But his hand did not. It refused to follow his command. His finger would not squeeze the trigger.
Janson stood stock-still, frozen as he had never been in his life, even as turbulence overtook his mind. His disgust for the casualties of “standard tactical protocol” became absolute, and now paralyzing.
The boy turned from him and scampered up the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time—back up the stairs, back to safety.
Yet his safety was their doom! Recriminations flooded Janson like lava: his two seconds of sentimentality had fatally compromised the mission.
The boy would sound the alarm. By allowing him to live, Janson had signed a death warrant for Peter Novak. For Theo Katsaris. For himself. And quite possibly for the other participants in the mission.
He had made an insupportable, inexcusable, indefensible mistake. He was now, in effect, a murderer, and of far more than one child. His stricken eyes ran from Novak to Katsaris. A man he admired more than any he’d known; another he loved like a son. The mission was over. Sabotaged by an errant force he could never have anticipated: himself.
Now he saw Katsaris streak by, saw Katsaris’s footprints in the blood; the man had taken the shortest route to the stairwell, vaulting over corpses and chairs. The boy had to have been within an arm’s length of the door to the hallway when Katsaris squeezed off a silenced shot to the heart. Even after the muzzle flashed, Katsaris remained in full precision-firing position: a steadying hand to his firing hand, the stance of somebody who could not afford to miss. The stance of a soldier firing at a person who could not return fire, but whose continued survival was itself a dire menace.
Janson’s vision blurred briefly, then focused again, and when it did, he saw the child’s lifeless body tumble down the stone stairs, almost somersaulting.
And then it lay on the bottom step, like a rag doll carelessly tossed aside.
When Janson moved a few feet closer, he saw that the boy’s head lay upon the metal tray he once carried so proudly. A saliva bubble had formed at his soft, childish lips.
Janson’s heart pounded slowly, powerfully. He was sickened, at himself and what he had nearly allowed to happen, and at the same time sickened by what needed to have happened. By the waste of it all, the prodigality with the one thing that mattered on this earth, human life. The Derek Collinses of the world would never understand. He remembered why he retired. Decisions like this, he recognized, had to be made. He had no longer wanted to be the one to make them.
Katsaris looked at him with wildly questioning eyes: Why had he frozen? What had come over him?
He felt strangely moved that Katsaris’s expression was one of bewilderment rather than reproach. Katsaris should have been furious at him, as Janson was furious at himself. Only the soldier’s love for his mentor could have modulated outrage into mere astonishment and incredulity.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Janson said.
Katsaris gestured toward the stairs, the egress stipulated in the revised plan.
But Janson had devised those plans, and knew when they would have to be altered for the sake of the mission. “That’s too dangerous now. We’ve got to find another way.”
Would Katsaris trust his judgment any longer? A mission without a commanding officer was a sure route to disaster. He had to demonstrate his mastery of the situation.
“First things first. Let’s get the American,” he told him.
Two minutes later, Katsaris fiddled with the lock of another iron gate as Novak and Janson looked on. The gate opened with a groan.
The flashlight played off matted hair that had once been blond.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the woman whimpered, cowering in her cell. “Please don’t hurt me!”
“We’re just going to take you home,” Theo said, angling the beam so that they could assess her physical condition.
It was Donna Hedderman, the anthropology student; Janson recognized her face. Once the KLF had captured the Steenpaleis, they had evidently moved the American woman to its dungeon as well. The two high-profile captives, they must have reasoned, would be easier to guard in one place.
Donna Hedderman was a big-boned woman, with a broad nose and round cheeks. She had once been heavyset, and even after seventy days of captivity, she was not lean. As was the way with terror groups of any sophistication, the KLF made sure that its prisoners were amply fed. The calculation was brutality itself. A prisoner weakened by starvation might succumb to disease and die. To die of disease was to escape the power of the KLF. A prisoner who died could not be executed.
Even so, Donna Hedderman had been through hell: it was apparent from her bleached, fish-belly flesh, her clumped and tangled hair, her staring eyes. Janson had seen photos of her in the newspaper articles about her kidnapping. In the pictures, from happier days, she was round, beaming, almost cherubic. “High-spirited” was a recurrent adjective. But the long weeks of captivity had taken all that away. A KLF communiqué had dementedly called her an American intelligence agent; if anything, she had left-wing sympathies that would have ruled out such employment. She had been singularly sympathetic to the plight of the Kagama, but then the KLF scorned sympathy as a nonrevolutionary sentiment. Sympathy was an impediment to fear, and fear was what the Caliph sought above all else.
A long pause. “Who do you work for?” she asked in a quavering voice.
“We work for Mr. Novak,” Janson said. A sidelong glance.
After a beat, Novak nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They are our friends.”
Donna Hedderman got to her feet and made her way toward the open gate. Edema had swollen her ankles, making her stride unsteady.
Now Janson conferred quietly with Katsaris. “There is another way, and right now it looks like the better bet. But we’ll need to pool resources. We each have an ounce of Semtex in our kit. We’ll need them both.” A small wad of Semtex, along with a detonation device, was included in their gear, standard spec-ops equipment for missions into uncertain environments.
Katsaris looked at him closely, then nodded. Janson’s tone of voice, the specificity of his instructions, were, for whatever reason, reassuring. Janson had not lost it. Or if he had, it was only a momentary lapse. Janson was still Janson.
“Kerosene lanterns.” Janson gestured toward them. “Before the place was electrified, it would have been the primary source of illumination. The governor general’s compound would have had a kerosene tank in the basement, something that would be filled from outside. He’d want to have a plentiful supply of the stuff.”
“They might have ripped it out,” Katsaris noted. “Filled it with cement.”
“Possibly. More likely it was left to rust, quietly. The subfoundation level is vast. It isn’t as if they would have needed the space.”
“Vast is right. How are we going to find it?”
“The blueprint has a tank positioned approximately two hundred meters in from the northwest retaining wall. I hadn’t realized what it was for, but it’s obvious now.”
“That’s some distance,” Katsaris said. “Is the woman going to be up to it?”
Donna Hedderman gripped the iron bars to help herself stay erect; clearly, the period of relative immobility had weakened her muscles, and her still considerable girth gave them a great deal to support.
Novak looked at her and turned away, embarrassed. Janson understood the kind of relationship that developed between two deeply frightened prisoners who might not be able to see each other but could communicate, whispering through pipes, tapping code on metal bars, passing notes scrawled with grime on scraps of cloth or paper.
“You run ahead, Theo. Let me know when you’ve located it, and I’ll bring the others.”
Three minutes elapsed before he heard Katsaris’s triumphant words in his earpiece: “Found it!”
Janson looked at his watch: further delay was dangerous. When might the next contingent of guards arrive to relieve the ones who had been on duty? When would they next hear the
scrape of the steel grate on the stone landing?
Now he led Peter Novak and Donna Hedderman along the dank subterranean corridor that led to the old kerosene tank. Hedderman held on to Janson’s arm as she walked, and even then her gait was slow and painful. These were not the cards he would have chosen, but they were the cards he had been dealt.
The tank, obviously long neglected, had an iron door with lead flanges to maintain a tight seal.
“There’s no time,” Janson said. “Let’s kick the damn thing in. The hinges are already rusting off. They just need help.” He made a running start toward the door, throwing up a foot as he reached iron door. If the door did not give way, the result would be a bone-jarring experience. But it did, collapsing in a cloud of dust and oxidized metal.
Janson coughed. “Get out your Semtex,” he said.
Now Janson strode through what had once been a storage tank for kerosene. The copper-lined chamber was still suffused with an oily smell. The fill hole was almost hidden by the hardened tarlike residue that covered the walls—impurities of the kerosene, which remained after many decades of disuse.
He hammered the butt of his HK against the outside wall, heard the hollow ring of the copper flashing. This was the area. Probably a four-foot elevation above the ground, unless it had been reduced by the passage of time.
Katsaris packed the ivory-colored putty, about the size of a wad of bubble gum, around the rusting iron bunghole and pressed into it twin silvery wires, filamentthin. The other end of the wires attached to a small, round lithium battery, similar in appearance to those used in many watches and hearing aids. The battery hung low, and Katsaris decided to press it into the Semtex, simply to stabilize it.
As he worked, Janson primed his own wad of Semtex, then took a few moments to determine the optimal position of the second blast. The positioning of plastique was crucial to the desired outcome, and they could not afford to fail. So far, they had been protected by the isolation of the dungeon—the layers of stone protecting it from the rest of the north wing. Mayhem had occurred, but no sound would have been audible to those who were not its victims. There was no way to make a soundless exit, however. Indeed, the aftershock from the blast would travel almost instantaneously throughout the Stone Palace, rousing everyone in the immense compound. There would be no confusion among the rebels about where the blast had originated, no confusion about where to dispatch soldiers. The escape route had to be hitchless, or their efforts would all be for nothing.
Now Janson pressed his ounce of Semtex to the corner of the far wall where it met the curving top of the copper-lined tank, three feet above Katsaris’s ounce.
It fell off, and Janson grabbed it before it hit the ground. The ivory putty would not adhere to the greasy surface.
What now? He took out his combat knife and used it to scrape the gummy residue from the corner of the tank. The blade was soon ruined, but his penlight revealed an area of gleaming, gouged metal.
He pressed the unsoiled side of the Semtex wad to the spot. It hung there, but uncertainly, as though it might drop at any moment.
“Fall back!” Janson called.
Theo and Janson exited the tank, Janson taking one last look to make sure the Semtex was still in position. Once the two rejoined the hostages, around a bend in the corridor, they depressed in unison the radio frequency controllers that activated the batteries.
The explosion was deafening, the reverberation a rumble-roar, like a vast collection of forty-thousand-watt speakers blasting bass-range feedback. The shock waves traveled through their flesh, causing their very eyes to vibrate. White smoke billowed inward, bringing with it the familiar nitrous scent of plastique—and something else, too: the salty tang of the sea breeze. They had a route to the compound’s exterior.
If they lived to use it.
Chapter Eight
How long would it take before the KLF forces were fully mobilized? A hundred and twenty seconds? Less? How many guards were on duty? How many guards were stationed along the battlements?
They would find out soon enough.
A portion of the heavy stone wall had crumbled under the blast, and thick, jagged metal plates were strewn everywhere. But Theo’s penlight confirmed what the moist sea breeze had promised. The opening was wide enough to enable them to clamber out to the exterior of the compound, if they used a push-pull maneuver. Katsaris went first. Janson would go last. Between them, they would help the weakened captives make their way over the rubble and onto the surrounding grounds.
Eighty seconds later, the four of them were on the outside. The sea breeze was stronger, and the night sky was brighter than it had been; the cloud cover was beginning to break up. Stars were visible, and so was a patch of moon.
It was not a good time for the nocturnal glow. They were outside the dungeon. But they were not free.
Not yet.
Janson stood against the limestone wall with the others, determining their precise position. The breeze cleared Janson’s nostrils, cleared them of the bloody, clinging stench of his victims, as well as of the fainter animal stench of the unwashed captives.
The area immediately beneath the limestone wall of the compound was safer, in certain respects, than the area farther out. The seaside battlements, he saw, were filled with armed men, some manning heavy artillery. That was why the battlements were constructed—to fire upon the corvettes and schooners of rival colonial empires. The farther out they were, the more exposed they would be.
“Can you run?” Janson asked Novak.
“A short distance?”
“Only a short distance,” he said reassuringly.
“I’ll do my damnedest,” the billionaire replied, jutjawed and determined. He was in his sixties, had been held in captivity under doubtful conditions, but his sheer force of will would see him through.
Janson felt reassured by his steely resolve. Donna Hedderman he was less certain of. She seemed the kind who might collapse into hysterics at any moment. And she was too heavy to sling over a shoulder.
He put a hand on her arm. “Hey,” he said. “Nobody’s asking you to do anything that’s beyond you. Do you understand?”
She whimpered, her eyes beseeching. A commando in black face paint was not a comforting sight to her.
“I want you to focus, OK?” He pointed to the rocky outcropping, fifty yards away, where the promontory dropped off in a sheer cliff. A low split-rail fence, painted white and peeling, surrounded the cliff, a visual demarcation rather than a physical impediment. “That’s where we’re going.”
For her sake, he did not spell out in further detail what the plan called for. He did not tell her that they would be going over the cliff, dropping down on ropes to a boat waiting on the frothing waters eighty meters below.
Katsaris and Novak now sprinted toward the outcropping at the promontory’s rocky overhang; Janson, slowed by the wheezing American, followed.
In the gray scale of nighttime vision, it looked like the very edge of the world. A crag of pale rock, and then nothingness, complete and absolute.
And that nothingness was their destination; indeed, their only salvation.
If they reached it in time.
“Find anchor!” Janson called to Katsaris.
The cliff was largely gneiss, a tough, metamorphic rock, weathered into irregular crags. There were a couple of plausible rock horns near the overhang. Using one of them would be safer and faster than pounding bolts or pitons into crevices. With sure, deft hands, Katsaris wrapped two loops of rope around the more prominent of the solid rock horns, making a doublestrand loop beneath it, secured with an overhand knot. If one strand were cut—by friction against a sharp crag, or a stray bullet—the other would hold. Janson had packed dry-coated 9.4mm Beal rope, with some elasticity to control the deceleration rate in a fall. It was compact, but strong enough for the job.
As Katsaris secured the anchor, Janson swiftly trussed Novak in a sewn nylon climbing harness, making sure the leg loops and wai
st belt were securely buckled. This would not be a controlled rappel: the work would be done by the equipment, not the man. And the equipment could not be elaborate: they had to rely upon devices that could be easily carried. A figure-eight descender would serve as the rappel brake. It was a simple piece of polished steel, smaller than his hand, with two rings on either end of a center stem. One ring was big, the other small. No moving parts. It could be rigged rapidly and easily.
Katsaris passed a bight of the rappel rope through the big ring and looped it around the stem. He clipped the small ring onto Peter Novak’s harness with a locking carabiner. It was a rudimentary device, but it would provide enough friction to safely control the rate of descent.
From a corner tower above the battlements, a guard aimed a long burst of gunfire in their direction.
They had been spotted.
“Christ, Janson, there’s no time!” Katsaris shouted.
But he could buy time—perhaps a minute, perhaps less.
Janson unhooked a stun grenade from his combat vest and threw it toward the watchtower. It arced through the air and into the guard’s cabin.
At the same time, Janson tossed the rope coil over the cliff. The sooner Novak followed, the safer he’d be: a single-pitch rappel was his only chance.
Unfortunately, the Kagama in the watchtower was swift and skilled: he grabbed the grenade and hurled it away from him, with seconds to spare. The grenade blew in midair, the flash outlining the four people at the edge of the cliff for attack like a floodlight from a guard tower.
“Now what?” asked Novak. “I’m no rock climber.”
“Jump,” Katsaris urged. “Now!”
“You’re mad!” Novak cried out, aghast and terrified by the black nothingness that seemed to stretch out below.
Katsaris abruptly lifted the great man and, taking care not to lose his own footing, pitched him off the side of the cliff.
It was graceless. It was also the only way. The humanitarian was in no state to absorb and follow even the most elementary coaching: a regulated plumb drop was his only chance. And the overhang meant that the rock face would be a safe distance away from him.
The Jason Directive Page 13