Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [49]
When he was sure that he had fully recovered from his dive, he slid below the surface of the water and set off to explore. He wanted to establish that no one else was in the hangar and to find a way up on to the gallery, since it would clearly be impossible to scale the sides of the convex fuselage. He surfaced quietly from the cloudy water towards the tail of the big amphibian and, in front of him, saw a metal ladder attached to the side of the dock. With silent strokes, he made his way towards it.
Taking a minute to collect himself after he had climbed up, Bond made a swift visual inspection of the hangar. What he needed was a camera. He would have to return, he thought, with the specially waterproofed Minox B that had been made for him in
London. It was normally used for close work, but he had a custom-built Zeiss lens for distance. Meanwhile, having run up the connecting steps to the upper level, he went to the nearest cargo crate and levered the top off with a tyre iron he found on one of the forklift trucks. The crate was not much bigger than a tea chest but was packed to the brim with bags made from heavy-duty polythene of the kind used by builders for damp-proof courses. Bond picked one up. It weighed about four pounds. The covering was so thick that it was hard to say what was inside. The packages were all of the same size and had clearly been produced and loaded not by hand but from an industrial assembly line. As Bond was considering his next move, he heard grinding metal, as of a door being pushed open on to the gallery, and flung himself to the ground behind the stacked cargo crates. There was the sound of a man’s voice, then of another answering it. As he pressed himself against the ground, Bond noticed what looked like a lump of brownish earth. He cursed silently. No wonder he’d been heard. The lump was an SID – a Seismic Intruder Detection device – one of the most discreet telltale gadgets of the last decade. It could detect movement of people, animals, or objects up to three hundred yards away.
It was powered by three mercury cells and had a built-in dipole antenna with a 150 MHz transmitter, which relayed its findings through coded impulses –
and all this in what looked like a small cowpat or clod of earth.
Bond heard the noise of running feet and shouting. If he went back into the water, he would have to surface for breath before he reached the relative safety of the open sea. Even if he kept beneath the fuselage he would have to come up for air at some point and could then be picked off. There was no chance he could find again the fissure in the steel wall through which he’d entered. He would have to make his exit by land.
The sooner he could get on to the guard and relieve him of his weapon, the better chance he had. There was no point in waiting while the SID alerted other guards to his presence.
Cautiously,
aware
of
his
vulnerable
nearnakedness, Bond edged out from behind the crates. The guard had gone down on to the lower gantry, presumably to make sure the craft had not been damaged. It was fifteen feet below the gallery level where Bond stood and he judged the drop too far for him to be sure of landing uninjured on the man’s shoulders.
Unsheathing his knife, he took the tyre iron to the rail that edged the gallery and threw it as far as he could. As the guard ran towards the clanging noise, Bond dropped to the lower gantry and sprinted along it to the tail section of the plane. He leaped up and was just in time to conceal himself behind the vertical as the guard turned and started to retrace his steps. With his face a few feet from the tail section, Bond noticed a strange thing: it was painted with the British flag.
He heard the guard come heavily back, and when he was level with him, Bond jumped down the five feet or so from the tail. The man let out a startled grunt as he fell face down beneath Bond’s weight.
‘ The