The Ian Fleming Files (14 page)

Cool as cucumber,
Fleming put a cigarette in his mouth and patted his pockets for a light before
looking at the soldier expectantly.

“Für ein
leichtes, bitte?”
Fleming said with the best fake drunk face he could
muster.

The guard sighed,
snapped his brass service lighter and lit Fleming’s smoke which wasn’t his
usual kind with the three gold stripes around the filter.

Fleming nodded
gratefully.
“Danke.”
He took a quick drag then puffed a dart of poison
smoke into the guard’s face. The German felt the sting of the toxin in his eyes
and was about to scream when Fleming muffled his mouth and smothered him until
he was unconscious. He folded the man’s body down a laundry chute and quickly
composed himself before trotting off to join Denise.

The sentry in the
tower was doing a spotlight sweep. Fleming and Denise waited for the right
moment before they streaked across the roof and climbed down. Fleming
shouldered the heavy haversack as he gripped the drainpipe. On the ground he
set the sovereigns aside and went to help Denise when she nodded to something
behind him and shouted “Six-heures!”

He spun round fast
to see a sentry with a Luger, quickly drew his silenced pistol and... Pfft!
Pfft! Double-tap to the head. The Nazi crumpled to the ground. Fleming darted
his eyes about. “Hurry!”

In the dining
room, Bock listened with increasing impatience as Speer droned on from his
dossier.

“Thrown out of two
English schools, attended universities of Munich and Geneva where he studied
German and French. His older brother is Peter Fleming, the famous travel
writer.”

Bock lurched
forward and walloped the table with his fist. “These are facts, Captain! I want
to know about the man’s character!”

As he leaned
forward, something whistled past his ear and there was a tinkling noise, like
the sound of breaking glass.

“Was ist das?”
said Bock in confusion.

Bock darted his
eyes to the window. There was another tinkle of glass and then the head of the
bodyguard seated to Bock’s left exploded like a watermelon, splattering gobs of
blood, brain and chipped bone all over the room and on everyone like shrapnel.

Speer dove onto
Bock and hurled him to the ground protectively. Another bullet whizzed by and
landed in the other bodyguard’s neck, ripping his throat out.

Bock shoved Speer
away. “Get off me you fool!”

Speer grabbed the
servant girl and used her as a shield, reached for his whistle and blasted
three sharp shrills.

Fleming and Denise
ambled unhurriedly down the driveway so as not to arouse suspicion. Fleming
looked at his luminous watch display that read 12:19. “This should be a blast,”
he said wryly.

Behind them, the
timer on the balcony hit 12:20.

KA-BOOM!!

The entire row of
upstairs windows imploded and thousands of glass shards cascaded down. Inside
the house, guests screamed as panic spread like wildfire. It was pandemonium.

Fleming held
Denise’s arm and quickened their pace. “We did our part,” he said. “Let’s hope
your friends fared as well.”

“Melik is one of
the finest shots in France,” she said.

They exited the
compound with the gold as another explosive detonated and a huge fireball
plumed. A siren wailed in the barracks to the rear of the farmhouse.
Stormtroopers mobilized, scrambling into troop vehicles and the six FMJ
paratroopers gathered for the manhunt. The sound of barking Dobermans added to
the din.

Melik was
frantically reloading his rifle when Fleming and Denise appeared. Eddie and
Remy were trying to get the sharpshooter to abandon his mount.
“Allez!
Allez! Vite!”
they cried.

A hail of machine
gun bullets strafed the ground and shredded the branches around Melik. Fleming
and Denise unloaded pistols in the direction of the shots. Eddie started the
truck while Remy frantically shoved nails into pine cones and threaded them
together with twine. He quickly stretched the spike strip across the road.

Fleming provided
cover while Denise scrambled into the truck. He followed her while Eddie cried
to Remy
“Allez!”

More bullets
whizzed by Melik as he collapsed his rifle and ran to the truck. Remy leaped
in. Eddie swung the truck around and they peeled out.

Fleming consulted
a map and plotted them an escape path to the border. Two Nazis on scooters were
the first to appear, zooming after the truck in urgent pursuit. One of them
unholstered his pistol and locked a bead on Remy, visible at a side window as
he fed a 200-round magazine belt into the Chauchat.

The Nazi’s scooter
rumbled over the belt of pine cones. Its tires burst and the driver lost
control as the vehicle skidded up an embankment, careened face-on into a pile
of boulders and exploded.

The second
scooterist swerved to avoid the debris and flew headlong into a tree. A troop
car filled with soldiers screeched up and was blocked from passing by the fiery
flotsam of the two wrecks.

Jodl screamed at
his flunkies to clear the path.
“Schnell! Schnell!”

He leaped out of
the vehicle and started to move the debris himself.

Fleming studied
his map while Melik was chastised by Denise. She glowered at the marksman.
“Idiot! How could you miss?”

“You had to go and
blow the place up and attract attention,” said Melik. “I had him in my sights.”

“We got the gold,”
she said. “Now we get Darlan.”

“Fuck Darlan,”
said Remy. “I want that Nazi pig!”

The convoy gained
and pelted the truck with automatic fire.

Remy fixed the
Chauchat to its tripod and swiveled the gun forward. He booted the doors of the
van open and let it rip.

The machine-gun
fusillade rattled the truck, bruising ears as Remy sent a deafening torrent of
rounds into the convoy. The lead troop car swerved and rolled over, careening
down a hillside.

Fleming told Eddie
to take a sharp left. Eddie barreled up an iced road flanked by clumps of firs.
“Kill the engine!” Fleming cried.

They waited in
stationary silence. The sound of the chase passed by.

Sighs of relief
were truncated by a loud whooping sound overhead.

A Flettner recon
copter modified into an attack ship beat up over the frozen slopes in a blast
of swirling snow, its powerful turbines throbbing in the air.

The pilot tilted
the craft to align its fixed waist armaments at the stationary truck.

Eddie slammed his
foot on the accelerator and reversed downhill. “Hold on!” he cried.

The copter banked
after them, its swastika markings clearly distinguishable in the back glow of
its powerful lights which raked through the trees, casting lurid wheeling
shadows on the snow.

Fleming and Denise
leaned out of the windows and unloaded.

The Flettner fired
its cannons, spitting lead and splintering the ground around the truck. A stand
of scrub pines was mowed down. Remy tried to shoot back but couldn’t angle the
Chauchat. Eddie tried evasive maneuvers as the Flettner pilot engaged his twin
grenade launchers and shells blasted them from above. Two front tires shredded
and Eddie lost control.

KA-BOOM! A
detonation sent the truck swerving wildly into the petrified bole of a mighty
spruce where it remained, wheels spinning.  

Fleming took a
quick assessment. “Evac! We’re sitting ducks!” He grabbed the haversack and a
grenade. Everyone shagged out as a shell blasted the front half of the truck,
smashing the windshield and setting Eddie on fire. He screamed, hands going
instinctively to protect his face. Melik dragged him out to the ground and
quenched the flames in snow while Eddie hollered and shook glass splinters from
his body.

The chopper
dipped, its guns blasting streams of ammunition, pocking the icy ground at
their feet as they scurried up the frozen hillside for shelter.

“Split up!”
shouted Fleming.

Remy, Melik and
Eddie made for a towering rock cluster while Fleming and Denise provided cover
by firing back at the copter. Fleming armed his American ‘pineapple’-style hand
grenade. “Keep shooting!” he told Denise and tossed her his Colt.

Denise emptied two
firearms at the huge hovering bird. They were forced downhill by the copter’s
path and became separated from the others. Fleming felt the heft of the grenade
as he eyeballed the chopper and made a fast calculation.

He lobbed his
projectile like a cricketer gunning for wickets. The pineapple described an
elegant trajectory through the air before crashing through the chopper’s canopy
and exploding.

KA-BOOM!!!

The magnificent
war machine was vaporized in a terrific blast that sent twisted rotor blades
and flaming wreckage scattering for miles. A sharp, choking odor of burned
rubber filled the air.

Denise was
stunned. “Bravo!”

Fleming was more
cautious. “Not exactly inconspicuous.”

“What is the
English phrase? ‘Men will be men.’”

“Actually,” he
corrected her, “it’s boys will be boys.”

A vague mass
started to emerge in the skies as the smoke cleared, a cloud-like black shape
slowly materializing through the drifting plumes.

Fleming’s face
dropped. An entire fleet of German army helicopters was headed their way.

He took her arm
and they bustled up the slope then flattened down on the ground, concealing
themselves in the undergrowth as the V-shape formation of Flettners and
Focke-Wulfs thundered over and circled back around. The recon copters had all
been modified into gunships with heavy fixed arms.

The two spies
managed to put some distance between them and the birds but a Flettner broke
off and came as close to the ground as it could without getting tangled in the
trees. Denise screamed. The rhythmic whooping of its rotor blades and the loud
draft of its wash was terrifying.

Fleming and Denise
bolted to a thicket of firs. Probing searchlights swept the ground. Above them,
Captain Speer appeared in the passenger seat of the lead Flettner and looked
down at the terrain through fluorescent night vision binoculars. He nodded to
the gunner in the rear who aimed a pistol out. There was a loud report and then
a blazing flare on a parachute slowly descended, wiping out the black and
turning everything into daylight.

Fleming and Denise
were still as statuary in the stand of firs. They waited. Denise trembled and
emitted a little cry.

Two more flares
came sailing slowly, elegantly down.

Their shadows shot
out in front of them and they were exposed.

Fleming eyed a
crevice in the mountain and made a decision. He looked at her and she nodded,
knowing what to do.

Another
flare-pistol cracked and suddenly they were surrounded by stark brightness.
They bolted for the grotto just as the fleet unleashed its firepower in a
blazing barrage. Endless streams of burning bullets tore from the copter guns
and clobbered the slopes in a cyclonic fury that churned snow and splintered
scree and broke bedrock into gravel. It was a roaring, riotous fusillade that
looked like red rain with a hailstorm of smoldering shell casings cascading
down amid a haze of sooty, sulfurous smoke. The clamorous percussion was a
sound to wake the dead and the hellish onslaught lasted until every ammunition
belt was spent and the screeching sound of empty, reeling carbines could be
heard.

The angry swarm
scattered but the dull thumping of rotors was faintly audible off in the
distance when Fleming and Denise peered out of their ice cavern. They embraced.
A bullet had grazed Fleming’s cheek. He slammed ice against the rivulet of
trickling blood and made sure Denise was all right. She shivered. “We have to
find the others,” she said. He looked at her. “How? We can’t exactly call out.
If they’re smart they’ll go where we’re going.”

“Which is where
exactly?”

“Across the border
to the British Embassy in Toulouse.”

The sulfur had
cleared and they could see that the sun was setting, casting strange twilight
hues of blue and pink light off the glistening snow. Denise pulled her coat
collar up over her ears for warmth. It was getting colder.

From afar came the
sounds of yapping hunting dogs and shrill whistle toots. Down in the gorge,
snow hunters moved through the twilight with slow-burning flares in their
hands. Fleming turned to see an eerie string of red lights headed their way.

The British secret
agent and the French Resistance operative soldiered on through the snow until
it was dark and they had left the search party noises far behind. They stopped
in a clearing in the woods that looked down over the next snow-covered pass. Fleming
turned and strained his eyes into the night. Clouds had buried the stars and it
was pitch black. There was nothing but darkness and then the search party
flares appeared like fireflies dancing in the night. He checked his compass and
they continued on, treading carefully along a steep ridge.

“We have to go
higher,” he said.

Denise was out of
breath. “Can we breathe up there?”

“Higher. It’s our
only hope. They won’t follow us up there in this light. Not tonight at least.”

They trekked
further, toward the highest elevations.

General Bock was
in his study where the dartboard wall safe gaped open. Like a big laughing
mouth, Bock thought. He seemed remarkably calm given the situation and was
almost genteel with Speer as he addressed him.

“What is your plan,
Captain?” he said.

Speer told him
what sounded like a smart scheme to corner the two spies by morning.

Bock turned to
Lieutenant Jodl and looked at him as if noticing his existence for the first
time. His voice remained cool and controlled.