Modesty Blaise #13: “Cobra
Trap” by Peter O’Donnell. This final novel actually contains five novelettes:
BELLMAN, THE DARK ANGELS, OLD ALEX, THE GIRL WITH THE BLACK BALLOON, and COBRA
TRAP.
BELLMAN begins shortly after Modesty has taken over The
Network and recruited Garvin. Modesty goes after Bellman, the man behind a drug
ring responsible for many drug addiction cases with children. She can’t make
the man fight her, so she’ll have a chance to kill him, so she frames him and
sends him to prison. Once out he only wants revenge on Modesty and Garvin. This
is a play on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, as Bellman captures them and leaves them
without weapons on a small island, stalked by three killers: Charlie
Brightstar, a Choctaw Indian; Van Rutte, a black African mercenary; and
Crichton, a big game hunter. But Modesty and Garvin make their own weapons and
turn the tables on the hunters.
THE DARK ANGELS is a three-man team of assassins, highly
trained in acrobatics. They are hired by a group of powerful British rich who
want foreign investors out of English business. When a foreign company starts a
building construction on British soil it’s time to kill the head honcho.
Tarrant is wise to the situation, but doesn’t know who is behind the killers.
Instead of asking Modesty and Willie to look into it, he tricks them by pulling
a gimmick on Modesty to make her think it’s her idea. In the meantime, The Dark
Angels are willing – and even anxious – to kill them and collect their pay.
OLD ALEX: Modesty is on a walk-about in the Pyrenees when a
sniper shoots her with a dart. She awakes in a cave, the entrance blocked by a
big boulder, where she cannot escape, and is left die. But an old farmer finds
her while out looking for logs with his ox. He takes her to his farm to meet all
the family. There is a mystery about Old Alex: he speaks French, but throws
about English words now and then, as if he wasn’t always a French farmer.
Matilda the old lady that has been with him since he was found fifty years ago
shows Modesty a uniform he had been wearing when they found him. He was an
British flying officer, shot down in WWII, but he can only remember from the
time the family here had found him, his past a complete blank. Modesty uncovers
the truth, and discovers that The Salamander Four had placed a contract on her;
the sniper had left her for dead. There is a lot going on in this story,
several stories are unraveling at the same time, and strangely they are all
connected. The Salamander Four are destroyed in this story.
THE GIRL WITH THE BLACK BALOON: A group of men are
kidnapping important men and holding them for ransom. When they kidnap an
important British gentleman, Tarrant is able to get a man inside their group
but his body is returned horribly mutilated. He was a friend of Modesty Blaise,
and when she learns of the death, she decides to tackle the case with Willie
Garvin. The girl with the black balloon is an innocent bystander who
accidentally blows their cover, but since she has a hot air balloon with a
basket, they ask her for help in getting above the castle where the kidnappers
are holding their captive. But things go wrong when the captive doesn’t want to
cooperate.
COBRA TRAP. It’s now over 8 years since Tarrant’s death, and
four years since their last serious action. Modesty is 52 years old and
beginning to show her age, and they’re both slowing down. Modesty has been
acting strangely also, showing more motherly love to Willie, as if holding a
deep secret. Steve and Dinah, also older, with two children, are away in Montelara,
Central America, when a rebel force attacks the government. Willie is with
them, and along with the government officials and a trainload of children, hope
to evade the Cobra Army. Willie contacts Modesty about the situation, and she
tells him she’s coming to help. The tracks are blown up before the train can
reach the border, and Willie must take tracks from behind them to replace the
damaged ones in front, which is going to take a lot of time, and the Cobra Army
is heading for them. Modesty arrives in a small plane; bails out, letting the
plane crash into a pass delaying the army, giving her and Willie time to set up
a fire zone to delay them until the train can get away. Here Modesty tells him
she has a tumor in her brain, and is dying, and this is her way out, and she
will hold the fire zone while he returns to the train to help Steve and Dinah.
It’s the way she prefers to die, instead of suffering longer with the tumor.
Willie agrees, but when she dies from a gunshot would, and his ankle is damaged
by a heavy rock, he sets plastic explosives and moves out, blowing a ton of
dirt over her body for a grave, then moves out with the Cobras following close
behind. He is picked off by a sniper in the end. Steve and Dinah successfully
escape in the train.
The author killed Modesty and Willie to insure no one else
would ever write stories featuring them, so I can understand his reasoning, but
that didn’t make it any easier to finally read of their deaths. Still, he
waited until they were middle age and slowing down, even allowing Modesty a
reason for dying. Of course, Willie could not have lived with her gone, so both
had to die. There were only 13 novels, two of which were short story
collections. The series was based on a popular comic book series by the author.
The stories are all topnotch, and I highly recommend the book, but only after
all the others have been read first.
