The James Bond Anthology

James Bond stumbled over a mangrove root, threw out his right hand for support from the bush, missed, tripped again and fell heavily. He lay for a moment, measuring the noise he must have made. It wouldn’t have been much. The inshore wind from the sea was feathering the swamp. A hundred yards away the river added its undertone of sluggish turbulence. There were cricket and bird noises. Bond got to his knees and then to his feet. What in hell had he been thinking of? Come on, you bloody fool! There’s work to be done! He shook his head to clear it. Gracious host! God damn it! He was on his way to kill the gracious host! Goblets of iced champagne? That’d be the day! He shook his head angrily. He took several very deep slow breaths. He knew the symptoms. This was nothing worse than acute nervous exhaustion with – he gave himself that amount of grace – a small fever added. All he had to do was to keep his mind and his eyes in focus. For God’s sake no more day-dreaming! With a new sharpened resolve he kicked the mirages out of his mind and looked to his geography.

There were perhaps a hundred yards to go to the bridge. On Bond’s left, the mangroves were sparser and the black mud was dry and cracked. But there were still soft patches. Bond put up the collar of his coat to hide the white shirt. He covered another twenty yards beside the rail and then struck off left into the mangroves. He found that if he kept close to the roots of the mangroves the going wasn’t too bad. At least there were no dry twigs or leaves to crack and rustle. He tried to keep as nearly as possible parallel with the river, but thick patches of bushes made him make small detours and he had to estimate his direction by the dryness of the mud and the slight rise of the land towards the river bank. His ears were pricked like an animal’s for the smallest sound. His eyes strained into the greenery ahead. Now the mud was pitted with the burrows of land crabs and there were occasional remnants of their shells, victims of big birds or mongoose. For the first time, mosquitoes and sand-flies began to attack him. He could not slap them off but only dab at them softly with his handkerchief that was soon soaked with the blood they had sucked from him and wringing with the white man’s sweat that attracted them.

Bond estimated that he had penetrated two hundred yards into the swamp when he heard the single, controlled cough.

15 | CRAB-MEAT

The cough sounded about twenty yards away, towards the river. Bond dropped to one knee, his senses questing like the antennae of an insect. He waited five minutes. When the cough was not repeated, he crept forwards on hands and knees, his gun gripped between his teeth.

In a small clearing of dried, cracked black mud, he saw the man. He stopped in his tracks, trying to calm his breathing.

Scaramanga was lying stretched out, his back supported by a clump of sprawling mangrove roots. His hat and his high stock had gone and the whole of the right-hand side of his suit was black with blood upon which insects crawled and feasted. But the eyes in the controlled face were still very much alive. They swept the clearing at regular intervals, questing. Scaramanga’s hands rested on the roots beside him. There was no sign of a gun.

Scaramanga’s face suddenly pointed, like a retriever’s, and the roving scrutiny held steady. Bond could not see what had caught his attention, but then a patch of the dappled shadow at the edge of the clearing moved and a large snake, beautifully diamonded in dark and pale brown, zigzagged purposefully across the black mud towards the man.

Bond watched, fascinated. He guessed it was a boa of the Epicrates family, attracted by the smell of blood. It was perhaps five feet long and quite harmless to man. Bond wondered if Scaramanga would know this. He was immediately put out of his doubt. Scaramanga’s expression had not changed, but his right hand crept softly down his trouser leg, gently pulled up the cuff and removed a thin, stiletto-style knife from the side of his short Texan boot. Then he waited, the knife held ready across his stomach, not clenched in his fist, but pointed in the flick-knife fashion. The snake paused for a moment a few yards from the man and raised its head high to give him a final inspection. The forked tongue licked out inquisitively, again and again, then, still with its head held above the ground, it moved slowly forward.