like a son. The mission was over. Sabotaged by an errant force he could never
have anticipated: himself.
Now he saw Katsaris streak by, saw Katsaris’s footprints in the blood; the man
had taken the shortest route to the stairwell, vaulting over corpses and chairs.
The boy had to have been within an arm’s length of the door to the hallway when
Katsaris squeezed off a silenced shot to the heart. Even after the muzzle
flashed, Katsaris remained in full precision-firing position: a steadying hand
to his firing hand, the stance of somebody who could not afford to miss. The
stance of a soldier firing at a person who could not return fire, but whose
continued survival was itself a dire menace.
Janson’s vision blurred briefly, then focused again, and when it did he saw the
child’s lifeless body tumble down the stone stairs, almost somersaulting.
And then it lay on the bottom step, like a rag doll carelessly tossed aside.
When Janson moved a few feet closer, he saw that the boy’s head lay upon the
metal tray he once carried so proudly. A saliva bubble had formed at his soft,
childish lips.
Janson’s heart pounded slowly, powerfully. He was sickened, at himself and what
he had nearly allowed to happen, and at the same time sickened by what needed to
have happened. By the waste of it all, the prodigality with the one thing that
mattered on this earth, human life. The Derek Collinses of the world would never
understand. He remembered why he retired. Decisions like this, he recognized,
had to be made. He had no longer wanted to be the one to make them.
Katsaris looked at him with wildly questioning eyes: Why had he frozen? What had
come over him?
He felt strangely moved that Katsaris’s expression was one of bewilderment
rather than reproach. Katsaris should have been furious at him, as Janson was
furious at himself. Only the soldier’s love for his mentor could have modulated
outrage into mere astonishment and incredulity.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Janson said.
Katsaris gestured toward the stairs, the egress stipulated in the revised plan.
But Janson had devised those plans, and knew when they would have to be altered
for the sake of the mission. “That’s too dangerous now. We’ve got to find
another way.”
Would Katsaris trust his judgment any longer? A mission without a commanding
officer was a sure route to disaster. He had to demonstrate his mastery of the
situation.
“First things first. Let’s get the American,” he told him.
Two minutes later, Katsaris fiddled with the lock of another iron gate as Novak
and Janson looked on. The gate opened with a groan.
The flashlight played off matted hair that had once been blond.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the woman whimpered, cowering in her cell. “Please don’t
hurt me!”
“We’re just going to take you home,” Theo said, angling the beam so that they
could assess her physical condition.
It was Donna Hedderman, the anthropology student; Janson recognized her face.
Once the KLF had captured the Steenpaleis, they had evidently moved the American
woman to its dungeon as well. The two high-profile captives, they must have
reasoned, would be easier to guard in one place.
Donna Hedderman was a big-boned woman, with a broad nose and round cheeks. She
had once been heavyset, and even after seventy days of captivity, she was not
lean. As was the way with terror groups of any sophistication, the KLF made sure
that its prisoners were amply fed. The calculation was brutality itself. A
prisoner weakened by starvation might succumb to disease and die. To die of
disease was to escape the power of the KLF. A prisoner who died could not be
executed.
Even so, Donna Hedderman had been through hell: it was apparent from her
bleached, fish-belly flesh, her clumped and tangled hair, her staring eyes.
Janson had seen photos of her in the newspaper articles about her kidnapping. In
the pictures, from happier days, she was round, beaming, almost cherubic.
“High-spirited” was a recurrent adjective. But the long weeks of captivity had
taken all that away. A KLF communiqué had dementedly called her an American
intelligence agent; if anything, she had left-wing sympathies that would have
ruled out such employment. She had been singularly sympathetic to the plight of
the Kagama, but then the KLF scorned sympathy as a nonrevolutionary sentiment.
Sympathy was an impediment to fear, and fear was what the Caliph sought above
all else.
A long pause. “Who do you work for?” she asked in a quavering voice.
“We work for Mr. Novak,” Janson said. A sidelong glance.
After a beat, Novak nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They are our friends.”
Donna Hedderman got to her feet and made her way toward the open gate. Edema had
swollen her ankles, making her stride unsteady.
Now Janson conferred quietly with Katsaris. “There is another way, and right now
it looks like the better bet. But we’ll need to pool resources. We each have an
ounce of Semtex in our kit. We’ll need them both.” A small wad of Semtex, along
with a detonation device, was included in their gear, standard spec-ops
equipment for missions into uncertain environments.
Katsaris looked at him closely, then nodded. Janson’s tone of voice, the
specificity of his instructions, were, for whatever reason, reassuring. Janson
had not lost it. Or if he had, it was only a momentary lapse. Janson was still
Janson.
“Kerosene lanterns.” Janson gestured toward them. “Before the place was
electrified, it would have been the primary source of illumination. The governor
general’s compound would have had a kerosene tank in the basement, something
that would be filled from outside. He’d want to have a plentiful supply of the
stuff.”
“They might have ripped it out,” Katsaris noted. “Filled it with cement.”
“Possibly. More likely it was left to rust, quietly. The subfoundation level is
vast. It isn’t as if they would have needed the space.”
“Vast is right. How are we going to find it?”
“The blueprint has a tank positioned approximately two hundred meters in from
the northwest retaining wall. I hadn’t realized what it was for, but it’s
obvious now.”
“That’s some distance,” Katsaris said. “Is the woman going to be up to it?”
Donna Hedderman gripped the iron bars to help herself stay erect; clearly, the
period of relative immobility had weakened her muscles, and her still
considerable girth gave them a great deal to support.
Novak looked at her and turned away, embarrassed. Janson understood the kind of
relationship that developed between two deeply frightened prisoners who might
not be able to see each other but could communicate, whispering through pipes,
tapping code on metal bars, passing notes scrawled with grime on scraps of cloth
or paper.
“You run ahead, Theo. Let me know when you’ve located it, and I’ll bring the
others.”
Three minutes elapsed before he heard Katsaris’s triumphant words in his
earpiece: “Found it!”
Janson looked at his watch: further delay was dangerous. When might the next
contingent of guards arrive to relieve the ones who had been on duty? When would
they next hear the scrape of the steel grate on the stone landing?
Now he led Peter Novak and Donna Hedderman along the dank subterranean corridor
that led to the old kerosene tank. Hedderman held on to Janson’s arm as she
walked, and even then her gait was slow and painful. These were not the cards he
would have chosen, but they were the cards he had been dealt.
The tank, obviously long neglected, had an iron door with lead flanges to
maintain a tight seal.
“There’s no time,” Janson said. “Let’s kick the damn thing in. The hinges are
already rusting off. They just need help.” He made a running start toward the
door, throwing up a foot as he reached iron door. If the door did not give way,
the result would be a bone-jarring experience. But it did, collapsing in a cloud
of dust and oxidized metal.
Janson coughed. “Get out your Semtex,” he said.
Now Janson strode through what had once been a storage tank for kerosene. The
copper-lined chamber was still suffused with an oily smell. The fill hole was
almost hidden by the hardened tarlike residue that covered the walls—impurities
of the kerosene, which remained after many decades of disuse.
He hammered the butt of his HK against the outside wall, heard the hollow ring
of the copper flashing. This was the area. Probably a four-foot elevation above
the ground, unless it had been reduced by the passage of time.
Katsaris packed the ivory-colored putty, about the size of a wad of bubble gum,
around the rusting iron bunghole and pressed into it twin silvery wires,
filament-thin. The other end of the wires attached to a small, round lithium
battery, similar in appearance to those used in many watches and hearing aids.
The battery hung low, and Katsaris decided to press it into the Semtex, simply