It was almost too easy, Janson mused. Then he realized why. While human rights organizations held conferences to discuss the problem of the small-arms trade in Sierre Leone or the traffic in military helicopters in Kazakhstan, Novak’s foundation had a more direct method for taking the noxious hardware off the market: it simply acquired the stuff. As Hochschild confirmed, as long as the model was discontinued and therefore irreplaceable, the Liberty Foundation would buy it, warehouse it, and eventually recycle it as scrap or, in the case of military transport, have it retooled for civilian purposes.
Thirty minutes later, a green light on the telephone blinked. Márta Lang picked up the handset. “So he’s en route? Condition?” There was a pause, and then she said, “We’ll assume a departure time in less than sixty minutes, in that case.” Her voice softened. “You’ve been a dear. We couldn’t appreciate it more. Really. And you be sure to send my love to Gillian, will you? We all missed you in Davos this year. You can be certain that Peter gave the PM an earful about that! Yes. Yes. We’ll catch up properly—soon.”
A woman of parts, Janson thought admiringly.
“There’s a reasonable chance that your Mr. Hennessy will beat you to the rendezvous,” Márta told him immediately after she hung up.
“My hat’s off,” Janson said simply.
Through the windows, the sun was a golden orb, cushioned by white, fluffy-looking clouds. Though they were flying toward the setting sun, the passage of time was keeping pace. When Lang’s eyes lowered to her watch, he knew she was looking at more than simply the time of day. She was looking at the number of hours Peter Novak had left. She met his gaze and paused for a moment before speaking. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I want to thank you for what you’ve given us.”
“I’ve given you nothing,” Janson protested.
“You’ve given us something of quite substantial value,” she said. “You’ve given us hope.”
Janson started to say something about the realities, the long odds, the abundant downside scenarios, but he stopped himself. There was a higher pragmatism to be respected. At this stage of a mission, false hope was better than none at all.
Chapter Three
The memories were thirty years old, but they could have been yesterday’s. They unspooled in his dreams at night—always the night before an operation, fueled by repressed anxiety—and though they started and ended at different points, it was as though they were from the same continuous loop of tape.
In the jungle was a base. In the base was an office. In the office was a desk. On the desk was a sheet of paper.
It was, in fact, the list for that date’s Harassment & Interdiction fire.
Possible VC rocket attack, launch site grid coordinates AT384341, between 0200 and 0300 this morning.
A VC political cadre meeting, Loc Ninh village, BT415341, at 2200 this evening.
VC infiltration attempt, below Go Noi River, AT404052, between 2300 and 0100.
That pile of well-thumbed slips on Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest’s desk was filled with similar reports. They were supplied by informants to ARVN officials, who then passed them along to the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, MACV. Both the informants and the reports were assigned a letter and a number assessing their reliability. Nearly all the reports were classified as F/6: reliability of agent indeterminate, reliability of report indeterminate.
Indeterminate was a euphemism. Reports came from double agents, from VC sympathizers, from paid informants, and sometimes just from villagers who had scores to settle and had figured out an easy way to get someone else to destroy a rival’s paddy dike.
“These are supposed to be the basis for our Harassment and Interdiction fire,” Demarest had said to Janson and Maguire. “But they’re bullshit. Some four-eyed Charlie in Hanoi wrote these for our sake, and piped them through the pencil dicks at MACV. These, gentlemen, are a waste of artillery. Know how I know?” He held up a filmy slip, fluttered it in the air like a flag. “There’s no blood on this paper.” A twelfth-century choral work played through the tiny speakers of an eight-track tape system, one of Demarest’s small enthusiasms.
“You get me a goddamn VC courier,” Demarest went on, scowling. “No, you get me an even dozen. If they’ve got paper on them, bring it back—certified with VC blood. Prove to me that military intelligence is not a contradiction in terms.”
That evening, six of them had rolled over the gunwales of the fiberglass-hulled STAB, the SEAL tactical assault boat, and into the bath-warm shallow water of Ham Luong. They paddled through an eighth of a mile of riverine silt and landed on the pear-shaped island. “Come back with prisoners, or don’t come back,” their CO had told them. With luck, they would do so: the island, Noc Lo, was known to be controlled by Viet Cong. But luck had lately been in scarce supply.
The six men wore black pajamas, like their foe. No dog tags, no signs of rank or unit, of the fact that they were a SEAL team, of the even more pertinent fact that they were Demarest’s Devils. They had spent two hours making their way through the island’s dense vegetation, alert to any sign of the enemy—sounds, footprints, even the smell of the nuoc cham sauce their enemy doused over their food.
They were divided into three pairs, two of them in front, traveling ten yards apart; two of them serving as rear guard, in charge of the forty-pound M60, ready to provide cover.
Janson was on point, paired with Hardaway, a tall, thickly built man with dark brown skin and widespaced eyes. He kept his head close-shorn with electric clippers. Hardaway’s tour of duty was up in sixty days, and he was getting antsy about returning stateside. A month ago, he had torn out a skin-mag centerfold and divided it into numbered squares. Each day, he filled in one of the squares. When they were all filled in, he would take his centerfold girl back home and trade her in for a real one. That was Hardaway’s idea, anyway.
Now, three hundred yards inland, Hardaway picked up a contraption made out of tire rubber and canvas, and showed it to Janson with a questioning look. They were mud shoes. The light-bodied VC used them to glide tracklessly through swampy terrain. Recently discarded?
Janson called for thirty seconds of silent vigilance. The team froze in place, alert to any noise that was out of the ordinary. Noc Lo was in the middle of a free-fire zone, where firing was permitted at any time without restriction, and there was no escape from the muffled sounds of distant batteries, mortars booming at halfsecond intervals. Away from the vegetation, one could see the white pulsations on the fringe of the horizon. But after thirty seconds, it seemed evident that there was no activity in the immediate vicinity.
“You know what the mortar fire makes me think of sometimes?” Hardaway asked. “The choir clapping in my church. Like it’s religious, some kind of way.”
“Extreme unction, Maguire would tell you,” Janson replied softly. He had always been fond of Hardaway, but this evening his friend seemed unusually distracted.
“Hey, they don’t call it the Holiness Church for no reason. You come to Jacksonville, I’ll take you one Sunday.” Hardaway bobbed and clapped to a rhythm in his head. “‘Sanctify my lord, sanc-tify my lord.’”
“Hardaway,” Janson warned, putting a hand on his gear belt.
The crack of a rifle told them that the enemy had learned of their presence. They would have to dive to the ground, to take immediate evasive action.
For Hardaway, however, it was too late. A small geyser of blood erupted from his neck. He staggered forward several yards, like a sprinter who had crossed the finish line. Then he collapsed to the ground.
As Maguire’s machine gun began to fire bullets over their heads, Janson scrambled over to Hardaway. He had been struck in the lower outside part of his neck, near his right shoulder; Janson cradled his head, applying pressure with both hands to the pulsing wound on the front of his neck, desperately trying to staunch the flow.
“Sanctify my lord,” Hardaway said weakly.
The pressure was not working. Janson felt his shi
rt becoming warm and wet, and he realized what was wrong. There was an exit wound, at the back of Hardaway’s neck, perilously near his spine, from which bright arterial blood was gouting.
In a sudden display of strength, he wrenched Janson’s hands from his neck. “Leave me, Janson.” He was trying to shout, but it came out as a low rasp. “Leave me!” He crawled away a few feet, then used his arms to raise himself, his head swiveling around the tree line as he tried to make out the shapes of his assailants.
Immediately, a blast hit his midriff, slamming him to the ground. His abdomen had been torn apart, Janson saw. Recovery was out of the question. One man down. How many more?
Janson rolled behind a thornbush.
It was a goddamn ambush!
The VC had been lying in wait for them.
Dialing his scope furiously, zooming through the marsh grasses and palms, Janson saw three VCs running down a jungle path directly toward him.
A direct assault? No, he decided: it was more likely that the raking overhead fire from the M60 had caused them to change their position. A few seconds later, he heard the sharp thwack of bullets hitting the ground near him.
Dammit! There was no way the fire could be this heavy and well targeted unless Charlie had received advance word of the infiltration. But how?
He shifted his rifle scope rapidly to different directions and focal points. There: a hooch on stilts. And just behind it, a VC aiming a Chicom AK-47 in his direction. A small, skilled man who must have been responsible for the last blast that had hit Hardaway.
In the moonlight, he saw the man’s eyes, and just underneath, the bore hole of the AK-47. Each, he knew, had spotted the other, and what AK-47 fire lacked in precision it made up for in volume. Now he saw the VC brace the butt on his shoulder and prepare to squeeze off a fusillade just as Janson located the man’s torso in his crosshairs. Within seconds, one of them would be dead.
Janson’s universe constricted to the three elements: finger, trigger, crosshairs. At that instant, they were all he knew, all he needed to know.
A double tap—two carefully aimed shots—and the little man with the submachine gun pitched forward.
Yet how many more were out there?
“Get us the fuck out of here!” Janson radioed back to base. “We need backup now! Send a Mike boat. Send whatever the hell you’ve got. Just do it now!”
“Just one moment,” the radio operator said. Then Janson heard the voice of his commanding officer coming on the line: “You holding up OK, son?” Demarest asked.
“Sir, they were expecting us!” Janson said.
After a pause, Demarest’s voice crackled on the radio headphones. “Of course they were.”
“But how, sir?”
“Just consider it a test, son. A test that will show which of my men have what it takes.” Janson thought he heard choral music in the background. “You’re not going to complain to me about the VCs, are you? They’re just a bunch of overgrown kids in pajamas.”
Despite the oppressive tropical heat, Janson felt a chill. “How did they know, sir?”
“If you wanted to find out how good you were at shooting paper targets, you could have stayed at camp in Little Creek, Virginia.”
“But Hardaway—”
Demarest cut him off. “He was weak. He failed the test.”
He was weak: Alan Demarest’s voice. But Janson would not be. Now he opened his eyes with a shudder as the plane touched down on the macadamized landing strip.
Katchall had for years been declared a restricted, no-entry location by India’s navy, part of a security zone that included most of the Nicobar Islands. Once it was rezoned, it became nothing less than a trading post. Mangoes, papaya, durian, PRC-101s, and C-130s all made their way to and from the sun-scorched oval of land. It was, Janson knew, one of the few places where nobody would blink at the sudden arrival of military transport vehicles and munitions.
Nor was it a place where the niceties of sovereign border control were observed. A jeep took him directly from the plane to the compound along the western shore. His team would already be assembling in the olive drab Quonset hut, a structure of ribbed aluminum over a frame of arched steel ribs. The floor and foundation were concrete, the interior pressed wood. A small prefab warehouse adjoined it. The Liberty Foundation had a low-profile regional office in Rangoon, and so was able to move advance men in place to ensure that the rendezvous sites were in order.
Little had changed since Janson had last used it as a base of operations. The Quonset hut he would borrow was one of many on the island, originally erected by the Indian military and now abandoned or commandeered for commercial interests.
Theo Katsaris had already arrived when Janson pulled up, and the two men embraced warmly. Katsaris, a Greek national, had been a protégé of Janson’s and was probably the most skilled operative he had ever worked with. The only thing that disturbed Janson about him, in fact, was his tolerance—indeed, appetite—for risk. Janson had known plenty of daredevils from his SEAL days and knew the profile: they typically came from depressed Rust Belt towns, where their friends and parents had led dead-end lives. They were up for anything that saved them from punching the clock at the rivet factory—including another tour of duty in VC-controlled territories. But Katsaris had everything to live for, including a stunningly beautiful wife. Impossible to dislike, he had a charmed life, and yet set little store by it. His very presence would raise morale; people enjoyed being around him: he had the sunny aura of a man to whom nothing bad would ever happen.
Manuel Honwana had been in the nearby hangar but made his way back when he learned of Janson’s arrival. He was a former colonel in the Mozambican air force, Russian-trained and unequaled at ground-hugging flight over hilly tropical terrain. Cheerfully apolitical, he had extensive experience with combating dug-in, entrenched guerrillas. And it was very much a point in his favor that he had flown numerous sorties in the fixed-wing rattletraps that were all his poor country could get its hands on. Most American flyboys were PlayStation graduates, used to being surrounded by millions of dollars in digital avionics. Instinct tended to atrophy as a result: they were mere custodians of the machine, less pilots than information-system technicians. But this job would require a pilot. Honwana could reassemble a MiG engine with a Swiss Army knife and his bare hands, because he’d had to. If he had instruments, so much the better; if he did not, he was unfazed. And if an emergency nonstandard landing was required, Honwana would be right at home: on the missions he’d both flown and directed, a proper airstrip was the exception, not the rule.
Finally, there was Finn Andressen, a Norwegian and a former officer in his country’s armed forces, who had degrees in geology and had a well-honed instinct for terrain assessment. He had designed security arrangements for mining companies around the world. He arrived within the hour, followed in short order by Sean Hennessy, the remarkably versatile and unflappable Irish airman. The team members greeted one another with hearty shoulder clasps or quiet handshakes, depending on their temperament.
Janson led them through the plan of attack, starting with the broad outlines and descending to details and alternative options. As the men absorbed the mission protocol, the sun grew red, large, and low in the horizon, as if it were getting heavier and its weight were forcing it down toward the sea. To the men, it was a giant hourglass, reminding them how little time remained.
Now they split up into pairs and set about finetuning the plan, bringing schematics in line with reality. Leaning over a folding wooden bench, Honwana and Andressen reviewed maps of wind-current and ocean-current patterns. Janson and Katsaris studied a plasticine mock-up of the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace.
Sean Hennessy, meanwhile, was doing chin-ups from an exposed I beam as he listened to the others; it had been one of his few distractions in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Janson glanced at him; would he be all right? He had no reason to think otherwise. If the Irishman’s complexion was paler than usual, his physique was burlier. Janso
n had run him through a rough-andready field physical and was satisfied that his reflexes were as quick as ever.
“You do realize,” Andressen said to Janson, turning away from his charts, “that there will be at least a hundred people based in the Stone Palace alone. Are you sure we have enough manpower?”
“More than enough,” Janson said. “If five hundred Gurkhas were called for, I’d have requested them. I’ve asked for what I need. If I could do it with fewer, I would. The fewer men, the fewer the complications.”
Janson now turned from the plasticine model to the highly detailed blueprints. Those blueprints, he knew, represented an enormous effort. They had been prepared in the past forty hours by a task force of architects and engineers assembled by the Liberty Foundation. The experts had been provided with extensive verbal descriptions from visitors, a profusion of historical photographs, and even present-day overhead satellite imagery. Colonial archives in the Netherlands had been consulted as well. Despite the rapidity with which the work was done, Novak’s people told him they believed it was “quite accurate” in most of the particulars. They also warned that some of the particulars, the ones pertaining to seldom-used areas of the structure, were “less certain” and that some of the materials analysis was conjectural and “uncertain.”
Less certain. Uncertain. Words Janson was hearing too often for his taste.
Yet what was the alternative? Maps and models were all they had. The Dutch governor general’s compound was adapted from a preexisting fortress, laid out on a promontory three hundred feet above the ocean. Walls of limestone, five feet thick, were designed to withstand cannonballs from Portuguese men-of-war of centuries past. The sea-facing walls were topped with battlements from which hostile schooners and corvettes would be fired upon.