Carte Blanche

control, and plowed headfirst 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 prone, 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 9-mm pistol rounds. He sighed and looked through the van. “Do you have anything that’ll shoot these?” He gestured at the bullets, which were useless in his weapon.
    “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-caliber magnum—powerful and boasting a tight cylinder lockup 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 semiautomatic 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 humor 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 for cover a dense garden of fine-needled fynbos varieties, watsonias, grasses, jacaranda and king protea. There were kigelia trees too, and some young baobabs. Even in the late autumn, much of the foliage was in full color, 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 toward 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