Propelled silently by his frog feet, the diver floated toward his destination. There was no light, except for the murky beam from his waterproof torch. He couldn’t be sure he was going the right way. He tried to recall the instructions he had received before setting out. The noise of his breathing filled his ears, along with the muffled, slow motion sounds of the deep. 
 
He was too old for this line of work. He felt his thickening midriff against his wet suit. As dangerous as these missions were, he was more concerned with the normal decline of aging as a civilian. How long did he have left, if he managed to stay alive today? Five years? Ten? Twenty at most? Twenty years seemed like a day.
 
His job was not only to set the limpet mines on the doors of The Dragon King’s Palace, but to be a redeeming symbol—a figurehead of a nation that yearned for its disintegrated empire. No doubt the Government liked nostalgia as a distraction from the drab existence it provided, and perhaps as a means to generate some cash. Two birds with one stone. If they couldn’t have the real thing any more, they could  have an image of it. The only evidence left of the empire was its flotsam—incarnations of past appropriations—curry, Eastern philosophy, opium, and tea.
 
It wasn’t just that he had to be a secret commando, but a public persona too. He was both covert and overt, but if the government wanted to pay him to be a paradox, then at least he would have some fun to make up for the meagre salary they provided. That had always been his philosophy. 
 
He was older now.
 
His name might be Bond. At least it wasn't Tintin. Maybe he could be called something different but similar: Bondla, Benz, Bland. James Bland. Perhaps something even further removed like Binder—Quentin Binder.
 
His mother, née Valery McGuiness, had dreamed the night before he was born that she should name him Tarquinius. The next day she gave up the idea, obviously not trusting her subconscious, and so Quentin entered the world, via his mother and a hospital in East Acton. There had been talk about Tarquinius as a middle name—Quentin Tarquinius. His father, a chain-smoking novelist, regarded by many as a shit, thought it sounded like Ancient Rome. So it became just Quentin, with no middle name. But what was wrong with Ancient Rome, aside from the obvious?
 
Some years later when he was playing in the garden with some friends, his mother took him aside and told him he would never amount to much. Or was it on a train, in a tunnel beneath the Alps? What mattered was that it was said, not where the telling took place. 
 
The thought came to him unannounced from the deep. Had she been right or wrong? It seemed so irrelevant now, and he wondered why she had ever bothered saying it.
 
He shone his dim light on his diver’s watch, strapped to his wrist with thick rubber. Where was this Dragon King’s Palace? He had no idea what its real name was. He knew what it was supposed to look like though. At the briefing they had shown him blurred photographs—giant gates, large enough to let a submarine pass through, set in reinforced ferrous concrete. An underwater city. Who could build such a monstrosity? A rogue nation? Some dark global conglomerate? Chinese folklore was rife with dragon kings living beneath oceans and rivers. Maybe the Chinese were involved. He was going to breach this place anyway. He should be there by now, according to what they had told him, but he knew they weren’t completely trustworthy. He worried that the undercurrents had caused him to drift off course. He might never arrive. 
 
His oxygen supply was diminishing and he was on the point of deciding to surface. He would be a speck on the ocean, waiting for the Royal Navy to retrieve him. He would be almost impossible to see, so he had been equipped with a transmitter to aid in locating him, and an automatically inflatable dinghy strapped in a pouch below the air tank. He wasn’t certain they would work. Still, better to take his chances above than below, with its lonely asphyxiation.
 
That Hermetic axiom—as above, so below is not true when it comes to oceans. The surface is quite different from the bed. They are not remotely similar.
 
His brain was babbling to itself again. Not a good sign. When he was younger he had always been completely focused on his work, to such an extent that he would feel detached. He had been purely a mechanism let loose on a purpose. That was when he was on a mission. When he had downtime he could carouse and womanize with the best of them. In fact he was the best of them. But now he was detached in a different way by a mind that was not interested in the mission, didn’t even know what it was, or couldn’t remember. Instead it subjected him to a flow of non-sequiturs that were both attractive and abhorrent. Perhaps it was the rubber tasting air he breathed, or the loneliness.
 
He had to pay attention and get control of himself, or otherwise he would perish in a swirl of dreams. It was time to go back up, while he still had the chance. He would have to abort the mission. He was not to blame. The information he had been given was incomplete, the equipment provided sub par. It was a classic error of bureaucracy, where details contradicted themselves amongst inter-departmental bickering. Then it occurred to him that maybe their ineptitude was deliberate. They might regard him as an embarrassment, a tool that had outlived its purpose. The dashing arrogance of a handsome youth was not attractive in a man his age. It was ridiculous and counterproductive. But they would look like fools if they suddenly abandoned the cause they had championed for so long. It would be much better if their hero was lost at sea, doing his duty until the end. He had the horrible feeling that the Navy would not come looking for him, should he reach the surface. They were letting him go.
 
As he began to rise upward, he noticed a sudden change in the environment, the equivalent of a dust cloud—churning sand most likely. He felt a distinct, rumbling vibration. He looked down and saw a submarine gliding below him like a giant barracuda. Ahead of it, two gates were sliding open. In an instant his younger self returned and he knew what he had to do without thinking. He immediately dove and grabbed a rail on the conning tower. His instructions had been only to mine the gates, but now that they were open a bigger prize beckoned.
 
The submarine entered the chamber and the doors closed behind it. He loosened his grip from the rail and drifted off. This was obviously a kind of lock. The water would be pumped out, and air would be pumped in to allow the craft to moor and the crew to exit. His instructions were to blow the doors, but it would be an added bonus if he blew the pump vents as well. He needed to remain hidden while the crew disembarked, so he dove down under the starboard side of the submarine—the port side abutted the quay. When it was safe he would mine the doors and the vents. He had five limpets, he might as well put one on the submarine too. As he waited, he opened the satchel that was strapped to his stomach and attached a magnetic mine to the hull. Suddenly the water level started to drop and he was dragged towards the nearest vent. There was nothing for him to hold on to, and he soon found himself pinned against the grate as the water was sucked from the room. He could only hope the level wouldn’t drop too far, leaving him exposed. He had set the timer of the limpet on the submarine for two hours. That should give him enough time to mine the doors and vents, and to make his exit. He would have to find another way out. 
 
The pumps stopped. Seconds later the room burst into light. Sodium vapour lights. He could see them from beneath the water. He was luckily still submerged but not deep enough to avoid discovery. He had a few seconds before the crew left the vessel and any maintenance people came to greet them. He swam back to his hiding place beneath the hull and waited. He heard the hatch opening. After giving himself thirty minutes to rest, he swam over to the doors and attached the mines, setting the timers for one and a half hours. Then he placed the remainder on two of the pump vents, with the same time delay. Lastly he removed the empty satchel and secured it to the grille on one of the vents. It was a precaution in case he was apprehended, and might prevent his sabotage from being noticed, or at least delay its discovery. The time had come to enter the Dragon King’s Palace.
 
He let his head break the surface of the water. He was in a large, cavernous room. An arched ceiling stretched over him. The walls were hospital green. There were five other quays, one of which was occupied by the submarine, the rest empty. He did not detect any sign of people. He swam over to an empty dock and climbed the steps, pausing to take off his flippers. He removed his Beretta from its waterproof container and attached the silencer. Then he turned off the air cylinder, leaving it strapped to his back. It was cumbersome but he only had an hour to make his exit, and didn’t want to lose time retrieving it.
 
Aside from the sea gates he had mined, there was only one other door leading out of the dock area. It was marked with a symbol, or group of symbols, that reminded him of cuneiform. It had a wheel lock, as on the door to a bank vault. He stood before it and listened. No sound. He glanced at his watch. Eighty-five minutes left. 
 
He put his hands to the wheel, and with the sensitivity of a cat burglar began to turn it. Instantly the silence was rent by the shrieking of klaxons. More lights came on and began flashing with a frequency he feared would resonate with his brain.
 
The door swung open and twelve men poured through, each one armed with a submachine gun. He evaluated his options and decided that the best was surrender, which he did immediately. His captors disarmed him and ushered him into the sunken city. 
 
They were all young and lithe, and were dressed alike—black trousers, combat boots, black polo necks with the same cuneiform symbols that were on the door, monogrammed on the left side of each chest in white. There was not an ounce of flab among them. Chiseled jaws and close cropped hair. They looked like fashion models. These were not the soldiers of an army, but the accoutrements of an autocrat. The attention to appearance and aesthetics suggested a single mind, not a committee. They were no doubt taking him to an audience with the Dragon King.
 
They led him down several long corridors. This place was big. They stopped at a door with a porthole. He tried to look through it but was blocked by his guards. They paused long enough to open a recessed cabinet in the wall and take out hairnets for each of them, including himself, even though his head was encased in rubber. Then they took him inside. The walls were filled with banks of slowly spinning wheels, stopping and starting, going in one direction and then the reverse, spooling tape between them. This room must be a computer. At the far end was a low console desk, forming a gentle arc. At its centre was a high backed chair. After a few studied seconds it swiveled to face them. 
 
The Dragon King was a woman.
 
“We’ve been expecting you Mr. Binder.” She smiled, “well not really, but we have been following your exploits.”
 
“I hope you’ve been suitably entertained.”
 
“Entertained… Yes. Very amusing…” She frowned. “Don’t they have a place for people like you, Mr Binder, who have outlived their usefulness?”
 
“They do. But I’m not at liberty to talk about it.”
 
She looked him over and raised her eyebrows.
 
“You look a little past your prime for this sort of thing, Mr Binder."
 
He detected the trace of an accent but couldn’t place it.
 
“I do it for pleasure. There’s no age limit to that.”
 
Despite his waning libido, he could imagine an intimate evening. A game of cat and mouse, some drinks.
 
“I’m curious as to whom we owe the honour of your visit, Mr Binder.”
 
“I was just passing by and thought I’d stop in. I’ve heard so much about you.”
 
She turned her attention to the guards.
 
“Get him out of this ridiculous diving suit and give him some clothes.”
 
Then she turned back to him.
 
“We will continue very soon, Mr. Binder, and we will discover why you are here. We have some instruments to help us solve the mystery. You might be interested in seeing them.”
 
On cue, one of the guards stepped forward with a metal briefcase and opened it in front of him. It contained a thumbscrew, a hypodermic syringe and some electrodes with wires attached.
 
Then he was hustled out of the room and taken to a cell off one of the corridors. On his way he took in as many details of his surroundings as he could, while counting the number of paces he took. When they reached their destination they made him strip naked. It was an awkward process peeling off the rubber suit and the guards were grinning. They conducted a cavity search and made him wait while one of them went to get him clothes. These turned out to be the same as what they were wearing, down to the monogrammed shirt, though they didn’t provide him with footwear. The trousers were too tight and he had to leave the waist button undone. The polo neck accentuated his paunch, which caused another burst of snickering. Then they left, taking everything with them including his watch. The door clicked shut and he heard the lock engage.
 
He estimated that there were about fifty minutes left before detonation. He could not know how much damage the explosions would do to the structure as a whole but the pressure at this depth would no doubt exploit any breach. He assumed that he would die within the hour. It seemed rather anticlimactic considering the life he had led.
 
There was no light in his cell and no furniture. He sat on the floor in the pitch dark. The impossibility of action and the darkness accentuated his thoughts. He had no inkling what was going on here beyond the usual games of power, and MI6 had given him even less information about this mission than usual. He wanted to know the meaning of the cuneiform, it took on an irrational significance. He was convinced that if he understood that, he would somehow be in a better position.
 
Ancient scripts had fascinated him as a child—hieroglyphs, cuneiform, Canaanite, Phoenician, early Greek. He had just started to study ancient languages at university when his education had been interrupted by the war and he had been drafted into the army. 
 
If events had unfolded differently, he would be a university professor, publishing books and papers, an erudite mentor to his students. They would be a source of inspiration to each other as they delved into the pleasures of knowledge. But each path taken erases the others around it. There is no return. 
 
The army had quickly led him to the commandos because of his daring nature and physical stamina. From there he had volunteered to join the newly formed and unorthodox, secret unit that became known as the SAS. He had felt at home with the relaxed attitude to military tradition and discipline. He had learned the skills he still used—of sabotage and subterfuge, of audaciousness and the capacity to never be deterred by insurmountable odds.
 
After the war he had been recruited to the position he held today, no doubt because of his covert experience and his good looks. He had jumped at the opportunity but it had caused his capacity for intellectual pursuits to atrophy and wither.
 
He heard footsteps coming down the corridor. One man. From the briskness he sensed purpose. He was obviously going to be taken back for questioning. He felt an opportunity presenting itself. Just one man this time. Foolish.
 
He took up a position flat against the wall by the door, on the opposite side to the hinges.
 
As the door swung open, he gently placed his right hand on top of the man’s head and his left on the jaw. In the split second it took for the guard’s eyes to adjust between light and dark, he had broken his neck with a quick wrench. The guard was dead at his feet. It was easy. He knew that it was a most selfish act to kill a living being but he felt no remorse. Once you’ve done it a few times, it loses meaning. He dragged the body into the cell, removed the boots and put them on himself. They weren’t a bad fit. He took the machine gun and quickly searched for extra ammunition. Finding none, he left the room and locked the door behind him.
 
Sitting in the dark had interfered with his sense of time. He wasn’t certain when the bombs would explode but he estimated that he had about twenty minutes. He needed to escape. Without his diving suit and aqualung his chances of survival were negligible, but he still had twenty minutes and might as well make use of them.
 
He headed in the opposite direction to the computer room. He passed numerous doors each marked with the curious cuneiform script but one caught his eye because it also bore the image of a staircase. He opened it. Stairs led up for as far as he could see, and beyond.
 
He noticed that every ninety-three steps there was a landing. He realized after passing two of them, that they served as decompression zones for a climber rising to the surface. Ninety-three steps were about sixty feet. He rested a while on each landing. The mines should detonate at any moment. He still expected to be a victim of his own sabotage but at least he would die free, and in the interim he did not want to suffer from the bends. So far he had heard no sign of pursuit, which was odd. He kept the machine gun ready to fire a burst if necessary.
 
He discovered that there was a cupboard in the wall on every landing with a push release door panel. Inside were water bottles and what looked like military food ration packs. This was a well designed operation. The outside of each door panel was covered with cuneiform script. Who were these people, the New Assyrians? He helped himself to food and water and kept going.
 
The bombs should have gone off by now. Something must have gone wrong. Even at this distance he was sure he would feel their effect. He couldn’t have climbed beyond their reach. His calves were burning. The pain was probably exacerbated by the gas bubbles in his blood, though he had been ascending correctly as far as he could tell. He was desperately tired but could not allow himself to fall asleep. There would be a time for that, maybe. But not yet.
 
The higher he climbed, the stranger he felt. He could not recall when he had left London, or how long he had been on this mission. He wondered if this endless staircase rose through a tube in the ocean, or if it was tunneled through rock—an undersea mountain. Did all mountains start beneath the sea? They had to start somewhere. He could no longer understand points of reference, which were what he needed to make sense of things. He was exhausted, under stress, and had a surfeit of nitrogen in his blood stream. That would be an explanation. Even as a younger man he would have felt these effects, and now he was… how old was he? He couldn’t place it. Definitely over fifty, maybe older. If he was to get out, he was going to have to acknowledge a dream like state, where events just happened without any rational cause and explanations were irrelevant.
 
He kept climbing. He imagined that he must have been climbing for almost twenty-four hours. This was the longest staircase he had ever ascended. It beggared the conceivable. The top was nowhere in sight, but the width of the passage seemed to be narrowing. Another landing. No cupboard, no cuneiform. Then bang. He walked into a wall. A dead end.
 
He collapsed on the floor in crushing defeat. Even for a man of his resilience this was too much. It was cruelty on an existential level, much worse than the suitcase of torture implements the Queen had wanted him to see. It negated everything, the kind of sadistic joke that only a god could play.
 
He lay prone in debilitating depression, face down on the floor. The machine gun was pressing into his chest, causing him pain. Eventually he could bear it no longer and got up.
 
He went over to the offending wall and ran his hands over it. A crack. It was not just a wall, there was a door in it, finely fitted with no handle or hardware on this side at least. He pushed. The door moved. With his fingertips he wrenched it wide open. Relief flooded through him, invigorating him with energy. This was rebirth, just not in East Acton.
 
It was dark on the other side, and very cold. Something greasy brushed against his shoulder. There were animal carcasses hanging on hooks. He must be in a meat refrigerator. He crossed the room and exited the other side. Again darkness. He looked around and surmised that this was a butcher’s shop. It was obviously night and after business hours. The entrance door had a window in it and he looked out. Beyond the parking area he could see a road and low buildings on the other side. He had surfaced in a small town.
 
He had to find somewhere to sleep. Not here where the employees would find him when they came to work in the morning and seeing as the entrance to the deep was in this establishment, that might mean the butcher was affiliated with the Dragon Queen and he needed to keep away from this place. He was hungry and made himself a sandwich with some sliced meat he found in a refrigerated cabinet.
 
He was on the point of leaving when he realized it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk down the street in a small town carrying a machine gun. It went against the grain to go into the unknown without a weapon, but such was the nature of covert operations—one had to divest oneself of firmly held beliefs and improvise. He went back through the meat cellar and propped the gun against the wall on the stairwell side of the door, then closed it. This side had a door knob. As an after thought, he took a rag from the counter and wiped down any surface he could remember touching. Then he unlocked the door to the shop and stepped outside, wiping the handles as he left.
 
The night was clear and moonlit. He could hear cicadas and it was not cold. It felt like late summer or early autumn. He could have sworn it had been winter when he set out, but there was no point in trying to understand. Better summer than winter anyway. The question was, should he turn left or right? It was not an easy decision because both choices seemed equally unimportant. It was quite something to be stymied by unimportance, and it gave him pause but he knew he should keep moving. He didn’t want to get stopped by the police, who were the only people likely to be around at this time. He passed by two parked cars. They looked like American vehicles. Could he be in America? 
 
A little further up the street he came across a small green—an area of lawn with a flagpole at its centre. He looked up, and though there was no wind and the flag hung limply, he could see that he was indeed in America. He didn’t even try to make sense of it.
 
At the green there was another road to the right and he turned on to it. This decision was easy. It looked like a less populated street. He soon came across a graveyard with a wooded area beyond it. He could find a good place to sleep in the woods. Somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed. It was warm enough to sleep outside relatively comfortably. 
 
The next day he awoke with the dawn, badly bitten by mosquitoes and feeling groggy. He would go back into the town and look around, and perhaps find something to eat. He thought he might try to contact Larry Adams, his colleague in the CIA. They had met in Iran when they were both involved in the Mosaddegh operation and had become friends. Though whether friendship was possible between spies was a moot point. It was a corrosive business. He realized that he really didn’t have any friends, just acquaintances. That might not be particular to him but a general aspect of aging. Young people were involved in each other’s lives more intensely than their seniors, who tended to drift away with responsibilities—marriages, offspring and the assumed concerns of adulthood. He had none of those responsibilities, yet he still had no friends.
 
He mulled over contacting the British Embassy but was ambivalent about it. Sleeping outdoors had an effect on the skin. He had forgotten, not having slept outside for a while. The way his skin felt was the cause of his ambivalence and also its expression perhaps. It was a crustiness that gave him the sense of a difference between him and himself. It was like meeting a stranger—a new person. Celebrity with its seductive invitations, kept him away from his own nature and would render him an empty shell if he came to believe what it told him. As a covert operative he was merely an expendable commodity on an accounts list. His personality was of no concern except for how it could be used, or how it might affect his performance. If not him, then some other person. It did not matter. He did not matter. So why go back? Especially now that he had disappeared so completely and inexplicably. They wouldn’t know where to start looking for him. He had died at sea in the course of his duty. 
 
He decided not to call Larry. It was a stupid idea. He would begin life as a beggar, and see where it led.
 
It was still early and most of the shops had not yet opened. He hobbled around on aching legs, getting a sense of the place. Though initially it had looked like just one street, he discovered many small side roads and enclaves. It was a bigger town than he had thought. He went back to take a look at the butcher’s shop in the daylight. It was open and there were several cars outside. It looked completely normal—nothing that would suggest a deeper significance. He wasn’t going to enter it though.
 
He turned back towards the the town centre. He had passed a café on his way down which seemed like a good prospect. That would be a good starting place. It was not difficult to assume the role of a beggar. Such people had nowhere particular to go, nothing particular to do and nothing to do it with—a condition which described his own situation.
 
He peered through the window at the customers being served their breakfasts. He could imagine the clatter inside and felt a pang of hunger. Those rations he had found in the stairwell had been adequate but not satisfying. He loitered in front of the building. There was something so simple about having basic needs and he felt more directly connected to humanity than he had in a long time. It seemed ironic that he had to sink so low to climb so high.
 
A woman stepped passed him. She gave him a quick appraisal and understood.
 
“Are you hungry? Would you like a muffin and a cup of coffee?
 
“Please… yes.”
 
“Milk and sugar in your coffee?”
 
“Just milk please.”
 
“Hold on.”
 
She came back out and handed him a hot paper cup and a small bag. “There you go.”
 
“Thank you.”
 
Her eyes flitted across the emblazoned cuneiform on his chest.”
 
“I haven’t seen you around before. Did you come up from the city?”
 
“I came up from the bottom of the sea.”
 
He could read the emotions on her face—compassion, curiosity, doubt and amusement, even a hint of fear. She took him for a madman.
 
“What were you doing down there?”
 
“Working.”
 
“What kind of work do you do?”
 
“I’m a secret agent.”
 
She cinched her bag up on her shoulder. “There’s a place up there,” she indicated the road with the graveyard, “a humanitarian organization. They might be able to help you with food and somewhere to stay. You should check it out. Number forty-seven I think. What’s your name?”
 
“Wellington. George Wellington.”
 
“Well take care, George.”
 
 

© Tom Newton 2023