Devil May Care

pharmaceutical company in the newspaper business. Suppose I had bought the most distinguished paper of your Establishment hypocrites, The Times. Then I could have put it in the hands of some malleable editor who shared my hatred of Britain and attacked the country from its own mouthpiece. I could have bought television channels, other papers … I could have piped in pornography and propaganda through every inlet until … But, no, Bond. It would have taken too long. And your “fair play” laws that limit ownership might have stopped me. So I pipe death into the veins, with needles. It’s the same, but quicker.’
    Gorner stood up. ‘Enough of this pleasant daydream. Chagrin, take Bond away. Make him work. Remember what the British did to the Kikuyu in the Mau-Mau rebellion. Go.’
    Chagrin walked in front of Bond while two armed guards followed. They took the open elevator up to the ground floor, then went by electric cart down a vaulted corridor to a barred iron door. Chagrin went to a keypad beside it and punched in a five-figure code.
    Bond memorized the sequence of sounds, as each number Chagrin pressed emitted a slightly different note.
    The door slid away and Bond was pushed into the open and forwards over the desert sand, towards what he recognized at once as a classic Soviet twin-engined 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 plainT-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 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 all-terrain 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