The Israel Bond Omnibus (80 page)
Read The Israel Bond Omnibus Online
Authors: Sol Weinstein
“I must say I like your attitudes,” he flipped and patted his back for the bon mot. Wondering vaguely which would hold out longer, his strength or his humor, he jogged toward the tent city, his sensual gray eyes seeking the perfidious Danish giant who’d led him down the garden path so often in this puzzling affair.
Kopy landed on her back, the weight of her drenched chute several times pulling her under, but she finally undid the harness and freed herself. Coughing, regurgitating brine, plankton and a medium-size langouste, and arching her willowy body, she began a choppy crawl to the shore.
Gottenu! It’ll take me an hour to reach him,
she lamented.
Then she saw the boat. “Help! Please help!”
Go-Down Mikimoto had no intention of stopping for this
gaijin
woman, whom she had seen parachuting down in the company of her man, but she had a guilty second thought:
Perhaps he loves this woman. I cannot do anything to hurt him, although rescuing her may shut me out of his life forever.
“Give me your hand,” said Go-Down and lifted the fatigued researcher into the dory. “You are his woman, is it not so?”
The Xeroxite gave her rescuer a knowing appraisal. “You love him, too.”
Go-Down did not answer, but her bobbing Adam’s apple betrayed her emotions and Kopy knew it was so.
“You poor, sweet little lady,” Kopy said, drawing the trembling Ama girl to her breast. “We’ve got to help him together. He’s in there alone against—God knows what. And I’ve a mission of my own.”
As Go-Down rowed, Kopy explained what had to be done.
“Oh, but I know Shimonoshima quite well, Miss Katz,” affirmed Go-Down. “Only yesterday I was at the site of the completed Great Herrosukka Buddha. Some of the Japanese workmen are relatives of mine and permitted me to pray before it.”
“And you didn’t see anything that looked like large tanks?”
“No, Miss Katz. But if these evil ones are as clever as you say, they might have concealed them in any number of large caves and built underground pipelines to your supposed missile. Yet I saw no missile. The only large edifice standing is the mighty Buddha itself.”
Kopy Katz swore at herself in Yiddish, then said, “I’m a fool to the tenth power, Go-Down. It’s so damn obvious. The missile is inside the Buddha!”
“Then we must kill it at its source, Miss Katz. As a child I played often in the labyrinths of Shimonoshima and still remember many of the passageways. I shall lead you through them for his sake.”
“You’re an OK gal, Go-Down,” said Kopy Katz. “Now get your stroke rate up to 150 per minute and let’s go spelunking.”
They smiled at each other, these two gorgeous, naked women, so different in background and appearance, but, like the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady, sisters under the skin.
[86]
23 The Quest Ends
Bond, crawling on his swollen belly like a deadly puff adder, racked up Nazis seven and eight in a noiseless fashion. They stood on guard several yards from Feldspars tent, smoking and chatting unconcernedly, and by the time they heard the
yoni
twigs snapping under his advancing body he’d pressed the button of his mezuzah to send the two Molochamovis-B-tipped needles whizzing into their necks.
Good-o! Ten left, counting the Dane, or rather the German, which he certainly had to be. But who was Feldspar or whatever his name was? He’d familiarized himself with the entire TUSH dossier since the organization’s inception in the mid-’50s and had etched into his memory the facts concerning every one of its major operatives, all of whom had been taken in the counterattack in Sahd Sakistan—except the late Holzknicht, who’d lammed to the U.S. None of them, either living or dead, came close to approximating the outré physique of Feldspar.
Lost in thought, he did not realize he himself was being stalked. Just as he tippy-toed to the giant’s tent, there was a rush of air, the slapping of naked feet and—
whump!—
he was cut down by a flying tackle.
“Bond! I need you! I need you!” wailed the aroused Magma Feldspar, whose satiny, powerful arms were locked around his ankles.
The commotion brought the Nazi scientists on the run and the great golden hand pushed aside the flap and Feldspar lurched out on the giraffe legs, a Luger cocked at Bond’s head.
“One more time!” Magma implored him, her greedy hands scrabbling at his manhood. “One more time!”
Bond said, “OK,” and absentmindedly began to vocal-bop the famous coda from Basie’s “April in Paris.”
“No, you lamebrain! I mean, take me, take me!”
“Excellent!” said Igneous Feldspar. “You have served me well, you Danish bitch. Now,
auf Wiedersehen
.” He swung the Luger around and fired. Magma Feldspar’s head blew up in a red cloud.
“You bastard—killing your own wife,” Bond swore and in a lightning draw aimed the Beretta at the spot between the giant’s ice-blue eyes.
Feldspar did not blink an eyelash. He seemed amused. “Fire, Oy Oy Seven.”
Bond squeezed the Beretta’s trigger.
Nothing.
The damn gun had jammed.
“It is a matter of record that all Berettas jam in crucial situations, Herr Bond. It serves you right for selecting a ladies’ gun.”
Thonk! Klonk! Frick! Frack!
His aides’ truncheons landed on Bond’s head and the secret agent was out cold.
“Welcome to BO minus forty, Herr Bond.” Triumph wreathed the pasty face of Igneous Feldspar.
“Which has no connection with Lifebuoy, I bet,” Bond said. He gave his pulpy head a shake. It seemed three sizes too big. His hands were clasped in front of him, turning blackish from the biting straps of saranoflex. “Forty minutes to blastoff, eh?”
“Sehr gut.
Your mentality is unimpaired by the piddling blows. This is a shining moment in your life, Herr Bond. Your hyperactive heart should be leaping for joy.”
“What do you mean, you murdering swine?”
The giant blew Muriel smoke into Bond’s face. “Tut, tut, my friend. Is that any way to speak to the man you’ve traveled thousands of miles to confront? I am Dr. Ernst Holzknicht.”
24 Neck Check
Well, why not?
Bond asked himself.
There were two of
me
. Yet the Holzknicht who went over the roof of the Samarra bathhouse looked like the old, despised model. An actor? An expendable, low-grade TUSH-y made up to simulate
lieber
Ernst?
“Let me begin at the beginning,” Holzknicht said.
Bond had no bone to pick with that approach. It was one his own logical mind might have chosen. “Please do.”
“When I fell from the Empire State Building and bounced off the foam-rubber skull of King Kong into the Lowenbrau beer truck, I suffered a multiplicity of injuries. But in the undaunted spirit of true Nazism I hung on and when the truck wended its way through Manhattan’s Yorkville section I tapped on the window, got the bewildered driver’s attention and paid him well to assist me into a certain apartment building on East Eighty-fourth Street.”
“Fritz Kuhn Towers, no doubt,” Bond broke in. “We’ve had it watched sporadically. Loaded with your kind of maniacs.”
Holzknicht let that disclosure pass. “In my heart was a consuming hatred for you and Eretz Israel which, if transformed into heat ergs, could have turned the polar cap into a Congo rain forest. I lay in my bed, broken and spent, but my brain was as sharp as ever. It told me that you would eventually turn up in Japan to seek the kind of sinister intrigue that can only be found here.”
“The historical verity,” Bond half whispered.
“Ah, someone in your M 33 and 1/3 has also read every novel of espionage ever written. Yes, the historical verity. Well put.”
“BO minus thirty-five,” trumpeted a voice from the walkie-talkie on Holzknicht’s cot.
“Why did you have to go through this elaborate folderol involving the Japanese? A few ounces of your
barbarella
toxin dumped by night into the major reservoirs of Eretz Israel would have accomplished your task.”
“Too simple, Herr Bond.” He sighed, a Heidelberg dean trying to explain the principles of Clausewitz to a child brought up on Bomba the Jungle Boy. “Like so many great men who reach middle age, I am afflicted by accidie, which can only be overcome by spurring on my mind to create concepts of infinite subtlety such as ‘Operation Alienation,’ which sought to destroy the spirit of Judaism by removing its most significant element—Jewish food.”
“You damn near succeeded,” Bond grunted.
“After my wounds healed and I’d decided to come to the Orient, it became necessary to alter my appearance. I administered local anesthesia to myself and operated on myself, replacing my fine German hands with these steam shovels—one at a time, of course—and adding eighteen inches to my legs by means of bone grafts. A lesser man would have been squeamish, but we of the Master Race are something more than lesser men. More or less. I softened the angular lines of my face with plastic surgery to achieve this bovine pastiness, inserted ice-blue contact lenses, let my black hair grow and went to Mr. Schatzi, the East Berlin hair stylist, who curled it and lightened it with Summer Blonde by Clairol. My next step was a change of nationality. In Copenhagen I bribed a minor official to create a new identity for me, then induced a bar slut to marry me. I knew our paths would cross, but you would be seeking Ernst Holzknicht, not a stumbling blond giant with a wife. I duped Magma into believing I was under Holzknicht’s influence via a faked telephone call, for it was my plan that she fall in love with you and in an intimate moment ‘spill the beans,’ as the Americans say.
“It has been a game of cat and mouse, Oy Oy Seven, and I have not been the mouse. How I laughed inside when your noble heart was touched by the pathetic, ungainly figure of Igneous Feldspar and his crushing secret sorrow. Of course, Knute Feldspar never existed. And, by the bye, I was the German officer responsible for the death of your beloved Helvig Rolvig.
“I obtained the approbation of the Japanese to carry on my excavation project and brought over the ‘Norwegians,’ for I was determined to have an ace in the hole, the missile, should all else fail. They were former members of the
Führer
’s V-2 echelon, who escaped Europe through our underground network to eventually turn up in Egypt to work for the Cairo Colonel. I borrowed them from a secret missile base in central Egypt.
“In the meantime I set into motion a series of incidents calculated to inflame the Japanese against Eretz Israel. The first was the trawler. In a Greek waterfront cafe its crew was fed coffee into which was mixed Hypno-70, a drug which has a hypnotic effect upon the taker lasting from a day to many months, depending upon the amount ingested. The
Blintz Charming
was cleared for passage through Suez by the Colonel and made its attack upon the Imperial gunboat. My second ploy, the destruction of the JAL jet, was foiled by you because of Aw Gee Minh’s petty desire for revenge. Had I known you were on that flight I would have ordered him to destroy another.
“The scrolls—faked, of course—were prepared by an Arab scholar versed in Biblical lore. Although they were inscribed on papyrus treated by a special process to make them appear pristine, I dared not let a true expert scrutinize them, so I insisted they remain in the cave. My mistake was chatting about them in the presence of Nikko Tee-Yin, whose consequent suspicious behavior convinced me he was from the
Kyodo Kikaku
. Before Yaynu eliminated him, he had already gotten word to his
ichi-ban
, who cabled that he wanted copies, so I agreed to the Xeroxing by Miss Katz.
“Once I knew Sanka’s interest was aroused, I was afraid to have an intelligence operative as shrewd as the Baron snooping around, so I ordered Skwato to tag him to Tokyo and liquidate him. By this time you were his ally and foiled Skwato’s attempts in Tokyo and Beppu.
“The other major provocations were also drug-inspired. One of my agents slipped it into Hyman DeFlower’s borscht in Brussels. I myself gave it to Schlomo Salvar in brandy.”
“Put two more foils on my tally sheet,
Herr Doktor
,” Bond said. “I led the demonstrators away from the Israeli embassy, then returned to prevent the Emperor’s death. I imagine the Ribicoff Rarity was a mere goldfish done up by a pop artist.”
“I learned of the failure of the latter scheme when I turned on television. Instead of fiery declarations of war it was carrying such drivel as
Shogun Fight at the Kamakura Korral
,
My Three Samurai
and
The Dog from U.N.C.L.E.
And today’s papers were peculiarly devoid of scathing editorials,” the Nazi said.
“Good-o! Sanka, Count Pishaka and Minister Kato have been suppressing the hotheads. Tell me, if all these gambits had worked, how would the Japanese have reached Israel?”
“Certain circles in Red China and the U.S.S.R., who would like to see Eretz Israel go under, were prepared to wink at the squadrons of Imperial Japanese atom bombers flying over their respective territories, even to refuel them. There would have been a brief violation of Iranian air space, then they would have zeroed in over Arab states, who, of course, were more than happy to cooperate. Would they have minded the loss of a few hundred thousand out of their one hundred million if the Zionist state was at long last exterminated?”