Janson raised himself from his crouch, peered into the windows behind the iron grille. Perspiration lay on him like a film of mud; the humidity of the air prevented evaporation. Now he envied Katsaris the procholinergic. The perspiration wasn’t cooling him; it just adhered to his skin, an unwanted layer of clothing.
At the same time, it concerned him that he was even conscious of such incidentals. He had to focus: Was there a wire?
He looked through the NV scope, angling it toward the iron grille behind the smoking peasants. Nothing.
No, something. An orange spot, too small to correspond to a body. In all likelihood, it was a hand belonging to a body concealed behind a stone wall.
The men on the veranda, it was a reasonable surmise, were unaware that they had backup; it would have diminished their already doubtful efficacy. But they did.
Did the backup have backup? Had a sequential operation been designed?
Improbable. Not impossible.
From a long thigh pocket, Janson withdrew a blackened aluminum tube, thirteen inches in length, four inches in diameter. Inside, it was lined with a snug steel mesh, which prevented the living creature within from making noise. An atmosphere of 90 percent pure oxygen prevented asphyxiation during the operation schedule.
The time had come for noise, for distraction.
He unscrewed one sealed end, the Teflon-coated grooves moving soundlessly over each other.
By its long, naked tail, he removed the rodent and flung it toward the veranda in a high parabola. It landed as if, in its nocturnal travels, it had lost its purchase and dropped off the roof.
Its glossy black pelt was now standing on end, and the creature made its telltale piglike grunts. The sentries had a visitor, and within four seconds they knew it. The short head, wide muzzle, scaly, hairless tail. One foot long, two and a half pounds. A bandicoot rat. Bandicota bengalensis was its formal name. Quite literally, Ahmad Tabari’s bête noire.
In their Dravidian tongue, the Kagama guards broke out into short, hushed, frantic exchanges.
“Ayaiyo, ange paaru, adhu yenna theridhaa?”
“Aiyo, perichaali!”
“Adha yepadiyaavadhu ozrikkanum.”
“Andha vittaa, naama sethom.”
“Anga podhu paaru.”
The animal scurried toward an entryway, following its instincts, while the guards, following theirs, tried to stop it. The temptation was to fire a weapon at the giant rodent, but that would awaken everyone in the compound and make them look foolish. Worse, it could draw attention to a failure, and a crucial one. If the Beloved One, asleep in the governor’s suite, were to come across this harbinger of death in his living quarters, there was no telling how he would react. He might, in a black terror, enact its prophecy himself by ordering the death of the sentries who had permitted its entry. They knew what had happened last time.
The consternation had, as Janson had hoped, brought out the others—the second team. How many? Three no, four.
The members of the second team were armed with American M16s, probably Vietnam-era. They were standard infantry issue during Vietnam, and the NVA collected them by the thousands after the South fell. From there, the M16 entered the international market and became the standard semi-automatic of less-than-well-funded guerrilla movements everywhere—the kind that bought on the installment plan, that scrimped and saved and never splurged on nonessentials. Christmas Club warriors. The M16 would fire short, buzz-saw bursts, seldom jammed, and, with a minimum of maintenance, was reasonably rust-resistant, even in humid climes. Janson respected the weapon; he respected all weapons. But he also knew that they would not be fired unnecessarily. Soldiers in proximity to a resting leadership did not make loud noises at four in the morning without good cause.
Janson withdrew a second bandicoot rat, an even larger one, and, as it writhed and squirmed in his gloved hands, pressed into its belly a tiny hypodermic filled with d-amphetamine. It would produce hyperactivity, thus making the rat even bolder and faster than the other one and, in the eyes of the sentries, even more of a menace.
A low, underhand toss. Its small, sharp claws grabbing at thin air, the rat landed on the head of one of the peasant sentries—who let out a brief but piercing scream.
It was more attention than Janson had been aiming for.
Had he overshot the mark? If the scream drew soldiers who were not assigned to the north wing, the exercise would prove self-defeating. So far there was no sign of that, although the guards who were already present were plainly agitated. Moving his head to the edge of the berm line, he watched the quiet confusion and dismay that had swept through the northern veranda. His destination was the space beneath that veranda, and there was no covered route to it, for the stone walkways that projected from the long east and west walls of the compound stopped fifteen feet before they reached the wall opposite.
That the guards were sitting in the light, whereas he and Katsaris would be in the dark, offered some protection, but not enough: the human visual field was sensitive to motion, and some of the interior light spilled onto the cobbled ground in front of the northern veranda. The mission required absolute stealth: however well trained and equipped, two men could not hold off the hundred or so guerrillas who were housed in the Stone Palace barracks. Detection was death. It was that simple.
Thirty feet away and six feet up, an older man, his leathery brown skin deeply creased, appeared on the veranda, enjoining silence. Silence: so as not to wake the sleeping commanders, who had taken residence in the palace as its proper and rightful inhabitants. As Janson focused on the older man, however, his unease grew. The man spoke of silence, but his face told Janson that it was not his sole, or even primary, concern. Only a larger sense of suspicion could explain the squinted, searching eyes; the fact that his focus moved quickly from the panicked sentries to the shadowy courtyard beyond him, and then to the iron-grilled windows above him. His darting gaze showed that he understood the peculiarities of nighttime vision: the way peripheral vision became more acute than direct vision, the way a direct stare transfigured shapes according to the imagination. At night, observant eyes never stopped moving; the brain could assemble an image from the flickering outlines they collected.
As Janson regarded the man’s creased face, he made some other quick inferences. This was an intelligent, wary man, disinclined to take the incident at face value. From the way the other men deferred to him, his position of seniority was obvious. Another sign of it was the very weapon cradled in a sling around his shoulders: a Russian KLIN. A commonplace weapon, but a smaller and slightly more expensive make than the M16s. The KLIN was more reliable for tightcluster shooting, as opposed to the raking fire to be expected from the relatively untrained.
The others would take their lead from him.
Janson watched him for a few more moments, saw him talking quietly in Kagama, gesturing toward the darkened courtyard, excoriating a sentry who had been smoking. This man was not an amateur.
Detection was death. Had they been detected?
He had to make the contrary assumption. The contrary assumption: What would Lieutenant Commander Alan Demarest have made of such reasoning, of the hopeful stipulation that the world would conform to one’s operational imperatives, rather than confound them? But Demarest was dead—had died before a firing squad—and, if there was any justice in the universe, was rotting in hell. At four o’clock on a sweltering Anuran morning, in the courtyard of the Stone Palace, surrounded by heavily armed terrorists, there was no advantage in calculating the operation’s chances of success. Its tenets were, had to be, nearly theological. Credo quia absurdum. I believe because it is absurd.
And the older man with the creased face: What did he believe? He was the one to take out first. But had enough time passed? By now, word of the small commotion would have been spread among those on duty. It was crucial that an explanation for it—the appearance of the accursed bandicoot—had spread as well. Because there would be other noises. That wa
s inevitable. Noises that had an explanation were innocuous. Noises that lacked an explanation would prompt further investigation, and could be deadly.
Janson withdrew the Blo-Jector, a twenty-inch pipe of anodized aluminum, from a dangle pouch on his black fatigues. Pockets and pouches had presented an operational challenge. They could not afford the ripping sound of Velcro, the clicking noise of a metal snap, so he had replaced such fasteners with a soundless contrivance. A pair of magnetic strips, sealed within soft woolen cladding, did the job: the magnets would keep the flaps shut tightly, yet would release and engage soundlessly.
Janson whispered his plan into his lip mike. He would take the tall man and the guard to his right; Katsaris should aim for the others. Janson now raised the rubber mouthpiece of the blowpipe to his lips, sighting over the end of the tube. The dart was of covert-ops design, a fine, 33-gauge needle and bolus housed within an acrylic-and-Mylar replica of a wasp. The artificial insect would withstand no more than a casual inspection, but if things went right, a casual inspection was all it would receive. He puffed hard into the mouthpiece, then quickly inserted another dart, and discharged it. He returned to his crouching position.
The tall man grabbed at his neck, pulled out the dart, and peered at it in the dim light. Had he removed it before it had injected its bolus? The object had visual and tactile resemblances to a large stinging insect: the stiff exoskeleton, the striped body. But its weight would be wrong, particularly if it still contained the incapacitant fluid, one milliliter of carfentanil citrate. The man with the creased face stared at it furiously, and then he looked directly at Janson. Focusing intently, he had evidently made out his form in the shadowed corner.
The soldier’s hand reached for a revolver, holstered on his side—and then he toppled forward off the veranda. Janson could hear the thud of his body hitting the cobblestones six feet below him. Two other sentries slid to the ground, losing consciousness.
A jabbering exchange broke out between two of the younger guards, to his far left. They knew something was wrong. Hadn’t Katsaris hit them yet?
The use of the incapacitant was not simply an attempt to be humane. Few human beings had experience with a carfentanil dart; there was a ten-second window when they would assume they had been stung by an insect. By contrast, there was nothing mysterious about gunfire: if a silenced shot didn’t cause instant unconsciousness—if it failed to penetrate the midbrain region—the victim would pierce the night with his yells, sounding the alarm for everyone to hear. In stealthy, close-up encounters, garroting would do, choking off air as it did blood, but that was not an option here. If the blow darts were a risky approach, tactical optimization was not about choosing the best possible approach; it was about choosing the best one available.
Janson aimed his blowpipe toward the jabbering two guards and was preparing to send off another dart when the two woozily collapsed; Katsaris had hit them after all.
Silence returned, softened only by the cawing of magpies and gulls, the buzzing and scraping of cicadas and beetles. It sounded right. It sounded as if the problem had been dealt with, and the men had returned to watchful waiting.
Yet the safety they had just gained for themselves could vanish at any moment. The information they had distilled from intercepts and sat imagery suggested that the next shift would not arrive for another hour—but there was no guarantee that the schedule had not changed. Every minute was now of immense value.
Janson and Katsaris made a dash for the darkness beneath the northern veranda, sliding between the stout piers that supported it at three-foot intervals. According to the blueprints, the circular stone lid was at the midpoint of the northern wall, just abutting the limestone of the main structure. Blindly, Janson felt along the ground, his hands moving along the rubblework foundations where ground and building met. Suddenly, he felt something poking at his hand, then sliding over it, like a taut rubber hose. He jerked back. He had disturbed a snake. Most varieties on the island were harmless, but the poisonous ones—including the saw-scaled viper and the Anuran krait—happened to be quite common. He pulled a combat knife from his fatigues and whipped it in the direction where the snake had been probing him. The knife encountered midair resistance—it had hit something—and he brought it down silently to the stone wall. Something sinewy and dense gave way before the razor-sharp blade.
“I found it,” Theo whispered, from a few feet away.
Janson turned on a small infrared flashlight and strapped on his night-vision scope, adjusting it from starlight mode to IR mode.
Theo was crouching before a large stone disk. The grotto under their feet had been used for any number of purposes over the years. The storage of prisoners was a principal one. At other points in time, it had been used for the storage of inanimate objects, ranging from foodstuffs to ammunition, and beneath the heavy circular masonry was a vertical passageway that was made to serve as a chute. The lid had been designed to be removed easily, but the passage of years had a way of complicating matters. That it could be removed at all would be sufficient.
The lid was fashioned with handholds on either side. Theo pulled on one, using his powerful legs as he tried to lift the flat round stone. Nothing. The only sound was his stifled grunt.
Now Janson joined him, crouching on the opposite side, placing both his hands on the slot that had been designed for that purpose. Bracing himself with his legs, he flexed his arms as hard as he could. He could hear Theo letting his breath out slowly as he strained himself to the utmost.
Nothing.
“Twist it,” Janson whispered.
“It’s not a jar of olives,” Theo said, but he repositioned himself accordingly. He braced himself with his legs against the perpendicular wall and, locking his hands around the slotted flange, pushed at the lid. On the other side, Janson pulled it in the same clockwise direction.
And there was movement at last: the abrasive grinding of stone on stone, faint but unmistakable. Janson realized what they had encountered. The circular bed where the lid had been seated was made of some sort of fired clay, and over the years, as the limestone had eroded in the tropical moisture, the amalgamated debris from each substance had formed a natural mortar. The lid had, in effect, been cemented in place. Now that the bonds had been broken, the task would be manageable.
He and Theo crouched over the lid again, as before, and lifted in one coordinated movement. The lid was eight inches thick and immensely heavy, meant to be moved by four strong men, not two. But it could be done. Using all their strength, they eased it up and placed it gently on the ground to one side.
Janson peered down into the hole they had uncovered. Just under the lid there was a grate. And through it, he heard a welter of voices drifting up from the subterranean space.
Indistinct, yes, but untroubled as well. Most of what a voice conveyed—anger, fear, merriment, scorn, anxiety—was through tone. Words as such were so much garlanding, designed to mislead as often as not. Much interrogation training had to do with learning to hear through words to the characteristics of sheer vocality. The sounds that drifted up were not those of any prisoner—Janson knew that much. And if you were stationed in the dungeon area and were not a prisoner, you were guarding the prisoner. These were the guards. These were their immediate enemy.
Lying flat on the ground, Janson placed his head directly above the grate. The subterranean air was cool on his face, and he became conscious of the smell of cigarettes. At first the sounds were like a babbling brook, but now he could separate them into the voices of several different men. How many? He was not sure yet. Nor could one assume that the number of speakers was the number of men.
The chute, they knew, descended through several feet of stone, angled at forty-five degrees for most of the way, then bending and funneling down more shallowly. Though a dim light filtered upward through the grate, nothing could be seen directly.
Katsaris handed Janson the fiber-optic camera kit, which looked like a makeup compact with a long co
rd attached. Janson, crouching with his back against the rough-carved limestone, threaded the cord down through the grate, inch by inch, taking care not to overshoot the mark. It was the thickness of an ordinary phone wire and had a tip hardly bigger than a match head. Within the cable ran a double-layered glass strand that would transmit images to a three-by-five-inch screen at the other end. Janson kept an eye on the small active-matrix display as he slowly fed the cord down the grate. If anyone down there noticed it and recognized what it was, the mission was over. The screen was suffused with gray hues, which grew lighter and lighter. Abruptly, it filled with a bird’s-eye view of a dimly illuminated room. Janson pulled the cord up an inch. The view was now partly occluded, but most of the previous vista was still in the screen. The tip was probably a millimeter from the end of the chute, unlikely to be detected. After five seconds, the device’s automatic focusing program brought the visual field into maximal sharpness and brightness.
“How many?” Katsaris asked.
“It’s not good,” Janson said.
“How many?”
Janson fingered a button that rotated the camera tip before he replied. “Seventeen guards. Armed to the teeth. But who’s counting?”
“Shit,” Katsaris replied.
“I’ll second that,” Janson grunted.
“If only there was a sight line, we could just hose the bastards.”
“But there isn’t.”
“How about we drop a frag grenade down right now?”
“All you need is a single survivor, and the prisoner’s dead,” Janson said. “We’ve been over all this. Better get your ass over to Ingress A.” Ingress A, as it was designated on the blueprints, was a long-disused entrance that would lead to the rear of the dungeon. It was a key part of the plan: while the prisoner was hustled into the bowels of the ancient compound, a silent white-phosphorous grenade would be dropped through the chute, incapacitating his guards.
“Roger that,” Katsaris said. “If it’s where it’s supposed to be, I should be back in three minutes. I just hope you can get some sort of fix on them in the meantime.”