The Ian Fleming Files (3 page)

“I don’t know
about this, mate,” he said in a low voice to Fleming. “Stealing a plane.”

“Commandeering,”
Fleming corrected him. “We’re commandeering a plane. There isn’t time for
paperwork, Syd, there’s too much at stake. Hitler gets those ships and it’s auf
Wiedersehen for the Royal Navy.”

They turned a
corner. Fleming spied a number and stopped.

“This is it,
Hangar 12.”

From his tool box,
Fleming took out a probe peeler with a flat, upturned end and slotted it into
the ID card reader.

“We’re headed
south over the channel,” Fleming said in a calm, measured voice as he teased
the mechanism, “climbing eighteen thousand feet for twenty-four miles ending
forty three degrees north and twenty three degrees east of Marseilles.”

Cotton did the
math. “That’s cutting it close fuel-wise.”

The lock sprang
open.

“Not with this
plane,” Fleming said as they slipped inside, past a plaque embossed with the
words “GROUND CREW ONLY.”

RAF technicians
were busy hammering and tinkering at planes which had their engines open and
parts exposed. Nodding and smiling as they went, Fleming and Cotton strode
confidently to a prototype de Havilland Mosquito DH-98 a.k.a “The Wooden
Wonder.” This model featured remotely controlled guns, a top speed of 275 miles
per hour at 15,000 feet and a range of 3,000 miles. The bodywork was a special
blue camouflage scheme and a series of modifications had been made to the
engines to produce more power at high altitudes.

Cotton regarded
the tricked out bomber with awe. “She’s a beaut!”

Fleming quickly
got to work. He unrolled a coil of black electrical cord, fired up an
electromagnetically powered nail gun and started riveting the cord to the
inside wall of the gun bay. Cotton checked fuel levels, noticed something and
shouted. The valves in the nail gun hissed as Fleming took his finger off the
trigger to hear.

“This plane’s
unmarked,” said Cotton.

“It’s not
officially in service.”

“You crazy pommie
bastard. I don’t want to go to jail for this. Not with my looks. I know how you
English sailors get in claustrophobic situations.”

“From personal
experience? This is the only craft suitable in terms of speed and altitude.
Forget jail, Syd, we’ll be heroes when the
Richelieu
sails down the
Thames. Now, tighten up those ailerons, we’re going to be at a ceiling of thirty
thousand feet.”

“Thirty thou? Want
me to fly you to the moon?”

“I want you to fly
above radar. Unless you’d rather be shot down over the channel by a German
patrol.”

“What about the
lenses? They’ll frost over.”

“Let me worry
about that.”

“But what about
us? This bird’s gonna be a flying icebox at that height, mate. We’ll freeze our
balls off!”

Fleming resumed
work, drowning Cotton out.

Cotton unzipped
his boilersuit revealing a standard olive drab RAF uniform with Royal
Australian Airforce shoulder flashes. He threw a heavy fleece leather jacket
on, found some gloves and strapped a B-6 ‘bone dome’ helmet with oxygen mask to
his chin.

Outside, a very
pretty and curvaceous secretary with a classic hourglass figure was marching
angrily toward the hangar with two gung-ho guards. She was no more than
nineteen, with satiny blue-black hair like Jane Russell pinned up in the
popular Victory style. She was wearing a dark woolen utility dress with
double-breasted bodice and pleated skirt and her bee-stung lips were plastered
with scarlet lipstick. The young soldiers were typical ‘Brylcreem Boys’, early
twenties, clad in Wedgwood blue RAF service uniforms without any aura of combat
experience about them.

“The mechanic said
they were with the 615th,” the girl said. “I knew he was lying, you could see
it in his eyes. Which were extremely blue. I’ve never seen such blueness
before. The scoundrel!” She felt her cheeks flush.

The first guard
tried to look tough as he racked his Lee Enfield bolt-action rifle. “Don’t worry,
luv, we’ll sort him out. Right, Nigel?”

Before Nigel could
respond the hangar doors slammed open and the Mosquito roared out with its twin
turbines blazing, blowing the secretary’s skirt up and blinding the two
servicemen with swirling clouds of gritty dust.

Fleming looked out
of the bubble canopy and arched an eyebrow appreciatively at the disheveled
girl fighting the strong blast from the plane’s spinning props, having to use
both her hands to keep her pleated skirt down.

The soldiers
leveled their Enfields at the Mosquito and were just about to let rip when
Cotton cranked the throttle and reached for the sky.

The DH-98 soared
over the sunny south of France and banked into an elegant turn before swooping
down to the coast.

Fleming and Cotton
felt the warmth return to their fingers as they removed their oxygen masks and
breathed freely. Cotton held the yoke between his knees and lit a cigarette
while Fleming conducted a sea search, scanning the skies for enemy planes and
analyzing marine maps, making mental notes of depths, bridges, power lines, any
other obstacles and anything unusual.

Cotton nodded at a
sleepy seaside fishing community on the sun-dappled coast. “Nothing but
tug-boats and trawlers. Five minutes, Skip, then back we go.”

Fleming surveyed
the shimmering turquoise with a pair of Bausch and Lomb binoculars. “There’s an
entire fleet anchored somewhere around here, Sydney. Where is it?” He
frantically rifled through scrolls of sea charts. “Take us over the next crest.”

Cotton jabbed a
gloved finger at the near-empty fuel gauge. “Dicey, mate.”

“Do it!”

Cotton tilted up
and over the ridge, shooting down its verdant slopes to see nothing but
dazzling white. Sheer blankness.

“Nada, mate. Ready
to loop back?”

Fleming wasn’t
convinced. His eyes flicked back and forth from his charts to the view through
his binocs. He put the binocs down and narrowed his eyes to manually scrutinize
the sparkling water. “This isn’t right, Sydney. There’s something down there.
Circle back!”

“Can’t do it,
mate. Fuel.”

Fleming snarled.
“Damn you, we’ll drop in Gibraltar if we have to. Circle back and get her as
low as you can.”

Cotton sighed and
banked left.

Fleming anxiously
waited, his eyes glued to the sea.

The Mosquito
double-backed but closer to the water this time.

The light was
blinding.

“Too bright,”
muttered Fleming.

A reflective
matter other than the glassy water was refracting back the sunlight creating a
blinding sheen of pure silver.

“Lower!” he cried
to the cockpit.  

Fleming crinkled
his eyes as the glare beneath them ebbed enough to reveal what looked like a
man-made atoll, a veritable city floating in the bay partly obscured by the
shrewd use of mirrors and vast furls of undulating cloth.

“Put her in
cruise!”

Cotton killed the
engine and dropped altitude. As the Mosquito steadily descended, the amorphous
mass coalesced into acres of steel tonnage concealed by massive swaths of silk
and rippling tarpaulin and even aluminum sheeting artfully positioned to
deceive aerial surveillance and confuse radar.

Fleming was giddy
as he took a gander between the cloaking screens at mammoth cruisers like the
celebrated
Algiers
with its sophisticated torpedo bulkhead and heavily
armored deck; World War 1 era ships
Provence
and
Bretagne;
modern
battleships (or ‘battle-cruisers’)
Dunkerque
and
Strasbourg
, and
six destroyers:
Mogador, Volta, Terrible, Kersaint
and the Jaguar-class
vessels
Lynx
and
Tigre.
French tricolor flags flew or drooped
from every flag-post.

Fleming counted
eight battleships in all, the French Fleet’s full complement.

When the Mosquito
whisked in closer, the scurrying human denizens of these floating worlds began
to appear and seemed tiny, dwarfed by the staggering size of the
superstructures.

Fleming crowded
into the gun bay and straddled the guns. He pushed a lever which caused an
optical instrument to retract toward his face, positioned his eye on the sights
and hollered to Cotton.

“Closer, man!
Whites of their eyes!”

Cotton tilted the
wheel forward forty-five degrees and they began to nose-dive.

Fleming removed
the leather gauntlet from his right hand and brought a felt patch down over his
left eye, cupping it, making his right eye and the sights into one. Then,
slowly, his fingertip found the trigger and hovered over it. He was utterly
concentrated, oblivious to the G-forces shuddering into his cheeks, the plane’s
deafening roar and the booming sirens blaring from the flotilla.

Fleming held his
breath and drew a bead on the crew.

French seamen in
navy blue appeared in the cross-hairs hurtling for cover, radioing to shore and
manning artillery posts.

Looking like a
determined swashbuckler, Fleming inched his finger down and lightly depressed
the trigger which had a black cable attached to it. The wire snaked down and
out across the flush riveted surface of the plane’s port wing to where discreet
subminiature Leica camera lenses had been installed in the flaps. The camera
motors sputtered to life, whirring and clicking in a furious flurry of
fluttering shutter sounds.

Fleming kept his
finger on the remote camera trigger and hollered at his subjects as film
unspooled. “Smile you miserable sods!”

Cotton was in his
element, hotdogging around the towering funnels of the epic
Strasbourg
,
careful to avoid the swivel guns of her deck and water line as he bobbed and
weaved, windmilling and snapping outrageous half turns before rotating 360
degrees and ascending skyward with a barnstorming flourish. Gunners scrambled
to man the skyscraper’s 3.5 inch howitzers and its four barrel heavy
machine-guns. But Cotton was too fast and gnat-like and by the time the
brigadiers and bombardiers were assembled he was gone.

A ring of security
dinghies encircled the sprawling castle of steel that was the
Commandant
Teste
, a heavily armed offensive seaplane tender capable of twenty knots
and purpose-built with five cranes, a catapult and hangars made to stow up to
twenty-six sea and fighter planes. It was the flagship of the fleet and Admiral
Darlan’s base of operations. One of the most
avant garde
vessels in
service anywhere in the world, the
Teste
was outfitted with all the
latest wireless gadgets, including ship-to-shore telephone and radio navigation
system.

On a flagpole aft
flew the insignia of Darlan’s family crest, a black dragon, wings expanded,
holding in its dexter claw a battle-axe erect.

In the ship’s
chart room, the diminuitive legendary French sailor Admiral Jean Louis Darlan,
61, was meeting with his inner circle which would be better described as an
isosceles triangle, with him at the vertex looking down the slanted legs at
Vice Admiral Honore Lafayette, 65, and Lieutenant Marcel ‘Bruno’ Gensoul, 30.
Darlan was in his parade dress of cloth admiral’s hat, white tunic with yellow
fringed epaulets, medals and cuirass. He carried the standard Ruby pistol, in a
beautiful alligator skin hip holster, and a sword cane whose blade was dipped
in a fast-acting toxin.

The son and
grandson of admirals, Darlan was a late bloomer who entered the École Navale at
the age of twenty-one and didn’t make his mark until the Great War when he
commanded an artillery battery at the Battle of Verdun. Darlan was shot in the
head whilst leading a successful charge that made the dispatches. During his
recovery he developed an interest in marine biology. Within a year he was
publishing essays in ichthyology journals. His childhood learning problems had
vanished. Instead of having trouble focusing, he could now concentrate on a
subject for weeks without the need for food or sleep.

He put away the
oceanography books and turned his new laser-focus to a political career. His
rise to Admiral de la flotte was meteoric. Some said it was easy for a man with
no need for sleep who had bona fide hero credentials. But for all his
brilliance and potential, Jean Louis never blossomed into a serious player. He
burned bridges and failed to amass enough of a support base to make a serious
run for the Elysée Palace. Darlan spent eight months climbing the greasy pole
of Parisian politics only to return to his ships and the watery realm that fate
had ordained he would rule. He accepted his lot, like the heroic man of destiny
he believed himself to be, and hopes of a kingdom on terra firma faded like a
dream.

A minor martinet,
the iron disciplinarian Darlan did a lot to improve the efficiency and
discipline within the French navy. His favorite form of peacetime punishment
was to make the offender stand to attention for twenty-four hours. It was
simple and effective. During war time he was permitted under French law to
indulge his penchant for keelhauling, which he reserved for the worst
offenders, as it was more a form of execution than punishment. How could one
possibly survive being dragged beneath the keel of a ship, from bow to stern,
in the open water while the vessel was making two or three knots? As the hull
was usually covered in barnacles and other marine growth, Darlan knew that if
the offender was pulled quickly, keelhauling would typically result in serious
cuts, loss of limbs and even decapitation. If the victim was dragged slowly,
his weight might lower him sufficiently to miss the barnacles, but this method
would frequently result in his drowning.

Darlan’s
consiglierie, the patrician spymaster Lafayette, was a refined, sophisticated
gentleman who loved opera, poetry, horse racing and the vineyards he owned in
Bordeaux. He had been in power since the Dreyfuss Affair and his information
network was vast and legendary. Not since Francis Walsingham, it was said, was
there a more informed practitioner of statecraft in Europe. His spies infested
the police, La Sécurité, the Deuxième Bureau, the general staff and every
branch of the military. The rats hailed from high society and low, from the
salons of Paris to the hash bars of Algiers. Lafayette recruited with charm,
bribery and blackmail. It was said that Walsingham went broke funding his own
private intelligence network. Money was not a concern for Lafayette who owned
most of Bordeaux and was one of the wealthiest men in France.