Sunday’s Peugeot bumped over potholes as it approached the perimeter fence of Janjaville airstrip. He had switched off his one headlight as there was a strict blackout imposed. Here and there at the side of the road were little flasks of burning oil providing a dim guiding light – enough to know you were on the right track. Bond looked at his watch. The journey had taken forty minutes, east out of Port Dunbar.
At the gate Bond showed his pass and they were waved through. The perimeter fence was high and heavily barbed-wired, Bond saw, as Sunday parked up behind the airstrip buildings. There was a concrete blockhouse with a towering radio mast and wires looping from it to a mobile radar dish that spun steadily round on its bearings. There was a corrugated-iron hangar, and a few low wooden huts made up the rest of the airstrip’s buildings. On the grass by the blockhouse several dozen soldiers sat patiently waiting beside a row of assorted lorries and trucks, all empty.
Bond was wearing the bush jacket Sunday had acquired for him – in fact it was an army-surplus combat jacket with a patched bullet hole in the back and the Dahum flag sewn on its right shoulder – the red sun in its white plane casting its black shadow below. Had it been stripped from a corpse, Bond wondered, cleaned and resold at a profit? He didn’t particularly care.
Bond stepped out of Sunday’s car and looked around. The runway was closely mown grass but there seemed to be orthodox landing lights, though currently extinguished. In front of the hangar were three Malmö MFI trainers painted in camouflage green and black – single-engined, boxy-looking aircraft with oddly splayed tricycle undercarriages that had the effect of making them look as if they were about to fall back on their tails. Technicians were working on them and Bond saw the spark-shower of oxyacetylene. To his eyes it looked like they were attaching .50-calibre machine guns on to pylons beneath the wings.
‘This will be our new air force,’ Sunday said with manifest pride. ‘Madame Kross, she ask for me to introduce you to Mr Hulbert Linck. Please to follow me, Mr Bond.’
Bond walked with Sunday towards the hangar. As he drew near he saw that there was a very tall European man supervising the work on the Malmös. Sunday approached him, gave a small bow and indicated Bond standing a few paces away. Very tall indeed, Bond realised, as the man turned to look at him. Six foot six, perhaps, like a basketball player, and he had all the lanky awkwardness and ungainliness of the very tall. He was in his fifties and his thinning, fine white-blond hair was blown into a kind of hirsute halo by the evening breeze. He wore faded jeans and canvas boots, his shirt had a tear at the elbow. He looked more like some crazed inventor than a shrewd international businessman and multimillionaire.
Sunday introduced Bond, respectfully. ‘Mr Bond from Agence Presse Libre.’
‘Hulbert Linck,’ the tall man said, in good English with the faintest accent that Bond found impossible to place: Swedish? German? Dutch? He shook Bond’s hand vigorously. ‘At last, the French are here.’
Bond saw, in the glow from the engineers’ lights, the shine of a zealot’s near-madness in Linck’s eyes. He immediately began talking rapidly.
‘When will the French recognise Dahum? Perhaps you can inform me. We’ve all been awaiting the news from the outside world.’ He put his thin hand on Bond’s shoulder. ‘Everything you write will be vitally important, Mr Bond. Vitally.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Bond said, changing the subject. ‘These are Malmös, aren’t they?’
‘Bought cheap off the Swedish air force,’ Linck said. ‘We’re converting them for ground attack. When we can strike back from the air the whole context of this war will change. You wait and see.’ Linck talked on excitedly, outlining his plans. It was as if the Zanzarim civil war and the survival of Dahum were a personal problem of his own. Dupree and Haas had told Bond of Linck’s unswerving support – he had spent millions of dollars of his fortune (his was a pan-European dairy empire, originally: butter, milk and cheese) recruiting and paying white mercenaries, chartering planes, buying illicit military materiel in the shadier locales of the world arms’ market, all to keep this fledgling African state alive. There was no rationale, Bond supposed, looking at the man as he spoke and gesticulated, it was a ‘cause’ pure and simple. It gave him something to live for – it was Hulbert Linck’s personal crusade. Bond had asked Haas where Linck was from and had received no precise answer. Nobody seemed to know his early history in any detail. Rumours abounded: that he had made his first fortune smuggling foodstuffs in the black market during the chaos of post-war Europe; that he was the bastard son of an English aristocrat and an Italian courtesan. He had a Swiss passport but was resident in Monte Carlo, Haas had told him; he spoke excellent German and French but no one really knew for sure where he was from – Georgia, someone had said, or one of the Baltic states, perhaps; Haas had even heard rumours about Corsica and Albania. His companies were all based in Liechtenstein, apparently.
Bond looked at him, closely – was the white-blond hair dyed? he wondered suddenly. Another ruse. Were the slightly deranged mannerisms – the wide-eyed enthusiasms, the carelessness about what he wore – more examples of a very clever and duplicitous mask? Everything about him, to Bond’s eyes, seemed slightly bogus and worked-up. He realised that for someone like Hulbert Linck the more speculation about his origins, the more wild guesses thrown about, the better the disguise.
Suddenly a bell rang briefly from the blockhouse and Bond sensed a quiver of readiness from those waiting around the Janjaville strip.
‘Excuse me, Mr Bond,’ Linck said and loped off.
The runway lights were switched on, delineating the grass strip with dotted lines of blue and, seconds later, Bond heard the growing roar of aero engines.
Then out of the darkness he saw landing lights appear and into the blue glow cast from the runway a Lockheed Super Constellation swooped, touching down heavily, bouncing, then great clouds of dust were thrown up as the four propellers went into reverse, slowing its progress so it could turn off and wheel round on to the piste in front of the hangar.
Bond had flown in Super Constellations in the 1950s, when they, along with the Boeing Stratocruiser, were the apogee of airline glamour. They still had a remarkable look about them, Bond thought, watching this one come to rest and the cargo doors in its side open. The three tail fins, the four radial engines, the unusually high undercarriage and the curved slim aerodynamics of the fuselage all gave it a particular degree of beauty for an aeroplane. This one was elderly, its paint finish patched and blistered and there was no airline logo in evidence, no trace of where, or from whom, Linck might have chartered it. Arc lights were switched on and the soldiers and the lorries rushed forward to unload its cargo.
Bond watched, his mind busy, as the plane was unloaded in minutes, the four propellers still turning. He saw boxes of ammunition, mortars, bazookas, heavy machine guns, food, powdered milk, crates of Scotch whisky and gin, drugs, spare tyres and what looked like household goods – air conditioners, stainless-steel sinks, a couple of coffee tables – all passed down the chain of soldiers’ hands from the cargo doors to the waiting lorries and trucks that, once loaded, sped off into the night. Bond looked on, amazed. Then, just as the doors seemed about to close, he saw Kobus Breed run from a building and climb the steps to the plane, handing over a small package to someone inside. The doors were shut, Breed descended and the steps were wheeled away. It wasn’t entirely one-way traffic, then, Bond thought to himself. Breed was now talking to Linck – like two familiars, Bond noticed. Linck clapped him on the shoulder and Breed headed off into the darkness.
‘The planes come two, three, four times a night,’ Sunday said.
‘Where from?’ Bond asked, turning back to Sunday.
‘Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Mali – we don’t know for sure.’
Bond looked at the tall figure of Linck, as the Super Constellation revved its engines and turned to taxi back to the runway. It hadn’t been on the ground for more than fifteen minutes, Bond thought, watching Linck waving enthusiastically at the taxiing plane as if he were bidding farewell to parting relatives.
‘Mr Linck, he control everything,’ Sunday said.
With an accelerating roar of its Wright radial engines the now empty Super Constellation barrelled down the Janjaville runway in a blue-tinged cloud of dust and took off into the night sky. The landing lights were extinguished and all that could be heard was the diminishing drone of the engines as the plane climbed to cruising height. Bond walked back to Sunday’s Peugeot, impressed: this rearguard action had real potential, he could see.