Bond sat between his host and Miss Brand. He made several attempts to engage her in conversation. He failed completely. She answered with polite monosyllables and would hardly meet his eye. Bond became mildly irritated. He found her physically very attractive and it annoyed him to be unable to extract the smallest response. He felt that her frigid indifference was overacted and that security would have been far better met with an easy, friendly approach instead of this exaggerated reticence. He felt a strong urge to give her a sharp kick on the ankle. The idea entertained him and he found himself observing her with a fresh eye – as a girl and not as an official colleague. As a start, and under cover of a long argument between Drax and Walter, in which she was required to join, about the collation of weather reports from the Air Ministry and from Europe, he began to add up his impressions of her.
She was far more attractive than her photograph had suggested and it was difficult to see traces of the severe competence of a policewoman in the seductive girl beside him. There was authority in the definite line of the profile, but the long black eyelashes over the dark blue eyes and the rather wide mouth might have been painted by Marie Laurencin. Yet the lips were too full for a Laurencin and the dark brown hair that curved inwards at the base of the neck was of a different fashion. There was a hint of northern blood in the high cheekbones and in the very slight upward slant of the eyes, but the warmth of her skin was entirely English. There was too much poise and authority in her gestures and in the carriage of her head for her to be a very convincing portrait of a secretary. In fact she seemed almost a member of Drax’s team, and Bond noticed that the men listened with attention as she answered Drax’s questions.
Her rather severe evening dress was in charcoal black grosgrain with full sleeves that came below the elbow. The wrap-over bodice just showed the swell of her breasts, which were as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record-sheet. At the point of the vee there was a bright blue cameo brooch, a Tassie intaglio, Bond guessed, cheap but imaginative. She wore no other jewellery except a half-hoop of small diamonds on her engagement finger. Apart from the warm rouge on her lips, she wore no make-up and her nails were square-cut with a natural polish.
Altogether, Bond decided, she was a very lovely girl and beneath her reserve, a very passionate one. And, he reflected, she might be a policewoman and an expert at jujitsu, but she also had a mole on her right breast.
With this comforting thought Bond turned the whole of his attention to the conversation between Drax and Walter and made no further attempts to make friends with the girl.
Dinner ended at nine. ‘Now we will go over and introduce you to the Moonraker,’ said Drax, rising abruptly from the table. ‘Walter will accompany us. He has much to do. Come along, my dear Bond.’
Without a word to Krebs or the girl he strode out of the room. Bond and Walter followed him.
They left the house and walked across the concrete towards the distant shape on the edge of the cliff. The moon had risen and in the distance the squat dome shone palely in its light.
A hundred yards from the site Drax stopped. ‘I will explain the geography,’ he said. ‘Walter, you go ahead. They will be waiting for you to have another look at those fins. Don’t worry about them, my dear fellow. Those people at High Duty Alloys know what they’re doing. Now,’ he turned to Bond and gestured towards the milk-white dome, ‘in there is the Moonraker. What you see is the lid of a wide shaft that has been cut about forty foot down into the chalk. The two halves of the dome are opened hydraulically and folded back flush with that twenty-foot wall. If they were open now, you would see the nose of the Moonraker just protruding above the level of the wall. Over there,’ he pointed to a square shape that was almost out of sight in the direction of Deal, ‘is the firing point. Concrete blockhouse. Full of radar tracking gadgets – Doppler velocity radar and flight-path radar, for instance. Information is fed to them by twenty telemetering channels in the nose of the rocket. There’s a big television screen in there too so that you can watch the behaviour of the rocket inside the shaft after the pumps have been started. Another television set to follow the beginning of its climb. Alongside the blockhouse there’s a hoist down the face of the cliff. Quite a lot of gear has been brought to the site by sea and then sent up on the hoist. That whine you hear is from the power house over there,’ he gestured vaguely in the direction of Dover. ‘The men’s barracks and the house are protected by the blast-wall, but when we fire there won’t be anyone within a mile of the site, except the Ministry experts and the BBC team who are going to be in the firing point. Hope it’ll stand up to the blast. Walter says that the site and a lot of the concrete apron will be melted by the heat. That’s all. Nothing else you need to know about until we get inside. Come along.’
Bond noted again the abrupt tone of command. He followed in silence across the moonlit expanse until they came to the supporting wall of the dome. A naked red bulb glowed over a steel-plated door in the wall. It illuminated a bold sign which said in English and German: mortal danger. ENTRY FORBIDDEN WHEN RED LAMP SHOWS. RING AND WAIT.
Drax pressed the button beneath the notice and there was the muffled clang of an alarm bell. ‘Might be somebody working with oxy-acetylene or doing some other delicate job,’ he explained. ‘Take his mind off his job for a split second as somebody comes in and you could have an expensive mistake. Everybody downs tools when the bell rings and then starts up again when they see what it is.’ Drax stood away from the door and pointed upwards to a row of four-foot-wide gratings just below the top of the wall. ‘Ventilator shafts,’ he explained. ‘Air-conditioned inside to 70 degrees.’
The door was opened by a man with a truncheon in his hand and a revolver at his hip. Bond followed Drax through into a small anteroom. It contained nothing but a bench and a neat row of felt slippers.
‘Have to put these on,’ said Drax sitting down and kicking off his shoes. ‘Might slip up and knock into someone. Better leave your coat here, too. Seventy degrees is quite warm.’
‘Thanks,’ said Bond remembering the Beretta at his armpit. ‘As a matter of fact I don’t feel the heat.’
Feeling like a visitor to an operating theatre, Bond followed Drax through a communicating door out on to an iron catwalk and into a blaze of spotlights that made him automatically put a hand up to his eyes as he grasped the guard-rail in front of him.
When he took his hand away he was greeted by a scene of such splendour that for several minutes he stood speechless, his eyes dazzled by the terrible beauty of the greatest weapon on earth.
12 | THE MOONRAKER
It was like being inside the polished barrel of a huge gun. From the floor, forty feet below, rose circular walls of polished metal near the top of which he and Drax clung like two flies. Up through the centre of the shaft, which was about thirty feet wide, soared a pencil of glistening chromium, whose point, tapering to a needle-sharp antenna, seemed to graze the roof twenty feet above their heads.
The shimmering projectile rested on a blunt cone of latticed steel which rose from the floor between the tips of three severely back-swept delta fins that looked as sharp as surgeons’ scalpels. But otherwise nothing marred the silken sheen of the fifty feet of polished chrome steel except the spidery fingers of two light gantries which stood out from the walls and clasped the waist of the rocket between thick pads of foam-rubber.