James Bond - Moonraker, James Bond by Ian Fleming
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PART ONE: MONDAY
CHAPTER I
SECRET PAPER-WORK
THE TWO thirty-eights roared simultaneously.
The walls of the underground room took the crash of sound and batted it
to and fro between them until there was silence. James Bond watched the
smoke being sucked from each end of the room towards the central
Ventaxia fan. The memory in his right hand of how he had drawn and fired
with one sweep from the left made him confident. He broke the chamber
sideways out of the Colt Detective Special and waited, his gun pointing at
the floor, while the Instructor walked the twenty yards towards him through
the half-light of the gallery.
Bond saw that the Instructor was grinning. "I don't believe it," he said. "I
got you that time."
The Instructor came up with him. "I'm in hospital, but you're dead, sir,"
he said. In one hand he held the silhouette target of the upper body of a
man. In the other a polaroid film, postcard size. He handed this to Bond and
they turned to a table behind them on which there was a green-shaded desk-
light and a large magnifying glass.
Bond picked up the glass and bent over the photograph. It was a flash-
light photograph of him. Around his right hand there was a blurred burst of
white flame. He focused the glass carefully on the left side of his dark
jacket. In the centre of his heart there was a tiny pinpoint of light.
Without speaking, the Instructor laid the big white man-shaped target
under the lamp. Its heart was a black bullseye, about three inches across.
Just below and half an inch to the right was the rent made by Bond's bullet.
"Through the left wall of the stomach and out at the back," said the
Instructor, with satisfaction. He took out a pencil and scribbled an addition
on the side of the target. "Twenty rounds and I make it you owe me seven-
and-six, sir," he said impassively.
Bond laughed. He counted out some silver. "Double the stakes next
Monday," he said.
"That's all right with me," said the Instructor. "But you can't beat the
machine, sir. And if you want to get into the team for the Dewar Trophy
we ought to give the thirty-eights a rest and spend some time on the
Remington. That new long twenty-two cartridge they've just brought out is
going to mean at least 7900 out of a possible 8000 to win. Most of your
bullets have got to be in the X-ring and that's only as big as a shilling when
it's under your nose. At a hundred yards it isn't there at all."
"To hell with the Dewar Trophy," said Bond. "It's your money I'm after."
He shook the unfired bullets in the chamber of his gun into his cupped hand
and laid them and the gun on the table. "See you Monday. Same time?"
"Ten o'clock'll be fine, sir," said the Instructor, jerking down the two
handles on the iron door. He smiled at Bond's back as it disappeared up the
steep concrete stairs leading to the ground floor. He was pleased with
Bond's shooting, but he wouldn't have thought of telling
him
that he was the
best shot in the Service. Only M. was allowed to know that, and his Chief
of Staff, who would be told to enter the scores of that day's shoot on Bond's
Confidential Record.
Bond pushed through the green baize door at the top of the basement steps
and walked over to the lift that would take him up to the eighth floor of the
tall, grey building near Regent's Park that is the headquarters of the Secret
Service. He was satisfied with his score but not proud of it. His trigger
finger twitched in his pocket as he wondered how to conjure up that little
extra flash of speed that would beat the machine, the complicated box of
tricks that sprung the target for just three seconds, fired back at him with a
blank .38, and shot a pencil of light aimed at him and photographed it as he
stood and fired from the circle of chalk on the floor.
The lift doors sighed open and Bond got in. The liftman could smell the
cordite on him. They always smelled like that when they came up from the
shooting gallery. He liked it. It reminded him of the Army. He pressed the
button for the eighth and rested the stump of his left arm against the control
handle.
If only the light was better, thought Bond. But M. insisted that all
shooting should be done in averagely bad conditions.
A dim light and a target that shot back at you was as close as he could get
to copying the real thing. 'Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't
prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence
Manual.
The lift eased to a stop and as Bond stepped out into the drab Ministry-of-
Works-green corridor and into the bustling world of girls carrying files,
doors opening and shutting, and muted telephone bells, he emptied his mind
of all thoughts of his shoot and prepared himself for the normal business of
a routine day at Headquarters.
He walked along to the end door on the right. It was as anonymous as all
the others he had passed. No numbers. If you had any business on the eighth
floor, and your office was not on that floor, someone would come and fetch
you to the room you needed and see you back into the lift when you were
through.
Bond knocked and waited. He looked at his watch. Eleven o'clock.
Mondays were hell. Two days of dockets and files to plough through. And
week-ends were generally busy times abroad. Empty flats got burgled.
People were photographed in compromising positions. Motor-car 'accidents'
looked better, got a more cursory handling, amidst the week-end slaughter
on the roads. The weekly bags from Washington, Istanbul, and Tokyo
would have come in and been sorted. They might hold something for him.
The door opened and he had his daily moment of pleasure at having a
beautiful secretary. "Morning, Lil," he said.
The careful warmth of her smile of welcome dropped about ten degrees.
"Give me that coat," she said. "It stinks of cordite. And don't call me Lil.
You know I hate, it."
Bond took off his coat and handed it to her. "Anyone who gets christened
Loelia Ponsonby ought to get used to pet names."
He stood beside her desk in the little anteroom which she had somehow
made to seem a little more human than an office and watched her hang his
coat on the iron frame of the open window.
She was tall and dark with a reserved, unbroken beauty to which the war
and five years in the Service had lent a touch of sternness. Unless she
married soon, Bond thought for the hundredth time, or had a lover, her cool
air of authority might easily become spinsterish and she would join the
army of women who had married a career.
Bond had told her as much, often, and he and the two other members of
the OO Section had at various times made determined assaults on her virtue.
She had handled them all with the same cool motherliness (which, to salve
their egos, they privately defined as frigidity) and, the day after, she treated
them with small attentions and kindnesses to show that it was really her
fault and that she forgave them.
What they didn't know was that she worried herself almost to death when
they were in danger and that she loved them equally; but that she had no
intention of becoming emotionally involved with any man who might be
dead next week. And it was true that an appointment in the Secret Service
was a form of peonage. If you were a woman there wasn't much of you left
for other relationships. It was easier for the men. They had an excuse for
fragmentary affairs. For them marriage and children and a home were out
of the question if they were to be of any use 'in the field' as it was cosily
termed. But, for the women, an affair outside the Service automatically
made you a 'security risk' and in the last analysis you had a choice of
resignation from the Service and a normal life, or of perpetual concubinage
to your King and Country.
Loelia Ponsonby knew that she had almost reached the time for decision
and all her instincts told her to get out. But every day the drama and
romance of her Gavell-Nightingale world locked her more securely into the
company of the other girls at Headquarters and every day it seemed more
difficult to betray by resignation the father-figure which The Service had
become.
Meanwhile she was one of the most envied girls in the building, and a
member of the small company of Principal Secretaries who had access to
the innermost secrets of the Service—'The Pearls and Twin-set' as they
were called behind their backs by the other girls, with ironical reference to
their supposedly 'County' and 'Kensington' backgrounds—and, so far as the
Personnel Branch was concerned, her destiny in twenty years' time would
be that single golden line right at the end of a New Year's Honours List,
among the medals for officials of the Fishery Board, of the Post Office, of
the Women's Institute, towards the bottom of the OBEs:
'Miss Loelia Ponsonby, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Defence.'
She turned away from the window. She was dressed in a sugar-pink and
white striped shirt and a plain dark blue skirt.
Bond smiled into her grey eyes. "I only call you Lil on Mondays," he
said. "Miss Ponsonby the rest of the week. But I'll never call you Loelia. It
sounds like somebody in an indecent limerick. Any messages?"
"No," she said shortly. She relented. "But there's piles of stuff on your
desk. Nothing urgent. But there's an awful lot of it. Oh, and the powder-
vine says that 008's got out. He's in Berlin, resting. Isn't it wonderful!"
Bond looked quickly at her. "When did you hear that?"
"About half an hour ago," she said.
Bond opened the inner door to the big office with the three desks and shut
it behind him. He went and stood by the window, looking out at the late
spring green of the trees in Regent's Park. So Bill had made it after all.
Peenemunde and back. Resting in Berlin sounded bad. Must be in pretty
poor shape. Well, he'd just have to wait for news from the only leak in the
building—the girls' rest-room, known to the impotent fury of the Security
staff as 'The powder-vine'.
Bond sighed and sat down at his desk, pulling towards him the tray of
brown folders bearing the top-secret red star. And what about 0011? It was
two months since he had vanished into the 'Dirty Half-mile' in Singapore.
Not a word since. While he, Bond, No. 007, the senior of the three men in
the Service who had earned the double o number, sat at his comfortable
desk doing paper-work and flirting with their secretary.
He shrugged his shoulders and resolutely opened the top folder. Inside
there was a detailed map of southern Poland and north-eastern Germany. Its
feature was a straggling red line connecting Warsaw and Berlin. There was
also a long typewritten memorandum headed
Mainline: A well-established
Escape Route from East to West
.
Bond took out his, black gunmetal cigarette-box and his black-oxidized
Ronson lighter and put them on the desk beside him. He lit a cigarette, one
of the Macedonian blend with the three gold rings round the butt that
Morlands of Grosvenor Street made for him, then he settled himself
forward in the padded swivel chair and began to read.
It was the beginning of a typical routine day for Bond. It was only two or
three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular
abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior
civil servant—elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally
in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close
friends, or at Crockford's; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one
of three similarly disposed married women; week-ends playing golf for
high stakes at one of the clubs near London.
He took no holidays, but was generally given a fortnight's leave at the end
of each assignment—in addition to any sick-leave that might be necessary.
He earned £1500 a year, the salary of a Principal Officer in the Civil
Service, and he had a thousand a year free of tax of his own. When he was
on a job he could spend as much as he liked, so for the other months of the
year he could live very well on his £2000 a year net.
He had a small but comfortable flat off the Kings Road, an elderly
Scottish housekeeper—a treasure called May—and a 1930 4 1/2-litre
Bentley coupé, supercharged, which he kept expertly tuned so that he could
do a hundred when he wanted to.
On these things he spent all his money and it was his ambition to have as
little as possible in his banking account when he was killed, as, when he was
depressed, he knew he would be, before the statutory age of forty-five.
Eight years to go before he was automatically taken off the 00 list and
given a staff job at Headquarters. At least eight tough assignments.
Probably sixteen. Perhaps twenty-four. Too many.
There were five cigarette-ends in the big glass ashtray by the time Bond
had finished memorizing the details of 'Mainline'. He picked up a red pencil
and ran his eye down the distribution list on the cover. The list started with
'M.', then 'CoS.', then a dozen or so letters and numbers and then, at the end
'oo'. Against this he put a neat tick, signed it with the figure 7, and tossed
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