Season of the machete

The Season of the Machete

By James Patterson

Copyright 1977

April 30, 1980; Turtle Bay

On the gleaming white-sand lip of the next cove, Kingfish and the Cuban can see a couple walking on the beach. they are just stick figures at this distance. Absolutely perfect victims. Perfect.

Hidden in palm trees and sky blue wild lilies, the two killers cautiously watch the couple slowly come their way and disappear into the cove.

The Cuban wears a skull-tight, red-and-yellow bandanna; rip-kneed khaki trousers; scuffed, pale orange construction boots from the Amy-Navy Store in Miami. The man called Kingfish has on nothing but greasy U.S. Army khakis.

The muscles of both men ripple in the hard, beating Caribbean sun.

The bright sun makes diamonds and blinking asterisks all over the sea. It glints off a sugar-cane machete hanging from the belt of the Cuban '

The weatherbeaten farm implement is two and a half feet long and sharp as a razor blade.

South of their hiding place, a great wrecked schooner-the Isabelle Anne-sits lonely and absurd, visited only by yellow birds and fish. Thirty yards farther south, the beach elbows around steep black rocks and makes a crystal path for walking. At this sharp bend lie reef fish, coml, sargassum, oyster drills, sea urchins.

Soon now, the two killers expect the couple to emerge from the cove and reappear on the narrow white path. The victims.

Perhaps a dark, bejeweled prime minister up on holiday from South America? Or an American politician with a coin- and milk-fed young woman who was both secretary and mistress?

Someone worth their considerable fees and passage to this serene and beautiful part of the world. Someone worth $50,000 apiece for less than one week's work.

Instead, a harmless-looking pair of adolescents turn the seaweed-strewn bend into Turtle Bay.

A bony, long-haired rich boy. A white-blond girl in a Club Mediterranee T-shirt. Americans. On the run, they clumsily get out of their shirts, shorts, sandals, and underwear. Balls and little tits naked, they shout something about last one in is a rotten egg and run into the low, starry waves.

Twenty or thirty feet over their heads, seagulls make a sound almost like mountain sheep bleating.

Aaaaaa! Aaaaaa! Aaaaaa! Aaaaaa! The man called Kingfish puts out an expensive black cigar in the sand. A low, animal moan rises out of his throat.

"We couldn't have come all this way to kill these two little shits."

The Cuban cautions him, "Wait and see. Watch them carefully."

"Aaagghh! Aaagghh!" The boy offers tin-ear bird imitations from the rippling water.

The slender blond girl screams, "I can't stand it. It's so goddamn unbelievably beautiful!"

She dives into sparkling aquamarine waves. Surfaces with her long hair plastered against her head. Her white breasts are small, nubby; up-pointed and rubbery from the cool water.

"I love this place already. Don't ever want to go back. Gramercy Park-yeck! I spit on East Twentythird Street. Yeck! Yahoo! Yow!"

The Cuban slowly raises his hand above the blue lilies and prickle bushes. He waves in the direction of a green sedan parked on a lush hill overlooking the beach.

The sedan's horn sounds once. Their signal.

An eerie silence has come over the place.

Heartheats; surf; little else.

The boy and girl lie on fluffy beach towels to dry under the sun. they close their eyes, and the backs of their eyelids become kaleidoscopes of changing color.

The girl sings, " 'Eastem's got my sunshine..........

The boy makes an impolite gurgling sound.

As the girl opens one eye, she feels a hard slap on the top of her head. It is painfully hot all of a sudden, and she feels dizzy. She starts to say "Aahhh" but chokes on thick, bubbling blood.

Pop... pop...

The slightest rifle shots echo in the surrounding hills.

Bullets travel out of an expensive West German rifle at 3,300 feet per second.

Then Kingfish and the Cuban come and stand over the bodies on the blood-spotted towels. Kingfish touches the boy's cheek and produces an unexpected moan, almost a growl.

"I don't think I like Mr. Damian Rose," he says in a soft, French-accented voice. "Very sorry I left Paris now. He's let this one live... for us."

The dying nineteen-year-old coughs. Blue eyes rolling, he speaks. "Why?" the boy asks. "Didn't do anything.

The Cuban swings the machete high. He chops down as if he were in the thickest jungle brush, as if he were cutting a tree with a single stroke.

Chop, wriggle, lift.

The killer meticulously attacks both bodies with the long broadsword. Clean, hard strokes. Devastating. Blood squirts high and sprays the killer. Flesh and bone part like air in the path of the razor-sharp knife. Puddles of frothy blood are quickly soaked up by the sand, leaving dark red stains.

When the -butchering is over, the Cuban drives the machete deep into the sand. He sets a red wool hat over the knife's handle and hasp.

Then both killers look up into the hills. they see the distant figure of Damian Rose beside the shiny green car. The handsome blond man is motioning for them to hurry back. He is waving his fancy German rifle high over his head.

What they can't quite see is that Damian Rose is smiling in triumph.

PREFACE

The Damian and Carrie Rose Diary

Consider the raw power and unlimited potential of the good old-fashioned "thrill kill." Under proper supervision, of course.

The Rose Diary

January 23, 1981; New York City

At 6:30 A.M. on the twenty-third of January, the birth date of his only child, Mary Ellen, Bernard Siegel-tall, dark, slightly myopic-began his usual" breakfast of loose scrambled eggs, poppyseed bagel, and black coffee at Wolf's Delicatessen on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City.

After the satisfying meal, Siegel took a Checker cab through slushy brown snow to 800 Third Avenue. He used his private collection of seven keys to let himself into the modern dark-glass building, then into the offices of the publisher par excellence for whom he worked, and finally into the largest small office on that floor-his office-to try to get some busywork done before the many-too-many phones began to ring; to try to get home early enough to spend time with his daughter. On her twelfth birthday.

A young woman, very, very tan, squeaky clean, with premature silver all through her long, sandy hair, was standing before the dark, double-glazed windows. The woman appeared to be watching 777 Third Avenue (the building across and down Third Avenue), or perhaps she was just staring at her own reflection.

Bernard Siegel said, "One-how the hell did you get in here? Two-who the hell are you? Three-please leave."

"My name is Carrie Rose." The woman turned to face him. She looked to be twenty-eight or twenty-nine, spectacularly poised and cool. "I've come to make you an even more famous man than you are now. You are Siegel, aren't you?"

The editor couldn't hold back a slight smile, the smallest possible parting of thin, severe lips. She called him "Siegel."

Damn these shameless, impudent young writers, he thought. Had she actually slept in his office to get an interview? to give lucky him first crack at this year's Fear of Flying, or Flying, or The Flies?

Squinting badly, pathetically, for a man under forty, Siegel studied Carrie Rose. Mrs. Carrie Rose, he was to find out soon. Wife of Damian Rose. Soldier of fortune herself.

Under closer scrutiny, the young woman was striking, tall, and fashionably trim. voguish.

She had on large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that made her look more sharp-witted than she probably was; the blue pin-striped suit was meant to keep Siegel off his guard, he was sure. An old Indian dodge.

"All right, I'm Siegel," the nearsighted editor finally admitted. "I'm hardly famous. And this sort of clever, gratuitous nonsense doesn't cut it with me.... Please leave my office. Go back and write one more draft of your wonderful book. Make a regular-hours appointment with my-"

"Oh, but you are famous, Bernard. " The woman interrupted him with an ingenue's toothy grin. "You're so well known, in fact, that busy people like myself go to great inconvenience to give you million-dollar book properties. Books that will make, at the very least, dents in history

Siegel laughed. A cruel little laugh, but she deserved it.

"Only a million for it?"

Carrie Rose laughed, too. "Something like that. "

She examined Siegel closely, then looked casu ally around his office at the unmatched oak and pine bookcases on two of the walls; an Olivetti letter a typewriter tucked inside the banged-up rolltop desk, with sheafs of crisp white bond stacked neatly be- side it; new, shiny book jackets pinned to a cork board; manuscripts in different-color typewriter-paper boxes. The editor.

Siegel put down his briefcase, kicked off his loafers, and sat on his chair. He gave her a long cold stare. "Well, where is this magnum opus?"

"You haven't had it ghostwritten yet," the young woman said. Carrie Rose. "Your writer's source material will be a diary my husband, Damian, and I kept last year. An unusual, very original diary that will cost you two million dollars. It's about... an awful nest of machete murders. Over a hundred of them.

The pretty woman said it very coolly "an awful nest of machete murders."

PART I

The Season of the Machete

March-July, 1979

Death in Lathrop Wells

CHAPTER ONE

Damian theorized that within Fifty years man would move onto and into the sea.

San Dominica was only a very small beginning. An exploratory expedition. Kid stuff. The people who engineered it didn't understand their own inner motivation...

three-fifths of the world is water, and that was about to be fought over on a staggering scale....

The Rose Diary

February 24, i 979; Lathrop We@, Nevada

As the stupid, piggy Chevrolet Impala floated through buzzard-infested desert, Isadore "the Mensch" Goldman was thinking that he was slightly surprised there really was a state of Nevada.

Every so often, though, the Chevrolet passed a tin road sign with PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF NEVADA stamped into it by some convict at Washoe County Jail.

Once, Goldman even saw some Nevadans: a woman and small children with frayed ankle boots, turquoise jewelry, faces the color of pretzel sticks.

Somewhere out here they tested H-bombs, the old man was thinking. At Mercury, Nevada. Then the seventy-four-year-old's mind went walking. He remembered something itchy about the still not-to-be-believed Bay of Pigs invasion. Then a very brief, fuzzy association he'd had with Rafael Trujillo that same year: 1961.

Goldman's history. All leading up to February 24, 1979. The biggest day of the old man's life.

Maybe.

A man named Vincent "Zio" Tuch was patting Isadore's gray-striped banker's trousers at one baggy knee. Death spots were all over Tuch's unsteady hand.

"Bizee Izzee, what are you thinkin'?" Tuch rasped. "You thinkin' this is a big-fashion setup, Izzie? That's what I'm thinkin'."

"Aahh... I'm getting too damn old to think all the time. " The consigliere casually dismissed the powerful old capo. It was a typically stupid, if well meant, Mustache Pete question.

Old Tuch told him to go make shit in his own pants-which was also typical.

Also typical was the fact that the caporegime smelled of cheap hair tonic spilled over twenty-year-old dandruff.

Goldman had flatly predicted that the final meeting at Lathrop Wells would be ridiculous beyond human belief. Even he was surprised. It had the consistency of Silly Putty. It looked like the opening scene of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

to begin with, both sides arrived at the farm in the most absurd "anonymous-looking" automobiles.

Goldman watched and counted bodies through the green-tinted windows of his own Impala.

There were nine chauffeurs driving such cars as Mustangs, Wildcats, Hornets, Cougars-even a Volkswagen Beetle.

There were seven bodyguards, out-and-out Buster Crabbe types.

Eleven actual participants besides himself and the shriveling zombie Tuch.

Somebody had remarked at the last meeting that they didn't want to have another Appalachia at Lathrop Wells: twenty Cadillac Fleetwoods suddenly arriving at some deserted farmhouse. Drawing attention from locals or the state police.

So there were none of the usual big black cars at the meeting in the Nevada desert.

All of the twenty-seven men wore dark business suits, with the exception of one Gucci-Pucci fag

Frankie "the Cat" Rao of Brooklyn, New York. Rao wore a black-and-white-checked sports jacket, a sleazy open-necked electric blue shirt, white Bing Crosby shoes.

"Dirty asshole," old Tuch said. "asshole with all of his pinky rings." "All very predictable," Isadore Goldman muttered. The old man lit up his first cigarette in more than eight months. Then he headed inside, through hot, heavy air that smelled like horses.

Inside the farmhouse it was air-conditioned, thank God.

A Fedders was blowing dust and what looked like cereal flakes all around the rustic, low-ceilinged rooms.

Goldman noticed the other side's head man whisper something to a younger man-his aide-decamp. The younger man looked a little like the Hollywood actor Montgomery Clift. His name was Brooks Campbell, and he would be going to the Caribbean for them.

The older man, their side's main spokesman, was Harold Hill. Harry the Hack to the trade.

Harold Hill had spent nearly ten years in Southeast Asia, and he had a certain inscrutable look about him. Something intangible. Isadore Goldman suspected that Hill was a pretty good killer for such an obvious loser type.

Within ten minutes the thirteen important negotiators had settled down comfortably around a wide beam table in the living room. Characteristically, they had taken opposite sides at the big wooden table. Dark, slightly European-looking men on one side. All-American football-player types on the other.

"By way of a brief introduction"-Goldman began the meeting after allowing just a snitch of small talk-"it was agreed at the last meeting-January seventeenth-that if Damian and Carrie Rose were available, they would be satisfactory contract operators for everybody concerned.... "

Goldman peeked over his silver-rimmed eyeglasses. So far, no objections.

"Consequently," he continued, "the Roses were contacted at a hotel in Paris. The St. Louis, it's called. An old gun sellers' hangout through several wars now.

"The Roses were given one month to prepare an outline for a plan that would achieve results agreeable to both sides at this table. they declined making an appearance at this meeting, however."

The consigliere looked up again. He then began to read from twenty-odd pages sent to him by the Roses. The pages outlined two rough plans for the proposed operations. One plan was titled "Systematic Government Assassinations," the other was simply called "Machete."

Also included in the brief was a list of pros and cons for each plan.

In fact, what seemed to impress both sides gathered around the table-what had impressed Goldman himself-was the seriousness with which both theoretical plans had been approached and researched. they were referred to specifically as "rough," "experimental," but the outline for each seemed obsessively airtight. Typically Damian Rose.

"The final bid they put in for this work," Isadore Goldman reported, "is one point two million. I myself think it's a fair estimate. I think it's low, in fact.... I also think this man Damian Rose is a genius. Perhaps the woman is, too. Gentlemen?"

Predictably, Frankie Rao had the first word on the plans.

"Is that fuckin' francs or dollars, Izzie?" he shouted down the wooden plank table. "It's fuckin' dollars those loonie tunes are talking about, isn't it?"

Goldman noticed that their man, Harold Hill, seemed startled and upset by the New York mobster.

The young man who looked like Montgomery Clift broke into a toothpaste smile, however. Brooks Campbell. Good for you, Isadore Goldman thought. Smart boy. Break the goddamn tensions down a little.

For the first time since the meeting began, most of the men at the long wooden table laughed. Both sides laughed like hell. Even Frankie Rao began to howl.

As the laughter died down, Goldman nodded to a dark-haired man who sat very quietly at the far end of the table. Goldman then nodded at their side's chief man, Harold Hill.

"Does the figure include all expenses?" was Hill's only question. The young man at his side, Campbell, nodded as if this were his question, too.

"It includes every expense," Isadore Goldman said. "The Roses expect this to take approximately one year to carry out. They'll have to use twenty to thirty other professionals along the way. A Who's Who of the most elite mercenaries."

"Dirt cheap. " The quiet, dark-haired man suddenly spoke in a deep, Senate floor voice. The man was Charles Forlenza, forty-three-year-old don of the Forlenza Family. The boss of bosses.

"You've gotten us a good price and good people, Isadore. As I expected.... I can't speak for Mr. Hill, but I'm pleased with this work myself. "

"The price is appropriate for this kind of guerrilla operation. " Harold Hill addressed the don. "The Roses' reputation for this sort of complex, delicate work is excellent. I'm happy. Good."

At this point on February 24, 1979, the United States, through a proprietary company called Great Western Air Transport, entered into one of the more sting alliances in its two-hundred-year history: a large-scale working agreement with the Charles Forlenza Family of the West Coast. The Cosa Nostra.

For both sides it meant that they could immediately farm out some very necessary dirty work.

Neither the United States nor the Forlenzas wanted to soil their hands with what had to be done in the Caribbean during 1979.

That was why they had so very carefully sought out Daniian and Carrie Rose. Les Dements, as the couple was once called in Southeast Asia. The Maniacs.

Two hours after the meeting in southwestern Nevada-on the way back to Las Vegas-a silvergray Buick Wildcat stopped along a long stretch of flat, open highway. The youthful chauffeur of the car got out. He went to the back door of the sedan and opened it. Then Melo Russo politely asked his boss to get out of the car.

"Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?' Frankie Rao said to his driver, a skinny young shark in reflector sunglasses.

"All right, so fuck you, then," Melo said.

He fired three times into the backseat of the Buick. Blood spattered all over the rear windows and slowly rnisted down onto the light silver seat covers. Then Russo dragged Frankie the Cat's body outside and put it in the trunk of the car.

It had been quietly decided at the farmhouse meeting that Frankie Rao was an unacceptable risk for Harold Hill and the nice young man who looked like Montgomery Clift.

"Typical, " Isadore Goldman muttered somewhere out on the Nevada desert.

CHAPTER Two

Once-in France, this was-in June or July-Damian had gone on a tirade about how perfect our work in Cambodia and Vietnam had been. How it bothered the hell out of him that no one could know. That there was no way to capitalize on the work... Funny quirk (twist): In a French village, Grasse, we sat in an espresso house. Damian conversed in English with a very polite street cleaner who spoke no English at all. He told the man every last detail about the Caribbean adventure. "Geniel Demon! Non?" he said in French at the end of it. The poor confused street cleaner smiled as if Damian were an insane little boy....

The Rose Diary

June 11, 1979; Paris

Three months after the Nevada meeting, in the fashionable St.-Germain section of Paris, Damian Rose swung back and forth on a rope hammock from Au Printemps. The hammock was tied to a heavy stonework terrace. The large pigeon-gray terrace overlooked the Jardin des Tuileries, the Seine, the Louvre. The scenery of Paris was as pretty as a Seurat painting this hazy morning.

Lying there in the late spring sun, Rose indulged himself in his one fatuous addiction: the reading of sensationalist newspapers and magazines.

After perusing The Boys_from Brazil, then glancing at the opening stories in the Enquirer, the overseas edition of Time magazine, and Soldier of Fortune, the elegant man rolled out of the hammock. Inside his and Carrie's apartment, he got out of a lamb's-wool pullover and expensive cream gabardines. Then he started to piece together the international costume of American students abroad.

He put on faded blue jeans, a police blue workshirt, lop-heeled Frye boots, and, finally, a red cow~ boy neckerchief. He applied light makeup to his eyes. Fitted a long dark wig over his own shorter hair.

today Damian Rose was going to play the part of a professor from the Sorbonne.

He had to buy a small supply of drugs in Les Halles: amphetamines, cocaine, Thai sticks. Then off to meet with a mercenary soldier who called himself the Cuban.

Tucking the workshirt tightly into Jockey shorts and zipping up his jeans, Damian walked through a living room overflowing with Broadway and Haymarket theater paraphernalia.

Then out the apartment's front door with a bang.

"Bonjour," he said to an emmerdeuse named Marie, an ancient woman who was always reading newspapers in the light of the hallway window.

Then boots clomped down marble stairs to a circular courtyard inside the building itself.

Damian climbed into a small black convertible in the courtyard. He left the convertible's top up. Windows partially up. Visors down. He put on blue air force-style sunglasses.

The sports car rolled out of the yard's black ironwork gates, and Rose started to hum an old song he liked very much-sweet "Lili Marlene."

It was a brilliantly clear and warm spring day now. White as paper.

The sweet smell of French bread baking filled the air on the narrow side streets.

As the shiny black car turned onto the boulevard St.-Germain, a bicyclists healthy-looking girl in an oatmeal @ top-stared her long, swafflike neck to see the face of the young man behind the sun-dappled windshield. The pretty girl wasn't quite fast enough.

As of June 1979, no one who shouldn't would know what the face of Damian Rose looked like.

April 24, 1979, Tuesday

Guilty!

CHAPTERTHREE

Bookkeeping... over the course of the year, we had to hire over a hundred different people. We paid out nearly $600,000 in overhead expenses. We paid forgers from Brussels, counterfeiters, gun salesmen from East Germany and the United States, informers, dope peddlers, whores, pickpockets. American intelligence men, top mercenaries like King Fish Toone, Blinkie Tomas (the Cuban), Clive Lawson. And not one of these people was ever told exactly what it was that we were putting together in the Caribbean....

The Rose Diary

The saying 'Mad dogs and Englishmen" refers obliquely to the fact that our sun will cook you like bacon. Beware Sign on beach at Turtle Bay

April 24, 1979; Coastown, San Dominica

Tuesday. The First Day of the Season.

Not by coincidence, April 24 marked the end of the most spectacularly newsworthy trial ever held on the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile Caribbean island of San Dominica.

Parts of the pyrotechnic high court scene were hard to imagine or describe.

For a beginning, the tiny, plain courtroom was packed to its high, square beam rafters. The room was as noisy as a sporting event. The slow-turning fans on the ceiling, like the ones in the movie Casablanca, were a sharp contrast to the frenzied atmosphere. The most perversely interesting of the defendants was fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet.

The five-foot-six-inch teenager had a slate black, intelligent face that was at the same time piggy and cruel. He had long black cornbraids that were sopping wet all through the trial, dripping at the ends like frayed rope hanging in the rain.

Every five minutes the boy's grandmother, his guardian, punctuated the final proceedings with a loud, pitiful scream from her seat in the courtroom gallery. "Leon!" she shouted. "My bway Leon! Oh, no, son! "

"You are murdering curs without any shame." The seventy-year-old judge, Andre Dowdy, lectured the teenager and the two grown men standing beside him.

"I feel no mercy toward any of you. Not even toward you, boy. I consider you all mad dogs.... "

Flanking Rachet, thirty-year-old Franklin Smith aimlessly shifted his weight from one orange workboot to the other; Chicki Holt-father of fourteen children by five women, the local newspaper liked to reprint with every new story on the trial-just stared up at the plain white ceiling and watched the slow fans. Frankly Chicki was bored.

Eight months earlier the same three men had stood outside a stammering Volkswagen Superbug one mile from the country town of New Burg. They'd robbed an American tourist, Francis Cichoski, a fireman from Waltham, Massachusetts, on a golfing vacation.

At the end of the broad-daylight holdup, one of the three blacks had knocked the white man down with the business side of a sugar-cane machete. The blow had killed Cichoski instantly. Then the man's crew-cut head had been chopped off and left lying on its cheek on the blacktop road.

In the eight months that followed, the motivation for the murder had been described as racial unrest; economic unrest; sex unrest; blood lust; obeah; soul music and kinky reggae; insanity; and, finally, the unsubtle beginning of a terrifying Pan-Caribbean revolution. These were not mutually exclusive, it was understood.

Recently, however, San Dominican's prime nun ister, Joe Walthey, had simplified the sociological aspects of the crime. "No matter what else," the dictatorial black said over rolling, blipping island TV, "these men must hang, or this island shall never find peace with itself again. Mark my words on this.

"The life of Francis Cichoski must be avenged," Walthey repeated @ times before he finally faded from the television screen.

At 10:30 A.M. Judge Andre Dowdy read his verdict in an unsteady, emotion-packed voice.

"All three of you men-Franklin Smith, Donald 'Chicki' Holt, Leon Elmore Rachet, " he read, "are found guilty of the murder as presented in evidence before me and this court. All of you will be taken to the Russville jail, and there be hanged no more than one week from today. May God have mercy on your souls. And on my own."

"An' on yo' ahss, too!" young Leon Rachet suddenly screamed out in the hushed courtroom. "An' on yo' ahss, Dowdy mon. "

Franklin Smith turned to the teenager, winced, and said, "Oohh, Leon, mon."

At 10:40 the dull gray roof of the Potts Rum Factory blew off like a slapstick comedian's hat;

then flashes of leaping flames of orange and red fired up into the balmy clear blue sky.

Literally within minutes, the Coastown factory was gone; an entire block of the capital was hopelessly ablaze.

At precisely 1:00 two white foremen were beaten senseless with ball bats at the Cow Park Bauxite Mines.

A hundred car windows were smashed in an executive parking lot.

The executive dining room was rushed, and all the prime ribs and hot hied chicken were either taken away or destroyed. Inside the courtroom in Coastown, meanwhile, Franklin Smith and Chicki Holt screamed obscenely at Judge Dowdy. Their already hoarse, long-haired American lawyer screamed at the elderly judge, too. they called him "mama's man"; "runny ass"; shit pussy"; "blood clot." Young Leon Rachet stood by quietly, simply watching. He reached inside his back pocket and produced a black beret for his sweaty head. At fifteen he fancied himself part Huey P. Newton, part Selassie, part Che. During the mad courtroom screaming, he turned to Franklin Smith and told the older man to shut his "black nager-boy mout."

Strangely, the thirty-year-old man did as he was told.

Outside the cigar-box courthouse, the reggae singer Bob Marley was being blasted from loudspeakers on top of a rainbow-colored VW van.

Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.

Angry black faces screamed at the courthouse building as if it were alive. Rude boys in the crowd carried posters promoting the cause of the revolutionary colonel Monkey Dred, and also of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Pretty, innocent-faced schoolchildren waved beautiful hand-painted banners-GO HOME ADMIRAL NELSON; GO HOME LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER; SAN DOMINICA A BLACK REPUBLIC.

Shiny-faced city policemen marched up Court Street behind see-through riot shields. People threw ripe fruit at the police. Mangoes, green coconuts, small melons.

A nut-skinned man in army fatigues ran up to a TV camera and made a bizarre, contorted face into the lens. "Aaahh deangerous!" he shouted, and became famous across the world.

a row of five Hertz rentals was blown up with plastique at Robert F. Kennedy Airport outside Coastown.

At 11:30 the three black murderers were led out onto the shiny white courthouse porch.

The San Dominican terrors were about to begin in earnest.

Fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet had on a Day-Glo flowered shirt and dark Tonton Macoute sunglasses. His black beret was tipped slightly over one eye. Deangerously. At first Rachet smiled broadly as he waved his handcuffed hands high over his head like a prizefight winner. Then, as the police shoved him down the glaring white steps, the boy began literally to scream at the sky

"Dred kill yo', mon! Monkey kill al you'! Slit al yo' troats. " Over and over the boy screamed out the name of an island revolutionary.

"Monkey Dred slit me own auntie's troat. Ayee! Ay-ee! "

. Suddenly a well-dressed black man in the crowd screamed out above all the other noise. "Gee-zass, mon. Oh, Gee-zass Ky-rist!"

Someone had thrown a sun-catching, silver Frisbee high up into the air. It curved down into the crowd around the handcuffed murderers.

As fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, where the back door of a black police Rover was flung open to receive him, his eyes turned up toward the suddenly descending silver Frisbee-and a white man in a Panama suit and hat stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots into the mad boy's face.

Carrie Rose watched the s@ge, possessed teenager crumple up and fall. She was among the large group of white tourists behind police lines. She hoped the rest of the terrors would go as smoothly as this one had.

Robert F. Kennedy Airport; Coastown, San Dominica

Tuesday Evening.

At 9:45 that night, an American Airlines Boeing 727 began its light, feathery approach down into San Dominica's Robert F. Kennedy Airport.

The massive silver plane glided in amazingly low over the blue-black Caribbean.

Big red lights blinked at one-second intervals on the plane's wings and tail. The red lights reflected beautifully off the dark blue sea.

Hidden in blackness beside a filling station near runway two, Damian Rose watched the pretty landing with considerable interest. He ran through his final plan one more time.

Meanwhile, out on runway one, the tires of the 727 were already touching down with the slightest bump and grind. A half-stoned calypso band began to play up near the main terminal.

The airplane's wheels screeched as its brakes and thrust-reversal system took hold.

As the plane reached a point halfway to its landing mark, Damian Rose was forced to make a decision. Raising an expensive German-made rifle to his cheek, he got a small dark box on the runway into the clear greenish light of his nightscope. He fired three times.

The unsophisticated bomb on the runway went off, drowning out the rifle explosions, and blew away a large section of the airplane's belly.

As the 727 rolled to a stop, flames burst from its midsection, then out the windows over its wings. Doors flew open, and emergency escape equipment tumbled outside. Screaming passengers started to come out of the airplane, some of them on fire.

The airport's two emergency trucks headed out toward the burning plane, slowly at first, their inexperienced drivers not believing what they were seeing.

A person's burning head was in one of the plane's tiny windows.

A white woman on fire ran across the dark tarmac, looking like a burning cross.

A stewardess stood at one door with her fingers buried in her frosted blond hair, screaming for help. Four hours later-when the fire was finally out six people from the 727 were dead, more than fifty others had been burned, and nobody on the island had a clue why it happened.

The next day the puzzle seemed to become a bit clearer.

April 25,, 1979,

Couple Slain On Beach

CHAPTER FOUR

In 1967, when we were selling fifty- and hundred-milligram bags of heroin, Damian told me that he aspired to be the greatest criminal mind in the world. He said that the world was ripe for a criminal hero: brilliant. with a little raffish touch of William Henry Bonney-a little Butch Cassidy gilding.... I liked that idea very much. I got to be Katharine Ross in the fantasy.

The Rose Diary

April 25, 1979; Turtle Bay, San Dominica

Wednesday Afternoon. The Second Day of the Season On the macadam highway that sliced through Turtle Bay, Peter Macdonald-a young man who was to play a large part in things to come-made his daily bicycle ride through the lush, sun-streaked paradise.

As he pedaled a ten-speed Peugeot, Macdonald was enjoying the extra luxury of recalling several foolish glories out of his past.

Nearly twenty-nine years old, Peter rode well enough. He looked healthy. Physically he was an attention getter. A pleasantly muscular six feet one, he rode in holey gray gym shorts with Property of USMA West Point printed in gold on one leg.

He wore ragged Converse All-Star sneakers from Herman Spiegel's Sportin' Supplies in Grand Rapids, Michigan... gray-and-red SnoWhird socks that made his feet peel their yellowing calluses... a bent, dusty Detroit Tigers souvenir hat that looked as if it had been worn every day of his life. And nearly had been.

Underneath the baseball hat, his chestnut-colored hair was cut short, very high up on the sides. It was a real throWhack haircut-a cut they used to call a "West Pointer."

Nearly everything about Peter Macdonald was throWhack: his young lumbedack's good looks; his high Episcopal morals, philosophies; Midwestern fanner stubbornness. Everything except for the last four months, anyway-the times he'd spent on San Dominica-the four months he'd been a lackey bartender, a beachcomber, a fornicator. Quite frankly, a nothing.

As he passed through the island hills, gnats began to swim in the sweat on his strong back.

Peter the Ridiculous, his girlfriend, Jane Cooke, Red to say in private places.

Once upon a time Peter had run around Michigan like that: quietly, desperately, ridiculously... in winter... in ten-pound black rubber sea boots.

Once upon a time he'd been an army brat-the last of the six Macdonald brothers, the last of the Super Six; then he'd been a West Point cadet; then a Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Old foolish glories.

When the high weeds and banana plants started to get too thick-buggy, disturbingly itchy-Peter rode closer to the sea, on the wrong side of the twolane Shore Highway. He was getting tired now. Rhythm going all to hell. Breaking down. Paradise Lost.

He looked down on the starry Caribbean-Turtle Bay-and thought that he would take a swim after his ride. Find Jane and take a dip with her... maybe talk her into spending the afternoon in bed.

He was very, very tired now, though. Knees threatened to wipe out his chin. Pedals fell flat as pancakes.

Stik-shhh, stik-shhh, stik-shhh, stik-shhh...

Shiny with sweat, Peter came around a sharp bend in the highway... and saw Damian Rose... thirty yards ahead of him on the road.

The tall blond man stood with a rifle in the crook of his arm, looking out over the sea.

Peter's first thought was that the blond man was enjoying some impromptu hunting. Pigs, most likely.

He could see the man's car parked a little way up the road. Green sedan. License plate CY and a few numbers.

Local?... Hadn't seen him around.... Must be renting a villa.... Looked rich enough. Snobby,too....

For some reason Peter took the man to be an Englishman.... He saw the flash of a tag marked "Harrods" inside the man's jacket.... The tall blond Englishman. Smashing.

As he passed by, the blond man turned and yelled out to him. Almost as if he'd been in a trance.

He yelled "Constitutional!" Some long word....

Macdonald took it for a greeting. Waved. Kept riding.

He even picked up his speed a little. The slightest show-off move: Daniel Morelon imitation. That saved him, they said.

The whole scene took less than fifteen seconds. Fifteen mind-bending, life-changing seconds. Then, another turn down the Shore Highway

bicycle flew downhill like a bat whistling-Peter was startled by a loud thrashing in the kelly green bush leading down to the beach.

He expected a little band of goats or some wild pigs. What he saw were two sweating, barebacked blacks running up the hill.

One of the men, the Cuban, was covered with blood. Smears that looked like finger paints.

All of which would eventually send tremendous shock waves through the CIA, the Cosa Nostra, the San Dominican government.... At a cost of one and a quarter million dollars, the Roses weren't supposed to leave witnesses.

As for Peter Macdonald, he was in deep trouble... but at least he was on the run.

CHAPTER FIVE

In Paris, he would sleep no more than three or four hours during the months before we left for the Caribbean. Usually, he'd go to bed around five in the morning.

Until then, he'd just be sitting in front of a gooseneck lamp, turned so the bright light was almost shining in his face. Thinking things through. He'd, sleep three or four hours, then be up by nine at the latest.

Thinking some more about the machetes.

The Rose Diary

Michael O'Mara and his wife, Faye, were walking very, very slowly.

Sand worshipers, they plodded westward, from cove to shining cove.

Sixty-year-old Faye hummed absently to herself. She made up a silly tune for "She sells seashells by the seashore."

From a distance, Mike and Faye looked like two old men down on the beach... as they turned a sharp bend and entered Turtle Bay.

"No wonder I'm so damn achy and tired," Mike said, hitching his baggy, electric blue swim trunks every fourth or fifth step, walking with his feet splayed out like a large arthritic duck.

"I can't sleep at these goddamn, ridiculous hotel prices. Who can sleep at forty... no. What is it? Fifty?... No, forty. Say thirty dollars every time you snooze.... I'll wait'll Coastown to sleep at those prices. At those prices, I'll wait'll we get back home if I have to."

Faye laughed right into the long ash of Mike's cigar. "That's very humorous, Miguel."

She stooped to pick up a nutmeg seashell, and her stomach bounced like a beach ball in her onepiece bathing suit. "Ha. Ha. Ha. That really cracks me up. Hee, hee. See, I'm laughing."

"Laugh away. Room in Coastown's thirty bucks for a double. European plan. That place I think I could sleep, maybe. Shit fire and save matches. Skip eatin' dinners altogether. Cut out the goat steaks easy enough.

Which part Faye didn't really hear-not this time around on the familiar broken, skipping record: Mike. Instead the big white-haired lady seemed annoyed at the shell she'd just found.

"I hate some people." She weighed the tiny shell scientifically in her palm. "The way they make ashtrays out of these beautiful things. Nature's wonders. Such a waste. And sooo tacky."

Mike O'Mara briefly examined his wife's new treasure. He thought he heard somebody coming and looked off toward the bushes. Nothing. Couldn't see worth a shit anymore.

He dropped her seashell in the rope net bag he was dragging along the hot sand. Began to feel a little like a Fairmount Park sanitation man, he thought. Asshole seashells.

"Who gets this work of art?" he asked in the seldom used, nonshouting voice he used as "good old Mike," doorman and purveyor of goodwill at the Rittenhouse Club in Philadelphia. "That one goes to Libby Gibbs." Faye stooped for another shell, a rose murex, she thought. "Uhnn... which leaves Aunt Betsy, Bobo, Yacky. And Mama.

Mike stooped down and splashed cool water around his ankles. Pink, swollen, starting-to-blister ankles. Damn. Jaysus Christ Almighty. was he actually paying good money to be tortured like this?

When he straightened up, he took his wife's soft, flabby upper arm. Danunit, he owed her this trip. He really did. Second honeymoon? Whatever you wanted to call it.

"Faye Wray," he said. "It's just that I don't understand why we have to fly away to some isd.... Then buy presents for everybody and their brother.... Now if this was the Christmas Islands... "

Suddenly Faye O'Mara looked awfully sad and tired. She was thinking that her kids didn't care anymore. Mike certainly didn't care. Nobody in this big wide world cared a whit what she thought about anything.

"Aren't you having fun here, Mike?" she asked for real. Serious. Then the bucktoothed Irishwoman grinned-the eternal struggle between the two of them-sharing that... something... making her smile and feel tender toward Mike.

The answer to her question never came, though.

Because Mike O'Mara was running for the first time in fifteen years. Huffing and puffing forward, looking as if his knees were locked.

He couldn't believe his eyes and waved for Faye to stay back. "Go back, Faye. Go back."

The Philadelphia doorman had found a bloody machete driven halfway to China in the sand. He'd found the two hippies who had been killed and mutilated by the Cuban and Kingfish Toone. And so had a hungry band of wild goats.

CHAPTER SIX

We forget that policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings for the most part. Damian said that they are basically unequipped to deal with the creative personality (criminal). It's impossible for them now, and it's getting worse. An amoral generation is coming up

fast. Can another police state be far behind?

The Rose Diary

Wednesday Evening

It was getting dark fast, black and blue and pink out over the Caribbean, when the chief of San Dominica's police force came to see the extraordinary machete murders.

Twenty or so less important policemen and army officials had already arrived. they were deployed all over the beach, like survey engineers.

Taking notes. Making measurements. Spreading out litters and yellow sheets that looked like rain slickers from a distance.

The policemen's white pith helmets floated through the crowd like carnival balloons.

Before he did anything else, the chief of police counted the valuable helmets on the heads of his men.

Then Dr. Meral Johnson quietly pushed himself through a buzzing ring of bathing suits and cutoff blue jeans; bald heads and brown freckled decolletage; double-knit leisure suits and pantsuits and flowing Empire dresses.

At least four hundred very frightened and very confused vacationers had gathered on the fingercove beach.

to get a look at the bodies.

And then not to believe their own eyes; not to believe their luck.

Once he was inside the circus of people, Dr. Johnson stopped to catch his breath. He lit up a stumpy black Albertson pipe. Pup, pup, PUP,

PUP...

The Americans were restless tonight! He made a small joke, then quickly felt very bad about it. Very bad. Awful.

A little shorter than five feet ten, four-eyed, seersuckered, two hundred fifty pounds, Metal Johnson looked rather tenuous as a policeman, he knew. Tenuous, or was it timorous?

More like a proper, stern West Indian schoolmaster-which he'd been-than a Joseph Wambaugh-style policeman come to solve grisly murders. More like a hick islander who polished his shoes with palm oil, his teeth with baking soda.

Well, so be it, Meral Johnson thought to himself. So be it. The massive policeman thereupon entered the machete Terrors.

Almost instantly the flustered German manager of the nearby Plantation Inn began to shout at him.

"What took you so long? Now you stop to smoke a pipe?"

Dr. Johnson paid the hotel manager as much attention as he would some sandfly buzzing around his trousers cuffs. Speaking to none of his subordinates first, he began to walk around the yellow rubber sheets that covered bits and pieces of the teenagers' bodies.

After his short walk, the police chief stood with his back to the sea and simply watched the scene of the double murder. He tried to bring his mind back down on an even keel.

The manager of the Plantation Inn had apparently ordered his waiters to cordon off the bodies of the two young people.

The waiters, mostly old blacks with fuzzy white crew cuts-eaming less than thirty dollars a week-stood at parade-ground attention in their stiff white dinner jackets. Each man had on black dress shoes with especially shiny toes. Each held a flaming torch removed from the inn's dining veranda. Each of the waiters looked sad and dignified and, above all, respectful of the terrible situation.

The scene was extraordinary-both colonial and primitive-and Johnson wanted to be certain he had it reproduced, burned into his optic nerve, before he began the thumb-screwing work ahead of him this night.

What a sight-tragedy, mystery. The worst he'd ever come upon.

First, Dr. Johnson approached the very inexperienced, frightened constable of Turtle Bay District.

Almost since he had arrived, twenty-eight-yearold Bobbie Valentine had been kneeling among the rubber sheets, looking like a mourner, looking as if he would be sick to his stomach. Meral Johnson kneeled and spoke to the man in a clear, relatively clean, Oxbridge accent. No trace of island patois.

"What is your thought here, Bobbie?" he asked. A short pause, then he answered his own question. "I think Colonel Dred, perhaps. He's contacted the newspapers and claimed responsibility, at least."

Before the constable had a chance to agree or disagree, the German hotel manager spoke over both their heads.

"I am Maximilian Westerhuis," he announced with authority-almost titular emphasis. "I manage the Plantation Inn. These two dead... "

The large black policeman stood up faster than seemed possible. His dark eyes flashed. Looking convincingly nasty, Johnson said the first thing that entered his head.

"You wish to make a confession here?"

Westerhuis took a confused step backward. "Of course not. Confessions?... Don't be absurd with me....

"Then I am talking to this very good policeman now." Dr. Johnson's voice returned to its usual polite whisper. "Please wait for me, Mr. Westerhuis. On the far side of your service crew."

The inn manager, tall, white blond, said nothing further. He stalked off angrily.

"Nazi, " Johnson muttered-an obvious idea that nonetheless went completely over the head of Constable Valentine. "I must do something about this crowd," Johnson said. "Something smart would be preferable."

Smoking his black pipe, the police chief started to walk from sheet to sheet again. Very gently he lifted the bulky rubber covers, then put them back exactly as they had been. It looked almost as if the policeman were checking on small sleeping children.

He stayed over the severed head of the young woman for what seemed like a very long time. Shining a small pocket light on the bodies, he studied the bloody faces and skulls.

The crowd of hotel guests became silent as he worked. Every man and woman watched him, but the police chief never looked up. For the first time in hours, you could hear birds in the air at Turtle Bay; you could hear the sea lapping.

Finally, with his head still down, as respectful as the old black waiters, Dr. Johnson walked back to his constable.

He'd spent the previous ten minutes, the entire slow dance back through the mutilated bodies, simply trying to gain some confidence from this crowd. to give them the impression that he'd handled murders like this before.

Now, maybe, he could begin some kind of investigation.

Using his handkerchief, he started by wriggling the sugar-cane machete out of the sand. He held the sharp broadsword up to the light of the moon.

"Hmmm," he muttered out loud. "Make sure no one takes any souvenirs." He spoke in a lower voice to Constable Bobbie Valentine. "Americans like souvenirs of disaster. We learned at least that much at the airplane fire....

"And one final thing, Bobbie. Will you spread this word for me?... If any of these men sell their hats as souvenirs, tell them they'll be selling pukka beads and seashells on the streets by this time tomorrow night. I counted sixteen hats coming down here!

Coastown, San- Dominica

At 7:45 the young man who looked like Montgomery Clift sat alone at a shadowy table on the veranda of the Coastown Princess Hotel.

As he sipped a Cutty Sark Scotch with Perrier water, he tapped his swizzle stick to the soft calypso beat of "Marianne Brooks Campbell was starting to get nervous.

Small problem: He was afraid the other people on the patio were beginning to notice that he was sitting there all by his lonesome.

Slightly larger problem: His Afro-haired waiter was hassling him, trying to get him to leave so a bigger party could sit at the table.

Very large problem: Darnian Rose was half an hour late for their first, presumably their only, face-to-face meeting.

Brooks Campbell didn't know all the details about Turtle Bay yet, but the general way the Roses worked was beginning to grate on his nerves. At first there were supposed to be only ten or twelve deaths on San Dominica, something like the 1973 uprisings on St. Croix. Now it looked as if it would be worse than that. Much worse. Rose was handling everything his own idiosyncratic way, and that was why Campbell had asked for the meeting. Demanded a meeting.

At 8:15 Damian Rose still hadn't appeared.

Campbell sat and watched a huge artificial waterfall dump endless gallons of water into an epic swimming pool directly below the patio. He watched couples in bathing suits as they wound their way along pretty paths lined with palm and Casuarina trees.

The small combo was playing a reggae tune now-"The Harder they Come." Revolutionary music.

By 8:45 Brooks Campbell realized that he wasn't going to meet Damian Rose.

Campbell had a sneaking suspicion that no one was ever going to see the mysterious soldier of fortune.

At nine o'clock the handsome thirty-one-year-old paid his bar bill at the Princess. He walked the twelve blocks to the U.S. embassy; heard war drams in the air out on the streets. Back at the embassy, he was greeted with the most disturbing news of his career.

Someone had seen a tall blond man at Turtle Bay that afternoon.

Someone had finally seen the face of Damian Rose.

Turtle Bay, San Dominica

The field machete left in the sand at Turtle Bay was half scythe, half butcher's cleaver.

From the look of it, it had seen heavy use on a sugar plantation or in the West Hills jungle. The knife part was twenty-six inches long, four inches wide. Heavy-duty steel. The wooden handle was seven inches, warped, badly nicked, with big rivets like a kitchen carving knife. When it was held in one hand, the machete brought to mind cutlasses and sword fighting.

Sitting in the paperback library at the Plantation Inn, Dr. Meral Johnson examined the sharp knife for a long time.

He held it up close to a bright reading lamp. He whipped it through the air, cutting at shadows. Scary weapon. Johnson had personally seen a machete cut a goat in half at a swipe.

The weary policeman plopped down on an old monis chair in the library. He began to sort through some of the loose, contradictory details of the case - -. the Turtle Bay massacre. The American Airlines' plane that was bombed. The curious shooting of Leon Rachet.

Right then, the best Dr. Johnson figured he could do was concentrate on details that might lead him or the army to the island revolutionary Monkey Dred. He instructed his men to do the same in their investigations.

It was an honest but costly mistake-and one the Roses had counted on.

Policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings... Witnesses.

A tennis pro and his wife from Saddle River, New Jersey, had seen a black hobo on the beach near the time of the machete murders.

An elderly Englishwoman saw a group of "unruly native boys" congregating in the royal palms just beyond the inn's main stretch of beach.

A couple from Georgia remembered seeing an old black man with some mangy goats on a rope leash.

A pretty eleven-year-old girl was brought to Dr. Johnson because she had a story, her mother said. The girl explained that around eight o'clock that evening, she'd locked herself in her mother's suite. Then she'd screamed bloody murder until one of the hotel bartenders-Peter Macdonald-came and broke down the door with a fire ax. The girl's mother, an actress, wanted the police chief to get both of them on an airplane back to New York

that evening. Crying, occasionally screaming at the black man, she said that her daughter was about to have a nervous breakdown.

Simultaneously, another group of "witnesses" was being questioned inside the inn's main business office.

" You're one of the bartenders here." Constable Bobbie Valentine spoke softly at first. The country policeman was sitting behind a Royal office typewriter, only occasionally glancing up from his notepad. "Talk to me, mon. " ,

In as few words as possible, Peter Macdonald tried to explain what he'd seen bike riding up on the Shore Highway that afternoon.

He described Dwnian Rose as English looking: tta tall blond Englishman."

He told the constable about the two blacks who'd come up from the beach, dripping with blood. He mentioned the expensive German rifle, the green sedan; he even described the coat from Harrods in London.

When he was finished, the black constable seemed to be smirking. He looked at Peter as if he were just another American nut on the loose. A crank case. " Dat's good, mon, " the policeman said. "Next, please," he called out the open office door.

Peter could feel himself starting to get a little angry. "Hey, could you wait a minute?" he said.

"Slow down for just a second, please. Okay? I understand that you're seeing a lot of very upset people tonight. I know it's crazy around here.... But what about this Englishman?"

"I took notes." The black man held up his pad. "Anyway, we already know about dem killers. Colonel Dred. Bad-ass. You know about Dred, mon? Nah, you don't know 'bout Dred. "

"I don't know much about him." Peter tried to break through to the policeman. "But I saw a blond white man up there where those two poor kids were killed. I saw a lot of blood on a couple of black guys who looked like they'd just strangled a grammar-school class with their bare hands. I got scared, and I don't get scared very easily."

Once again the policeman seemed to be smirking. He was so know-it-all in his attitude, Peter wanted to rap him.

"I know, mon. I know it. Blond Englishmon type. Tall. Green car license starts CY. Check it out for you, mon. Check it out.... Okay-who's next with stories here?"

As the only legitimate witness walked out of the investigation... as the unbelievable confusion and mistakes just started to mount... Dr. Meral Johnson wandered out on the dark Plantation grounds.

CHAPTER SEVEN

People never want to die, for some strange reason. Especially young people.

Especially young, unfulfilled singles on vacations they can't afford. Originally, we'd planned the First machete murders for the island's version of Club Mediterranee. The Plantation Inn was chosen because of secondary considerations.

The Rose Diary

Turtle Say, San Dominica

In the noisy background of the Plantation Inn's Cricket Lounge, a young, bone-tanned woman complained that she would never be able to shut her eyes and catch some sun at a beach again.

"Two murders. Just like the movies," someone was saying-a short-haired man with a coke spoon dangling around his neck.

Up at the lounge bar, Peter Macdonald talked to his girlfriend, Jane Cooke. He also served up galIons of planter's and boom -boom punch; rum toddies; Jamaica coffee; swizzles; fog-cutters-and an amazing quantity of good old-fashioned neat whiskey.

"I know how paranoid this sounds," he said to Jane, "but the police didn't seem to want to listen.

"That constable took your statement. He did, didn't he?"

"Yeah. I guess. But he seemed to have the whole thing wrapped up, Janie. Colonel Dred! Colonel Dred! Forget everything else. The tall blond man. The fancy rifle. Jesus, I don't know. I hope they're right.... It's just that they weren't very professional about it. It was like Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour in there.

"Ahhh, Pee-ter, mon."

The lilting voice of the lounge calypso singer drifted across the room.

Then the singer whistled into his microphone. He tapped the mike with a long, effeminate fingernail. Blew softly into strange, snaky bamboo pipes.

"No need be afraid of Leon," he whispered to his white audience. Couples out of John O'Hara and John Marquand. Lots of bright WASPY green in their o@tfits-green and Bermuda pink.

He sang to them. "San Dominic' woman's love day say... is lak a momin' dew.... Jus' as lakly it fall on de horse's turd... as on de rose."

The singer laughed. A pretty imitation of Geoffrey Holder.

A few people in the dark, red-lantemed bar started to clap.

Peter Macdonald pulled at a bicycle bell hidden somewhere in the liquor bottles over the bar. "I wan' tcr, sing yo peoples lubbley song 'bout sech a oom@n," the singer went on. "'Bout her rose. An'... well, you know it, my friends... de unworty objet ub dat gal's affection. Me own rival. A real shit!"

At the same time, Chief of Police Meral Johnson walked down damp stone stairs, then along a row of cells in the dimly lit medieval basement of the Coastown jail.

-Walking behind him was a lineup of seven policemen and clerks. Nearly everyone in the Coastown jail at that late hour. The somber parade turned down another row of cells. Then another. At the end of the third row, a tall, perspiring constable waited beside an open, steel-plated door. Inside the cell, the chief of police could already see the white man who shot Leon Rachet the previous morning.

The mysterious, middle-aged white man was lying on his cot with both arms spread wide. His hairy bare legs dangled off one end of the bed. A puddle of urine and blood ran out of the cell, right down a big drain in the dirty corridor.

While Dr. Johnson had been out at the Plantation Inn, the man had been murdered.

Killed in his bed. In jail. By a sugar-cane machete.

The crude knife was sticking out of the dead man's hairy belly-a red wool cap hung carefully on its hilt.

"Monkey Dred," Johnson whispered.

"Pee-ter! Pee-ter!" The calypso singer's sweet voice drifted across the Cricket Lounge.

"Tell me dis one ting, mon?... What be de difference be-tween Ifishmon wedding an' Irishmon wake?"

Sulking, a little embarrassed, Peter resisted. He didn't want to be a part of the show tonight. Not tonight. Not with the image of the mutilated nineteen-year-olds crawling through his mind like bloodwonns.

"So what's the difference?" someone called out from the dark bar.

Peter looked at Jane and could see the samewhat? distaste? nausea?

"One less drunk?" The chestnut-haired man finally gave in; yanked the asinine bicycle bell, feltvery strangely, dumbly-a little homesick.

May 3, 1979, Thursday Tourists Flee Resort Hotels!

"Go from Slush to Lush!" Magazine Ad for San Dominica

Nine murders were reported around the resort island on the third day.

Two knifings; two pistol shootings; a forced drowning; four machete killings.

Sophisticated TV news crews began to arrive on San Dominica in the early afternoon: hippie cameramen, soundmen who looked like NASA engineers, "California Dreaming" directors, assistant directors, reporters, and commentators. Crews came from ABC, CBS, NBC. they came from local stations in New York City, Miami, and Chicago. Apparently the machete murders were an especially popular item in Chicago and New York.

Reporters and crew members were given hazard 75 dangerous pay just as they received for covering combat assignments, urban riots, or madmen on the loose.

Newspaper correspondents-quieter types, less lose Angelese-started to arrive, too.

they came from the States, of course, but they also began to come in from Western Europe; from Africa and Asia; and especially from South America. The Third World countries were particularly well represented.

The newshounds smelled a revolution! Meanwhile, police and army experts were predicting that the sudden, mind-boggling violence would either die down completely-orflare up all over the Caribbean. So far-even with Colonel Dred as an obvious target-it was a hell of a mystery.

CHAPTEREIGHT

We had learned long before we ever saw the Caribbean that beautiful scenery provides the most chilling background for any kind of terrorism.

The Rose Diary

May 3, 1979;. Titchfleld Cove, San Dominica

Thursday Morning The Third Day of the Season.

Dressed in loose-fitting blue jeans and a blue cotton T-shirt, Damian Rose climbed hard and as fast as possible. He moved toward huge outcroppings of black rock poised above the Shore Highway.

High up in the rocks, the lazy island trade winds had chiseled two primitive heads over centuries and centuries-neither of which, Rose was thinking as he moved along, had been worth the hot air and bother.

His fingers curled into small cracks, Rose pulled himself up over countless tiny ledges toward the sea blue sky. He could feel his boots crunching loose rocks as he ascended; he could taste his own salty sweat. After fifteen minutes of hard climbing, he pulled himself onto a barren ledge of flat rock. The small jut of rock was about four feet long, less than three feet wide. Close up, the black rock was loaded with specks of shiny mica. Mica and tiny seagull bones.

From the gull's high burial ground, Damian could see everything he needed to see.

The morning after the Turtle Bay murders had turned out crisp and pure, with a high blue sky all over the Caribbean. A hawk flew directly over his head, watching the empty highway and watching him, it seemed. Far below, the sea was choppy in spite of the pacific blue skies. Brown reefs were visible on the outskirts of Titchfield Cove. There was a long, dramatic stretch of crystal beach that ended in another hill of high black rocks.

Damian Rose began to concentrate on a slightly balding dark-haired man and his two children as they walked down the perfect beach.

The three of them were getting their feet and legs wet in the creamy surf... walking along as if they were waiting for the man who photographed such moments for postcards and greeting cards.

Damian took out two lengths of streamlined black pipe. He began to screw them together. Made a barrel. Screwed the longer pipe into a lightweight stock. Made a gun. Added a sniper's scope from his backpack.

The dark-haired man, Walter Marks, dived over a small blue wave and disappeared.

His boy and little girl seemed leery of the water. Attractive children, Rose bothered to notice. Two blonds, like their mother.

Their father was an ass to take them out the morning after the machete killings. A shallow, foolish ass. Promised them a vacation. Always kept his promises.

Rose put the sight of the German rifle to his eye. Thin crosshairs that didn't meet.

He watched Marks's slick brown hair surface in bubbles. The man stood up, and the water was only to his waist. He had a very hairy chest: brown hair that seemed to turn black in wet tufts.

Through the powerful Zeiss sight, Walter Marks seemed close enough to reach out and touch. Rose saw the Cuban waving from high weeds not far behind the beach. "Shooting goldfish in a bowl": he remembered a strange, wonderful saying.

Damian squeezed off just one shot.

Walter Marks fell over backward in the three foot-high water. He looked as if he were trying to step back over a wave to amuse his children.

The bullet had gone through the center of his forehead, spitting out brain like a corkscrew.

The children began to scream at once. they hugged each other and seemed to be dancing in the suddenly pinkish water.

Kingfish and the Cuban appeared with the machete. The Roses' inspired buck-and-wing team. Wading out into the sea.

Fortunately, but at the same time unfortunately for the Marks children, there had to be witnesses this time. The witnesses were to be the children themselves.

Too bad, Rose thought for a split second. And yet perfect.

The cold-blooded murder of the president of ASTA. The public execution of the president of the American Society of Travel Agents.

Who deserved it for being such a pompous fool. For ignoring all the warnings.

Turtle Bay, San Dominica

Somewhere in the U.S. Marine annals, it says that "a Marine on Embassy Duty is an Ambassador in uniform. "

Clearly out of uniform-dressed in gray insignia shorts and nothing else-twenty-four embassy duty marines spent the morning of May 3 conducting a dreaded sector search of the beach at Turtle Bay.

The muscular soldiers picked up driftwood, seahorses, periwinkle, clear, rubbery jellyfish. they picked up chewing gum, matches, lint, stomachturning shreds of human flesh, strands of hair, the nub of a woman's finger. they picked up everything on the beach that wasn't sand: literally everything.

they put whatever they found into heavy-duty plastic bags marked XYXYXY.

Then the marine captain ordered his men to "rake the sand back to normal."

Hand in hand up on the Shore Highway, Peter Macdonald and Jane Cooke watched the dubious detective work going on all over the beach.

Beside a big man like Macdonald, Jane seemed -slighter than she really was. Close up, she was somewhat big-boned-an old-fashioned rnidwestem beauty right out of Nelson Algren. Freckles, dimples, long blond hair a river of curls.

Before she'd become a social director at the Plantation Inn, Jane had been a high-school English teacher in Pierre, South Dakota. At twenty-one she'd married another English teacher; miscarried their future Joyce Carol Oates in a Pien-e shopping mall; was separated at twenty-three.

After that, Jane had decided to see a little bit more of the world than the Dakota Badlands. She'd traveled down to South America. Traveled up to the Caribbean. Haiti, finally San Dominica. Then Peter Macdonald. Crazy, funny Peter-who reininded her of a poem-also of a Simon & Garfunkel song called "Richard Cory."

Before he'd come to the Plantation Inn, Peter had been, first and foremost, the last and least worthy (in his own mind, anyway) of the six Macdonald brothers. Three college baseball stars, two academic big deals-and then Peter. Little Mac.

As a result, Peter had become a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (like his fatherBig Mac). He'd left West Point after his second class year-become a soldier for real. A Special Forces sergeant; decorated twice; shot in the back once. A war hero-whatever that was in the midseventies.

With a little luck and good planning that winter, he'd wound up in the sunny Caribbean. R&R... "Getting your shit together," his suddenly contemporary-as-hell father had written in a long letter.... He'd met Jane in September, and they'd moved in together by the end of the month. Both of them living and working at the ritzy Plantation Inn... not bad.

Jane had only one question about the marines working down on Turtle Bay. "What in heck do they do it for?" Peter found himself smiling. "Rake dirt?.

don't know what for. they don't know. Somebody probably knew why at one time or another. Now they just do it. Soldiers rake dirt on every military base in the world."

"Well, it's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. One of the dumbest. It's dumber than baseball. " Jane grinned.

"It's a whole lot dumber when you're behind the rake. That's okay, though.... Let's walk.... By the way, baseball isn't dumb."

they walked up through a lot of banana and breadfruit trees. A pretty jungle with a few parrots and cockatoos to spice things up. Kling-kling birds, too.

Macdonald took his baseball cap out of a back pocket and tugged it on to keep out bugs.

"What are you going to do now, Peter?" she finally asked him.

Macdonald sighed. "I don't know what I should do.... Maybe the murders were just what the police say. Dassie Dred making sure his people get fair trials from now on. No more hanging sentences. Simple as that." "And the Englishman?"

"Ah, the bloody white man. The damn, tall, blond, Day-of- the-fucking-Jackal character. Complicating our beautifully uncomplicated existence.

Peter picked up a rock and sidearmed a high inside curve around a banana tree. "You know what else?... I'm starting to feel bad about wasting my life all of a sudden.... Anything but that, dear God. Please don't make me feel guilty about feeling good. See, I was just in this fucked-up war and... "

Jane put her arms around Peter's slim waist. Behind him she could see sharp blue sea through palm leaves. It was all so perfect-that most of the time she didn't completely believe in it.

"Tell me this, Peter Macdonald. Where does it say that not killing yourself working is wasting your life?"

Macdonald sn-dled at the wise blond girl. He held on to one of her soft breasts and kissed her mouth gently. "I'm not sure... but it's engraved on my brain. I feel that exact thought grinding away in there every day that I'm down here. Every time I dive into the deep blue sea." He put his hand over his mouth. When he did that, his voice came out deep and strange. "Get yourself a decent job, Macdonald, you bum. Shape UP before it's all over, Pete. Be somebody or be gone.... Anyway"-his voice came back to normal-"I guess I have to do something about the Englishman, huh, Laurel?"

Jane winced slightly. In their little South Seas fantasy world-their paradise life in the Caribbean-she was called Laurel; Peter was Hardy-haha.

"I wish you wouldn't," the blond woman said. "Really. I'm serious, Peter."

"I have to try one more thing," Peter said.

For that moment, though-at 8:30 on Thursday morning-the two of them made a little clearing on the pretty hillside. they lay down together like two missionary lovers.

Peter pulled gently at the white shirt knotted under her breasts. Jane lifted her slender arms - Let the loose white shirt go up around her neck, shoulders.

"I love you so much," she whispered. "Just thought I'd say that."

He took a soft, cool breast in each hand. Unzipped her shorts - Slid shorts and panties down over her dark brown legs. She unbuckled red L. L. Bean suspenders, pulled at blue jeans, helped him out of underwear and baseball hat. He was kissing her everywhere, tonguing her nipples for a long, lazy time. Feeling soft, invisible down on her stomach. Smelling coconut oil.

Peter entered Jane slowly, an inch at a time, then long, slow thrusts..... they stopped each other twice. Delaying, saving Then they came with little spasms that made them dizzy. A long climax, both of them whispering as if they were in church.

When they finally sat up again, all the marines were gone. Turtle Bay looked perfect and innocent again. Raked neat as a farmer's field.

Chuk, chuk, chuk was the sound machetes made cutting sugar cane.

Chik, chik, chik was the sound Peter heard.

Chik, chik, chik.

Chik, chik, chik. Chik, chik, chik. Cashoo.

Peter had found Maximilian Westerhuis tabulating fancy yellow-on-white hotel bills in his eighthy-eight office, wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses, looking somewhat mathematical. A cipher.

The coal black machine the German used for counting looked as if it had somehow survived the Weimar Republic. In addition to the machine, there were red-and-blue-edged letter envelopes scattered all over the inn manager's desk: news from the Fatherland.

Resting on some of the papers was a big foamy mug of W@burger dark.

Peter stood in the doorway, reluctant to announce himself to the huffy young German. Then the pecking on the adding machine stopped.

"Peter, what do you want? Can't you see I'm too busy with all of these fools checking out of the hotel?"

Looking slightly dizzy, the white-blond man eyed him with distaste over his wire rims. "Macdonald, what is it you want! " The strident voice came once again. I want to beam myself right back out of your office, Peter was thinking. You're so full of yourself, hot shit and vinegar, that it turns my stomach.

"I have to ask a personal favor," Peter said softly, wincing inside at the toady way the words came out. Playing Heinrich Himmler to Max's Hitler. "I need to borrow your BMW."

The inn manager huffed out a small nose laugh. "Borrow my motorcycle? Have you gone mad? Leave me alone. Get out of here."

"Yeah, well, in a minute.... You see, I've got to talk to somebody else about the man I saw on the Shore Highway yesterday. It's bothering me, Max. I've got to find out why the hell they-"

"You talked to me, Macdonald," Westerhuis cut in. "I talked to the stupid newspaper people. You talked to the policeman last night. People know about your man up on the hill, night wahr? Now I tell you, leave. You don't ever call me Max, by the way. "

Peter suddenly cut off all pretense of diplomacy. "I want to talk to the American ambassador in Coastown!... Lives could be at issue here, Westerhuis. I need your fucking BMW for two or three hours. That's it, you know. Be a human being, huh? Pretend. "

The inn manager began to use one side of his metal office desk like a brass drum. "Absolutely not!" he pounded. "I thought it over for five seconds, and the answer is no! Now get out of here. One more word and I fire you as bartender Johnny on the spot."

Peter turned away and started out of the claustrophobic office. "Peter on the spot," he mumbled. "Screw you, you Nazi- love child."

"What is that I hear?" Westerhuis called out the door after him.

Then, chik, chik, chik, he was operating the antique tabulator again, thinking: Poor damn fool Peter Macdonald. Poor fool bartender. Should have stayed in the army for your entire life. Outside, an expensive-looking silver key was turning the ignition of the shiny black BMW motorcycle-Peter Macdonald and Jane Cooke had taken big steps in the wrong crazy direction. Both of them were about to jump in way over their heads.

Peter said, "Sure. Max said it was okay.... Hang on tight, here we go!"

Which was, perhaps, the understatement of the decade.

CHAPTER NINE

I believed that Damian could be happy in Europe on $10 a day. I could be content, I think, on Jacqueline Onassis's $ 1 0,000 a week. Sometimes I find myself reading Cosmopolitan and identifying with Jackie. Weird fantasy lifel I've even plotted out how I could get to marry one (or more) of the world's richest men.... Damian could be wealthy if he cared primarily about money. Damian could be an international film star like Bronson or Clint Eastwood. or the still-life president of General Motors. Damian could be, Damian could be... sitting on rocks in Crete. Starting to repeat myself as I approach thirty. Scary thoughts for your basic hick out of Nebraska.

The Rose Diary

Coastown, San Dominica

In the middle of a world of hack-arounds-fruit and straw vendors, fruits, package-rate tourists, cabdrivers by the gross, beeping double-decker buses-Carrie Rose looked around Politician Square and tried to single out one poor bugger who had to be sacrificed that morning.

She concentrated on ten or so long-haired dopers grazing near the entrance to Wahoo Public Beach.

Here pure white trash floated down from the United States... seniiacceptable bums in tie-dyed REGGAE T-shirts. In LOVE RASTAFARI T-shirts. Drinking out of Blue Label beer cans. Chewing gum to a man. Eatin fresh coconut.

Beyond choosing the comatose group, it was all too disturbingly arbitrary, Carrie couldn't help thinking. Depressing. Darnian's sort of game.

Finally she settled on a short, skinny one. A freak's freak among the idle young Americans. Carrie named him the Loner.

The Loner appeared to be nineteen or twenty. Dirty jeans and a buckskin vest over his bare, sunken chest. Long, stringy blond hair. Wide moon eyes.

The Loner was also smoking island marijuana like a morning's first cup of Maxwell House coffee.

Carrie Rose stopped a schoolboy walking on her side of the triangular street section. A pretty brown boy of eight or nine. Books all neat and nice, held together in a red rubber sling. She asked him if he had time to earn fifty cents before his classes started that morning.

When the boy said that he did, Carrie pointed through the crowds. She directed his eyes until he saw the long-haired white man in the gold vest.

The Loner had moved up against the wall of a paint-scabbing boathouse. "Holding up the walls," they used to say back in her hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska.

"All you have to do," Carrie explained to the schoolboy, "is take this letter to that man. Give him this five dollars here. Tell him he has to deliver my letter to Fifty Bath Street. Fifty Bath Street....

"Now tell me what you have to do for your fifty cents. "

The little black boy was very serious and bright. He repeated her instructions exactly. Then the boy's face lit up.

"Hey, rnissus, I could deliver yo' letter myself.

Carrie's hand sunk deep into her wallet for the money. "No, no. " She shook her head. "That man over there will do it. And you should tell him that a big black man is watching him. Tell him the letter is going to the black man's girlfriend."

"All right. All right. Give me everything. I take it to him all right."

The boy disappeared while crossing the square

the hectic, colorful crowd. Carrie panicked. Started to cross the street herself.

Then the boy suddenly resurfaced near the lounging hippies. He approached the Loner, grinning a mile, waving the long yellowish envelope.

The long-haired man and the boy negotiated in front of the boathouse.

A buttery sun was rising up just over the building's buckling tin roof. SAN DOMINRCA-BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD was painted in red on the shack.

Finally the Loner accepted the letter.

Carrie sat on a bench and took out the morning Gleaner. COUPLE SLAIN ON BEACH. Cross-legged, wearing her large horn-rinnned glasses, she was among twenty or thirty tourists reading books and newspapers down a long line of sagging white benches.

The Loner looked up and down the crowded street for his benefactor. Very paranoid, apparently. Then the man did an odd little bebop step for whoever was watching. "Dyno-mite. " they would find out his nickname later that day.

Finally the Loner headed off in the direction of Trenchtown District. to deliver a soon-to-be-famous letter at 50 Bath Street.

The American embassy in Coastown was wonderfully quiet, Macdonald was thinking.

A little like West Point's Thaver Hall in the lull of summertime. Like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he'd spent one lonely, lazy summer after the an-ny.

Green-uniformed security men walked up and down long corridors on the balls of their spongy cordovans. Whispery receptionists whispered to messengers about the latest machete murder. Friendly Casuarina trees waved at everybody through rows of bay windows in the library.

Peter passed the plush wood and dark leather furniture in every room and hallway. Heavy brass ashtrays and cuspidors left over from the Teddy Roosevelt era. The smell of furniture polish was everywhere. Lemon Pledge furniture polish and fresh-cut hibiscus and oleander.

Peter decided that it was all very official and impressive-very American, in some ways-but also very cold and funereal.

And frightening.

Dressed in a neatly pressed Henry Truman sports shirt-windblown palm trees and sailboats on a powder blue background-with a permanent flush in his cheeks, Peter was led up to his hearing by a starchy butler type. A haughty black in a blue holy communion suit.

Up thick-carpeted stairways. Down deserted passageways with nicely done oil portraits of recent presidents on all the wall space. Up a winding, creaking, wooden stairway.

Finally, into the doorway of a cozy third-floor office. A neat room where some teenager could have had the bedroom of his dreams.

A young man, a public safety adviser, was sitting at a trendy', refinished desk inside the attic room. Very suntanned and handsome, the man struck Peter as a case study favoring the pseudoscience of reincarnation. The subconsul was an exact lookalike for the dead American actor Montgomery Clift.

"Mr. Campbell. " The snippy black literally clicked his heels. "A Mr. Peter Macdonald to see you, sir. "

"Hi," Peter said. "I'm sorry to bother you like this. "

"No bother. Sit down. Have a seat."

Peter sat on a wine red settee across from Campbell. Then, talking with a soft Midwestern accentvaguely aware of the Helter-Skelter horrors and dangers he was officially associating himself with-he began to tell Brooks Campbell what he'd seen....

The two black men chugging up through high bush from the beach at Turtle Bay.

The blood so bright, stopsign red, it looked as if it had to be paint.

The striking blond man forever framed among sea grapes and royal palms in his mind.

The expensive German-made rifle. The green sedan. The jacket from London... all of it happening roughly parallel with the place where the two nineteen-year-olds had been killed and mutilated, had their corpses desecrated beyond belief.

By the end of the strange, appalling story, a new, wonderful sensation: Peter felt that he'd actually been listened to.

Campbell was leaning way back on his swivel chair, smoking a True Blue cigarette down to the filter, looking very serious and interested. Looking like a young, troubled senator in his starchy blue shirt with the rolled-up sleeves.

"You said you'd gone around another bend in the Shore Highway." Campbell spoke in a deep orator's voice. A hint of wealth in it; a slight lockjaw tendency. "Did you see the black men actually join up with this other man? The blond man?"

That was a good point, Peter considered. Not a bad start. He had never seen the men actually get together.

"No. I was really going on the bike by then. It wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to stop and... well, you know... the whole thing lasted about thirty seconds."

Peter began to smile. An involuntary, nervous smile. A serious moment of doubt and vulnerability. He caught himself twisting his sports shirt between his thumb and forefinger.

Campbell sat forward on his swivel chair. He rushed out his cigarette. "I've got to ask you to take my word about something, Peter. " He leveled Macdonald with a stare. "I'll try. Shoot."

"Turtle Bay was an isolated incident. It was retribution for a harsh Supreme Court decision here in Coastown.... Except for the fact that some Americans were killed, it's a local affair. I don't know if you've read anything about the murders at Fountain Valley golf course on St. Croix-"

"Okay. That theory is all well and good," Peter broke in. "But what about this blond monkey? Seriously. Can you tell me what a white man was doing there with a sniper's rifle? Kind of gun you use to blow John Kennedy's Adam's apple out with. Tell me something comforting about that guy and I'll go home happy. Won't bother you ever again. "

Brooks Campbell got up from his desk. He made a tiny crack in the drapes, and bright sunlight pierced into the attic room. "You know what, Peter?" he said, giving just a hint of a slick politician's smile. "I don't know what in hell a white man was doing up there.

"Let me tell you a little state secret, though. I've listened to over, oh, fifty people who have clues about Turtle Bay. I've listened to the police, the army... and everything I've heard so far points to Colonel Dassie Dred. I don't know what else to tell you here, Peter."

Campbell stopped his pacing. His mind had been wandering back to a meeting one year ago in the Nevada desert. to slick projections made about Damian and Carrie Rose.

Christ! They'd screwed up already. Rose was blown wide open. The great mysterious Damian Rose-whom even they had never been able to see.

Campbell looked across the small attic room at Peter Macdonald. His eyes fell to the Hawaiian shirt. "Trust me, Peter." He smiled halfheartedly, his mind still on the Roses. "Give my secretary a number where I can reach you."

Peter didn't answer right away. Mind going a little crazy on him. In God we trust. All others pay cash, Brooks.... He had the sudden nauseating feeling that he was all by himself again.

"Jesus," slipped out of his mouth.

Then the surly black secretary came back, and the interview was over.

Peter left the big white mansion in a sweat. He couldn't remember feeling so alone and down in a long, long time. Not since the march into Cambodia.

As he walked through the pretty embassy grounds, he nodded at the well-scrubbed marines on guard duty, smiled at the Walt Disney World tourists-but he kept thinking back to the government actor Brooks Campbell.

Who, meanwhile, stood behind a big dormer winddow up on the third floor. Smoking a cigarette, watching Macdonald go out the front gates. The Witness.

Just before noon the Loner shuffled down Bath Street in Coastown.

The long-haired man, "Dyno-mite," was holding Carrie Rose's letter as if it were a birthday party invitation his mother had told him to keep nice and clean.

Chachalacas and a cockatoo chatted up and down the pretty, quiet side street. A few pariah dogs barked at him, and the Loner barked back. Some goats were lunching mindlessly on garbage and scruffy back lawns-and the Loner remembered that he was hungry, too.,

And stoned out of his mind. Wasted. Blown away. Feeling rather nice on the balmy afternoon.

Fifty Bath turned out to be the office of the Evening Star newspaper.

The Loner rang a bell hanging loose by its own electrical wires. Then he waited.

In a few minutes a black girl with hibiscus in her hair appeared in the doorway. The girl was laughing as if she'd just been told a joke. She accepted the manila envelope. Then suddenly, unbelievably, loud shotgun blasts shattered the quiet of the side street. The Loner was thrown hard against the doorjamb and wall. His skinny, needle-tracked arms flew up, palms out flat. His hair flew like a dirty mop being shaken out. Bullets held him against the wall, stitching his chest and face. He was dead before he slid to the ground.

A few minutes later the Evening Star's flabbergasted black editor was trying to read the letter the man had brought. The letter appeared to be from Colonel Dassie Dred-Monkey Dred.

It promised the most severe and unusual punishments if the white foreigners didn't leave San Dominica.

It promised that if the letter itself wasn't printed for all to see in the evening news, a similar delivery would be made at 50 Bath Street the following morning.

At 12:30 Dr. Meral Johnson arrived at the tiny newspaper office. The black police chief examined the gaping hole in the newspaper office's front door. He looked at the dead man. Talked with the young girl who had accepted the letter. Sent his men to scour the neighborhood, to try to find out if anyone had witnessed the shooting. Then it was Meral Johnson himself who came up with the name "Dead Letter" to describe the delivery. Thus far, Dr. Johnson realized sadly, it was just about his only contribution to the extraordinary case.

CHAPTER TEN

The cr6me de la cr6me of the Intelligence

people are the plodding bureaucrats. The worst of them are the Ivy League and Eton boys. And in this case, the cr6me didn't necessarily rise to the top.

The Rose Diary

Fairfax Station, Virginia

That afternoon and evening, Washington, D.C., was filled with ironic talk about the failure of Vietnamese and Chinese negotiators to agree on a peace settlement. Speechwriters for Jimmy Carter were already busy preparing a vow that America would keep its pledge abroad; that America would not turn back to isolationism.

Thirteen miles southwest of the capital was Harold Hill's Old Virginny Home on six neat acres in Station. The land was closed in by green rolling hills and white picket fences. It was rich in honeysuckle, boxwoods, dogwoods, and full-bred domestic animals. On one of the white fence gates was the hand-painted sign OUR OLD VIRGINNY HOME.

Perhaps! But when Harold Hill was away from home, he sometimes referred to the place as "Vanilla Wafer."

From every vantage point, the Hill homestead seemed innocent and indistinctly sweet. The most secretive thing anyone might even associate with the normal-looking place was the presence of one of A. C. Nielsen's famous survey TVs. But never murder, or mayhem, or Intelligence. Which is more or less the way Harry the Hack wanted it.

On most weekday evenings during the spring and early summer, Hill was in the habit of playing hardball with his son, Mark. Mark was fourteen, a budding star in Babe Ruth league baseball. Every night that there was no game, Mark had to throw his father one hundred strikes or be damned.

Hill was haunched awkwardly over loose-fitting Top-Siders that night; just sweating nicely; starting to enjoy the exercise-the warm itch in his palm under a Rawlings catcher's mitt.

Suddenly he was called to the house by his wife, Carole. "Long distance calling," she shouted from the porch in an Alabama accent she hadn't lost while living in eight different countries. "It's Brooksie Campbell.

Hill excused himself to his son, then jogged up toward the big Colonial-style house. On the way inside, forty-four-year-old Harold Hill started to feel a little turmoil in his stomach.

Brooks Campbell just didn't call you at home. Not to shoot the bull, anyway. There was something about this terrorism bullshit-Campbell's so-called specialty-that didn't sit well with Harold IEII.

Terrorism was something for the Arabs and Israelis. The Irish. The Symbionese Liberation Army. Something for the little people who had to play dirty. Terrorism just wasn't something Americans should be getting involved with. Inside his den, Hill dialed an eight hundred number on a phone he kept in a locked desk drawer.

What would happen-he continued his thought from outside-if a major power started playing dirty pool on a regular basis? All-out, no-holds-ban-ed dirty? What would happen if America found a real guerrilla" war? Shee-it! is what would happen. A return to the Dark Ages.

Hill punched an extension button, and the call from the Caribbean was switched onto a safe line, a scrambler.

He could still'see Mark outside. Throwing high pop-ups over an old spruce. Catching them basket like Willie Mays. The boy had an incredible throwing arm. Incredible.

Just as he began to think that the telephone switch-over was taking too long, he heard Brooks Campbell's voice.

"Hello, Harry." A slightly muffled Campbellhis deep stage voice sounded a little muddy. "The reason I'm calling, Harry-"

Harold Hill let out a short, snorting laugh meant to slow down the younger man. "I think I'm going to sit down for that. For the reason you're calling.

"Yeah, sit down. It's not good news.... It turns out, uh, that Rose was seen by a man at Turtle Bay yesterday. How about that? We buy someone even we haven't seen, a fucking genius, supposedly, and he's immediately made by somebody else. Shit, Harry, if I didn't know better, I'd say that somebody is fucking around with us. At any rate, I don't want to take any chances with this."

"Does Rose know he was seen? Tell me the whole thing, Brooks."

"Basically, he knows his situation," Campbell said. "He called us today. At least his wife did. She said they want to take care of it themselves. Cute?"

"Terrific.

"The man who saw him is a nobody, thank God. American, though.... By the way, Rose shot and cut up the president of ASTA this morning. Harry, they're freelancing like crazy now. I don't even remember the original plan we were shown. He skipped a meeting with me last night. They've gone fucking nuts on us."

Harold Hill closed his eyes and visualized Campbell. Brooks Corbett Campbell. Princeton man. WASP from New London, Connecticut. Slated for big things at the Agency. Neo-Nazi, in Hill's humble opinion. Kind of guy who always thinks he knows what's best for everybody else.

"Well, uhhh... I think we have to go along with them a while longer. Don't you? Maybe you ought to lay hands on this witness. It seems to me that we may need him to identify Rose. Eventually, anyway.... I have no intention of letting them leave the island after this is over. That's an obvious stroke. " "Sounds good." Brooks Campbell raised his voice above some transatlantic chatter. "That's pretty much the way I see it right now

Hill paused for a moment. He thought he ought to try to cheer Campbell up a bit. S.O.P. All right. Okay on that," said Harry the Hack. "Now let me have the bad news

Young Brooks Campbell tried to laugh. Your basic combat camaraderie. "Thought you'd never ask," he said.

Coastown, San Dominica

Let's try to look at this shitty mess logically," Jane suggested.

Peter didn't answer. He was way off someplace else. At the artillery range outside Camp Grayling in central Michigan. Shooting tin cans off Brooks Campbell's head. With a bazooka.

At ten that night the two of them were out on the dark patio of Le Hut Restaurant, trying to comprehend mass murder. Occasionally picking through a stew pot of oily bouillabaisse. Both of them about as hungry as the shrimp in the pot.

Peter finally raised his puppy-dog brown eyes to her and shrugged. "Who could come up with that kind of idea?... Slicing up two nineteen-year-old kids like Jack the Ripper?"

Jane sat with her chin in the palms of thin hands. Serious, she looked like an older version of Caroline Kennedy. She was catching the eye of all the black waiters.

"Probably the same kind of creep who would make two little kids watch their own father die," she answered. "It just makes me feel so awful. Creepy and sick. Really shitty-besides being scared.

Thinking back on the scene at the American embassy, Peter began to feel a little useless, motelike. Little Mac fucks it up again.... Maybe he just hadn't explained himself well enough, he thought. Something sure had gone wrong at the embassy. Because the tall blond man was important one way or the other. He had to be.

Jane pointed out to the street. Playful grin on her face; premachete smile. "I didn't know one of your brothers was down on the island. Heh, heh. "

Right in front of Le Hut a street clown was entertaining a small crowd. The scruffy clown was white. BASIL: A CHILDREN'S MINSTREL said his hand-painted sign.

Basil was a young man behind all his Indian and clown paints. Around the eyes he seemed very serious about the show, even a little sad. Only dressed the way he was-raggy canary-yellow pantaloons, an outrageous pastel nightcap-the man also seemed pixilated.

"Love is the answer," he said to natives and a few tourists walking past him on Front Street. "Love is the answer," he whispered to the people eating and drinking in Le Hut.

"Ahhh," Jane whispered to Peter, winked, talked like Charlie Chan. "But what is question?" She saw that he was still partially lost in his own thoughts. Turtle Bay. What had upset him at the U.S. embassy?

"Do you know any children's tricks? Children's minstrel tricks?" she whispered across the table. "Macduff? Are you there? Are you here with me?

Or are you Sherlock Holmes off solving great murders?"

Peter smiled and blushed. "Sorry. I'm here. Hello!

He traveled back to the cafe from faraway places: Vietnam; his parents' house up on Lake Michigan, where every summer for six straight years Betsy Macdonald came and dropped another brownhaired, brown-eyed baby boy. The Super Six.

"Children's tricks?" Peter grinned. Had a rush of feeling for this eccentric plains girl from Dakota. He thought for just a second. Remembered something his brother Tommy used to do for his kids.

Peter picked up his Le Hut paper napkin. Twisted it tight- and held it under his nose. The napkin looked like a droopy mustache. Greasy. Full of fish scraps. "You must pay the rent," Peter said in an obvious villain's voice.

He switched the napkin to the side of his hair. It became a girl's ribbon. "I can't'pay the rent," he said in the falsetto of a heroine in distress.

Mustache voice: "You must pay the rent!" Ribbon voice: "I can't pay the rent!" He switched the napkin under his chin, where it became a puffy bow tie. Peter spoke in a voice like Dudley Do-Right. "I'll pay the rent!" Ribbon voice: "My hero."

Mustache voice: "Curses, foiled again."

"I wish it was that easy," Jane said.

She kissed his paper mustache. Laurel and Hardyha-ha. Neither of them quite full-fledged adults yet. Not in all ways. Lots of good intentions to grow up,though. That night they slept together for the last time. Ever.

Crafton's Pond, San Dominica

Meanwhile, the first meeting between the Roses and Colonel Monkey Dred was close to its very shaky start.

Motors off, four cars sat on opposite sides of a flat, narrow field near Nate Crafton's rat-infested pond in the West Hills District. The field's regular use was for prop planes coming from, and going to, New Orleans with shipments of ganja and cocaine.

This particular night it was misty up around the pond itself. The wet grass was full of long, husky water rats.

By mutual agreement each side had brought only two cars. There were to be no more than two passengers in either auto. Since there seemed to be no way to prevent them, guns had been permitted.

Shortly before starting time, a third vehicle appeared on the horizon on Dred's side of the field.

At 1:00 A.M. The first violation of the treaty for this evening.

As Monkey Dred was driven forward in a noisy, British-made van, the twenty-seven-year-old Jamaican- and Cuban-trained revolutionary saw that the secret airfield was dark, without motion. Quite pretty, with a pale quarter moon set over the surrounding jungle. The van stopped with a jolt at the edge of the field. Dred's driver flashed his headlights on and off. On and off.

Across the moonlit darkness, another set of car lights switched on, then off. Rose.

Watching the scene through a cloudy, bugsmeared windshield, Dred started to nod and smile. Rose was already accepting compromises: the third car. "Goan to be easy, mon, " he said to his driver.

Two of the five cars then drove halfway out onto the landing field. Once again, the agreed-upon procedure. The Roses were very keen on orderly procedures, Dred was beginning to notice. Like the British in the American Revolution.

Before his van had fully stopped, the colonel jumped out and stood at rigid attention in the tall grass. Less than forty yards away, he could see Rose climbing out of some kind of American pleasure car.

The white man wasn't as big as Dred had expected. Not bigger than life, certainly.... He was wearing a light-colored suit with a big Panama-style hat. Very flashy. Absurdly so.

On signal, the headlights of both vehicles were turned off. Then the two started to walk toward each other in the dark. In less than thirty seconds they were only a few feet apart. The smell of some kind of fertilizer met that of a strong French cologne.

"Yo' hab dose guns for me?" The revolutionary spoke with a heavy island patois.

Carrie Rose took off the floppy yellow hat. She smiled at Colonel Dred. " You're a dead man," she said. "My husband has you in his sights on an M21 sniper's rifle right now. The rifle has a night sighting device, so he's watching us in a pretty green light. Care to wave?"

"I don't believe dat." The black man remained calm.

Carrie put her hat back on, and a powerful rifle shot kicked up a clod of grass not three feet away from the guerrilla.

The lights on all the cars around the field shot back on again. The black man froze. Threw a hand up to keep his people in place.

"Our intentions are good. " Carrie talked as if nothing at all had happened. "But we wanted you to know that you mustn't try to do anything other than what we agreed on. We agreed only two cars apiece. Not three. Two.

"If you're still interested in guns," the tall woman continued, "you'll come to the Charles Codd estate. Tomorrow evening at ten o'clock. Similar arrangements. Two cars."

"Why yo' doin it?" the black man finally asked. He folded his arms; stood his ground.

"We want to help you take over this island," Carrie said to him. She shrugged. "We're being paid to do that. Come to the Codd estate tomorrow. You'll find out everything you want to know. You'll even meet Damian."

Carrie Rose then turned away. She left the guerrilla leader a little dumbfounded. Beginning to wonder how it happened with Castro up in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Who had come to set him up with guns and bombs?

"He's just a boy," Carrie said to the Cuban as she got back inside the duk American cu. "Isn't it funny that they would be interested in him?" "Solamente tres dias mas,

Just three days more.

is all the Cuban said.

May 4, 1979, Friday 45 U.S. Marshals Arrive

CHAPTERELEVEN

We'd carefully plotted out a funhouse maze of confusion. Confusion on all fronts. Like a blizzard in summer, where it's never even snowed before....

By May 4, ordinary farmers wielding machetes in their fields stimulated heart attacks. A black man wading in the surfeven an unfamiliar black lifeguard-was enough to send piggy little whites scurrying inside their expensive strawroofed huts. Fishing boats that drifted too close to shore were waved away by private guards with rifles. No one shut their eyes sunbathing on the beaches.... And countless tourists spent their suntime in dingy prop airline and government offices. Pan Am, Eastern, Prin-Air, BOAC, all put on extra flights, but even these couldn't accommodate the exodus.... So far, we were pretty much on schedule.

The Rose Diary

The fourth day was much quieter-four island deaths reported. All of them grisly machete murders, however.

Early in the morning, forty-five United Statesfederal marshals were flown in to help keep order in the larger cities of San Dominica. Some of these same State Department marshals had been used during the American Indian uprising at Wounded Knee.

Eight Vietnamese-style HSL-1 helicopters came in from Pensacola, Florida, to help with surveillance and search work.

Because they'd been painted with green-andbrown combat camouflaging, the helicopters provided one of the scarier sights for the rentaining tourists. Suddenly it looked and sounded as if they were in the middle of an undeclared war zone. Army helicopters were continually swooping down out of the lush green hills, as in the opening scenes in M*A*S*H.

More witnesses to the machete murders were being found: "a veritable anthology of fascinating, conflicting stories," one French newspaper would eventually write. Five hundred eleven people questioned so far, but no one other than Peter Macdonald claiming to have seen a white man with the raiding parties of blacks.

The chance of Macdonald's story having any effect now seemed rather small, in fact.

There were simply too many chiefs on the scene, too many chiefs prowling around the ghoulish nwrgues, too many hip experts who thought they understood what was going down.

CHAPTERTWELVE

What we did on San D ominica was something like turning loose Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, Speck, Bremer, Manson, and Squeaky Fromme. All in one place at the same time.

The Rose Diary

May 4, 1979; Coconut Bay, San Dominica

Friday Morning. The Fourth Day of the Season.

Lieutenant B. J. Singer, a 1966 Annapolis product, sat on an undersized aluminum beach chair, reading a book called Supership. His wife, Ronnie, lay beside him with The Other Side of Midnight propped up in the sand. Neither of the Singers was a very enthusiastic reader.

Suddenly Supership slipped through B.J.'s fingers.

The shiny hardcover book hit the metal arm of the beach chair, then fell broken-backed onto the sand. B.J.'s head dropped back.

"What?" Ronnie said.

"I can't stand it. " Her husband sat with his eyes closed, with coconut butter glistening all over his body. "I hate this sitting around. I feel like a goddamn kid who has to have his mother come with him every time he wants to take a swim or go explore. Or do anything! "

Ronnie Singer looked up from her paperback. She closed one eye to the bright 10:00 A.M. sun. "Oh, go ahead, then. " She spoke with the softest, teasing Texas accent. "You go drown yourself, honey. Get your head cut off by the Zulus.... See if Mom really cares. Mom doesn't care a damn. "

B.J. crossed one hairless leg over the other. The big redheaded man growled at his wife.

"Ohhh... Mom cares, " Ronnie then cooed from her beach blanket.

"I would like... to take off this itchy swimsuit now. On our own personal private beach. And soak up some of our own private sun on my own shriveled private parts. And dip those poor neglected bastards in our sparkling blue sea.... Just like the TV ad suggested. Remember the TV ad for this place?"

Ronnie Singer closed her book with a dull thud. The little blond woman let out a large-size sigh. Her big breasts expanded impressively under a thin polka-dot strip of bathing suit. Mom, she called herself.

"All right, let's go for a walk, sailor."

II I'll do it." B.J. flashed a smile.

"I don't know if I'm brave enough to take off my clothes, though."

"Swish, swish, swish," B.J. kidded her.

"Very funny, B.J. Cool it."

they walked north through two pretty coves. to a smaller, more private beach where the big brown hulk of a wrecked schooner sat out a few hundred yards from shore.

When they came up, even-steven with the rigless boat, B.J., then Ronnie, waded out into clear bluegreen water full of tiny angelfish.

Ronnie slipped off the top of her suit and let her sand white breasts float free on the water. She started to laugh, to blush even.

Once the cool water got up around his chest, the navy man turned to check out the kelly green of West Hills. "Prettiest damn jungle he started to say.

Then he saw two shirtless blacks lying in a grove

of baby palms. Unbelievable, heart-freezing sight. You never believe it can happen to you.

"Oh, Jesus, my God," he whispered to Ronnie. "They're on this beach." The young couple began to swim out toward the shipwreck. Slow wading at first, then an athletic breaststroke. " Go behind it. " B. J - had taken command. " You make it okay, Ronnie?"

Damian Rose's first rifle shot hit with a thunk eight yards in front of them.

The Singers pulled up short. Then they kept going toward the old wreck. Much more frantic now. Hard, splashing strokes.

A second shot kicked up water less than a foot away from B.J. A third shot echoed in the distance but never seemed to hit anywhere. B.J. didn't let on that he'd been hit in the back.

Finally they were in the long, cool shadow cast by the schooner. The boat towered thirty to forty feet over their bobbing heads. Ugly rot and barnacles were visible all over the sides.

As they swam around one corner of the schooner, Ronnie felt a strong sweep of water at her side. Like a cold spring. The topless woman turned her head slightly-saw a four-, maybe five-foot silverish shadow not twelve inches away. For a moment she stopped swimming altogether. Her head dipped underwater. She had quick, panicky thoughts of her two young sons back in Newport News; of her mother; of drowning.

Another silver streak surfaced at B.J.'s side. Flashing. Twisting. At least a sixty-pound great barracuda. Two of them now.

"Swim easy," B.J. gasped. "Stay behind the boat. No matter what. Swim easy, babe."

The cigar-shaped fish seemed to glide in the water. Back and forth with the larger humans; touching their tails as if exploring; showing off sharp, pointy teeth.

Feeling the pain in his upper back, B.J. finally floated under the schooner's sagging bow. sprit. From there he could see the beach clearly.

He spotted the two barebacked blacks retreating up into the hills. He couldn't see the rifleman anywhere.... He watched the blacks until they disappeared into thick, thick jungle. Watched until the pain in his back was too great. Then he and Ronnie paddled around the boata man and a woman-and the two big, surging fish.

The Singers were careful not to make sudden movements as they swam. they were careful to do as little splashing as possible. As little breathing.

And finally, when the young man and woman got into four or five feet of water-when they could just touch bottom-the great barracudas turned away. The fish flashed their tails and headed back

Ronnie ran the last fifty yards to shore.

As the Singers lay on the wet sand like shipwrecked survivors, Damian Rose squeezed, squeezed, shot them both dead anyway.

to be simplistic about things, I just didn't want to live and die in some godforsaken whistle-stop. Like Madame Bovary.

The Rose Diary

Coastown, San Dominica

At eleven o'clock that morning, Carrie Rose lounged beside a 2,500,000-gallon saltwater swim ming pool at the Coastown Princess Hotel.

Next to her at the poolside bar, a thirty-three year-old stockbroker from New York, Philip Becker, was lamenting the decline and fall of the good life. He was also trying to put the make on Carrie.

"It is a sad, shitty affair." Philip Becker eulo gized San Dominica in a most-good-natured way. "Here you finally make time for a vacation. You pay out two thousand, say, for ten glorious days of not having to schlepp around Manhattan with all the gum snappers, panhandlers, the general roll call of sewer snipes.... And then suddenly, slambam, you don't just get a little rain to ruin your good time.... You don't get a sunburn.... You get a bloody revolution!"

Carrie shook out her long sandy hair, exposed the tiniest mother-of-pearl earrings. She was beginning to smile at the way Becker was telling his dimwitted stories.

"I like the way you say that." She rested her hand on the back of his. "You get a revolution!" she repeated his thought.

"That is exactly what we have here," the stockbroker said. "Machete knife behind every palm tree. " He was beginning to stare openly at her breasts now; her long legs; brown swimmer's stomach; her crotch.

"This Dred-excuse me, Colonel Dred-is going to do some major league bloodletting now. Which means I'm going back to the safer confines of New York."

"All of a sudden a hundred and fifty thousand tourists and landowners want to get off this island at the same time," Carrie said. Philip Becker smiled. He raised his glass in a mock salute. "to, uh... Colonel Monkey Dred,

who, uh, niined our respective vacations. Up yours, Monkey. 9

At which point Carrie Rose decided that she liked this one well enough. Philip Lloyd Becker. A wonderfufly confident man. Nearly as smooth as Damian Simpson Rose.

Smooth Philip continued to smile at her. He was gallant. Handsome. Physically nice: a walking advertisement for -the New York Athletic Club. And he was as empty-headed as the proverbial dizzy blonde.

When he finally asked her if she wanted to go back to his suite, Carrie said yes. That was the beginning of a little cherchez la femme side plot. Also an experiment.

Friday Afternoon

Down and out in Coastown, as disoriented as people in a Neil Simon situation, Peter and Jane first got the bum's rush at San Dominica's Government House. 'Men at the Gleaner and the Evening Star newspaper offices.

"If, indeed, there is a mysterious white man involved, " a British-sounding Uncle Tom at Government House explained, "he'll most surely turn up when we catch Colonel Dred. And, right now, we are trying to put all our efforts into catching Dred."

"Well, Jesus Christ, man. Don't let us keep you from the manhunt, " Peter said before Jane could pull him away.

At noon the two of them wandered through the crowded Front Street marketplace. Children were selling green coconuts, yams, fresh fish. Tinny record-shop speakers blasted songs like "Kung Fu Fighting." Jane was getting leers and lazy smiles from all the local males.

"Take a taxi ride, lady?"

"Eat me coconut?"

One block off Front Street they went out onto the very famous and beautiful Horseshoe Beach.

"This could be the nicest day anywhere, ever," Jane said as -they began to walk on the gleaming sand. "God!"

The entire surface of the Caribbean was nearly white, glittering with the brightest galaxy of stars. Jane's long blond curls were shining.... She was the blond beauty you always see at the beaches but nobody ever seems to get.

As the two of them walked along-in spite of their best intentions not to-they began to feet wonderfully calm and content. As if nothing really mattered except the buttery sun, getting a tan, keeping the sea spray in their faces.

"It's so grand, Peter. Kowabunga! Old Indian expression of delight and awe-from The Howdy Doody Show."

"Kind of makes you wonder why somebody would pick central Michigan to settle in. Any cold climate. Oh, Caleb, isn't that the most gorgeous stretch of tundra! Let's build our house there."

"Oh... hush, puppy."

WaMng barefoot, carrying loafers and sandals, they passed under a low wooden pier. Pilings coated with seaweed and barnacles. Some sort of hot- sauce-and-clams bar chattering overhead. As they emerged from under the dark, rotting planks, Peter happened to glance up at the boardwalk. What he saw snapped his perfect mood like a twig.

Sauntering along, carefree as tourists, were the black killers from Turtle Bay. The Cuban and Kingfish Toone. Even more disturbing, the smaller of the two was pointing down at the beach. Right at Jane and him.

"Janie, we don't have time to think this out," he said, "but I want you to get ready to run like an absolute madwoman. The killers from Turtle Bay are at our beach."

Meanwhile the two blacks hurried to a set of wooden stairs twisting down to the sand. Dressed in lightweight suits and fedoras, they looked like duded-up Caribbean businessmen.

Peter looked back once and saw the two men running. Strong-looking bastards. Coming like goddamn madmen, knocking sunbathers down and stepping on them. What the hell were they figuring on? A public execution?

"Let's go. Run!"

Split-splat. Split-splat. Bare feet kicked sand high, kiddng sand on people sunbathing on either side of their nmwng track. Jane running fast, thank God. Jesus!

Trying to keep up the pace, Peter bled for some smart idea of what to do now. He looked back over his shoulder again. Almost trainwrecked into a family drag-assing hotel towels,

American sun dreamers doing absolutely zilch, backing away from the chase. Kitty Genovese goes to the Caribbean.

Stumbling through a particularly jammed beach towel Parking lot, Jane could feel her chest and thighs starting to burn up. A slight stitch in her side. A hundred yards ahead she spotted squat limestone buildings. Showers. Dressing rooms. Shooting from the roof of the little complex, a white swma to the boardwalk. y

"Peter! Way up there!"

A few strides farther on, Peter grabbed the cabana jacket of a tall, very hairy man. "Help us!,! he gasped. "Will you call the police?"

The hairy man shoved him. Stepped back. "Keep your hands off. Get away from me, you. II

Nobody listened. No wonder the police and the U.S. embassy people had been so strange-they couldn't believe somebody was @g to help.

Even more terrified, the young man and woman started to run again.

they broke through crowds heading in to shower and dress in the limestone buildings. Fat boys with plastic foothalls. Strong smells of sun lotions. Not really feeling these people who hit off their bodies. Numb, everything unreal.

Inside the bathhouse was a large, cool concrete room. No discernible purpose for the room. Twenty or thirty people were milling around. Rude Boys smoking corncob pipes. Four different doors going out.

"Stairs?" Peter screamed at a pink face under a big straw hat. Princess.

"The stairs!" Jane screamed with him now. "Tell us where!" As Princess pointed left, Peter and Jane heard a commotion starting up behind them.

Suddenly a black lifeguard ran out of one of the concrete hallways. 0. J. Simpson with combraids. He yelled in a booming voice at the two men just coming through the main entrance.

Booooomm!

A single, unbelievable explosion echoed through the bathhouse. Bright red blood sprayed all over. The shocked lifeguard crashed back into a limestone wall. He came off the wall face first, braids jangling, down onto the concrete floor.

All kinds of people were screaming, "Murder!" in the strange bare room. People diving on the floor... a hole as big as a baseball in the lifeguard's back. Red Rorschach splatter. Total panic.

Peter and Jane were off and running again, feeling shitty about the young black guy. Left-but they didn't see any stairs there.

"You got any ideas?"

G&No.t@

"Holy shit!

Another wild mouse left and they found doors. BATHROOM, MEN'S SHOWER, CLOSET, WOMEN'S SHOWER, MAINTENANCE. Then they were at a complete dead end in the building. Fresh out of clever ideas, too.

Then Jane got her idea. "Here."

Inside WOMEN'S SHOWER, billowing steam hit them like a sudden hot log. they saw the bare rump of a white woman. Two rumps. Rows of gray lockers and benches.

"L4Dok for a place to hide in here.

The bare woman went left, Peter and Jane right. As they did-dragging each other around sharp locker comers-they heard the big metal door to the corridor open and shut again.

"Nice try," Peter said.

He Yanked at a wooden door and they were inside a narrow tiled room with five or six showers running water. Down through the waterfalls they saw a naked black woman and a little girl of about three.

The girl had a head full of creamy soapsuds. She was looking at the strange, intruding white couple as if they were the real Laurel and Hardy. The girl's mother looked terrified, though. Hands across her breasts, she started to scream.

"Please," Jane whispered, walking right back through the showers, dragging Peter. "I know how it must look, but some men are chasing us. Please don't scream."

At the end of the row of showers, the two of them slipped into a narrow alcove. ,

"Hidden from the front door, at least," Jane whispered to Peter.

"What do yo' want in here?" The black woman finally spoke to them.

"Please help us," Jane whispered again.

Pressed unbelievably hard against the damp tile wall, feeling her much cooler perspiration mix with the warin shower room water, she had an image that made her tremble. A clear picture of the two men coming into the shower. Firing at her and Peter. Firing at the woman. Firing at the little girl. BIZARRE SHOWER ROOM MASSACRE!

they could all hear the two men outside in the dressing rooms. Loud voices. Curses. Women screaming. Lockers slamming and opening.

"I think I'm having a nosebleed," Jane said.

Then it didn't matter. Nothing did. The two killers were inside the shower room.

Thinking about hand-to-gun combat, Peter listened to the black woman.

"What do you want in here?" she said to the two men. The same thing she'd asked him and Jane.

Neither of the Turtle Bay killers answered her Then a man's shoes clicked down hard against the tile floor. Cleats. Coming back to check for himself. So weird not being able to see the bastard. Gun drawn?

Every muscle in Peter's and Jane's bodies began to clench. Across from them a wet mop was leaning against the wall. Weapon?... Weapon.

Peter felt unbelievably protective suddenly. Full of rage. Ready to hit the black butcher boy with the mop. Make a try for his gun. One shot at the guy in the front. Impossible odds.

Then the second man called out. Something in Spanish. Vamonos. Both men left, and there was screaming outside. More doors slamming.

Jane hung up on the wall like a wet tissue, Blond hair down and dirty like a mop. Her nose bleeding.

Peter sank down to a full squatting position. Fetal position. Scared shitless position. He saw that the black woman in the shower with them was quite young. Twenty. Twenty-one. All ribs and sharp bones. The little girl was very, very pretty. Crying now because her mother was crying.

"Jesus, we're Sorry," Peter said.

He and Jane waited a few minutes, made the woman promise to tell the police, then they left the dressing room.

Out in the concrete halls they didn't see either of the black killers. The building was jammed with people, though. Unbelievable shouting was blasting u and down the concrete tunnels. People were crying.

Finally they found the stairway out. they pushed and shoved their way through a wide-eyed crowd trying to find out what had happened. "Is it another machete murder?... " At the top of the stairs, Jane grabbed Peter hard around his chest. "Hold me, Peter," she said. "Just hold me for a minute - "

Then, for the second straight day, the police of San Dominica took descriptions of the Cuban and Kingfish Toone.

"No blond Englishman?" the constable asked.

"He was there," Peter said. "We just didn't see him this time."

The black policeman smiled. "We didn't see him last time, either.

Las Vegas, Nevada

Friday Evening

That night in Las Vegas, the whole San Dominican operation continued toward a major blowup at breakneck speed: Great Western Air Transport reestablished contact with the Forlenza F@ly for the first time since Lathrop Wells.

At ten o'clock a long-haired fat man-somebody's bright idea of a professional gambler typefollowed Isadore Goldman's chauffeur-driven Fleetwood out of the glittering Flamingo Hotel. Toward "downtown."

The fat intelligence man's name was Tommie Hicks, and he was a 1968 Stanford Law School graduate. Beyond that, he'd been one of the original CIA representatives at the farmhouse in Lathrop Wells.

Hicks followed Goldman two cars back down Sahara Boulevard. Into the Strip proper. Past 9:5883 degrees on the Sahara clock. Past the Sands and three hundred other gaudy hotels.

to Caesar's Palace.

Once ensconced inside the gambling mecca, izzie Goldman began to play high-stakes blackjack. The old man was what the croupiers call a George player: a very classy high-roller.

In his first hour at blackjack, Goldman won what is a comfortable year's salary for most peoplejust over $34,000. Then the old man proceeded to lose more than $40,000, playing baccarat.

Since Tommie Hicks himself made $28,000 a year, the turnaround fascinated the hell out of him. Several times during the evening he fantasized walking up and taking away the old gangster's chips for safekeeping.

Just after 1:00 A.m. Goldman finally got up from his chair at baccarat. He headed for one of the men's rooms.

CAESAR'S it read on the swing door.

Tommie Hicks followed Goldman one swing behind. He understood perfectly well that he was no more than a centurion at this particular game.

The CIA man took the shiny urinal to the left of the old man.

Funny thing-Tommie Hicks found that he didn't have to go. Not a drop. Kind of humorous, actually. Something slightly ludicrous about sleuthing a fivefoot-two, seventy-four-year-old man, anyway. "Didn't I meet you at one of Harry Hill's parties?" he asked as the old man tinkled.

A black man-pimp-looked their way from three urinals down the line. The black stud sniiled big ivory-and-gold teeth.

Izzie Goldman stared over at Hicks. He shrugged his small, rounded shoulders. "Not me, Abe."

The old gangster finished urinating and zipped up. He walked over to the fancy sinks. Goldman pushed his gold watch up on his skinny arm and started to wash his hands.

The pimp splashed on some English Leather. Then he walked out of the bathroom without washing his hands.

"Schvuggs like the smell of it. " Goldman nodded at the closing door. He put both hands up to his head, seemed to be stretching the neat part in his white hair. "Mr. Hill has a problem, I take it," he said, still chewing on a soggy cigar.

"Not so much Mr. Hill. There's a problem with our other two friends. "

Isadore Goldman hit the whooshing faucets. He vaguely remembered this fat cow from the farmhouse in the desert. "A little problem, I hope."

"So far, very little... but we want your approval to get rid of both of them if the problem continues. "

Goldman squinted at himself in the water-spotted mirror over the sink. Prune, he thought. Small prune, but prune.

He shrugged his shoulders at the younger man standing behind him. "You should know enough not to ask me.... But I'll tell you one thing to make your trip out here worthwhile. I would be very surprised if clever people like these Roses couldn't handle any little problems that come up. "

Tommie Hicks smiled in the gilded mirror over the old man's head. "We were very surprised," he said, "that some problems did come up."

Turtle Bay, San Dominica

At eight o'clock that night Macdonald stepped off a sputtering, wheezing double-decker bus heading north from Coastown. Sweat-stained alligator shirt thrown over his shoulder, he started down the neady raked gravel driveway of the Plantation Inn.

Having persuaded Jane to stay with hiends in Coastown for the night, he was all alone with the problem of being an unwanted only witness.

Apparently the local police weren't going to help.... The people at the U.S. embassy weren't exactly rolling out the red carpet for him, either.... Neither were the newspapers.

Why not? That was the $64,000 question. Why the hell not?

Plowing across the dark, deserted Plantation Inn beachfront, Peter started to wonder if all real-life crime investigations might be just as frustrating as this one. A lot of bungling around in the dark. Dumb-bunny screwups all over the place. No quick solutions. Not ever.

, As he saw the outline of the beach cottage where he and Jane lived, his mind leaped back to the two black killers in Coastown. If those two were home grown revolutionaries-Dred's people-then he was Cary Grant.

Paranoid now-careful, anyway-he stopped walking. His heart started to pound in a way it hadn't since the day he'd left the lonely hill country of South Vietnam. From the cover of thick-leaved banana trees, he studied the silent black world like a Special Forces sergeant....

Little pink honeymoon bungalow. Shadowy roof. Louvered windows. Wooden door looking as if it had been put up crooked because of the shifting sand. Dark, spooky Caribbean. Nice spot for an ambush....

After watching the place for a good ten minutes, seeing no apparent trouble, nothing moving except dark palm fronds and citrus clouds, Peter began to walk toward his home.

Halfway up the pebble-and-seashell walk, he saw a dark shape thrown across a white patio table. Moving a step closer, he recognized Max Westerhuis's Afghan, and he moaned out loud.... The beautiful, long-haired dog had been cut in half.

The machetes.

"Oh, Jesus God," he swore loudly. Trembled. Nearly got sick. It was the first time he'd actually seen the work of the razor-sharp knives.

The body of the thoroughbred dog-Fool's Hot Toast-had been cleanly separated across its thin rib cage. Ants and black flies were eating at the bloody crease as if it were a long, horrifying serving table.

Peter hurried past the dog and went inside. He collected clothes, money, a Colt.44 revolver hidden away in his T-shirts. His personal memento mori.

He caught his breath. Thought about where to hide. Had to decide about whom he could talk to, whom he could trust. Figure out a way to get off San Dominica altogether.

Most of all, he wanted to lead them away from Jane. Make it clear to them that their problem was with him. The Witness.

Wondering why they'd gone to the bother of killing the dog, wondering if they were watching him, and who the hell the tall blond man was, anywayPeter Macdonald jogged back toward the brightly lit inn. He passed quickly through the porticoback into the dark rear parking lot. He called Jane in Coastown. Got no answer at her friend's place.

And then, at 8:45 on May 4-having damn little idea what he planned to do with it-Peter stole the hotel manager's BMW motorcycle for the second time that week.

As he slowly, quietly, rode the bike up the drive, a tall man stepped into the shadowy road now filling up with dust.

Damian Rose watched Macdonald get awayand he let him.

Peter Macdonald was right about on schedule.

The machetes were every bit as effective as he thought they'd be that first afternoon at Turtle Bay.

N there had been any doubt that he and Came were worth $1 mdhon gomg into the operation, there wouldn't be after it was over. The two of them were going to be as famous- as Charles Manson and Company-and marketable to boot.

May 5, 1979, Saturday Declare War On Monkey Dred

On the fifth day, San Dominican prime minister Joseph Walthey held an emotional press conference to announce that the terrible machete murders could now definitely be attributed to Colonel Dred and his very small group of dissidents.

Standing before news microphones with his wife, with the U.S. ambassador and his wife, Joseph Walthey revealed that at seven o'clock that morning a battalion of San Dominican and U.S. troops had entered the jungles of West Hills. A confrontation with Colonel Dred was expected before the end of the day.

In the meantime both Robert F. Kennedy Airport in Coastown and Kiley Airport in Port Gerry had been transformed into angry beehives of abnormal activity. A spokesmanfor the airlines said that even at the accelerated flight departure rate, it would take at least anotherfour days to accommodate all of the people who wanted to leave San Dominica, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and Haiti.

Small curiosity. While thousands were departing from the islands, a few hundred rabid ambulance chasers arrived to witness the machete terrors.

During the firstfour days, more than 250 people came to San Dominica to witness the bizarre scene. Simply to be there. to watch death in action. Maybe even to get a photograph or a sound track.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"I have no moral reactions anymore," Damian said. "Sometimes, though, I feel a kind of icy, grand compassion." The

Rose Diary

May 5, 1979; West Hills, San Dominica

Saturday Morning. The Fifth Day of the Season.

Peter was beginning to get his second wonn'seye view of those sneaky, dirty little wars that had come of age-or at least back into vogue-during the 1960s.

For a terrifying few minutes he had a pretty clear vision of man's inhumanity to man. Of the bizarre contrivances some men will use to gain an advantage. The horror of being alone and unknowing in the middle of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Of being an absolute nobody in the greater scheme of things. A zero on the world's Richter scale. A gook.

A thick, dark liquid was dripping dead center on his chest. Motor oil, he realized after a few fuzzyeyed seconds.

A train was coming!

A train was getting close to his hiding place in the West Hills' jungle. Colonel Dred's turf.

A train? Peter considered. Hiding place? He was going buggy. He rolled over sideways and peeked through reeds of tall grass; tried to clear his sore throat of pollen and dew. Two lizards walked by at his eye level, one following the other. they seemed to be well acquainted. to be good friends, maybe lovers.... The two lizards stopped and played in the grass like small dinosaurs. Quite gregarious little monsters. Red bubbles throbbed under their greenand-blue chins.

Macdonald slowly rolled out, away from the BMW. He sat in the grass and picked grass and stones out of his arm and watched the sun as it peeked through trees dripping heavy moss. The sky was flaming over the leaf cover. Hot, hot, today.

Hiding out, he considered once again, trying the feeling out like a new sports coat. On the run.

After another minute massaging hopeless thoughts, Peter got up and started to make a fire. Gathered leaves and a few sticks, twigs, grass reeds, anything dry. He went over to the motorcycle and pulled out the German's dandy cross-country kit.... In a few minutes he'd make instant Nescafd coffee. Powdered eggs. Some kind of dried, salty beef.

Crouched over the small fire, the young man gulped down the equivalent of four eggs, the worst coffee he could imagine, mystery meat, and a chocolate bar that came all the way from West Germany chustfor such an occashun. While he finished the quick meal, Peter thought about Jane. He considered going into Coastown to get her. Decided against it. She was better off as far away from him as possible. Probably as far away as possible from the San Dominican police, too. For the moment Jane was fine where she was. Which was more than he could say for himself.

After he finished breakfast, he went back to the BMW's shiny black leather saddlebags. He took out a West Point T-shirt and unwrapped the Colt.44.

It seemed strange, unreal, as he held the old gun. He turned the chamber and saw all eight shells. He examined the gun further, remembered the army shooting ranges at West Point that were hidden in massive gray-stone buildings on a hill above the football field, Michie Stadium. He remembered a seedy shooting range inside a steaming, tin-roofed building in the Cholon section of Saigon.

Peter slowly raised the long-barreled Colt. Aimed at a mottled banana tree leaf. Aimed at a tiny chattering yellow bird. Aimed at a small green coconut. Finally at a small black snake slithering up a gom- mier tree.

The tree was a good thirty-five paces away. Thirty-five yards. What pistol enthusiasts regard as trick or shoWhoat shooting.

Looking like an old-fashioned duelist, aiming ever so carefully, Peter squeezed the trigger gently.

The distant head of the black snake exploded as if it were rotten inside. The rest of the snake dropped from the gommier like a loose vine.

In a way, the neat shot pleased and surprised him. He really hadn't expected the showpiece revolver to be so well balanced. As for the shooter-well, he knew all about the other shooter.

"Hoo boy!" Peter said out loud to the deangerous West Hills. "Now what, hotshot?"

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

The John Simpson Roses. Strange, blueblood family. Damian's fourteen-year-old brother was caught cheating on a bloody exam at the Horace Mann School. Teenager swallowed half a beaker of sulfuric acid. Didn't die because the dose was so high he vomited it all up. He was crippled from his neck down, though. In an institution ever since. Damian's mother living in an institution year-round, too. Father rides round and round Manhattan and London in a big black limo provided by a multinational bank. Damian planning 'to kill his father in the limo one day....

The Rose Diary

Mercury Landing, San Dominica

Saturday afternoon.

The shoreline at Mercury Landing was pretty and very secluded.

Black cliffs rose high on either side of a silver of gleaming white sand. There was a glen of royal palm trees. Yellow birds. Flocks of parrots, as in an open-air pet store. A big red sun over the sea like God's angry eye.

There was a big white house over the sea, too. And on one side of the house, a dark green sedan was hidden in the shadows of Casuarina trees.

There could be no doubt about one thing: San Dominica was a paradise on this earth.

Down on the beach at Mercury Landing, a man and woman were walking in the nude. Without her clothes, Carrie Rose's legs seemed a little too long, a little bowed. Her feet were slightly too large and too flat.

These were nitpicks, however, because the slender young woman was quite beautiful without clothes.

Walking beside her, Damian was almost as impressive to look at. The tall blond man wore nothing, but he had an expensive terry-cloth jumpsuit draped over one arm. He had broad shoulders and well-muscled legs. A hard, flat stomach. Pretty blond hair.

A long, sun-tanned cock hung out of the light, curly hair between Damian's legs.

"The killing should all be over now," Carrie was saying to him, with the little midwestem twang always in her voice. "It's taking too long, Damian. A week is too long. "

Damian just smiled at her. He glanced out at a boat coming over a distant reef. A gray smudge on a wiggly black line. "You just want the tension you're feeling to be over, " he said in a soft, detached voice. "It isn't taking too long at all. It's perfect so far. This island is as insane and paranoid as a madhouse.... Besides, in two days or so you get to leave. You can even start to spend all our money. Buy yourself a few cars or something, Carrie. " Carrie Rose slipped her arm around her husband's firm waist. "I want you to leave with me. I think it will be better that way. Will you do that, Damian? Leave with me?" "If I leave"-Damian started to raise his voice-"then Campbell and Harold Hill will come looking for us. Sooner or later they'll find us. Suddenly a big black car will arrive at our villa somewhere or other. Their short-haired killers will come down on us like little Nazis. Kill us. Become he roes. Write books and make movies like The French Connection.

"Look at how it's growing." Damian suddenly changed moods, smiled unexpectedly. "Irreverent little beast. Big beast."

As he was walking, his penis had extended itself straight out and to the left. Blood had gone to its tip-which was just touching Carrie's bare leg.

She pushed it away. "If I have to tell you everything explicitly, I'm frightened this time. You're playing too many games this time. I don't want us to end like this.... You mentioned little Nazis before. Well, we're going to be searched for like Nazis. " - Damian threw up his arms like a Frenchman. "Let them search. Let them search. they looked for Eichmann for twenty years. They're stupid, Carrie.

Remember that. they are all stupid, humbling idiots."

Carrie just bowed her head. She let her long hair swing from side to side, brushing over her breasts.

For the next few minutes they walked along the lip of the cove in silence. "If I were to lie down in the water there?" She finally spoke....

The two beautiful people walked to where the white sand was slicked-over wet. Damian put down the expensive terry-cloth suit, and Carrie lay on it. Damian kneeled over her-began to lower himself slowly. For a fleeting moment his clear blue eyes seemed almost gentle to her.

"So tell me, Carrie," he said, "how was your handsome stockbroker?"

Saturday Evening.

The main coup de theatre was staged that night, Saturday, May 5.

At eleven o'clock automobile headlights appeared at Mercury Landing's high, silver-painted front gates. Emerging from the shadowy gates, the Cuban waved the first car on.

Standing at the other end of the driveway, Damian Rose could hear gravel being crushed under heavy automobile tires. One hour late, but they were coming, anyway.

The tall blond man checked a Smith & Wesson revolver under his suit jacket. A small snub-nosed.38. A very appropriate weapon for the evening's performance, Rose thought.... Tonight he was going to play Hammett for the locals. As he continued to watch down the hill, a second and third set of headlights turned onto the pitchblack driveway. One pair of lights was outrageous y cross-eyed. It exposed tall Bermuda grass on one side of the car, palm trees and purplish sky on the other.

The three cars completely disappeared for a moment. they passed behind bay trees and bushes called fire-of-the-forest, where six local gunmen had been told to wait. Just wait.

Then bright headlights sprayed all over the vined walls and windows of the whitewashed main house. The cars began to park in a glen of casuarinas in front of the villa.

Ready or not, Damian thought to himself, this is it. Curtain time.

He rehearsed all his lines one final time before he had to go on.

Out on a large flagstone terrace at the rear of the villa, Kingfish Toone could be heard speaking pidgin English with a French-Congolese accent.

"We are prepare to offer you cash only," the broad-shouldered mercenary explained to the four guerrilla leaders who had just arrived. "One hundred twenty-five thousand. You could buy whatever you like with the money. Guns. Whatever you like. That is my final offer, Colonel."

Dassie "Monkey" Dred let his pretty chocolate face fall between his long legs. His long combmids fell. He began to laugh in a loud, crude voice.

Then he started making bird noises out on the terrace.

"Ayeee! S'mady take dis monkey-mahn away fram me," Dred said to no one in particular. "Dis Afhcahn smell lak hairdresser fram Americah."

Kingfish Toone smiled along with Dred's men. The African had met and dealt with this type of madman before.

Across the terrace, the Cuban sat on a small wicker rocking chair, saying nothing at all.

"That smell is something called soap. You've never smelled soap before, have you?"

A tall white man spoke from the doorway leading back into the house. His blond hair was all wet, slicked back close to the scalp, like something out of Esquire or Gentlemen's Quarterly. He was wearing an expensively tailored cream gabardine suit. Appropriate accoutrements, perfectly matched. An inlaid ivory watch. An ivory ring. A black Gucci belt and Gucci loafers.

Damian Rose ran his hand back over his wet hair once again. Then he crossed the patio to the young, bearded revolutionary. As he walked, his jacket swung open, revealing a fancy belt holster and the Smith & Wesson.

"Colonel Dred. " Damian smiled like a Clint Eastwood character. "Your work is admired far off this island. In Europe, I'm talking about. In black America. "

The guerrilla soldier's face softened for a split second that wasn't lost on Rose. Then Dred dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. He spit on the terrace.

"Yo' very well-train ape"-he indicated King fish Toone sitting across the terrace-"has offered me-what is it?@cash.... I don't need dat. I have all kind cash from ganja sellin'.

Rose's soft blue eyes never left the much darker eyes of the San Dominican. "First of all, my 'welltrained ape' could rip off your coconuts in about five seconds' time, Colonel. Secondly, whatever your problem is, we can find a solution."

"He wants the guns used in this raid." The Cuban spoke in Spanish from his seat across the terrace. "He has trouble buying guns."

"For obvious reasons." Damian turned back to Dred. "I don't want to arm you that well, Colonel.... You may have the guns, however. We'll give you two hundred fifty M-16's. Plus handguns. "

"Fifty thousan' rounds of ammunition. At least fifty machine guns," Dred shouted. His three officers smiled and clapped their hands like Barnum and Bailey chimps.

The lips of the tall blond man parted in a slight smile. He slid his hands back over the wet hair again. He took out a pack of English cigarettes.

"I can't give you the machine guns," Damian said flatly.

Suddenly Monkey Dred was on his feet, shouting at the top of his lungs. His combraids shook like a hundred dancing black snakes. A U.S. Army ammunition belt around his waist jounced and jangled.

"Forty machine guns, den! Deliver at least one day before dat massacres. "

Damian Rose picked up a camphor candle from a patio table. He lit his cigarette with it. The word massacres rolled over his tongue. Massacree.

"One fifty-millimeter machine gun. For you!" Rose let the cigarette dangle. "But the other guns to be distributed right now. Plus a bonus of twentyfive thousand rounds of ammunition.... If I could offer you more, I would. It's not my money, Colonel.... Our friends in Cuba know what you need, and what you don't."

A loud laugh came up from somewhere deep in the black man's chest. "All right, den!" he shouted.

Damian Rose smiled. Friends in Cuba indeed... he'd won. Massacree!

He heaved the red jar and camphor candle far down the hillside toward the Caribbean. The lamp hit a distant, invisible rock. It broke with the pop of a light bulb. Just after it hit, lights flashed on and off down on the water. A small motor boat started to come in toward shore.

Carrie.

"Your guns, Colonel," Damian Rose announced. "Enough guns and ammunition to take over the entire island... if you'll listen to just a bit of advice."

As early as 6:00 A. M. on the sixth day, there were bold, unnerving machete murders -in the two most expensive hotels in San Dominica's two principal cities.

In Coastown, a youngfashion photographerfrom Greenwich, Connecticut, was found floating facedown in a pretty courtyard swimming pool in the Princess Hotel. A black-handled sugar-cane machete was sticking out of the man's back like an exclamation point to the crime.

In Port Gerry, an English barrister's wife was hacked to pieces while she was gathering hibiscus in the garden of the exclusive Spice Point Inn. The woman was then bundled up in Spice Point towels and thrown onto the inn's dining veranda byfleeing, ha6r-naked black men.

Also very early in the morning, both the Gleaner and the Evening Star received Dead Letters. In these new communications, Colonel Dred claimed responsibility for the morning's hotel murders.

Dred also warned that the rate of race killings on San Dominica would escalate by 1,000 percent daily until an interest in all hotels, restaurants, and other nwjor businesses was turned over to the people.

Someone at the Gleaner calculated that sincefour people had died so far on the fifth, a minimum of forty people had to die on May 6.

Then four hundred... then four thousand...

May 6, 1979, Sunday

Princess,,

Spice Point,

Hit

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We're conditioned to expect things to happen at a certain rate. to have a certain rhythm. What we did'on San Dominica was to take all of the prevailing rhythms away.

The Rose Diary

May 6, 1979, Coastown, San Dominica

Sunday Morning. The Sixth Day of the Season.

At 7:15 the morning of the sixth day, Peter Macdonald stepped through the latchen door of Brooks Cainpbell's expensive villa in Coastown, shouted, "Scrambled eggs! " and knocked the handsome CIA man down with a hard, right-handed punch to his Greco-Roman nose.

"You better stay right down there," Peter yelled as Campbell tried to push himself to his feet. He took out the Colt.44 and pointed the barrel at an imaginary target, one-half inch in circumference, centered between Campbell's hazel-brown eyes.

"What the hell do you want?" "Just the truth," Peter said quietly. "I'm not going to go into what's happened to me since the last time you fucked me over-how I came to sleep in your garage last night-but I want to know everything you know about the machete murders. I want to know all your so-called state secrets."

Very slowly, cautiously, Campbell got to his feet. "There's only one problem with what you're saying, " he said to Peter. "I just don't believe you'd shoot me. I know you wouldn't."

The next thing Brooks Campbell saw was the big steel handle of the Colt.44. It struck him sideways across the cheekbone, and he crashed down on the yellow tile floor again.

"You will believe I'll shoot you in a minute," he heard dimly. A brown workboot stamped down hard on his chest, then he was pulled up roughly by his hair. Suddenly he felt a hot streak go down the right side of his face.

"Now, dammit, you better talk to me, mister. I know how to do shit like this. Torturing men. Believe me I do."

Campbell was beginning to focus in on the heat burner of his own kitchen stove. The coil was red hot-a glowing orange-and his hair was starting to smoke. Bacon cooking on another burner was spitting all over the other side of his face.

"I swear to God I'll fry your goddamn ear!" Macdonald yelled at him, army drill instructor style.

"We know the Mafia is involved somehow!" Campbell finally screamed out. "Let me up. I'm burning, Macdonald!"

Peter loosened his stranglehold, but not so much that Campbell could get up. "I don't know what that's supposed to mean. The Mafia... the Mafia what?"

"They've been trying to get the assembly here to legalize casino gambling for years.... Now they're going to get what they want-or they say they'll destroy this place. Blow up San Dominica and write it off as a tax loss.... That's all we know. I swear it. Macdonald, I'm on fire!"

Peter finally let go of Campbell. What he'd heard started to make a little sense. It explained some of the things-diat had happened.

"What does Colonel Dred have to do with that? With the Mafia? Casino gambling?"

The CIA man was holding his ear as if it had been bitten into. He was wearing a gold-and-red dragon kimono, and for once in his life Brooks Campbell looked ridiculous.

"We don't know how or even if they got to Dred. " He continued to tell half-truths with some conviction. "Apparently, something big is coming up soon. Those letters in the newspapers are actually warnings to the assembly. Some big horror show is coming. What you don't understand is that we're all going wild trying to stop it from happening. "

"I'm getting a feeling that you're lying again," Peter said. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. He direw Campbell some ice for the bruise on his face. Then he took a long, sloppy swig of orange juice from an open jug.

"AU right." He waved the coWhoy pistol at Campbell. "This has been a little better than our first talk, I guess. I'll be back ff I need to know anything else from you. Just don't ever make the mistake of @ng that I wouldn't shoot you. I'd shoot you. I don't even like you."

Peter backed out the kitchen door, then ran to the BMW.

Now what kind of horror show could be coming up? he wondered as he eased the motorcycle down palm-lined lanes and backed out toward the rain forest. Would the Mafia get mixed up in something like this? And how does the blond man fit in? A mercenary? to do what?

But, Christ, this was a hell of a lot better than being a bartender for a nutty German storin trooper.... Maybe he should become a cop, or a ftffip Marlowe-type detective or something. Someday soon....

After his success with Campbell, Peter was at least feeling alive again. That was a start.

Coastown, San Dominica

A seagull flapped up Parmenter Street. Dipped to scrutinize natives setting up a brightly colored fruit mart. Angled right shoulder, wing first, and lided like a clever wooden airplane over the exclu- sive cnmson-roofed Coastown Princess Hotel.

Sitting pretty with a big supply of steaming coffee, kipper and eggs, fresh rolls and sweet butter, Carrie Rose was out on her loggia at the Princess.

She was just beginning to compose a long, personal entry in the million-dollar diary. When she wrote, she told about a particular late summer afternoon in Paris. An afternoon that had provided a key to the whole thing.

August 10, 1978; Paris

The place was called Atlantic City, and it was a trendy little bistro recently sprung up as a haven for Americans on the avenue Marceau.

The cafe was already famous for its twelve varieties of le hamburger. And, to a lesser extent, for its big wooden posters illustrating different trivial points about a seedy boardwalk resort in southeastem New Jersey.

DID YOU KNOW THAT?

THE FIRST EASTER PARADE IN AMERICA was HELD IN ATLANTIC CITY...

THE FIRST FERRIS WHEEL was OPER AT'ED IN ATLANTIC CITY....

THE FIRST MOTION PICTURE was MADE IN ATLANTIC CITY....

THE FIRST PICTURE POSTCARDS WERE FROM ATLANTIC CITY....

Floppy white hat covering half of her face, Carrie Rose walked back slowly into the dark bar. She heard "Lady Marmalade" playing on the jukebox. "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?.

White butterfly stockings swished softly as she continued until she saw the wheelchair. Then Carrie realized that, for the first time in a long time, she was frightened.

"The incomparable, infamous Mrs. Rose." Nickie Handy spoke to her from the corner of a candlelit booth. "Now what could your pleasure be this lovely, shitty afternoon?"

As Carrie slid into the oaken booth, she kissed the top of Nickie's head. Her ex-partner. Then, as she settled in across from her old friend, she couldn't help staring at the crippled man's face.

Nickie Handy, still not thirty years old, had no left cheek now. No left side to his face. Just sagging flesh hanging off a cheekbone.

"I should come see you more than this," she said softly. "Both Damian and I are rats, Nickie. We really are bad."

A waitress came and Carrie ordered a bottle of pouilly-fuiss6. Nickie made a remark about the French girl's breasts. "Sow's teats," he said with a crooked little smile.

"Let's have it. Let's have it." He turned back to Carrie. "Don't hand me this visiting-the-localVFW crap. Buying your hot-shit wines and all that......

"All right. I came to talk to you about the shooting. Saigon."

A surprised look dropped over Nickie Handy's sad, Quasimodo face. "Let's not," he said. Then suddenly his face twisted up like a pretzel and he raised his voice.

II You're looking at me like a fucking cat, Carrie That disdainful look Siamese cats get. Bee-utiful! I love it, you cunt."

"You're paranoid." Carrie continued to speak softly, almost lovingly. "Damian and I are doing a job with Harold Hill. Harry the Hack and your very goodfriend Brooks Campbell - Who would you suggest we go talk to?"

The cripple took his mug of beer and slowly spilled it out onto the pine-and-sawdust floor. "Beeutiful! "

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" a dark-bearded French bartender called back. "Behave yourself, Nickee!"

Handy screwed up his face again. Some kind of awful tic, apparently.

"Brooks Campbell was supposed to be paying me in that alley in Saigon. Blew my head off instead. Hello, Nick. Blam! Blam! Blam!... Left me for a fucking cold stiff in the sewer, Carrie.

"Dead chink mouse floated past my nose. I thought I was in hell already. Crippled in the sewer. Face messed up like it is. Your new partners, you say?"

"There was no provocation for what they did, Nickie? Privateering?... It was just a double cross?"

"Straight double cross! Me and a poor gook bastard. I think he even kept my money for himself. Brooks Campbell. Fucking movie-star face."

"Those awful bastards, Nickie."

"Your partners," Nickie said again. "I love it! I love it!"

Carrie and the crippled man sat drinking in the Americanized bar until after five o'clock. At that point American business types began to crowd inside. Tourists and backpacking hippies from the nearby L'Etoile. By 5:30 it was impossible to hear a normal conversation inside the tacky bistro.

Saying something about cigarettes, Carrie reached inside her shoulder bag. Then she leaned over deep into the dark booth and shot Nickie Handy dead. Two soft little pffits that were never heard over the din. Heart shots. Quicklike, because she didn't want him to hurt.