I dropped instantly and Bonard's body flew over me in a headlong tackle from the right. I took his shoe in the jaw and saw pinwheels. My gun had fallen from my hand — I saw him, hazily, starting to raise his gnn arm again. As 1 kicked out and knocked his arm up, the shot went wild. But my head had cleared, I kicked out again, getting one foot behind his leg. He went down, another shot going wild I was on him, wrestling for the gun, when I heard the hammer click on the empty chamber. I smashed a blow at his face but he was quick and wiry. He rolled just enough to make it a grazing blow and then kicked free of my grip. Hulling across the ground, he came up on his feet with something in his hand. It was a length of wire cable and he sent it snapping, whiplike, through the air. I turned away from it, but it landed on my back and I felt it cut in like a knife. It was almost as bad as the burning, searing pain in my shoulder when the bullet had torn into me.
He sent the wire cable zinging through the air again but 1 half fell, half leaned backwards, hitting the ground hard. My hand, outstretched, felt something cold and metal, it was a saw — a big, heavy-duty saw. Bonard was coming in with the slashing cable again. I winked the saw over and, using it as a shield, deflected the blow that whipped down at me. Scrambling to my feet, I held the saw before me and moved in on him. He struck with the cable again, and once more I took it on the flat of the saw.
Then he got smart. Dropping low, he lashed out with the cable and I felt it curl around my leg with searing pain. But before he could pull the vicious weapon free, I brought the heavy saw around in a long arc. The jagged metal teeth caught him on the side of the neck and blood gushed from him like a fountain. He staggered back, clutching at his neck. I dived and tackled him, bringing him down hard. His sallow face now white, he was a dying rat still fighting furiously. His hands clawed at my face and I put my head down and butted him with it. I heard his head fall backwards and hit the ground with a dull thud. I got an elbow up and smashed it against his neck, holding him still. The blood flowed from the severed arteries of his neck in a steady, red flow.
"That was Mona who got away in the other car," I yelled at him. "Mona and the Chinese Commie. Where did she go?"
His eyes were beginning to turn glassy and his face was ghastly white, but still strained in hate and fury.
"You'll never find them," he gasped. "Never."
"Do something good in your last goddamn minutes," I yelled at him. "Where did she go?"
"Never find them… never," he gasped again, his lips pulled back in the snarl of death. "She's too smart… too smart. She's put a great barrier between you… too smart."
I shook him again but I was shaking a dead man. I lay there atop him for a minute, gathering myself and fighting the pain in my shoulder. And then slowly, painfully, I pulled myself up. I readied down and took Wilhelmina from his pocket. Kneeling down, I searched him, but he had nothing on him that would tell me anything I wanted to know. I got up again and walked slowly back to where the panel truck stood, a hardly recognizable shape with a thick covering of wet cement almost obliterating it. I stumbled into Bollard's car, a black Mercedes. My shoulder was paining me like the tortures of hell. The bullet must have hit a nerve. And Mona was gone, off and running. I had to find her.
I put the car in gear slowly, backed out and headed for Townsville. My shoulder continued to throb and burn — it hurt so much I could hardly keep my thoughts straightened out. Mona, Mona, Mona, I repeated to myself, I had to find Mona. She was going for her second cover, I was sure, and equally sure it had to be on the coast. She was a pro, that one, and she'd never return to the ranch or the apartment. She'd figure I'd have both of them covered sooner or later. Damn, but that shoulder was about to fall off, I thought, grimacing.
It was a long, painful drive back to Townsville, seeming to last longer that it actually did, and by time I stopped the car I was feeling lightheaded from the constant searing pain. I stumbled from the car and up the stairs, the first light of day following me into the hallway. I leased on the bell and finally the door opened a crack and smoke-gray eyes peered out at me, frowning at my swaying figure in the hallway. Then the eyes widened in recognition and the door was flung open.
"Yank!" she gasped. "What in bloody hell's happened to you?"
I stumbled past her and fell against the couch and she saw the blood-stained smear at my shoulder. She was on her knees with scissors at once, cutting away the shirt. She helped me up and into the bedroom. I sank down on the bed and gritted my teeth as she stripped me down to shorts. Her voice made little cries of dismay as she saw the deep slashes on my back and legs from the cable. She handed me a bottle of whiskey and I took a long gulp. It helped, but only a little. The cold compresses she put on the shoulder finally brought some relief. Then, with a skin-diving first-aid kit, she applied antiseptic lotion to my slashes.
"This is getting to be a habit, isn't it?" I grinned at her. The robe, loose at the top, let her round breasts peek out at me as if they were offering an incentive to heal up quickly. I talked to her as she worked on me, telling her the main points of what had happened. She wouldn't have believed that I was loud-mouth, freckled Tim Anderson if I hadn't still had some of the make-up on and my hair wasn't still red.
"Lord, almighty," she said. "And to think you had me sized up as a part of all that."
"Well, dammit, you were part of it," I said, "And I noticed that you kept on finding people for them after I left. You steered them to Tim Anderson."
I sat up and saw her lips grow tight. "Yes, that's bloody well right," she said. "After you left, I was damned mad at everything and everyone. If they wanted to keep giving me money, that was fine with me. It's always been scratch for me, and I expect it always will be. There's no one looks out for little Judy except herself."
"And when I pulled out suddenly like that you went right back to the old stand," I accused.
"Maybe that's how it was," she said, her chin thrust forward defiantly. "Nobody's shown me a better stand to go back to."
She finished taping my shoulder and stepped back. The burning had stopped and I saw her looking at me.
"Lord, you're a dinkum lad," she said. "Even all banged up the way you are now."
She turned away, gathering up the bandages and tapes, while I took another pull at the whiskey. I put my head back and gazed up at the ceiling. In the white expanse I saw Mona Star — deadly, gorgeous, lying Mona — and tried to figure out where she could be holed up. Without Mona in my hands, I had nothing, really. I'd only stopped them temporarily. She was smart, luscious and vicious. She could and would start up again if she were left running around loose- I was convinced now that she was a direct agent for the Chinese. There were still a lot of empty holes that needed explaining about her, especially how she got to be Major Rothwell's top assistant with full security clearance. But I didn't wonder about that now. I was wracking my brain for some load, some small, remembered thing or incident or object that might clue me into her new hideout. But I was drawing a blank. I needed something or someone to open a door that might trigger my mind. Just then Judy came back into the room and did it, literally as well as figuratively. She opened the closet door and I saw all the scuba-diving gear she had stacked in there. It was the trigger that set my mind off on a fast series of leaps — skin-diving, underwater, marine objects, the collection in the large cases at the Circle Three ranch — Some of the rare things in that collection were found in one place only, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland! The giant clam shell was one example. These large bivalves grow that size in the waters of the reef, one of the most fantastic collections of marine life found in the world.