he turned down his wrists and pulled the toggles down between his thighs,
bringing his forward motion to a complete stop. As he sank down the remaining
few feet, he tensed his leg muscles and rotated his body in the direction of the
fall, bending his knees slightly. Two seconds before he hit the ground, he had
to decide whether to make a soft-roll landing—knees and feet together—or try for
an upright landing, which meant keeping them apart. In for a penny, in for a
pound: he’d go for a standing touchdown.
Keeping his leg muscles flexed, he sank to the ground on the soles of his boots.
The soft rubber was designed for silence, and it performed as it was meant to.
Soundlessly, he bounced on the balls of his feet, preparing to fall. But he did
not.
He was standing. On the ground of the courtyard.
He had made it.
He looked around him, and, in the starless night, he could just make out the
contours of a vast deserted courtyard, three times as long as it was wide. A
large white structure—the old fountain, as the blueprints had specified—loomed
several yards away. He was almost exactly in the center of an area that was
approximately the size of half a football field and that was eerily quiet. There
was, he confirmed, no sign of movement—no sign that his arrival had been
observed.
Now he unhooked his rig, removed his flight suit, and quickly gathered the
canopy from the cobblestoned courtyard. It would have to be hidden before
further action could be taken. Even a starless night was not wholly devoid of
illumination. The black nylon, visually protective against the night sky,
contrasted with the light gray cobblestone. It couldn’t be allowed to lie on the
ground.
But where was Katsaris?
Janson looked around. Had Katsaris overshot the courtyard? Landed on the beach,
far below? Or on the hard-packed gravel road that led to the compound? Either
mistake could be lethal—to him and to the others involved in the mission.
Dammit! Once again, a small fist of fury and fear gathered strength within him.
It was the hubris of the planner that he—he, of all people—had succumbed to: the
desk jockey’s error of thinking that what worked on paper would mesh with
tactical reality. The tolerances were too small. Every member of the team knew
it; the men were simply too much in awe of his record to drive the point home.
The jump required something close to perfection, and perfection wasn’t possible
in this fallen world.
Janson felt a surge of frustration: who knew that better than he did? It was
sheer luck that he himself had made it this far.
His thoughts were interrupted by a faint rustle—the sound of the cells of a
nylon canopy gently collapsing overhead. Janson looked up into the black sky. It
was Katsaris, floating down slowly, as he flared his chute and landed with a
gentle, noiseless roll. He scrambled to his feet and came toward Janson.
Now there were two of them.
Two of them. Two highly experienced, highly skilled operatives.
And now they were in place—in the middle of the Stone Palace courtyard. The last
place, he had to believe, where anyone would expect visitors.
There were two of them—against an entire battalion of armed guerrillas.
Still, it was a start.
CHAPTER SIX
Now Janson activated the communication system and tsked into the filament
microphone near his mouth, a click and sibilant. Military protocol.
Katsaris followed his lead: he silently removed his flight suit, then gathered
the canopy into a tight bundle.
The two of them packed the nylon fabric of canopy and suit into the dank basin
of the grand stone fountain that stood in the center of the courtyard. Once an
impressive feat of sculpture—its marble was finely incised—it now gathered
rainwater and algae. A light-absorbing scum adhered to the sides of the wide,
circular pool like a black liner. It would do. Black on black: the protective
coloration of the night.
Janson’s hands groped over his vest and fatigues, his fingers identifying the
key items of equipment. Katsaris, standing nearby, was doing the same; each
visually inspected the other’s camouflage and gear, standard procedure for such
operations. They had each traveled a long distance in turbulent conditions. A
lot could happen in that time. Punched by the slipstream, whipped by crosswinds,
a paratrooper could arrive without his full complement of equipment, however
securely it had been attached to his combat vest and fatigues. Janson had
learned that from his SEAL days; Katsaris had learned it from him.
Janson surveyed his partner. The whites of his eyes were the only beacons from
his painted face. Then he saw a patch of pale over his right shoulder.
Katsaris’s shirt had been torn during his landing roll, revealing light skin.
Janson signaled him to stand still while he pulled out a few inches of black
electricial tape from a spool in his fatigues. He taped the seams together, and
the light patch disappeared. Tailoring in the drop zone, Janson thought to
himself.
And yet such details could make all the difference. Their black garb would help
them disappear into the shadows of a deeply shadowed courtyard. By the same
token, even a few inches of silvery flesh could spell betrayal in the carelessly
roving beam of a guard’s flashlight.
As he had emphasized on Katchall, the rebels would not have hightech perimeter
defenses, but they would have defenses of a sort that technology had not yet
equaled: the five senses of vigilant human beings. An ability to detect
anomalies in the visual, aural, and olfactory fields that surpassed the
capabilities of any computer.
The descent had largely been through subzero winds. But on the ground, even at
four o’clock in the morning, it was eighty-five degrees and humid. Janson could
feel himself starting to sweat—real sweat, not condensation from the
atmosphere—and he knew that in time his body’s own smell could betray him. His
dermal proteins, those of a meat-eating Westerner, would be alien to the
Anurans, who subsisted largely on vegetables and fish curries. He’d have to
trust that the salt breezes would whisk away any olfactory signals of his
presence.
Janson unhooked his night-vision glasses from his combat vest and raised them to
his eyes; the large courtyard was suddenly bathed in a soft green glow. He made
sure that the black rubber ocular cups were pressed firmly against his face
before he dialed up the image luminosity: any light spilling from the NV scope
could alert a watchful sentry. He had once seen a member of a commando team
killed by a patrol who had caught the telltale glint of green and fired almost
blindly. Indeed, he had once seen a man perish because of an illuminated watch
dial.
Now he and Katsaris stood back-to-back, each conducting an NV sweep of the
opposite quadrants.
On the north side of the courtyard were three orange phosphorescent blobs, two
leaning toward each other—a sudden white flare emerging between their spectral
forms. Janson depowered the scope before lowering it to view the scene with his
naked eyes. Even from twenty yards away, he could clearly see the flickering
flame. A match had been struck—an old-fashioned fireplace match, it appeared—and
two of the guards were lighting their cigarettes with it.
Amateurs, Janson thought. A guard on duty should never provide incidental
illumination and should never encumber his most important weapon, his hands.
But then who were these people? There was a vast gap between the Caliph with his
top strategists, trained by terror cells in the Middle East, and their
followers, typically recruited from villages filled with illiterate peasants.
There would be highly trained sentinels and soldiers in place. But their
attention would be directed toward the outside world. They would be at the
battlements and in the watchtowers. The ones stationed along the inner courtyard
would be charged with the relatively trivial chores of internal discipline,
making sure that no ganja-fueled carousing disturbed the sleep of the Caliph or
the members of his command.
Though they stood only a few feet away from each other, Katsaris whispered into
his filament microphone, his voice amplified in Janson’s ear-niece: “One sentry.
Southeast corner. Seated.” A beat. “Probably half asleep.”
Janson replied in a subwhisper, “Three sentries. The north veranda. Very much
awake.”
In a hostage exfiltration, as neither had to be reminded, one went where the
guards were. Unless an ambush had been laid: the visible guards in one place,
the valuables in another, and a further set of guards in wait. Yet there was no
room for doubt in this case. The blueprints made it clear that the dungeon was
located beneath the northern face of the courtyard.
Janson moved slowly to his left, along the wall, and then beneath the overhang
of the western veranda, walking half-crouched beneath the parapet. They could
not be overreliant on the darkness: a rod in the human retina could be activated