Janson knew, used flat rectangles of metal, not pins, and the springs were
placed inside the cylinder itself rather than in the lock shell. He produced a
small tension wrench; in shape it resembled a dental pick, but was little larger
than a matchstick. He placed the bent end of the wrench in the keyway, pushing
on its far end, so as to maximize both the torque and his tactile sensitivity.
Each would be important. One by one, he pulled each tumbler away from the shear
line. After ten seconds, the tumblers had been picked. The lock was not yet
ready to open, however. Now he inserted a second tool, a pick of carbide steel,
thin yet inflexible, and began applying clockwise torque.
Holding his breath, he kept both instruments in the keyway as he heard the
tongue withdraw and used the tension to pull the door toward him, just a few
inches. The door swung easily on well-oiled hinges. Those hinges had to be well
oiled: as it opened, he saw that the door was fully eighteen inches thick. The
governor general may have placed a dungeon beneath his feet, but he wished to be
spared even the faintest echoes of whatever cries might come from it.
Janson opened the door a few more inches, standing now a foot away from the
entrance, in case someone was lying in wait.
Slowly, carefully, he verified that at least the immediate passageway was clear.
Now he walked through the door, to a stone landing worn smooth with time, and,
using his electrical tape, he secured the brass tongue to the door so that it
would not relock.
And he began to make his way down the stairs. At least they were stone, not
creaking wood. A few more steps down the landing led to a second impediment, a
hinged grate of steel bars.
The portcullis-like grate succumbed to his slim tools without difficulty; unlike
the stone door above, however, it was far from soundless.
It opened with a distinct scraping noise, of metal against stone—one that the
assembled guards could not have failed to hear.
Astonishingly, they did not react. Why? Another decoy? Birds on a wire—this time
a flock of them?
A flurry of thoughts ran though Janson’s mind. Then he caught the word Theyilai!
Even with his guidebook Anuran, he knew that word: tea. The guards were
expecting somebody—somebody coming with a samovar of tea for them. That was why
they did not start at the noise. On the other hand, if that tea did not arrive
soon, they would grow suspicious.
Now he could see directly some of what he had glimpsed through the fiber-cam. A
single, naked incandescent bulb provided lighting. He heard the gentle burble of
conversation resuming, the card game still at full steam. The smoke that had
wafted up through the stairwell suggested at least a dozen cigarettes lighted
simultaneously.
Seventeen guards for one man. No wonder they had little worries about the
security of their hostage.
Janson thought about the young KLF proter champ, with his high-stakes play, the
play that meant either disaster or triumph. Nothing in between.
Everything now was a question of timing. Janson knew that Katsaris was awaiting
his command, a silent thermite grenade in his hand. Ordinary combat procedure
would have called for a “flash and banger,” but an audible explosion might alert
others. If the soldiers stationed in the barracks were mobilized, the odds of a
successful exfiltration would shift from slim to none.
Katsaris and Janson each had a modified MP5K, a 4.4-pound submachine gun made by
Heckler & Koch, with a short barrel, a sling-attachment buttcap, and a sound
suppressor. The magazines held thirty hollow-point rounds, for close-quarter,
interior use. The 9mm Hydra-Shok bullets were less likely to ricochet; they were
also more likely to destroy any flesh they encountered—to tear rather than
simply penetrate human viscera. Janson’s SEAL comrades had cruelly nicknamed
this weapon, which had a firing rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, the
“room broom.” What could not be silenced was the clamor of its victims. But the
massive hallway door would provide substantial acoustic isolation, and several
feet of stone separated the grotto from the floor above it.
Janson took six steps down, then swung himself onto the four-foot-deep concrete
ledge. It was, as expected, draped with PVC pipes and insulated electrical
wires, but he landed without a sound. So far, so good. The soldiers were
studying their cards; no one was scanning the ceiling.
Now he flattened himself against the wall and inched along the ledge carefully;
the farther he was from the stairway, the less expected his firing position
would be—and the sooner he would be able to reach Peter Novak in his cell. At
the same time, Janson’s sight-line position was far from ideal; soldiers at one
end of the larger table would still be able to see him if they looked up and
into the shadowed ledge. Yet, as he reminded himself, there was no reason for
them to do so.
“Veda theyilai?” The proter champion, thumbing his cards at the end of the
table, spoke the words in a tone of slight annoyance, and as he did, he rolled
his eyes. Had anything registered?
After a beat, he lifted his eyes again, peering into the gloom of the overhead
shelf. His hands moved toward his cradled Ruger Mini-14.
Janson had not been wrong about the young man’s powers of observation. His scalp
was crawling. He had been made.
“Now!” Janson whispered into his lip mike and slid to a prone position on the
farthest recess of the concrete ledge as he put on his polarized goggles. He
flipped his weapon’s safety down, setting it to full fire.
The young man stood up suddenly, shouting something in Kagama. He fired his gun
toward the area where he had seen Janson, and the bullet took a bite out of the
concrete just an inch from his head. A second bullet tore into nearby ductwork.
Suddenly, the dimly lit room filled with a flare of eye-searing brightness and
heat. The slow-burning thermite grenade had arrived: a small, indoor sun,
blinding even those who tried to look away. Its brightness was a multiple of
that emitted by a welder’s torch, and the fact that the guards’ eyes had
adjusted to low-light conditions made the blindness all the more complete.
Scattered gunfire was directed toward Janson, but the angle made it a hard shot,
and the bullets were poorly aimed.
Through his nearly black goggles, Janson saw the soldiers in disarray and
confusion, some shielding their eyes with forearms and hands, others firing
blindly toward the ceiling.
Still, even a blind shot could be fatal. With the entire room whited out by the
preternaturally bright flare, he returned fire, directing the automatic
fusillades in tight, carefully aimed clusters. He depleted one thirty-round
magazine and snapped in another. Shouts filled the room.
Now Katsaris appeared, bounding down the stairway with polarized goggles and a
softly buzzing MP5K, directing bullets at the guerrillas from yet another angle.
In seconds it was over. Few of them, Janson reflected, even had the opportunity
to look their opponents in the eye. They had been slaughtered, impersonally, by
a smoothly operating magazine-fed weapon that discharged bullets at a rate of
fifteen per second. Because of the low-signature sound suppression, the MP5
bursts were not merely lethal but eerily quiet. It took Janson a moment before
he realized what the sound reminded him of: the fluttering of a deck of cards
being shuffled. Killing should not sound like that, Janson thought to himself.
It was too trivial a soundtrack for so grave an action.
An odd silence now reigned. As gloom and shadows returned, Janson and Katsaris
removed their goggles. The naked, forty-watt overhead bulb, Janson noticed, was
still intact. The guards were not so lucky. Bodies were splayed on the floor, as
if pinned there by the hollow-point bullets. They had functioned as they were
designed to, discharging their entire force to the bodies they hit, coming to a
stop several inches into those bodies, destroying all the vital organs they
encountered. As Janson came closer, he saw that some of the men were taken down
even before they’d had the opportunity to flip the safeties of their Ml6
carbines.
Were there any signs of movement? It took him a few moments before he saw it.
Sliding along the ground was the young man who had played the amazing
thirteen-card set—the man who had lifted his eyes to the concrete ledge. His
midriff was red and slick, but his arms were outstretched, reaching for the
revolver of the lifeless soldier next to him.
Janson let off one more burst from his HK. Another shuffle of life’s deck, and
the young man became still.
The grotto was an abattoir, filled with the rich, sickening stench of blood and
the contents of ripped-open alimentary canals. Janson knew the stench all too