Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [83]
‘ This is the strangest war room I ever saw,’ said Felix Leiter, looking at the bowls of pomegranates and barberries on the table and the ocean view through the window of Jalal’s Five Star room 234.
J. D. Silver held his cup of tea to his mouth while his eyes swivelled round to take in his surroundings. The bedside telephone bleeped, and Felix picked it up. ‘It’s for you, Darius,’ he said. ‘Your man Babak in Tehran.’
Darius leaped over the bed and grabbed the receiver.
‘Babak? Have you got the details? Good. Let me have them.’
On the pad of paper by the bed his pen scribbled furiously – ‘Latitude 46.34944. Longitude 48.04917. Latitude 48.8047222. Longitude 44.5858333’ – and other words in Farsi illegible to Leiter and Silver, who looked over his shoulder.
After about five minutes, Darius replaced the
receiver and handed the piece of paper to J. D. Silver.
‘ This is where the Ekranoplan is heading,’ he said.
‘ These are the speed calculations and this codeword means it’s nuclear-armed. You’re going to have to move fast.’
‘Sure,’ said Silver. ‘How secure is this line?’
‘Who knows?’ said Leiter. ‘But it’s the only one we got, pal.’
Silver hunched over the phone. ‘Just cut me a little slack here, guys. There’s one or two codes I have to put in when I get through that even you guys . . . No offence.’
‘None taken,’ said Leiter. ‘Let’s admire the view, Darius.’
‘Hamid,’ said Darius, ‘will you wait in the corridor outside?’
Felix and Darius stood in the window and looked towards the sea. Felix raised the metal claw he used for a right hand. ‘I’d cross my fingers if I had any,’
he said.
Darius, large and bear-like, put his arm round Felix’s shoulders. ‘It’s all destiny,’ he said. ‘ Kismet.’
‘Double four six,’ Silver’s voice was saying. ‘Eight seven. Callback.’ With his right foot, he gently pressed down on the telephone line where it went into a wall fixing under the bedside table.
One by one the small internal wires became disconnected under the pressure of his foot. Finally, the entire cable came free from the skirting-board and Silver pushed the frayed end quietly out of sight beneath the bed.
‘You got it, Langley!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Here we go. Latitude 46.34944. Longitude 48.04917. Latitude 48.8047222. Longitude . . .’
‘Looks like we’re in good shape, Darius,’ said Felix.
‘Now for the airliner.’
17. Carmen’s Song
The VC-10 levelled out at thirty thousand feet, somewhere east of Tehran, and continued on its smooth, level progress north, towards Kazakhstan in the southern Soviet Union. In any other circumstances, thought Bond, as he looked from his window down on to the Elburz mountains, it was a perfect day for flying. Holding the piece of glass in the tips of the fingers of his right hand, he continued the friction against the rope on his left wrist – gently and, with luck, imperceptibly. Thank goodness, he thought, for the space between the first-class seats. In economy, a small vibration would almost certainly have been relayed to the guard in the aisle seat to his left. Bond twisted his body towards the aisle, lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though he was exhausted by his desert ordeal and had submitted to his
destined end. He estimated the remaining distance to Zlatoust-36 to be approximately fifteen hundred miles, depending on where exactly in the desert Gorner’s lair was located. He knew the VC-10 could cruise at over five hundred miles per hour – a figure well publicized in the political squabbles that had surrounded the commissioning of the plane by the British government for BOAC.
They had already been airborne for an hour, he guessed, and if Scarlett didn’t appear within the next sixty minutes, he would have to try to take on four armed men single-handed. Unless, of course, he could do something to enlist the help of Ken Mitchell on the flight deck. It seemed unlikely. Mitchell looked like the kind of man whose idea of action was eighteen holes in the monthly medal at Woking.
Bond