Carte Blanche Part 35

Flank them? Flank who?

'Wait,' Bond shouted. 'There's n.o.body there. Go with Kwalene! Secure Hydt.'

But the big man seemed not to have heard and plodded over the ground like an elderly Cape buffalo, disappearing into the brush. What the h.e.l.l was he doing?

Just then a few rounds peppered the ground near them. Bond and Jordaan dropped to the ground. He forgot about Lamb and looked for a target.

Several hundred yards away Dunne and the two men with him had regrouped and paused in their retreat, firing back at their pursuers. Bullets. .h.i.t near the van but caused no damage or injury. The three men vanished behind piles of rubbish on the edge of Disappearance Row, the seagull population thinning as the birds fled from the gunfire.

Bond jumped into the driver's seat of the van. In the back, he was pleased to see half a dozen large containers of ammunition. He started the engine. Jordaan ran to the pa.s.senger side. 'I'm coming with you,' she said.

'Better if I do this myself.' He suddenly recalled Philly Maidenstone's recitation of Kipling's verse, which he'd decided was not a bad battle cry.

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone . . .

But Jordaan jumped into the seat beside him and slammed the door. 'I said I'd fight by your side if it was legal to do so. Now it is. So go! They're getting away.'

Bond hesitated only a moment, then slammed the van into first and they bounded off down the dirt roads that gridded the huge complex, past Silicon Row, Resurrection Row, the power plants.

And rubbish, of course millions of tons of it: paper, carrier bags, bits of dull and s.h.i.+ny metal, fragments of ceramic and food sc.r.a.ps, over which the eerie canopy of frantic seagulls was rea.s.sembling.

It was hard driving as they swerved around earth-moving equipment, skips and bales of refuse awaiting burial, but at least the winding route gave Dunne and the two guards no easy target. The three men turned and fired sporadically but were concentrating mostly on escaping.

On her radio Jordaan called in and reported where they were and whom they were pursuing. The special-forces team would not arrive for at least another thirty minutes, Bond heard the dispatcher tell her.

Just as Dunne and the other men reached the fence separating the filthy sprawl of the plant from the reclaimed area, one guard spun around and fired an entire magazine their way. The rounds pounded the front grille and tyres. The van jerked sideways, out of control, and ploughed head first into a pile of paper bales. The air bags deployed and Bond and Jordaan sat stunned.

Seeing that their enemy was down, Dunne and the other guards began firing in earnest.

Amid the sound of bullets slamming into sheet metal, Bond and Jordaan rolled out of the shuddering vehicle and into a ditch. 'You injured?' he asked.

'No. I . . . It's so loud!' Her voice quivered but her eyes told Bond she was successfully fighting down her fear.

From beneath the wing of the van, Bond had a good shot at one of their adversaries and, lying p.r.o.ne, he aimed with the automatic.

One round left.

He squeezed the trigger but the instant the firing pin hit primer, the man ducked. He was gone when the bullet arrived.

Bond grabbed an ammunition box and ripped off the lid. It contained only .223 rounds, for rifles. The second held the same. In fact, they all did. There were no 9mm pistol rounds. He sighed and looked through the van. 'Do you have anything that'll shoot these?' He gestured at the wealth of useless bullets.

'No a.s.sault rifles. All I have is this.' She drew her own weapon. 'Here, you take it.'

The pistol was a Colt Python, a .357-calibre magnum powerful and boasting a tight cylinder lock-up and superb pull. A good weapon. But it was a revolver, holding only six rounds.

No, he corrected when he checked. Jordaan was a conservative gun owner and kept the chamber under the hammer empty. 'Speedloader? Loose rounds?'

'No.'

So, they had five bullets against three adversaries with semi-automatic weapons. 'You've never heard of Glocks?' he muttered, slipping the empty one into his back waistband and weighing the Colt in his palm.

'I investigate crimes,' she replied coolly. 'I don't have much occasion to shoot people.'

Though when those rare instances do arise, he thought angrily, it would be helpful to have the right tool. He said, 'You go back. Just keep to cover.'

She was looking steadily into his eyes, sweat beading at her temples, where her luxurious black hair frothed. 'If you're going after them I'm coming with you.'

'Without a weapon, there's nothing you can do.'

Jordaan glanced to where Dunne and the others had disappeared. 'They have a number of guns and we only have one. That's not fair. We must take one away from them.'

Well, maybe Captain Bheka Jordaan had a sense of humour, after all.

They shared a smile and in her fierce eyes Bond saw the reflection of orange flames from the burning methane. It was a striking image.

Crouching, they slipped into Elysian Fields, using a dense garden of fine-needled fynbos varieties, watsonias, gra.s.ses, jacaranda and King Protea as cover. There were kigelia trees too, and some young baobabs. Even in the late autumn, much of the foliage was in full colour, thanks to the Western Cape climate. A brace of guinea fowl observed them with some irritation and continued on their awkward way. Their gait reminded Bond of Niall Dunne's.

He and Jordaan were seventy-five yards into the park when the a.s.sault began. The trio had been moving away but it seemed that they had done so merely to lure Bond and the SAPS officer further into the wilderness . . . and a trap. The men had split up. One of the guards dropped on to a hillock of soft green ground cover and laid down suppressing fire while the other Dunne, too, possibly, though Bond couldn't see him crashed through the tall gra.s.ses towards them.

Bond had a good shot and took it, but the guard went to cover the instant Bond fired. He missed again. Slow down, he told himself.

Four rounds left. Four.

Jordaan and Bond scrabbled into a dip near a small field filled with succulents and a pond that would probably be home to stately koi, come the spring. They looked up, over the gra.s.s veld, scanning for targets. Then what seemed to be a thousand shots, though it was probably more like forty or fifty, rained down on them, striking close, shattering rock and spraying water.

The two men in khaki, probably desperate and frustrated at their delayed escape, tried a bold a.s.sault, charging Bond and Jordaan from different directions. Bond fired twice at the man coming at them from the left, hitting the man's rifle and left arm. The guard cried out in pain and dropped the weapon, which tumbled to the bottom of the hill. Bond saw that, though the man's forearm was injured, he'd drawn a pistol with his right hand and was otherwise capable of fighting. The second guard made a run to cover and Bond fired fast, tapping him somewhere on his thigh, but that wound too seemed superficial. He vanished into the brush.

One round, one round.

Where was Dunne?

Sneaking up behind them?

Then silence again, though silence filled with ringing in their ears and the internal ba.s.s of heartbeats. Jordaan was s.h.i.+vering. Bond eyed the Bushmaster, the rifle that the injured guard had dropped. It lay around ten yards away.

He studied the scene around them carefully, the landscape, the plants, the trees.

Then he noted tall gra.s.ses swaying fifty or sixty yards distant; the two guards, invisible in the thick foliage, were moving in, keeping some distance between them. In a minute or two they'd be on top of Bond and Jordaan. He might take one out with his last bullet but the other guard would be successful.

'James,' Jordaan whispered, squeezing his arm. 'I'll lead them off I'll go that way.' She pointed to a plain covered with low gra.s.s. 'If you fire, you can hit one and the other may take cover. That'll give you a chance to get to the rifle.'

'It's suicide,' he whispered back. 'You'd be completely exposed.'

'You really must stop your incessant flirting, James.'

He smiled. 'Listen. If anybody's going to be a hero, it's me. I'm going to head towards them. When I tell you, go for the Bushmaster.' He pointed to the black rifle lying in the dust. 'You're qualified to use it?'

She nodded.

The guards moved closer. Thirty yards now.

Bond whispered, 'Stay low until I tell you. Get ready.'

The guards were making their way cautiously through the tall gra.s.s. Bond surveyed the landscape again, took a deep breath, then rose calmly and walked towards them, his pistol pointed down at his side. He raised his left hand.

'James, no!' Jordaan whispered.

Bond did not respond. He called to the men, 'I want to talk to you. If you help me get the names of the other people involved, you'll receive a reward. There'll be no charges against you. You understand?'

The two guards, about ten paces apart, stopped. They were confused. They saw that he couldn't hit them both before the other shot him, yet he was walking slowly in their direction, calm, not lifting his pistol.

'Do you understand? The reward is fifty thousand rand.'

They stared at each other, nodding a little too enthusiastically. Bond knew they were not seriously considering his offer; they were thinking they might draw him closer before they fired. They faced him.

And as they did so the powerful gun in Bond's hand barked once, still pointed downward, letting go its final bullet into the ground. As the guards crouched, startled, Bond sprinted to his left, putting a row of trees between him and the guards.

They glanced at each other, then ran forward to where they had a better view of Bond, who dived behind a hill as their Bushmasters began to clatter.

It was then that the entire world exploded.

The muzzle flashes from the men's rifles ignited the methane spewing from the fake tree root, transporting the gas from the landfill beneath them to Green Way's burn off facilities. Bond had ruptured it with his last bullet.

The men now vanished in a tidal wave of flame, a roiling thunderhead. The guards and the ground they'd stood on were simply gone, the fire widening as panicked birds fled into the air, the trees and brush bursting into flames as if they were soaked in incendiary accelerant.

Twenty feet away Jordaan rose unsteadily. She started towards the Bushmaster. But Bond ran to her, shouting, 'Change of plan. Forget it!'

'What should we do?'

They were thrown to the ground as another mushroom cloud of flame erupted not far away. The roar was so loud Bond had to press his lips against her sumptuous hair to make himself heard. 'Might be a good idea to leave.'

61.

'You are making a terrible mistake!'

Severan Hydt's voice was low with threat but a very different state of mind was revealed in the expression on his long, bearded face: horror at the destruction of his empire, both physical, from the fires in the distance, and legal, from the special-forces troops and police descending on the grounds and office.

There was nothing imperious about him now.

Hydt, in handcuffs, and Jordaan, Nkosi and Bond were standing amid a cl.u.s.ter of bulldozers and lorries in the open area between the office and Resurrection Row. They were near the spot where Bond would have been killed . . . if not for Bheka Jordaan's dramatic arrival to arrest the 'poachers'.

Sergeant Mbalula handed Bond his Walther, extra clips and mobile phone from the Subaru.

'Thank you, Sergeant.'

SAPS officers and South African special forces roamed through the facility, looking for more suspects and collecting evidence. In the distance, fire crews were struggling and it was a struggle to put out the methane fires, as the western edge of Elysian Fields became just another outpost of h.e.l.l.

Apparently the corrupt politicians in Pretoria, the ones in Hydt's pocket, had not been so very high up, after all. Senior officials stepped in quickly and ordered their arrest and full back-up for Jordaan's operation in Cape Town. Additional officers were sent to seize Green Way's offices in all South African cities.

Medics scurried about here too, attending to the wounded, which included only Hydt's security staff.

Hydt's three partners were in custody, Huang, Eberhard and Mathebula. It was not clear yet what their crimes were but that would be established soon. At the very least they had all smuggled firearms into the country, justifying their arrest.

Four of the surviving guards were in custody and most of the hundred or so Green Way employees who'd been milling about in the car park had been detained, pending questioning.

Dunne had escaped. Special-forces officers had found evidence of a motorcycle, which had apparently been hidden under a tarp covered with straw. Of course, the Irishman would have kept his lifeboat ready.

Severan Hydt persisted, 'I'm innocent! You're persecuting me because I'm British. And white. You're prejudiced.'

Jordaan could not ignore this. 'Prejudiced? I've arrested six black men, four whites and an Asian. If that's not a rainbow, I don't know what is.'

The reality of the disaster kept coming home to him. His eyes swivelled away from the fires and began taking in the rest of the grounds. He was probably looking for Dunne. He would be lost without his engineer.

He glanced at Bond, then said to Jordaan, his voice laced with desperation, 'What sort of arrangement could we work out? I'm very wealthy.'

'That's fortunate,' she said. 'Your legal bills will be quite high.'

'I'm not trying to bribe you.'

'I should hope not. That's a very serious offence.' She then said matter-of-factly, 'I want to know where Niall Dunne has gone. If you tell me, I'll let the prosecution know that you helped me find him.'

'I can give you the address of his flat here-'

'I've already sent officers there. Tell me some other places he might go to.'

'Yes . . . I'm sure I can think of something.'

Bond noticed Gregory Lamb approaching from a deserted part of the grounds, carrying his large pistol as if he'd never fired a weapon. Bond left Jordaan and Hydt standing together between rows of pallets containing empty oil drums and joined Lamb near a battered skip.

'Ah, Bond,' the Six agent said, breathing heavily and sweating despite the chilly autumn air. His face was streaked with dirt and there was a tear in the sleeve of his jacket.

'You caught one?' Bond nodded at the slash, caused, it seemed, by a bullet. The a.s.sailant had been close; powder burns surrounded the rent.

'Didn't do any damage, thankfully. Except to my favourite gabardine.'

He was lucky. An inch to the left and the slug would have shattered his upper arm.

'What happened to the guys you went after?' Bond asked. 'I never saw them.'

'Got away, sorry to say. They split up. I knew they were trying to circle back on me but I went after one of them anyway. That's how I got my Lord Nelson here.' He touched his sleeve. 'But dammit, they knew the lie of the land and I didn't. I got a piece of one of them, though.'

'Do you want to follow the blood trail?'