Part 35 (2/2)

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 gra.s.s. 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 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.'

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 cl.u.s.ter of bulldozers and lorries in the open area between the office and Resurrection Row. They were near the spot where Bond would have been killed . . . if not for Bheka Jordaan's dramatic arrival to arrest the 'poachers'.

Sergeant Mbalula handed Bond his Walther, extra clips and mobile phone from the Subaru.

'Thank you, Sergeant.'

SAPS officers and South African special forces roamed through the facility, looking for more suspects and collecting evidence. In the distance, fire crews were struggling and it was a struggle to put out the methane fires, as the western edge of Elysian Fields became just another outpost of h.e.l.l.

Apparently the corrupt politicians in Pretoria, the ones in Hydt's pocket, had not been so very high up, after all. Senior officials stepped in quickly and ordered their arrest and full back-up for Jordaan's operation in Cape Town. Additional officers were sent to seize Green Way's offices in all South African cities.

Medics scurried about here too, attending to the wounded, which included only Hydt's security staff.

Hydt's three partners were in custody, Huang, Eberhard and Mathebula. It was not clear yet what their crimes were but that would be established soon. At the very least they had all smuggled firearms into the country, justifying their arrest.

Four of the surviving guards were in custody and most of the hundred or so Green Way employees who'd been milling about in the car park had been detained, pending questioning.

Dunne had escaped. Special-forces officers had found evidence of a motorcycle, which had apparently been hidden under a tarp covered with straw. Of course, the Irishman would have kept his lifeboat ready.

Severan Hydt persisted, 'I'm innocent! You're persecuting me because I'm British. And white. You're prejudiced.'

Jordaan could not ignore this. 'Prejudiced? I've arrested six black men, four whites and an Asian. If that's not a rainbow, I don't know what is.'

The reality of the disaster kept coming home to him. His eyes swivelled away from the fires and began taking in the rest of the grounds. He was probably looking for Dunne. He would be lost without his engineer.

He glanced at Bond, then said to Jordaan, his voice laced with desperation, 'What sort of arrangement could we work out? I'm very wealthy.'

'That's fortunate,' she said. 'Your legal bills will be quite high.'

'I'm not trying to bribe you.'

'I should hope not. That's a very serious offence.' She then said matter-of-factly, 'I want to know where Niall Dunne has gone. If you tell me, I'll let the prosecution know that you helped me find him.'

'I can give you the address of his flat here-'

'I've already sent officers there. Tell me some other places he might go to.'

'Yes . . . I'm sure I can think of something.'

Bond noticed Gregory Lamb approaching from a deserted part of the grounds, carrying his large pistol as if he'd never fired a weapon. Bond left Jordaan and Hydt standing together between rows of pallets containing empty oil drums and joined Lamb near a battered skip.

'Ah, Bond,' the Six agent said, breathing heavily and sweating despite the chilly autumn air. His face was streaked with dirt and there was a tear in the sleeve of his jacket.

'You caught one?' Bond nodded at the slash, caused, it seemed, by a bullet. The a.s.sailant had been close; powder burns surrounded the rent.

'Didn't do any damage, thankfully. Except to my favourite gabardine.'

He was lucky. An inch to the left and the slug would have shattered his upper arm.

'What happened to the guys you went after?' Bond asked. 'I never saw them.'

'Got away, sorry to say. They split up. I knew they were trying to circle back on me but I went after one of them anyway. That's how I got my Lord Nelson here.' He touched his sleeve. 'But dammit, they knew the lie of the land and I didn't. I got a piece of one of them, though.'

'Do you want to follow the blood trail?'

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