Agent Down.
'Take the bloody shot!' had been M's - dare he think of it as a premature ejaculation? He would, Bond decided, since there really wasn't any better term for it. Given just a little more time he would have had the bastard and the job done. Instead, moments after the order sounded in his earpiece he felt the sear of the bullet.
God dammit!
The echo of the weapon discharging followed after.
The force of the shot flung him backwards, off balance. His equilibrium compromised, his mind shocked and body screaming in outrage, there was nothing left to do. For a split second, without the train beneath his feet it seemed like he was floating, flying even. Then the rush of wind told him he was in free-fall.
'Agent down.'
The voice sounded flat, slightly tremulous in Bond's ear. She'd made a mistake that couldn't be rectified.
No further communication followed. They were sitting, likely shocked into silence in their safe, comfortable offices in MI6 headquarters, London. He was hundreds of miles away, mid-plunge into a ravine following a tussle on the roof of a train. Shot by a fellow agent. To all intents and purposes, dead.
Except that he wasn't dead. He might well be so in the very near future with the earth rushing up to meet him at alarming speed, but for the time being he was still alive. And he was damned well furious!
His mission into Turkey to retrieve the stolen list had turned out to be just that, a turkey. Bond hated irony.
His fellow agent had simply followed an order. He shouldn't really berate her for that, but he was going to do it anyway. What better to do while falling to your death than apportion culpability on the long way down.
B he should call her, since they'd not been formally introduced. B for bitch. Or should that be babe? F for failure. L for lousy bloody markswoman who should never have been let loose to compromise his mission. Or maybe he should be grateful she wasn't a better shot. She might have actually managed to kill him instead.
The truth was that M's order hurt more than the hit did. More than he knew the landing would. Impacting water from any great height was as bad as hitting concrete, though what exactly constituted too high a drop he didn't know. Bond willed his injured body to relax. It was how drunks survived falls from party balconies with a minimum of damage. Tensing up could prove fatal. His shrapnel riddled shoulder protested as did his newly punctured side.
Re-lax. Or you'll be dead.
And he had a few choice words for Ma'am before that happened. With a bit of luck he'd lose consciousness before impact but since he'd been beaten, shot (twice) and failed to retrieve the list it wasn't looking to be his day.
Deep breath. Relax.
When impact did come, and it hurt like the dickens he knew it would, her words were still ricocheting in his head.
Take the bloody shot!
He'd had his hands on the data hanging tantalisingly from his opposite's neck. He could have broken the chain, strangled the man into unconsciousness or even snapped his blasted neck. Granted none of those options was easily accomplished while trading blows with a highly trained operative on top of a speeding train, and the tunnels hadn't helped either. But he could have done it, of that Bond was confident.
His boss hadn't trusted him to do his job. Had that betrayal pricked M's conscience at all? He damn well hoped so.
When next he saw her, he was going to give her a piece of his mind, preferably with a glass of her best single malt in hand. Provided that is he didn't bleed, freeze or get pummelled to death on a river bed first. Was the water really this icy, or was his body going into shock the reason he felt suddenly oh so very cold.
The pull of the current seemed to increase as he was swept along. Waterfall perhaps? Lovely. Bond could only hope there weren't any rocks on the way down.
What would his obituary say? How might M describe Commander James Bond, at the last? She'd always had a soft spot for him, that much he knew, even if she was willing to sacrifice him for the cause.
As his world faded to black, as he sank deeper into the cold depths of his watery tomb, 007 hoped that whatever she did eventually type up, it would at least give her trouble.
TBC.