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sad.
Gala came to herself in a large top-floor room that seemed to be full of
machinery. She was tied very securely to a chair and apart from the searing
pain in her head she could feel that her lips and cheek were bruised and
swollen.
Heavy curtains were drawn across the window and there was a musty smell in the
room as if it was rarely used. There was dust on the few pieces of
conventional furniture and only the chromium and ebonite dials on the machines
looked clean and new. She thought that she was probably in hospital. She
closed her eyes and wondered. It was not long before she remembered.
She spent several minutes controlling herself and then she opened her eyes
again.
Drax, his back to her, was watching the dials on a machine that looked like a
very large radio set. There were three more similar machines in her line of
sight and from one of them a thin steel aerial reached up to a rough hole that
had been cut for it in the plaster of the ceiling. The room was brightly lit
by several tall standard lamps, each of which held a naked high wattage bulb.
To her left there was a noise of tinkering and by swivelling her half-closed
eyes in their sockets, which made the pain in her head much worse, she saw the
figure of Krebs bent over an electric generator on the floor. Beside it there
was a small petrol engine and it was this that was giving trouble. Every now
and then Krebs would grasp the starting-handle and crank it hard and a feeble
stutter would come from the engine before he went back to his tinkering.
"You dam' fool," said Drax in German, "hurry up. I've got to go and see those
bloody oafs at the Ministry."
"At once, mein Kapitän
," said Krebs dutifully. He seized the handle again. This time after two or
three coughs the engine started up and began to purr.
"It won't make too much noise?" asked Drax.
"No, mein Kapitän
. The room has been soundproofed," answered Krebs. "Dr Walter assures me that
nothing will be heard outside."
Gala closed her eyes and decided that her only hope was to feign unconscious
for as long as possible. Did they intend to kill her? Here in this room? And
what was all this machinery? It looked like wireless, or perhaps radar. That
curved glass screen above Drax's head that had given an occasional flicker as
Drax fiddled with the knobs below the dials.
Slowly her mind started to work again. Why, for instance, was Drax suddenly
talking perfect German? And why did Krebs address him as
Herr Kapitän
? And the figures in the black book. Why did they nearly kill her because she
had seen them?
What did they mean?
Ninety degrees, ninety degrees.
Lazily her mind turned the problem over.
Ninety degrees difference. Supposing her figures had been right all the time
for the target eighty miles away in the North
Sea. Just supposing she had been right. Then she wouldn't have been aiming the
rocket into the middle of France after all. But
Drax's figures. Ninety degrees to the left of her North Sea target? Somewhere
in England presumably. Eighty miles from
Dover. Yes, of course. That was it. Drax's figures. The firing plan in the
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little black book. They would drop the Moonraker just about in the middle of
London.
But on London! On London!!
So one's heart really does go into one's throat. How extraordinary. Such a
commonplace and yet there it is and it really does almost stop one breathing.
And now, let me see, so this is a radar homing device. How ingenious. The same
as there would be on the raft in the North
Sea. This would bring the rocket down within a hundred yards of Buckingham
Palace. But would that matter with a warhead full of instruments?
It was probably the cruelty of Drax's blow across her face that settled it,
but suddenly she knew that somehow it would be a real warhead, an atomic
warhead, and that Drax was an enemy of England and that tomorrow at noon he
was going to destroy
46
London.
Gala made a last effort to understand.
Through this ceiling, through this chair, into the ground, The thin needle of
the rocket. Dropping fast as light out of a clear sky. The crowds in the
streets. The Palace. The nursemaids in the park. The birds in the trees. The
great bloom of flame a mile wide. And then the mushroom cloud. And nothing
left. Nothing. Nothing, Nothing.
"No. Oh, no
!"
But the scream was only in her mind and Gala, her body a twisted black potato
crisp amongst a million others, had already fainted.
CHAPTER XIX
MISSING PERSON
BOND SAT at his favourite restaurant table in London, the right-hand corner
table for two on the first floor, and watched the people and the traffic in
Piccadilly and down the Haymarket.
It was 7.45 and his second Vodka dry Martini with a large slice of lemon peel
had just been brought to him by Baker, the head waiter. He sipped it,
wondering idly why Gala was late. It was not like her. She was the sort of
girl who would telephone if she had been kept at the Yard. Vallance, whom he
had visited at five, had said that Gala was due with him at six.
Vallance had been very anxious to see her. He was a worried man and when Bond
reported briefly on the security of the
Moonraker, Vallance seemed to be listening with only half his mind.
It appeared that all that day there had been heavy selling of sterling. It had
started in Tangier and quickly spread to Zurich and New York. The pound had
been fluctuating wildly in the money markets of the world and the arbitrage
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