The Israel Bond Omnibus (72 page)

“No, Iz, I meant—”

Feldspar said quickly, “And here is Dr. Yaynu, your Pied Piper for this excursion. Good morning, Yaynu.”

The hawk-faced Bulgarian, wearing a black mock-turtle necked sweater and Levi Strauss jeanlets, nodded a greeting.

“No scuba gear for you, Dr. Yaynu?” Bond said.

Dr. Yaynu’s eyes became hooded. “I don’t believe I am going as far as you are, Mr. Bond,” an averment the Israeli sifted for a double meaning.

The Bulgarian ushered them into blackness and flicked the switch on his outsize flashlight. A monstrous black billepede skittered over the cave floor and Kopy screamed. Dr. Yaynu squashed it indifferently under his half-calf Nancy Sinatras. “Here are many such creatures—scorpions, tarantulas, black widows. Mind where you place your hands.”

The passageway slanted downward and they began to smell an overpowering combination of primordial ooze and the musty salt of the sea. Dr. Yaynu’s beam picked up myriads of crawlies, each new one sending a spasm through the shapely researcher. Once Bond felt his front foot plunging into a crack and shouted, but Kopy grasped his hand and pulled him free. “Iz, be careful, darling. No telling how deep these things go.”

When he heard Kopy gasping for breath, he said, “Let’s stop, doctor, and give Miss Katz a rest.”

“If you wish, Mr. Bond. Actually we are at the chamber where Skwato found the scrolls of Shimon. We had it widened to accommodate Professor Feldspar. Slide through the opening, Miss Katz, and we shall pass the Xerox to you.”

Bond lit a Raleigh. “Go ahead, baby. History awaits you.” She smiled, kissed him warmly and knelt at the opening, wriggled through on her tummy and took the Xerox from Bond.

“Iz!” Her voice had a hollow, faraway ring. “They’re here! And they’re just marvelous!” There was a whirring and clicking and her excited bursts, “Got it! Got it!”

“She will be occupied some time, Mr. Bond. Would you care to see another of the wonders of this place?”

“You’re the doctor,” said Bond. “Lead on.”

They took a left fork and scrambled toward an ever-increasing roar. “An enthralling grotto, Mr. Bond, formed by eruptions and oceanic erosion. It is a sight you’ll never forget.”

He was not overstating the case. They emerged into a cathedral of nature hewn by ten thousand herculean stonemasons. Below seethed the ocean, this way and that, buffeting the walls with maniacal force.

“Is this not a magnificent place to die, Oy Oy Seven?”

Dr. Yaynu’s hand sported a long-barreled Brezhnev-Kosygin.

Israel Bond’s lips formed a moue of disgust. “It appears I’ve let myself be a TUSH pigeon again, Dr. Yaynu—if that’s your name.”

“It will do for you, Mr. Bond, although it once was General Bolsheeyit, one of the top policymakers of the KGB until you smashed my career by your daring foray into the Soviet Union with matzoh to lighten the hearts of the Russian Jews. It was you who murdered my assassin, Torquemada LaBonza, ‘The Man with the Golden Gums.’ And it was you who disposed of our bloc’s top counterspy, the Bulgarian named Avakum Zakhov, whom we had lent to the Syrians to conduct a campaign of terror under the pseudonym of Feisal Fullah-Sheik.” The hawk face hardened into hideous hatred. “Yes, you, Oy Oy Seven, brought me disgrace and forced me to flee Mother Russia, you filthy Zhid!” He smashed the flashlight against Bond’s jaw.

Bond said through gritted teeth, “And Holzknicht reached into the grudge file and plucked you out, too, eh, Yaynu? All kinds of ghosts are slithering out of that file, it seems. I suppose you’re going to kill the girl as well.”

“No, my friend.
Herr Doktor
wishes the world, especially the Japanese, to see the reproductions. I am sure you noted Baron Sanka’s dismay at the notion his antecedents were Jewish. Multiply that feeling by one hundred million sons and daughters of Dai Nippon and you will get the picture. Step by step—and there are even greater provocations in the works—they will be irritated into a war against Eretz Israel. I shall tell Miss Katz we went sightseeing and, alas, you slipped on the ledge and fell into the grotto. Move back, Mr. Bond. At the count of three it will be all over.”

Bond took a tiny step backward.

“Raz.”
The ex-KGB bigwig was counting in Russian, an added fillip of revenge for Bond’s role in the Matzohball affair. Below, the sea issued a seductive siren’s call:
Come on down! You’re finished, Oy Oy Seven. Why even wait for the third count? Come on down! Take one more step back and find eternal rest in my bosom.

His mind telegraphed back:
The hell with you, Tomon the way Dooley, Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, too! And make that wire collect!

“Dva.”
Yaynu ticked off the second count.

But Bond, who’d been measuring the time between counts, was spinning in the graceful pivot taught him by the Big O of the Cincinnati Royals, and at
“Tri”—
three—had his back to the Russian and felt the bullet whang into the heavy-gauge steel of the oxygen tank. He completed the pivot to see Yaynu clutching at the spot in his guts where the slug had ricocheted. Yaynu blatted, but in a final suicidal lunge battered his bullet-like head into Bond’s belly.

And they went over.

On the way down Bond was an unstoppable wild man, the crook of his bronze muscular arm crushing his foe’s neck, and he screamed a beloved old Passover song into the bluish Slavic face.

“Die, die Yaynu! Die, die, Yaynu! Die, die, Yaynu! Die, Yaynu, die, Yaynu!”

How long they fell he could not be sure—two or three seconds, perhaps—and as he saw the sea rushing to meet him he twisted in midair and swung the body of the strangled Yaynu under him so that it would take the brunt of the impact. Nevertheless his own head exploded in a red network of zigzag pain patterns and he soared to the surface, affixed his face mask, started the oxygen and submerged again, for he’d got the bad news. He was some two hundred feet from the ledge with no way to scale the sheer sides of the grotto. If there was a way out it would have to come from underneath, perhaps a channel to the Pacific. If water had got in, there had to be an egress somewhere. There had to be! He’d only an hour’s worth of life-sustaining air; not a pip of a popkin could be wasted.

Round and round Bond swam, examining his watery trap from all sides, his eyes straining to pierce the murky greenness. He tensed. A shadow passed over his head; wicked rows of teeth grinned at him. Barracuda! Ten muscular feet of murder whose Gillette super-stainless cutting power could serrate him to strips.
Keep swimming at a steady pace,
his heart warned
, or it’ll sense your panic and close in. Make believe you’re a larger, deadlier fish, a dolphin, say. Nothing dares attack a dolphin.
He sliced toward the bottom and saw a colony of sponges, a bull and several simpering does. Pulling a razor-sharp Solingen-Helm knife from his right flipper, he slashed away at the harem, liberating the great round bull and, bouncing it off his head in the jocular manner of a dolphin at play, made some sportive ‘Flipper’ noises he hoped would approximate a dolphin’s chuckle. It seemed to do the trick. The ‘cuda backed off respectfully.

Was that a blessed glimmer of light in the distance? Yes! He gave the bull sponge a friendly farewell pat on its holey buttocks and paddled toward the light, thrilling as he felt the water turning warmer. The light became more intense and his heart leaped. Thank God, he’d found a cut-through to the sea! The current seemed inexorable, but he fought it inch by inch, until he could now see a dimly red ball of fire—the sun!
Stroke,
stroke, stroke; you’re almost out of here, buddy boy; thirty feet more, twenty, ten....

The current reversed suddenly. Unbelievably. It was no longer pushing him; it was pulling him. Why?

Gottenu!
The suction was damn near wrenching the mask from his face. In a frightening glimpse Bond saw the sun blacked out by something at the end of the tunnel to freedom, something yawning, two valves widening to reveal a pearly ambience. There was a last sucking sound and he was drawn into its midst. The valves snapped shut with sickening finality.

And Israel Bond knew he’d exchanged the frypan for the oven. He was locked inside that most dreaded of all deep-sea denizens, the one-hundred-foot oyster!