Authors: Sebastian Faulks
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 Their bloodied forearms were then withdrawn and in their hands were polythene-wrapped parcels, like the ones Bond had seen at Noshahr.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.
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
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 the bazaar with the muzzle of Chagrin’s revolver against his lower vertebrae. It was a tawdry market. Instead of silk, the stalls sold cigarettes and imitation Western goods – records, perfumes, plastics – made in China. In the food section there were displays of Sistani sugar melons, ruby grapes, boxes of Bami dates and orange-coloured spices, but over them all hung the sickly smell of opium, the
Papaver somniferum
.
‘
Taliak
,’ hissed an old man at Bond, gesturing him to follow behind a curtain. His grey beard was yellow from years of smoking the
taliak
or opium he hoped to sell.
Chagrin pushed the old man in the chest, and he fell back through his curtain. What surprised Bond was how few police there seemed to be in Zabol. From this he concluded that the main trafficking was done far away from the bazaar and that the police
were tolerant of small-scale dealing, no doubt because they were themselves implicated.
They walked through the town till they came to an industrial area. Here, Bond saw the ten Jeeps reassembled outside a low mud-brick warehouse which, to judge from the illustrated hoarding beside it, was supposed to deal in melons. The corrugated doors were reeled back, screeching on their runners, and the Jeeps drove in.
In the gloom inside, a dozen Afghans, their tribal costumes criss-crossed with bandoleers of ammunition, pointed Soviet rifles at Chagrin’s men as they loaded wooden tea chests into the back of the Jeeps. There were twenty in all, two for each Jeep. It was a colossal amount of raw opium, Bond thought, but nothing like enough to keep the wheels of Gorner’s factory turning. Heaven knew how much he was flying in from Laos.
Under heavy cover from his men, Chagrin walked to the middle of the warehouse and placed a thick foolscap envelope on an empty crate. He stood his ground while one of the Afghans opened it and counted the fistfuls of US dollar bills it contained. At the Afghan’s silent nod of approval, Chagrin turned and gestured to the men. There was the sound of ten engines starting, and the convoy left at
one-minute intervals. Bond and Chagrin were in the final Jeep, which was driven rapidly round the edge of town by the youngest and most nervous-looking of the drivers. About ten minutes outside Zabol, they joined the nine other vehicles behind a hill of sand and rock.
The way ahead, back to the military transporter, which Bond could just make out on the flat horizon, was through a narrow defile with bare, pitted hills on both sides.
Chagrin took a pocket knife from his trousers and cut through the ropes at Bond’s wrists. ‘Hellfire Pass,’
he said.
Then something resembling a smile crept over his half-inanimate flesh. Bond thought of the Vietnamese children in their Bible-study groups.
‘You drive first Jeep,’ said Chagrin. ‘Go.’
All the other men were laughing.
Bond climbed into the driver’s seat on the lefthand side. There was no time for
hejira
, or tactical retreat. This was the moment to go hard. He rammed the gear lever into first and dropped the clutch. The four drive-wheels screeched, then gripped the desert earth. The Jeep went forward with such leaping eagerness that Bond was almost thrown from his seat. He battled with the steering-wheel and regained control
as he put his right foot down and worked up through the gears. He felt the weight of the two tea chests in the back shifting from side to side on the ruts and potholes of the sanded track. He saw a flash of rifle fire from the hillside on his left, glanced up to where Afghan tribesmen were firing from behind rocks. He heard a bullet whine off the Jeep’s bonnet and wrenched the wheel from side to side to make himself a harder target. Then came the heavier wheeze of a hand-launched rocket, and the road in front of him exploded into a ball of spitting rock and sand, shattering the Jeep’s windshield and filling his eyes with dust. Bond dashed his sleeve across his eyes to clear his vision. A long shard of glass had cut through his cheek and impaled itself there, with the sharp end in his gum.
Gunfire started from the hill to his right, and he became aware that another vehicle was close behind, though he had no time to check if it was the next of Gorner’s Jeep convoy or an enemy bandit pursuing him. He knew only that he had to keep going. Automatic fire intensified from the hills to his right, and ripped through the flimsy passenger seatback, ricocheting from the steel frame. It seemed the whole landscape had come alive in its insane hunger for the drugs he was carrying. Bond’s knuckles stood
white on the wheel and blood ran down his cheek on to his sweat-drenched workshirt. He thought of Gorner’s face, of Scarlett on the walkway and Poppy held captive in the belly of the desert. He roared loud in anger and defiance, then rammed his right foot flat down against the floorboards while the dense gunfire hit the body of the Jeep like mad sticks clattering on a snaredrum.
Suddenly Bond was in the air, catapulted from his seat by a grenade explosion beneath the axle. He landed on his left shoulder, agonizingly, rolled over and made for the cover of a rock. He glanced back to see his Jeep upside down on the road, the wheels turning frantically under the command of the trapped accelerator. As a bullet embedded itself in a crevice of the rock behind him, Bond looked round and saw the raised molehill of an access point to a
quanat
, the underground water system that must run to Zabol. Sprinting zigzag across the stony ground, he ducked down behind the raised earth, and found a sheet of corrugated iron across an entrance. Hurling the sheet aside, he lowered himself in and dropped fifteen feet into cold water.
For a moment, he had time to think. It was possible that no one had seen him, though he doubted it, since Hellfire Pass seemed at that moment to be the
most populated part of Persia. He guessed that he had been sent as a decoy while the other Jeeps went through a safer route, north of the narrow defile, to regroup at the main transport lorry. The important thing was somehow to get back to Gorner’s lair. Stranded in the desert, he was no use to Scarlett, or to Poppy, or to the Service. Somehow he had to find a way back to Chagrin’s men.
The water was waist-high and cold. Bond lowered his face into it and carefully withdrew the piece of glass from his cheek. Then he snapped it into two jagged pieces of about two inches each and stowed them carefully in the buttoned breast pocket of his shirt.
A pistol shot disturbed the surface of the water. Someone was at the
quanat
access point, firing down. Bond began to make his way upstream, fording through the water from the distant mountains. The current was such that it was hard to make progress. He ducked beneath the surface and swam for as many strokes as his lungs permitted, but when he surfaced he could see that he had managed only a few yards. Another shot went past him. They were in the water with him. Bond pushed on with all his strength, but soon noticed something else was happening: the water was rising. This could only have happened by
human intervention, he thought. There could not have been a sudden extra burst of snowmelt in a far-off mountain gully, so there had to be some sort of sluice that someone had closed downstream or a gate upstream that had been operated to divert more water. But he could see nothing in the darkness of the torrent.
He put his hand above his head and felt the roof of the narrow channel only a few inches above him. If the flow increased much more, he would drown. He couldn’t turn back, into the teeth of his armed pursuers, so he had no choice but to continue. Forging onwards, with his hands ahead of him, Bond felt the water rising to the level of his mouth. He dipped his head beneath the flow and swam again, hoping to find a place where the uneven passage would be higher and so give him air above the surface. But when he came up, the headroom was so tight that he had to bend his neck sideways to breathe. Thrashing desperately now, Bond made one last push forward with his arms in the torrential darkness. His left hand encountered something different: air. There was a hole in the roof of the
quanat
, and against the rush of water he managed to grip its rocky side and get his head high enough up into it to breathe. A little further up, there was another handhold of
rock, and as the rising water swirled round his waist, Bond knew that upwards was now the only way he could go.
He cursed the width of his shoulders as he pulled himself up the narrow funnel, the jutting desert rocks slicing through the skin of his palms. Eventually, his feet were clear of the water, and he was alone, wedged in the skintight tube of earth.
He made a fraction of an inch, and then another fraction. With bleeding feet and hands, he rose by almost imperceptible degrees through the narrow chimney. What, he thought, could be the point of this – when for all he knew there might be thirty feet of solid earth above him? He could hear the water below, and decided that when he was no longer able to move, he would try to drop down and die in its cold depths. His left shoulder, on which he’d landed when thrown from the Jeep, allowed little movement from his left arm, so it was with one functioning hand only that he tried to fight his way up. Half-inch by half-inch, with his lacerated and bleeding hands, he shoved himself up into the blind, tight funnel that held his shoulders. His hip was seizing with cramp, but he couldn’t move it to free the muscle. Above him, the shaft seemed to grow narrower, the air less plentiful.
Bond had always known that death would come sooner or later in the service of his country and had remained indifferent to the thought. He was not, he thought, going to change his attitude now. Then his exhausted mind flashed back unaccountably to an evening in Rome and to the bar of a hotel where Mrs Larissa Rossi had raised an eyebrow as she crossed her legs. He could see them now – and her mouth, whose upper lip occasionally stiffened into something like a pout. The light honey glow of her skin . . . the unrepentant wildness in her eyes.
Bond squeezed himself another inch through the constricting earth. He thought he must be hallucinating. He was dying, but he could think of nothing but Scarlett. The way she had glanced down a little nervously as she said, ‘My husband has had to go to Naples for the night . . . You could come up to our suite for a drink if you like.’
Bond felt his breath failing in his lungs. Did he love this woman? Had he discovered too late? Stinging tears of frustration mingled with the sweat and blood on his face.
He gave no thought to his approaching death, only to Scarlett in the gilded armchair in his Paris hotel room, her long legs demurely crossed and her empty hands folded in front of her breasts . . .
Turning the last of his breath into a groan, Bond thrust himself upward with all his might in one final, dying effort. His hands went through packed sand and earth, then encountered air. He scrabbled frantically for a grip.
.
15. ‘Do You Want Me?’
A ray of light broke the surface above him, then came a draught of dry, burning air. With a low growl Bond rammed his uninjured shoulder against the hard rim of earth above him till he was able to push himself up and his head at last was clear. With almost unendurable pain, he worked his shoulders, then his torso through the hole. Finally, he levered his waist and legs out and collapsed on to the sand, gasping and moaning as he fought the fog of unconsciousness. When vision returned to him, he found he was looking at a pair of polished brown leather toecaps and the turn-ups of a cream linen suit. As he lifted his head, the sole of the shoe came on to his cheek and pushed his face into the dirt.