Carte Blanche

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 bass of heartbeats. Jordaan was shivering. Bond eyed the Bushmaster, the rifle that the injured guard had dropped. It lay around ten yards from them.
    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 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 toward 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 toward 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 grinned and 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 toward 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.”

Chapter 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 cluster of bulldozers and lorries in the open area between the