containers. It’s their only way to spill the contents. I’m going to fire towards them and drive them back to their car. Wait till the Mercedes is in that muddy area near the restaurant, then shoot out the tyres and keep them inside it.’
‘We should take them now!’
‘No. Don’t do anything until they’re beside the restaurant. They’ll have no defensive position inside the Mercedes. They’ll have to surrender. Do you understand me?’
The SRAC went dead.
Damn. Bond started forward through the dust towards the place where the third rail car, the one containing the hazardous material, waited to be ripped open.
Niall Dunne tried to reconstruct what had happened. He’d known he might have to improvise, but this was one thing he had not considered: a pre-emptive strike by an unknown enemy.
He looked out carefully from his vantage-point, a stand of bushes near where the locomotive sat, smoking, clicking and hissing. The assailant was invisible, hidden by the darkness of night, the dust and fumes. Maybe the man had been crushed to death. Or fled. Dunne lifted the rucksack over his shoulder and made his way round the diesel to the far side, where the derailed wagons would give him cover from the intruder – if he was still alive and present.
In a curious way, Dunne found himself relieved of his nagging anxiety. The death had been averted. He’d been fully prepared for it, had steeled himself – anything for his boss, of course – but the other man’s intervention had settled the matter.
As he approached the diesel he couldn’t help but admire the massive machine. It was an American General Electric Dash 8-40B, old and battered, as you usually saw in the Balkans, but a classic beauty, 4,000 horsepower. He noted the sheets of steel, the wheels, vents, bearings and valves, the springs, hoses and pipes… all so beautiful, elegant in simple functionality. Yes, it was such a relief that-
He was startled by a man staggering towards him, begging for help. It was the train driver. Dunne shot him twice in the head.
It was such a relief that he hadn’t been forced to cause the death of this wonderful machine, as he’d been dreading. He ran his hand along the side of the locomotive, as a father would stroke the hair of a sick child whose fever had just broken. The diesel would be back in service in a few months’ time.
Niall Dunne hitched the rucksack higher on his shoulder and slipped between the wagons to get to work.
5
The two shots James Bond had heard had not hit the hazardous-materials car – he was covering that from thirty yards away. He guessed the engine driver and perhaps his mate had been the victims.
Then, through the dust, he saw the Irishman. Gripping a black pistol, he stood between the two jack-knifed wagons filled with scrap metal directly behind the engine. A rucksack hung from his shoulder. It seemed to be full, which meant that if he intended to blow up the hazardous-material containers, he hadn’t set the charges yet.
Bond aimed his pistol and fired two shots close to the Irishman, to drive him back to the Mercedes. The man crouched, startled, then vanished fast.
Bond looked towards the restaurant side of the track, where the Mercedes was parked. His mouth tightened. The Serbian agents hadn’t followed his orders. They were now flanking the work shed, having pulled the Irishman’s Slavic associate to the ground and slipped nylon restraints around his wrists. The two were now moving closer to the train.
Bond scrabbled to his feet and, keeping low, ran towards them.
The Serbs were pointing at the tracks. The rucksack now sat on the ground, among some tall plants near the engine, obscuring a man. Crouching, the agents moved forward cautiously.
The bag was the Irishman’s… but, of course, the man behind it was not. The driver’s body, probably.
‘No,’ Bond whispered into the SRAC. ‘It’s a trick!… Are you there?’
But the older agent wasn’t listening. He stepped forward, shouting, ‘
At that moment the Irishman leant out of the engine’s cab and fired a burst from his pistol, hitting him in the head. He dropped hard.
His younger colleague assumed that the man on the ground was firing and emptied his automatic weapon into the dead body of the driver.
Bond shouted, ‘
But it was too late. The Irishman leant out of the cab again and shot the younger agent in the right arm, near the elbow. He dropped his gun and cried out, falling backwards.
As the Irishman leapt from the train, he let go half a dozen rounds towards Bond, who returned fire, aiming for the feet and ankles. But the haze and vapours were thick. He missed. The Irishman holstered his gun, shouldered the rucksack and dragged the younger agent towards the Mercedes. They disappeared.
Bond sprinted back to the Jetta, jumped in and roared off. Five minutes later he soared over a hillock and landed, skidding, in the field behind Restoran Rostilj. The scene was one of complete chaos as diners and staff fled in panic. The Mercedes was gone. Glancing towards the derailed train, he could see that the Irishman had killed not only the older agent but his own associate – the Serbian he’d dined with. He’d shot him as he’d lain on his belly, hands bound.
Bond got out of the Jetta and frisked the body for pocket litter but the Irishman had stripped the man of his wallet and any other material. Bond pulled out his own Oakley sunglasses, wiped them clean, then pressed the dead man’s thumb and index finger against the lens. He ran back to the Jetta and sped after the Mercedes, urging the car to seventy miles an hour despite the meandering road and potholes pitting the tarmac.
A few minutes later he glimpsed something light-coloured in a lay-by ahead. He braked hard, barely controlling the fishtailing skid, and stopped, the car engulfed in smoke from its tyres, a few yards from the younger agent. He got out and bent over the man, who was shivering, crying. The wound in his arm was bad and he’d lost a great deal of blood. One shoe was off and a toenail was gone. The Irishman had tortured him.
Bond opened his folding knife, cut the man’s shirt with the razor-sharp blade and bound a wool strip round his arm. With a stick he found just off the lay-by he made a tourniquet and applied it. He leant down and wiped sweat from the man’s face. ‘Where is he going?’
Gasping, his face a mask of agony, he rambled in Serbo-Croatian. Then, realising who Bond was, he said, ‘You will call my brother… You must take me to the hospital. I will tell you a place to go.’
‘I need to know where he went.’
‘I didn’t say nothing. He tried. But I didn’t tell nothing about you.’
The boy had spilt out everything he knew about the operation, of course, but that wasn’t the issue now. Bond said, ‘Where did he go?’
‘The hospital… Take me and I will tell you.’
‘Tell me or you’ll die in five minutes,’ Bond said evenly, loosening the tourniquet on his right arm. Blood cascaded.
The young man blinked away tears. ‘All right! You bastard! He ask how to get to E Seven-five, the fast road from Highway Twenty-one. That will take him to Hungary. He is going north. Please!’
Bond tightened the tourniquet again. He knew, of course, that the Irishman wasn’t going north: the man was a cruel and clever tactician. He didn’t need directions. Bond saw his own devotion to tradecraft in the Irishman. Even before he had arrived in Serbia the man would have memorised the geography around Novi
