James Bond - Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond by Ian Fleming
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To J.F.C.B.
and E.L.C.
and to the memory of
W.W.Jr., at Saratoga. 1954 and
1
THE PIPELINE OPENS
WITH its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler's arms the big
pandinus
scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole un-
der the rock.
There was a small patch of hard, flat earth outside the hole and the scorpi-
on stood in the centre of this on the tips of its four pairs of legs, its nerves
and muscles braced for a quick retreat and its senses questing for the minute
vibrations which would decide its next move.
The moonlight, glittering down through the great thorn bush, threw sap-
phire highlights off the hard, black polish of the six-inch body and glinted
palely on the moist white sting which protruded from the last segment of
the tail, now curved over parallel with the scorpion's flat back.
Slowly the sting slid home into its sheath and the nerves in the poison sac
at its base relaxed. The scorpion had decided. Greed had won over fear.
Twelve inches away, at the bottom of a sharp slope of sand, the small bee-
tle was concerned only with trudging on towards better pastures than he had
found under the thorn bush, and the swift rush of the scorpion down the
slope gave him no1 time to open his wings. The beetle's legs waved in
protest as the sharp claw snapped round his body, and then the sting lanced
into him from over the scorpion's head and immediately he was dead.
After it had killed the beetle the scorpion stood motionless for nearly five
minutes. During this time it identified the nature of its prey and again tested
the ground and the air for hostile vibrations. Reassured, its fighting claw
withdrew from the half-severed beetle and its two small feeding pincers
reached out and into the beetle's flesh. Then for an hour, and with extreme
fastidiousness, the scorpion ate its victim.
The great thorn bush under which the scorpion killed the beetle was quite
a landmark in the wide expanse of rolling veld some forty miles south of
Kissidougou in the south-western corner of French Guinea. On all horizons
there were hills and jungle, but here, over twenty square miles, there was
flat rocky ground which was almost desert and amongst the tropical scrub
only this one thorn bush, perhaps because there was water deep beneath its
roots, had grown to the height of a house and could be picked out from
many miles away.
The bush grew more or less at the junction of three African states. It was
in French Guinea but only about ten miles north of the northernmost tip of
Liberia and five miles east of the frontier of Sierra Leone. Across this fron-
tier are the great diamond mines around Sefadu. These are the property of
Sierra International, which is part of the powerful mining empire of Afric
International, which in turn is a rich capital asset of the British Common-
wealth.
An hour earlier in its hole among the roots of the great thorn bush the
scorpion had been alerted by two sets of vibrations. First there had been the
tiny scraping of the beetle's movements, and these belonged to the vibra-
tions which the scorpion immediately recognized and diagnosed. Then there
had been a series of incomprehensible thuds round the bush followed by a
final heavy quake which had caved in part of the scorpion's hole. These
were followed by a soft rhythmic trembling of the ground which was so
regular that it soon became a background vibration of no urgency. After a
pause the tiny scraping of the beetle had continued, and it was greed for the
beetle that, after a day of sheltering from its deadliest enemy, the sun, final-
ly got the upper hand against the scorpion's memory of the other noises and
impelled it out of its lair into the filtering moonlight.
And now, as it slowly sucked the morsels of beetle-flesh off its feeding
pincers, the signal for the scorpion's own death sounded from far away on
the eastern horizon, audible to a human, but made up of vibrations which
were far outside the range of the scorpion's sensory system.
And, a few feet away, a heavy, blunt hand, with bitten finger nails, softly
raised a jagged piece of rock.
There was no noise, but the scorpion felt a tiny movement in the air above
it. At once its fighting claws were up and groping and its sting was erect in
the rigid tail, its near-sighted eyes staring up for a sight of the enemy.
The heavy stone came down.
"Black bastard."
The man watched as the broken insect whipped in its death agony.
The man yawned. He got to his knees in the sandy depression against the
trunk of the bush where he had been sitting for nearly two hours and, his
arms bent protectingly over his head, scrambled out into the open.
The noise of the engine which the man had been waiting for, and which
had signed the scorpion's death warrant, was louder. As the man stood and
stared up the path of the moon, he could just see a clumsy black shape com-
ing fast towards him out of the east and for a moment the moonlight glinted
on whirling rotor blades.
The man rubbed his hands down the sides of his dirty khaki shorts and
moved quickly round the bush to where the rear wheel of a battered motor-
cycle protruded from its hiding place. Below the pillion, on either side,
there were leather toolboxes. From one of these he extracted a small heavy
package which he stowed inside his open shirt against the skin. From the
other he took four cheap electric torches and went off with them to where,
fifty yards from the big thorn bush, there was a clear patch of flat ground
about the size of a tennis court. At three corners of the landing ground he
screwed the butt end of a torch into the ground and switched it on. Then,
the last torch alight in his hand, he took up his position at the fourth corner
and waited.
The helicopter was moving slowly towards him, not more than a hundred
feet from the ground, the big rotor blades idling. It looked like a huge, bad-
ly-constructed insect. To the man on the ground it seemed, as usual, to be
making too much noise.
The helicopter paused, pitching slightly, directly over his Jiead. An arm
came out of the cockpit and a torch flashed at him. It flashed dot-dash, the
morse for A.
The man on the ground flashed back a B and a C. He stuck the fourth
torch into the ground and moved away, shielding his eyes against the com-
ing whirl of dust. Above him the pitch of the rotor blades flattened imper-
ceptibly and the helicopter settled smoothly into the space between the four
torches. The clatter of the engine stopped with a final cough, the tail rotor
spun briefly in neutral, and the main rotor blades completed a few awkward
revolutions and then drooped to a halt.
In the echoing silence, a cricket started to zing in the thorn bush, and
somewhere near at hand there was the anxious chirrup of a nightbird.
After a pause to let the dust settle, the pilot banged open the door of the
cockpit, pushed out a small aluminium ladder and climbed stiffly to the
ground. He waited beside his machine while the other man walked round
the four corners of the landing ground picking up and dowsing the torches.
The pilot was half an hour late at the rendezvous and he was bored at the
prospect of listening to the other man's inevitable complaint. He despised all
Afrikaners. This one in particular. To a Reichs-deutscher -and to a Luft-
waffe pilot who had fought under Galland in defence of the Reich they
were a bastard race, sly, stupid and ill-bred. Of course this brute had a
tricky job, but it was nothing to navigating a helicopter five hundred miles
over the jungle in the middle of the night, and then taking it back again.
As the other man came up, the pilot half raised his hand in greeting. "Ev-
erything all right?"
"I hope so. But you're late again. I shall only just make it through the
frontier by first light."
"Magneto trouble. We all have our worries. Thank God there are only
thirteen full moons a year. Well, if you've got the stuff let's have it and
we'll tank her up and I'll be off.',.'
Without speaking, the man from the diamond mines reached into his shirt
and handed over the neat, heavy packet.
The pilot took it. It was damp with the sweat from the smuggler's ribs.
The pilot dropped it into a side pocket of his trim bush shirt. He put his
hand behind him, and wiped his fingers on the seat of his shorts.
"Good," he said. He turned towards his machine.
"Just a moment," said the diamond smuggler. There was a sullen note in
his voice.
The pilot turned back and faced him. He thought: it's the voice of a ser-
vant who has screwed himself up to complain about his food. "Ja. What is
it?"
"Things are getting too hot. At the mines. I don't like it at all. There's
been a big intelligence man down from London. You've read about him.
This man Sillitoe. They say he's been hired by the Diamond Corporation.
There've been a lot of new regulations and all punishments have been dou-
bled. It's frightened out some of my smaller men. I had to be ruthless and,
well, one of them somehow fell into the crusher. That tightened things up a
bit. But I've had to pay more. An extra ten per cent. And they're still not
satisfied. One of these days those security people are going to get one of my
middlemen. And you know these black swine. They can't stand a real beat-
ing." He looked swiftly into the pilot's eyes and then away again. "For the
matter of that I doubt if anyone could stand the sjambok. Not even me."
"So?" said the pilot. He paused. "Do you want me to pass this threat back
to ABC?"
"I'm not threatening anyone," said the other man hastily. "I just want
them to know that it's getting tough. They must know it themselves. They
must know about this man Sillitoe. And look what the Chairman said in our
annual report. He said that our mines were losing more than two million
pounds a year through smuggling and IDE and that it was up to the govern-
ment to stop it. And what does that mean? It means 'stop me'!"
"And me," said the pilot mildly. "So what do you want? More money?"
"Yes," said the other man stubbornly. "I want a bigger cut. Twenty per
cent more or I'll have to quit." He tried to read some sympathy in the pilot's
face.
"All right," said the pilot indifferently. "I'll pass the message on to Dakar,
and if they're interested I expect they'll send it on to London. But it's noth-
ing to do with me, and if I were you." the pilot unbent for the first time, "I
wouldn't put too much pressure on these people. They can be much tougher
than this Sillitoe, or the Company, or any government I've ever heard of.
On just this end of the pipeline, three men have died in the last twelve
months. One for being yellow. Two for stealing from the packet. And you
know it. That was a nasty accident your predecessor had, wasn't it? Funny
place to keep gelignite. Under his bed. Unlike him. He was always so care-
ful about everything."
For a moment they stood and looked at each other in the moonlight. The
diamond smuggler shrugged his shoulders. "All right," he said. "Just tell
them I'm hard up and need more money to pass down the line. They'll un-
derstand that, and if they've got any sense they'll add another ten per cent
on for me. If not…" He left the sentence unfinished and moved towards the
helicopter. "Come on. I'll give you a hand with the gas."
Ten minutes later the pilot climbed up into the cockpit and pulled the lad-
der in after him. Before he shut the door he raised a hand. "So long," he
said. "See you in a month."
The man on the ground suddenly felt lonely. "
Totsiens
," he said with a
wave of the hand that was almost the wave of a lover. "
Alles van die beste
."
He stood back and held a hand up to his eyes against the dust.
The pilot settled into his seat and fastened the seat-belt, feeling for the
rudder pedals with his feet. He made sure that the wheel brakes were on,
pushed the pitch control lever right down, turned on the fuel and pressed
the starter. Satisfied with the beat of the engine, he released the rotor brake
and softly twisted the throttle on the pitch control. Outside the cabin win-
dows the long rotor blades slowly swung by and the pilot glanced astern at
the whirring tail rotor. He settled himself back and watched the rotor speed
indicator creep up to 200 revolutions a minute. When the needle was just
over the 200, he released the wheel brakes and pulled up slowly and firmly
on the pitch lever. Above him the blades of the rotor tilted and bit deeper
into the air. More throttle, and the machine slowly rose clattering towards
the sky until, at about 100 feet, the pilot simultaneously gave it left rudder
and pushed forward the joystick between his knees.
The helicopter swung towards the east and, gathering height and speed,
roared away back up the path of the moon.
The man on the ground watched it go, and with it the £100,000 worth of
diamonds his men had filched from the diggings during the past month and
had casually held out on their pink tongues as he stood beside the dentist's
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