"Fear of death takes a while to get used to."
Pitt picked up the Cuban's flashlight, hooded it in his hand, and began stripping off the uniform. "Fortunately he's a short little rascal, about your size. Your feet will probably swim in his boots, but better too large than too small."
"Is he dead?"
"Just a small dent in the skull from a rock. He'll come around in a few hours."
She wrinkled her nose as she caught the thrown fatigue uniform. "I don't think he ever bathed."
"Launder it in the sea and put it on wet," he said briskly. "And be quick about it. This is no time to play fashionable rich bitch. The sentry at the next post will wonder why he hasn't shown up. His relief and sergeant of the guard are bound to come along pretty soon."
Five minutes later Jessie stood dripping in the uniform of a Cuban armed forces patrol guard. Pitt was right, the boots were two sizes too big. She lifted her damp hair and neatly tucked it under the cap. She turned and stared at Pitt as he emerged from the trees and bushes carrying the Cuban's rifle and a palm frond.
"What did you do with him?" she asked.
"Stashed him a ways inland under a bush." Pitt's voice betrayed a sense of urgency. He pointed at a tiny beam of light about a quarter of mile down the beach. "They're coming. No time for a volleyball game. Get a move on."
He roughly pushed her toward the trees and followed, walking backward brushing away their footprints with the palm frond. After nearly seventy yards, he dropped the frond and they hurried through the jungle growth, putting as much distance between them and the beach as possible before daylight.
They had covered five miles when the eastern sky began to brighten from black to orange. A sugarcane field rose up out of the fading darkness, and they skirted its border until it ended beside a paved two-lane highway. No headlights played on the asphalt in either direction. They walked along the shoulder, ducking into the brush whenever a car or truck approached. Pitt noticed that Jessie's steps were beginning to falter and her breathing was coming in rapid gasps. He halted, placed his handkerchief over the lens of the flashlight, and shone it in her face. He didn't require the credentials of a sports physician to see that she was done in. He put his arm around her waist and pushed on until they reached the steep sides of a small ravine.
"Catch your breath, I'll be right back."
Pitt dropped down the slope into a dry creek bed that threaded a jagged course around a low hill littered with large boulders and scrub pine. It passed under the highway through a concrete pipe three feet in diameter and spread into a fenced pasture on the other side. He scrambled back up to the road, silently took Jessie's hand, and led her stumbling and sliding to the gravelly bottom of the ravine. He flicked the beam of the flashlight inside the drainpipe.
"The only vacant room in town," he said in a voice as cheerful as he could make it under the circumstances.
It was no penthouse suite, but the curved bottom of the pipe held a good two inches of soft sand, and it was a safer haven than Pitt could have hoped for. Any pursuing guards who eventually came on their trail and followed it to the highway would assume the landing party met a prearranged ride.
Somehow they managed to find a comfortable position in the cramped darkness. Pitt set the gun and flashlight within easy reach and finally relaxed.
"Okay, lady," he said, his words echoing through the drainpipe. "I think the time has come for you to tell me what in hell we're doing here."
But Jessie didn't answer.
Oblivious to her clammy, ill-fitting uniform, oblivious even to aching feet and sore joints, she was curled in a fetal position sound asleep.
<<61>>
"Dead? All dead?" Kremlin boss Antonov repeated angrily. "The entire facility destroyed and no survivors, none at all?"
Polevoi nodded heavily. "The captain of the submarine that detected the explosions and the colonel in command of the security forces sent ashore to investigate reported that they found no one alive. They retrieved the body of my chief deputy, Lyev Maisky, but General Velikov has yet to be found."
"Were secret codes and documents missing?"
Polevoi was not about to put his head on the block and take responsibility for an intelligence disaster. As it was, he stood within a hair of losing his lofty position and quickly becoming a forgotten bureaucrat in charge of a labor camp
"All classified data were destroyed by General Velikov's staff before they died fighting."
Antonov accepted the lie. "The CIA," he said, brooding. "They're behind this foul provocation."
"I don't think we can make the CIA the scapegoat on this one. The preliminary evidence points to a Cuban operation."
"Impossible," Antonov snapped. "Our friends in Castro's military would have warned us well in advance of any ambitious plan to attack the island. Besides, a daring and imaginative operation of this magnitude goes far beyond any Latin brain."
"Perhaps, but our best intelligence minds do not believe the CIA was remotely aware of our communications center on Cayo Santa Maria. We haven't uncovered the slightest indication of surveillance. The CIA is good, but its people are not gods. They could not have possibly planned, rehearsed, and carried out the raid in the few short hours from the time the shuttle left the space station until it suddenly veered off our programmed flight path to Cuba."
"We lost the shuttle too?"
"Our monitoring of the Johnson Space Center revealed that it landed safely in Key West."
"With the American moon colonists," he added flatly.
"They were on board, yes."
For seconds, too furious to react, Antonov sat there, his lips taut, unblinking eyes staring into nothingness. "How did they do it?" he growled at last. "How did they save their precious space shuttle at the last minute?"
"Fool's luck," said Polevoi, again relying on the Communist dogma of casting blame elsewhere. "Their asses were saved by the devious interference of the Castros."
Antonov's eyes suddenly focused on Polevoi. "As you've so often reminded me, Comrade Director, the Castro brothers can't go to the toilet without the KGB knowing how many squares of paper they use. You tell me how they suddenly crawled in bed with the President of the United States without your agents becoming aware of it."
Polevoi had unwittingly dug himself into a hole and now he shrewdly climbed out of it by switching the course of the briefing. "Operation Rum and Cola is still in progress. We may have been cheated out of the space shuttle and a rich source of scientific data, but it is an acceptable loss compared to gaining total mastery of Cuba."
Antonov considered Polevoi's words, and swallowed the bait. "I have my doubts. Without Velikov to direct the operation its chances for success are cut in half."
"The general is no longer crucial to Rum and Cola. The plan is ninety percent complete. The ships will enter Havana Harbor tomorrow evening, and Castro's speech is set for the following morning. General Velikov performed admirably in laying the groundwork. Rumors of a new CIA plot to assassinate Castro have already been spread throughout the Western world, and we have prepared evidence showing American involvement. All that's left to do is push a button."
"Our people in Havana and Santiago are alerted?"
"They're prepared to move in and form a new government as soon as the assassination is confirmed."
"And the next leader?"
"Alicia Cordero."