“Hurry back,” Janson said distractedly. He finetuned the image manually, rotating the camera tip occasionally for a new angle.
Through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, he saw that the men were sitting around two tables, playing cards. It was what soldiers did, God knew. Strong, armed men, with the power to make life-or-death decisions, would arm themselves against their most pressing enemy, time, with flimsy, laminated pieces of cardstock. He himself had played more card games while outfitted in combat fatigues than he cared to remember.
Janson studied the casual movements, the pickups and discards. He knew this game. He had played it for hours in the Mauritian jungle once. It was called proter, and was essentially the Indian Ocean’s answer to rummy.
And because Janson knew the game, his gaze was drawn by a young man—eighteen, nineteen?—who sat at the larger table and drew glances from the others, half wary, half admiring.
The young man looked around, his acne-dotted cheeks gathering into a smile, revealing even white teeth and a sly look of victory.
Janson knew this game. Not just proter. He knew the game that the young man was playing: take maximum risk for maximum reward. That, after all, was the game they were both playing.
A bandolier of what looked like 7mm rounds was draped over the young man’s shoulder; a Ruger Mini-14 was cradled in a sling around his chest. A heavier automatic weapon—Janson could not see enough to verify its make—was propped against his chair and was no doubt the reason for the bandolier. It was a complement of arms suggesting that the young man had some sort of position of leadership, in military as well as recreational matters.
Now the young man rubbed his knuckles against the blue rag tied around his crown and scooped up the entire pile.
Janson could hear a few shouts: card-game incredulity.
This was a bizarrely self-destructive move at this point of the game—unless, that is, a player was certain he could get rid of the cards at once. Such certainty required extraordinary powers of observation and retention.
The game came to a halt. Even the soldiers at the smaller second table crowded around to watch. Each had a rifle, Janson saw as the men stood, and at least one side arm. The equipment looked worn but well maintained.
The young man flipped down cards, one after another, in a string of flawless sequences. It was like the moment in a pool match when a master pockets ball after ball, appearing to play a private game. And when the young man had finished, he had no cards left. He tossed back his head and grinned. A thirteen-card set: evidently his comrades had never seen such a thing, because they burst into applause—anger at having been defeated giving way to admiration at the deftness with which the defeat had been managed.
A simple game. A Kagama guerrilla leader who was also a champion proter player. Would he be as agile with the machine gun by his chair?
Through the fiber-optic spyglass, Janson took in the intent look on the young man’s face as another round of cards was dealt. He could tell who would win if the set was ever finished.
He could also tell that these were not simple farmers, but seasoned veterans. It was evident even from the way their weaponry hung on their combat garb. They knew what they were doing. If they found themselves under siege and had only seconds to regroup, any one of them would take out the prisoner. From intercepts he had seen, it was likely to be their standing instructions.
He zoomed in on the acned young man, then swiveled again. Here were seventeen seasoned warriors, at least one of whom had almost supernal powers of observation and retention.
“We’re fucked”: Katsaris on the lip mike, expressionless and to the point.
“I’ll be right over,” Janson said, retracting the camera by a few inches into the recesses of the chute. His gut clenched into a small, hard ball.
Janson stood up as far as the space allowed, his joints aching from the extended crouch. The truth was, he was too old for this sort of expedition, too old by at least a decade. Why had he chosen to play this role, the most dangerous and demanding of them? He’d told himself that he was the only one who would be willing to do it, to face the odds; or rather, if he was not willing to, nobody else would or should. He had told himself, as well, that his experience made him the best one for the job. He had told himself that having devised the plan, he would be the one best prepared to alter it if necessary. But was vanity involved, too? Did he want to prove to himself that he could still do it? Or was he so desperate to expunge a debt of honor to Peter Novak that he had made a decision that might ultimately endanger Novak’s own life, as well as his own? Doubts came to his mind like a shower of needles, and he forced himself to remain calm. Clear like water, cool like ice. It was a mantra he had often repeated to himself during the long days and nights of terror and agony he’d known as a POW in Vietnam.
Katsaris was standing precisely where the blueprints had suggested they would find the second entrance—the entrance that made the entire operation possible.
“The thing is where it’s supposed to be,” Katsaris said. “You can see the outline of the trapdoor.”
“That’s good news. I like good news.”
“It’s been sealed off with cinder block.”
“That’s bad news. I hate bad news.”
“Masonry’s in sound shape. Probably not more than thirty years old. There might have been a problem with flooding at some point, and this was the fix. Who knows? All I know is that Ingress A no longer exists.”
Janson’s gut furled even tighter. Clear like water, cool like ice.
“Not a problem,” Janson said. “There’s a workaround.”
But it was a problem, and he had no workaround. All he knew was that a commanding officer must never let his men sense panic.
They had entered into the situation with sketchy knowledge. There was the information, confirmed by intercepts, that Peter Novak was being held in the colonial dungeon. There was the inference, supplied by common sense, that he would be heavily guarded. There was the necessary recourse to an aerial insertion. But then? Janson had never entertained the idea of a merely frontal approach to the dungeon—running a gauntlet that would equally jeopardize the rescuer and the one to be rescued. What made the plan workable was the prospect of simultaneity: removing the hostage even as the guards were being incapacitated. There was no longer any viable rear entrance. Hence no viable plan.
“Come with me,” Janson said. “I’ll show you.”
His mind raced as he and Katsaris returned to the cargo chute. There was something. The realization went from inchoate to merely murky, but something was better than nothing, hope better than no hope.
Manipulating the fiber-optic cuff, he shifted the field of vision away from the seated soldier and toward the worn staircase that rose up at the end of the room. “Stairway,” he said. “Landing. Ductwork. Ledge.” Projecting out from the midlevel landing was a shelf of poured concrete. “A relatively recent addition—the last few decades, I’d guess, done when the plumbing got modernized.”
“Can’t get there without being spotted.”
“Not necessarily. The period of exposure—going from the landing to the concrete shelf—would be relatively brief, the room is filled with the haze of cigarette smoke, and they’re all playing a pretty damn engrossing round of proter. You still get the principle of simultaneity. It’s just that we’re going to have to resort to the main entrance as well as the chute.”
“This was your backup plan?” Katsaris shot back. “You’re doing more improvising than the Miles Davis Quintet. Jesus, Paul, is this an operation or a jam session?”
“Theo?” It was a request for understanding.
“And what guarantee is there that there won’t be a guard hived off, stationed in the dungeon with the prison?”
“Any close contact with Peter Novak is dangerous. The KLF knows that—they’ll guard him, but they’ll keep him isolated from any of the Kagama rebels.”
“What are they afraid of—that he’ll stab a guar
d with a cuff link?”
“His words are what they’re afraid of, Theo. In a poor country, the words of a plutocrat are dangerous things—implements of escape more formidable than any hacksaw. That’s why the guards are going to be grouped together, and at some distance from the prisoner. Let the prisoner have the opportunity to strike up a relationship with a single guard, and who knows what manipulations might occur? Remember, Theo, the per capita income in Anura is less than seven hundred dollars a year. Imagine a Kagama guard being drawn into conversation with a man worth tens of billions . You do the math. Everybody knows that Novak is a man of his word. Suppose you’re a Kagama rebel, and he’s telling you that he could make you and your family rich beyond the dreams of avarice. You’re going to start to think about it—it’s human nature. Ideological fervor might immunize some men against that temptation, the way it has with the Caliph. But nobody in command is going to count on it. BSTS—better safe than sorry. So you guard him, but you isolate him, too. It’s the only safe way.”
Unexpectedly, Katsaris smiled. “OK, boss, just give me my marching orders,” he said. Both of them had moved to a place beyond fear; an odd Masada-like serenity had settled in, at least for the moment.
Removing the grate required them both, and the effort needed was doubled by the imperative that it be removed noiselessly. By the time Janson left Katsaris there, his joints and muscles were protesting furiously. He was creaky. That was the truth of it. The Beretta, in its thigh holster, seemed to dig into his flesh. Perspiration beaded up on his water-resistant face paint; rivulets fell into his eyes and burned. His muscular recovery, Janson was learning the hard way, was not what it once was: his muscles remained knotted longer—they ached when the last thing he needed to deal with was bodily pain. Years ago, in the midst of combat, he would feel as if he himself were a weapon, an operational automaton. Now he felt all too human. Sweat was beginning to cause the nylon combat suit to bind around his knees, crotch, underarms, elbows.
A humbling thought crossed his mind: Maybe he could have stayed by the chute, and let Katsaris do this part. Now he clambered up the rubblework supporting wall toward the narrow rectangular gap that would lead to the inside edge of the veranda. The rectangular space, one of several along the roofline, served to prevent water from pooling on the first floor during the heavy downpours of monsoon season. As he wriggled through the eighteen-inch-wide drainage port, he found that he was having difficulty breathing: Exertion? Fear? Katsaris had told him he’d come up with a good plan. He was, they both knew, lying. This wasn’t a good plan. It was merely the only one they had.
His muscles still spasming, Janson made his way down a service corridor adjoining the stateroom of the north wing. He flashed on the blueprints: down the corridor to the left, twenty feet. The door would be at the end of the hallway. Discreet. Wood-clad stone. The unremarkable-looking door that led to an unspeakable pit. Two chairs to either side were empty. The men, having been summoned by the commotion, would be still unconscious at the foot of the veranda. The same was true of the backup pair of guards, who would have had a clear view of the hallway. Seven down. Seventeen to go.
Janson’s pulse quickened as he stood before the door. The lock was many decades old, and more of a formality than anything. If an intruder had got this far, a lock on a door was unlikely to stop him. It was, as a quick inspection confirmed, a wafer tumbler lock, probably of mid-century design. Such locks, Janson knew, used flat rectangles of metal, not pins, and the springs were placed inside the cylinder itself rather than in the lock shell. He produced a small tension wrench; in shape it resembled a dental pick, but was little larger than a matchstick. He placed the bent end of the wrench in the keyway, pushing on its far end, so as to maximize both the torque and his tactile sensitivity. Each would be important. One by one, he pulled each tumbler away from the shear line. After ten seconds, the tumblers had been picked. The lock was not yet ready to open, however. Now he inserted a second tool, a pick of carbide steel, thin yet inflexible, and began applying clockwise torque.
Holding his breath, he kept both instruments in the keyway as he heard the tongue withdraw and used the tension to pull the door toward him, just a few inches. The door swung easily on well-oiled hinges. Those hinges had to be well oiled: as it opened, he saw that the door was fully eighteen inches thick. The governor general may have placed a dungeon beneath his feet, but he wished to be spared even the faintest echoes of whatever cries might come from it.
Janson opened the door a few more inches, standing now a foot away from the entrance, in case someone was lying in wait.
Slowly, carefully, he verified that at least the immediate passageway was clear. Now he walked through the door, to a stone landing worn smooth with time, and, using his electrical tape, he secured the brass tongue to the door so that it would not relock.
And he began to make his way down the stairs. At least they were stone, not creaking wood. A few more steps down the landing led to a second impediment, a hinged grate of steel bars.
The portcullis-like grate succumbed to his slim tools without difficulty; unlike the stone door above, however, it was far from soundless.
It opened with a distinct scraping noise, of metal against stone—one that the assembled guards could not have failed to hear.
Astonishingly, they did not react. Why? Another decoy? Birds on a wire—this time a flock of them?
A flurry of thoughts ran though Janson’s mind. Then he caught the word Theyilai!
Even with his guidebook Anuran, he knew that word: tea. The guards were expecting somebody—somebody coming with a samovar of tea for them. That was why they did not start at the noise. On the other hand, if that tea did not arrive soon, they would grow suspicious.
Now he could see directly some of what he had glimpsed through the fiber-cam. A single, naked incandescent bulb provided lighting. He heard the gentle burble of conversation resuming, the card game still at full steam. The smoke that had wafted up through the stairwell suggested at least a dozen cigarettes lighted simultaneously.
Seventeen guards for one man. No wonder they had little worries about the security of their hostage.
Janson thought about the young KLF proter champ, with his high-stakes play, the play that meant either disaster or triumph. Nothing in between.
Everything now was a question of timing. Janson knew that Katsaris was awaiting his command, a silent thermite grenade in his hand. Ordinary combat procedure would have called for a “flash and banger,” but an audible explosion might alert others. If the soldiers stationed in the barracks were mobilized, the odds of a successful exfiltration would shift from slim to none.
Katsaris and Janson each had a modified MP5K, a 4.4-pound submachine gun made by Heckler & Koch, with a short barrel, a sling-attachment buttcap, and a sound suppressor. The magazines held thirty hollow-point rounds, for close-quarter, interior use. The 9mm Hydra-Shok bullets were less likely to ricochet; they were also more likely to destroy any flesh they encountered—to tear rather than simply penetrate human viscera. Janson’s SEAL comrades had cruelly nicknamed this weapon, which had a firing rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, the “room broom.” What could not be silenced was the clamor of its victims. But the massive hallway door would provide substantial acoustic isolation, and several feet of stone separated the grotto from the floor above it.
Janson took six steps down, then swung himself onto the four-foot-deep concrete ledge. It was, as expected, draped with PVC pipes and insulated electrical wires, but he landed without a sound. So far, so good. The soldiers were studying their cards; no one was scanning the ceiling.
Now he flattened himself against the wall and inched along the ledge carefully; the farther he was from the stairway, the less expected his firing position would be—and the sooner he would be able to reach Peter Novak in his cell. At the same time, Janson’s sight-line position was far from ideal; soldiers at one end of the larger table would still be able to see him if they looked up and int
o the shadowed ledge. Yet, as he reminded himself, there was no reason for them to do so.
“Veda theyilai?” The proter champion, thumbing his cards at the end of the table, spoke the words in a tone of slight annoyance, and as he did, he rolled his eyes. Had anything registered?
After a beat, he lifted his eyes again, peering into the gloom of the overhead shelf. His hands moved toward his cradled Ruger Mini-14.
Janson had not been wrong about the young man’s powers of observation. His scalp was crawling. He had been made.
“Now!” Janson whispered into his lip mike and slid to a prone position on the farthest recess of the concrete ledge as he put on his polarized goggles. He flipped his weapon’s safety down, setting it to full fire.
The young man stood up suddenly, shouting something in Kagama. He fired his gun toward the area where he had seen Janson, and the bullet took a bite out of the concrete just an inch from his head. A second bullet tore into nearby ductwork.
Suddenly, the dimly lit room filled with a flare of eye-searing brightness and heat. The slow-burning thermite grenade had arrived: a small, indoor sun, blinding even those who tried to look away. Its brightness was a multiple of that emitted by a welder’s torch, and the fact that the guards’ eyes had adjusted to lowlight conditions made the blindness all the more complete. Scattered gunfire was directed toward Janson, but the angle made it a hard shot, and the bullets were poorly aimed.
Through his nearly black goggles, Janson saw the soldiers in disarray and confusion, some shielding their eyes with forearms and hands, others firing blindly toward the ceiling.
Still, even a blind shot could be fatal. With the entire room whited out by the preternaturally bright flare, he returned fire, directing the automatic fusillades in tight, carefully aimed clusters. He depleted one thirty-round magazine and snapped in another. Shouts filled the room.
Now Katsaris appeared, bounding down the stairway with polarized goggles and a softly buzzing MP5K, directing bullets at the guerrillas from yet another angle.