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.
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.