The Israel Bond Omnibus (27 page)

The hand squeezed the trigger twice. Anna, still howling at the top of her lungs, fell dying, blood spurting from her stomach on the plush Gulistan Saroyan carpet. The door opened, startling the little man in the gypsy garb, who pushed through the drapes and bolted down the fire escape.

“B & T time again,” a cheery Bond called; then froze in horror.

She was still laughing when he found her. “Golden gums... that voice... golden gums... hee hee ha ha....” And she died in his arms.

“It’s one hundred and thirty-five in the shade, to be exact,” responded the precise Itzhok Ben Franklin, consulting his thermometer.

“Gottenu!”
exclaimed Bond. “I’m afraid to even guess what it is here in the sun.”

“Ninety-six.”

He slapped at a botfly trying to bore into his neck. “These damn burros are slow as hell. Can’t they go any faster?”

“I doubt it,” Zvi said. “They’re carrying one hundred sacks of matzoh meal, two hundred pounds to a sack.”

“What the hell for?” Bond fired back.

“The Peace Corps plans to throw a gigantic Passover Seder meal for the poor in a couple of nights.”

“If
there’s a Peace Corps, you mean. We still have to find little Pablito.”

Good lads! he thought. They, of course, knew all about Anna and were trying to make light conversation to take his mind off the awful night. Except Nochum, that little snotnose, who rode ahead, his face an insolent mask.

When the sting pierced his right shoulder he first thought some giant jungle bee had dive-bombed him. Then he saw the puff of smoke and heard Nochum’s anguished cry: “Ambush!”

Down dove Bond, flattening his body in the rotting vegetation. “Take cover!” Then there was a sound that set his adrenal glands flowing in terror. The sound of a miniature sort of thunder... and the pounding, earth-shaking sound of a stampede. He knew what it meant.

Buffalo leeches!

The filthy bloodsuckers were on him now, drinking deeply of his claret which poured out of three dozen punctures from ankle to thigh.
Gottenu!
don’t let them go higher!

The sound of their munching was drowned out by a sudden horrible scream that trailed off. Nochum! And yells through the green, impenetrable rain-forest walls. “You meet your maker, Israeli dogs! We cut out your tongues, Jews!” Now a strident falsetto: “Marine, tonight you die! Marine, tonight you die!”

An ex-Jap
soldat
, no doubt, fighting the wrong war, he mused, but no less malevolent.
“Banzai gezunt,
Tojo!” he screamed in rebuttal.

“Bond! Over here. I’m hit!” Zvi! His hands frantically trying to cover a dark stain spreading over his shirt front.

“How bad?” said Bond, manfully ignoring his own shoulder wound and the gnawing below.

“Chest.
Oy vay,
it hurts! I was trying to reach poor Nochum. He’s had it.”

“How?”

“I rode...” Zvi coughed... “up to him when the first shot went off. It’s awful, Bond, awful! He’s lying face down in a pit... must be a hundred spikes through him.”

Bond lit a Raleigh, pressed it to Zvi’s blood-flecked mouth. “Poison, too, I’ll wager. This must be Vi Teh Minh and his China boys. It’s their kind of show. They’re jungle fighters, you know.”

Zvi inhaled. Thwack! He pitched forward. Now there was a second stain between his shoulder blades. “The last little joke for an old pal, Oy Oy Seven...”

Bond gulped, fighting back scalding tears. “Well, Zvi,” he grinned weakly. “You got it in the chest... you got it in the back... and with all that you still haven’t had a bellyful.”

“Oh,
mommeleh
... I haven’t got a bellyful. What a f— mind on that bastard! Oh,
mommeleh...”
his laugh and life gurgled out. Lovable Zvi Gates was dead.

The scum! The f— scum! “All right, you dirty yellow slant-eyed bastards! Uh, no racial derogation intended, fellows.” He tore at a ring on his belt. “Let’s see how you like a pineapple in your Chink faces.” He stood up, cocked his arm, let the pineapple fly square in the face of an oncoming guerrilla. Its spines drilled into his eyes; the rotten insides squirted into the man’s mouth. The marauder gagged and ran off vomiting. Good! But at least you’ll live, you bastard! It’s just a goddam shame it wasn’t a grenade, Bond thought.

Wait! HaLavi’s package! He raced back to his burro and cut the bundle loose with a slash of his machete. Tearing away the paper, he pulled out a half-dozen jars containing bright red gelatinous matter. “Mother Margolies’ Old World Boysenberry Jelly,” the labels read.

He tucked the jars into his coat jacket and slid on his belly through the brush, a Jewish fer-de-landsman bent on revenge. Five of them! Grouped about a mortar, one of them about to pump in a shell. “Here, you bastards! Let’s have a jam session!” He hurled all six of the jars into the Vi Teh Minh quintet. They went off simultaneously, merging into one red ball of flame. He heard their screams, smelled barbecuing flesh.

“It must be napalm jelly... ‘cause jam don’t shake like that!” he shouted.

“Bond, over here!” Itzhok now! Was he cashing in his chips as well?

“You all right, kid?”

“I think so. Something’s got my foot.”

Bond leaned over. “It’s a Malay snare. Got your ankle. Don’t move. There may be poison on the thorns.” He cut it away but, as he did, he noticed Itzhok’s face was already bluish in pallor. He slit the
Sabra’s
trouser leg, saw a telltale pinprick of a hole near the calf.

“I feel numb, Oy Oy Seven.”

“Hold on! Hold on!” He finished cutting off the thornstudded vine. But Itzhok was not answering. And never would again.

I’ve lost all three... in one swell foop. My gutsy little team is gone. I’m alone in a scorching emerald wilderness, with no men and four dozen stinking burros carrying twenty thousand pounds of matzoh meal. He began to laugh wildly. Any second now he expected a bullet between the eyes. But aside from the hum of insects and the jabbering of howler monkeys, the jungle was silent. Looks like my jelly broke up the traffic jam, he thought. Zvi, would that you could have heard that one, old comrade.

He was starting to feel the loss of blood; heat, hum and howl combined with the moldy odor of the jungle to set his head spinning. He fell into the muck.

Pain! Something sticking in his shoulder.

“Look, angel,” he croaked. “I know you have to fasten on my wings, but for God’s sake—you should pardon the expression—use Scotch tape. That f— safety pin is killing me.”

The figure in white looming above him said, “He’s coming out of it, Sister. More sulfa, please.”

Bond opened a cautious eye. His angel was a bulky man with warm brown eyes. In a white smock. A doctor! “Who are you?”

“Ben Kildare I ain’t. My handle’s Marv Browndorf, doctor attached to the ill-fated Peace Corps camp. This lady is Sister Kate. And no shimmy jokes about her. She’s heard ‘em all.”

“Ill-fated?”

“Yes, a column of them hit the camp at the same time the advance guard ambushed you. We heard the noise and came down.”

“Where am I?” He reached for a Raleigh.

“You’re in a bed at the convent OLEO. They very kindly gave our remaining corpsmen refuge. We’ve only got six left out of twenty. You, I’m afraid, have none left.”

“I know,” Bond said. “I saw two of my boys get it. And Spector?”

“There was no time to pull him out of the pit. Besides, there are a couple tons of scavenger ants cleaning up down there. And we had to get you up here fast. Wounds fester like mad here in the tropics. By the way, the monks got your burro train up here. The matzoh’s piled up in a nice cool cellar, so don’t worry about it.”

“That’s the least of my worries. But what the hell are monks doing in a convent?”

Dr. Browndorf probed his Johnson & Humphrey Q-tip again into the wound, causing Bond to cry out. “Go ahead. Yell all you want. What are monks doing here? Well, there are some heavy chores around here the sisters can’t handle. Besides, these monks are in their sixties. Nice old coots, Brother Thelonius and Brother Julius. I like ’em.”

Bond pulled himself up. “Those goddam buffalo leeches....” He looked at his legs, dotted with minute scars.

“Used an old Burmese trick to get rid of ’em. Touched ’em with a lighted cigarette and they fell off. Funny thing, though, I used one of your cigarettes on a single leech and the rest of ’em fell off, curled up and died without even being touched. What do you smoke, anyway?”

“Look, Doc, I’ve got to get the hell out of here. That kidnapped kid must be found or Israel’s name will be mud in El Tiparillo and all of Latin America.”

Dr. Browndorf frowned. “You nuts? You’ve lost blood and you’re weak as a kitten. It’s beddy-bye for you, Bond.”

“Like hell!” and he inched up painfully. “See, I’m standing. Now, get me a horse. I want to nose around this area and there isn’t much time.”

“It’s your funeral,” the doctor shrugged. “But good
mahzel
and good hunting, Oy Oy Seven!”

In no hurry at all, and not about to be pushed, was scraggly Old Kemtone, the bag of bones and alleged horse he had borrowed from the considerate monks.

Deliberately it picked its way down the rocky trail to the valley, stopping now and then to nibble the fragrant top of a locoweed bush, whinnying as it chomped the stuff down.

“Well, here I am... on my high horse,” he sallied. “Come on, you glorified dachshund. Speed it up.”

Old Kemtone answered by rearing up. Bond felt himself flying backwards. Splash! He was up to his neck in a brass monkey-cold mountain stream, ears rocked by the strident love-calls of the brass monkeys.

As he stood shivering he heard a voice through the roar of the torrent. A sweet and low voice, crooning a soulful old blues song:

“Ah got de blues; oh Lawd, Ah got de blues,

Ah said Ah got de blues; oh Lawd, Ah got de blues,

Oh yeah, Ah got de blues; oh, Lawd, Ah got de blues.”

He recognized it in a second. It was one of the great blues torchants of jazz history, titled “Guess What Ah Got?” And that voice? So familiar! Didn’t he have a recording of that voice doing that very ditty? Of course!

As he tried to squeeze the information from his fogged mind, he saw near a tree two sensationally formed brown legs, just an enticing flash of thigh... and then he heard a deep growl. There was something tawny and spotted moving out to the end of the tree limb.

Tigre!
A powerful jaguar, undisputed king of Latin-American jungles. He heard a tiny frightened “oh” behind the tree. The blues singer was quite aware of the deadly stalker above her, crouched to spring.

Bond waded hip-deep into the frigid waters, unarmed; yet prepared to take the brunt of the snarling cat’s lunge. Damn fool! I left HaLavi’s new rifle in Old Kemtone’s stirrup.

Three hundred yards away was another rifle at the ready, an angry eye pressed against the telescopic lens, the back of Israel Bond’s head split neatly in the T-sight. A cheap Delicado cigarette dangled from the lips of Torquemada LaBonza.

He squeezed the trigger just as the
tigre
roared and zeroed in on Bond. The Israeli bent as the cat’s paws ripped his shoulders, the foul breath from the decayed flesh in its teeth nearly causing him to pass out.