Devil May Care

shall watch you take off in a few minutes, then I shall await the inevitable. Do you have any farewell message to your countrymen? Your queen? Your prime minister?’
    Bond bit his lip. Poppy’s words went through his head. ‘Kill Gorner.’
    ‘Very well, then,’ said Gorner. ‘Shall we play?’
    The familiar guards took Bond along the corridor and rammed the muzzles of their guns into his ears as they rose on the telescopic elevator. The electric cart was waiting to transport them to the main doors, where the driver operated the laser beam release.
    It was not yet nine o’clock, but the heat of the Persian sun was already intense as they crossed the runway to the brilliantly shining VC-10. The high tail, with the four rear-mounted Rolls-Royce Conway jet engines, gave the aircraft a superbly sleek silhouette, and at any other time the prospect of its ‘hush-power’ ride would have lifted Bond’s spirits. But he knew on this occasion that his only chance of getting out of the plane alive depended on the remote possibility that a slender female investment banker with shining black hair and a Soviet pistol she had not been trained to fire had somehow hidden herself on board.
    Bond breathed in deeply and set his foot on the steps up to the main passenger door. Once on board, he was hustled down the gangway and pushed into a window seat towards the back of the first-class section. As he bent his head beneath the overhead locker, he allowed the shard of glass he had secreted in his mouth to drop on to the seat ahead of him. One guard sat next to him, another in the row in front and a third behind. The engines were already turning slowly.
    A dark, thick-set man in combat trousers and a white T-shirt leaned over from the aisle. ‘I am Massoud,’ he said. “We do checks with pilot. We leave in half-hour. You stay where you are. If you move, we kill you.’
    ‘Worse than Dan Air,’ said Bond. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
    ‘Be quiet. No smoke. Fasten seat-belt.’
    Bond did as he was told. This was the moment in a flight he normally enjoyed, knowing that he would have a few hours to himself, unreachable by the demands of M or any of the women in his life – time in which he could read a few pages of Ben Hogan on The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, then watch the sun glinting on the wings as he sipped a Bloody Mary over the Arctic cloudscape.
    Bond looked up to see another man staring down at him from the aisle. He wore a grubby BOAC shirt. He looked English, and afraid. ‘My name’s Ken Mitchell,’ he said, in the tones of the Surrey golf course. ‘I’m the pilot of this crate for my sins. I’m just here to tell you not to try anything funny. It’s our only hope. I do the take-off and get us most of the way. Then they’re going to bring you up to the flight deck for the last bit. They’ve promised me that if I play ball with them, they’ll let me go. Don’t muck it up for me, Mr Bond. It’s my little girl’s birthday tomorrow.’
    ‘All right,’ said Bond. ‘Any tips on how to fly it?’
    ‘To keep her level, don’t look at the instruments. Pick something on the horizon, the edge of a cloud or something. Orientate yourself by that, not by the instruments. But we’ll be on autopilot most of the way. She flies herself.’
    ‘Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy your flight, Ken.’
    Mitchell gave him one last imploring look as he was grabbed by the arm and pushed back towards the cockpit.
    A few minutes later, Bond felt the jolt of the engines engaging as the plane began to taxi. Through his window he could see the green light winking on top of the simple control tower, half a mile distant. At the end of the runway, the big plane turned and stopped.
    Bond heard the Rolls-Royce engines roar from the back of the fuselage, and then they were moving forward purposefully, rapidly accelerating. He felt the small of his back pushed against the padded first-class seat as the nose lifted and the rear thrust drove the great plane up through the thin air into the burning desert sky.
    In the steel hangar in Noshahr, the last of the camouflage nets was cleared from the nose of the Ekranoplan and the engines were started. The fourteen-man crew all carried fake British passports, though eight were Persian, two Iraqi, two Turkish, one was a Saudi, and the last, who sat at the radio console wearing headphones, was a Farsi-speaking Russian.
    It was the first time the Ekranoplan, modified by the addition of four