The train trundled through Brandenburg Station. Now there were scores of bodies – men, women, children, soldiers. The platform was scribbled with them, faces upwards to the roof, down in the dust, cradled sideways. Bond searched for movement, for an inquisitive eye, for a twitching hand. Nothing! Wait! What was that? Thinly through the closed window there came a soft, mewing wail. Three perambulators stood against the ticket office, the mothers collapsed beside them. Of course! The babies in the perambulators would have drunk milk, not the deadly water.
Oddjob got to his feet. So did the whole of Goldfinger’s team. The faces of the Koreans were indifferent, unchanged, only their eyes flickered constantly like nervous animals. The
Germans were pale, grim. Nobody looked at anyone else. Silently they filed towards the exit and lined up, waiting.
Tilly Masterton touched Bond’s sleeve. Her voice trembled. ‘Are you sure they’re only asleep? I thought I saw some sort of… sort of froth on some of the lips.’
Bond had seen the same thing. The froth had been pink. He said, ‘I expect some of them were eating sweets or something when they fell asleep. You know what these Americans are – always chewing something.’ He softly mouthed the next words. ‘Stay away from me. There may be shooting.’ He looked hard at her to see she understood.
She nodded dumbly, not looking at him. She whispered out of the corner of her mouth, ‘I’m going to get near Pussy. She’ll look after me.’
Bond gave her a smile and said ‘Good’, encouragingly.
The train clicked slowly over some points and slid to rest. There came one blast of the diesel’s windhorn. The doors swung open and the different groups piled out on to the platform of the Bullion Depository siding.
Now everything went with military precision. The various squads formed up in their battle order-first an assault group widi sub-machine guns, then the stretcher-bearers to get the guard and other personnel out of the vault (surely an unnecessary refinement now, thought Bond) then Goldfinger’s demolition team – ten men with their bulky tarpaulin-covered package – then a mixed group of spare drivers and traffic-control men, then the group of nurses, now all armed with pistols, who were to stay in the background with a heavily armed reserve group that was to deal with any unexpected interference from anybody who, as Goldfinger had put it, ‘might wake up’.
Bond and the girl had been included in the Command Group which consisted of Goldfinger, Oddjob and the five gang leaders. They were to be stationed on the flat roofs of the two diesel locomotives which now stood, as planned, beyond the siding buildings and in full view of •the objective and its approaches. Bond and the girl were to handle the maps, the timetables and the stop-watch, and Bond was to watch out for fumbles and delays and bring them at once to Goldfinger’s attention to be rectified by walkie-talkie with die squad leaders. When the bomb was due to be fired, they would take shelter behind the diesels.
There came a double blast from the windhorn and, as Bond and the girl climbed to their position on the roof of the first diesel, the assault squad, followed by the other sections, doubled across the twenty yards of open ground between the railway and Bullion Boulevard. Bond edged as close as he could to Goldfinger. Goldfinger had binoculars to his eyes. His mouth was close to the microphone strapped to his chest. But Oddjob stood between them, a solid mountain of flesh, and his eyes, uninterested in the drama of the assault, never flickered from Bond and the girl.
Bond, under cover of scanning his plastic map-case and keeping an eye on the stop-watch, measured inches and angles. He glanced at the next-door group of the four men and the woman. They were gazing, in frozen attention, at the scene before them. Now Jack Strap said excitedly, ‘They’re through the first gates.’ Bond, putting half his mind to work on his own plans, took a quick look at the battlefield.
It was an extraordinary scene. In the centre stood the huge squat mausoleum, the sun glinting off the polished granite of its walls. Outside the big open field in which it stood, the roads – the Dixie Highway, Vine Grove and Bullion Boulevard – were lined with trucks and transporters two deep with the recognition flags of the gangs flying from the first and last vehicle of each convoy. Their drivers lay piled up outside the shelter of the surrounding guard wall of the vault while, through the main gate, poured the tidy disciplined squads from the train. Outside this world of movement there was absolute stillness and silence as if the rest of America was holding its breath at the committal of this gigantic crime. And outside lay the bodies of the soldiers, sprawling where they had fallen – the sentries by their pill boxes, still clutching their automatic pistols, and, inside the protecting wall, two ragged squads of soldiers in battledress. They lay in vague, untidy heaps, some bodies athwart or on top of their neighbours. Outside, between Bullion Boulevard and the main gate, two armoured cars had crashed into each other and now stood locked, their heavy machine guns pointing, one at the ground and the other at the sky. A driver’s body sprawled out of the turret of one of the vehicles.