“All right, let’s go then. See you in about half an hour.” Bond felt for the knife at his waist, shifted the webbing, and put the mouthpiece between his teeth. He turned on the air and, his fins slapping on the muddy sand, walked down and into the water. There he bent down, spat into his mask to prevent it steaming up, washed it out, and adjusted it. Then he walked slowly on, getting used to the breathing. By the end of the wharf he was up to his ears. He quietly submerged and launched himself forward into an easy leg crawl, his hands along his flanks.
The mud shelved steeply and Bond kept on going down, until, at about forty feet, he was only a few inches above the bottom. He glanced at the big luminous figures on the dial of his watch—12:10. He untensed himself and put his legs into an easy, relaxed rhythm.
Through the roof of small waves the pale moonlight flickered on the gray bottom, and the refuse—motor tires, cans, bottles—cast black shadows. A small octopus, feeling his shock wave, turned from dark brown to pale gray and squeezed itself softly back into the mouth of the oil-drum that was its home. Sea flowers, the gelatinous polyps that grow out of the sand at night, whisked down their holes as Bond’s black shadow touched them. Other tiny night things puffed thin jets of silt out of their small volcanoes in the mud as they felt the tremor of Bond’s passage, and an occasional hermit crab snapped itself back into its borrowed shell. It was like traveling across a moon landscape, on and under which many mysterious creatures lived minute lives. Bond watched it all, carefully, as if he had been an underwater naturalist. He knew that was the way to keep nerves steady under the sea—to focus the whole attention on the people who lived there and not try to probe the sinister gray walls of mist for imaginary monsters.
The rhythm of his steady progress soon became automatic, and while Bond, keeping the moon at his right shoulder, held to his course, his mind reached back to Domino. So she was the sister of the man who probably highjacked the plane! Probably even Largo, if Largo was in fact involved in the plot, didn’t know this. So what did the relationship amount to? Coincidence. It could he nothing else. Her whole manner was so entirely innocent. And yet it was one more thin straw to add to the meager pile that seemed in some indeterminate way to be adding up to Largo’s involvement. And Largo’s reaction at the word “spectre.” That could he put down to Italian superstition—or it could not. Bond had a deadly feeling that all these tiny scraps amounted to the tip of an iceberg—a few feet of ice pinnacle, with, below, a thousand tons of the stuff. Should he report? Or shouldn’t he? Bond’s mind boiled with indecision. How to put it? How to grade the intelligence so that it would reflect his doubts? How much to say and how much to leave out?
The extrasensory antennae of the human body, the senses left over from the jungle life of millions of years ago, sharpen unconsciously when man knows that he is on the edge of danger. Bond’s mind was concentrating on something far away from his present risks, but beneath his conscious thoughts his senses were questing for enemies. Now suddenly the alarm was sounded by a hidden nerve—Danger! Danger! Danger!
Bond’s body tensed. His hand went to his knife and his head swiveled sharply to the right—not to the left or behind him. His senses told him to look to the right.
A big barracuda, if it is twenty pounds or over, is the most fearsome fish in the sea. Clean and straight and malevolent, it is all hostile weapon, from the long snarling mouth in the cruel jaw that can open like a rattlesnake’s to an angle of ninety degrees, along the blue and silver steel of the body to the lazy power of the tail fin that helps to make this fish one of the five fastest sprinters in the sea. This one, moving parallel with Bond, ten yards away just inside the wall of gray mist that was the edge of visibility, was showing its danger signals. The broad lateral stripes showed vividly—the angry hunting sign—the gold and black tiger’s eye was on him, watchful, incurious, and the long mouth was open half an inch so that the moonlight glittered on the sharpest row of teeth in the ocean—teeth that don’t bite at the flesh, teeth that tear out a chunk and swallow and then hit and scythe again.