[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

the other sat before tripod binoculars that were trained on the Disco through
a gap in the blinds of a side window. The khaki walkie-talkie set was beside
them on the floor. Bond gave them the new briefing and got on the radio to the
Police Commissioner and confirmed it to him. The
Commissioner passed two messages to him from Leiter. One was to the effect
that the visit toPalmyra had been negative except that a servant had said the
girl's baggage had gone on board the Disco that afternoon. The boathouse was
completely innocent. It contained a glass-bottomed boat and pedallo. The
pedallo would have made the tracks they had seen from the air. The second
message said that the Manta was expected in twenty minutes. Would Bond meet
Leiter at thePrince George , Wharf, where she would dock.
***
The Manta , coming with infinite caution up-channel, had none of the greyhound
elegance of the conventional submarine. She was blunt and thick and ugly. The
bulbous metal cucumber, her rounded nose shrouded with tarpaulin to hide the
secrets of her radar scanner from the Nassavians, held no suggestion of her
speed, which Leiter said was around forty knots submerged.  But they won't
Page 111
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
tell you that, James. That's Classified. I guess we're going to find that even
the paper in the can is Classified when we go aboard. Watch out for these Navy
guys, Nowadays they're so tight-lipped they think even a belch is a security
risk.
 What else do you know about her?
 Well, we won't tell this to the captain, but of course in C.I.A. we had to be
taught the basic things about these atom subs, so we could brief agents on
what to look for and recognize clues in their reports. She's one of the George
Washington Class, about four thousand tons, crew of around a hundred, cost
about a hundred million dollars. Range, anything you want until the chow runs
out or until the nuclear reactor needs topping up---say every hundred thousand
miles or so. If she has the same armament as the George
Washington, she'll have sixteen vertical launching tubes, two banks of eight,
for the Polaris solid-fuel missile. These have a range of around twelve
hundred miles. The crews call the tubes the `Sherwood
Forest' because they're painted green and the missile compartment looks like
rows of great big tree trunks. These Polaris jobs are fired from way down
below the surface. The sub stops and holds dead steady. They have the ship's
exact position at all times through radio fixes and star sights through a
tricky affair called a star-tracker periscope. All this dope is fed into the
missiles automatically. Then the chief gunner presses a button and a missile
shoots up through the water by compressed air. When it breaks surface the
solid-fuel rockets ignite and take the missile the rest of the way. Hell of a
weapon, really, when you come to think of it. Imagine these damned things
shooting up out of the sea anywhere in the world and blowing some capital city
to smithereens. We've got six of them already and we're going to have more.
Good deterrent when you come to think of it. You don't know where they are or
when. Not like bomber bases and firing pads and so on you can track down and
put out of action with your first rocket wave.
Bond commented drily,  They'll find some way of spotting them. And presumably
an atomic depth charge set deep would send a shock wave through hundreds of
miles of water and blow anything to pieces over a huge area. But has she got
anything smaller than these missiles? If we're going to do a job on the Disco
what are we going to use?
 She's got six torpedo tubes up front and I dare say she's got some smaller
stuff---machine guns and so forth. The trouble's going to be to get the
commander to fire them. He's not going to like firing on an unarmed civilian
yacht on the orders of a couple of plainclothes guys, and one of them a Limey
at that.
Hope his orders from the Navy Department are as solid as mine and yours. The
huge submarine bumped gently against the wharf. Lines were thrown and an
aluminum gangplank was run ashore. There was a ragged cheer from the crowd of
watchers being held back by a cordon of police. Leiter said,  Well, here we
go. And to one hell of a tad start. Not a hat between us to salute the quarter
deck with.
You curtsy, I'll bow.
20.
Time for Decision
The interior of the submarine was incredibly roomy, and it was stairs and not
a ladder that led down into the interior. There was no clutter, and the
sparkling paintwork was in two-tone green. Powerlines painted in vivid colors
provided a cheerful contrast to the almost hospital decor. Preceded by the
Page 112
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
officer of the watch, a young man of about twenty-eight, they went down two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]