It was time, now, for him to swim into the center of the flow. The agent of the Bond understood that the moment he received the report. Battle was about to be openly joined.
He wondered, for a moment, how the young Pluthrak would proceed. But he did not wonder for long. This one was truly namth camiti—perhaps even, as the Bond's preceptor hoped, something greater. Namth camiti, not of Pluthrak alone, but of all Jao. Perhaps, even—the agent's own great hope—what he himself had awaited for twenty years. Namth camiti of humans as well as Jao.
That, it was still too early to determine. But the agent had no doubt at all what tactic the young Pluthrak would use, to bring down the Narvo brute. With one so young and bold and self-confident, it could only be advance-by-oscillation.
To be sure, it was the most dangerous tactic as well as the most adventurous. Oppuk himself had not dared to use it, when he brought down the Hariv. But Jita had been a cautious and canny clan leader, against whom advance-by-oscillation was ill-suited. Against the Narvo as he had become, swollen and gross with twenty years of arrogant rule, the agent thought it would work splendidly.
A whale hunt. It was a fitting way, the agent thought, for a leviathan to drive himself onto the rocks.