The man on the ground suddenly felt lonely. “Totsiens,” he said with a wave of the hand that was almost the wave of a lover. “Alles van die beste.” He stood back and held a hand up to his eyes against the dust.
The pilot settled into his seat and fastened the seat-belt, feeling for the rudder pedals with his feet. He made sure that the wheel brakes were on, pushed the pitch control lever right down, turned on the fuel and pressed the starter. Satisfied with the beat of the engine, he released the rotor brake and softly twisted the throttle on the pitch control. Outside the cabin windows the long rotor blades slowly swung by and the pilot glanced astern at the whirring tail rotor. He settled himself back and watched the rotor speed indicator creep up to 200 revolutions a minute. When the needle was just over the 200, he released the wheel brakes and pulled up slowly and firmly on the pitch lever. Above him the blades of the rotor tilted and bit deeper into the air. More throttle, and the machine slowly rose clattering towards the sky until, at about 100 feet, the pilot simultaneously gave it left rudder and pushed forward the joystick between his knees.
The helicopter swung towards the east and, gathering height and speed, roared away back up the path of the moon.
The man on the ground watched it go, and with it the £100,000 worth of diamonds his men had filched from the diggings during the past month and had casually held out on their pink tongues as he stood beside the dentist’s chair and brusquely inquired where it hurt.
Still talking about their teeth, he would pick the stones out of their mouths and hold them up to the dentist’s spotlight, and then softly he would say 50, 75, 100; and they always nodded and took the notes and hid them in their clothes and went out of the surgery with a couple of aspirins in a twist of paper as an alibi. They had to accept his price. There was no hope of a native getting diamonds out. When the miners did get out, perhaps once a year to visit their tribe or to bury a relative, there was a whole routine of X-rays and castor oil to be gone through, and a grim future if they were caught. It was so easy to go to the dental surgery and pick the day when ‘Him’ was on duty. And paper-money didn’t show up on X-rays.
The man wheeled his motor-cycle over the rough ground on to the narrow trail and started off towards the frontier hills of Sierra Leone. They were more distinct now. He would only just have time to get to Susie’s hut before dawn. He grimaced at the thought of having to make love to her at the end of an exhausting night. But it would have to be done. Money was not enough to pay for the alibi she gave him. It was his white body she wanted. And then another ten miles to the club for breakfast and the coarse jokes of his friends.
“Do a nice bit of inlay, Doc?”
“I hear she has the best set of frontals in the Province.”
“Say Doc, what is it the full moon does to you?”
But each £100,000 worth meant £1000 for him in a London safe deposit. Nice crisp fivers. It was worth it. By God it was. But not for much longer. No sir! At £2o,ooo he would definitely quit. And then…?
His mind full of lush dreams, the man on the motor-cycle bumped his way as fast as he could across the plain-away from the great thorn bush where the pipeline for the richest smuggling operation in the world started its devious route to where it would finally gush out on to soft bosoms, five thousand miles away.
2
GEM QUALITY
“Don’t push it in. Screw it in,” said M impatiently.
James Bond, making a mental note to pass M’s dictum on to the Chief of Staff, again picked up the jeweller’s glass from the desk where it had fallen and this time managed to fix it securely into the socket of his right eye.