Down to the beginning of the rocks, now lapped by the incoming tide, sprawled the debris of the cliff face, an avalanche of chalk blocks and shapes. The white dust of its collapse covered nearly an acre. Above it a jagged rent had appeared in the cliff and a wedge of blue sky had been bitten out of the distant top where before the line of the horizon had been almost straight. There were no longer any seabirds near them and Bond guessed that the smell of disaster would keep them away from the place for days.
The nearness of their bodies to the cliff was what had saved them, that and the slight protection of the overhang below which the sea had bitten into the base of the cliff. They had been buried by the deluge of smaller stuff. The heavier chunks, any one of which would have crushed them, had fallen outwards, the nearest missing them by a few feet. And their nearness to the cliff was the reason for Bond’s right arm having been comparatively free so that they had been able to burrow out of the mound before they were stifled. Bond realized that if some reflex had not hurled him on top of Gala at the moment of the avalanche they would now both be dead.
He felt her hand on his shoulder. Without looking at her he put his arm round her waist and together they got down to the blessed sea and let their bodies fall weakly, thankfully into the shallows.
Ten minutes later it was two comparatively human beings who walked back up the sand to the rocks where their clothes lay, a few yards away from the cliff-fall. They were both completely naked. The rags of their underclothing lay somewhere under the pile of chalk dust, torn off in their struggle to escape. But, like survivors from a ship-wreck, their nakedness meant nothing. Washed clean of the cloying gritty chalk dust and with their hair and mouths scoured with the salt water, they felt weak and bedraggled, but by the time they had got their clothes on and had shared Gala’s comb there was little to show what they had been through.
They sat with their backs to a rock and Bond lit a first delicious cigarette, drinking the smoke deeply into his lungs and expelling it slowly through his nostrils. When Gala had done the best she could with her powder and lipstick he lit a cigarette for her and, as he handed it to her, for the first time they looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Then they sat and looked silently out to sea, at the golden panorama that was the same and yet entirely new. Bond broke the silence. “Well, by God,” he said. “That was close.”
“I still don’t know what happened,” said Gala. “Except that you saved my life.” She put her hand on his and then took it away.
“If you hadn’t been there I should be dead,” said Bond. “If I’d stayed where I was-” He shrugged his shoulders. Then he turned and looked at her. “I suppose you realize,” he said flatly, “that someone pushed the cliff down on us?” She looked back at him with wide eyes. “If we searched around in all that,” he gestured towards the avalanche of chalk, “we would find the marks of two or three drill-holes and traces of dynamite. I saw the smoke and I heard the bang of the explosion a split second before the cliff came down. And so did the gulls,” he added.
“And what’s more,” continued Bond after a pause, “it can’t have been only Krebs. It was done in full view of the site. And it was done by several people, well organized, with spies on us from the moment we went down the cliff path to the beach.”
There was comprehension in Gala’s eyes and a flash of fear. “What are we to do?” she asked anxiously. “What’s it all about?”
“They want us dead,” said Bond calmly. “So we have to stay alive. As to what it’s all about, we’ll just have to find that out.
“You see,” he went on, “I’m afraid even Vallance isn’t going to be much help. When they made up their minds we were properly buried, they’ll have got away from the top of the cliff as fast as they could. They’d know that even if someone saw the cliff-fall, or heard it, they wouldn’t get very excited. There are twenty miles of these cliffs and not many people come here until the summer. If the coastguards heard it they may have made a note in the log. But in the spring I expect they get plenty of falls. The winter frosts thaw out in cracks that may be hundreds of years old. So our friends would wait until we didn’t turn up tonight and then get the police and coastguards to search for us. They’d keep quiet until the high tide had made porridge out of a good deal of this.” He gestured towards the shambles of fallen chalk. “The whole scheme is admirable. And even if Vallance believes us, there’s not enough evidence to make the Prime Minister interfere with the Moonraker. The damn thing’s so infernally important. All the world’s waiting to see if it’ll work or not. And anyway, what’s our story? What the hell’s it all about? Some of those bloody Germans up there seem to want us dead before Friday. But what for?” He paused. “It’s up to us, Gala. It’s a lousy business but we’ve simply got to solve it ourselves.”