Moonraker (novel) - Plot

Plot

British Secret Service agent James Bond is asked by his superior, M, to join him for the evening at M's club, Blades, where one of the members, the multi-millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax, is winning a lot of money playing bridge, seemingly against the odds. M suspects Drax of cheating, but although claiming indifference, he is concerned why a multi-millionaire and national hero, such as Sir Hugo, would cheat at a card game. Bond confirms Drax's deception and manages to "cheat the cheater"—aided by a cocktail of powdered Benzedrine mixed with non-vintage champagne and a deck of stacked cards—winning £15,000 and infuriating the out-smarted Drax.

Drax is the product of a mysterious background, unknown even to himself (allegedly). As a supposed British soldier in World War II, he was badly injured and stricken with amnesia in the explosion of a bomb planted by a German saboteur at a British field headquarters. After extensive rehabilitation in an army hospital, however, he eventually returned home to become a major aerospace industrialist.

After building his fortune and establishing himself in business and society, Drax started building the "Moonraker", Britain's first nuclear missile project, intended to defend the United Kingdom against its Cold War enemies (c.f. the real Blue Streak missile). The Moonraker rocket was to be an upgraded V-2 rocket using liquid hydrogen and fluorine as propellants; to withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures of its engine, it used columbite, in which Drax had a monopoly. Because the rocket's engine could withstand higher heat, the Moonraker was able to use more powerful fuels, greatly expanding its effective range.

After a Ministry of Supply security officer working at the project is shot dead, M assigns Bond to replace him and also to investigate what has been going on at the missile-building base, located between Dover and Deal on the south coast of England. All of the rocket scientists working on the project were German. At his post on the complex, Bond meets Gala Brand, a beautiful Special Branch agent working undercover as Personal Assistant to Drax. He also uncovers clues concerning his predecessor's death, concluding that the former Security Chief may have been killed for witnessing a submarine off the coast.

Drax's henchman Krebs is caught by Bond snooping through his room. Later, an attempted assassination nearly kills Bond and Gala under a landslide, as they swim beneath the Dover cliffs. Drax takes Gala to London where she discovers the truth about the Moonraker (by comparing her own launch trajectory figures with those in a notebook picked from Drax's pocket), but she is caught. She soon finds herself captive at a secret radio station (intended to serve as a beacon for the missile's guidance system) in the heart of London. While attempting to rescue her in a car chase, Bond is also captured.

Drax tells Bond that he was never a British soldier and has never suffered from amnesia. In fact, he was a German commander of a Skorzeny commando unit and the saboteur (in British uniform) Graf Hugo von der Drache, whose unit had placed the car bomb at the army field headquarters, only to be injured himself in the detonation. The amnesia story was simply a cover he used while recovering in hospital, in order to avoid allied retribution, although it would lead to a whole new British identity. Drax, however, remained a dedicated Nazi, bent on revenge against England for the wartime defeat of his Fatherland and his prior history of social slights suffered as a youth growing up in an English boarding school before the war. He now means to destroy London with the very missile he has constructed for Britain, by means of a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead that has been secretly fitted to the Moonraker. He also plans to play the stock market the day before to make a huge profit from the imminent disaster.

Brand and Bond are imprisoned under the Moonraker's booster engines so as to leave no trace of them once the Moonraker is launched. Before this first (supposedly un-armed) test firing, Bond and Gala escape. Gala gives Bond the proper coordinates to redirect the gyros and send the Moonraker into the sea. Having been in collaboration with Soviet Intelligence all along, Drax and his henchman attempt to escape by Russian submarine—only to be killed as the vessel flees through the very waters onto which the Moonraker has been re-targeted. After their de-briefing at headquarters, Bond meets up with Gala, expecting her company—but they part ways after Gala reveals that she is engaged to be married to a fellow Special Branch officer.