His hand on the dead-man throttle, the driver of the Serbian Rail diesel felt the thrill he always did on this particular stretch of railway, heading north from Belgrade and approaching Novi Sad.
This was the route of the famed Arlberg Orient Express, which ran from Greece through Belgrade and points north from the 1930s until the 1960s. Of course, he was not piloting a glistening Pacific 231 steam locomotive towing elegant mahogany-and-brass dining cars, suites and sleepers, where passengers floated upon vapours of luxury and anticipation. He commanded a battered old thing from America that tugged behind it a string of more or less dependable rolling stock packed snugly with mundane cargo.
But still he felt the thrill of history in every vista that the journey offered, especially as they approached the river, hisriver.
And yet he was ill at ease.
Among the wagons bound for Budapest, containing coal, scrap metal, consumer products and timber, there was one that worried him greatly. It was loaded with drums of MIC – methyl isocyanate – to be used in Hungary in the manufacture of rubber.
The driver – a round, balding man in a well-worn cap and stained overalls – had been briefed at length about this deadly chemical by his supervisor and some idiot from the Serbian Safety and Well-being Transportation Oversight Ministry. Some years ago this substance had killed eight thousand people in Bhopal, India, within a few days of a leak from a manufacturing plant there.
He’d acknowledged the danger his cargo presented but, a veteran railwayman and union member, he’d asked, ‘What does that mean for the journey to Budapest… specifically?’
The boss and the bureaucrat had regarded each other with the eyes of officialdom and, after a pause, settled for ‘Just be very careful.’
The lights of Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, began to coalesce in the distance, and ahead in the encroaching evening the Danube appeared as a pale stripe. In history and in music the river was celebrated. In reality it was brown, undramatic and home to barges and tankers, not candle-lit vessels filled with lovers and Viennese orchestras – or not here, at least. Still, it wasthe Danube, an icon of Balkan pride, and the railwayman’s chest always swelled as he took his train over the bridge.
His river…
He peered through the speckled windscreen and inspected the track before him in the headlight of the General Electric diesel. Nothing to be concerned about.
There were eight notch positions on the throttle, number one being the lowest. He was presently at five and he eased back to three to slow the train as it entered a series of turns. The 4,000-horsepower engine grew softer as it cut back the voltage to the traction motors.
As the cars entered the straight section to the bridge the driver shifted up to notch five again and then six. The engine pulsed louder and faster and there came a series of sharp clangs from behind. The sound was, the driver knew, simply the couplings between wagons protesting at the change in speed, a minor cacophony he’d heard a thousand times in his job. But his imagination told him the noise was the metal containers of the deadly chemical in car number three, jostling against each other, at risk of spewing forth their poison.
Nonsense, he told himself and concentrated on keeping the speed steady. Then, for no reason at all, except that it made him feel better, he tugged at the air horn.
Lying at the top of a hill, surrounded by obscuring grass, a man of serious face and hunter’s demeanour heard the wail of a horn in the distance, miles away. A glance told him that the sound had come from the train approaching from the south. It would arrive here in ten or fifteen minutes. He wondered how it might affect the precarious operation that was about to unfurl.
Shifting position slightly, he studied the diesel locomotive and the lengthy string of wagons behind it through his night-vision monocular.
Judging that the train was of no consequence to himself and his plans, James Bond turned the scope back to the restaurant of the spa and hotel and once again regarded his target through the window. The weathered building was large, yellow stucco with brown trim. Apparently it was a favourite with the locals, from the number of Zastava and Fiat saloons in the car park.
It was eight forty and the Sunday evening was clear here, near Novi Sad, where the Pannonian Plain rose to a landscape that the Serbs called ‘mountainous’, though Bond guessed the adjective must have been chosen to attract tourists; the rises were mere hills to him, an avid skier. The May air was dry and cool, the surroundings as quiet as an undertaker’s chapel of rest.
Bond shifted position again. In his thirties, he was six foot tall and weighed 170 lb. His black hair was parted on one side and a comma of loose strands fell over one eye. A three-inch scar ran down his right cheek.
This evening he’d taken some care with his outfit. He was wearing a dark green jacket and rainproof trousers from the American company 5.11, which made the best tactical clothing on the market. On his feet were well-worn leather boots that had been made for pursuit and sure footing in a fight.
As night descended, the lights to the north glowed more intensely: the old city of Novi Sad. As lively and charming as it was now, Bond knew the place had a dark past. After the Hungarians had slaughtered thousands of its citizens in January 1942 and flung the bodies into the icy Danube, Novi Sad had become a crucible for partisan resistance. Bond was here tonight to prevent another horror, different in nature but of equal or worse magnitude.
Yesterday, Saturday, an alert had rippled through the British intelligence community. GCHQ, in Cheltenham, had decrypted an electronic whisper about an attack later in the week.
meeting at noah’s office, confirm incident friday night, 20th, estimated initial casualties in the thousands, british interests adversely affected, funds transfers as discussed.
Not long after, the government eavesdroppers had also cracked part of a second text message, sent from the same phone, same encryption algorithm, but to a different number.
meet me sunday at restaurant rostilj outside novi sad, 20:00. i am 6+ foot tall, irish accent.
Then the Irishman – who’d courteously, if inadvertently, supplied his own nickname – had destroyed the phone or flicked out the batteries, as had the other text recipients.
In London the Joint Intelligence Committee and members of COBRA, the crisis management body, met into the night to assess the risk of Incident Twenty, so-called because of Friday’s date.
There was no solid information on the origin or nature of the threat but MI6 was of the opinion that it was coming out of the tribal regions in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and its affiliates had taken to hiring Western operatives in European countries. Six’s agents in Kabul began a major effort to learn more. The Serbian connection had to be pursued, too. And so at ten o’clock last night the rangy tentacles of these events had reached out and clutched Bond, who’d been sitting in an exclusive restaurant off Charing Cross Road with a beautiful woman, whose lengthy description of her life as an under-appreciated painter had grown tiresome. The message on Bond’s mobile had read,
NIACT, Call COS.
The Night Action alert meant an immediate response was required, at whatever time it was received. The call to his chief of staff had blessedly cut the date short and soon he had been en route to Serbia, under a Level 2 project order, authorising him to identify the Irishman, plant trackers and other surveillance devices and follow him. If that proved impossible, the order authorised Bond to conduct an extraordinary rendition of the Irishman and spirit him back to England or to a black site on the Continent for interrogation.
So now Bond lay among white narcissi, taking care to avoid the leaves of that beautiful but poisonous spring flower. He concentrated on peering through the Restoran Roštilj’s front window, on the other side of which the Irishman was sitting over an almost untouched plate and talking to his partner, as yet unidentified but Slavic in appearance. Perhaps because he was nervous, the local contact had parked elsewhere and walked here, providing no number plate to scan.
The Irishman had not been so timid. His low-end Mercedes had arrived forty minutes ago. Its plate had revealed that the vehicle had been hired today for cash under a false name, with a fake British driving licence and passport. The man was about Bond’s age, perhaps a bit older, six foot two and lean. He’d walked into the restaurant in an ungainly way, his feet turned out. An odd line of blond fringe dipped over a high forehead and his cheekbones angled down to a square-cut chin.
Bond was satisfied that this man was the target. Two hours ago he had gone into the restaurant for a cup of coffee and stuck a listening device inside the front door. A man had arrived at the appointed time and spoken to the head waiter in English – slowly and loudly as foreigners often do when talking to locals. To Bond, listening through an app on his phone from thirty yards away, the accent was clearly mid-Ulster – most likely Belfast or the surrounding area. Unfortunately the meeting between the Irishman and his local contact was taking place out of the bug’s range.
Through the tunnel of his monocular, Bond now studied his adversary, taking note of every detail – ‘Small clues save you. Small errors kill,’ as the instructors at Fort Monckton were wont to remind. He noted that the Irishman’s manner was precise and that he made no unnecessary gestures. When the partner drew a diagram the Irishman moved it closer with the rubber of a propelling pencil so that he left no fingerprints. He sat with his back to the window and in front of his partner; the surveillance apps on Bond’s mobile could not read either set of lips. Once, the Irishman turned quickly, looking outside, as if triggered by a sixth sense. The pale eyes were devoid of expression. After some time he turned back to the food that apparently didn’t interest him.
The meal now seemed to be winding down. Bond eased off the hillock and made his way through widely spaced spruce and pine trees and anaemic undergrowth, with clusters of the ubiquitous white flowers. He passed a faded sign in Serbian, French and English that had amused him when he’d arrived:
SPA AND
RESTAURANT ROŠTILJ
Located in a declared therapeutic region, and is recommended by all for convalescences after surgeries, especially helping for acute and chronic diseases of respiration organs, and anaemia.
Full bar
He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelt of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant. His two ‘comrades’, as he thought of them, were waiting here.
James Bond preferred to operate alone but the plan he’d devised required two local agents. They were with the BIA, the Serbian Security Information Agency, as benign a name for a spy outfit as one could imagine. The men, however, were undercover in the uniform of local police from Novi Sad, sporting the golden badge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Faces squat, heads round, perpetually unsmiling, they wore their hair close-cropped beneath navy-blue brimmed caps. Their woollen uniforms were the same shade. One was around forty, the other twenty-five. Despite their cover roles as rural officers, they’d come girded for battle. They carried heavy Beretta pistols and swathes of ammunition. In the back seat of their borrowed police car, a Volkswagen Jetta, there were two green-camouflaged Kalashnikov machine guns, an Uzi and a canvas bag of fragmentation hand grenades – serious ones, Swiss HG 85s.
Bond turned to the older agent, but before he spoke he heard a fierce slapping from behind. His hand moving to his Walther PPS, he whirled round – to see the younger Serb ramming a pack of cigarettes into his palm, a ritual that Bond, a former smoker, had always found absurdly self-conscious and unnecessary.
What was the man thinking?
‘Quiet,’ he whispered coldly. ‘And put those away. No smoking.’
Perplexity sidled into the dark eyes. ‘My brother, he smokes all time he is out on operations. Looks more normal than notsmoking in Serbia.’ On the drive here the young man had prattled on and on about his brother, a senior agent with the infamous JSO, technically a unit of the state secret service, though Bond knew it was really a black-ops paramilitary group. The young agent had let slip, probably intentionally for he had said it with pride, that big brother had fought with Arkan’s Tigers, a ruthless gang that had committed some of the worst atrocities in the fighting in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
‘Maybe on the streets of Belgrade a cigarette won’t be noticed,’ Bond muttered, ‘but this is a tactical operation. Put them away.’
The agent slowly complied. He seemed about to say something to his partner, then thought better of it, perhaps recalling that Bond had a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian.
Bond looked again into the restaurant and saw that the Irishman was laying some dinars on the metal tray – no traceable credit card, of course. The partner was pulling on a jacket.
‘All right. It’s time.’ Bond reiterated the plan. In the police car they would follow the Irishman’s Mercedes out of the drive and along the road until he was a mile or so from the restaurant. The Serbian agents would then pull the car over, telling him it matched a vehicle used in a drug crime in Novi Sad. The Irishman would be asked politely to get out and would be handcuffed. His mobile phone, wallet and identity papers would be placed on the boot of the Mercedes and he’d be led aside and made to sit facing away from the car.
Meanwhile Bond would slip out of the back seat, photograph the documents, download what he could from the phone, look through laptops and luggage, then plant tracking devices.
By then the Irishman would have caught on that this was a shake-down and offered a suitable bribe. He’d be freed, to go on his way.
If the local partner left the restaurant with him, they’d execute essentially the same plan with both men.
‘Now, I’m ninety per cent sure he’ll believe you,’ Bond said. ‘But if not, and he engages, remember that under no circumstances is he to be killed. I need him alive. Aim to wound in the arm he favours, near the elbow, not the shoulder.’ Despite what one saw in the movies, a shoulder wound was usually as fatal as one to the abdomen or chest.
The Irishman now stepped outside, feet splayed. He looked around, pausing to study the area. Was anything different? he’d be thinking. New cars had arrived since they’d entered; was there anything significant about them? He apparently decided there was no threat and both men climbed into the Mercedes.
‘It’s the pair of them,’ Bond said. ‘Same plan.’
‘ Da .’
The Irishman started the engine. The lights flashed on.
Bond oriented his hand on his Walther, snug in the D.M. Bullard leather pancake holster, and climbed into the back seat of the police car, noticing an empty can on the floor. One of his comrades had enjoyed a Jelen Pivo, a Deer Beer, while Bond had been conducting surveillance. The insubordination bothered him less than the carelessness. The Irishman might grow suspicious when stopped by a cop with beer on his breath. Another man’s ego and greed can be helpful, Bond believed, but incompetence is simply a useless and inexcusable danger.
The Serbs got into the front. The engine hummed to life. Bond tapped the earpiece of his SRAC, the short-range agent communication device used for cloaked radio transmissions on tactical operations. ‘Channel Two,’ he reminded them.
‘ Da, da .’ The older man sounded bored. They both plugged in earpieces.
And James Bond asked himself yet again: had he planned this properly? Despite the speed with which the operation had been put together, he’d spent hours formulating the tactics. He believed he’d anticipated every possible variation.
Except one, it appeared.
The Irishman did not do what he absolutely had to.
He didn’t leave.
The Mercedes turned awayfrom the drive and rolled out of the car park on to the lawn beside the restaurant, on the other side of a tall hedge, unseen by the staff and diners. It was heading for a weed-riddled field to the east.
The younger agent snapped, ‘ Govno! What he is doing?’ The three men stepped out to get a better view. The older one drew his gun and started after the car.
Bond waved him to a halt. ‘No! Wait.’
‘He’s escaping. He knows about us!’
‘No – it’s something else.’ The Irishman wasn’t driving as if he were being pursued. He was moving slowly, the Mercedes easing forward, like a boat in a gentle morning swell. Besides, there was no place to escape to. He was hemmed in by cliffs overlooking the Danube, the railway embankment and the forest on the Fruška Gora rise.
Bond watched as the Mercedes arrived at the railtrack, a hundred yards from where they stood. It slowed, made a U-turn and parked, the bonnet facing back towards the restaurant. It was close to a railway work shed and switch rails, where a second track peeled off from the main line. Both men climbed out and the Irishman collected something from the boot.
Your enemy’s purpose will dictate your response – Bond silently recited another maxim from the lectures at Fort Monckton’s Specialist Training Centre in Gosport. You must find the adversary’s intention.
But what washis purpose?
Bond pulled out the monocular again, clicked on the night vision and focused. The partner opened a panel mounted on a signal beside the switch rails and began fiddling with the components inside. Bond saw that the second track, leading off to the right, was a rusting, disused spur, ending in a barrier at the top of a hill.
So it was sabotage. They were going to derail the train by shunting it on to the spur. The cars would tumble down the hill into a stream that flowed into the Danube.
But why?
Bond turned the monocular towards the diesel engine and the wagons behind it and saw the answer. The first two cars contained only scrap metal, but behind them, a canvas-covered flatbed was marked Opasnost-Danger! He saw, too, a hazardous-materials diamond, the universal warning sign that told emergency rescuers the risks of a particular shipment. Alarmingly this diamond had high numbers for all three categories: health, instability and inflammability. The Wat the bottom meant that the substance would react dangerously with water. Whatever was being carried in that car was in the deadliest category short of nuclear materials.
The train was now three-quarters of a mile away from the switch rails, picking up speed to make the gradient to the bridge.
Your enemy’s purpose will dictate your response…
He didn’t know how the sabotage related to Incident Twenty, if at all, but their immediate goal was clear. As was the response Bond now instinctively formulated. He said to the comrades, ‘If they try to leave, block them at the drive and take them. No lethal force.’
He leapt into the driver’s seat of the Jetta. He pointed the car towards the fields where he’d been conducting surveillance and jammed down the accelerator as he released the clutch. The light car shot forward, engine and gearbox crying out at the rough treatment, as it crashed over brush, saplings, narcissi and the raspberry bushes that grew everywhere in Serbia. Dogs fled and lights in the tiny cottages nearby flicked on. Residents in their gardens waved their arms angrily in protest.
Bond ignored them and concentrated on maintaining his speed as he drove towards his destination, guided only by scant illumination: a partial moon above and the doomed train’s headlight, far brighter and rounder than the lamp of heaven.
The impending death weighed on him.
Niall Dunne crouched among weeds, thirty feet from the switch rails. He squinted through the fading light of early evening at the Serbian Rail driver’s cab of the freight train as it approached and he again thought: a tragedy.
For one thing, death was usually a waste and Dunne was, first and foremost, a man who disliked waste – it was almost sinful. Diesel engines, hydraulic pumps, drawbridges, electric motors, computers, assembly lines … all machines were meant to perform their tasks with as little waste as possible.
Death was efficiency squandered.
Yet there seemed to be no way around it tonight.
He looked south, at the glistening needles of white illumination on the rails from the train’s headlight. He glanced round. The Mercedes was out of sight of the train, parked at just the right angle to keep it hidden from the cab. It was yet another of the precise calculations he had incorporated into his blueprint for the evening. He heard, in memory, his boss’s voice.
This is Niall. He’s brilliant. He’s my draughtsman…
Dunne believed he could see the shadow of the driver’s head in the cab of the diesel.
Death… He tried to shrug away the thought.
The train was now four or five hundred yards away.
Aldo Karic joined him.
‘The speed?’ Dunne asked the middle-aged Serb. ‘Is it all right? He seems slow.’
In syrupy English the Serbian said, ‘No, is good. Accelerating now – look. You can see. Is good.’ Karic, a bearish man, sucked air through his teeth. He’d seemed nervous throughout dinner – not, he’d confessed, because he might be arrested or fired but because of the difficulty in keeping the ten thousand euros secret from everyone, including his wife and two children.
Dunne regarded the train again. He calculated speed, mass, incline. Yes, it wasgood. At this point even if someone tried to wave the train down, even if a Belgrade supervisor happened to notice something was amiss, phoned the driver and ordered him to apply full brakes, it would be physically impossible to stop the train before it hit the switch rails, now configured to betray.
And he reminded himself: sometimes death is necessary.
The train was now three hundred yards away.
It would all be over in ninety seconds. And then-
But what was this? Dunne was suddenly aware of movement in a field nearby, an indistinct shape pounding over the uneven ground making directly for the track. ‘Do you see that?’ he asked Karic.
The Serbian gasped. ‘Yes, I am seeing- It’s a car! What is happening?’
It was indeed. In the faint moonlight Dunne could see the small light-coloured saloon, assaulting hillocks and swerving around trees and fragments of fences. How could the driver keep his high speed on such a course? It seemed impossible.
Teenagers, perhaps, playing one of their stupid games. As he stared at the mad transit, he judged velocity, he judged angles. If the car didn’t slow it would cross the track with some seconds to spare… but the driver would have to vault over the tracks themselves; there was no crossing here. If it were stuck on the rail, the diesel would crush it like a tin of vegetables. Still, that wouldn’t affect Dunne’s mission here. The tiny car would be pitched aside and the train continue to the deadly spur.
Now – wait – what was this? Dunne realised it was a police car. But why no lights or siren? It must have been stolen. A suicide?
But the police car’s driver had no intention of stopping on the rail or crossing to the other side. With a final leap into the air from the crest of hill, the saloon crashed to earth and skidded to a stop, just short of the roadbed, around fifty yards in front of the train. The driver jumped out – a man. He was wearing dark clothing. Dunne couldn’t see him clearly but he appeared not to be a policeman. Neither was he trying to flag down the engine driver. He ran into the middle of the track itself and crouched calmly, directly in front of the locomotive, which bore down upon him at fifty or sixty miles an hour.
The frantic blare of the train’s horn filled the night and orange streaks of sparks shot from the locked wheels.
With the train feet away from him, the man launched himself from the track and vanished into the ditch.
‘What is happening?’ Karic whispered.
Just then a yellow-white flash burst from the tracks in front of the diesel and a moment later Dunne heard a crack he recognised: the explosion of a small IED or grenade. A similar blast followed seconds later.
The driver of the police car, it seemed, had a blueprint of his own.
One that trumped Dunne’s.
No, he wasn’t a policeman or a suicide. He was an operative of some sort, with experience in demolition work. The first explosion had blown out the spikes fixing the rail to the wooden ties, the second had pushed the unsecured track to the side slightly so that the diesel’s front left wheels would slip off.
Karic muttered something in Serbian. Dunne ignored him and watched the disc of the diesel’s headlight waver. Then, with a rumble and a terrible squeal, the engine and the massive wagons it tugged behind sidled off the track and, spewing a world of dust, pushed forward through the soil and chipped rock of the rail bed.
From the ditch, James Bond watched the locomotive and the cars continue their passage, slowing as they dug into the soft earth, peeling up rails and flinging sand, dirt and stones everywhere. Finally he climbed out and assessed the situation. He’d had only minutes to work out how to avert the calamity that would send the deadly substance into the Danube. After braking to a stop, he’d grabbed two of the grenades the Serbians had brought with them, then leapt on to the tracks to plant the devices.
As he had calculated, the locomotive and wagons had stayed upright and hadn’t toppled into the stream. He’d orchestrated hisderailment where the ground was still flat, unlike the intended setting of the Irishman’s sabotage. Finally, hissing, groaning and creaking, the train came to a standstill not far from the Irishman and his partner, though Bond could not see them through the dust and smoke.
He spoke into the SRAC radio. ‘This is Leader One. Are you there?’ Silence. ‘Are you there?’ he growled. ‘Respond.’ Bond massaged his shoulder, where a sliver of hot, whistling shrapnel had torn through his jacket and sliced skin.
A crackle. Finally: ‘The train is derailed!’ It was the older Serbian’s voice. ‘Did you see? Where are you?’
‘Listen to me carefully.’
‘What has happened?’
‘Listen! We don’t have much time. I think they’ll try to blow up or shoot the haz-mat containers. It’s their only way to spill the contents. I’m going to fire towards them and drive them back to their car. Wait till the Mercedes is in that muddy area near the restaurant, then shoot out the tyres 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 towards the place where the third rail car, 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 pre-emptive 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 towards 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.
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 jack-knifed 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 towards 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 towards 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 leant 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 leant out of the cab again and shot the younger agent in the right arm, near the elbow. He dropped his gun and cried out, falling backwards.
As the Irishman leapt from the train, he let go half a dozen rounds towards Bond, who returned fire, aiming for the feet and ankles. But the haze and vapours were thick. He missed. The Irishman holstered his gun, shouldered the rucksack and dragged the younger agent towards the Mercedes. They disappeared.
Bond sprinted back to the Jetta, jumped in and roared off. Five minutes later he soared over a hillock and landed, skidding, in the field behind Restoran Roštilj. The scene was one of complete chaos as diners and staff fled in panic. The Mercedes was gone. Glancing towards the derailed train, he could see that the Irishman had killed not only the older agent but his own associate – the Serbian he’d dined with. He’d shot him as he’d lain on his belly, hands bound.
Bond got out of the Jetta and frisked the body for pocket litter but the Irishman had stripped the man of his wallet and any other material. Bond pulled out his own Oakley sunglasses, wiped them clean, then pressed the dead man’s thumb and index finger against the lens. He ran back to the Jetta and sped after the Mercedes, urging the car to seventy miles an hour despite the meandering road and potholes pitting the tarmac.
A few minutes later he glimpsed something light-coloured in a lay-by ahead. He braked hard, barely controlling the fishtailing skid, and stopped, the car engulfed in smoke from its tyres, a few yards from the younger agent. He got out and bent over the man, who was shivering, crying. The wound in his arm was bad and he’d lost a great deal of blood. One shoe was off and a toenail was gone. The Irishman had tortured him.
Bond opened his folding knife, cut the man’s shirt with the razor-sharp blade and bound a wool strip round his arm. With a stick he found just off the lay-by he made a tourniquet and applied it. He leant down and wiped sweat from the man’s face. ‘Where is he going?’
Gasping, his face a mask of agony, he rambled in Serbo-Croatian. Then, realising who Bond was, he said, ‘You will call my brother… You must take me to the hospital. I will tell you a place to go.’
‘I need to know where he went.’
‘I didn’t say nothing. He tried. But I didn’t tell nothing about you.’
The boy had spilt out everything he knew about the operation, of course, but that wasn’t the issue now. Bond said, ‘Where did he go?’
‘The hospital… Take me and I will tell you.’
‘Tell me or you’ll die in five minutes,’ Bond said evenly, loosening the tourniquet on his right arm. Blood cascaded.
The young man blinked away tears. ‘All right! You bastard! He ask how to get to E Seven-five, the fast road from Highway Twenty-one. That will take him to Hungary. He is going north. Please!’
Bond tightened the tourniquet again. He knew, of course, that the Irishman wasn’t going north: the man was a cruel and clever tactician. He didn’t need directions. Bond saw his own devotion to tradecraft in the Irishman. Even before he had arrived in Serbia the man would have memorised the geography around Novi Sad. He’d go southon Highway 21, the only major road nearby. He’d be making for Belgrade or an evacuation site in the area.
Bond patted the young agent’s pockets and pulled out his mobile. He hit the emergency call number, 112. When he heard a woman’s voice answer, he propped the phone beside the man’s mouth, then ran back to the Jetta. He concentrated on driving as fast as he could over the uneven road surface, losing himself in the choreography of braking and steering.
He took a turn fast and the car skidded, crossing the white line. An oncoming lorry loomed, a big one, with a Cyrillic logo. It veered away and the driver hit the horn angrily. Bond swerved back into his lane, missing a collision by inches, and continued in pursuit of the only lead they had to Noah and the thousands of deaths on Friday.
Five minutes later, approaching Highway 21, Bond slowed. Ahead he saw a flicker of orange and, in the sky, roiling smoke, obscuring the moon and stars. He soon arrived at the accident site. The Irishman had missed a sharp bend and sought refuge in what seemed to be a wide grass shoulder but in fact was not. A line of brush masked a steep drop. The car had gone over and was now upside-down. The engine was on fire.
Bond pulled up, killed the Jetta’s motor and got out. Then, drawing the Walther, he half ran, half slid down the hill to where the vehicle lay, scanning for threats and seeing none. As he closed on it he stopped. The Irishman was dead. Still strapped into the seat, he was inverted, arms dangling over his shoulders. Blood covered his face and neck and pooled on the car’s ceiling.
Squinting against the fumes, Bond kicked in the driver’s window to drag the body out. He would salvage the man’s mobile and what pocket litter he could, then wrench open the boot to collect luggage and laptops.
He opened his knife again to cut the seat belt. In the distance: the urgent wah-haof sirens, growing louder. He looked back up the road. The fire engines were still a few miles away but they’d be here soon. Get on with it! The flames from the engine were increasingly energetic. The smoke was vile.
As he began to saw away at the belt, though, he thought suddenly: firefighters? Already?
That made no sense. Police, yes. But not the fire brigade. He gripped the driver’s bloodied hair and turned the head.
It was not the Irishman. Bond gazed at the man’s jacket: the Cyrillic lettering was the same as on the lorry he’d nearly hit. The Irishman had forced the vehicle to stop. He’d cut the driver’s throat, strapped him into the Mercedes and sent it over the cliff here, then called the local fire service in order to slow the traffic and prevent Bond pursuing him.
The Irishman would have taken the rucksack and everything else from the boot, of course. Inside the car, though, on the inverted ceiling, towards the back seat, there were a few scraps of paper. Bond jammed them into his pockets before the flames forced him away. He ran back to the Jetta and sped off towards Highway 21, away from the approaching flashing lights.
He fished out his mobile. It resembled an iPhone, but was a bit larger and featured special optics, audio systems and other hardware. The unit contained multiple phones – one that could be registered to an agent’s official or nonofficial cover identity, then a hidden unit, with hundreds of operational apps and encryption packages. (Because the device had been developed by Q Branch it had taken all of a day for some wit in the office to dub them ‘iQPhones’.)
He opened an app that gave him a priority link to a GCHQ tracking centre. He recited into the voice-recognition system a description of the yellow Zastava Eurozeta lorry the Irishman was driving. The computer in Cheltenham would automatically recognise Bond’s location and determine projected routes for the truck, then train the satellite to look for any nearby vehicle of this sort and track it.
Five minutes later he heard his phone buzz. Excellent. He glanced at the screen.
But the message was not from the snoops; it was from Bill Tanner, chief of staff at Bond’s outfit. The subject heading said: CRASH DIVE – shorthand for Emergency.
Eyes flipping from the road to the phone, Bond read on.
GCHQ intercept: Serbian security agent assigned to you in Incident 20 operation died on way to hospital. Reported you abandoned him. Serbs have priority order for your arrest. Evacuate immediately.