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By Root 214 0

forwards over the desert sand, towards what he recognized at once as a classic Soviet twinengined Mi-8 Hip. It had a five-blade main rotor and was capable of carrying thirty-six armed men. The sun was searingly hot during the short walk to the aircraft. The slowly moving blades were already whipping up the sand as they climbed the steps. There were ten more of Gorner’s men inside, all armed and dressed in plain T-shirts with army combat trousers and heavy ammunition belts. The cargo door was pulled shut, the rotors accelerated and, with an effortless surge, the helicopter swept up into the air, banked left and roared away over the desert. Bond could tell from the sun that they were flying east, towards Afghanistan. In his mind, he went over the sound of the electronic keypad Chagrin had used and fixed the sequence of noises in his memory as a primitive tune. He practised it again and again till it had lodged itself in his memory like the most annoying pop song on the radio. When the helicopter eventually put down, it was next to a modest caravanserai, a rectangle of improvised buildings to which water had been fed from some distant mountain snowmelt by the system of underground quanats that J. D. Silver had described

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to him. Bond made out its path running to the building like that of a furiously burrowing desert mole. The men left the helicopter and were given water and food from a table in the open courtyard.

Bond could smell the kebab and rice and found himself salivating. He hadn’t eaten since dinner with Hamid and Scarlett in Noshahr. But his hands were tied, and when the cook made to offer him some food, Chagrin shook his head.

‘Irish men,’ he said. ‘No food.’

‘Water?’ said Bond.

Chagrin poured some water into a bowl. ‘Like dog,’

he said. ‘Like English with slaves.’

Bond knelt down and lapped at the warm water. There were about a dozen tethered camels in the caravanserai. The local men placed ladders against their flanks, climbed up and thrust their hands through cauterized cuts into their humps. Their bloodied forearms were then withdrawn and in their hands were polythene-wrapped parcels, like the ones Bond had seen at Noshahr. Bond presumed the camels had been trained to follow a route across the desert by being heavily watered at each end.

‘Go,’ said Chagrin, pushing Bond towards an allterrain army vehicle that was waiting with its engine already running.

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It was a six-hour drive over rough desert tracks, then up through the mountains before the first sight of any human habitation. Bond remembered from his study of the maps that there were proper roads along the southern edge of the Dasht-e Lut, going from Bam to Zahedan, then up to Zabol at the border. But where there were roads there would be roadblocks and police searches, so the desert route was clearly better for Gorner’s purpose.

The landscape became greener as they came down from the mountains and drove across the plain towards Zabol. About ten miles short, the all-terrain vehicle stopped, and the men transferred to ten waiting open-topped Jeeps. With the Jeep drivers, Bond and Chagrin, the party now totalled twenty-two. They left at three-minute intervals, not wanting, Bond presumed, to be seen as a group. The military lorry itself, though big enough to carry back several hundredweight of opium, was obviously too conspicuous to be seen in town.

A few minutes later, Bond was in the city he’d imagined, in his hotel in Tehran, as the end of the world. It was a dusty, treeless place of grey-brown walls made of mud bricks. The streets were laid out on a closed grid, which gave it a tight, claustrophobic feeling. The dry heat was intense, and unmediated by

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any tall buildings. Although there were some Persians of the kind he’d seen in Tehran, in Western clothes, there were many more dark-skinned tribesmen with Afghan headdresses and unkempt black beards. Sizeable though it was, Zabol had the lawless feel of an old frontier town.

Bond was ordered out of his Jeep, which then drove off to avoid being seen in the city. He was walked through