Then he forgot the hatred he had for all black things and cocked his head towards the north. Thank heavens! He moved round the bush to get the torches and the packet of diamonds out of the tool boxes.
A mile away in the low bush the big iron ear of the sound-detector had already stopped searching, and the operator, who had been softly calling the range to the group of three men beside the army truck, now said : “Thirty miles. Speed one-twenty. Height nine hundred.”
Bond glanced at his watch. “Looks as if midnight at full moon is the rendezvous,” he said. “And he’ll be about ten minutes late.”
“Looks like it, Sir,” said the officer from the Freetown Garrison Force who was standing next to him. He turned to the third man. “Corporal. Make sure there’s no metal showing through the camouflage net. This moon’ll pick up anything.”
The truck was standing under cover of the low bush on a dirt track that ran across the plain in the direction of the village of Telebadou in French Guiana. That night, they had started off from the hills as soon as the locator had picked up the sound of the dentist’s motor cycle on the parallel track. They had driven without lights, and they had stopped as soon as the motor cycle had stopped and there was no longer protection from the noise of its engine. They had put a camouflage net over the truck and over the locator and over the bulge of the Bofors mounted beside it. Then they had waited, not knowing what to expect at the dentist’s rendezvous-another motor cycle, a rider on a horse, a jeep, an aeroplane?
Now they could hear the distant clatter in the sky. Bond gave a short laugh. “Helicopter,” he said. “Nothing else makes that racket. Get ready to take the net down when he lands. We may have to give him a warning shot. Is the loud-hailer switched on?”
“Yes, Sir,” said the Corporal at the locator. “And he’s coming in quick. You should be able to see him in a minute. See those lights just come on, Sir? Must be the landing ground.”
Bond glanced at the four thin shafts of light, and then he looked up again into the great African sky.
So here came the last of them, the last of the gang, and yet the first. The man he’d taken a look at in Hatton Garden. The first of the Spangled Mob, the gang that had rated so high in Washington. The only one, except the harmless, rather likeable, Shady Tree, Bond had not yet had to kill-or, he thought of the Pink Garter Saloon and the two men from Detroit, almost kill. Not that he had wanted to kill these people. The job M had given him had only been to find out about them. But, one by one, they had tried to kill him and his friends. Violence had been their first resort, not their last. Violence and cruelty were their only weapons. The two men in the Chevrolet in Las Vegas who had shot at him and hit Ernie Cureo. The two men in the Jaguar who had bludgeoned Ernie and had been the first to draw guns when it came to the fight. Seraffimo Spang, who had started to torture him to death and had then tried to shoot them or smash them down on the railway track. Wint and Kidd, who had given Tingaling Bell the treatment, and then Bond, and then Tiffany Case. And, of the seven, he had killed five-not because he liked it, but because somebody had had to. And he had had luck and three good friends, Felix and Ernie and Tiffany. And the bad men had died.
And now here came the last of the bad men, the man who had ordered his death, and Tiffany’s, the man who, according to M, had built up the traffic in diamonds, organized the pipeline and run it ruthlessly and efficiently through the years.
On the telephone to Boscombe Down, M had been brief and his voice had had an edge to it. He had reached Bond on the Air Ministry line a few minutes before the Canberra was due to take off for Freetown. Bond had taken the call in the Station Commander’s office, with the scream of the Canberra testing her jets in the background.