"Where are we going?
"To the Explorer." McMurray seems to be in a hurry. "Go on, it doesn't do to be late."
"Come on." That's Todt. She clambers over the motorboat's side and jumps down inside.
Ramona follows her, not without a murderous look at McMurray. **Can you — ?** I begin to think, then I realize I can't hear her inside my head. Shit, I glance round and the guard who led me up here nods significantly at the boat.
Double-shit. They must have come up with a portable version of the jammer they used on me and Ramona last night. I climb over the side of the boat and sit down next to Ramona, at the opposite side from Todt and McMurray.
"Where's the jammer?" I ask quietly.
"I think he's got it." She doesn't meet my eyes. "They don't trust us.
"If our positions were reversed, would you?" asks Johanna.
I startle. She smiles: it's not a friendly expression.
"I'd trust you anywhere, darling," says Ramona: "I'd trust you to fuck up."
"You — " Todt turns a peculiar shade, as if she's getting ready to explode. McMurray puts a hand on her arm before she can stand up.
"You'll both be quiet," he says in a curiously calm tone, and oddly, they both shut up. I glance sideways and see Ramona's cheek twitching. She rolls her eyes frantically at me, and the penny drops.
I lean over towards McMurray. "You've made your point.
Let them talk. They won't do it again."
"You sure of that, boy?" McMurray looks amused. "I've known these hellcats and their type longer than you've been alive, and they'll — "
"That's not the point!" I stab one finger at him. "Do you want her willing cooperation, or not"
He makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a snigger, just as there's a loud grinding noise from the crane and the boat lurches. "All right, have it your way," he says indulgently as we lift off the deck with a bump that throws Ramona against me.
"Bastard," she says indistinctly. Then the mist clears and I can suddenly feel her presence in my mind again, as warm and vibrant as my own pulse. **Not you, him,** she adds internally. **Thanks. It's not like Pat to make a mistake like that, lifting both blocks at the same time.**
**Think it's intentional?** I ask, wondering how long we've got to talk.
**Not really.** McMurray is saying something to Todt, who's slumped against the railing away from him. I try to make the most of his lapse: **I've noticed them making other mistakes. Listen, I got into Eileen's surveillance network. Mo's arrived, and there's a backup team on the way to rescue us.** The crane swings us over the edge of the Mabuse and the boat drops like a lift towards the sea below, leaving my stomach somewhere above my head. **Griffin's on the spot, looks like he's been playing an inside game. Ramona, if you run into Mo, don't get her pissed-off, she's brought her — ** I suddenly realize that my head's full of cotton-wool and Ramona isn't listening. She looks at me and blinks, then stares at McMurray, who smiles faintly in response. "What's that about?" she asks, aggrieved.
"No talking out of class." He looks at me speculatively. A porthole winds past the back of his head, embedded like a zit in the flank of a behemoth. "Orders from the boss. Once you're aboard the TMB-2, then you get to talk among yourselves."
"Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can," Todt sneers.
We hit the water with a neck-jarring thump, and everything gets very busy for a minute or two. The two black berets who've been riding down with us fire up the engine and cast-off the cables securing us to the crane, which in turn throws us variously into one another and across the bottom of the boat. It's a bouncy, jarring ride, and I get a lungful of spray as I try to sit up. It ends with me coughing over the side, wishing I had Ramona's gills. By the time I'm halfrecovered we're turning away from the Mabuse and accelerating across open water. I finally get some air back and look around to see that we've circled the former destroyer. In the distance, there's land on the horizon, but much closer to home a monstrous cliff-like bulk looms over us — the former Glomar Explorer.
My sense of scale fails me when I try to take it in. I find myself looking up, and up, and up — the thing's as big as a skyscraper, nearly a fifth of a kilometer long. After the Explorer was retired and mothballed in the 1970s they cut the superstructure away, but Billington's people have rebuilt the huge derrick that towers ten stories above the deck, the two huge docking legs and the big cranes at each end of the moon pool, and the entire drilling platform and pipe management system. It looks like an oil rig humping a supertanker. There are loud pumps or engines running up on the deck, and a hammering noise overhead; looking up I see a chopper closing in on the helipad at the stern of the ship. "Who's that"
I ask.
"That'll be the boss arriving," says McMurray. To the driver: "Take us in."
We motor steadily towards a platform hanging near the waterline, halfway along one flank of the giant ship. The ship sits eerily still in the water, as if it's embedded in the top of a granite pillar anchored to the sea floor. As we get closer, the noise from the drilling platform up top gets louder, a percussion of rhythmic clanking and clattering sounds adding to the bass line of the motors and the squeal of drill segments grating across each other as the pipe-feeding mechanism winches them off the huge pile under the superstructure and passes them to the automatic roughneck mechanism. When we tie up alongside the metal staircase I feel the deep humming vibration of the bow and stern thrusters holding the ship on position against the waves.
"Up and out!" The black berets are waving us onto the platform. While Todt and the guards are busy down below, Ramona and I follow McMurray up the ladder towards a door two decks up. He leads us on a bewildering tour of the colossal drilling ship, up and down narrow corridors and cramped stairwells and finally along a catwalk overlooking a giant room with no floor — the moon pool. A black beret on duty at the door passes us ear defenders as we step out onto the catwalk. The noise is deafening and the air feels like I've walked into a cross between a sauna and a machine shop: greasy and humid with a stink of overheated metal parts. A sickly sweet undertone hints of fishy things that have died and not gone to heaven, embedded in the machinery that moves the underwater doors at the bottom of the moon pool.
It's not like this in the movies: presumably James Bond's enemies all employ crack task-forces of janitors spritzing everything with pine-scented disinfectant at fifteen-minute intervals to keep down the rotten shellfish stink.
About ten meters in front of me, a metal pipe as thick as my thigh descends from the underside of the drilling deck, hypnotically spearing into the pool below. I stare at it, following it down to the bubbling point of white water where it plunges into the moon pool and the deep ocean below.
Somewhere far down there a drowned alien artifact awaits its arrival. Presumably Billington, with his expertise in Gravedust interrogations, knows what to expect. Above us the drilling platform shudders and roars, hellishly loud as it feeds infinite numbers of pipe segments to the sea god.
McMurray walks along the catwalk until he reaches a row of incongruous office windows and a door, just as you'd expect to find overlooking the shop floor of a factory or a workshop. We follow him inside.
It's a big room, and as befits the villain's working headquarters one wall is occupied by a gratuitously large projection screen showing a map of the sea floor below the Explorer. There are lots of consoles with blinking lights, and half a dozen black berets sitting at desks where they mouse around schematics on a computer-controlled engineering interface. So far so good. It would look a lot like the control room of a power station, if not for the fact that there's something that resembles a dentist's chair in the middle of the floor. The ankle and wrist straps and the pentacles around its base suggest that it's not designed for root canal jobs. To top it all off there's a gloating villain standing front and center, wearing a Nehru suit and cradling an excessively somnolent Tiddles in his arms.