Everyone Janson had assembled in that Quonset hut knew precisely what was at stake. They also knew the obstacles they faced in trying to derail what the Caliph had set in motion. Nothing would be gained by compounding Novak’s death with their own.
It was time for a final briefing. Janson stood; his nervous energy made it difficult for him to sit. “OK, Andressen,” he said. “Let’s talk terrain.”
The red-bearded Norseman turned the large, calendared sheets of the elevation maps, pointing out features with a long forefinger. His finger moved along the massif, almost ten thousand feet at the Pikuru Takala peak, and then onward to the plateaus of shale and gneiss. He pointed out the monsoon winds from the southwest. Tapping a magnification of Adam’s Hill, Andressen said, “These are recently reclaimed areas. We’re not talking about sophisticated monitoring. A lot of what we’re up against is the protection offered by the natural terrain.”
“Recommended flight path?”
“Over the Nikala jungle, if the Storm Petrel’s up for it.”
The Storm Petrel was Honwana’s well-deserved nickname, honoring his ability to pilot a plane so that it nearly skimmed the ground, the way a storm petrel flies above the sea.
“The Petrel’s up for it,” Honwana said, his lips parting to reveal ivory teeth in what was not quite a smile.
“Mind you,” Andressen went on, “as long as we can hold off until around four hundred hours, we’ll be almost guaranteed a heavy cloud cover. That’s obviously advisable for the purposes of stealth.”
“You’re talking about a high-altitude jump through heavy cloud cover?” Hennessy asked. “Jumping blind?”
“A leap of faith,” said the Norseman. “Like religion. Like embracing God.”
“Begorrah, I thought this was a commando operation, not a kamikaze one,” Hennessy put in. “Tell me, Paul, what bloody fool is going to be making this jump?” The Irishman looked at his fellow crew members with genuine concern.
Janson looked at Katsaris. “You,” he told the Greek. “And me.”
Katsaris stared at him silently for a few moments. “I can live with that.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” Hennessy said.
Chapter Four
Packing one’s own chute: it was practically a ritual, a military superstition. By the time one got out of jump camp, the habit was as ingrained as brushing one’s teeth or washing one’s hands.
Janson and Katsaris had repaired to the adjoining warehouse to do the job. They started by draping the canopy and rigging over the large, flat concrete flooring. Both sprayed silicone over the rip-cord cable, the closing pin, and the closing loop. The next steps were rote. The black canopy was made of zero-porosity nylon, and Janson rolled his body over the loose drapes, pressing as much air out of it as he could. He straightened the stabilizer lines and toggles, and folded the flattened canopy to ensure an in-sequence opening, taking care that the rigging was on the outside of the folds. Finally, he bunched it into the black mesh pack, squeezing the remaining air through the edge stitching before slipping a clasp through the grommet.
Katsaris, with his nimble fingers, was finished in half the time.
He turned to Janson. “Let’s you and I do a quick weapons inspection,” he said. “Pay a visit to the junk shop.”
The premise of a team was that anybody would accept personal risk to reduce a risk borne by another. An ethos of equality was crucial; any sense of favoritism was destructive to it. When they met as a group, Janson therefore dealt with the men in a tone that was at once brusque and friendly. But even within elites, there were elites—and even within the innermost circles of excellence, there is the chosen one, the golden boy.
Janson had once been that person, almost three decades earlier. Just a few weeks after he’d arrived at the SEAL training camp at Little Creek, Alan Demarest had picked him out from the enlisted trainees, had him transferred to ever more elite combat teams, ever more grueling regimens of combat drills. The training groups got smaller and smaller—more and more of his peers dropped out, defeated by the punishing schedule of exercises—until, by the end, Demarest isolated him for intensive sessions of one-on-one training.
Your fingers are weapons! Never encumber them. Half a warrior’s intelligence is found in his hands.
Don’t squeeze the vein, squeeze the nerve! Memorize the nerve points until you can find them with your fingers, not your eyes. Don’t look—feel!
I spotted your helmet above that ridgeline. You’re fucking dead!
Can’t see a way out? Take the time to see things differently. See the two white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt, baby. It will make you free. Firepower by itself won’t do it. You’ve got to think your way out of this one.
Yes! Turn your hunter into your prey! You’ve got it!
And thus did one legendary warrior create another. When Janson had first met Theo Katsaris, years back, he knew—he simply knew, the way Demarest must have known about him.
Yet even if Katsaris had not been so extraordinarily gifted, operational equality could not supplant the bonds of loyalty forged over time, and Janson’s friendship with him went far beyond the context of the commando mission. It was a thing compounded of shared memories and mutual indebtedness. They would talk to each other with urgency and candor, but they would do so away from the others.
The two made their way to the far end of the warehouse, where Foundation-supplied weaponry had been stowed earlier that day. Katsaris quickly disassembled and reassembled selected handguns and long-barreled weapons, making sure that the parts were oiled, but not too heavily—combusted lubricant could create plumes of smoke, visual or olfactory giveaways. Imperfectly plumbed barrels could overheat too quickly. Hinges should be tight, but not too tight. Magazines should slide readily into place, but with just enough resistance to ensure they would be held securely. Collapsible stocks, like those of the MP5Ks, should collapse with ease.
“You know why I’m doing this,” Janson said.
“Two reasons,” Katsaris said. “Arguably the two reasons you shouldn’t be doing this.” Katsaris’s hands moved as he spoke, the clicking and snapping of gunmetal providing a rhythmic counterpoint to his conversation.
“And in my position?”
“I’d do exactly the same,” Katsaris said. He raised the disassembled chamber pocket of a carbine to his nose, scenting evidence of excessive lubrication. “The military wing of the Harakat al-Muqaama al-Islamiya never had a good reputation for returning stolen property.” Stolen property: hostages, especially those suspected of being assets of American intelligence. Seven years ago, in Baaqlina, Lebanon, Janson had been captured by the extremist group; his captors initially thought they had taken an American businessman, accepting his legend at face value, but the flurry of highlevel reactions fueled other suspicions. Negotiations quickly went off the rails, foundering on power struggles within the faction. Only the timely intervention of a third party—the Liberty Foundation, as it later emerged—caused them to alter their plans. After twelve days of captivity, Janson walked free. “For all we know, Novak wasn’t even involved, didn’t have any knowledge of the situation,” Katsaris went on. “But it’s his foundation. Ergo, you owe the man your life. So this lady comes up to you and says, Baaqlina has come due. You’ve got to say yes.”
“I always feel like an open book around you,” Janson said, his smile crinkling the lines around his eyes.
“Yeah, written with one time pad encryption. Tell me something. How often do you think about Helene?” The warrior’s brown eyes were surprisingly gentle.
“Every day.”
“She was magical, wasn’t she? She always seemed so free.”
“A free spirit,” Janson said. “My opposite in every way.”
Katsaris slid a nylon-mesh brush through the bore hole of another automatic weapon, checking for any cracks, carbo
n deposits, or other irregularities, and then he looked straight into Janson’s eyes. “You once told me something, Paul. Years ago. Now I’m going to tell it to you.” He reached over, placed a hand on Janson’s shoulder. “There is no revenge. Not on this earth. That’s storybook stuff. In our world, there are strikes and reprisals and more reprisals. But that neat, slatecleaning fantasy of revenge—it doesn’t exist.”
“I know.”
“Helene’s dead, Paul.”
“Oh. That must be why she hasn’t been answering my phone calls.” His deadpan was masking a world of pain, and not very well.
Katsaris’s gaze did not waver, but he squeezed Janson’s shoulder harder. “There is nothing—nothing—that can ever bring her back. Do what you want to the Kagama fanatics, but know this.”
“It was five years ago,” Janson said quietly.
“Does it feel like five years ago?”
The words came out in a whisper. “Like yesterday.” It was not how an officer spoke to those he commanded. It was how a man spoke to the person with whom he was closest in the world, a person to whom he could never lie. He exhaled heavily. “You’re afraid I’m going to go berserk and visit the wrath of God upon the terrorists who killed my wife.”
“No,” Katsaris said. “I’m afraid that on some gut level, you think that the way to wipe the slate clean, the way to honor Helene, is to get yourself killed by them, too.”
Janson shook his head violently, though he wondered whether there could be any truth to what Katsaris said. “Nobody’s going to die tonight,” he said. It was a ritual of self-assurance, they both knew, rather than a statement of probabilities.
“What’s ironic is that Helene always had real sympathy for the Kagama,” Janson said after a while. “Not the terrorists, not the KLF, of course, but the ordinary Kagama caught in the middle of it all. Had she lived, she probably would have been right by Novak’s side, trying to work out a peace agreement. The Caliph is an arch-manipulator, but he exists because there are genuine grievances for him to manipulate.”
“If we’re here to do social engineering, we’ve been given the wrong equipment.” Theo ran a thumbnail against a combat knife, testing its keenness. “Besides, Peter Novak tried that, and look where it got him. This is a strict in-out. Insertion and extraction.”
Janson nodded. “If everything goes right, we’ll be spending a total of a hundred minutes on Anura. Then again, if you’ve got to deal with these people, maybe it’ll help if you know where they’re coming from.”
“If we’ve reached that stage,” Katsaris replied grimly, “everything will have gone wrong that can go wrong.”
“I won’t mind taking this baby out for a spin,” Honwana said admiringly. He, Janson, and Hennessy were standing in the gloomy hangar, their eyes still adjusting from the bright sun outside to the shadows within.
The BA609 was a sea-landing-equipped tiltrotor aircraft; like the discontinued Ospreys, it had propellers that enabled vertical takeoffs and landings but that, when tilted to the horizontal position, would enable the craft to function like a fixed-wing airplane. Bell/Agusta had crafted the fuselage of this particular specimen not from steel but from a tough molded resin. The result was an exceptionally lightweight craft that could travel much farther on a liter of fuel than any conventional design—up to four times as far. Its versatility would be important to the success of the mission.
Now Honwana ran his fingertips over the nonreflective surface. “A thing of beauty.”
“A thing of invisibility, if the gods are with us,” said Janson.
“I’ll pray to the ancestors,” Honwana said, with no little mirth. A Moscow-educated die-hard atheist, he was sympathetic to neither indigenous nor missionaryspread forms of religiosity.
“There’s a full tank. Assuming you haven’t put on weight since we worked together last, that should just get us there and back.”
“You’re cutting things close. The tolerances, I mean.” The Mozambican’s eyes were serious.
“No choice. Not my timetable, not my locale. You might say the KLF is calling the shots here. I’m just trying to improvise as best I can. This isn’t a wellscoured contingency plan we’re looking at. More like, ‘Hey, kids, let’s put on a show.’”
“Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a barn,” Hennessy put in heavily. “With a whole load of high explosives.”
The north coastline of Anura nipped in like a deeply grooved valentine’s heart. The eastern lobe was mostly jungle, sparsely inhabited. Honwana flew the tiltrotorcraft low to the ground through the Nikala jungle. Once over the sea, the plane angled upward, banking nearly forty degrees.
Despite the plane’s curious trajectory, Honwana’s piloting was extraordinarily smooth, anticipating and compensating for wind currents and updrafts. The nowhorizontal nacelles emitted a steady noise, something between a hum and a roar.
Andressen and Hennessy were up front with Honwana, part of the crew, providing essential navigational support; separated by a bulkhead, the two paratroopers were left alone on uncushioned benches in the rear of the aircraft, to confer with each other and go through their last-minute preparations.
Half an hour into the flight, Katsaris consulted his shockproof Breitling and swallowed a 100mg tablet of Provigil. It would adjust his circadian rhythms, ensuring late-night alertness, without the excessive stimulation and exaggerated confidence that amphetamines could induce. They were still two hours away from the drop zone. The Provigil would be in maximal effect during the operation. Then he took another small pill, a procholinergic that would inhibit perspiration.
He gestured toward a pair of thick black aluminum tubes that Janson was holding up to his ear.
“Those things are really going to make it?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Janson said. “As long as the gas mixture doesn’t leak. The little darlings are going to be full of pep. Just like you.”
Katsaris held up a foil strip of Provigil tablets. “Want one?”
Janson shook his head. Katsaris knew what he was doing, but Janson knew that drugs could have unpredictable side effects in different people, and he declined to take substances he had no experience with. “So tell me, Theo,” he said, putting away the tubes and shuffling the blueprints, “how’s the missus?” Now that they were not around the others, he once more called his friend by his first name.
“The missus? She know you call her that?”
“Hey, I knew her before you did. The beautiful Marina.”
Katsaris laughed. “You have no idea how beautiful she is. You think you do, but you don’t. Because right now she’s positively radiant.” He pronounced the last word with special emphasis.
“Wait a minute,” Janson said. “You don’t mean she’s …”
“Early days, still. First trimester. Touch of morning sickness. Otherwise, she’s doing great.”
Janson flashed on Helene, and he felt as if a giant hand were squeezing his heart in a crushing grip.
“And we are a handsome couple, aren’t we?” Katsaris said it with mock swagger, but it was the indisputable truth. Theo and Marina Katsaris were among God’s favored, perfect specimens of Mediterranean strength and symmetry. Janson remembered a week he’d spent with them in Mykonos—remembered the particular afternoon when they encountered an imperious Paris-based director of a fashion shoot in pursuit of the ever potent combination of skimpy swimsuits, abundant white sand, and azure sea. The Frenchwoman was convinced that Theo and Marina were models, and demanded the name of their agency. All she saw were their perfect white teeth, flawless olive complexion, glossy black hair—and the possibility that these attributes were not enlisted for some commercial enterprise struck her as a wasteful indifference toward a valuable natural resource.
“Then you’re going to be a father,” Janson said. The rush of warmth he had felt on hearing the news quickly cooled.
“You don’t sound overjoyed,” Katsaris said.
Janson said nothing for a few moments. “Yo
u should have told me.”
“Why?” he returned lightly. “Marina’s the one who’s pregnant.”
“You know why.”
“We were going to tell you soon. In fact, we were hoping you’d agree to be the godfather.”
Janson’s tone was almost truculent. “You should have told me before.”
Theo shrugged. “You don’t think a dad should take risks. And I think you worry too much, Paul. You haven’t gotten me killed yet. Look, I understand the risks.”
“I don’t understand the risks, dammit. That’s the point. They’re poorly controlled.”
“You don’t want to orphan my kid. Well, guess what—neither do I. I’m going to be a father, and that makes me very, very happy. But it isn’t going to change the way I lead my life. That’s not who I am. Marina knows that. You know it, too—that’s why you picked me in the first place.”
“I don’t know that I would have picked you had I realized—”
“I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about then. I’m talking about Epidaurus.”
It was only eight years ago when a twenty-man contingent from the Greek army was detailed to a Cons Op–run interception exercise. The objective was to train the Greeks to detect and deter a growing small-arms trade that made use of Greek freighters. A ship a few miles off the coast of Epidaurus was chosen at random for the exercise. As luck would have it, however, the ship happened to be loaded with contraband. Even worse, a Turkish drug merchant was on board, accompanied by his heavily armed private guard. Things went wrong, terribly wrong, in a cataract of misfortune and misunderstanding. Inexperienced men on both sides panicked: the supervisors from Consular Operations could observe—by means of a digital telescope and the remote listening devices on the frogmen’s suits—but, agonizingly, they were too far away to intervene without jeopardizing the trainees’ safety.
From a small frigate anchored half a nautical mile away, Janson had been horrified by the disastrous unfolding of events; in particular, he recalled the twenty tension-filled seconds in which matters could have gone either way. There had been two bands of armed men, evenly matched. Each individual maximized his own chance of survival by opening fire first. But once the automatic weapons were engaged, the surviving members of the adversary would have no choice but to return fire. It was the sort of suicidal “fair fight” that could easily have resulted in 100 percent fatalities for both sides. At the same time, there was no chance that the Turk’s guards would stand down—it would be seen as a treasonous abdication, ultimately repaid by their own compatriots with a swift death.