of inanimate objects, ranging from foodstuffs to ammunition, and beneath the
heavy circular masonry was a vertical passageway that was made to serve as a
chute. The lid had been designed to be removed easily, but the passage of years
had a way of complicating matters. That it could be removed at all would be
sufficient.
The lid was fashioned with handholds on either side. Theo pulled on one, using
his powerful legs as he tried to lift the flat round stone. Nothing. The only
sound was his stifled grunt.
Now Janson joined him, crouching on the opposite side, placing both his hands on
the slot that had been designed for that purpose. Bracing himself with his legs,
he flexed his arms as hard as he could. He could hear Theo letting his breath
out slowly as he strained himself to the utmost.
Nothing.
“Twist it,” Janson whispered.
“It’s not a jar of olives,” Theo said, but he repositioned himself accordingly.
He braced himself with his legs against the perpendicular wall and, locking his
hands around the slotted flange, pushed at the lid. On the other side, Janson
pulled it in the same clockwise direction.
And there was movement at last: the abrasive grinding of stone on stone, faint
but unmistakable. Janson realized what they had encountered. The circular bed
where the lid had been seated was made of some sort of fired clay, and over the
years, as the limestone had eroded in the tropical moisture, the amalgamated
debris from each substance had formed a natural mortar. The lid had, in effect,
been cemented in place. Now that the bonds had been broken, the task would be
manageable.
He and Theo crouched over the lid again, as before, and lifted in one
coordinated movement. The lid was eight inches thick and immensely heavy, meant
to be moved by four strong men, not two. But it could be done. Using all their
strength, they eased it up and placed it gently on the ground to one side.
Janson peered down into the hole they had uncovered. Just under the lid there
was a grate. And through it, he heard a welter of voices drifting up from the
subterranean space.
Indistinct, yes, but untroubled as well. Most of what a voice conveyed—anger,
fear, merriment, scorn, anxiety—was through tone. Words as such were so much
garlanding, designed to mislead as often as not. Much interrogation training had
to do with learning to hear through words to the characteristics of sheer
vocality. The sounds that drifted up were not those of any prisoner—Janson knew
that much. And if you were stationed in the dungeon area and were not a
prisoner, you were guarding the prisoner. These were the guards. These were
their immediate enemy.
Lying flat on the ground, Janson placed his head directly above the grate. The
subterranean air was cool on his face, and he became conscious of the smell of
cigarettes. At first the sounds were like a babbling brook, but now he could
separate them into the voices of several different men. How many? He was not
sure yet. Nor could one assume that the number of speakers was the number of
men.
The chute, they knew, descended through several feet of stone, angled at
forty-five degrees for most of the way, then bending and funneling down more
shallowly. Though a dim light filtered upward through the grate, nothing could
be seen directly.
Katsaris handed Janson the fiber-optic camera kit, which looked like a makeup
compact with a long cord attached. Janson, crouching with his back against the
rough-carved limestone, threaded the cord down through the grate, inch by inch,
taking care not to overshoot the mark. It was the thickness of an ordinary phone
wire and had a tip hardly bigger than a match head. Within the cable ran a
double-layered glass strand that would transmit images to a three-by-five-inch
screen at the other end. Janson kept an eye on the small active-matrix display
as he slowly fed the cord down the grate. If anyone down there noticed it and
recognized what it was, the mission was over. The screen was suffused with gray
hues, which grew lighter and lighter. Abruptly, it filled with a bird’s-eye view
of a dimly illuminated room. Janson pulled the cord up an inch. The view was now
partly occluded, but most of the previous vista was still in the screen. The tip
was probably a millimeter from the end of the chute, unlikely to be detected.
After five seconds, the device’s automatic focusing program brought the visual
field into maximal sharpness and brightness.
“How many?” Katsaris asked.
“It’s not good,” Janson said.
“How many?”
Janson fingered a button that rotated the camera tip before he replied.
“Seventeen guards. Armed to the teeth. But who’s counting?”
“Shit,” Katsaris replied.
“I’ll second that,” Janson grunted.
“If only there was a sight line, we could just hose the bastards.”
“But there isn’t.”
“How about we drop a frag grenade down right now?”
“All you need is a single survivor, and the prisoner’s dead,” Janson said.
“We’ve been over all this. Better get your ass over to Ingress A.” Ingress A, as
it was designated on the blueprints, was a long-disused entrance that would lead
to the rear of the dungeon. It was a key part of the plan: while the prisoner
was hustled into the bowels of the ancient compound, a silent white-phosphorous
grenade would be dropped through the chute, incapacitating his guards.
“Roger that,” Katsaris said. “If it’s where it’s supposed to be, I should be
back in three minutes. I just hope you can get some sort of fix on them in the
meantime.”
“Hurry back,” Janson said distractedly. He fine-tuned the image manually,
rotating the camera tip occasionally for a new angle.
Through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, he saw that the men were sitting around
two tables, playing cards. It was what soldiers did, God knew. Strong, armed
men, with the power to make life-or-death decisions, would arm themselves
against their most pressing enemy, time, with flimsy, laminated pieces of
cardstock. He himself had played more card games while outfitted in combat
fatigues than he cared to remember.
Janson studied the casual movements, the pickups and discards. He knew this
game. He had played it for hours in the Mauritian jungle once. It was called
proter, and was essentially the Indian Ocean’s answer to rummy.
And because Janson knew the game, his gaze was drawn by a young man—eighteen,
nineteen?—who sat at the larger table and drew glances from the others, half
wary, half admiring.
The young man looked around, his acne-dotted cheeks gathering into a smile,
revealing even white teeth and a sly look of victory.
Janson knew this game. Not just proter. He knew the game that the young man was
playing: take maximum risk for maximum reward. That, after all, was the game
they were both playing.
A bandolier of what looked like 7mm rounds was draped over the young man’s
shoulder; a Ruger Mini-14 was cradled in a sling around his chest. A heavier
automatic weapon—Janson could not see enough to verify its make—was propped
against his chair and was no doubt the reason for the bandolier. It was a
complement of arms suggesting that the young man had some sort of position of
leadership, in military as well as recreational matters.
Now the young man rubbed his knuckles against the blue rag tied around his crown
and scooped up the entire pile.
Janson could hear a few shouts: card-game incredulity.
This was a bizarrely self-destructive move at this point of the game—unless,
that is, a player was certain he could get rid of the cards at once. Such
certainty required extraordinary powers of observation and retention.
The game came to a halt. Even the soldiers at the smaller second table crowded
around to watch. Each had a rifle, Janson saw as the men stood, and at least one
side arm. The equipment looked worn but well maintained.
The young man flipped down cards, one after another, in a string of flawless
sequences. It was like the moment in a pool match when a master pockets ball
after ball, appearing to play a private game. And when the young man had
finished, he had no cards left. He tossed back his head and grinned. A
thirteen-card set: evidently his comrades had never seen such a thing, because
they burst into applause—anger at having been defeated giving way to admiration
at the deftness with which the defeat had been managed.
A simple game. A Kagama guerrilla leader who was also a champion proter player.
Would he be as agile with the machine gun by his chair?
Through the fiber-optic spyglass, Janson took in the intent look on the young
man’s face as another round of cards was dealt. He could tell who would win if
the set was ever finished.
He could also tell that these were not simple farmers, but seasoned veterans. It