Douglas Preston - Two Graves

As he ran, slipping his arms into the shirt, he could already hear the commotion of shouted voices and the pounding of soldiers’ boots echoing through the stone bowels of the old fortress.

68

COLONEL SOUZA AND HIS HANDPICKED FORCE OF THIRTY men moved through the dense evergreen forests east of Nova Godói. He could see, through the breaks in the trees, the looming hills that marked the volcanic crater within which the town was located. He stopped to consult his GPS and observed, with satisfaction, that they were only a mile from the previously determined reconnoitering point on the crater rim.

All had gone according to plan. Their approach had been unobserved. The eastern forests were the densest and hilliest in the area. The lack of trails and any signs of hunting indicated this was, as hoped, a place not frequented by the residents of the town.

While thirty soldiers was a great many less than Pendergast had asked for, Souza had carefully considered the pros and cons of going in with a much larger force of less trained soldiers versus one of highly trained, fit commandos cherry-picked from his former group. He had settled on this as the perfect number. A lightning-fast commando-style assault was what the colonel had spent his earlier life training for, what he knew how to do—and what was more, it was clearly appropriate in this situation, against a limited force of fanatics. The men he had picked were proficient with their weapons, boasting exceptional tactical training and psychological preparation. His own son, Thiago, a superbly built, loyal, and intelligent young man, was acting as his aide-de-camp. Tactics were key; surprise was essential; to hit hard and fast the way to go.

The colonel smiled, thinking how the Internet had told them everything they needed to know. It was something he had never even considered until Pendergast had brought him detailed maps of the town and surrounding terrain, all created from Google Earth and overlaid onto standard topographic maps obtained from the Serviço Geológico do Brasil. These Americans with their technological ingenuity! The only essential information remaining was the internal layout of the fortress—and the actual numbers of men-at-arms in the enemy camp.

He felt sure Pendergast—with his clever plan of allowing himself to be captured—would obtain that information for him. The more time he had spent with the strange, pale gringo, the more impressed he had been. Of course, escaping from the Nazis was no sure thing—especially for a lone man. On the other hand, a lone man might well be the perfect strategy. Pendergast seemed to think so—he’d been willing to stake his life upon it.

The colonel’s soldiers moved through the dripping forest in complete silence, shadows among the trees. The ground rose as they ascended the forested rim of the crater. At a certain point, Souza gestured for the soldiers to remain back while he went ahead with Thiago, his ADC. They were exactly on schedule, and he hoped Pendergast—given the unknown variables he would have to face—would be similarly efficient. Souza motioned for his squad to come forward. Moving with great caution, they came to an outcropping of rock. A convenient break in the trees afforded them a view of the village, lake, and island fortress.

The town lay below them, about a mile off, a half-moon of white and yellow stucco buildings with slate roofs arranged along the shores of the lake. Off to one side lay a large expanse of cultivated fields. The fortress itself sat half a mile offshore, to their northeast. It was built on a low cinder cone in the center of the lake, the lower ramparts of stone, with poured concrete forming the modern inner superstructure. This first glance gave the colonel a bad moment. A lot depended on the gringo.

Glassing the position of the fortress, he identified a shallow cove on the back side: an ideal place to land his forces, separated from the fortress by a ridge, protected and hidden. He examined it with minute care, memorizing every detail.

He consulted his watch. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled signal. He snugged himself down to wait in the shelter of the rocks and brush.

“Let the men have tea,” he told his son. A moment later he and his men were enjoying hot thermoses of sweetened black tea with milk. The colonel sipped as he waited, occasionally gazing at the fortress with his binoculars. The sun was in just the right position—that had been carefully planned—and fortunately was not obscured by clouds. The weather reports were holding up nicely.

The tea tasted marvelous, and he enjoyed it slowly, taking the opportunity to light up a cheroot as well. He puffed at it reflectively. He had had his doubts about this mission, but those were behind him now. He had, he knew, two traits that were perhaps not always desirable in a public official: absolute integrity, with a hatred of bribes and corruption—and an instinct for finding his own solution to a problem, even if it meant operating well outside standard procedure. Both of these had seriously hurt his career, eventually landing him back—as Pendergast had so shrewdly observed—in Alsdorf. But Souza was now convinced that the only way to stop the murders in the town he’d sworn to protect, to lance the boil that was Nova Godói, was through extraordinary action. Pendergast, he sensed, was also one comfortable operating outside accepted practice. They had that much in common. Whatever the outcome, they were committed now. There was no longer any time for second-guessing—only for action.

Finally the moment came and he began to scrutinize the fortress steadily with the binoculars. And there it was: flashes of sunlight off a mirror. Pendergast had penetrated the fort according to plan.

The colonel felt an enormous sense of relief—not because he had doubted Pendergast’s abilities, but because he knew, from his days with BOPE, that no matter how well one planned an operation, there were an unlimited number of ways it could go wrong.

The flashed message, in standard Morse code, was a long one. Very long. Grinding out the cheroot upon the rocky outcropping, Souza wrote everything down in his field notebook, word after word: a description of the fortress, a general layout of its passageways and tunnels, its strong and weak points, the size of the defending force, their weapons loadout—everything.

It was all good. Except for the fact that the defending forces, as best Pendergast could make out from his preliminary reconnaissance, numbered well over a hundred. That was considerably more than the colonel had assumed. Still, they would have the advantage of surprise. And according to Pendergast’s information, they would have a clean line of attack, where the fortress’s straightened quarters, passageways, and tunnels would minimize the defenders’ advantage in numbers.

He sent Thiago back down to the group, and soon his men were moving down from the rim, spreading out, surrounding the town in preparation for a three-pronged assault—stage one of the attack.

69

SEEING THE DISTANT MIRROR FLASH OUT OF THE GREEN canopy of the forest, Pendergast knew that the colonel had received his message. Discarding the shard of mirror he’d appropriated from a barracks lavatory, he crept down from the ruined gun port halfway up the battlements of the old fortress. His reconnoiter had by necessity been incomplete, but he had nevertheless been able to identify the main ingress points, the defensive ramparts, the basic layout. What he needed to find now was the weakest, most vulnerable section of ancient curtain wall. The original plan he’d discussed with the colonel had been to find the fort’s ammunitions cache, or central armory, and blow it up, opening a hole in the castle’s outer wall; but he had been unable to do so. There were simply too many soldiers, swarming about like bees in an angry hive, for him to locate it.