John Gardner: Brokenclaw

Just before he shot, Bond imagined he could see Brokenclaw’s eyes bearing in on his own, but this, he thought later, was probably his imagination, as was the feeling of a great arc of evil surging from the man’s body.

Bond knew he was on target. He loosed the arrow and saw it strike firmly into Brokenclaw’s throat. There was a noise which he recognised, he had read of it somewhere, the noise like the muffled murmur of a great torrent advancing through woodland, a howl of despair.

He clearly saw Brokenclaw clutch at the arrow, as though trying to tear it from his throat. Then the huge Chinese Indian gave a long, hoarse choke, his hands dropped from the attempt to withdraw the arrow, his arms flew outwards, flapping like some wounded bird cut down by a shot. They were still moving in a flying motion as his body hit the ground.

‘James! Behind you! Behind you!’ He knew the man’s voice, and even as he turned, saw that the Indian, Even Both Ways, was poised on the rim of the oval bowl of ground surrounding the encampment, his bowstring drawn back, the shaft ready to fly. At the same moment, there was the sound of a shot which echoed around the camp as Even Both Ways threw back his hands and was tossed like a piece of garbage into the air.

Bond tottered forwards towards Brokenclaw’s body, lying very still. Then his knees gave way and he sank into a grey mist.

‘Hey, James? James, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay.’

The mist swam in front of his eyes and he was again submerged in a great undulating wave of pain, but he could just make out Ed Rushia’s craggy face above him.

‘Hell, Ed,’ he croaked. ‘I said only in the last resort. I had to do this on my own.’

‘You did, James.’ A different voice. ‘Ed saved you when one of Brokenclaw’s men tried to take you out. It was all over by then. Oh, James, darling. What you did was . . .’

He knew the voice belonged to Chi-Chi, but somehow it began to slink away into another land as the darkness came in.

They operated five times during the next six weeks. In spite of M wanting Bond to be moved back to the United Kingdom, the Americans insisted they should do everything. ‘In any case, we need your boy for a good debriefing,’ John Grant had told the chief of the British Service, so M gave in with grace.

Grant’s people came to see him in the Naval hospital at regular intervals, and he learned a little more about the late Brokenclaw Lee’s empire. For one thing, everybody was convinced that his melting pot of Indian tribes in the Chelan Mountains had been for some eventual purpose. ‘They seemed peaceful enough,’ Grant told him, ‘but we figure he only took in the most basic types, those who would return to the old brutal ways. No reservation Indian would ever think of performing the o-kee-pa torture rite nowadays. We’re pretty sure he had some reason for building a private Indian army that had nothing to do with peace.’

Eventually, Bond was able to walk again with hardly any pain. The damage inflicted on his legs had been worse than that on his back, but the doctors said that, eventually, he would only have the scars to prove that it happened at all.

Sue Chi-Ho visited Bond every day, and every day thanked him for what he had done. ‘I have been reading the lives of those two whose names we took,’ she told him one afternoon. ‘Abelard and Héloïse. I came across a quote from one of her letters to him – after she went into a convent and he lost his manhood. It seems something good to live by. She wrote—

May it be sudden, whatever you plan for us; may man’s mind

Be blind to the future. Let him hope on in his fears.

I am glad we’re blind to the future. If I’d known what lay in store for us in Operation Curve , I’d never have gone ahead. I don’t care what happens now, I just don’t want to know what tomorrow will bring.’

Finally they told Bond he could leave the hospital. Chi-Chi picked him up late one afternoon and drove him back to her apartment. He had telephoned M privately and had been given four weeks’ sick leave, though they both knew there would be a year of physiotherapy before Bond’s muscles could be completely restored.

The apartment was back to normal, and even the shattered glass on the museum poster had been repaired.

‘This is where we came in,’ Bond said.

‘Yes, but tonight will be different, James. I really have planned a wonderful meal. Just sit down, relax and I’ll get it started.’ She went into the kitchen, and a few seconds later Bond heard her explode with anger. She came storming out – ‘Guess what I’ve done? I’ve forgotten to get the wine. James, would you be a darling and . . . ?’

‘No!’ Then he saw her begin to laugh. ‘Absolutely no! No way! Never! Negative and out!’

John Gardner served with the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Marines before embarking on a long career as a thriller writer, including international bestsellers The Nostradamus Traitor , The Garden of Weapons , Confessor and Maestro . In 1981 he was invited by Glidrose Publications Ltd – now known as Ian Fleming Publications – to revive James Bond in a brand new series of novels. To find out more visit John Gardner’s website at www.john-gardner.com or the Ian Fleming website at www.ianfleming.com

By John Gardner

Licence Renewed

For Special Services

Icebreaker

Role of Honour

Nobody Lives For Ever

No Deals, Mr Bond

Scorpius

Win, Lose or Die

Licence to Kill

Brokenclaw

The Man from Barbarossa

Death is Forever

Never Send Flowers

SeaFire

GoldenEye

COLD

An Orion ebook

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

This ebook first published in 2012 by Orion Books

© Glidrose Publications Ltd 1990

The right of John Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

James Bond and 007 are registered trademarks of Danjaq, LLC, used under licence by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4091-2724-6

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