“Veda theyilai?” The proter champion, thumbing his cards at the end of the table, spoke the words in a tone of slight annoyance, and as he did, he rolled his eyes. Had anything registered?

After a beat, he lifted his eyes again, peering into the gloom of the overhead shelf. His hands moved toward his cradled Ruger Mini-14.

Janson had not been wrong about the young man’s powers of observation. His scalp was crawling. He had been made.

“Now!” Janson whispered into his lip mike and slid to a prone position on the farthest recess of the concrete ledge as he put on his polarized goggles. He flipped his weapon’s safety down, setting it to full fire.

The young man stood up suddenly, shouting something in Kagama. He fired his gun toward the area where he had seen Janson, and the bullet took a bite out of the concrete just an inch from his head. A second bullet tore into nearby ductwork.

Suddenly, the dimly lit room filled with a flare of eye-searing brightness and heat. The slow-burning thermite grenade had arrived: a small, indoor sun, blinding even those who tried to look away. Its brightness was a multiple of that emitted by a welder’s torch, and the fact that the guards’ eyes had adjusted to lowlight conditions made the blindness all the more complete. Scattered gunfire was directed toward Janson, but the angle made it a hard shot, and the bullets were poorly aimed.

Through his nearly black goggles, Janson saw the soldiers in disarray and confusion, some shielding their eyes with forearms and hands, others firing blindly toward the ceiling.

Still, even a blind shot could be fatal. With the entire room whited out by the preternaturally bright flare, he returned fire, directing the automatic fusillades in tight, carefully aimed clusters. He depleted one thirty-round magazine and snapped in another. Shouts filled the room.

Now Katsaris appeared, bounding down the stairway with polarized goggles and a softly buzzing MP5K, directing bullets at the guerrillas from yet another angle.

In seconds it was over. Few of them, Janson reflected, even had the opportunity to look their opponents in the eye. They had been slaughtered, impersonally, by a smoothly operating magazine-fed weapon that discharged bullets at a rate of fifteen per second. Because of the low-signature sound suppression, the MP5 bursts were not merely lethal but eerily quiet. It took Janson a moment before he realized what the sound reminded him of: the fluttering of a deck of cards being shuffled. Killing should not sound like that, Janson thought to himself. It was too trivial a soundtrack for so grave an action.

An odd silence now reigned. As gloom and shadows returned, Janson and Katsaris removed their goggles. The naked, forty-watt overhead bulb, Janson noticed, was still intact. The guards were not so lucky. Bodies were splayed on the floor, as if pinned there by the hollow-point bullets. They had functioned as they were designed to, discharging their entire force to the bodies they hit, coming to a stop several inches into those bodies, destroying all the vital organs they encountered. As Janson came closer, he saw that some of the men were taken down even before they’d had the opportunity to flip the safeties of their M16 carbines.