Devil May Care

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 north-western 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, whichwas attached by a temporary steel walkway to the surrounding gallery. At the back of the hangar, piles of cargo in crates were lashed to wooden battens. Bond could see two or three forklift trucks standing idle.
    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