The clang beside his ear and the sharp impact against his left shoulder were simultaneous. Automatically, Bond sprang back from the hull. Below him the bright needle of the spear wavered slowly down into the depths. Bond whirled. The man, his black rubber suit glinting like armor in the moonlight, was pedaling furiously in the water while he thrust another spear down the barrel of the CO2 gun. Bond hurled himself toward him, flailing at the water with his fins. The man pulled back the loading lever and leveled the gun. Bond knew he couldn’t make it. He was six strokes away. He stopped suddenly, ducked his head, and jackknifed down. He felt the small shock wave of the silent explosion of gas and something hit his foot. Now! He soared up below the man and scythed upward with his knife. The blade went in. He felt the black rubber against his hand. Then the butt of the gun hit him behind the ear and a white hand came down and scrabbled at his airpipe. Bond slashed wildly with the knife, his hand moving with terrifying slowness through the water. The point ripped something. The hand let go of the mask, but now Bond couldn’t see. Again the butt of the gun crashed down on his head. Now the water was full of black smoke, heavy, stringy stuff that clung to the glass of his mask. Bond backed painfully, slowly away, clawing at the glass. At last it cleared. The black smoke was coming out of the man, out of his stomach. But the gun was coming up again slowly, agonizingly, as if it weighed a ton, and the bright sting of the spear showed at its mouth. Now the webbed feet were hardly stirring, but the man was sinking slowly down to Bond’s level. Suspended straight in the water, he looked like one of those little celluloid figures in a Ptolemy jar that rise and fall gracefully with pressure on the rubber top to the jar. Bond couldn’t get his limbs to obey. They felt like lead. He shook his head to clear it, but still his hands and flippers moved only half consciously, all speed gone. Now he could see the bared teeth round the other man’s rubber mouthpiece. The gun was at his head, at his throat, at his heart. Bond’s hands crept up his chest to protect him while his flippers moved sluggishly, like broken wings, below him.
And then, suddenly, the man was hurled toward Bond as if he had been kicked in the back. His arms spread in a curious gesture of embrace for Bond and the gun tumbled slowly away between them and disappeared. A puff of black blood spread out into the sea from behind the man’s back and his hands wavered out and up in vague surrender while his head twisted on his shoulders to see what had done this to him.
And now, a few yards behind the man, shreds of black rubber hanging from its jaws, Bond saw the barracuda. It was lying broadside on, seven or eight feet of silver and blue torpedo, and round its jaws there was a thin mist of blood, the taste in the water that had triggered its attack.
Now the great tiger’s eye looked coldly at Bond and then downward at the slowly sinking man. It gave a horrible yawning gulp to rid itself of the shreds of rubber, turned lazily three-quarters on, quivered in all its length, and dived like a bolt of white light. It hit the man on the right shoulder with wide-open jaws, shook him once, furiously, like a dog with a rat, and then backed away. Bond felt the vomit rising in his gorge like molten lava. He swallowed it down and slowly, as if in a dream, began swimming with languid, sleepy strokes away from the scene.
Bond had not gone many yards when something hit the surface to his left and the moonlight glinted on a silvery kind of egg that turned lazily over and over as it went down. It meant nothing to Bond, but two strokes later, he received a violent blow in the stomach that knocked him sideways. It also knocked sense into him, and he began to move fast through the water, at the same time planing downward toward the bottom. More buffets hit him in quick succession, but the grenades were bracketing the blood patch near the ship’s hull and the shock waves of the explosions became less.