Christopher Wood - The Spy Who Loved Me

Bond crossed to the window and judged the distance to the ground. Six feet. He swung his legs over the sill and dropped

to land in the gravel with his arms spread wide. There was no sound, only lines of expensive motor-cars gleaming in the darkness. He advanced to the first clump of palms and listened. Had the man again disappeared into thin air? Then there was a stab of light and Bond saw a heavy silhouette levering itself into the cabin of a small truck. The door slammed and the light disappeared. Bond doubled round in a semi-circle and came up behind the vehicle as the starter began to hector life into the engine. If only he had the Walther! There was no possibility of him being able to tackle this armed ogre with his bare hands. The engine still refused to fire and Bond closed with the back of the truck and pressed down the handle. One of the doors swung open and he quickly scrambled inside amongst a welter of cables, wires and junction boxes. Now the engine exploded into resentful life and the truck began to tremble. Bond held his breath and waited for it to move forward.

Then the back door opened.

Bond’s heart jumped to his mouth before he recognized Anya scrambling in beside him. In her hand was a Bcrctta .25 levelled at a point equidistant between his eyes. A Beretta .25. His old gun. The gun he had carried for fifteen years until it failed him once and was sentenced to death by a Court of Inquiry and the evidence of Major Boothroyd, Armourer to International Export and the world’s greatest small-arms expert.

Bond looked from the weapon to Anya with cold, ironic eyes. ‘If we go on meeting like this, people will start to talk.’

Anya moved the gun close to Bond’s heart and spoke in a low whisper. ‘What happened to Kalba?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘And the microfilm?'

Bond jerked his head towards the cab. Anya followed his glance warily and then slid a slim hand inside his jacket. Bond smiled cynically. ‘And I thought Russian women were incapable of feeling.'

Undeterred, Anya continued to frisk him. ‘Make no mistake, Commander. I intend to recover that microfilm.'

‘exactly my own sentiment. That’s why I’m sitting in this rather uncomfortable truck.’ Bond nodded towards the

Beretta. ‘Do put that thing away. You’re not going to fire it and let our friend know we’re here.’

In the cabin, Jaws listened to Bond’s words floating up from the small speaker set into the dashboard and furled his lips back in a metallic smile. Stromberg would be pleased with him. As instructed he had eliminated the two traitors and now, as a bonus he was going to remove two other sources of potential nuisance to the organization. Jaws spread his elbows and draped himself over the wheel in preparation for a long drive.

Jaws’ real name was Zbigniew Krycsiwiki. He was born in Poland, the product of a union between the strong man of a travelling circus and the Chief Wardress at the Women’s Prison at Kracow. The relationship and subsequent marriage had been a stormy one and, when it broke up, the young Zbigniew stayed with his mother and attended school and subsequently university at Kracow. He grew to a prodigious height but in temperament he followed his father and was surly and uncooperative, given to sudden outbreaks of violent temper. Because of his size he commanded a place in the university basketball team, but he was sluggish of reaction and his lack of speed was constantly exposed by more skilful but less physically endowed players. This lack of ability to compete despite his natural advantages played upon his mind and he became, more and more, a dirty player singled out by the crowd for jeers and abuse. A series of incidents culminated in his being ordered from the court during a key match against Poznan and reaching up to tear down the net and assault the referee. A merciless flaying with the loop of metal meant that the official had his scalp lifted from his head before Zbigniew was eventually pacified.

That was the end of his career as a basketball player and university student. He worked for a while for a butcher and then in a slaughterhouse before being arrested by the secret police in the 1972 bread riots. His appearance on the streets hurling paving stones owed nothing to political conviction but was a direct result of his natural appetite for violence. This appetite was temporarily sated when the police manacled his hands behind his back in a punishment cell and beat him with hollow steel clubs encased in thick leather until his jaw was turned into bonemeal. They left him, thinking they had killed him, but they reckoned without the tenacious hold on life exerted by Zbigniew Krycsiwiki. He prised the cuff of? one of the manacles apart on a wall hook, strangled a warder and drove through the prison gates - and three guards who got in his way - in a stolen three-ton truck. He exchanged this for a private car and drove to Gdansk where he succeeded in stowing away on one of Stromberg's vessels that happened to be taking on timber in the port.

He was eventually discovered near to death as the vessel neared Malmo. Reports of his grotesque size and appearance attracted the interest of Stromberg, who flew down from Stockholm to view the strange stowaway. To Stromberg, ugliness could be more affecting than beauty and in Zbigniew’s swollen, brutish face and huge ungainly body he saw a creature that might have come from the Stygian, unexplored depths of the ocean. He determined to recast him in the mould of his imagination and when told by local medical opinion that the jaw could never be rebuilt he cast further afield.

Doctor Ludwig Schwenk had been responsible for many of the more notorious experiments on human guinea-pigs, in Buchenwald. He had grafted an alsatian’s head to a man’s body and kept the resulting mutation alive for three weeks. He had experimented with genital transplants, some of them involving men and animals. With the collapse of Nazi Germany he had fled to Sweden, changed his name and set up practice as a country GP in a village near Halmstad. Part of the Stromberg's income accrued from blackmailing Nazi war-criminals with the threat of revealing their whereabouts to agents of the Israeli Mossad. It was a simple matter to persuade Schwenk to take an interest in Zbigniew’s case. After fourteen operations involving the grafting of tissue and the insertion of platinized steel components, the artificial jaw was operational. Only one sacrifice was necessary. In order to work the jaw, Zbigniew’s vocal cords had to be severed and reharnessed to the electric impulse conductor that opened and shut the two rows of terrifying, razor-sharp teeth. Zbigniew Krycsiwiki was now mute. Like a fish.

It was six o’clock when the jolt of the vehicle coming to a halt made Bond open his eyes. He was cold and stiff and Anya was leaning against his chest, asleep. Her shoulders were slightly hunched as if she sought to nuzzle closer to whatever warmth his body might provide. Bond shook her gently awake and saw her eyes suddenly open wide like those of a startled animal. She turned her head and, seeing what she had been using as a pillow, drew quickly away.

The cab door slammed and Bond tensed, ready to spring if the back of the van opened. Beside him, Anya retrieved the Beretta from a side pocket of her evening bag and trained it on the doors. Seconds passed. Bond edged forward and slowly pushed one of the doors until there was a quarter-inch gap. Sand and a sandstone wall about three feet away. He pushed the door wider and waited. Nothing happened. The wall rose to about twenty feet and was surmounted by a carved lion, its features worn away by millennia of desert sand storms. Bond swung his stiff legs over the back of the van and dropped noiselessly to the sand. He squatted down and peered under the wheels. There was no sign of anyone. Only a huge jumble of masonry giving the impression of a box of children’s building bricks scattered across the sand. Giant columns, ornamental facades, avenues, esplanades, doorways, triumphal arches, rows of sphinxes and huge statues with their faces eaten away by time and the elements.