Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [5]
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 was his 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 W at 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.
3
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