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The Central American rainforest is never silent. The Panama isthmus is home to more species of tropical bird than anywhere else in the world, and Bond could hear their trills and squawks all around him. It was like Crab Key all over again, except that instead of fleeing Dr. No's men through a cypress swamp with Quarell and Honey Ryder, he was trudging through the Panamanian jungle with a heavily limping Felix Leiter leaning on his shoulder.
"Remind me again," Leiter panted, "how many miles it is to Gatun?"
Bond frowned, his sunburned and battered face making the expression forboding. "Six miles." Six miles through some of the densest and most inhospitable terrain in central America -- a mosquito-infested combination of rain forest and mangrove swamp that would challenge a healthy man in prime condition. Bond and Felix, both of them injured and exhausted, would be lucky to make it to Gatun at all, let alone within the next twenty-four hours.
If they did not, if they failed to arrive before the deadline, then von Gunther's deadly plan would proceed unopposed, and the massive explosions he had arranged would wipe out the Gatun Dam and the massive Gatun locks, releasing the hundreds of tonnes of water held back for use in regulating the water levels of the canal and rendering the only sea route between the Caribbean and the Pacific completely impassable.
"Six miles," Leiter repeated. He didn't say anything more, but Bond caught his meaning anyway.
He could feel the tremors of strain and exhaustion in the thin frame pressed against his side, and knew that his own reserves of strength were running low. The bullet wound in his arm was a hot, sullen ache, the injury swollen in a way that promised infection.
Leiter stumbled over an exposed root, his useless leg buckling, and Bond just barely managed to prevent both of them from falling. It would be the first of many falls, he knew, as the two of them grew more and more tired.
"James," Leiter said, after a long moment wherein both of them leaned against a strangler fig and caught their breath. "There is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to be able to walk through five more miles of this. You can pretend to be some kind of superhero all you want, but it's time to face reality, and the reality of it is that you can't drag my deadweight through the jungle all the way to Gatun."
Strangler figs, Bond remembered, were polinated solely by a single species of wasp, plant and insect utterly incapable of surviving without one another. Funny, the things the mind latched on to when it was exhausted.
There was no room in this business for sentiment. Bond, when on a mission, was as cold and ruthless as necessary in order to get the job done; you had to be, or one slip up, one yielding to finer feelings at the wrong moment, could condemn the whole mission to failure, and the agent's life along with it.
"I can't leave you behind," he said honestly. "You're the only one of us who speaks Spanish."
Leiter stared at him blankly for a second, and then began to laugh.