Veggi-Finger

Tommy Robbins looked at the hacked up piece of cadaver on his dinner plate.

"Eat it, Tommy," said his mother. "It's good for you."

Tommy didn't like the looks of the steak his mother served for the late evening supper. Usually he was a normal boy who liked normal food, and a meat 'n potatoes meal was something he normally relished. This time, however, there was something about the steak that didn't appeal to him.

"Tommy H. Robbins, if you don't eat that meal your mother prepared, you'll be sent to your room and grounded for 10 weeks!" said his father. "You know we can't afford meat as much as we used to, particularly since my salary was cut back at the accounting office. Now do the right thing and eat your food!".

Tommy did as his parents asked. He ate the steak, potatoes, and peas. For dessert there was an apple cobbler. He left the dinner table feeling satiated. Five weeks later he was dead.

A jet fighter pierced the sky high above Bosnia, leaving a ripple of sonic booms behind it on the ground below. The warring factions in the Balkans, as brutalized as ever since the formations of their ethnic identities many centuries ago, didn't even bother to look for the source of the noise. They had heard too many explosions, and dodged too many hand grenades, to even care about sonic booms from yet another NATO flyover. Had they bothered, however, to train their binoculars on the F-18, they would have seen a small canister drop from the port wing. The canister dropped to 500 meters above ground, then released a small parachute that gently dropped it onto a terraced hillside. From a nearby cave, an athletic figure emerged and picked up the package.

"Why can't they deliver these things when I'm not in the middle of dinner?" grumbled the man. "Don't they know how hard it is to get a proper Lancashire mutton in this part of the world?"

Opening the cannister, the man took out a message.

Need you back at Mom's house. Big problem with the goodie bag. Don't delay.

"That's just like them," murmured James Bond to himself. "Just when they send you to one assignment, they find one that's more urgent. Well, big problem or no, I'm going to finish my supper!"

He turned back to the cave, taking a few steps until he heard the whistle of an incoming mortar shell. Bond took cover behind a large boulder just in time to hear an explosion. Within seconds he was covered with the dust of the cave the served as his hideout, mingled with a few scraps of mutton and blots of Leicester cheese.

He cursed the warring parties for destroying his last meal in the Balkans; he didn't know how close he had come to a horrible death.

"Good to have you back, Bond," said the Chief. "We've missed you."

"I've been gone three days! How could you miss me?"

"Details, details, 007! You know how hectic the pace is at headquarters. An assassination here, an epidemic there--it's sometimes hard to keep it all straight. Anyway, we wouldn't disturb you if it weren't important, wot?"

"It had better be important. I was in the middle of a mutton supper when I received your letter. As I was walking back to finish it, some guerilla destroyed it with a mortar shell!"

"So you didn't eat the mutton?" inquired the Chief.

"No, but that doesn't mean I won't put it on my expense account."

"Thank heavens!" said the Chief. "Bond, have you heard of something called 'bovine spongiform encephalopathy'?"

"Yes, the 'mad cow disease'. Rather horrid, I understand. It turns the victim's brain into a sponge."

"Quite right, 007. We've known about the disease for several years now, and we worked with scientists from the Ministry of Agriculture in an attempt to keep it limited to a small area of Wales. Unfortunately, one shipment of infected cattle got through to a central packing house, and from there it spread to other food chains in Europe. What's worse, an American tourists thought it would be fun to take a McDonald's hamburger made in France, smuggle it through the Yankees' customs agents, and share it with his friends. Instead, the tourist dumped it next to a cattle ranch, where five cows ate the infected hamburger. From there the disease found its way into a small restaurant into Port Waterford."

Bond didn't quite get the Chief's message. "Chief, pardon me for asking, but what does Britain's most secret spy ring care about a small restaurant in Port Waterford?"

"Because, my boy, what you may not know, and what the Americans certainly don't know, is that Port Waterford is the home of your predecessor, 006. We sent him there after he started displaying signs of mental instability. We gave him a new identify, false Social Security number, driver's license, and whatever establishes you as a proper American citizen. Until now, it's worked rather well. We have a mail carrier that delivers his mail daily, just to keep an eye on him.

"If 006 should become ill with the mad cow disease, our nation and the entire world will be in danger. Before we sent him off to America, he made a deal with news corresponding at the London Times. If the correspondent doesn't receive a phone call from 006 on the first of each month, the correspondent will open a safe deposit box that has the codes to launch our nuclear missiles. There is a good possibility that the correspondent will sell those codes to the North Koreans for millions, or to the Iranians for hundreds of millions."

"So what do you want from me?" asked Bond.

"You are to leave for Port Waterford tomorrow morning. From there you go directly to the post office and meet with our mail carrier. He'll tell you the address of 006. You'll have to meet with 006, gain his confidence, and convince him to give you a copy of the key to his safety deposit box. Once you get the key, you return to London, open the box, and destroy the list of codes."

"Doesn't sound to hard, Chief," said Bond.

"I'm sure a man of your experience can pull this off very quickly. I just have one word of advice. When you go to Port Waterford, don't eat any hamburgers.

To be continued...