the hostages, around a bend in the corridor, they depressed in unison the radio frequency controllers that activated the batteries.
The explosion was deafening, the reverberation a rumble-roar, like a vast collection of forty-thousand-watt speakers blasting bass-range feedback. The shock waves traveled through their flesh, causing their very eyes to vibrate. White smoke billowed inward, bringing with it the familiar nitrous scent of plastique - and something else, too: the salty tang of the sea breeze. They had a route to the compound's exterior.
If they lived to use it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
How long would it take before the KLF forces were fully mobilized? A hundred and twenty seconds? Less? How many guards were on duty? How many guards were stationed along the battlements?
They would find out soon enough.
A portion of the heavy stone wall had crumbled under the blast, and thick, jagged metal plates were strewn everywhere. But Theo's penlight confirmed what the moist sea breeze had promised. The opening was wide enough to enable them to clamber out to the exterior of the compound, if they used a push-pull maneuver. Katsaris went first. Janson would go last. Between them, they would help the weakened captives make their way over the rubble and onto the surrounding grounds.
Eighty seconds later, the four of them were on the outside.- The sea breeze was stronger, and the night sky was brighter than it had been; the cloud cover was beginning to break up. Stars were visible, and so was a patch of moon.
It was not a good time for the nocturnal glow. They were outside the dungeon. But they were not free.
Not yet.
Janson stood against the limestone wall with the others, determining their precise position. The breeze cleared Janson's nostrils, cleared them of the bloody, clinging stench of his victims, as well as of the fainter animal stench of the unwashed captives.
The area immediately beneath the limestone wall of the compound was safer, in certain respects, than the area farther out. The seaside battlements, he saw, were filled with armed men, some manning heavy artillery. That was why the battlements were constructed - to fire upon the corvettes and schooners of rival colonial empires. The farther out they were, the more exposed they would be.
"Can you run?" Janson asked Novak.
"A short distance?"
"Only a short distance," he said reassuringly.
"I'll do my damnedest," the billionaire replied, jut-jawed and determined. He was in his sixties, had been held in captivity under doubtful conditions, but his sheer force of will would see him through.
Janson felt reassured by his steely resolve. Donna Hedderman he was less certain of. She seemed the kind who might collapse into hysterics at any moment. And she was too heavy to sling over a shoulder.
He put a hand on her arm. "Hey," he said. "Nobody's asking you to do anything that's beyond you. Do you understand?"
She whimpered, her eyes beseeching. A commando in black face paint was not a comforting sight to her.
"I want you to focus, OK?" He pointed to the rocky outcropping, fifty yards away, where the promontory dropped off in a sheer cliff. A low split-rail fence, painted white and peeling, surrounded the cliff, a visual demarcation rather than a physical impediment. "That's where we're going."
For her sake, he did not spell out in further detail what the plan called for. He did not tell her that they would be going over the cliff, dropping down on ropes to a boat waiting on the frothing waters eighty meters below.
Katsaris and Novak now sprinted toward the rocky outcropping at the promontory's rocky overhang; Janson, slowed by the wheezing American, followed.
In the gray scale of nighttime vision, it looked like the very edge of the world. A crag of pale rock, and then nothingness, complete and absolute.
And that nothingness was their destination; indeed, their only salvation.
If they reached it in time.
"Find anchor!" Janson called to Katsaris.
The cliff was largely gneiss, a tough, metamorphic rock, weathered into irregular crags. There were a couple of plausible rock horns near the overhang. Using one of them would be safer and faster than pounding bolts or pitons into crevices. With sure, deft hands, Katsaris wrapped two loops of rope around the more prominent of the solid rock horns, making a double-strand loop beneath it, secured with an overhand knot. If one strand were cut - by friction against a sharp crag, or a stray bullet - the other would hold. Janson had packed dry-coated 9.4mm Beal rope, with some elasticity to control the deceleration rate in a fall. It