The wind and spray whipped past my face as the 50-foot vessel shot over the waves. Four 250-horse outboards propelled the boat through the teal Bahamian water at close to seventy miles-per-hour. Rhythmic vibrations started at the front of the boat and rocketed underneath. As the boat made a wide turn out to sea, Paradise Island rapidly receded to starboard.
Emma, a beautiful British girl with a deep tan and soft, brown hair, sat beside me as we closed on the Russian freighter. We made a high-speed pass off its port bow. Yes, our man in Nassau had been right - one well-placed limpet mine should do the job. I looked over my shoulder at the tanks and gear waiting in the back of the boat….
That was the fantasy, anyway. Sadly, the reality was a bit less exotic.
The boat, the Russian freighter, and Emma were real enough, but there was no scuba gear, nor was there a pressing need to blow anything up. I was actually on my honeymoon in the Bahamas. I had paid for a trip in the Thriller – a 50-foot catamaran designed to carry 30 or so passengers. For $40 U.S., I was shooting over the waves about 100 yards from the beach at 70 m.p.h. on a quick trip around Paradise Island. Emma was actually the first mate. And if truth be told, I was back in the third row surrounded by other tourists just like myself.
I mention this because it suddenly occurred to me that, with a little imagination, this was the most James Bond-like thing I had ever done.
My life, I’m ashamed to admit, isn’t the kind of thing people write novels about. Five days a week, I’m a mild-mannered Web developer. But not today. Today I was on a $250,000 powerboat rocketing through the very waters that James Bond ventured into back in Thunderball (Nassau is just a few minutes from Paradise Island). I boarded the boat at the marina of the Atlantis Resort. Just across the dock was a yacht called the Izanami that would have put the Disco Volante to shame. (The crew wouldn’t tell me who was onboard, but I’m positive it was Blofeld.)
If you’ve ever “played Bond,” raise your hand. Yeah, I thought so. We all do it. I imagine every Bond fan has a stretch of road on which he or she likes to run through the Honda’s gears a little faster than normal, pretending that SPECTRE agents are in hot pursuit. Life can get so repetitive that we just can’t resist the urge to spice things up with a little creative thinking. In no time, the guy next to you on the subway becomes an enemy agent, the laptop in your bag now contains nuclear secrets, and the train is really going from Paris to London instead of from Omaha to Kansas City.
Looking back, I guess I’ve been playing Bond for years. Where I work, there’s a magnetic card-strip reader to get into the building after hours. To use it, you enter a small, sterile room watched by a security camera. You swipe your card though the machine, and punch in a passcode. The machine beeps authoritatively every time you press a button. Then it thinks for a bit and flashes “Accepted” before opening the door. It’s lost its novelty by now, but initially I’ll admit to a few unnecessary trips to the car just so I could use the little machine.
And the technological revolution of the last few years has given us so many wonderful opportunities to be like our man OO7. The science of biometrics has produced a $100 device that reads your fingerprint before allowing you access to your computer. What fun! Do we really need this device? Well, no. But do we all want it? Hell yes! You never know when SPECTRE is going to go after your Quicken files. (“Don’t play games, Mr. Bond - we know how much you spend at Starbucks.”)
Some variations on a theme:
Playing Bond for the commuter: Years ago, I knew a guy who’d pretend that when his radar detector sounded an alarm, it meant that he’d been locked onto by enemy missiles. Evasive maneuvers would immediately ensue. Being that a nearby police radar had usually set the detector off, this guy tended to get a lot of tickets.
Playing Bond for the filthy rich: On the flight home from the Caribbean, while paging through a copy of Forbes, I found an ad for the “light-armored BMW 7 Series Protection cars.” Now, I knew that some people liked to armor-plate their cars, but this was an ad from BMW itself for cars you can order from your local dealer. The cars “combine BMW elegance with the latest defenses, from a bullet-resistant passenger cabin that is virtually impenetrable – including the glass [up to .44 magnum] – to run-flat tires.” The tag line? “Protection isn’t a luxury. But it can be luxurious.” Ha! Ain’t that straight out of a Bond movie?
Playing Bond for the lunatic fringe: In that same issue of Forbes I read a short profile of a company called Team Delta. For $695 this outfit will subject you to what it calls the “Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Program.” You’re given details of a fake military mission that you have to keep secret. For three days, ex-military intelligence and special forces personnel will, well, torture you - mostly psychological, but apparently they can get physical too – to get the information. I’m not kidding. Apparently some people just want to see if they can survive the experience.
So is all this a symptom of something more serious? Could I (we) be harboring feelings of deep dissatisfaction about life? I doubt it. Sure, I’d like to be James Bond, but only for the cool stuff. Just because I want to drive a DB5 and sleep with Claudine Auger doesn’t mean I want to get my delicates whacked with a carpet beater for hours. Give me Brioni, Bollinger, and Barbara Bach; leave the cocaine shredders and hairy-ass tarantulas at home.
Anyway, if you ever get down to the Bahamas, take a ride on the Thriller. Leave any loose articles of clothing at home (your Hilfiger cap will be history inside of a minute), and prepare for a ride you won’t soon forget. But wait for a rough day at sea: although we did get airborne off the wake of a fishing boat, the seas were perhaps too smooth on the day I took my ride. The trip was exhilaratingly fast, yet relatively undramatic.
Nevertheless, when I got back to shore, I was amazed to find that the 70 m.p.h. wind had actually bent my sunglasses back across the bridge of my nose. After a few minutes of fiddling, I had fixed the glasses and was thankful that the infrared camera and satellite uplink built into them were still intact.
Thank God – Q would’ve killed me otherwise