The Secatur was entering the passage through the reef, about eighty yards away, he guessed. The paravane was skimming slowly along almost at right angles to her. Another thirty yards and the red torpedo would be crossing the broken water over the reef. A further thirty yards behind, they were riding slowly across the surface of the bay.
Sixty yards to go to the reef.
Bond twisted his body and Solitaire came up, gasping.
Still they moved slowly along through the water.
Five yards, ten, fifteen, twenty.
Only forty yards to go before they hit the coral.
The Secatur would be just through. Bond gathered his breath. It must be past six now. What had happened to the blasted mine? Bond thought a quick fervent prayer. God save us, he said into the water.
Suddenly he felt the rope tighten under his arms.
‘Breathe, Solitaire, breathe,’ he shouted as they got under way and the water started to hiss past them.
Now they were flying over the sea towards the crouching reef.
There was a slight check. Bond guessed that the paravane had fouled a niggerhead or a piece of surface coral. Then their bodies hurtled on again in their deadly embrace.
Thirty yards to go, twenty, ten.
Jesus Christ, thought Bond. We’re for it. He braced his muscles to take the crashing, searing pain, edged Solitaire further above him to protect her from the worst of it.
Suddenly the breath whistled out of his body and a giant fist thumped him into Solitaire so that she rose right out of the sea above him and then fell back. A split second later lightning flashed across the sky and there was the thunder of an explosion.
They stopped dead in the water and Bond felt the weight of the slack rope pulling them under.
His legs sank down beneath his stunned body and water rushed into his mouth.
It was this that brought him back to consciousness. His legs pounded under him and brought their mouths to the surface. The girl was a dead weight in his arms. He trod water desperately and looked round him, holding Solitaire’s lolling head on his shoulder above the surface.
The first thing he saw was the swirling waters of the reef not five yards away. Without its protection they would both have been crushed by the shock-wave of the explosion. He felt the tug and eddy of its currents round his legs. He backed desperately towards it, catching gulps of air when he could. His chest was bursting with the strain and he saw the sky through a red film. The rope dragged him down and the girl’s hair filled his mouth and tried to choke him.
Suddenly he felt the sharp scrape of the coral against the back of his legs. He kicked and felt frantically with his feet for a foothold, flaying the skin off with every movement.
He hardly felt the pain.
Now his back was being scraped and his arms. He floundered clumsily, his lungs burning in his chest. Then there was a bed of needles under his feet. He put all his weight on it, leaning back against the strong eddies that tried to dislodge him. His feet held and there was rock at his back. He leant back panting, blood streaming up around him in the water, holding the girl’s cold, scarcely breathing body against him.
For a minute he rested, blessedly, his eyes shut and the blood pounding through his limbs, coughing painfully, waiting for his senses to focus again. His first thought was for the blood in the water around him. But he guessed the big fish would not venture into the reef. Anyway there was nothing he could do about it.
Then he looked out to sea.
There was no sign of the Secatur.
High up in the still sky there was a mushroom of smoke, beginning to trail, with the Doctor’s Wind, in towards the land.
There were things strewn all over the water and a few heads bobbing up and down and the whole sea was glinting with the white stomachs of fish stunned or killed by the explosion. There was a strong smell of explosive in the air. On the fringe of the debris, the red paravane lay quietly, hull down, anchored by the cable whose other end must lie somewhere on the bottom. Fountains of bubbles were erupting on the glassy surface of the sea.