Captain Tighpants presents
Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in
DEAD RINGER
This is a work of fiction, using characters created by Ian Fleming. The author recognises that
he has no right to claim these characters as his own - I'm just borrowing them for a while.
Chapter I -- Dear One
Somewhere off the coast of Cape Verde, West Africa
In life, it is said that two things are certain: death, and taxes.
In the intelligence community, it is much the same. Death is an inevitability - indeed, it is often a means to an end, or in some cases, the end itself - but the difference between life and intelligence work is in the second certainty: not taxes, but bad intelligence. Which is precisely how James Bond came to find himself five miles from where he was supposed to be, nearly thirty miles from where intelligence said he should have been, and God alone knew how far he was from land.
He surfaced in the roiling sea, letting the momentum of the enormous waves carry him about while he searched the horizon. He could not rightly assign blame for the mistake, partially because he did not know who to blame, and partially because he did not have the time to go blaming anyone for his current predicament, but mostly because the culprit was Mother Nature herself, unleashing a minor fury on the Atlantic Ocean. In their hurry to plan an operation with a limited window of opportunity, someone had forgotten to check the weather, and now Bond found himself at the mercy of the currents and large waves around him. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a faint glow that he knew to be his target. By his rough estimation, the mishap with the weather had put him further out to sea than he had originally planned, and so the glow could only be one thing. Still, best to be sure. He let the next wave lift him up, and sure enough, the glow took shape: a boat. Satisfied that his target had been confirmed, Bond tucked himself over and dived back down under the water before the wave could break. He started swimming towards the boat, letting each wave push him further and further in the general direction and adjusting his position between the waves. It took longer than if he had swum straight to it, but it used less energy, and Bond's instincts told him that he was in for a long night. Besides, the boat was not going anywhere. The fool at the helm had decided to fight the waves rather than ride the storm out and circle back around to his destination.
Her name was the MV Milaya, a Russian word meaning "dear one". She was a small cruise liner; there the likes of the Queen Mary II could hold over three thousand passengers, the Milaya barely held five hundred. Registered in Bulgaria and flying the flag of Estonia, she was twenty-five years old, and her age was starting to show. She was certainly not the kind of pleasure liner that people wanted to board. Indeed, as far as MI6 could tell, she had never made landfall and taken on passengers in at least a decade and possibly more. Closer examination had found a confusing mire of shell companies and dummy corporations that made it almost impossible to determine who actually owned the cruise ship.
The Milaya had first appeared on MI6's radar after she emerged from the Baltic Sea. Most commecial shipping liners went through the Kiel Canal, starting at the German city of Kiel and ending at Brunsbuttel, effectively bypassing Denmark before heading for the English Channel. The Milaya on the other hand, had swung north through the Kattegat before turning into the Skagerrak, the two straits that separated Denmark from Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia. She had then taken a long and involved loop, circling up around Scotland before disappearing entirely. MI6 had scoured the North Sea looking for her, but she had disappeared entirely before reappearing weeks later somewhere off the coast of Morocco. After contacting a well-placed source in St. Petersburg, MI6 had discovered that the Milaya's intended destination was Nicosia in Cyprus, which demanded the question of why the crew had suddenly decided to head south. With a satellite trained on the cruise liner full-time, MI6 had launched an investigation and James Bond had been dispatched, flying out from Gibraltar before parachuting onto the site.
Another wave picked Bond up as he approached the cruise liner, and he was about to slip under when he spotted a second set of lights beyond the Milaya. Despite the captain's dogged refusal to follow conventional shipping lanes, the storm had blown her into one. Bond slipped under the wave just in time to avoid being carried into the side of the Milaya. He surfaced again and began franctically searching for a ladder to avoid being pulled under by the ship as she passed by. It took him a long moment to realise that the boat was completely stationary; the captain had given up on his futile attempts to fight the swell, and instead had decided to kill the engines and endure the storm. The lack of a ladder was proving difficult, but Bond hardly expected the crew to welcome him with open arms. Spotting the lifeboats hanging from the side, an idea began to form in his mind. He delved into the folds of his wetsuit and pulled out his weapon, a Walther P99 that had been refined to protect it against the elements. Waiting for the next rumble of thunder, Bond took aim at the pulley mechanism that cotnrolled the descent of the lifeboat and fired in sync with the clap of thunder. Nothing happened; he was too wide. Adjusting his aim, he threw caution to the wind and fired again. The pulley sparked as the bullet struck it, and the bow of the lifeboat fell into the ocean at an angle, with the aft still suspended above the water. Bond scrambled over the side of the boat and climbed up to the aft, grasping the cable still anchored to it in his hands. Glad that he had taken his time in approaching the Milaya, he started pulling himself up, hand over hand, to scale the side of the boat. He paused just before the deck railing and scanned the space above him to ensure that nobody was watching, before hositing himself up and over the railing and onto the deck.
Standing on the rain-sllick deck, his weapon cocked and ready, Bond paused as a flash of lighting lit up the heavens and a single thought penetrated his mind.
What fresh hell is this?