THE JANSON DIRECTIVE
Robert Ludlum
PROLOGUE
8°37’N, 88°22’E N. Indian Ocean, 250 miles east of Sri Lanka Northwestern Anura
The night was oppressive, the air at body temperature and almost motionless.
Earlier in the evening there had been light, cooling rains, but now everything
seemed to radiate heat, even the silvery half-moon, its countenance brushed with
the occasional wisps of cloud. The jungle itself seemed to exhale the hot, moist
breath of a predator lying in wait.
Shyam shifted restlessly in his canvas chair. It was, he knew, a fairly ordinary
night on the island of Anura for this time of year: early in the monsoon season,
the air was always heavy with a sense of foreboding. Yet only the ever attentive
mosquitoes disturbed the quiet. At half past one in the morning, Shyam reckoned
he had been on checkpoint duty for four and a half hours. In that time,
precisely seven motorists had come their way. The checkpoint consisted of two
parallel lines of barbed-wire frames—”knife rests”—set up eighty feet apart on
the road, to either side of the search and administration area. Shyam and Arjun
were the two sentries on forward duty, and they sat in front of the wooden
roadside booth. A pair of backups was supposedly on duty on the other side of
the hill, but the hours of silence from them suggested that they were dozing,
along with the men in the makeshift barracks a few hundred feet down the road.
For all the dire warnings of their superiors, these had been days and nights of
unrelieved boredom. The northwestern province of Kenna was sparsely populated in
the best of times, and these were not the best of times.
Now, drifting in with the breeze, as faint as a distant insect drone, came the
sound of a gunned motor.
Shyam slowly got to his feet. The sound was growing closer.
“Arjun,” he called out in a singsong tone. “Arjun. Car coming.”
Arjun lolled his head in a circle, working out a crick in his neck. “At this
hour?” He rubbed his eyes. The humidity made the sweat lie heavily on his skin,
like mineral oil.
In the dark of the semi-forested terrain, Shyam could finally see the
headlights. Over a rewed-up motor, loud whoops of delight could be heard.
“Dirty farm kids,” Arjun grumbled.
Shyam, for his part, was grateful for anything that interrupted the tedium. He
had spent the past seven days on the night shift at the Kandar vehicle
checkpoint, and it felt like a hardship post. Naturally, their stone-faced
superior had been at pains to emphasize how important, how crucial, how vital in
every way, the assignment was. The Kandar checkpoint was just up the road from
the Stone Palace, where the government was holding some sort of hush-hush
gathering. So security was tight, and this was the only real road that connected
the palace to the rebel-held region just to the north. The guerrillas of the
Kagama Liberation Front knew about the checkpoints, however, and kept away. As
did most everyone else: between the rebels and the anti-rebel campaigns, more
than half the villagers to the north had fled the province. And the farmers who
stayed in Kenna had little money, which meant that the guards could not expect
much by way of “tips.” Nothing ever happened, and his wallet stayed thin. Was it
something he had done in a previous life?
The truck came into view; two shirtless young men were in the cab. The roof was
down. One of boys was now standing up, pouring a sudsy can of beer over his
chest and cheering. The truck—probably loaded with some poor farmer’s kurakkan,
or root crops—was rounding the bend at upward of eighty miles per hour, as fast
as the groaning engine would go. American rock music, from one of the island’s
powerful AM stations, blared.
The yelps and howls of merriment echoed through the night. They sounded like a
pack of drunken hyenas, Shyam thought miserably. Penniless joyriders: they were
young, wasted, didn’t give a damn about anything. In the morning they would,
though. The last time this happened, several days earlier, the truck’s owner got
a visit later that morning from the youths’ shamefaced parents. The truck was
returned, along with many, many bushels of kurakkan to make amends for whatever
damage had been done. As for the kids, well, they couldn’t sit without wincing,
not even on a cushioned car seat.
Now Shyam stepped into the road with his rifle. The truck kept barreling
forward, and he stepped back. No use being stupid about it. Those kids were
blind drunk. A beer can was lobbed into the air, hitting the ground with a
thunk. From the sound, it was a full one.
The truck veered around the first knife rest, and then the second knife rest,
and kept going.
“Let Shiva tear them limb from limb,” Arjun said. He scrubbed at his bushy black
hair with his stubby fingertips. “No need to radio the backstop. You can hear
these kids for miles.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Shyam said. They were not traffic cops, and the
rules did not permit them to open fire on just any vehicle that failed to stop.
“Peasant boys. Bunch of peasant boys.”
“Hey,” Shyam said. “I’m a peasant boy myself.” He touched the patch sewn on his
khaki shirt: ARA, it read. Army of the Republic of Anura. “This isn’t tattooed
on my skin, all right? When my two years are up, I’m going back to the farm.”
“That’s what you say now. I got an uncle who has a college degree; he’s been a
civil servant for ten years. Makes half what we do.”
“And you’re worth every ruvee,” Shyam said with heavy sarcasm.
“All I’m saying is, you got to seize what chances life gives you.” Arjun flicked
a thumb at the can on the road. “Sounds like that one’s still got beer in it.
Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Pukka refreshment, my friend.”
“Arjun,” Shyam protested. “We’re supposed to be on duty together, you know this?
The two of us, yes?”
“Don’t worry, my friend.” Arjun grinned. “I’ll share.”
When the truck was half a mile past the roadblock, the driver eased up on the
accelerator, and the young man riding shotgun sat down, wiping himself off with
a towel before putting on a black T-shirt and strapping himself in. The beer was
foul, noisome, and sticky in the heavy air. Both guerrillas looked grave.
An older man was seated on the flat bench behind them. Sweat made his black
curls cling to his forehead, and his mustache gleam in the moonlight. The KLF
officer had been prone and invisible when the truck crashed the checkpoint. Now
he flicked the communicate button on his walkie-talkie, an old model but a
sturdy one, and grunted some instructions.
With a metallic groan, the rear door of the trailer was cracked open so that the
armed men inside could get some air.
The coastal hill had many names and many meanings. The Hindus knew it as
Sivanolipatha Malai, Shiva’s footprint, to acknowledge its true origins. The
Buddhists knew it as Sri Pada, Buddha’s footprint, for they believed that it was
made by Buddha’s left foot when he journeyed to the island. The Muslims knew it
as Adam Malai, or Adam’s Hill: tenth-century Arab traders held that Adam, after
he was expelled from Paradise, stopped here and remained standing on one foot
until God recognized his penitence. The colonial overlords—first the Portuguese
and then the Dutch—viewed it with an eye to practical rather than spiritual
considerations: the coastal promontory was the ideal place for a fortress, where
mounted artillery could be directed toward the threat posed by hostile warships.
It was in the seventeenth century that a fortress was first erected on the hill;
as the structure was rebuilt over the following centuries, little attention was
ever paid to the small houses of worship nearby. Now they would serve as way
stations for the Prophet’s army during the final assault.
Ordinarily, its leader, the man they called the Caliph, would never be exposed
to the confusion and unpredictability of an armed engagement. But this was no
ordinary night. History was being written this night. How could the Caliph not
be present? Besides, he knew that his decision to join his men on the terrain of
battle had increased their morale immeasurably. He was surrounded by
stouthearted Kagama who wanted him to be a witness to their heroism or, if it
should turn out to be the case, their martyrdom. They looked at the planes of
his face, his fine ebony features, and his strong, sculpted jaw, and they saw
not merely a man anointed by the Prophet to lead them to freedom but a man who
would inscribe their deeds in the book of life, for all posterity.
And so the Caliph kept vigil with his special detail, on a carefully chosen