He looked over the two dead men. Both carried machine pistols and diver’s knives. Their flashlights were identical rubber-coated, heavy-duty marine lights. They wore identical dark T-shirts and dark cotton pants with cargo pockets, dark-brown canvas shoes.
He turned over the man on the deck. He was young, dark; he had grown a brave little mustache. Tarp pulled up what was left of the T-shirt and searched the abdomen, then opened the pants and pulled them down. There was a plastic-covered card taped below the man’s navel. Tarp pulled it loose. It had been laminated; it was dark green, with a legend in black letters and a thumbprint but no photograph.
A get-out-of-jail-free card. There was one just like it on the other man. Other than the cards, there was no identification, no wallets, no keys. Nothing.
DGI, he thought. Dirección General de Inteligencia. The Cuban KGB.
Tarp squatted on the deck and scowled at the moonless sky.
It made no sense.
He knew what had happened well enough: somebody had busted Repin’s deal with the Cuban navy captain and the DGI men had been put aboard to deal, not with Repin, but with the man who had brought Repin back. The navy captain had divorced himself from all that as quickly as he could, so that, if there were repercussions later, he could claim to have done his duty both to Cuba and to Repin. And the DGI men had come aboard Tarp’s boat to capture or kill him. But if they failed, then Tarp would go free.
That made no sense.
Tarp thought of the figure in scuba gear whom he had glimpsed on the patrol boat’s ladder.
They planted a bomb on me, he thought. He wrapped his arms tighter around his knees and stared at the darkness. He knew it now as surely as he knew that he had killed two men. It would have taken only minutes for the diver to plant a limpet mine under the sportfisherman’s hull. Then the DGI men would have killed him or captured him and they would have left the boat to drift and then blow up. There would have been no loose ends that way.
Tarp felt as if a gentle wind were blowing over his scalp. He was sitting on a bomb whose timer was running.
There was an inflatable forward of the cabin, and he raced to make it ready. Even with the help of the two flashlights, it took him valuable minutes to loosen it and get it into the water and pull the inflation lanyards. There was a small British outboard in clamps next to where it had been stowed, and he loosened those and screwed the little one-lung engine to the wooden transom with impatient movements.
He grabbed the .22 from its hiding place and climbed into the dinghy. The jointed oars seemed useless for moving the stubborn hull, which rose on a slight swell and seemed to go nowhere. Tarp pulled harder, waiting for the limpet mine to blow, imagining the inflatable lifting suddenly on the explosion and the fabric tearing, the floor erupting under him, ripping him apart, striking his legs and spine and genitals with the force of a runaway truck. He pulled as hard as he could. The inflatable coasted down the swell; when it rose again, the sportfisherman was fifty feet away. He rowed for ten minutes, when the fishing boat was a small silhouette against the pale light above the Cuban coast, and then he rested, his breath rasping, his arms weak.
He had brought the stainless-steel bottle of gasoline from the boat and he poured gas into the little motor’s fist-sized tank. The motor was a noisy workhorse that would push the inflatable all the way to Florida if he would let it. And if I had the gas.
He started the engine and headed slowly up the coast. His watch told him it was half an hour since Repin had boarded the patrol boat. Eleven minutes later, there was a roar of fire behind him, and any doubt he had had about what the scuba diver had been doing was removed. The light trickled down over the water toward him like an oil slick as red fire went up like a ball, turned orange, then gold, and then sank quickly to a low glare of yellow. Gasoline was burning on the surface where the boat had been, but the boat was gone.
He went slowly westward, steering by the lights of the coast and the stars that showed through muggy haze. There was no use trying to get out into the Gulf. If the Cubans didn’t get him, the Coast Guard would.
He turned in toward the Cuban mainland, and, a quarter of a mile out, cut the engine and went over the side, slashing the inflatable and letting it sink on the engine’s weight before he struck out for shore.
Moscow here I come, he thought wryly.
Chapter 6
He lay on a sandy ridge twenty yards above the coarse grass that marked the edge of the beach, with broken butts of palm fronds around him like big celery stalks. Behind him were small pines, on which he had draped his clothes to dry. Now, in the daylight, he gathered the clothes and brought them down to the place among the palms so they would not be seen.
He cut the American labels from the clothes. He wanted Cuban identification and Cuban money, and for that he would have to find Repin. Moving around was going to be dangerous, because Cuba was a country as localized and as organized as a medieval manor; any stranger would be reported. Every city block, every rural crossroads, had its Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, which functioned as neighborhood council and intelligence center and which could put together anything from a party to a purge.
He was hungry. Today he could ignore hunger. Tomorrow would be different. He would have to get to Havana and make contact with Repin quickly. How long before Repin returned to Moscow? he wondered. More to the point, how long before the DGI put the military and the militia on him? Or would they know that the boat had blown up and believe that both he and their men were gone?
A helicopter came over at ten o’clock. Tarp, wearing only the dark-blue briefs that looked like swimming trunks, walked boldly to the water’s edge and stood there, hands on hips, staring at the water. When the chopper passed over, he waved.
A few minutes later, he heard voices. He knelt by his clothes with one hand under them, holding the .22. They came closer, and he could tell that one was a woman’s. Then words — English words — became understandable. “Definitely not what I… Incredible! Night after… Betrayal… take me for, anyway?”
The word serious was used several times.
A male voice said, “Yeah.” In very American English. Tarp kept his head down. They passed on his left, going toward the beach.
“I’m really, I mean I’m really disappointed. I mean, I’m disappointed.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think?”
“They’re not serious.”
“It’s really disappointing.”
He peered through the palms and saw a young man and woman. She had very pale hair that looked almost white in the sunlight, but her skin was burned pink. She was wearing a dress that looked like a piece of Edwardian underwear, white, frilly, eyeletted, with a very full skirt. She was carrying her shoes in her left hand and just then she was digging the toes of one foot into the sand like a pouting child. The boy with her might almost have been a clone of the younger Agency man, for he had the same look of rather brutish innocence, that amoral California quality of brainless muscle. He wore shorts and a bright-yellow T-shirt with a decoration on the front.
“Nightclubs,” Tarp could hear the girl saying. “Goddamn nightclubs just make me barf. Don’t they, Rick?”