The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,40

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