Carte Blanche

contents. I’m going to fire toward them and drive them back to their car. Wait till the Mercedes is in that muddy area near the restaurant, then shoot out the tires 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 toward the place where the third railcar, 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 preemptive 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 toward 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.

Chapter 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 jackknifed 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 toward 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.
    Incompetence . . .
    Bond scrabbled to his feet and, keeping low, ran toward 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, “ Ne mrdaj! Do not move!”
    At that moment the Irishman leaned 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, “ Opasnost! ”
    But it was too late. The Irishman now shot the younger agent in the right arm, near the elbow. He dropped his gun and cried out, falling backward.
    As the