Solo

European man supervising the work on the Malmös. Sunday approached him, gave a small bow and indicated Bond standing a few paces away. Very tall indeed, Bond realised, as the man turned to look at him. Six foot six, perhaps, like a basketball player, and he had all the lanky awkwardness and ungainliness of the very tall. He was in his fifties and his thinning, fine white-blond hair was blown into a kind of hirsute halo by the evening breeze. He wore faded jeans and canvas boots, his shirt had a tear at the elbow. He looked more like some crazed inventor than a shrewd international businessman and multimillionaire.
    Sunday introduced Bond, respectfully. ‘Mr Bond from Agence Presse Libre.’
    ‘Hulbert Linck,’ the tall man said, in good English with the faintest accent that Bond found impossible to place: Swedish? German? Dutch? He shook Bond’s hand vigorously. ‘At last, the French are here.’
    Bond saw, in the glow from the engineers’ lights, the shine of a zealot’s near-madness in Linck’s eyes. He immediately began talking rapidly.
    ‘When will the French recognise Dahum? Perhaps you can inform me. We’ve all been awaiting the news from the outside world.’ He put his thin hand on Bond’s shoulder. ‘Everything you write will be vitally important, Mr Bond. Vitally.’
    ‘I’ll do my best,’ Bond said, changing the subject. ‘These are Malmös, aren’t they?’
    ‘Bought cheap off the Swedish air force,’ Linck said. ‘We’re converting them for ground attack. When we can strike back from the air the whole context of this war will change. You wait and see.’ Linck talked on excitedly, outlining his plans. It was as if the Zanzarim civil war and the survival of Dahum were a personal problem of his own. Dupree and Haas had told Bond of Linck’s unswerving support – he had spent millions of dollars of his fortune (his was a pan-European dairy empire, originally: butter, milk and cheese) recruiting and paying white mercenaries, chartering planes, buying illicit military materiel in the shadier locales of the world arms’ market, all to keep this fledgling African state alive. There was no rationale, Bond supposed, looking at the man as he spoke and gesticulated, it was a ‘cause’ pure and simple. It gave him something to live for – it was Hulbert Linck’s personal crusade. Bond had asked Haas where Linck was from and had received no precise answer. Nobody seemed to know his early history in any detail. Rumours abounded: that he had made his first fortune smuggling foodstuffs in the black market during the chaos of post-war Europe; that he was the bastard son of an English aristocrat and an Italian courtesan. He had a Swiss passport but was resident in Monte Carlo, Haas had told him; he spoke excellent German and French but no one really knew for sure where he was from – Georgia, someone had said, or one of the Baltic states, perhaps; Haas had even heard rumours about Corsica and Albania. His companies were all based in Liechtenstein, apparently.
    Bond looked at him, closely – was the white-blond hair dyed? he wondered suddenly. Another ruse. Were the slightly deranged mannerisms – the wide-eyed enthusiasms, the carelessness about what he wore – more examples of a very clever and duplicitous mask? Everything about him, to Bond’s eyes, seemed slightly bogus and worked-up. He realised that for someone like Hulbert Linck the more speculation about his origins, the more wild guesses thrown about, the better the disguise.
    Suddenly a bell rang briefly from the blockhouse and Bond sensed a quiver of readiness from those waiting around the Janjaville strip.
    ‘Excuse me, Mr Bond,’ Linck said and loped off.
    The runway lights were switched on, delineating the grass strip with dotted lines of blue and, seconds later, Bond heard the growing roar of aero engines.
    Then out of the darkness he saw landing lights appear and into the blue glow cast from the runway a Lockheed Super Constellation swooped, touching down heavily, bouncing, then great clouds of dust were thrown up as the four propellers went into reverse, slowing its progress so it could turn off and wheel round on to the piste in front of the hangar.
    Bond had flown in Super Constellations in the 1950s, when they, along with the Boeing Stratocruiser, were the apogee of airline glamour. They still had a remarkable look about them, Bond thought, watching this one come to rest and the cargo doors in its side open. The three