflage nets into the Caspian Sea, more than a hundred yards long. It had a raised tail with two large fins and it had wings, but they were cut off –
amputated almost before they had begun to taper. The nose was like that of a large passenger plane, but behind it, mounted on top of the fuselage, were what looked like eight jet engines.
The craft was clearly at home in the water, yet it had no propellers beneath the surface and must therefore travel through the air. On the other hand, the abbreviated wings could surely not give it enough lift to fly at any altitude. But then, Bond suddenly thought, perhaps that was the point of it: a fast, low-flying amphibious vehicle that could cover large distances under radar.
If it worked on the principle of a hovercraft, or something like it, then perhaps it could even operate over dry land as well – provided the surface was flat. Bond’s mind went back to the maps he had laid out on the bed in his hotel room. He remembered the
Soviet lowlands north of Astrakhan on the far northwestern shore of the Caspian. Was it possible that this monstrous machine could go in a straight, unstopping line from the docks of Persian Noshahr right through to Stalingrad?
There was a loading door on the starboard side, which was attached by a temporary steel walkway to the surrounding