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 assault 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
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, grasses, 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 assault 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 grasses 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 grass 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 assault, 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.
Where was Dunne?
Sneaking up behind them?
Then silence again, though silence filled with ringing in their ears and the internal bass of heartbeats. Jordaan was shivering. 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 grasses 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 grass. ‘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
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 grass. 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
