“But it’s a huge plane. It must need special runways and so on. It must have come down somewhere. You can’t hide a plane of that size.”
“Just so. All these things are obvious. By midnight last night the R.A.F. had checked with every single airport, every one in the world that could have taken it. Negative. But the C.A.S. says of course it could be crash-landed in the Sahara, for instance, or on some other desert, or in the sea, in shallow water.”
“Wouldn’t that explode the bombs?”
“No. They’re absolutely safe until they’re armed. Apparently even a direct drop, like that one from the B-47 over North Carolina in 1958, would only explode the T.N.T. trigger to the thing. Not the plutonium.”
“How are these SPECTRE people going to explode them, then?”
M spread his hands. “They explained all this at the War Cabinet meeting. I don’t understand it all, but apparently an atomic bomb looks just like any other bomb. The way it works is that the nose is full of ordinary T.N.T. with the plutonium in the tail. Between the two there’s a hole into which you screw some sort of a detonator, a kind of plug. When the bomb hits, the T.N.T. ignites the detonator and the detonator sets off the plutonium.”
“So these people would have to drop the bomb to set it off?” Apparently not. They would need a man with good physics knowledge who understood the thing, but then all he’d have to do would be to unscrew the nose cone on the bomb—the ordinary detonator that sets off the T.N.T.—and fix on some kind of time fuse that would ignite the T.N.T. without it being dropped. That would set the thing off. And it’s not a very bulky affair. You could get the whole thing into something only about twice the size of a big golf bag. Very heavy, of course. But you could put it into the back of a big car, for instance, and just run the car into a town and leave it parked with the time fuse switched on. Give yourself a couple of hours’ start to get out of range—at least a hundred miles away—and that would be that.”
Bond reached in his pocket for another cigarette. It couldn’t be, yet it was so. Just what his Service and all the other intelligence services in the world had been expecting to happen. The anonymous little man in the raincoat with a heavy suitcase—or golf bag, if you like. The left luggage office, the parked car, the clump of bushes in a park in the center of a big town. And there was no answer to it. In a few years’ time, if the experts were right, there would be even less answer to it. Every tin-pot little nation would be making atomic bombs in their backyards, so to speak. Apparently there was no secret now about the things. It had only been the prototypes that had been difficult—like the first gunpowder weapons for instance, or machine guns or tanks. Today these were everybody’s bows and arrows. Tomorrow, or the day after, the bows and arrows would be atomic bombs. And this was the first blackmail case. Unless SPECTRE was stopped, the word would get round and soon every criminal scientist with a chemical set and some scrap iron would be doing it. If they couldn’t be stopped in time there would be nothing for it but to pay up. Bond said so.
“That’s about it,” commented M. “From every point of view, including politics, not that they matter all that much. But neither the P.M. nor the President would last five minutes if anything went wrong. But whether we pay or don’t pay, the consequences will be endless—and all bad. That’s why absolutely everything has got to be done to find these people and the plane and stop the thing in time. The P.M. and the President are entirely agreed. Every intelligence man all over the world who’s on our side is being put on to this operation—Operation Thunderball they’re calling it. Planes, ships, submarines—and of course money’s no object. We can have everything, whenever we want it. The Cabinet have already set up a special staff and a war room. Every scrap of information will be fed into it. The Americans have done the same. Some kind of a leak can’t be helped. It’s being put about that all the panic, and it is panic, is because of the loss of the Vindicator—bombs included, whatever fuss that may cause politically. Only the letter will be absolutely secret. All the usual detective work—fingerprints, Brighton, writing paper—these’ll be looked after by Scotland Yard with the F.B.I., Interpol, and all the NATO intelligence organizations, helping where they can. Only a segment of the paper and the typing will be used—a few innocent words. This will all be quite separate from the search for the plane. That’ll be handled as a top espionage matter. No one should be able to connect the two investigations. M.I.5 will handle the background to all the crew members and the Italian observer. That will be a natural part of the search for the plane. As for the Service, we’ve teamed up with the C.I.A. to cover the world. Alien Dulles is putting every man he’s got onto it and so am I. Just sent out a General Call. Now all we can do is sit back and wait.”