Colonel Sun Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Kingsley Amis

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1 A Man in Sunglasses

  2 Into the Wood

  3 Aftermath

  4 Love from Paris

  5 Sun at Night

  6 The Shrine of Athene

  7 Not-So-Safe-House

  8 Council of War

  9 The Altair

  10 Dragon Island

  11 Death by Water

  12 General Incompetence

  13 The Small Window

  14 The Butcher of Kapoudzona

  15 ‘Walk, Mister Bond’

  16 The Temporary Captain

  17 In the Drink

  18 The Dragon’s Claws

  19 The Theory and Practice of Torture

  20 ‘Goodbye, James’

  21 A Man from Moscow

  Author’s Note

  About Ian Fleming

  Also by Ian Fleming

  Copyright

  About the Book

  First published in 1968, four years after Ian Fleming’s death, this was the first Bond ‘continuation’ novel, penned by one of Britain’s finest novelists, Kingsley Amis.

  ‘A man in my line of business shouldn’t work to a timetable’

  Lunch at Scott’s, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on his chief M – James Bond’s life has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency…until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and his house staff savagely murdered. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island where, stripped of all professional aids, Bond must avert a world-menacing conspiracy and face unarmed the monstrous devices of the glacial, merciless Colonel Sun.

  About the Author

  Robert Markham was the pseudonym of Kingsley Amis. Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer’s Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995.

  ALSO BY KINGSLEY AMIS

  Lucky Jim

  That Uncertain Feeling

  I Like It Here

  Take a Girl Like You

  One Fat Englishman

  The Anti-Death League

  I Want It Now

  The Green Man

  Girl, 20

  The Riverside Villas Murder

  Ending Up

  The Crime of the Century

  The Alteration

  Jake’s Thing

  Collected Short Stories

  Russian Hide-and-Seek

  Stanley and the Women

  The Old Devils

  Difficulties With Girls

  The Folks That Live on the Hill

  The Russian Girl

  Mr Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories

  You Can’t Do Both

  The Biographer’s Moustache

  Memoirs

  To the memory of

  IAN FLEMING

  INTRODUCTION

  I wrote this book, sidestepping out of my career as a straight novelist for the occasion, because I was asked to do so and because I found the project irresistible. When Ian Fleming died before his time in 1964, it was felt that James Bond was too popular a figure to be allowed to follow him. Who was around that might provide a passable successor to the Fleming canon?

  No doubt I seemed as likely a lad as most. My last novel under my own name had had bits of espionage in it. More to the point, I had published in 1965 what was intended as a light-hearted and sympathetic survey of the original thirteen volumes, The James Bond Dossier, most of it written before Fleming’s death and approved by him in all but three tiny details, which I corrected. And, as I said, I could not wait to try it.

  Quite soon I had the makings of a plot, though just as with my other novels I have never been able to remember what order they turned up in. But the matter of setting, of where, so important in all Bond’s adventures, must have arisen and been decided early on. He had never yet operated in mainland Greece, let alone the islands, any more than I had, but then I had an American mate, bilingual in Greek, who had already promised to show me everything from the Acropolis in Athens (and Dionysos’s restaurant overlooking it) to Rhodes across the strait from Turkey (and squid and ouzo on the waterfront).

  And so he did, and more. Before starting off, I already knew a good deal about the question why – why Bond must go to Greece. Well, the villainous Colonel Sun, on a mission from his adventure-minded masters, the Red Chinese, is on an Aegean island plotting a blow not only against the West in general and Greece in particular, but against Russia (so Bond gets a Russian girl assistant). Also, M is there, not by choice, and one good reason for his presence is my having noticed on the map that his house in Windsor Park is only a few miles by back roads from London Airport, so anybody planning to kidnap him and smuggle him out of the country …

  It took me two trips, of course, to Athens and Piraeus and past Cape Sounion to the Cyclades island group, Kea, Kithnos, Serifos, Sifnos, Paros, Naxos, Ios, among the last three of which I placed my invented island, Vrakonisi. The first trip was to pick up ideas, the second to get the details right, essential in any Bond novel. It was no trouble at all to find the best olives, the best shellfish, the best local wine, and the sun, the sea and the islands would have filled a dozen notebooks. We went in a fifty-foot converted fishing-boat called the Altair, the twin and namesake of the one in the book, and there was a certain amount to be said of that vessel and that experience. (Catch me trying it today, in those treacherous waters.)

  I eked out this kind of material with the secret-service jargon and supposed organizational background I had soaked in from my reading of Fleming and of certain factual pamphlets. There was one useful field I knew in detail and at first hand: some of the infantry weaponry of the Second World War. So in Colonel Sun a goodie shoots a baddie not with a contemporary repeating weapon but with a more accurate Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle, and the heroine wields a Thompson sub-machine gun, a piece I renewed acquaintance with when the real Altair turned out to have a working specimen in its locker – ‘in Greece, you never know,’ said the captain.

  But the James Bond of Dr No or Goldfinger would have needed far more in the way of technical expertise than I could supply. Amis-style Bond found himself attacking the enemy with hand-grenades or a hunting-knife, bolting sausages and fruit before the night assault, going in for the kill on his own two feet. No hovercraft, no helicopters, no rockets, and no double portions of Beluga caviare served in candlelit restaurants by white-jacketed waiters. He finds no use for the picklock and baby transmitter and the rest of the gadgets supplied by Q Branch on his departure. His own strength, determination and ingenuity are enough.

  The contrast is less with the original Bond, the real Bond of the Fleming novels, than with the Bond of the films, that rakish nonentity who drops yobbo-style throwaways out of the corner of his mouth before or after escaping by personal jet-pack or submersible car fitted with missile-launchers or (any moment) reactor-powered iceberg. The most ludicrous divergence yet is that between the book of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), about how a nice Canadian girl down on her luck is rescued from a couple of small-time hoods by a decent English copper called James Bond, and the film of that title (1977), which has a psychopath trying to start World War III by hijacking US an
d Russian submarines, and Bond being incredibly active in stopping him.

  Fleming’s Bond found plenty of time to be active (and more believably and so more thrillingly) in the intervals of behaving like a recognizable human being. No one would call him one of the great character-portraits of English literature, but he is much more of a person than the mere ‘silhouette’ his creator disparagingly called him. Tough, yes, resourceful, all that, but fully capable of indignation, compunction, remorse, tenderness and a protective instinct towards defenceless creatures, see for example ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ and Thunderball. And so his adventures are much more interesting than the adolescent fantasies of the cinematic ‘James Bond’.

  It seems right to end this with thoughts of Ian Fleming, who was a masterly action-story writer in the tradition of Conan Doyle and John Buchan. I for one found it beyond me to follow worthily in his footsteps, but I am honoured to have been given the chance of trying, and found it all great fun.

  Kingsley Amis

  London 1991

  1

  A MAN IN SUNGLASSES

  James Bond stood at the middle tees of the eighteenth on the Sunningdale New Course, enjoying the tranquil normality of a sunny English afternoon in early September. The Old Course, he considered, with its clumps of majestic oak and pine, was charmingly landscaped, but something in his nature responded to the austerity of the New: more lightly wooded, open to the sky, patches of heather and thin scrub on the sandy soil – and, less subjectively, a more testing series of holes. Bond was feeling mildly pleased with himself for having taken no more than a four at the notoriously tricky dogleg sixth, where a touch of slice in the drive was likely to land you in a devilish morass of bushes and marshy hummocks. He had managed a clear two hundred and fifty yards straight down the middle, a shot that had demanded every ounce of effort without (blessed relief) the slightest complaint from the area where, last summer, Scaramanga’s Derringer slug had torn through his abdomen.

  Near by, waiting for the four ahead of them to move on to the green, was Bond’s opponent and incidentally his best friend in the Secret Service: Bill Tanner, M’s Chief of Staff. Noticing the deep lines of strain round Tanner’s eyes, his almost alarming pallor, Bond had taken the opportunity of an unusually quiet morning at Headquarters to talk him into a trip down to this sleepy corner of Surrey. They had lunched first at Scott’s in Coventry Street, beginning with a dozen each of the new season’s Whitstable oysters and going on to cold silverside of beef and potato salad, accompanied by a well-chilled bottle of Anjou rosé. Not perhaps the ideal prelude to a round of golf, even a little self-indulgent. But Bond had recently heard that the whole north side of the street was doomed to demolition, and counted every meal taken in those severe but comfortable panelled rooms as a tiny victory over the new, hateful London of steel-and-glass matchbox architecture, flyovers and underpasses, and the endless hysterical clamour of pneumatic drills.

  The last of the four, caddie in attendance, was plodding up to the green. Tanner stepped to his trolley – having some minor Service shop to exchange, they were transporting their clubs themselves – and pulled out the new Ben Hogan driver he had been yearning for weeks to try out. Then, with characteristic deliberation, he squared up to his ball. Nothing beyond a nominal fiver hung on this game, but it was not Bill Tanner’s way to pursue any objective with less than the maximum of his ability – a trait that had made him the best Number Two in the business.

  The sun beat down. Insects were droning in the little belt of brambles, rowans and silver birch saplings to their left. Bond’s gaze shifted from the lean, intent figure of the Chief of Staff to the putting green a quarter of a mile away, the famous, ancient oak by the eighteenth green of the Old Course, the motionless line of parked cars. Was this the right sort of life? – an unexacting game of golf with a friend, to be followed in due time by a leisurely drive back to London (avoiding the M4), a light dinner alone in the flat, a few hands of piquet with another friend – 016 of Station B, home from West Berlin on ten days’ leave – and bed at eleven thirty. It was certainly a far more sensible and grown-up routine than the round of gin and tranquillizers he had been trapped in only a couple of years back, before his nightmare odyssey through Japan and the USSR. He should be patting himself on the back for having come through that sticky patch. And yet …

  With the sound of a plunging sabre, Bill Tanner’s driver flashed through the still, warm air and his ball, after seeming to pass out of existence for an instant, re-appeared on its soaring arc, a beautiful tall shot sufficiently drawn to take him well to the left of the clump of Scotch pines that had brought many a promising score to grief at the last minute. As things stood he had only to halve the hole to win.

  ‘It looks like your fiver, I’m sorry to say, Bill.’

  ‘About time I took one off you.’

  As James Bond stepped forward in his turn, the thought crossed his mind that there might be a worse sin than the cardinal one of boredom. Complacency. Satisfaction with the second-rate. Going soft without knowing it.

  The man wearing the rather unusually large and opaque sunglasses had no difficulty, as he sauntered past the open windows of the club lounge towards the putting-green, in identifying the tall figure now shaping up to drive off the eighteenth tee. He had had plenty of practice in identifying it over the past few weeks, at greater distances than this. And at the moment his vision was sharpened by urgency.

  If any member had marked out the man in sunglasses as a stranger and approached him with inquiring offers of help, he would have been answered courteously in a faintly non-British accent – not foreign exactly, perhaps South African – to the effect that no help was needed. Any moment now, the stranger would have explained, he expected to be joined by Mr John Donald to discuss with him the possibilities of being put up for membership. (Mr John Donald was in fact in Paris, as a couple of carefully placed telephone calls had established earlier that day.) But, as it turned out, nobody went near the man in sunglasses. Nobody so much as noticed him. This was not surprising, because a long course of training, costing a large sum of money, had seen to it that he was very good at not being noticed.

  The man strolled across the putting-green and seemed to be examining, with exactly average interest, the magnificent display flower-bed and its thick ranks of red-hot pokers and early chrysanthemums. His demeanour was perfectly relaxed, his face quite expressionless, as the eyes behind the glasses looked in the direction of the flowers. His mind, however, was racing. Today’s operation had been set up three times already, before being abandoned at the eleventh hour. There was a date schedule on it so tight that further postponement might mean the cancellation of the entire scheme. This would have greatly displeased him. He very much wanted the operation to go through, not for any fancy idealistic or political reason, but simply out of professional pride. What was being undertaken would, if all went well, end up as the most staggeringly audacious piece of lawlessness he had ever heard of. To be associated with the success of such a project would certainly bring him advancement from his employers. Whereas to be associated with its failure …

  The man in sunglasses drew his arms in to his sides for a moment, as if the approach of evening had brought a stray gust of air that suddenly struck chill. The moment passed. He had no trouble making himself relax again. He considered dispassionately the undeniable fact that the time schedule he was working to was even tighter than the date schedule, and was showing signs of coming apart. Events were running half an hour late. The man Bond and his companion had lingered hoggishly over their lunch in the rich aristocrats’ restaurant. It would be very awkward if they lingered over the drinks these people felt bound to consume around this hour.

  A casual glance showed that the two Englishmen had finished their round of infantile play and were approaching the club house. The man in sunglasses, his eyes invisible behind the dark lenses, watched sidelong until, laughing inanely together, they had passed out of sight. No further delay had occu
rred. Although he had not looked at his watch for half an hour, and did not do so now, he knew the correct time to within a minute.

  A pause. Silence but for a few distant voices, an engine being started in the car park, a jet aircraft in a distant corner of the sky. Somewhere a clock struck. The man went through a tiny underplayed pantomime of somebody deciding regretfully that he really cannot be kept waiting any longer. Then he walked off at an easy pace towards the entrance. As he neared the road he took off his sunglasses and slipped them carefully into the top jacket pocket of his anonymous light-grey suit. His eyes, of a washed-out blue that went oddly with his dead black hair, had the controlled interestedness of a sniper’s as he reaches for his rifle.

  ‘Do you think I’m going soft, Bill?’ asked Bond twenty minutes later as they stood at the bar.

  Bill Tanner grinned. ‘Still sore about ending up two down?’ (Bond had missed a four-foot putt on the last green.)

  ‘It isn’t that, it’s … Look, to start with I’m underemployed. What have I done this year? One trip to the States, on what turns out to be a sort of discourtesy visit, and then that miserable flop out East back in June.’

  Bond had been sent to Hong Kong to supervise the conveying to the Red mainland of a certain Chinese and a number of unusual stores. The man had gone missing about the time of Bond’s arrival and had been found two days later in an alley off the waterfront with his head almost severed from his body. After another three days, memorable chiefly for a violent and prolonged typhoon, the plan had been cancelled and Bond recalled.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault that our rep went sick before you turned up,’ said Tanner, falling automatically into the standard Service jargon for use in public.

  ‘No.’ Bond stared into his gin and tonic. ‘But what worries me is that I didn’t seem to mind much. In fact I was quite relieved at being spared the exertion. There’s something wrong somewhere.’