Two Graves (53 page)

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.

S
EEING 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.

No matter. He had the next best thing to an ammo dump in the small backpack slung over his shoulder: a brace of oxyacetylene tanks, nearly full.

Moving down an old spiral staircase, he paused to listen. The immense size of the fortress and its echoing passageways had proven a godsend, broadcasting the stomp of approaching boots. Indeed, Pendergast had been surprised at the blundering nature of the troops involved in the fortress’s defense, their reactive thinking, their lack of strategy. It was the one detail that didn’t feel quite right to him.

Still, he intended to take advantage of it as long as he could.

Moving still deeper into the older levels of the fortress, he found a tunnel that ran along the inside of the outer perimeter wall. He moved along it, briefly shining the flashlight on the masonry, testing
the joints with the point of the purloined knife. The mortar was as rotten as wet soil, but the blocks here were well dressed and fitted together too tightly to be shifted. In some areas there were cracks in the masonry, but they were too small to be serviceable, and the masonry too stable for his purposes.

As he descended to the next level, pausing to listen from time to time, he passed a series of locked, stainless-steel doors set into the inner wall, relatively new doors retrofitted to what had probably once been the dungeons of the fortress, now apparently converted into laboratories. Several of the steel doors were wide open, lights still burning within the labs, giving every impression of having been hurriedly abandoned by the working scientists—perhaps at the sound of gunfire.

Just beyond the series of doors, he found what he was looking for. In the outer foundation wall, a series of large cracks ran upward in a broad radial pattern, with dislocated blocks along their margins. In some places, the cracks were as much as eight to twelve inches broad. The stone floor was similarly cracked. Most interesting. This cracking was not caused by the normal settling of the ground. Just the opposite. Rather, the radial pattern of the cracks implied that a resurgence of the volcano’s caldera floor was taking place—creating massive points of instability that seemed to run right through the base of the twenty-foot-thick curtain wall.

Working fast with the knife, Pendergast first carved away the rotten masonry around a displaced block along the edge of the largest crack, then pried it loose with the point of the pick. By working the block back and forth, he finally managed to slide it out, leaving a gaping hole. Reaching in, he was gratified to find that the interior of the massive wall was traditional eighteenth-century Spanish rubble-core construction, in which dressed stone was used for the facing of the exposed walls, with the large space between filled with loose stones and dirt. Alternating with the knife and the pick, he managed to hollow out a cavity in the rubble large enough to fit the twin cylinders of oxygen and acetylene. Carefully inserting them into place, he checked the wristwatch he had appropriated from one of the guards. If all was going according to schedule, Souza’s men would at this
moment be starting to invade the town, preparing to commandeer boats for the assault on the fortress itself. According to the time line they had prepared, in approximately twenty to thirty minutes several boats would land at the island docks, making a diversionary feint, while the boats filled with the main group of Souza’s soldiers would meanwhile be landing in the cove behind the fortress.

He therefore had fifteen minutes to wait. Now would be a good time to examine the laboratories he had passed earlier.

The first lab he came to was locked with a primitive World War II–era mechanism that resisted the ministrations of his knifepoint for only a moment. He found himself in a laboratory, not advanced by modern standards, but adequate for its purpose: the dissection and autopsying of human remains.

But as he examined the space more closely, shining the flashlight around, he noted a small but telling difference between this room and a standard pathology lab, such as might be found in the basement of a hospital. No pathology lab he had ever seen required straps, cuffs, and other restraining devices.

It became clear to Pendergast that this lab was not for dissection; it was for vivisection.

Moving out of the room, Pendergast continued down the hall, shining his light into the open doors or the window insets of the closed ones. Most showed evidence of recent, active use. Several had not even been cleaned, with hair, blood, and bits of sawed bone still littering their gurneys. Much dreadful scientific work had been done here—and despite the apparent sudden abandonment, he nevertheless got the impression that a long-extended project had recently reached its culmination.

Something in one of the locked labs caught his attention. He stopped, peering intently through the window. Once again, he was able to defeat the lock in a matter of moments. The beam of his flashlight revealed a swatch of hair lying on a gurney. Other evidence—including dead insect larvae—indicated that the remains that had lain on this gurney had been in a state of decomposition.

Slowly, very slowly, he moved closer, shining his light on the hair.
He noted that it had the precise auburn shade of Helen’s hair; a color that had always reminded him of wildflower honey. Instinctively, he reached out to touch it—then managed to withdraw his hand before it made contact.

A plastic box stood on an organ table, and he went to it and—after a brief hesitation—removed its cover. Inside he found the remains of Helen’s dress, buttons, some personal effects. As he gingerly reached inside and stirred the contents with his fingers, the beam of his light caught a flash of purple. He pushed aside a fragment of cloth to reveal a gold ring, set with a star sapphire.

Pendergast went rigid. For ten minutes, perhaps more, he did not move, simply staring into the box of personal effects. Then he took the ring and placed it in the pocket of his rough prison pants.

Leaving the room as silently as he had entered it, he paused for a minute, listening attentively to the distant drumming of feet, the hoarse bark of shouted commands. Then he quickly returned to the crack in the outer wall and the makeshift oxyacetylene bomb he’d placed within it, glancing at his watch. He was overdue to begin the detonation process.