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 fine-tuning the plan, bringing
schematics in line with reality. Leaning over a folding wooden bench, Honwana
and Andressen reviewed maps of wind-current and oceancurrent 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. Janson had run him through a rough-and-ready 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.
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,