Solo

Port Dunbar. He tossed his hat and webbing belt into a deep ditch by the roadside, untucked his trousers from his boots and flagged down the first taxi he saw, asking to be taken to the Press Centre. A good night’s work, he thought – $50 well spent – time for a drink, a bite to eat and then bed. He just wished it could be as easy to deal with Geoffrey Letham. The Letham problem nagged at him – he realised it would be for the best if he could find a solution to that issue as well.

·18·
     

ONE-WAY TICKET OUT
     
    Bond kept very much to himself the next two days. He stayed in his room writing up an account in encrypted plain-code of everything that had happened to him (the narrative looked like notes for an article set in rural France: he was a woman, Blessing a man, the war a complex property deal). It would mean nothing to any other reader but for him it would function as an important aide-memoire for his eventual report to M, given that absolutely nothing about this mission had really gone to plan.
    On the first morning, Sunday reappeared in an ancient woodwormed Morris Traveller that he had bought for $10. They set off in it for a day trip to the blockaded port of Port Dunbar – which, because of the copious silting of the Zanza River Delta, was now some ten miles to the south of the city itself. Bond wandered along its empty quays and wharves, its giant rusty cranes and derricks standing sentinel over empty tracts of water, listening to the far-booming surf beyond the harbour. He knew that out at sea the two ex-Royal Navy frigates that comprised the Zanzarim Marine Force were patrolling the Bight of Benin looking for blockade runners. And further out at sea, waiting for its moment, was Hulbert Linck’s cargo vessel full of ‘serious stuff’ that might just change the course of this war.
    Bond stood on the dockside looking out at the horizon feeling himself in a strange kind of limbo, thinking that everything would change – or that nothing might change. He thought of Tony Msour unconscious in the boot of the Peugeot hidden in the midst of an oil-palm plantation – what effect would his mysterious absence have on events? It was an act of audacious inspiration that might have no consequence at all, or else it would materially alter everything. It was all in the balance – he had played his best cards, now he could only wait and see.
    As one day dragged into the next he began to feel that time was a curious irrelevance. He had his room in the Press Centre, he was fed, he could buy a drink. Somewhere to the north of the city, on the forest roads and tracks, across creeks and marshy expanses, by collapsed bridges and mined causeways, Zanzarim soldiers confronted Dahumian ones, everybody waiting – waiting to see what might happen next.
    Then the first symbol of that possible change arrived in the late afternoon of the second day after the abduction of Tony Msour. Suddenly, the city’s air-raid sirens sounded and for the first time Bond sensed something crack in the ordered discipline of the population of Port Dunbar. It wasn’t panic but it was fearfulness, anxiety, and the streets became full of people running, frantically looking for shelter. He thought he could hear the distant roar of jet engines and a SAM missile was fired – more in hope than expectation – from the battery in the central square. Then, after twenty minutes the all-clear sounded. Breadalbane said that a MiG had been shot down but no one believed him.
    The next morning Kobus Breed came to see him at the Press Centre. Bond was surprised.
    ‘You booked your passage out?’ Breed asked.
    ‘Not yet,’ Bond said, carefully. ‘Why do you ask?’
    Breed lowered his voice, as if he might be overheard. ‘I might need your expertise,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a massive Zanza Force build-up on the main highway. We’ve seen heavy armour – Centurion tanks. And the artillery shelling has gone up two hundred per cent. Something big’s about to happen.’
    ‘Look,’ Bond said. ‘Kololo was a one-off. You’re the brave soldier being paid five thousand dollars a month to fight for Dahum, not me.’
    ‘We could always arrange something.’
    ‘I’m not a military man any more,’ Bond said. ‘You’re on your own.’
    ‘And our bloody fetish priest has disappeared,’ Breed said. ‘Can you believe it? Picked up by a “white soldier” three days ago.’
    ‘One of your guys?’
    ‘Absolutely no.’
    Bond shrugged.