Palace.
Sean Hennessy, meanwhile, was doing chin-ups from an exposed I beam as he listened to the others; it had been one of his few distractions in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Janson glanced at him; would he be all right? He had no reason to think otherwise. If the Irishman's complexion was paler than usual, his physique was burlier. Janson had run him through a rough-and-ready field physical and was satisfied that his reflexes were as quick as ever.
"You do realize," Andressen said to Janson, turning away from his charts, "that there will be at least a hundred people based in the Stone Palace alone. Are you sure we have enough manpower?"
"More than enough," Janson said. "If five hundred Gurkhas were called for, I'd have requested them. I've asked for what I need. If I could do it with fewer, I would. The fewer men, the fewer the complications."
Janson now turned from the plasticine model to the highly detailed blueprints. Those blueprints, he knew, represented an enormous effort. They had been prepared in the past forty hours by a task force of architects and engineers assembled by the Liberty Foundation. The experts had been provided with extensive verbal descriptions from visitors, a profusion of historical photographs, and even present-day overhead satellite imagery. Colonial archives in the Netherlands had been consulted as well. Despite the rapidity with which the work was done, Novak's people told him they believed it was "quite accurate" in most of the particulars. They also warned that some of the particulars, the ones pertaining to seldom-used areas of the structure, were "less certain" and that some of the materials analysis was conjectural and "uncertain."
Less certain. Uncertain. Words Janson was hearing too often for his taste.
Yet what was the alternative? Maps and models were all they had. The Dutch governor general's compound was adapted from a preexisting fortress, laid out on a promontory three hundred feet above the ocean. Walls of limestone, five feet thick, were designed to withstand cannonballs from Portuguese men-of-war of centuries past. The sea-facing walls were topped with battlements from which hostile schooners and corvettes would be fired upon.
Everyone Janson had assembled in that Quonset hut knew precisely what was at stake. They also knew the obstacles they faced in trying to derail what the Caliph had set in motion. Nothing would be gained by compounding Novak's death with their own.
It was time for a final briefing. Janson stood; his nervous energy made it difficult for him to sit. "OK, Andressen," he said. "Let's talk terrain."
The red-bearded Norseman turned the large, calendared sheets of the elevation maps, pointing out features with a long forefinger. His finger moved along the massif, almost ten thousand feet at the Pikuru Takala peak, and then onward to the plateaus of shale and gneiss. He pointed out the monsoon winds from the southwest. Tapping a magnification of Adam's Hill, Andressen said, "These are recently reclaimed areas. We're not talking about sophisticated monitoring. A lot of what we're up against is the protection offered by the natural terrain."
"Recommended flight path?"
"Over the Nikala jungle, if the Storm Petrel's up for it."
The Storm Petrel was Honwana's well-deserved nickname, honoring his ability to pilot a plane so that it nearly skimmed the ground, the way a storm petrel flies above the sea.
"The Petrel's up for it," Honwana said, his lips parting to reveal ivory teeth in what was not quite a smile.
"Mind you," Andressen went on, "as long as we can hold off until around four hundred hours, we'll be almost guaranteed a heavy cloud cover. That's obviously advisable for the purposes of stealth."
"You're talking about a high-altitude jump through heavy cloud cover?" Hennessy asked. "Jumping blind?"
"A leap of faith," said the Norseman. "Like religion. Like embracing God."
"Begorrah, I thought this was a commando operation, not a kamikaze one," Hennessy put in. "Tell me, Paul, what bloody fool is going to be making this jump?" The Irishman looked at his fellow crew members with genuine concern.
Janson looked at Katsaris. "You," he told the Greek. "And me."
Katsaris stared at him silently for a few moments. "I can live with that."
"From your lips to God's ear," Hennessy said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Packing one's own chute: it was practically a ritual, a military superstition. By the time one got out of jump camp, the habit was as ingrained as brushing one's teeth or washing one's hands.
Janson and Katsaris had repaired to the adjoining warehouse to do the job. They started by draping the canopy and rigging over the large, flat concrete