Night Duty Summary

It is a week later, and Bond has returned to London. He has been assigned to the night shift at the headquarters of the British Secret Service, answering coded telephone dispatches from field stations all over the world. Bond was reluctant to take on such a routine assignment, but now finds he does not mind it. The work is not hard, and he is fed regularly from the canteen. During the slow times, he has time for a book he is writing about forms of hand-to-hand combat from around the world. For sources, he has several manuals from international secret services such as the CIA and the OSS. His most recent acquisition is a manual of combat techniques used by SMERSH, which is described as a "Soviet organization of vengeance and death." (p.59) Bond finds some of the techniques distasteful.

Turning...