Devil May Care

lashed up at Bond with his foot, but Bond had anticipated the move. He caught Massoud’s ankle in two hands, stamped his foot down into the groin for leverage and gave a sudden twist. He felt the ligaments tear and heard the scream.
    ‘Get the controls!’ he shouted to Scarlett, who pulled back hard to try to stop the dive.
    Bond climbed on top of the disabled Massoud, turned him face down and smacked his head repeatedly into the floor of the flight deck until he stopped moving. Then he grabbed the throttle levers and eased them back, before trying to help Scarlett level out the airliner. The man who might have managed the manoeuvre, Mitchell, lay dead at their feet.
    ‘I can’t do it!’ Scarlett was screaming. ‘It’s too heavy. It won’t respond.’
    ‘The controls are shot to hell,’ shouted Bond, wiping Massoud’s blood from his face. ‘And we’re decompressing. The guard must have gone through the window. Let’s go. Where’s the parachute?’
    He pulled open the crew locker and found what he wanted.
    ‘Strap it on!’ he said, handing the parachute to Scarlett.
    ‘But what about you?’
    ‘Do it!’ Bond yelled.
    Scarlett did as she was told, feeding the straps up through her legs and round her waist into the central lock, leaving the packed parachute itself hanging and bulging from behind.
    Bond climbed up the sloping aisle to the passenger door, with Scarlett clinging on to him.
    ‘Put it to manual,’ she said.
    With shaking hands, they tried to wrestle the door open.
    ‘We’re still too high,’ said Bond. ‘The pressure’s too great.’
    In her torn uniform Scarlett looked at him with desperate eyes.
    ‘We need water to land in,’ said Bond. ‘Stay there.’
    Back on the flight deck, he throttled back to minimum, just above stalling speed. He picked up the Luger from the floor, put the safety catch on and stuck it in his waistband. As an afterthought, he slipped off Ken Mitchell’s shoes and buttoned them inside his own shirt. Then he gave one last heave to the controls, to set the plane on a course over the long expanse of water to the west. It levelled out enough to allow him to climb back to the door, where Scarlett was clinging on.
    ‘Try again,’ he shouted.
    They fought the door release, and as it began to give, Bond said, ‘I’m going to hold on to you.’
    He put his arms through the harness and locked his hands together under Scarlett’s breasts.
    ‘Don’t do anything. Let me pull the cord,’ said Bond, and at the same moment kicked the door.
    Scarlett was sucked out at once into the slipstream, with Bond on her back. The plane was at such an angle that the engines and the tail passed above their heads as they rolledand rolled through the thin air above Russia, Bond half crushing Scarlett’s ribs with the strength of his embrace, she digging nails and fingers into his wrists to keep him with her. The air rocketed into their lungs as they tumbled in freefall.
    Bond waited as long as he dared until, gripping Scarlett still harder with his left hand, he slid his right over to the rip-cord lever and pulled. There was a short delay, then a bang and flap and Scarlett’s body was jerked upright with such violence that Bond was almost shaken from her back. She screamed as she felt his grip slipping, and grasped his wrists. But his elbows were caught in her harness, and, as the parachute filled and their speed decreased, he was able to lock his arms round her again.
    Bond tried to manoeuvre them towards the water he could see about two thousand feet below. The maximum weight allowed on a military parachute was somewhere near two hundred pounds. He calculated rapidly that even though Scarlett was a slender girl, they were nearer three hundred pounds between them. For a moment there was a kind of peace as they floated down. Then they heard a sound like an earthquake and twisted to look away behind them.
    The Vickers VC-10 had veered right in its descent and had exploded on the face of a mountain.
    ‘The Urals have lost a peak,’ Bond shouted into Scarlett’s ear.
    He looked down at the water, now no more than five hundred feet below.
    ‘The second you hit the water, smack the release. Got it? Otherwise the chute’ll drown you.’
    ‘Okay,’ Scarlett shouted back.
    The water, Bond could now see, was not a lake but partof a wide river. It didn’t matter, he thought – so long as it was deep enough.
    Fifty feet above the surface he disentangled his arms from the