and rounder than the lamp of heaven.
3
The impending death weighed on him.
Niall Dunne crouched among weeds, thirty feet from the switch rails. He squinted through the fading light of early evening at the Serbian Rail driver’s cab of the freight train as it approached and he again thought: a tragedy.
For one thing, death was usually a waste and Dunne was, first and foremost, a man who disliked waste – it was almost sinful. Diesel engines, hydraulic pumps, drawbridges, electric motors, computers, assembly lines
Death was efficiency squandered.
Yet there seemed to be no way around it tonight.
He looked south, at the glistening needles of white illumination on the rails from the train’s headlight. He glanced round. The Mercedes was out of sight of the train, parked at just the right angle to keep it hidden from the cab. It was yet another of the precise calculations he had incorporated into his blueprint for the evening. He heard, in memory, his boss’s voice.
Dunne believed he could see the shadow of the driver’s head in the cab of the diesel.
Death… He tried to shrug away the thought.
The train was now four or five hundred yards away.
Aldo Karic joined him.
‘The speed?’ Dunne asked the middle-aged Serb. ‘Is it all right? He seems slow.’
In syrupy English the Serbian said, ‘No, is good. Accelerating now – look. You can see. Is good.’ Karic, a bearish man, sucked air through his teeth. He’d seemed nervous throughout dinner – not, he’d confessed, because he might be arrested or fired but because of the difficulty in keeping the ten thousand euros secret from everyone, including his wife and two children.
Dunne regarded the train again. He calculated speed, mass, incline. Yes, it
And he reminded himself: sometimes death is necessary.
The train was now three hundred yards away.
It would all be over in ninety seconds. And then-
But what was this? Dunne was suddenly aware of movement in a field nearby, an indistinct shape pounding over the uneven ground making directly for the track. ‘Do you see that?’ he asked Karic.
The Serbian gasped. ‘Yes, I am seeing- It’s a car! What is happening?’
It was indeed. In the faint moonlight Dunne could see the small light-coloured saloon, assaulting hillocks and swerving around trees and fragments of fences. How could the driver keep his high speed on such a course? It seemed impossible.
Teenagers, perhaps, playing one of their stupid games. As he stared at the mad transit, he judged velocity, he judged angles. If the car didn’t slow it would cross the track with some seconds to spare… but the driver would have to vault over the tracks themselves; there was no crossing here. If it were stuck on the rail, the diesel would crush it like a tin of vegetables. Still, that wouldn’t affect Dunne’s mission here. The tiny car would be pitched aside and the train continue to the deadly spur.
Now – wait – what was
But the police car’s driver had no intention of stopping on the rail or crossing to the other side. With a final leap into the air from the crest of hill, the saloon crashed to earth and skidded to a stop, just short of the roadbed, around fifty yards in front of the train. The driver jumped out – a man. He was wearing dark clothing. Dunne couldn’t see him clearly but he appeared not to be a policeman. Neither was he trying to flag down the engine driver. He ran into the middle of the track itself and crouched calmly, directly in front of the locomotive, which bore down upon him at fifty or sixty miles an hour.
The frantic blare of the train’s horn filled the night and orange streaks of sparks shot from the locked wheels.
With the train feet away from him, the man launched himself from the track and vanished into the ditch.
‘What is happening?’ Karic whispered.
Just then a yellow-white flash burst from the tracks in front of the diesel and a moment later Dunne heard a crack he recognised: the explosion of a small IED or grenade. A similar blast followed seconds later.
The driver of the police car, it seemed, had a blueprint of his own.
One that trumped Dunne’s.
No, he wasn’t a policeman or a suicide. He was an operative of some sort, with experience in demolition work. The first explosion had blown out the spikes fixing the rail to the wooden ties, the second had pushed the unsecured track to the side slightly so that the diesel’s front left wheels would slip off.
Karic muttered something in Serbian. Dunne ignored him and watched the disc of the diesel’s headlight waver. Then, with a rumble and a terrible squeal, the engine and the massive wagons it tugged behind sidled off the track and, spewing a world of dust, pushed forward through the soil and chipped rock of the rail bed.
4
From the ditch, James Bond watched the locomotive and the cars continue their passage, slowing as they dug into the soft earth, peeling up rails and flinging sand, dirt and stones everywhere. Finally he climbed out and assessed the situation. He’d had only minutes to work out how to avert the calamity that would send the deadly substance into the Danube. After braking to a stop, he’d grabbed two of the grenades the Serbians had brought with them, then leapt on to the tracks to plant the devices.
As he had calculated, the locomotive and wagons had stayed upright and hadn’t toppled into the stream. He’d orchestrated
He spoke into the SRAC radio. ‘This is Leader One. Are you there?’ Silence. ‘Are you there?’ he growled. ‘Respond.’ Bond massaged his shoulder, where a sliver of hot, whistling shrapnel had torn through his jacket and sliced skin.
A crackle. Finally: ‘The train is derailed!’ It was the older Serbian’s voice. ‘Did you see? Where are you?’
‘Listen to me carefully.’
‘What has happened?’
‘Listen! We don’t have much time. I think they’ll try to blow up or shoot the haz-mat
