Solo

some sinew or vein had been bodily wrenched from his side. His head reeled as she reapplied the dressing and taped it down again. The sister was a rather wonderful woman who treated Bond with pointed egalitarianism – he could have been a duke or a kitchen skivvy and nothing would change in her manner, he knew.
    ‘There you are, Commander,’ she said, with an ironic smile, using his rank for the first time. ‘A normal human being once more – no tubes hanging out of you.’
    After she’d gone Bond went into his bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He was pale and he’d lost weight and the scar on his face stood out more starkly, he thought. He felt well enough but not particularly strong, not his usual self. Still, he couldn’t hang around until his physical status quo returned. There was work to be done. He had been thinking hard since M’s visit and the unexpected offer of a month’s leave. A whole month – what could be achieved in four weeks? As far as M was concerned he had carried off his mission with flying colours, but from Bond’s point of view there was a sour taste of bitter dissatisfaction and incompleteness. Two people had tried to kill him – one had tried to maim him in the most brutal way possible; the other was a woman he had made love to in all openness and generosity of spirit, and she had tried to deliver the
coup de grâce
to a man who was already grievously wounded. He couldn’t forget those terrible seconds in the control tower at Janjaville airstrip – he would never forget them. To stare death in the face like that, to feel bullets impact on your own vital body . . . You couldn’t, you shouldn’t, just write that down to experience, walk away with a shrug and congratulate yourself on your luck. Fate and blind chance had conspired to keep him alive. Many people had tried to kill Bond over his career and, more often than not, he had managed to show them the folly of that ambition. M had told him to relax, get well, cosset himself – but at the forefront of his mind he wanted retribution, he wanted to hunt these people down and confront them. He wanted to be their grim nemesis and revel in that moment. What was the point of a month’s holiday when this was your frame of mind? No – this was an opportunity to be seized. His superior officer had gifted him a month of repose and idleness. Bond decided instead, with hardening resolve, that these days were going to be put to exceptionally good use.
    He pulled on his dressing gown over his pyjamas, and left the private wing, going down to the ward sister’s station at the foot of the stairs. He asked if he could make some telephone calls and was directed to a glassed-in cubicle with a pay telephone inside. Once he’d borrowed some change he made three calls: first to his bank to arrange a transfer of money; then he telephoned Donalda and asked for an address and finally he was put through to his secretary, Minty Beauchamp, and told her he was going on holiday for a month and would be out of contact.
    As he lay in bed that night, Bond plotted the nature of his revenge in more detail – revenge on Blessing Ogilvy-Grant (or whatever name she was now going under) and Kobus Breed, the man with two faces. And throw in Hulbert Linck for good measure, he thought, if it turned out he’d been involved in Bond’s purported assassination. And as he speculated about what he might do to these people, as and when he caught up with them, he felt peace of mind slowly returning, but he didn’t forget that they too, if they were alive, might simultaneously be plotting their revenge on James Bond, the man who had messed up their little war in Africa. Somehow he was sure that they would know he hadn’t died in the concrete cell beneath the Janjaville control tower. Any dead Briton found in the aftermath of Dahum’s collapse would have made some newspaper or news bulletin, somewhere. No, the absence of comment would be seen as confirmation of his unlikely survival.
    In any event, a plan was slowly taking shape in his mind – but it was a plan he had to carry out himself. It could have nothing to do with his role as a Double O operative, M or the Service. It had to be wholly unauthorised – it had to be rogue action. He smiled to himself in the darkness of his room: in a way the fact that it would be unauthorised would make it all the sweeter. He intended to ‘go solo’, as he phrased it to himself. In the unwritten