They know what they’re doing. I don’t care what time of day or night, if we rumble straight in there, we’ll get cut to pieces.”
Mendonza said, “You have a better idea?”
“Yes I do,” Favor said. “They watch the front side of the island, the dock, because that’s where you’d expect somebody to come. But the back side? That cliff? They won’t expect that.”
“I don’t climb cliffs,” Stickney said. “I don’t suppose Al climbs cliffs, either. Ari, I don’t know.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not a climber.”
“I am,” Favor said. “Here’s how I see it. We move out when the moon goes down. That’s a little after two, according to the software. Bring the boat in slow and quiet, maybe within half a mile of the island. I swim the rest of the way. Climb the wall, up over the top. They won’t have a clue. Then, you know … then I do my thing.”
“What about us?” Mendonza said.
“Lay back a couple of miles and watch close,” Favor said. “I’ll let you know when to come.”
“How will you do that?” Stickney said.
“I’ll figure it out. You’ll know.”
The others were silent.
Favor said, “This makes sense. You all know it. This is how it has to be. I won’t do it any other way. This is it.”
The script was almost finished now, Arielle thought. They had gotten to Favor insisting on his own sacrifice. Demanding it.
“Ari hasn’t had anything to say about this,” Stickney said.
“That’s right, Ari’s been quiet,” Favor said. He looked at her. “What do you think about all this?”
Just one line remained now in the script, and she knew what it was.
She just wasn’t ready to say it yet.
Instead she said, “You’ll have to be perfect. Your margin for error will be zero. You slip off that wall, you’re fucked. One wrong step on the island, you’re fucked. There are no rat holes when you leave this boat.”
“The holes always run out eventually,” Favor said.
His eyes said, Come on now. Don’t you dare let me down.
She said, “I don’t like it, but I don’t see any better way.”
And that was it, the final line, bringing them to where they all knew it had to go.
“Good,” Favor said. “We have a plan.”
“Tomorrow is a special day,” Andropov said. “And this is the most important shift you’ll ever spend on the island. Very soon we may have intruders who’ll try to bring down everything we’ve worked for, and I expect you to find them and stop them.”
He was speaking to eleven men: six regular members of the island’s security team, the two orderlies who usually dealt with the prisoners, plus Markov and the two others from Manila.
They were seated on the floor, in the hallway outside the operations room, in the main building. At the end of the corridor was the surgical suite, with the operations room and the pharmacy and the armory and the surgeons’ ready room in between.
Two of the six-man island security crew exchanged a disbelieving glance. Yuri Malkin and Kostya Gorsky had been on the island since the start, and nobody had come close to threatening the operation.
Literally, nobody even had come within sight, except the two local fishermen, and Yuri had dealt with them easily enough.
Yuri raised a hand.
”Sir, will they be coming in great force?” he said. “Will it be by plane or by sea? Can we expect airborne?”
He was twitting Andropov, but Andropov took it seriously.
“There should be no more than four,” he said. “Three men and a woman. I don’t know how they’ll arrive. They’re clever as hell.”
All of the men seated on the floor were combat veterans, specialists. Even the two orderlies were warriors—former commando medics with Spetsnaz, the fearsome Russian special forces.
That made a force of eleven. Three men and a woman taking them on—they wanted to see this.
“Are you sure we don’t need reinforcements?” said Kostya Gorsky. Someone snickered behind him.
“Just do your jobs, stay alert,” Andropov said. “The perimeter posts all have night-vision binoculars. Use them. Draw some greenies from the pharmacy if you think you’ll have trouble staying awake. We’ll go back to a reduced crew after daybreak. I’m not concerned about the daylight hours. It’s tonight that worries me.”
Markov read off a list of post assignments. He had originally designed the island’s security arrangement: four watch posts at the edges of the island, looking out in four directions, plus two posts in the interior that were rarely used. Tonight all six would be manned, with a seventh sentry outside