As the zero hour grew near, an unspoken sense of anxiety mounted. They had taken what precautions they could. The aircraft was fully blacked out, with no lights and nothing that might reflect light from another source. Sitting on canvas slings near the plane’s greasy ramp, Katsaris and Janson followed the same rule; they wore nothing reflective. As they approached the drop zone, they put on full black-nylon combat garb, including face paint. To have done so too far in advance would have been to risk overheating. Their equipment-laden vests looked lumpy beneath the flight suit, but there was no alternative.

Now came the first great improbability. He and Katsaris had three thousand jumps between them. But what would be required tonight was beyond anything they had experienced.

Janson had been pleased with himself when he first had the insight that the compound’s sole point of vulnerability was directly overhead—that the one possibility of an undetected arrival would be from the night sky to the center of the courtyard. Whether there was a serious chance of accomplishing this, on the other hand, remained purely conjectural.

To arrive undetected, they would have to fall to the ground, silently, through the starless, moonless night that the monsoon season would provide. The satellite weather maps confirmed that at four o’clock in the morning, and extending through the next hour, the cloud cover would be total.

But they were men, not action figures. To succeed, they would have to land with extraordinary precision. To make things worse, the same weather system that provided cloud cover also provided unpredictable winds—another enemy of precision. Under ordinary circumstances, any one of these complications would have led Janson to abort a jump.

It was, in too many ways, a shot in the dark. It was also the only chance Peter Novak had.

Honwana opened the hatch at the altitude they had agreed upon: twenty thousand feet. At that altitude, the air would be frigid, perhaps thirty below zero. But exposure to those temperatures would be relatively brief. Goggles, gloves, and the tight-fitting swimming-caplike helmets they wore would help, as would their nylon flight suits.

It was another reason they wanted to release off the water, more than a lateral mile from the Stone Palace. As they descended, they would want to be able to discard items like the rip-cord handle and their gloves, and to do so with the assurance that these items would not come raining down over their target like so many warning leaflets.

The high-altitude release would also give them more time to maneuver themselves into position—or to get themselves hopelessly out of position. Without physical rehearsal, it was impossible to know whether this was the right decision. But a decision had to be made, and Janson made it.

“OK,” Janson said, standing before the open hatch. “Just remember. This isn’t exactly going to be a hop-and-pop. Time to play follow-the-leader.”