For almost the first time since I'd known her Petra's obsession with the island's megalithic past was overlaid by more immediate concerns as we speculated about what they planned to do and when, the villa hull-down and indistinct on the heathland's horizon. I asked her whether she had any glasses in the car. She reached over to the back seat, grabbed the bag that contained her archaeological gear, and after rummaging around in it, produced a pair of those very small, high-magnification binoculars. I rolled the window down and with some difficulty managed to focus them on the villa. The field of vision was very small. 'I was only once involved in a political upheaval.' Petra's voice was low and intense as though she were afraid of being overheard. 'I was in the Cordillera Real just north of La Paz and a ragged bunch of them passed through my camp. Defeated revolutionaries are very unpredictable. South American revolutionaries, anyway, and I had found an Inca tamba that nobody had discovered before. All very exciting, worked stone blocks jigsawed together so that they wouldn't be toppled by earthquakes, and these exhausted men in fear of their lives flopping down in the undergrowth I'd cleared. There was a thick cloud mist, everything very damp and cold. They lit a fire, huddling round it.', It was strange to be watching the villa through glasses. Last time I had seen it I had been breaking in by the garage window and there had been nobody there. Now it was just as dark, but the cars and the truck were clear proof that there were men inside it. They must be sitting there, waiting.
'What is it? Can you see something?'
I shook my head. All the glasses showed me was the Moorish front with its arched colonnade, the low wall that separated it from the road and the blockhouse shape of it against the night sky with the cars tucked in against the garage and the truck left out in the road.
'Go on, Petra.' Lennie leaned forward, his head between us. 'What happened? Did they mess you about?'
'If you mean what I think you mean, the answer is no, they were too bloody tired. But they did something worse They ate up everything I had, all my stores, then went off with my tent, even my sleeping bag. I think they'd have had the clothes off my back if I'd been a man, they were that ragged and desperate. Only their guns looked in good condition.'
I thought I saw the glow of a cigarette. It was there for a second, then Lennie knocked against me and I lost it. It had come from the last arch of the villa's colonnaded front, and focusing on it, I thought I could just make out the darker outline of a figure standing there. I heard Petra say something about trekking more than twenty miles through snow and ice and a blazing midday sun before she managed to hitch a ride with some geologists into La Paz.
'And what happened to the men who pillaged your camp?' Lennie asked.
'Oh, the Army caught up with them in the end. About a dozen of them were gunned down from a helicopter, the rest were tracked down, tortured and hanged. The usual thing. There's no mercy in the Andes.'
'I never experienced anything like that,' Lennie said quietly. 'And I've been around. But nothing like that.' And he added, leaning his head further forward between us, 'You think there's going to be a revolution here?'
She didn't tell him not to be ridiculous. She didn't comment. She just sat there, not saying a word, and at that moment a bright star shot up from the sea to our right, blazing a vertical trail that burst into a blob of white so bright that even at that distance it lit up our faces. 'Bloody hell!' Lennie pushed his nose almost against the windscreen. 'What is it?'
'Pyrotechnic.' The pop of its burst came to us faintly as I jumped out of the car, steadying my elbow on the top of it and searching with the glasses for the ship that had fired it. A second stream of sparks flew up, a second burst, but this time green. I still couldn't pick out the shape of the vessel, so it was presumably close in below the line of the cliffs.
'That a distress signal?' Petra asked, but I think she knew it wasn't, because her head was turned towards the villa. Through the glasses I saw shadows moving, followed almost immediately by the sound of a car engine starting up. Doors slammed, the cars emerging on to the road. Then the truck's diesel roared into life and it began to move, one car in front, the other behind. The time was 01.32. Miguel's estate stayed parked against the wall.
'What now?' Petra had already started the engine.
'Go back,' I told her. 'Back down towards Arenal, then take the main development road and we'll wait for them lust short of where it joins the Alayor highway.' Either they were meeting up with a ship at Macaret or else somewhere further up the long inlet that finished at the new quay just beyond Addaia.
'I don't get it, mate,' Lennie muttered in my ear as Petra felt her way along the dark strip of the road without lights. What do they want with a ship when their truck's already loaded? They can't be picking up more.' But I was thinking about Wade then, that first visit of Gareth's to Menorca, the questions he had asked me over that lunch. And on board Medusa,the suddenness with which we had left Malta, the way he had looked that evening when I went back down to his cabin from the bridge, his sudden decision to tell me about Evans.
We reached the crossroads and Petra pulled in to the verge. We sat there for perhaps five minutes, but there was no sound and nothing passed. I told her to drive straight across and head for the high point above the entrance to the Addaia inlet. From there we would have a clear view of Macaret itself and the seaward entrance to the harbour. We would also be able to look southwards down the length of the inlet to the two small islands that protected the final anchorage.
When we got there we were just in time to catch a glimpse of a small vessel heading down the pale ribbon of the inlet. 'Fishing boat by the look of it/ Lennie muttered.
Out of the car again, I was able to fix the glasses on it. No doubt about it. The boat was the Santa Maria.I jumped back into the passenger seat and told Petra to turn the car, go back to the main road, then take the cut-off down the steep little hill to Port d'Addaia itself. 'But go carefully,' I warned her as she swung the Beetle round. 'They may have dropped somebody off to keep watch. And stop near the top so that we can check if they're there or not.'
When we reached Addaia she tucked herself into a little parking bay where we had a clear view of the quay across pantile roofs and the steep overgrown slope of the hillside, and it wasn't just the truck from Codolar that was waiting there. I counted no less than five trucks, all parked in line along the concrete edge of the quay and facing towards us. There were more than a dozen cars, too, and a lot of men, most of them gathered round the back of the last truck, where crates were being dumped on the quay, prised open and the weapons they contained handed out.
'Christ! See that, mate. They got rocket-launchers. The hand-held type. What do the bastards want with them?' Lennie had followed me out of the car and across the road. From there we had a clear view of the anchorage where I had joined Carp for the voyage to Malta. And there, as though I were seeing it all again, like on video but from a different angle, was the Santa Mariamotoring in through the narrows that separated the humpbacked outline of the second island from the muddy foreshore and the huddle of fishermen's dwellings. The boat was headed straight for the quay, and as she slowed and swung her stern to lie alongside, I saw she had a stem light showing.
That was when we heard the rumble of engines coming from seaward, and a moment later we saw the dim shape of a flat box of a vessel. There were two of them, old LCTs dating from the days before they called them logistic landing craft. I recognised them immediately, one of them having dropped me off at Loch Boisdale on its way to St Kilda some years back. The Santa Mariahad clearly been leading them in. Now she was alongside and a man had jumped ashore. I watched him through the glasses as the men on the quay gathered round him. Even in that dim light I was certain it was Evans. He was head and shoulders taller than most of them, standing there, hands on hips, issuing orders. He wore a kepi-like forage cap and camouflage jacket and trousers, and the way he stood, the arrogance and the air of command, I was suddenly reminded of early pictures of Castro.