Two Graves

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 i

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 pla

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 pla

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 tu

It was all good. Except for the fact that the defending forces, as best Pendergast could make out from his preliminary reco

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 reco

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 tu

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 i

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.