“Don’t shoot!” a young Greek shouted. He lay down his weapon, yet the gesture conveyed not fear but disgust. Janson heard his voice tinnily but clearly through the transmitter unit. “Cretins! Dolts! Ingrates! We work for you.”
The jeers of the Turks were boisterous, but the claim was sufficiently bizarre that they demanded further explanation.
An explanation arrived, mixing fact and fiction, brilliantly improvised and fluently delivered. The young Greek invoked the name of a powerful Turkish drug magnate, Orham Murat, to whose cartel the merchant on board belonged. He explained that their commanding officers had assigned him and the other soldiers to search suspect freighters but that Murat had paid them generously to ensure that his own vessels were protected from seizure. “A generous, generous man,” the young officer had said, in a tone of solemnity and greed. “My children have him to thank for their three meals a day. With what the government gives us? Bah!” The other Greeks were silent at first, their reticence interpreted as simple fear and awkwardness. Then they began to nod, as they understood that their colleague was telling this tale for their own sakes. They lowered their weapons and kept their gaze downcast, unchallenging.
“If you are lying …” the seniormost member of the Turkish guard began in a growl.
“All we ask is that you not radio about this—our superiors monitor all maritime communications, and they have your codes.”
“Lies!” barked a gray-haired Turk. It was the merchant himself who had finally appeared on deck.
“It is the truth! The American government has helped our commanders with this. If you radio about us, you might as well shoot us now, because the army will have us executed when we return. In fact, I would beg you to shoot us now. Then the Greek army will think we died as heroes and provide pensions to our families. As to whether Orham Murat will be as generous to your widows and children when he learns that you destroyed an operation he spent so much time and money on—this you will have to decide for yourselves.”
A long, uncomfortable silence ensued. Finally, the merchant broke in: “Your claims are preposterous! If they had access to our communications—”
“If? If? Do you think it is an accident that we were ordered to board your freighter?” The Greek snorted contemptuously. “I ask you one question. Do you really believe in coincidence?”
With that, the salvation of his unit was secured. No smuggler—none who survived long, anyway—ever believed in coincidence.
The young Greek led the other frogmen back into the water and to the American-run frigate. Loss of life: zero. Seven hours later, a flotilla of maritime security vessels converged on the Minas: artillery engaged and aimed. In the face of an overwhelming display of force, the drug merchant and his guard surrendered.
Afterward, Janson introduced himself personally to the young Greek who had the spur-of-the-moment ingenuity to seize upon and invert the one implausible truth—the truth that the drug merchant’s freighter had been boarded by accident—and so render his tale plausible indeed. The young man, Theo Katsaris, turned out to be more than just levelheaded, clever, and bold; he was also endowed with remarkable physical agility and had earned top-percentile scores in field-skill tests. As Janson learned more about him, he saw how anomalous he was. Unlike most of his fellow servicemen, he came from a comfortably middle-class background; his father was a mid-level diplomat, once posted to Washington, and Katsaris had attended St. Alban’s for a couple of years in his early teens. Janson would have been tempted to dismiss him as merely an adrenaline addict—and that was part of the story, without a doubt—but Katsaris’s sense of passion, his desire to make a difference in the world, was genuine.
A few days later, Janson had drinks with a Greek general he knew who was himself a product of the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Janson explained that he had come across a youngster in the Greek army who had potential that could not be fully exploited by the routine of the Greek military. What he proposed was to take him under his wing and supervise his training personally. At the time, the leadership of Consular Operations was particularly attuned to “strategic partnerships”—joint operations with NATO allies. Under such auspices, Consular Operations would gain an asset in the short term; in the longer term, Greece would ultimately benefit by having somebody who could pass along skills and techniques in counterterrorism to his fellow citizens. The deal was done by the third cocktail.
Now, in the rear of the tiltrotorcraft, Janson gave Katsaris a steely look. “Marina know what you’re doing?”
“Didn’t tell her details, and she didn’t press.” Katsaris laughed. “Come on, Marina has more balls than the Greek army’s Eighth Division. You know that.”
“I do know that.”
“So let me make the decisions. Besides, if this operation is too risky for me, how can you in good conscience ask another person to take my place?”
Janson just shook his head.
“You need me,” Katsaris said.
“I could have gotten somebody else.”
“Not somebody as good.”
“I won’t deny that.” Neither man was smiling anymore.
“And we both know what this operation means to you. I mean, it isn’t just work for hire.”
“I won’t deny that, either. Arguably, it means a lot for the world.”
“I’m talking about Paul Janson, not the planet Earth. People before abstractions, right? That was something else we always agreed on.” His brown eyes were unwavering. “I’m not going to let you down,” he said quietly.
Janson found himself oddly touched by the gesture. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said.
As the zero hour grew near, an unspoken sense of anxiety mounted. They had taken what precautions they could. The aircraft was fully blacked out, with no lights and nothing that might reflect light from another source. Sitting on canvas slings near the plane’s greasy ramp, Katsaris and Janson followed the same rule; they wore nothing reflective. As they approached the drop zone, they put on full black-nylon combat garb, including face paint. To have done so too far in advance would have been to risk overheating. Their equipment-laden vests looked lumpy beneath the flight suit, but there was no alternative.
Now came the first great improbability. He and Katsaris had three thousand jumps between them. But what would be required tonight was beyond anything they had experienced.
Janson had been pleased with himself when he first had the insight that the compound’s sole point of vulnerability was directly overhead—that the one possibility of an undetected arrival would be from the night sky to the center of the courtyard. Whether there was a serious chance of accomplishing this, on the other hand, remained purely conjectural.
To arrive undetected, they would have to fall to the ground, silently, through the starless, moonless night that the monsoon season would provide. The satellite weather maps confirmed that at four o’clock in the morning, and extending through the next hour, the cloud cover would be total.
But they were men, not action figures. To succeed, they would have to land with extraordinary precision. To make things worse, the same weather system that provided cloud cover also provided unpredictable winds—another enemy of precision. Under ordinary circumstances, any one of these complications would have led Janson to abort a jump.
It was, in too many ways, a shot in the dark. It was also the only chance Peter Novak had.
Honwana opened the hatch at the altitude they had agreed upon: twenty thousand feet. At that altitude, the air would be frigid, perhaps thirty below zero. But exposure to those temperatures would be relatively brief. Goggles, gloves, and the tight-fitting swimming-caplike helmets they wore would help, as would their nylon flight suits.
It was another reason they wanted to release off the water, more than a lateral mile from the Stone Palace. As they descended, they would want to be able to discard items like the rip-cord handle and their gloves, and to do so with the assurance that these items would
not come raining down over their target like so many warning leaflets.
The high-altitude release would also give them more time to maneuver themselves into position—or to get themselves hopelessly out of position. Without physical rehearsal, it was impossible to know whether this was the right decision. But a decision had to be made, and Janson made it.
“OK,” Janson said, standing before the open hatch. “Just remember. This isn’t exactly going to be a hop-and-pop. Time to play follow-the-leader.”
“No fair,” Katsaris said. “You always get to go first.”
“Age before beauty,” Janson grunted as he made his way down the four-foot aluminum ramp.
Then he leaped out into the inky skies.
Chapter Five
Blasted by the aircraft’s powerful slipstream, whipsawed by icy crosscurrents, Janson struggled to keep his limbs properly aligned. Free fall, it was called, and yet it did not feel like falling. Surrendering to gravity, he felt perfectly still—felt himself to be immobile in the face of powerful, loudly whistling winds. Moreover, free fall, in this case, would have to be anything but free. Four miles below him was a heaving ocean. If he were to achieve the necessary trajectory, almost every second of his fall would have to be carefully controlled. If the next two minutes did not go as planned, the mission would be over before it had begun.
Yet the turbulence made control difficult.
Almost immediately, he found himself buffeted by the wind, and then he began to spin, slowly at first and then faster. Dammit! He was overcome by paralyzing vertigo and a growing sense of disorientation. A deadly combination at this altitude.
Facedown, he arched hard, spreading out his arms and legs. His body stopped spinning, and the vertigo abated. But how much time had elapsed?
In ordinary free fall, terminal velocity was reached at about 110 miles per hour. Now that he had stabilized, he needed to slow the descent as much as possible. He moved into spider position, keeping his limbs spread out and rounding his spine into a C. All the while, the freezing winds, seemingly angered by his efforts to harness them, whipped at his rig, equipment, and clothing, and burrowed behind his goggles and flight cap. His gloved fingers felt as if they had been injected with Novocain. Slowly, he moved his right wrist toward his face, and he peered through his goggles at the large, luminous displays of the altimeter and the GPS unit.
It was high-school math. He had to make it to the drop zone within the forty seconds that remained. An inertial fiber gyroscope would tell him if he was moving in the right direction; it would be less help in figuring out how to correct his course.
He craned his head to see where Katsaris was.
There was no sign of him. That was not a surprise. What was the visibility, anyway? Was Katsaris five hundred feet away from him? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?
It was not an idle question: two men hurtling blindly through a dark cloud could collide, fatally. The odds were against such a collision. But then the whole operation itself was in defiance of any rational calculation of the odds.
If, at the end of the jump, they were off the destination point by a mere twenty feet, the result could be disastrous. And the same cloud cover that conferred invisibility also made a precision landing immeasurably more difficult. Normally, a paratrooper would land on a well-marked DZ—tracer flares were standard practice—using his vision as he tried to direct himself with the rig toggles. To an experienced sky diver, this became a matter of instinct. But those instincts would be little help in this case. By the time they were close enough to the ground to see much of anything, it could very well be too late. Instead of instinct, they would be forced to rely upon global positioning system devices strapped to their cuffs and, in effect, play an electronic game of Marco Polo.
Thirty-five seconds. The window was closing: he had to get into delta position as soon as possible.
Janson swept his arms back and steered himself with his shoulders and hands. No good: a walloping, gale-level crosscurrent struck Janson and pulled him into an overly steep flight path. He immediately realized what had gone wrong. He was consuming altitude swiftly. Too swiftly.
Could anything be done about it?
His only chance was to increase his drag. Yet he had to progress toward the compound as fast as possible if he had any chance of reaching it. To do both would be impossible.
Had he destroyed the mission only seconds into it?
It could not be.
But it could.
Lashed by icy winds, Janson found the quiet commands of expertise competing with a din of internal recrimination. You knew this wouldn’t work; it couldn’t work. Too many unknowns, too many uncontrollable variables. Why did you accept the mission in the first place? Pride? Pride in your professionalism? Pride was the enemy of professionalism: Alan Demarest had always said so, and here he spoke the truth. Pride gets you killed. There never was a reasonable chance of success. No sane person or responsible military branch would accept it. That’s why they turned to you.
A quieter voice penetrated the din. Max track.
He had to move into track position. It was his own voice he heard, from decades back, when he was training new recruits to a special SEAL team. Maximum track.
Could he do it? He had not attempted the maneuver in many years. And he had certainly never tracked on a GPS-directed jump. Tracking meant turning one’s body into an airfoil, with the humped profile of an airplane’s wing, so that one actually acquired some lift. For several seconds, Janson accelerated, with his head down and his limbs spread out slightly. He bent his arms and waist slightly, and rolled his shoulders forward, as if preparing to kowtow; he cupped his hands. Finally, he pulled his head back as he put his legs together, pointing his toes like a ballet dancer.
Nothing happened. He was not tracking.
It took ten seconds of acceleration before he experienced a sense of lift and noticed that his dive was beginning to flatten. In a max track, a human being should be able to reach an angle of descent that was close to forty-five degrees from vertical.
In theory.
In max track, it should be possible to move as rapidly horizontally as one was moving vertically—so that every yard downward took one almost a yard forward, closer to the drop zone.
In theory.
In reality, he was an equipment-laden commando who, beneath his flight suit, had forty pounds of gear hooked to his combat vest. In reality, he was a forty-nine-year-old man whose joints were stiffening in the subzero air that blasted its way through his flight suit. A max track required him to maintain perfect form, and it was not clear how long his skeletal muscles would permit him to do so.
In reality, every glimpse he took at his altimeter and GPS unit violated that perfect form he was depending on. And yet without them he was truly flying blind.
He cleared his mind, swept from it all anxieties; for the time being, he would have to be a machine, an automaton, devoted to nothing other than the execution of a flight trajectory.
He stole another glance at his wrist-worn instruments.
He was heading off course, he saw from the blinking of the GPS device. How far off course? Four degrees, maybe five. He angled both hands in parallel, at forty-five degrees, slightly deforming the cushion of air that surrounded him, and was rewarded with a slow turn.
The GPS device stopped blinking, and he felt suffused with a heedless, unthinking sense of hope.
He was tracking, soaring through the inky skies, an air cushion conserving his altitude as he tracked toward his destination. He was black, the sky was black, he was at one with the currents. The wind was in his face, but it was also keeping him aloft, like the hand of an angel. He was alive.
A vibration at his wrist. The altimeter alarm.
A warning that he was reaching the vertical point of no return—the height below which the only sure thing was death on impact. The manuals put it in less dramatic words: they referred to the “minimum altitude for parachute deployment.” A high-altitude,
lowopening jump established only the rough parameters: if the opening was too low, the ground would hit him like a tractor-trailer in the passing lane of the autobahn.
And yet he was farther away from the DZ than he’d planned to be at this point. He had imagined that he would be in the immediate vicinity of the compound when he opened the chute. For one thing, the difficulties in maneuvering amid shifting currents were immensely greater with an open canopy. For another, slowly drifting downward over the Stone Palace brought with it a greater danger of detection. A man plummeting at 160 miles per hour was harder to see than a man slowly drifting beneath a large rectangular parachute.
There were risks either way. He had to make a decision. Now.
He craned his head around, trying to see something, anything, in the thick blackness. What he felt was, in free flight, an entirely unaccustomed sensation: claustrophobia.
And that decided him: there would be fog. He and his black canopy would not stand out against the starless night. He arched himself into a vertical position, reached for the rip-cord handle, and tugged. There was a brief flutter as the tightly packed chute spread itself in the air and the lines stretched out fully. He felt the familiar jolt, the sense of being gripped at his shoulders and seat. And the noise of the wind ceased, as if a MUTE button had been pressed.
He tossed the rip-cord handle away and peered up to make sure the black nylon canopy was properly flared. He himself had a difficult time making out its outlines in the night sky, just fifteen feet above him. On another occasion, that might have been unsettling; tonight it was reassuring.