The Passage

30

The sun came out for an hour around noon, briefly gilding turbulent swells the color of new cane leaves. Then waned again, veiled by high wispy clouds, aligned as if radiating from some far-off point beyond the view of the fifteen people in the two small boats that tossed and rolled in the grip of the sea.

Tomás had put up the mast pole, a piece of pipe stolen from the sugar mill, and set the sail. The wind was strong and steady, and as soon as the crazy quilt of stitched sacking climbed the pole, it bellied out, cracking and slapping. But after half an hour of shouting and adjusting ropes, both craft were scudding along, zigzagging as Augustín fought the tiller.

As they gathered speed, something funny happened. The waves were still huge, but they didn’t jerk and slam them about as they had before. Now they lifted the boats gradually, the skiff first, then the bigger boat. Tilted them forward, making them race along for a few yards, and then let them down again, where they swayed, the sail slatting and sagging, till the next wave rose astern.

And gradually, Augustín learned to guess what the sea would do, and their rippling trail unrolled across the murky heaving surface nearly in a straight line — headed west.

The people from Batey Number 3 lay in them, heads nodding with each roll, sprawled out with shirts or arms over their faces, legs propped on thwarts or each other’s stomachs. They looked like two boatfuls of dead rocking across the sea.

When Graciela woke, she felt dizzy and a backache pounded at her kidneys. She lay inert, feeling the boat roller-coastering forward under her, listening to the sea bubble past. It wasn’t uncomfortable, really, except for her wet clothes and the itching where they chafed. Of course, she hadn’t been able to stretch out for two days and nights. So that now lying in an inch of water in the bottom of a pitching boat was actually almost comfortable. The backache, sure, but after three times she knew that this close to the parto, she could be in a feather bed and her back would still ache.

Then her mind moved beyond and she remembered the day and the night before. She’d left the graves of her children and husband, and Coralía, too, behind forever. A thin sharp knife turned in her heart, bittersweet, relief and regret and longing all mixed up so that she didn’t know what she felt. Then, lagging it by only a moment, came fear. She lifted her head, to see a bare thin back, bony shoulder blades like incipient wings. The boy was sitting in the stern, looking out.

“Miguelito.”

His head jerked around. “Tia Graciela. ¿Estás despierta?”

“Help me up, chico. Where is grandmother Aracelia?”

“Up front, with Julio and Gustavo.” He got his arm under her and helped her onto the thwart. When she was arranged, she turned her head to the others. They nodded back, eyes red and sleepy. She bent, the boat tipping even under that tiny shift of weight, and glanced down. Clear water rolled back and forth over her bare feet.

“More water’s coming in. The boat is leaking.”

“I bail it every couple of hours. It’s not much. Don’t worry, Tia.”

“You’re a good boy, Miguelito.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes, realizing only now how hungry and thirsty she was. The sky seemed very bright. The sun struck through the thin high clouds. She seldom got sunburn in the fields, but already her cheeks stung. Moving awkwardly — big as she was, the least motion was difficult — she dipped a corner of her skirt into the water and patted her face and neck with it. That refreshed her, and straightening her back, she looked around.

The sea was so much bigger than she’d expected. It made her feel small and alone, like standing in a field at night, looking up at the stars. But what was that they were saying about other boats? Clinging to the gunwale, she searched nearsightedly around as they rose to a swell. She didn’t see anyone else. Then, surprise, she did, a little boat not all that far away. She lifted a hand tentatively, and to her delight the people in it waved back. They were Cuban all right; no one else could smile as lightheartedly out here. Ahead of the skiff, a dripping rope led to the stern of Tomás’s boat, and above it, surprising her before she recognized it, was the sail — her sail, the one she’d stitched together out of the sacks the rice came in. The patchwork expanse bulged as if it had swallowed the wind and the wind was trying to get out. She examined it worriedly, but her doubled seams seemed to be holding. Below it, Xiomara caught her eyes. Graciela smiled back, but just then the skiff fell forward off a wave and she felt water spring into her mouth. If only it would stop, just for a moment, she’d be fine. But it never stopped ….

“Tia Graciela, you all right?”

She felt Gustavo’s wiry arms around her as she retched. It was terrible, being sick when you were this pregnant. She felt miserable, dirty, sweaty, and turgid. Then she felt something else, and her hand dropped to her stomach. Tight as a drum already, it was growing harder.

She clung to the gunwale, staring into the swirling green. She dreaded what she was about to pass through, but at the same time she wished the baby would hurry and come. No, no, she didn’t mean that! She had weeks yet to go. If he was born in Miami, he’d be an americano, no?

She clung grimly to the wood, and after a time the giant hand that had been squeezing her slowly opened.

Miguelito sat in the bow, looking at his hands. He remembered when they’d been a baby’s, small and soft and unable to grab anything but his mother’s dress. Now she was dead and he was big, and he could do almost anything he wanted with them …. Why, he was a man. And someday, they’d be hard and stiff like old Gustavo’s, and in the rainy season he’d complain that they hurt, deep inside.

Or maybe that didn’t happen in America ….

He wondered what it was going to be like. He’d listened on the radio, tuning in secretly to the Voice of America with the high whistle of the jamming. He heard Cuban voices talk about their crossing and how free and rich and happy they were in the great country to the north. It was like eavesdropping on the saints, hearing the testimony of those who had gone to heaven. He’d even dreamed about it last night. Yes, he’d forgotten when he woke, but now he remembered it again.

He’d been drifting in the water, all alone, at night. But as dawn approached, he’d seen a light and started swimming toward it. As the sun came up, the light faded, but he saw land in the same direction, with white clouds stacked above. He paddled weakly toward it, like a drowning dog. The current swept him along the coast and for a long time he was afraid he wouldn’t make it, that he’d be dragged past. Now he could make out bushes or small trees. A point of land reached out for him, but the current moved faster. His arms were so heavy …. As he rounded the point, he saw a bay, a lighthouse rising from an eminence. He kept swimming and passed the peninsula a hundred yards from the surf, which he heard clearly.

The current changed then and pushed him in toward a stone jetty. The waves jostled him as he drew slowly nearer. But when he reached it at last, the stones were too huge to climb. Barnacles covered them, razoring his hands like broken black glass. The current carried him, screaming, off the seawall’s end, around it, and into a harbor.

In the bay, white boats lay at anchor. Beautiful women lay on the decks, sipping fruit drinks in the sun. They didn’t look down. They talked to one another as he swept by, struggling, crying out, drowning.

Then all at once, he realized he didn’t have to struggle. He didn’t even have to swim. He rose from the sea and began walking toward the shore, toward white and gold buildings towering against the blue sky. He could hear many bands playing all together, like at the Carnaval. As he drew closer to the beach, people gathered to greet him — beautiful blond women in bathing suits, strong men with black hair and white teeth. They carried him gently from the water and up onto the sand, speaking rapidly in a strange, beautiful language that had to be English. The sand was white and, to his surprise, soft. He smiled up at the circle of concerned faces. Someone gave him a Coca-Cola to drink. They were so friendly, the Americans.

Then he saw that they weren’t smiling; they were laughing. Only then did he realize that he was lying naked before all of them; the women were laughing and pointing. His clothes were back in Cuba. He had to return, go back to his father’s hut ….

“¡Hola!”

He snapped his head around, to see the other boat not far away at all. It had come up on them gradually. His eyes ran over it curiously. It was almost square. Above it rose a curious double mast and a slanted boom with a brown sail. It was green, the part the people sat in, and looked familiar. He sat astonished for a second, then laughed out loud. It was a truck bed. They were using a truck bed as a boat!

“Hello!” he yelled back.

“Where are you from?”

Tomás’s bellow answered before he could. “Alcorcón,” he shouted.

“Where?”

“Camagüey. Where are you from?”

“Puerto Vita.”

“That is far to the east,” Gustavo muttered. “Way down in Oriente.”

“It’s in Holguín Province now,” Miguelito told the old man patronizingly. “There’s no more Oriente.”

“It’s still Oriente, boy, no matter what the Communists call it.”

“How long have you been at sea?” Tomás shouted across.

“Two days, chico. Hey, how far to Miami?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any extra food?”

“We have just barely enough. Are you out?”

“No, we’ve still got some boniatos.”

“We don’t have much for ourselves.”

“I understand, amigo. Shall we stay together?”

“Sure. We’ll stay in sight.”

“Vaya con Dios, okay?”

“Vaya con Dios. See you in los Estados Unidos.”

They waved, and Miguel gave them a salute as the boxy hull turned away, the slanted bow crushing down the waves.

That evening toward sunset, an airplane came over — a big one, with a white belly and a long tail like a dragonfly. They waved, but it didn’t turn or indicate in any way that it had seen them. It just flew on steadily, then disappeared to the right of the setting sun.

“It’s going back to America,” Julio said, and the people in the chalana looked after it, each thinking his own thoughts.

They ate plantains, then finished the water in the bottle. They passed it around one last time, her, Miguelito, Gustavo, and finally Julio. The young man made a gesture of renunciation, but Gustavo said, “Drink, chico, you must stay strong in case we need you.” So he took it and drained the last clear fluid, then held it up.

“Empty,” he said. Then he turned, cupping his hands, and yelled across the foaming murky track that separated them from the others, “Hey! Tomás! We’re out of water!”

Guzman came out of the cockpit, hair snarled. He looked like he’d been asleep. “¿Qué pasa?”

“We’re out of water.”

“What, you guzzled that up already?”

“We haven’t ‘guzzled’ it. It was only one bottle, and that was since yesterday.”

Tomás looked worried, or angry, but he nodded. He glanced around, looked up at the sky, and then ducked back into the cabin.

He reappeared with another bottle cradled in his stumped arm and began crawling aft, bracing himself as the sail rattled and boomed and the boat pitched. He got to the stern and looked back at them. “Pull yourself up here. Use the rope.”

Julio bent to the line and started shortening the distance, hand over hand. Gustavo coiled the soft worn manila neatly as it came in. But when they were only a few feet away, a wave suddenly lifted their stern. They coasted forward, sliding down its slick slant, and crashed into the back of the bigger boat so violently splinters flew. Julio shot forward, almost jerked out of the skiff. “¡Mierda! Be careful, carajo!” Tomás yelled.

“The water!” Xiomara screamed, pointing, and they all, in both boats, turned and looked at where the plastic glinted and rolled in their wake. Augustín yanked the tiller over, but Tomás put out his hand, guiding him back on course. “It’s gone. Nenita, hand me another,” he said quietly.

Colon came out of the cabin. He said, so loudly that Graciela could hear him even over the wind, “They already had their water. They fucked up and lost it. No more for them.”

“Hand me another bottle, Temilda,” said Tomás.

Colon adjusted his pistol belt. “Did you hear me, Guzman? I said, they had their chance.”

Tomás glanced at him but didn’t argue, didn’t respond at all. He took a piece of wire from his pocket and twisted it around the neck of the new bottle the twins passed up. Colon frowned but didn’t say anything else. He just stood watching, hands on his hips, swaying as the boat rolled. Tomás looped the wire over the rope, then pushed it down toward the skiff. It hesitated, disappearing under the sea as the line slacked. Then, dragged by the current of their passage, it slid the last few feet.

Julio held it up, flourishing it like a trophy. Xiomara and Nenita, looking back, smiled. But Graciela saw Colón’s scowl as he turned away, bent, crawled back into the darkness of the cabin. Tomás had humiliated him, shown the others he had no cojones. For that, she knew, a man must have revenge.

The sunset that night was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. High thin clouds all aligned like the plowed rows of a field. At first they glowed like hot wires, then gradually cooled through copper to gold before fading away at last into black tiger stripes on a cobalt night. Just before they disappeared, she felt something on her thighs. Turning her back to the men, she gestured Aracelia over. Then she lifted her skirt a few inches, exposing a rash on her calves and painful raw patches where the skin had rubbed off her knees.

“Oh,” the old woman whispered. She glanced quickly at the men, who were looking at the sky, and unwound her head cloth. She splashed water quickly on Graciela’s belly, wiping off the blood and mucus. Graciela gasped at the salt sting.

“How does it feel?”

“Not pain exactly. Like cramps.”

“Contractions?”

“It’s too early for that.”

Aracelia nodded, wrinkled face serene. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Raise yourself.” She slid her hands under the younger woman’s buttocks, easing the cloth between her thighs, then bound it tightly.

Just then, a rogue gust came over the sea.

It caught Augustín, on the tiller, by surprise. It snatched the sail from the side and slammed the boom around, and suddenly the whole thing, mast and sail and all the ropes and rigging, collapsed and fell, half into the sea, half onto the people on deck. Cries and shouts came from under it.

But even after knocking down their sail, the gust didn’t stop. It kept increasing, making the boat heel over crazily, dragging the mass of wreckage. It started to come broadside to the waves, dragging the skiff around after it. Julio grabbed the paddle, looking quickly aft.

Shouting came from the boat ahead. “Pull it in. Roll it up. Get the end of that rope. Is it broken? Augustín—”

Through the failing light, Graciela caught sight of the men struggling with the flapping cloth. Then heard, all too plainly, a long ripping sound as the boom rolled over the side, followed by intense and impassioned cursing. And all this time, the boats were still slowing, still skating slowly around.

“Tomás!” Julio yelled. But Guzman didn’t answer. He was somewhere under the flapping, slamming sail.

Then the wave hit them.

It lifted and heeled them and the boat kept going on over, farther and farther. The twins and the Colon kids started screaming. Graciela, horrified, looked for an endless time at the tin bottom of the big boat.

Then the kids screamed again and the wave passed under it and it came back down, rocking back so heavily it sent the water surging out from underneath it in a great wave. “Get it back around!” Julio was screaming, paddling furiously to keep their own stern backed into the seas. “Augustín! Start the motor!”

Tomás appeared roaring from under the sail, pushing up the mast. His shoulders bulged as a hand and a stump levered the heavy pipe back into the sky. The forward rope came taut but the after one swung frayed, worn through. “Grab it!” he yelled. “Okay, tie it to something, coño, apirate!”

“The boom’s gone, Tomás, and half the sail.”

“That’s okay; we can fix that.”

When Augustín yelled, “Okay, it’s tied,” Guzman sagged to his knees on the cabin top, one arm around the mast. When he had his breath back, he motioned weakly to take in the remnants of the sail, which was flapping loose, thundering and roaring ahead of the wildly rolling boat.

Later, the five people in the skiff sat in the darkness, watching the vanishing ghostly blur ahead. “That was not good,” Gustavo said softly.

“It’s getting rougher. The wind keeps getting stronger.”

“What if the sail falls down again?”

“Tomás can run the engine,” said Miguel.

“There’re only a couple liters of gas left,” Julio said.

“He should just take it down,” said Gustavo. “The current’s taking us west. This is a big river out here. I used to fish out here, years ago.”

“He can’t, Tio. Those waves hit us sideways, we’re going to turn over. You saw it; it almost happened.”

“This river, it ends up in Miami?” Miguel asked them. “How much farther is it to Florida?”

“I’m not sure. It can’t be too much farther; we’ve been going for a whole day.”

“Those people from Holguín have been out for two days now.”

“Yeah, but they had farther to go.”

The men talked deep into the night. Graciela didn’t join their conversation. Neither did old Aracelia. They sat together near the bow, near the little pocket the pointed end of the chalanita made. And gradually, the men, too, passed into silence, till all was heaving, whistling dark. She lay down in the floorboards, wrapping her dress tightly around her, and listened to the sea gurgling past her ear.

She started awake, the scream tearing her throat apart before she even knew what was wrong.

In the black night, the skiff seemed to spin, sliding sidelong down the roaring black chest of a wave. She screamed again, grabbing at something soft to keep from being thrown out of the boat, and then her throat closed and all she could do was moan. Julio yelled and then everyone was yelling. Then, all at once, they stopped, listening to answering shouts across the water, but faint, so faint.

There was the distant pop of a shot, then nothing, nothing but roaring darkness, with the wind blustering and whining as they rose dizzyingly in the black, then dropped, leaving her stomach floating out somewhere above the waves. She felt strength drain from her fingers even as they gripped wet wood. She stared into black, praying for a glimpse of something, anything — a spark, a face, a star, a light. Nothing came.

Then nausea grabbed her again, and this time acid stripped her throat raw and left her gagging. She hit at the wood, feeling her hands bruise but not caring. Then she felt Miguelito’s thin arms. He sounded scared, too. “Tia Graciela … Tia Graciela. Sit down! You’re going to make us go over!”

“They’re gone; they’re gone.”

Julio’s voice, grim as the night: “I’ve got the end of the rope.” Old Gustavo: “Yeah?”

“It’s cut.”

“That hijo de puta. He cut it, the fat one. The son of a bitch Communist chivato, he cut our rope.”

“Or his fat wife.”

“She’s a whore, but she wouldn’t do that. It was him, I tell you.”

“Tomás will come back for us.”

“If he can find us. But in the dark, how?”

“We should have had a light — a candle, anything.”

Miguelito said, “Maybe he can’t come back. You heard the shot. What if they killed Tomás, Julio?”

Julio didn’t answer, and Graciela felt panic close her throat again. Oh God, oh blessed Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre, patron of the sea … Squatting on the floorboards, she pressed her fists tightly to her face.

When dawn came they were alone. She looked until her eyes hurt, but there was no sign of the others. There were other boats, but miles away, and she didn’t think any of them were Tomás’s. They were alone now, five people in a little leaking boat.

Gustavo, Aracelia, and Miguelito lay in the water on the bottom, their mouths gaping in sleep. Only Julio was awake. He was staring out fixedly at an oncoming wave, the paddle poised in his hands like some kind of weapon.

Then he bent, dark skin showing through the ragged T-shirt, and abruptly, furiously dug it into the water. The stern rose and the boat started to roll. But Julio dug harder and the stern swung back just in time to meet the sea. It drove under them, heaving them upward with arrogant power. As they rose, the wind punched at them in heavy cold gusts that ripped spray off the ragged waves and blew it in white trailing lines along the green surface.

Then it was past, and her cousin sagged back. She saw the bloody smears his hands had dyed into the handle of the whittled wood. One by one, the others woke, opened their eyes blankly. She dragged herself up, trying to ease the ache in her back. She wasn’t hungry at all anymore … but so tired. She blinked burning eyes out at the sea. Something was missing, something that had been there before. Then she knew: the birds. They didn’t slant along the waves anymore, cocking an eye their way as they went by. There were no birds at all.

They were alone under a vast sky that was sealed now with a low darkness from which filtered a cold mist. On the far horizon, a black ominous-looking wall of cloud barred off half the world. They looked at it speechlessly, staring for a long time as the boat went up and down, spinning and rolling in the whistling wind.

31

The sea, half an hour before dawn. The uneasy, faintly glowing waves grasp at the bleaching sky but fall back with a slapping noise before they reach it. As they break, the wind spatters spray across their glossy black bellies. They shoulder one another like a big-city crowd. Sometimes they merge into a crest. At other times, their meeting makes only a low place on the sea, a patch of illusory calm. Their surface is slaty, save for an occasional flecking of foam.

The sky reflects the sea, lightless and uneasy. The gray clouds writhe as they ride the high wind.

In these last minutes before dawn, lights rise gradually from the sea: red to port, green to starboard, masthead and range brilliant white. They move steadily closer, striking colored sparks off the tossing crests.

A gray shape forms on a gray horizon. It grows, taking on shape, solidity, reality, detail. A low whine joins the sigh of the wind.

Suddenly it looms over the restless water. Wave after wave, still black in the final minutes of night, is sliced and smashed apart under a blunt blade of gray steel. The waves spit silver fragments that skip away, swerving and dipping along the swell lines: flying fish. The sea parts unwillingly, tearing energy from the moving metal with a dull roar like a collapsing cliff. The high gray sides move past, rolling with the ponderous slow beat of a massive metronome.

But as soon as the squared-off counter moves past, the sea sweeps stubbornly in again. For two minutes, it swirls and leaps, frothing white in the growing metal light. A billion bubbles rise and froth and burst. Gradually, it subsides, healing itself with a smooth, gently heaving skin, a shallow smoothness that seethes beneath with whirlpools.

Then another bladelike bow plows it apart again.

Half a mile apart, in line ahead at a thousand yards’ separation, USS Barrett followed USS Dahlgren on a northerly course at high speed. Far to port, the low hills of Cuba humped out of the sea like surfacing whales. To the east, just visible, was a bank of cloud that was Haiti. The dominant swell swept in from the northeast, but there was a cross swell, too, making the seas choppy and confused.

Gradually, the sun emerged, visible in the intervals between the speeding clouds. First as a tentative lightening over Hispaniola, a gradual brightening that lighted the world from below. Then suddenly squirting up into sight, a swollen, shimmering ball like a condom filled with blood. Rays of red light shot across the water toward the racing ships, coppering masts and rotating radars, then moving down to paint their decks. Beneath the sodden orb the sea seethed like boiling aluminum, and low altocumulus hurtled overhead as if on motor-driven belts.

On the bridge of the second ship, Dan stood behind Cannon as the navigator set his sextant carefully in its box, wedged it under a shelf, and booted up the computer in the nav shack. The screen flickered, then read:

Cannon hit ENTER and the screen blanked. He began typing in GMT, the DR position, star number, observed altitude.

As Dan turned away, the barometer caught his eye. He tapped it, not because that did anything on a modern instrument but because that was what everyone did. Then he raised his eyes to look the length of the bridge. The morning was colorless through the slanted windows. Cold photons penetrated salt-spattered Plexiglas and glanced off waxed wood, gray paint, polished brass, plastic, aluminum. They showed him tired men with pallid faces.

“What’s the trend, Dave?”

“Dropping.”

“Fast?”

“Something wicked coming our way.”

“What’s Fleet Weather calling it?”

“A tropical depression now, and still strengthening.” The navigator pulled down the board and showed him the twenty-four-hour forecast. Dan read it, memorizing figures and locations in case the captain asked, then looked out again to the two points of distant land. The nearer was Cuba, emerging now from the westerly darkness. Successive ranges of hills were cut from steadily lighter shades of reddish gray paper. He looked at Dahlgren’s slowly rolling stern half a mile ahead; at the whitish river of churned-up sea that led to Barrett’s own bow; at the two long streamers of commingled, nearly invisible smoke that blew from the racing destroyers. The sea heaved between them, but the distance never varied. The water was taking on the faintest hint of blue as the rising sun burrowed its rays under the waves. Patches of foam showed here and there, but no streaks yet. He glanced at the relative wind indicator, bent to the radarscope, checked the surface board one last time.

He said to Van Cleef, “Okay, it’s five-thirty. I’ll be on the horn for a while. Keep a sharp lookout.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He pulled the phone off the bulkhead and buzzed the at-sea cabin. Leighty answered with a grunt. “Good morning, Captain. Mr. Lenson here,” Dan said.

“Okay, I’m up. How’s it look up there?”

“We’re passing Punta Maisi, coming up on the oh-six hundred turn. Dahlgren’s holding thirty knots—”

“Thought it was twenty-eight-no, I remember you calling me when they went to thirty.”

“Yes, sir. The only contacts are Skunk Charlie — bears zero-eight-six, range eighty-nine hundred, closest point of approach at the turn will be over six thousand yards — and Skunk Bravo, past and opening to the south. The morning is overcast, with true wind fifteen knots from zero-four-eight, gusting to twenty, seas four to five feet. Dahlgren’s the guide in line ahead, thousand yards’ interval.”

“What’s Fleet Weather got to say about this low-pressure area?”

“It’s a tropical depression now, sir.” He repeated back what he’d memorized, finishing, “As of oh-four hundred, the center was moving northwest at about eight knots.”

“How are we on PIM?”

PIM was position of intended movement, the moving point where the ship should be according to the movement report they’d filed in the hectic two hours between when he’d been awakened and the time the two destroyers had passed Windward Point. He leaned over the chart, at the extremity of the phone cord. “Sir, we’re about two miles ahead right now.”

“Nothing from Dahlgren?”

“Just the half-hour radio checks.”

“Any beefs from the engineers?”

“No, sir.”

“And the next turn’s at six. Okay, somebody at my door. Must be Pedersen with breakfast. Call me if anything changes.”

Dan said he would and hung up. He glanced at Van Cleef; the JOOD had his binoculars up to starboard. Dan followed them, caught for a moment a tiny tossing speck silhouetted by an immense bloody sun. It seemed to expand as it rose, growing more malevolent at each appearance between the bands of cloud.

“Skunk Charlie’s a small boat, sir.”

“Very well.”

The overhead speaker of the radio remote hissed and said suddenly, making Van Cleef jump for the signal pad and codebook, “Juliet Papa, this is Lima Lima. Signal follows. Corpen port three-one-zero. I say again, corpen port three-one-zero. Standby — execute. Over.”

“I break that to read, turn port, following in my wake, new course three-one-zero.”

“Make it so. Give him a roger and turn in the knuckle,” said Dan. Van Cleef bawled over his shoulder, “Left five degrees rudder, steady course three-one-zero. Lima Lima, this is Juliet Papa. Roger, out.”

Dan called the captain, told him the new course, then leaned against the plot table, feeling Barrett lean, then begin rolling as she picked up the swell. He couldn’t decide how he felt. It felt good leaving Gitmo. But there was disappointment, too — like showing up at the dentist’s office and finding it closed. They’d all been wound up for the battle problem. But how could you tell how you really felt until you knew where you were going? And they didn’t know that, not even a hint.

All he knew was that at 0300, reveille had been passed throughout the ship for an emergency under way and that Barrett and Dahlgren were now en route to the Grand Bahama Passage. But no one aboard knew why, not even the radiomen, which meant the captain was in the dark, too. The only concrete facts were that they’d done an emergency sortie and were now tearing ass for either north Cuba or South Florida.

Or, to be more exact … He examined the chart again. Cannon had plotted their PIM. It curved northwest once they exited the Passage, angling gradually left around the tip of Cuba, where it ended, hanging out there in space. But if they continued on that last course, they’d be steaming parallel to the northern coast. Two hundred and forty miles, just eight hours at this speed, and they’d be entering the twisting bottleneck of the Old Bahama Channel — two to four hundred fathoms under their keel but only ten miles wide at Cay Lobos, and reefs on either side. Past that, the wedge of the Cay Sal Bank split the possibilities into two. They could go westward via the Nicholas Channel toward Havana and the Florida Keys or northward via the Santarén toward the east coast of Florida, Bimini, and Grand Bahama Island.

Okay, short-fuze orders, unexpected changes of plan weren’t unknown in the U.S. Navy. The unexpected happened — coups, hostage situations, revolutions, disasters — and ships had to be scrambled. But the funny thing was that once they’d exited Gitmo, their readiness condition had actually dropped. They were back to peacetime steaming now, with five watch sections and no weapons manned.

That meant there couldn’t be any sort of military threat. Finally, he had to admit he was beat. He checked the scope again, ran his binoculars across Dahlgren’s stern — a high rooster tail obscured her, then parted, blown downwind — and around the horizon. Nothing but the points of land, the two contacts, both falling astern, and the two destroyers tearing along to the north, alone in the waste of waters. No, he didn’t like the looks of that sky.

He stood motionless before the windows, looking out as the last shadows fled. The forecastle brightened to where he could see individual wash-down nozzles, bolt heads in the missile launcher, the faint uneven weld seams in the deck plating. The boatswain, silver pipe dangling around his neck, brought the scope hood out from the charthouse and fitted it over the radar repeater. When he was done, Dan put his face to it.

Still nothing … He stretched, then leaned against the plot table again. Getting under way unexpectedly, there’d been no time to plan exercises, drills, the other things the XO and the ops officer generated to occupy the watch standers’ free time. So once the confusion and hurry were over, they floated in a void of unscheduled time.

Gradually, other thoughts reemerged from the outer darkness, things he’d shoved out of his mind during Reftra — such as Leighty, such as his own position. He had an uneasy feeling he hadn’t heard the last of the Naval Investigative Service.

Barrett didn’t pass reveille at sea. The captain felt people could be trusted to get up on their own. So the first word passed was “titivate ship” at 0700. A little later, Cannon came up again, talked to the boatswain and Van Cleef. Then he saluted Dan and said he was ready to relieve.

The wardroom was packed. Pulling out a chair, Dan said, “Permission to join the mess, XO.” Vysotsky nodded without speaking. Dan ordered scrambled eggs and French toast. Lauderdale, Quintanilla, Martin Paul were back in short sleeves. After wearing long sleeves for weeks at Gitmo, their bare upper arms looked strange.

The exec said hoarsely, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” got up from an empty plate, and left, carrying his coffee cup like a live grenade. It had a skull and crossbones on it and the letters XO.

“So what’s the latest?” Dan asked the operations officer. Quintanilla shrugged.

“Nothing official.”

“Okay, anything unofficial?”

“I heard something in the spaces about a spill,” said Giordano, lifting his cup as Antonio carried the full pot past.

“An oil spill?”

“Tanker hit an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It was on the news on the radio. Maybe we’re riding to the rescue.”

“You know the first thing you hear’s always bullshit.”

“That’s a Coast Guard mission, not ours.”

“You wanted scuttlebutt. Felipe?”

“I’d guess something to do with this maneuvering Castro’s doing in the UN. But I don’t know how that would relate to us, or having us up north rather than down south.”

“We need better rumors than that,” said the XO, coming back in. Dan thought Vysotsky looked very tired. “You guys are falling down on the job, all I can say.”

“Hey, XO, one question.”

“Shoot, Dwight.”

“CINCLANTFLT pulls us out of training for some crisis action thing before we do the final battle problem. But then whatever it is, it’s over. Do we have to go back to Gitmo? Or do they check us off on the requirement, based on our performance up to when we left?”

“Good question. It’d probably depend on how long we were out and how close going back would crowd us up to the deployment date. Final decision would be up to the training people on Admiral Claibourn’s staff. Don’t throw anything away, though. We could get a message at noon, turn around and go back, do the battle problem tomorrow.”

A knock, and Chief Erb came in with the message board. They fell silent as Vysotsky silently read and initialed it. When the radioman left, he cleared his throat. “Interesting,” he murmured.

“For Chrissake, XO—”

“Okay, it says to drop speed to twenty knots to conserve fuel, but we’re still headed northwest. They want us and Dahlgren to break out our landing-party stores, ready ships’ boats, and prepare to embark or refuel helicopters. Norm, Dwight, we need to file a report on status of food, fresh water, JP-four, diesel, gasoline, batteries, habitability items. Dave, we’ll need a medical-stores inventory, too. We need to come up on International Marine Distress, one fifty-six point eight megahertz, one fifty-six point three, one fifty-seven point one, one-fifty-six point sixty-five, and the emergency CB channel. There’s more.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll read it at officers’ call. Let’s go.”

Dan filled two pages in his wheel book with things to do, then started delegating them to his chiefs and officers. Whatever was in the wind, it was going to take a lot of supplies and a lot of radio communications.

When he had everything farmed out and working, he stopped in CIC and stood in front of the combat direction system’s screen. The system was up, and he studied the NTDS symbology. Gradually, he noted other units being sortied: a unit from Key West that broke as Patrol Hydrofoil Squadron Two; others were Coast Guard, and there were two NATO friendlies. He started to identify them, then didn’t. Time was elastic at sea. How slowly the minutes crept by on watch, and how quickly they sped when too much had to be done.

He headed aft, looking into one compartment after another. In the computer room, Shrobo and Dawson and Hofstra were on the screens again. They glanced his way with their usual glazed gazes as he pulled up a stool.

Suddenly, Dan felt guilty. Shrobo was still aboard. No one had remembered him during the hectic hours before getting under way. He could have been left ashore at Gitmo, either to await their return or be flown home. He couldn’t blame anyone else; he should have thought of it.

“What’s it look like, Doc?”

The civilian shoved himself back from a keyboard and drew his hands from the top of his skull down to his chin. “Like doing a crossword puzzle backward, in Greek.” He leaned back farther, and Dan caught his stool just before it went over. “Thanks …. Like wandering down one of these passageways and opening this door and then that door, and there’s a glimpse of something for just a fraction of a second. Then it’s gone.” He blinked. “Is it light outside?”

“Yeah, it’s light.” Dan stood up. “Let’s go out, get you out of here for a couple of minutes.”

When they emerged onto the midships platform, the overcast had clamped down all around the horizon: a darker patch ahead, a slanted haze beneath — a rainsquall. When Dan leaned over the rail, he could see Dahlgren rolling heavily ahead, mast tops nodding from side to side. Barrett rolled, too, but more slowly, and the sea slipped past, littered with sargasso weed looking like what was left after you ate a bunch of grapes. Dan ran his eyes around the seals on the Harpoon canisters as Shrobo detached his glasses and lifted his naked face. “Smells clean out here,” he said. Then, when Dan didn’t answer, he added, “I mean, without the poison we’re always sucking in with every breath on land. I suppose it’s still there, but the dilution factor … Do you know anything about the immune system?”

“The what?” For a second, he thought Shrobo was still talking about ACDADS. “Oh. You mean the human immune system?”

“Uh-huh. My wife’s allergic to any form of chemical contaminant — like the stuff on mattresses, new carpets, the scents on toilet paper, dyes …. There are more people like that than we suspect.” He went on about chemical emanations from building materials, pesticides, fertilizers. “She can’t even read the newspaper — the ink. There’s a place called Portsmouth Island, in North Carolina. It was abandoned years ago; there’s never been any spraying or other chemical contamination. I’m thinking of starting a colony there.”

Dan said, “Look, Doc, I owe you an apology.”

“An apology?” Shrobo opened his eyes.

“This diversion, mission, whatever it is … I should have arranged to leave you in Gitmo, arranged for the base people to fly you home. I’m sorry. It slipped my mind.”

Shrobo shrugged. “It’s a break from being an administrator. But I’d like to call home if I can, let Alma know what’s going on.”

“I’ll set you up with the comm officer. We should be in range of the Key West marine operator pretty soon.”

“Thanks.” Shrobo blinked in the pale radiance. “You know, you can almost feel it out here, the energy.”

“It is pretty bright.”

“I meant another kind of energy. Every sphere — like our planet — contains within it two opposed tetrahedrons. Their intersections produce access points, or chakras. One of those dimensional gates is in the middle of what we call the Bermuda Triangle.”

Dan looked sideways at him, realizing that the thick glasses, the medical smock, the neurotic preoccupation with his health aside, Shrobo was still one weird bird. You couldn’t deny he was brilliant, but after three weeks aboard he still had to have someone take him to the mess hall. And a Kidd-class didn’t have that complicated a layout.

“So, how’s the system fix going? I see we have NTDS back.”

Shrobo blinked. “Do they? I’ve been concentrating on the virus. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to be self-erasing.”

“What?”

“Oh, this is a very interesting guy we have here. If you really want to go into it …”

“Sure,” said Dan. He owed the guy that, to listen.

“The virus operates in the following sequence. One: It establishes itself by writing its basic program — what I call the ‘infector’—to memory, with several backups in various portions of the memory. Two: It ’unzips’ the actively hostile portion of the program and writes it to additional areas of operating memory. Three: Running in main memory, not continuously, but in short bursts between lines of the executing program, it actively destroys data by deleting portions of existing code. Four: It masks the damage by replacing the erased code with randomly generated garbage, mimicking the format of the original data.” Shrobo paused. “Clear so far?”

Dan nodded.

“Okay. Then, and unlike any virus I’ve ever heard of before, step five: It erases itself.”

“You said that before. But I don’t understand. Then what’s the problem?”

“Because it leaves behind its toxins — the garbage written to the tape. It rezips itself to the spore form and writes the infector to several portions of the tape. Then it erases itself from the operating memory.”

“Whew.”

“The end result — about a minute after you first boot it — is an infected and degraded tape. The damage accrues so gradually that it may take a while even to notice — especially in the case of the sonar system, which uses deep algorithms to process the signal. That’s why you noticed it first in the weapons-control module. You actually get a physical output there, which you can visually observe to be faulty.” He fitted his glasses back on again, looked at Lenson. “Any questions?”

“Jesus. Okay, one — this garbage it writes. Can you at least write us something to detect and delete that? Then we could figure where it is by what it leaves behind.”

Shrobo smiled mischievously. “A parity check, you mean? I tried. This virus generates the same total of ones and zeroes that are in the original line of code, only they’re totally scrambled.”

“This is a real bastard.”

“It’s the most cunningly designed program I’ve ever seen. It’s very difficult to investigate. If the program’s running and you attempt to stop it to read its internal code, it erases. So far, all I’ve managed to do is establish its overall length. Eighty lines. A masterpiece of compression.”

“Where would something like this come from?”

“I have no idea. But whoever wrote it was damned good.”

Dan stared down into the sea as it all reverberated around in his mind. Finally, he said, “How about this built-in booby trap? Can you write a program that activates that? Make it blow itself up?”

“Good insight. That was one of the first things I tried. The self-destruct feature doesn’t work in the spored form. Only when it’s unzipped. But Matt and I are still working on it.”

“Matt? … Oh, Petty Officer Williams.”

“That’s one sharp kid you’ve got there. He’s been a big help. We’ll keep you and the captain advised how it goes.”

“Okay. Thanks. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Feel that,” said Shrobo.

Dan hesitated, then gripped the proffered bicep. It felt flabby and soft. “Not bad, huh?” the scientist said. “The workout room — weights, stationary bike.”

“That’s good.”

“And I think we’re getting close to cracking this thing. It’s not St. Paul on the road to Damascus, but I think we’re getting close.”

“Anything you need, let me know.”

“Attention, please,” said the 1MC, and they both fell silent, turning to listen.

“This is the captain speaking.

“As you know, we’ve been under way since early this morning, headed north and then northwest around the tip of Cuba. We have just received a message clarifying where we are going, and why.

“The message directs us to proceed to the north central coast of Cuba, between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Our mission is to be available for on-scene tasking in the vicinity of Boca de Marcos-Anguilla Cay area, in reference to a possible mass boat lift.

“There are no further details on the mission, but there are preparatory taskings that have been passed down via the appropriate department heads. It looks to me like a humanitarian operation. It should not compromise our combat readiness or our ability to return to Guantánamo Bay, which I would anticipate after our activities here are complete.

“I’ll keep you informed as more information comes in. Carry on.”

Dan made his excuses to Shrobo and left him standing at the rail, blinking up at the sky as if at a huge screen filled with interesting new data. He picked up his morning traffic, the Teletype clatter coming through the little grilled door as the duty radioman slid it open, slid his pile through, clicked it closed. As he leafed rapidly through it, the 1MC’s hollow voice echoed around him: “Haul over all hatch hoods and gun covers.” They were entering the squall.

He decided to go aft and see how the inventory of helo stores was going. He wondered what exactly they’d have to do in a boat lift. He wondered what they’d find two hundred miles ahead, and which way the storm would decide to go. As he headed down the passageway, absently noting that the red “occupied” light was on again over the door to the crypto vault, he couldn’t shake a growing feeling of unease.

On the far side of that door, a clock hummed to itself in the isolated quiet of a steel-walled cave. A diffuser hummed a steady drone, breathing cold air on the close-cropped head of the man who sat at a bolted-down desk positioned between two large safes.

He sat scratching his bald spot within a windowless steel-sided cubicle surrounded on all sides by the ship. An arm’s length away, a heavy system of levers and dogs were locked into welded sockets. The single massively built access was airtight and watertight. Once locked down, it could not be unsealed by anything short of a cutting torch, and even that would take hours to burn through nearly a foot of hardened armor steel. At the upper and lower edges, springed pins were set to trip if it was opened without the proper combination, setting off alarms throughout the ship.

The other three bulkheads were lined with stacked racks of publications, bulletins, films, and data tapes. They stirred uneasily as the ship rolled, restrained by fiddle boards and shock cords. Some were tactical, outlining the way the Navy would maneuver in war or how it would coordinate operations with the other services and allied navies. Others were intelligence, carefully setting forth everything that was known and speculated about possible enemies around the globe. And still others had to do with communications procedures, security, and how to use, maintain, and repair the classified equipment aboard.

The whole room was shadowy. There was a fluorescent light in the overhead, but it was dark. The only light came from the bulb of a single lamp, set low to illuminate the surface of the desk.

Rubbing his head slowly, the officer seated at it was looking at his notebook, doing nothing in particular, just thinking.

Finally, he reared back, stretched, looking around the interior of the compartment. Then he reached out — everything was within reach; he didn’t have to get up — and spun a dial.

The safe came open with the muffled clank of heavy pins disengaging.

Inside it were more publications, racks of them. They were technical manuals for the KL-47, the KWR-37, KW-7, KY-36, KW-21 … for all the message, voice, and computer encipherment systems Barrett carried. There were spare cards and parts and the specialized tools required to diagnose malfunctions in complex cryptographic equipment, as well as the bulky red-bound books that contained the daily key lists for each system.

He peered in for a few seconds, running his gaze down the spines. Finally, he took one out. Placing it on the desk, he flipped through the pages till he found the one he wanted. It was a complicated schematic diagram, stamped at the top and bottom with threatening red letters. Then he reached back into the safe, feeling around till his hand closed on a delicate sphere of thin glass.

Taking down a rag from behind a cable, he carefully unscrewed the hot bulb from the lamp, plunging the vault for a moment into darkness impenetrable and complete. No tiniest ray of light leaked in. Not the slightest chink or crack had been tolerated when the vault was built. Then the lamp came back on, three times as bright as before.

Centering the diagram under the 150-watt bulb, he reached back again into the safe for a small camera. He was starting to load it with film when he paused.

He thought, Why am I doing this?

Did he need to do any more of this? Ever again?

He sat unmoving for a few seconds, then decided that he really didn’t. Whatever happened, the time for that was past forever now. He closed the camera and put it back into the safe. He slammed the book closed, weighed it in his hand for a second — a lead insert in the spine gave it considerable heft — then slid it back into place.

He slammed the safe shut with a clang, pulled the handle down to lock it, and spun the dial. Last, he carefully took the oversized bulb out of the desk lamp and replaced it with the standard one.

He stood motionless again, holding the still-hot, oversized bulb. Would there be any reason he might need it again? He couldn’t think of any. The long masquerade was drawing to a close.

He hooked the trash can out from under the desk with his shoe. A moment later, the imploding bulb burst and rattled against the inside like the explosion of a tiny shell.

32

The world roared. Gone mad, the wind was no longer wind but an irresistible power so violent that even the gigantic waves it had built cowered before it, cringing as it stripped the white crowns from their heads and flung them across the sea. The flying spray mingled with torrents of rain to make what she breathed, even lying facedown in the bucking, rolling skiff, as much water as air.

The black wall had grown steadily as it approached, and with it the wind, until at midmorning, with the sky lightless as night, the rain started — rain as if an enraged God had abrogated his word to Noah and determined again to drown the race of men. It was so heavy and continuous that she could only breathe by making a mask with cupped hands over her mouth. The rain whipped her back as she lay gasping and choking. The gradually sinking boat reeled and leapt so madly that only wedging their bodies beneath the thwarts kept them from being shaken out.

The wind increased, and increased … for hour on hour, till it became one prolonged shriek, till the world, unable to endure, began to break apart. The waves smashed over them, and for long seconds she couldn’t breathe at all, just stared at her hands through the green water. The mad shaking and roaring went on and on, till there was nothing else inside her head at all, just the insane wind, the steady crash of the sea.

Then the wind increased.

Some time later she felt another body pressed close to hers. She opened her eyes in the midst of pandemonium.

The sky was black. She’d never seen night in the day. She could only dimly make out the person whose face was pressed against hers. It was Julio, his eyes streaming water, hair a black pressed-down slickness, mouth an open O. The side of his face streamed blood.

“I can’t hear you,” she screamed, and couldn’t even hear herself.

His head turned away, and she felt something rough brush her hands. She flinched, then realized what it was.

She let him pass the rope under and around her. It dug into her flesh. But now she could relax the terrible tension in her arms. She no longer had to hold on.

With relief came utter weakness, as if her body, no longer needing to resist, had surrendered. A black wall at the edge of her consciousness swept toward her, flickering with lightning. Shaken, battered, she slid downward into lightless caverns bigger than the sea, an abyss that closed around her like welcoming arms.

When she came back to consciousness, the rain had stopped, but the wind had reached a fury that made everything that had come before seem pitiful, slight, and only a prelude to what now seemed the destruction of the world. She raised her head and peeped into it, like a smelter peering into a fiery furnace.

There was no sea, no air, only a frothing airborne foam that boiled in the black light like seething milk. Whenever the flooded boat rose to a crest, the wind clawed at it, trying to careen and tumble it away, smash it apart into boards, bodies, splinters. She was alternately weightless and incredibly heavy, either gasping salty liquid air or crushed breathlessly beneath the solid sea. She gagged and strangled, fighting against the ropes before animal fear subsided and she remembered they were there to hold her aboard the only solidity in this howling waste. Still choking and coughing, she tried to lift her head again — into a terrifying world of gray-black clouds, driven like mad horses by the flickering lash of lightning. The boom and roar of thunder was the only sound the horrific howling of the wind could not blot out. A strange pale penumbra glowed and shimmered around each corner of the boat, and she stared, blinking as cold spray razored her eyes, before she realized it was the wind itself made visible, streaming at unimaginable speed around anything still projecting above the welter of boiling foam.

A black head thrust itself suddenly up from it. Under an incandescent sheet of lightning, she made out Miguelito’s blank eyes, his mouth dilated in an expressionless gasp — so bright, she could see the black rot of his teeth and the molded curves of the back of his throat. Another motion and her staring eyes flicked aft. Julio, cheeks drawn back in a rictus of effort, was bending into the paddle as foam covered him like a blanket drawn up to his chest. Every muscle in his thin arms stood out. Behind him, old Gustavo was staring aft at an oncoming wave. Then the glare flickered and ran down into the sea, and they all disappeared, sucked back into nonexistence, and the black came back with a clap like the thunder.

She thought, We’re going to die here.

And somehow it didn’t seem hostile or threatening. She thought of Death now with yearning, as a black peace where storms could reach no more. It couldn’t be so bad, Death. Did not Armando, the dead children, her own mother wait there for her and the child she carried?

At her feet in the dark, the scrabble of nails, the old woman. She was dragging herself up inch by inch, pressing her bony old body close. Graciela could feel her pelvis, her ribs as they dragged across her own. Their faces touched, and the ancient fingers dug into her arms like talons.

Then, to Graciela’s slow wonder, she felt the old woman shove herself upright. What was she doing?

Then the lightning came.

The flash showed her old Aracelia kneeling in the madly plunging boat, gaunt body swaying, hair blown straight back by the wind from her transfigured hollow-cheeked face. Her hands were raised in supplication or curse. White-rimmed eyes stared up at the roaring clouds. Her mouth was open, screaming soundlessly in the shrieking fury — no, not screaming, but her lips were moving in prayer or charm, but speaking to something. Graciela felt horror move in her soul. She followed the old woman’s locked gaze. Black churning clouds, the flickering curving underbelly of the storm like huge crushing rollers in a great mill. But what did the old woman see? What scarred, glaring orisha, what enraged ancient god of Africa riding on the lightning flashes, beating the drums of thunder?

The skiff plunged over a crest and dropped as if there were nothing below them for a thousand miles. All at once, the sea seemed to open and then close, sealing its lips over them, swallowing them like a great fish.

Graciela’s whole body contracted. Her fingernails ripped into the wooden bottom as it rolled over her, as the whole sea turned itself upside down. Then there was no light at all, only a green flicker from below, above, from all around her, lighting up the screaming yet soundless face of the old woman, eyes staring open, hair streaming, below her ….

They were upside down, capsized, sinking, and she was tied in ….

With a tired, logy toss, the boat surfaced again. The howl of the wind was muffled now, and the spray drummed hollowly on the bottom, above her head. She opened her mouth, hoping for air, but as the foam melted, it seemed to bleed away through the wood, leaving her only water to breathe — salt water, bitter and warm in her mouth. Her chest heaved and her hands scratched and tore, gouging out palmfuls of splinters, her nails snapping without pain as the buried, panicking, dying animal tried to dig its way to the air.

Someone was beside her, kicking and struggling, too, against the sea. But her open eyes caught only dim underwater shapes, outlined and frozen by the ghostly luminescence of lightning. She sagged, exhausted, unable to fight any longer. She opened her mouth to the sea.

The boat came up and the edge of it caught the wind. The terrible shriek reached her only distantly as she sank away. Then the cord at her arms and thighs came taut and she was pulled upward. She fought it, wanting to sink into the peaceful green. Were those faces down there? Yes, there were her father and mother, and old Abuela, Grandmother, reaching out their arms for her in the streaming green-gold light.

Suddenly, one of the cords went slack. Her arm fell free and she beat the water with it weakly. The other cord tugged, and she saw in another flicker-flash two sets of legs kicking madly above her, then felt arms around her, pulling her up.

Then all at once, the remaining cord tore at her again, cutting into her flesh like the edge of a dull machete, and she was ripped bodily from the sea’s womb and grave and thrown up and across a hard narrow blade of wood. Back into the roar and howl, but also back into something resembling air. Her throat unlocked and she coughed and gagged as the flooded hulk rocked slowly from side to side.

Just then, the lightning detonated across half the sky, a solid blue arc of vibrating flame that lighted the whole of her heaving, shrieking world. In its hellish light, she saw a thin brown hand reach up through the seethe and welter of sliding sheets of foam. Then, fingers still extended, it slowly slid beneath the surface of the sea.

It wasn’t as if the storm ended after that. It didn’t. The waves were as huge as ever, and now, with the boat half-submerged, they passed over as much as under it. The waterlogged chalanita rose as each one rolled in, but too slowly, and the sea covered them for long seconds, sealing them like flies in green jelly. But then it passed and the hulk swam slowly upward, and they could gasp and breathe for a little while before the next. Nor did the rain stop. But the hellish wind slacked a little. The racing black clouds still hurtled past above them, but as if to a destination farther on and not to concentrate their fury on this one small spot of ocean. The lightning flickered on, but in the distance now.

They clung to the half-submerged wreck, exhausted, staring at each other or at nothing: Graciela, Miguelito, and old Gustavo, his white hair streaming water. He looked exhausted, a hundred years old.

Julio hadn’t come up again.

Graciela realized now what he’d been doing in those last moments under the overturned boat. He was trying to right it. But with her tied in, he couldn’t without lifting her deadweight out of the water, too. That was why he’d unlashed her arm, so he could get the gunwale high enough that the wind, catching its edge, would do the rest, finish flipping it upright again. Then somehow he’d managed to thrust her up and out of the water, back into the little pocket of wet wood that was their only protection against the sea.

Only he’d already been tired, fighting all night to keep their stern to the swells. That last effort had exhausted him, and he’d slipped away … and Aracelia, too. The old woman was gone without a trace. Graciela remembered her open mouth, fixed horror-stricken eyes, hair streaming out as if still blown by the wind as she fell slowly into the flickering black.

The three who were left clung silently to the wreck, looking out over a barren, chaotic sea.

Sometime later, Miguel crawled and splashed toward her. He put his mouth to her ear. This time, she could just make out the words he shouted at the top of his lungs. She shook her head, close to fainting, then opened her eyes again and thrust her hand inside her dress.

Miracle of miracles, the bottle was still there. She pushed it toward him and he scrambled forward and wedged it in the little overhang at the front. Then he looked back at her.

“Tia? This might give you some shelter.”

It was only a tiny niche, but as soon as he said this it seemed infinitely desirable, somewhere she’d be safe and protected. He helped her untangle the line and move up over the thwarts. She fell, hurting her knees, but kept crawling with awkward, fierce determination till she reached it and curled herself in.

Gustavo crawled aft to counterbalance her and the two men huddled in the middle of the boat, carefully, so as not to turn it over. A wave submerged them. The waterlogged hull rolled, started to turn over, then came slowly back as Miguel threw himself across to the other side. The water drained away and the old man yelled, “No paddle. Can’t keep her right.”

Miguel: “The food’s gone, too, and the bailer.”

“Julio should have tied all that stuff in.”

“He used the line for Tia. And how could he tie the paddle in? He was using it till we went over.”

Gustavo rubbed his face. Salt caked his eyebrows. “I think the worst part’s passed over. If we can keep afloat one more night, maybe another boat will pick us up.”

“I haven’t seen anybody since the storm started.”

“They’re out here; we just can’t see them. We can’t see a hundred varas in this.”

Miguel wondered why the old man kept using the old words, the old ways of measuring. Then, suddenly, he understood. That was why he was old: He refused to change. Looking at the old man’s reddened eyes, his thin bare shanks, he promised himself to remember this secret. A little later, his head fell forward and he nodded slowly to the pitching, fast asleep.

Late that day, the wind rose again, though not to the madness of the storm’s climax. The rain came back with it, the low gray clouds lashing them with cold silver whips. Spray and rain mingled, as if the sky and the sea were quarreling over who could punish them more. Graciela crouched like a hunted animal into the enclosing wood of the boat’s bow. And like an animal, she wished for the concealing dark.

Miguel and Gustavo were bailing, back in the waist. They had no bailer, so they were simply throwing water out with their hands. As they worked, they yelled to each other. She wasn’t really listening, but now and then the wind brought her a snatch.

“You think they’re out there? Or could they have gone down?”

“I don’t know.”

“I miss them.”

“Me, too, muchacho. But maybe we’ll see them again in Miami.”

“You think so?”

“Si Dios quiere.”

“You think we’ll make it, Tio Gustavo?”

“If God wills,” said the old man again. “Do you think this water’s going down at all?”

“I don’t think so. Should we keep on bailing?”

“It can do no harm.”

“Have you ever been to America?”

“I saw Tampa once — fishing, back before the revolution.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like any land. Like Cuba.”

“No skyscrapers?”

“I didn’t see any,” said Gustavo. “Of course, they might have built some since then.”

Miguel was silent for a while. Then he said, “Do you think they’ll send us back?”

“Send us back?” the old man sounded surprised. “Why? They’re friendly people, the Americans. And there are other Cubans there. They’ll help us. No, I don’t think they’ll send us back.”

“I won’t go back,” said Miguel. “Never.”

The old man didn’t say anything to that. He shielded his eyes, and rain ran off his fingers as he peered into the squall. “I thought I heard something — a motor or engine.”

“Another airplane?”

“Maybe not. Over there?”

“I don’t see anything,” said the boy. He turned slowly, running his eyes along the ragged waves.

“Coño, it’s getting dark,” he said.

And Graciela put out her hand, groping, to seize someone or something. Her mouth came open without her direction and an agonized low moan vibrated in her throat.

It can’t be, she thought with that corner of her mind that no matter what she felt, no matter how afraid she was, still looked on with bemused detachment at the strangeness of this life on earth. Not yet. This was too early, weeks too early. She waited through the minutes, praying for the pain not to return.

When it came again, it was like a wave, only not outside, but within her body. It started as a tightening, then grew into a pressure, squeezing, twisting tighter and tighter. She panted for air as it reached its peak. Then the wave passed and the knot loosened slowly and she could breathe again and open her eyes, to see the boy and the old man peering in at her warily.

“Are you all right, Tia?”

She felt her salt-dried lips crack as she smiled at them. They were afraid, even though all they had to do was watch, and maybe help a little. But this was something men never knew. A passage through which they could never step. It was strange, but even here she felt as she had when it first began, the other times — as if the baby brought with it some mysterious glory. Or maybe just that soon it would be over, one way or another. Ahead lay pain and fear and maybe at the end nothing but sorrow if the child didn’t live. But that euphoric glow, like a long swallow of aguardiente, warmed her icy hands and seeped like slow fire along her legs. If only the old woman were still here to help.

“It’s starting,” she gasped. “It’s coming.”

“What is coming, Tia?”

“The baby, Miguelito. The baby.”

The wind rose again as a wave drove the lonely boat upward with dizzying speed, lifting them all, boy and old man and woman, once more toward the steadily darkening sky.

33

They caught sight of the first one late in the morning.

Dahlgren and Barrett had run northeast for the entire day and night, making this their second day out of Guantánamo. Dan and Leighty and Quintanilla were standing on the wing, holding their hats against the blustering wind, when the lookout leaned over the rail of the flying bridge. “Sir,” he said, and all three officers’ heads jerked up. “Look out there around zero-three-zero relative. I think you’ll see a boat.”

Dan lifted his binoculars, and the ring of sight caught it right away: a white triangle amid the heaving gray of a running sea. A sail … a wave lifted it and for an instant his eye froze and plucked from motion an elongated shape. Then it disappeared, sinking again.

“Any more of them?” the captain shouted up.

The lookout didn’t answer, hunching his shoulders into his binoculars. Then, without a word, he extended his arm and swept it from port to starboard, taking in an immense arc of sea.

Leighty hung his cap on the speaker tube and pulled himself up the ladder. Barrett took a roll as he got halfway up, and he crouched and gripped the handrail, then recovered and kept climbing. When he reached the Big Eyes, he uncapped them and swung the huge pedestal-mounted binoculars slowly around the horizon, tracing the same arc drawn by the lookout’s arm.

“XO, to the bridge,” he shouted down.

“Aye aye, Captain. Boatswain! Call the exec. If he’s not in his stateroom or ship’s office, pass the word.”

Vysotsky pounded up a few minutes later. Dan told him the captain was topside, and he disappeared up the ladder. Simultaneously, the tactical radio remote spoke inside the pilothouse. Dan stayed on the wing in case Leighty gave another order, but he could hear the message coming over. It was from Dahlgren. “Speed ten,” Van Cleef yelled out.

“Give them a roger and drop to two-thirds.”

Another white pyramid broke the gray to port, and Dan swept his glasses around the horizon again. He counted five sails now, lurching and swaying across the leaden sea. He bared his teeth. According to Fleet Weather, over the past twenty-four hours the storm had curved, angling off northward. Good from their point of view, but there were a lot of people sweating it out in South Florida, Dade and Broward. So the center shouldn’t pass directly overhead, and they’d be in the navigable semicircle.

Still, it wasn’t good weather. They were registering forty knots on the wind indicator, and Barrett was rolling heavily as she came beam to the swells. He didn’t even want to think what it must be like in a small boat.

“Let’s try reporting in,” Leighty shouted down. His voice was a thin cry above the keen of the wind.

Dan shouted back, “Aye aye, sir,” and went inside. The coordination net was on remote number two, a clear, unscrambled VHF circuit. That would make range essentially line of sight mast to mast, around thirty miles at a guess. He motioned to the boatswain to dog the leeward door. Clearing his throat, he popped the handset and said in a slow, distinct radio voice, “Any station this net, this is USS Barrett, DD-nine ninety-eight. Over.”

A decisive tenor answered almost before he was done. “USS Barrett, this is USCGS Munro, WHEC-seven twenty-four. Over.”

“Uh, Munro, this is Barrett, reporting in on this net.” He gestured frantically at Chief Morris, who read the ship’s current position off the chart as Dan repeated it into the mike. Munro came back with her position. Dan told Van Cleef to get that down to CIC, make sure she was properly identified on the surface picture.

Leighty came back in as Dahlgren reported in. He reached for the message board as he listened. Dan pulled his own copy of the OTC’s message out of his shirt pocket and rescanned it, refreshing his brain.

Since this was a humanitarian operation, the Commander, Seventh Coast Guard District, had designated Munro’s commanding officer the officer in tactical command of the boat-lift monitor mission. As the other ships reported in, he assigned them to picket positions in a gradually narrowing bottleneck leading from the north coast of Cuba to the Florida Keys. They were to direct and assist the refugees, providing food, water, and navigational advice, and “fulfill a police mission as required.” If they judged a craft too badly found to proceed, they were to advise the crew and passengers to turn back to Cuban waters. They were not to take refugees aboard unless foundering was imminent.

Okay, Dan thought, that was pretty straightforward, except maybe for the part about telling them to go back. He refolded the message as Van Cleef said, “Sir, they’re getting thicker up ahead.”

Dan stepped to the window. His binoculars stopped halfway to his eyes.

He didn’t need them now.

As he’d checked their orders, Barrett had coasted on, not fast, but now she was surrounded. Ragged sails dotted the heaving sea all around them. He stared out, transfixed and appalled. There had to be a hundred boats in view now, and more poked over the horizon each minute. It looked like a regatta, as if everyone in Cuba had set sail in whatever they could find that would float.

“Slow to five,” said Leighty. “Hoist the battle colors. Stand by the motor whaleboat. Away the casualty and assistance team.”

Suddenly, the bridge, previously quiet except for the crackle of the speakers, was filled with voices. “Engines ahead one-third. Indicate pitch for five knots.”

Ping, ping. “Engine Room answers, ahead one-third.”

“Very well.”

“Away the motor whaleboat, Section I provide. Away the Cat Team, muster on the flight deck — belay my last, away the Cat Team, muster on the fantail.”

“Bridge, Main Control. Request permission to go to split plant ops.”

“Permission granted,” said Leighty. Van Cleef hit the switch on the 21MC to relay that to the engineers. At that moment, Munro came back on the air. Dan whipped out his pencil and got the signal down on the margin of the chart. “This is USS Barrett. I read back: Take Station Bravo, conduct channelization operations, and render assistance in accordance with your zero-two-zero-seven-three-zero-zulu. Maintain guard on this net and other nets in accordance with paragraph five. Report hourly at time fifteen. Over.”

“This is USCGC Munro, roger, out.”

Chief Morris read off, “Station Bravo: East corner, twenty-two degrees, fifty-five minutes north, seventy-eight degrees, thirty-five minutes west. Southwest corner, twenty-two degrees, fifty-two north, seventy-eight forty west. Northeast corner, twenty-three twelve north, seventy-eight forty-seven west. Northwest corner, twenty-three zero-nine north, seventy-eight fifty west.” He had it already penciled in, but Dan stretched over the chart with dividers, making sure. The area was twenty miles long and five wide, oriented along the east side of where the Old Bahama Channel bent north to become the Santarén. Leighty leaned in over his shoulder. Dan felt him pressing against him as the captain’s finger moved along the outboard limit of their patrol area.

“Shit. He’s got us thumbtacked right up against the reef.”

The captain was right, Dan saw. Along the inner edge of their area, the sea shoaled precipitously from 180 fathoms to 3.5. Along the vast light blue shallow-water sprawl of the Great Bahama Bank, rocks and shoals were marked with tiny crosses: Larks Nest, Copper Rock, Wolf Rocks, Hurricane Flats. Not a nice position, he thought. Reefs and flats to the north, Cuban territorial waters to the south. Obviously thinking along the same lines, Leighty asked Morris, “How far is it to Cuba, Chief?”

“From the southwest corner, twelve miles, sir.”

“Shit,” Leighty muttered. “And as the storm goes by, the wind’ll swing around to put us right on those rocks …. Okay, we’ll just have to keep a close watch on the fathometer. Ask Mr. Paul to give me a call about the anchor. Give us a course, Chief; let’s get headed over there.”

They wheeled slowly north and cranked on speed. Leighty limited them to fifteen knots, saying he didn’t want to run over anyone — if a boat didn’t have a sail up, they might not see them till they came out of the swell line. Dan asked if he should double the lookouts. Leighty said that was a good idea.

The captain started for the ladder, then hesitated, brow furrowed. “I meant to ask them something when they came up on the circuit — the political end.”

“How do you mean, sir?”

“I mean, what exactly we intend to do with these people. Do we turn them back? Or are they political refugees?”

“I don’t know, sir. Sorry, I didn’t think to ask that.”

“It’d help to know. I’m going to call them back on a scrambled net, see if the OTC has any dope on that. Be down in Combat.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Leighty had the door open when the lookout phone talker said, “Aircraft to port, bearing two-seven-zero, position angle two.” Van Cleef went out on the wing and reported back, “Multi-engine. Looks like a P-three.”

Dan looked at Leighty, who was still lingering. The captain blinked, apparently thinking. Dan hit the intercom. “Combat, Bridge: We have a P-three in sight up here.”

“Bridge, Combat: We’re talking to him. He’s from VP-ninety-three out of Key West. He’s reporting surface contacts to the OTC.”

“Roger.”

“Captain’s off the bridge,” the boatswain bellowed. Dan rubbed his face, looking at his watch: still forty-five minutes before his turnover.

“Somebody waving to us, to starboard,” the phone talker said.

“What’s that?” He turned quickly.

“Wait one … Sir, somebody waving at us. Bearing zero-four-zero.”

“I’ve got him,” Van Cleef said. Dan lined his glasses on his and saw them, caught for an instant on the crest of a wave.

“Head on over there, sir?”

“Yeah. I’ll call the captain.” He reached for the intercom.

Barrett pitched slowly, heavily, as the little boat danced crazily in her lee. Dan, leaning out, signaled to the fantail. A crack, and the orange thread of a shot line bellied in the wind and fell across the boat. When a tow line was across and they were trailing astern, he said, “Pass to the linehandlers: Haul them in and stand off about fifty feet.”

“Petty Officer Bacallao, lay to the fantail,” said the 1MC.

Dan had taken the conn back from Van Cleef, anticipating tricky maneuvering. With props turning at zero pitch, Barrett was essentially a huge sailboat, and she tended to turn downwind, which would be uncomfortable, to say the least, for the refugees. He had to juggle the engines and rudder to keep her bow into the seas, which swept down in impressive-looking ranks from the north. Closer to the reefs, the short fetch should shelter them, but out here they were building to a size that made the little craft astern pitch and heave sickeningly.

“Ready to relieve you, sir.”

He returned Cannon’s salute but told him to stand by, get the rhythm of the sea before he took over. A few minutes later, Dan handed over the binoculars, calling out to mark the passage of responsibility — hastily, because the helmsman was already wrestling the bow around again. Cannon stepped to the centerline, shouting orders, and Dan backpedaled out of the way.

He jogged aft and emerged on the helo deck. Aft of him, the weather decks stepped downward. He ran across the flight deck, feeling it slant under him so that his progress was an arc, not a straight line, and clattered down two more ladders to join a clotted knot of khaki and denim on the fantail.

A strange-looking craft rode the swells a hundred feet off, undulating as the waves passed under it. Two men were stretched out atop it. “Let me see those,” Dan muttered to a chief with binoculars.

With seven magnifications, he could see the stitching in the canvas stretched over what were obviously old inner tubes. Some had gone soft, wobbling at every blow of the sea. The two clung grimly to sewn-on handholds. “Jesus Christ,” he heard the chief mutter. There was no engine and only the snapped-off stump of a board that must have been their mast.

He looked around. The captain and the Spanish-speaking petty officer, Signalman Third Bacallao, stood by the rail, looking down. Bacallao held a loud-hailer. Behind them were several boatswain’s mates and Ensign Paul.

And behind them was Harper, a short-barreled riot gun at port arms. With him were the rest of his security team, all armed. Catching his look, Harper gave him a wry little smile.

“Ready for anything, right, Chief Warrant?”

“That’s my job, sir.” Harper nodded toward the sea. “Looks like the fucking America’s Cup out here.”

“Sure does.”

“Yeah, we ought to get some pictures. Then when anybody tells you communism’s so great, show them these guys. Imagine wanting to get away from something so bad that you’ll go to Miami.”

Dan stared down, overcoming his shock at their craft long enough to study its passengers: two emaciated men of indeterminate age. The white-eyed faces that turned upward from time to time could not be read in terms of the emotions he knew. Bacallao turned the bullhorn on and off, making a loud clicking noise, watching the captain.

“But what happens when they get there?”

“Yeah, good point. Too fucking many Cubans in Florida already.” That wasn’t what Dan had meant, but Leighty was saying something. When he stopped, making an abrupt gesture toward the men below, Bacallao lifted the loud-hailer and shouted a question. They responded with weak cries. Dan moved up a couple steps to hear the petty officer translate. “They say they have food but no more water. They don’t know which way to go. They want to know how far America is.”

“Mr. Paul, send them down some water. Chief Warrant Officer Harper—”

“Here, sir.”

“Jay, we need to break out some of that landing-party gear. I want compasses, ponchos, groundsheets. Get it all staged up here; there’re going to be a lot more boats in this condition.”

Harper hesitated. “Sir, I’m on the security team.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about their taking over the ship, Mr. Harper,” said Leighty. His eye caught Dan’s and he smiled faintly, then turned back to the rail and the emaciated men on the oversized air mattress. Then he turned back and waved Lenson up.

“Did you ever get through to the OTC?”

“On what, sir?”

“On the political question — whether they’d be repatriated, held, whatever.”

“Oh. No, sir, I didn’t. I’m sorry, I misunderstood—”

“That’s all right; maybe I didn’t make myself clear.”

The sky broke open in a spatter of rain. Cold, heavy drops clattered down from the whirling gray above to the heaving gray deck. The boatswains had slid down plastic jugs and the Cubans were drinking, holding grimly with one hand while the other held the containers to their lips. Water ran down thin throats.

“Think they’ll make it?” Leighty muttered.

Dan looked around at the sea. The shelter of Barrett’s towering sides had damped the waves, but the raft was still going up and down so violently, he could barely follow it with his eyes. Outside the lee, the seas were high and cruel. He could only imagine what they looked like to the men below. The Cubans were shouting something now. Their voices arrived all but drowned in the roar of the wind, inhuman, shrill, and distant, like the piping of seabirds.

“They might, sir. The wind’s bad, but the Stream’s with them. You can go a long way in a small boat. Look at Captain Bligh.”

“Bligh was a seaman. And he had a longboat, not something stitched out of canvas and inner tubes.” Another man joined them and Leighty said, “George, what odds you give ’em?”

The exec stared down, mouth tightening as he watched the light raft soar skyward. As it reached the crest, Dan leaned forward, fingers going white on Barrett’s sturdy lifeline. The wind had caught and lifted the corner. For a moment, it teetered on the brink of capsizing, or maybe just dumping everyone off and soaring away downwind, skipping from crest to crest like a runaway balloon. But one of its occupants rolled over just in time, plunging the errant end so deep green water covered it and him. They clung grimly as the raft rode down the glassy back of the wave.

Vysotsky said hoarsely, “I don’t know. Fifty-fifty?”

“That high? That thing’s not going to hold air forever.” Leighty snapped to the interpreter, “Ask them what they are. Fishermen? Sailors? What?”

Ballacao said, after an exchange that was interrupted when the boat veered dangerously close to the side, “They say they worked in a cigar factory, sir.”

Leighty suddenly looked angry. “Okay, that’s it. Get them aboard.”

Heads snapped around on the fantail. “Sir?” said Dan.

“I said, get them aboard. Jacob’s ladder to port. Get moving!” he snapped at the astonished boatswain’s mates. “Have heaving lines ready in case one of them slips.”

Beckoned aboard, the men hesitated, then unshipped lengths of board and began rowing furiously. The boatswains hauled in on the line. Ensign Paul jumped forward, shouting, but too late. The raft was pulled under the counter, out of sight. For a terrible moment, Dan thought the screw had gotten them. But they must have jumped at the last minute, because they appeared pale and shaken at the top of the ladder. The sailors hauled them aboard, where they stood dripping and shuddering, looking around apprehensively. Up close, they were younger than Dan had thought at first. Their inflamed eyes seemed to pulsate as they looked around. Raw bloody patches showed at ankles and knees, where the canvas had rubbed. “Get the chief master-at-arms,” Leighty snapped to Vysotsky. “Get them some clothes. Find a space to bunk them. Have the corpsman look them over before they eat.”

One man, cheeks hollowed around a cigarette, started suddenly toward the captain. Leighty shook his head brusquely and started off. “Sink the raft,” he called over his shoulder.

“I’ll take care of it, sir.” Harper unslung the riot gun.

Leighty went forward, apparently back to the bridge. Shortly thereafter, white sea shot from the screws and Barrett got under way again, into the teeth of the wind.

Dan stood under the outstretched barrel of the five-inch, wondering if he would have the guts to put to sea in something like that. They could have no idea of what lay before them — except a damn good chance of dying. But still, they’d done it, and made it. Or at least two of them had.

What horror lay behind them, that they’d risk their lives to escape? He’d heard a lot about Cuba, but now, looking at the men’s backs as they were led away, covered with olive drab blankets, he realized how little he really knew. You heard about torture and forced labor. But then you read that they’d conquered illiteracy, distributed land, that medical care was free …. In the end, you didn’t know what to believe, except that a bearded man in fatigues had come out of the mountains and overthrown a dictator, then become one himself; that the CIA had tried to kill him, and failed; that the Russians spent $10 million a day in aid, and that Cuban soldiers were fighting in Angola, Mozambique ….

But people kept trying to escape. And wasn’t that, finally, the proof of the matter? They hid in the wheel wells of jets, hijacked passenger planes, swam to Guantánamo, crossed barbed wire and minefields and seas. Only God knew how many of them didn’t make it.

He stood on the fantail for about an hour. Barrett passed boat after boat, all tossing madly, all headed somewhere between northwest and west. Some passengers waved, but in others they saw no motion at all.

The ship picked her way among them, angling from boat to boat in what seemed like random course changes. But after a while, he figured it out. If the boat had a sail and people waved, Barrett proceeded past. If they seemed unusually agitated, had no sail, or the lookouts saw no motion, Leighty hove to and checked them out. The captain came back to the fantail each time, personally deciding whether simply to pass down supplies and give them a quick navigation lesson or to take them aboard. Gradually, a crowd of men and a few women gathered inside the hangar, where Oakes had assembled blankets, water, sandwiches, and hot coffee. The corpsman worked at a table, dressing scrapes and cuts. Some of the crew drifted back and sat around the flight deck, attempting to communicate in broken phrases.

When they finally reached Area Bravo, the clouds to the northeast, toward Andros, glowed with the milky reflected light that meant breaking surf. Cannon recommended a two-leg course along the southwest edge, and Leighty agreed. They maintained steerageway at five knots, rolling about fifteen degrees. The captain watched the sea for a time, then lowered the motor whaleboat. It lay to a mile south of them, and when boats sheered toward it, the boat crew intercepted them. They reported back by radio, and Leighty, running things from his seat on the bridge, decided whether to take them aboard or let them go on. As far as Dan could see, he turned no one back to Cuba, despite what the message had directed.

Additional ships kept reporting in: a British destroyer, HMS Rhyl; a Dutch frigate, Van Almonde; the Venezuelan gunboat with whose crew Dan had gotten drunk, Federación. Munro gave them areas stretching up the eastern side of the Santarén Channel. The hydrofoils from Key West reported in and were assigned stations to the west. Aircraft droned over, and once the whaleboat was vectored south to assist a boat that appeared to be on fire. They rescued the crew and brought them back to the growing group in the hangar.

Dan caught a short nap, knowing there might not be much sleep if the weather kept worsening. The center of the storm was due to pass over Nassau early the next morning. Then it was time for watch again. The wind was whistling in the signal halyards and antennas as he climbed back to the bridge. Barrett was rolling in earnest now, taking long swoops as the beam seas marched past.

Harper had the deck. “What’s going on?” Dan asked him. “Still steaming back and forth?”

“That’s right. Basically, we’re just here showing them where to go, keeping them off the rocks. The wind’s picking up, though. Looks like the bad shit will pass closer than they thought.”

“Great.” Dan looked out toward where the seas, black and huge, came roaring out of the afternoon mist. He checked the fathometer next, then checked the reading against their satellite navigation position. He felt slightly less comfortable when he recalled that the satnav software was running on the AN/UYK-7s. Fortunately, they had loran here, too. He confirmed that the quartermasters were taking fixes every fifteen minutes.

“Want to stay off those rocks,” he told Morris.

“You got it, sir.”

“Captain on the bridge, Jay?”

“Yeah, he’s over there in the chair. Got his eyes closed.”

“What’s the whaleboat doing?”

“We recovered it twenty minutes ago. They’re refueling it, putting more food and water and gas aboard. Going to swap out crews and put it back in again, keep it out till dark.”

Harper sounded on top of things this afternoon. Good, maybe his counseling had taken effect. Then what he’d said about the whaleboat penetrated. “Till dark? In these seas?”

“That’s the word.”

“What’s the gas for?”

“Apparently, a lot of these boats are out of gas because they’ve been fighting this son-of-a-bitching wind, and they didn’t have much to start with because it’s rationed.”

Quintanilla, behind them: “Dan, how you fixed for sleep?”

“Not great, but I got my head down for an hour. Why?”

“We need an officer on the whaleboat.”

“I’m just getting ready to come on watch. Anyway, is this a good idea? It’s awful heavy weather out there.”

“That’s when they need us. Every gallon of gas we can hand out could save a life tonight. That’s what the captain says, and I think he’s right. I’ll take OOD. Can you do it?” Felipe insisted. Dan shrugged, then added, “Okay. Just let me get my boots on, all right?”

He got his steel-toed boots, foul-weather jacket, ball cap, and flashlight from his stateroom, then reported to the whaleboat just as the rain clamped down again, heavy and drenching.

The crew was climbing in, getting ready to lower. Dan stood close to the bulkhead, checking the crew. BM1 Casworth was the coxswain, with EM2 Reska, two boat hooks, McMannes and Didomenico, and the translator, Bacallao. Casworth told him he’d already done the inventory. They had two radios, two loud hailers, a hand searchlight with signaling capability, two battle lanterns, spare batteries, an M14, a .45, flares, and a kit of tools to fix motors and patch holes. They had food and water, individual kits prepackaged on the mess decks in taped-up trash bags. Each kit also included a photocopied chart of the Straits of Florida, a pack of Kents, and a butane lighter with the USS Barrett crest, the last two items outdated ship’s store stock Cash had kicked in. Finally, they had a hundred gallons of P-250 stabilized gasoline in ten-gallon jerricans and two lashed-on fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel fuel.

“How do we transfer it?”

“Pumps and hoses, we float the hose downwind lashed to a life jacket.”

“They know what to do with it?”

“We done it six times so far, sir. Seems to work.”

“Okay, how about the standard equipage — anchor, grapnel, fire extinguisher, line—”

“Yes, sir. I sighted all that.”

“Any other problems?”

“The motor cut out a couple of times. It always started again, but Reska just swapped out the filters. He thinks that’ll take care of it.”

Dan nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else they might need. He moved forward into the rain but stopped at the gunwale just before he stepped into the boat, looking into it, the men waiting, the gear and supplies that covered the floorboards.

He hesitated there, struck by a suspicion he’d done this before. Then he realized he had. Only the chiefs name then had been Bloch, and the coxswain’s, Popeye Rambaugh. The crew Rocky, Brute Boy, Ali X, Slick Lassard. A black night with the wind coming off the Pole. And beneath the swaying keel of Reynolds Ryan’s whaleboat, a sea black as used motor oil, its surface dull and somehow viscid, gruel-like, as if it were kept from solidifying into black ice only by unending motion. And beyond it, a swell and another swell, and after that, utter dark and a thousand miles of dark till the coast of Norway.

Casworth must have thought he was scared, because he muttered, “It’s like they say in the Coast Guard, sir. You got to go out. You don’t got to come back.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. It was true. Looking down at the seas sweeping away from the ship, he really didn’t want to go down there. Then he thought of the refugees, without motors, without sails, some without even boards to paddle with. While he had a stout boat with a good diesel, a good crew, and a ship within call if they got in a jam.

He made himself step over the coaming, grab the monkey line, and nod to the boatswain at the lowering gear. “Lower away,” he yelled.

34

Swaying out over the murky, storm-lashed green, the men on deck shouting and tending steadying lines as the whaleboat pendulumed, Dan thought with resigned dread that he’d never seen a boat launched in heavy seas without confusion, screaming, and near disaster. This time was no exception. As soon as they hoisted away, Barrett began a series of vicious rolls. The boat swung, slowly at first, but rapidly increasing its arc. The crew flinched and crouched as it came within inches of slamming into the hull.

He clung grimly to the rough knotted line as the winch drums turned, reeling them slowly downward. If anything let go, it would be all that would save him. The sea looked more terrifying the closer they got, foaming and seething. The frightening thing was that they were still in the lee. As the keel took the water, a wave charged in on the bow. It sucked the boat down, then thrust it up again. The heavy releasing hook clacked open suddenly, jerked free of McMannes’s hand, and darted aft, straight for Dan’s skull. He ducked as the crewman jerked it back by the safety lanyard. Beside them, Barrett’s sides heaved and sucked as the ship rolled. He blinked, unwilling to credit that he’d just caught a glimpse of the bilge keel.

“Cast off, you stupid asshole!” Casworth screamed, bent to the throttle. The bow hook, face crimped in sudden fear, jerked the sea painter free. The boat plunged and he staggered, almost dived overboard as the line flew upward.

The motor roared, and the boat heaved, yawed, and toppled, brushing paint and fiberglass and a strip of trim off against Barrett’ s side as the hulls kissed. Then, gradually, it drew away. The coxswain increased the rudder as they turned, glancing back to check the position of the stern. The wind and rain and spray hit them as they emerged from the shelter of the gray steel walls, drawing a translucent curtain over the fading outline of the destroyer as it increased speed again, moving off, leaving them behind.

Crouched to keep his balance in the bucking, reeling boat, Dan aped his way toward the stern. He had to brace himself with both hands to keep from being slammed into the molded-in thwarts and seats. Casworth gripped the big chromed wheel like a wrestler locked with his opponent. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder, gauging a whitecap as it took shape out of the gray. Suddenly he whipped the wheel hard left. The stern dug and the boat spun just in time to catch the sea dead aft. Dan clutched the gunwale as she rushed forward, rising, then swallowed his lunch again as she dropped out from under his feet. Didomenico, McMannes, Bacallao, and Reska huddled on the thwarts, looking like fat, wet ducks in the shiny green hooded ponchos pulled on over their life preservers.

When he looked back again, the ship was just a shadow in the storm. Then she was gone. Christ, he thought angrily. They couldn’t even see the ship, let alone another small boat. He tried the radio and got a loud-and-clear. “How are you doing?” Chief Kennedy’s voice asked him. “Over.”

“It’s rough out here. Over.”

“If it gets too hairy, sir, let us know and we’ll come over and pick you up. That’s from Mr. Quintanilla.”

“Uh, Barrett One. That’s good to know, Chief, but I think we can take this as long as it doesn’t get any worse. Where you want us? Over.”

“Head out around two-two-zero magnetic. We got a couple of pips out there, we think. We don’t have a real good radar picture in all this spray and seas, sir. Just try not to run into anybody. Over.”

“Roger, Barrett One, out. Casworth! Two-two-zero magnetic.”

“Two-two-zero, aye.”

They made their way through a heaving, roaring dimness like early dusk. A sea came over the gunwale and soaked them all in warm brine, floating the ration packs into a tilted shoal against the port side. The murky water sloshed over the floorboards, then disappeared, sucked down into the bilge pumps as the motor hammered steadily. Dan hunched his shoulders against the rain and spray, wishing he’d put on a poncho before he was soaked through.

They ran out along 220 till Kennedy advised them they were a mile or so out from the ship, right about where the captain wanted them.

On the way, he had time to think about what they were supposed to be doing. He’d reported to the whaleboat without really thinking it through. Now he was having doubts. Too late, as usual, he thought. They were running downwind now, the easiest reach. It’d be a lot rougher trying to maintain position. If Casworth screwed up and broached, it would be touch-and-go if the whaleboat would stay upright. The water was warm, but he didn’t relish the thought of going into it in these seas with only a kapok life preserver.

In the second place, he wasn’t sure they were going to be able to find anybody, much less help them. The whaleboat didn’t have radar, and in this rain and spray, they couldn’t see more than a hundred yards. A whole flotilla could drift past, and they wouldn’t have a clue.

Finally, he told Casworth to start sounding the horn. If anybody was out here, maybe they’d call out, and then they could find them by steering for the sound.

After an hour, though the seas stayed high, the squalls seemed to slack off. Gradually, the mist thinned. He could see the sky again, low, tarnished, swollen-looking clouds that raced by about two hundred yards above the crests, it looked like. Horizontally, he could see maybe half a mile, but the waste of gray-green sea was empty now. He wondered where the regatta had gone.

Around 1500, a craft appeared to the west, rolling hard in the swells. Casworth spotted it first and spun the wheel to make for it. Dan clung to the gunwale, trying to keep from barfing but realizing it was a battle he was going to lose.

It was about forty feet long, an old-fashioned wooden fisherman with a scabby white hull and faded pink upperworks and a juryrigged mast lashed upright on the foredeck with yellow plastic rope. It bucked wildly as the waves creamed by beneath it. A streamer of cloth fluttered at its head, almost like a burgee, but actually tatters of blown-out sail. As Casworth maneuvered them alongside, five men came out of the cabin, waving and gesturing them in. Dan told Casworth to hold off while Bacallao checked things out with the loud-hailer. After a spirited conversation, he reported that the boat was out of Neuvitas, that they’d been under way for a day and a half, that they knew approximately where they were, had a working compass and a chart, and knew how to dead reckon. They needed food, water, and fuel. “Gasoline or diesel?” Reska said, rubbing his hands.

They said gasolina, and got twenty gallons of it in jerricans and five ration-and-water packs. Dan made sure they knew about the reefs to the north and Cuban waters to the south. Finally, he waved and Casworth pulled away. “Buena suerte,” Bacallao called. “Vaya con Dios.”

“Those guys don’t seem to be in such bad shape,” McMannes yelled as the old-fashioned vertical stack puffed smoke and the boat turned its head slowly westward. “Yeah,” Dan yelled over the steady roar of the wind. “They look like they just might dock in Biscayne Bay.”

The afternoon stretched on. The wind gusted and dropped, gradually hauling around, but the waves kept rolling in. Didomenico lost his balance and fell against the lashed-in drums, gashing his forehead, but insisted that they stay out. Dan gradually went through the seasickness and got his small-boat legs. They encountered and succored two more boats. One had ten refugees aboard, the other fifteen. He judged they could ride out the night, so he let them go on without taking anyone aboard. Watching them draw away, he wondered what had happend to the rafts. The answer that seemed most likely — that they’d broken apart — he didn’t like to think about. He concentrated instead on keeping alert. Each time the whaleboat rose in the gradually waning light, his horizon expanded dramatically to a mile-wide circle of wild green sea. He remembered how cramped the straits had seemed from Barrett’s chartroom. Now they seemed immense.

“Whatcha think, sir?”

“It shouldn’t get any rougher than this, BM One.”

“That’s about what I think, sir. It’s bad in those squalls, though.”

“You’re doing a good job, Casworth.”

Watching the clouds scud overhead, he remembered that when you faced the wind in the northern hemisphere, the center of a rotating disturbance lay behind your right shoulder. He swiveled in the blowing rain and figured that the storm lay to the northeast. A stroke of luck it hadn’t come through here. None of these people would be alive now.

“Barrett One, Barrett,” the walkie-talkie crackled, startling him. Good thing it was waterproof, since it was resting in an inch of water in the bottom of his pocket.

“Barrett One, over.”

“This is the XO, Dan. Captain wants the whaleboat back aboard. We hold you out at two-three-seven true, eighteen hundred yards. Over.”

“Roger, sir, we’re heading back. Over.”

Vysotsky signed off, and Dan lurched upright, got a hand on Casworth’s shoulder. He shouted into his ear, “Just got the word to recall. Make it about zero-five-seven. We’ll call them after we figure we’ve gone a mile if we don’t see ’em by then.”

As they turned into the seas, the ride got rougher — a lot rougher as their forward speed added to the impact of the wind and sea. The boat hammered its way up each comber like a bulldozer climbing a hill, then toppled over, hitting with a crash that whipped the hull and threw curving sheets of clear water to either side. Dan’s crotch chafed with salt water. His head felt light from the continuous motion. Yeah, it was getting dark. This was the right decision, getting them back aboard. As to the refugees … it would be a long, rough night.

He was thinking ahead to hot strong coffee, a hot meal, sleep when McMannes yelled, “Something ahead.”

He shielded his eyes. The spray lashed them and he gasped, then squinted again where the crewman pointed. A shape loomed mistily from a wave, then sank from sight.

“Head over there, sir?”

“Yeah,” he yelled back. “Didn’t look very big, though. Might just be wreckage.”

Didomenico bent and plugged in the searchlight. McMannes crouched in the bow with the boat hook, grapnel and heaving line ready by his boots. Casworth flicked a switch and the running lights came on, startlingly bright. Dan realized only then how dark it had gotten. The boat climbed a long swell, dropped with a shudder that made the running lights flicker, then started climbing the next one. The stinging rain started again, whipping out of the gray murk like .22 bullets. The shadow didn’t show for a while, then it did, closer. Dan saw that it was smaller than the others they’d seen that afternoon, lower, too. In fact, when he glimpsed it again, it looked awash, barely afloat. He was leaning forward to shout this to Casworth when the coxswain leaned on the horn. It droned out over the heaving sea, ludicrously faint in the roar of the wind. Nothing moved.

“Abandoned,” McMannes yelled back. Casworth hesitated, then spun the wheel away.

At the same instant, Dan saw what he’d taken for debris along the gunwale stirring. A moment later, a head came up.

“No! There’s somebody there.” When he looked back, there were two heads, hands waving weakly.

Casworth was spinning the wheel back, bringing the bow around. “I see ’em, sir. Stand by, Manny.”

“Bow hook?”

“Better go with the grapnel. Try not to hit any of ’em with it.”

The searchlight came on, and the engineman swept it along the boat as they made up on it.

Dan swallowed, staring down as the whaleboat rose dizzily and the other craft sank, as if they were on opposite ends of a seesaw. These people were in trouble. The boat was wallowing, barely a hand’s breadth of freeboard amidships. It rolled slowly as the waves lifted it. No mast that he could see. There was no motor, nor even oarlocks. Ragged dark outlines resolved into ravaged faces as the beam found them.

“We’ll take these guys aboard,” he shouted to Casworth. The coxswain nodded tightly, squinting as he eyed the narrowing barrier of heaving darkening sea.

She hadn’t heard the drone of the horn, hadn’t heard anything, so deeply was she concentrating on the other waves, the ones passing through her body. They gathered somewhere below her chest, then squeezed downward with relentless and incredible force, a giant’s fist pounding the floor of her pelvis. They were too powerful to fight. She could only wait, taking gasping breaths, and endure, praying in the intervals.

So when Gustavo shook her and Miguel, she didn’t even open her eyes. She was concentrating on the next wave, which was gathering now, throwing its shadow ahead of it.

“A boat,” Gustavo said. “You see it, too. Is it coming toward us?”

“Yes. Yes!”

“I can’t tell if they see us.”

“They see us all right. There, they are turning on a light. Wave at them! ¡Hey! ¡Aqui, aqui!”

The wave rose higher, sending the shadow of fear racing ahead of it. She panted, snatching breath as she lay in the warm water, as if being born herself. Sometimes she couldn’t tell where the water ended and she began. Maybe the sea and her waves were the same and she was giving birth to some sea creature.

Virgencita, quitame este dolor por favor. Mother of God, take this next pain away. I offer it to you.

She bit down on the twisted rag, moaning as the wave broke over her, submerging her deep beneath a red-lighted tide.

Dan stood as the whaleboat towered above the wreck, then dropped below it as the crest passed. This would be tricky. They hadn’t had to lay alongside the other boats and he wasn’t sure, considering the violence of the sea, that it was smart to try. Spray ripped free in slow motion from a breaking, shattering sea, fluttered out and suddenly slashed his face, cold-warm, salty, stinging. He squeegeed it off his eyes as the other boat rose again, seesawing with a slow, dangerous, logy rhythm. He really didn’t see why it was still afloat. The free surface of the water inside destroyed all its stability. It was pocked with roughly patched holes.

On the bow, McMannes got up as Didomenico crouched, holding to his belt under the poncho. They glanced back and Casworth nodded.

McMannes swung the grapnel in a short arc. It bulleted out, plunged downward, and disappeared into the boat. The two men — one old, one young, Dan saw by the light Reska tried to hold steady despite the crazy bucking — grabbed the line and hauled it in, shouting in weak, croaking voices. “What are they saying?” he shouted to Bacallao.

“Can’t make it out, sir.”

“We’re taking them aboard. The way that thing looks, we may stove it in when we come alongside. Tell them to be ready to jump.”

The translator yelled it across, but the words met head shaking, violent motions of negation. “What the hell’s their problem?” Casworth yelled. “Tell ‘em to get the fuck ready to come over here; we ain’t going to save their fuckin’ boat. It’s fixing to sink.”

“He says there’s someone else — a woman.”

“A woman,” Dan repeated. “Great. Okay, where is she? You see anybody else, McMannes?”

“Just those two guys, sir.”

“Tell them to get over here. Casworth, try to put the bow right down on their stern.”

The older man waved, with a toothless grimace. A cheery, grateful motion of a bony long hand. Then he was slipping over the counter, cautiously but swiftly lowering himself into the water. He grabbed the line as it came taut.

Hand over hand, underwater more than above it, he pulled himself through the wind-ruffled sea. The whaleboat surged and plunged, spray broke over them, and a hand appeared suddenly over the gunwale. McMannes and Reska grabbed it and hauled him in. He sprawled on the floorboards, a bony old guy in torn shorts, one sandal hanging off a swollen-looking dark-skinned foot.

“Okay, the other guy,” Dan said to Bacallao.

But somebody was shouting. It was the Cuban they’d just rescued. He fought Didomenico’s hand off, jerked his way up, and crawled over the thwarts toward Dan, pleading in loud Spanish. “What’s he want?” Lenson asked the translator.

“He insists there’s a woman aboard, sir.”

Dan looked around at the darkness. It wasn’t going to be easy, finding the ship in this. He wasn’t looking forward to hoisting back aboard, either. He didn’t see any woman. Had the old guy gone off his rocker out here in the storm? But if it was true, they couldn’t leave her; she might be hurt or too sick to move.

He knew then, accepting it, that he was going to have to check it out.

“Okay, I’m going over there, see what he’s trying to tell us,” he said. “If there’s anybody else, or if it’s all in his head. I’ll get the kid, too. Take her in close as you can, Casworth.”

“Be careful, sir. Take the forty-five.”

“I don’t need the goddamn forty-five. Just get me as close as you can without smashing in the side. Here’s the radio. Take it; I don’t want to drop it when I jump.”

While they’d been discussing it, the whaleboat had drifted back, away from the wreck. McMannes had let the grapnel line go when he was helping the old guy aboard. Casworth spun the wheel, tucking the radio into his belt, and kicked the throttle lever forward with his knee. The motor hammered and the bow crashed down. A blast of spray like a car wash sanded their faces. Dan kept his down, shielding it with his hands as much as he could.

There, the wreckage again — you couldn’t really call it a boat — a mad bouncing shadow in the rain and spray. Reska’s light strobed across the kid, all the way aft. In the instantaneous brilliance, Dan could see everything. Hell, he thought, there’s nobody else in there. But maybe the kid was too scared to jump. If he had to, he’d just push him overboard; the guys could pick him up from the water. There was no more time to dick around.

He crouched on the gunwale, one hand down like a sprinter bracing for the start. Then, as the half-submerged hulk passed him going upward, he launched himself heavily and gracelessly out and across.

The gunwale hit him in the stomach, so hard that he couldn’t breathe for a few seconds, just hung there with his legs dragging in the sea. The kid had hold of his arms, but either he was too weak or Dan was too heavy, in sodden clothes, life preserver and foul-weather gear and boots, to move. Then with an enormous effort, he levered one boot over the gunwale. The other followed, and he rolled over into a shallow pool of warm water.

The beam of Reska’s light flashed in his eyes and lighted the interior for a tenth of a second before it leapt away, the boat dropping like a stone.

The woman was curled up in a little cuddy, all the way forward. The wooden overhang sheltered her. She had a narrow catlike face and dark hair stuffed under some sort of cloth. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was set like a jammed square knot. There was something wrong with her, but he couldn’t see what.

Then suddenly, he did: the way her taut fingers dug into the edge of the cuddy, the awkward, tumbled sprawl, the upthrust knees folded against the wet bulge of stomach.

The hulk rolled sluggishly as he crawled toward her, sending a wave traveling from thwart to thwart. He shifted to balance it, and the boat lurched the other way. He turned his head and yelled to Casworth with all of his strength, howling madly into the wind.

“It’s a woman. She’s pregnant.”

The coxswain’s voice, miles distant: “Can you get her over here?”

He crouched in front of her, studying her face. The darkness gave him nothing. Then a knife edge of Reska’s light caught her squeezed eyelids. He felt her hand where it gripped wood like a C-clamp. A plastic bottle was wedged behind her. Her eyes snapped open for a fraction of a second, seeing him, yet somehow not. Then they rolled back and sank closed again.

He said awkwardly, “Excuse me,” and put a hand on her belly. Under the wet rough cloth, it was rock-hard.

“Sir?”

He turned and yelled, “She’s having it. Jesus, shit, and this thing’s sinking. Throw me something to bail with.”

He regretted asking as the whaleboat closed in. Casworth was a good coxswain, but no one could predict these seas, this wind. The reinforced bow loomed above him, then crashed down only feet away, sending a torrent of water over the boat. He screamed and waved them away at the same moment that two hard hats came flying in.

A helmetful of sea was heavy. The water didn’t pour out when he upended the helmet. It just blew away. The boat rolled again, almost dumping him out. The motion made him sick, it was so close to going over. But he kept bailing, grimly, till his arms were aching.

Another wave came aboard, wiping out all his work in a second. The woman moaned again. He glanced at her swiftly. Not more than three, four minutes apart. But they had to move her. The waterlogged, weakened shell beneath them could break apart or turn over at any second. He didn’t see how they’d come this far in it. Maybe they’d capsized already. There wasn’t a thing in it, no oars, no mast — just the boy with the huge eyes, and the woman.

He looked over his shoulder, to see the older Cuban standing in the whaleboat, shouting. Then McMannes was dragging him down. He popped up again and waved. Dan half-rose, then grabbed the thwart as the boat started to go over. Splinters lanced his hand, but he barely felt it. “What?” he screamed.

“Sir, you better get back aboard.”

“Shit! Come on over here and get us! Get over here now; pick us up!”

What the hell was his problem? The whaleboat seemed to be farther away. McMannes was still waving, but he was looking behind him now — at Casworth, who was bent over the console.

Then he heard it. The whaleboat’s engine was growling, roaring, and then, making his heart stall — nothing. Then he heard the grind of the starter and a renewed burst of sound.

The engine was missing, cutting out. Casworth was gunning the throttle each time he restarted it, trying to keep it running. But as Dan looked across the raging sea, he shook his head helplessly. He let go of the wheel with one hand, made a quick beckoning motion, then grabbed it again as the boat’s head fell off, across an oncoming sea.

The engine stalled and died, and a moment later the lights of the boat died, too, dimming and then going out in falling, fading sparks. The roar of the wind filled his ears. Faint shouts came from where the lights had disappeared. He could distinguish Casworth’s roar, McMannes’s voice. A feeble yellow beam flicked on and wove around: one of the battle lanterns, but in the immense dark that surrounded them, it looked like a dying firefly.

Dan stared. The next minute, he was tearing at his pockets. His desperate fingers found the narrow cylinder of his bridge penlight. He pulled it free and thumbed the button. The next minute, he cursed. The little lifer lights weren’t waterproof. He yelled, but his voice was too puny and faint to carry over the bellow of the wind.

The dim searching beam faded slowly, then winked out. A moment later, it bobbed into view again. Each time it reappeared, it was fainter, and farther away.

Then it vanished.

They were alone, he and the boy and the woman — alone under the sealed-down darkness of the racing clouds, in a heaving, waterfilled boat. He stared into the dark, unable to move. The sense of abandonment was too great to grasp. Ten minutes before, he’d been looking forward to a meal, dry clothes, his bunk. Now they were as distant as the stars. He was adrift, abandoned, at the mercy of the hungry sea.

A moment later, he was scooping and throwing water as fast as he could make his arms work. If they went over before Casworth got the engine restarted, he had a life vest, but the others didn’t. The Cubans didn’t have anything — which meant he’d have to try to hold them up. In these seas … He bent and felt with his hand across the bottom of the boat, hoping for line or cord, but found nothing. The wood felt spongy and bits came off and stuck under his fingernails. Shit, no wonder it was full of water! The bottom was as rotten as an old stump.

A wave came out of the dark, hit them broadside, like a huge black bull goring its horns beneath them, then tossing them toward the sky. They rushed upward, the motion and the speed sickening and terrifying with nothing visual to match it against. The wind blasted them with spray at the crest.

The grapnel, he thought. That has line on it. He scrambled aft, pushing the boy aside roughly in his haste to get by.

The rough iron claw was jammed into the stern board, points dug deep. He hauled line in rapidly, measuring fathoms with outstretched arms: five, six, seven … eight fathoms. He hoped it was enough. He stripped off his life vest, snapped the straps into D-rings, then half-hitched the end of the line fast to the straps.

He had it lifted, ready to throw it overboard, when he saw the wave coming in from astern: a huge one, towering above the rest. Green-glowing, it grew so slowly, it hardly seemed to move.

He threw the bundled vest into the wind as hard as he could, then threw the loose line over after it. The boat hesitated, then started to rise, but too slowly.

The wave bulged up dark on both sides, then broke apart with an avalanche roar over them, hammering him into the bottom like a nail under a sledgehammer. He clutched and scrabbled mindlessly to keep from being sucked out of the boat. He closed his eyes under black water, thinking, This is it; it’s going over.

But it didn’t.

Slowly, the hulk pushed itself to the surface again. The wind caught it as it rolled his gasping face reluctantly back to the air. He gasped for breath as his heart throbbed in his throat, waiting to see if they were going to live a few more minutes.

Pushed downwind, yet held back by the floating scoop of the life vest, the hulk swung slowly to present its back to the wind. Now when the waves hit, the stern split them like a blunt ax. The water still rolled over them, but at least it didn’t feel like it was going to capsize.

Reprieve, he thought. He dragged a sodden arm across his eyes and blinked around, hoping for a glimpse of the whaleboat’s lights. But his eyes found no color, no light, only the cold phosphorescent sparkle of the breaking waves. Either the motor was still dead, the whaleboat drifting downwind without power, or else Casworth had lost them in the storm.

A moan from forward jerked his thoughts from his own problems. A long, animal whimpering, building to a scream that made his scalp prickle.

Yeah, he thought when he reached her. Her arms were rigid, and when his hand found hers, the cold fingers clamped on with inhuman strength. Her nails dug into his flesh like the points of a grapnel.

She was due, and it was coming — now. Another glance at the huddled boy told him there’d be no help from that quarter.

Staring into her face in the dark, he muttered, “I’m here. I’m going to help. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”

He hoped desperately that he was telling her the truth.

35

As he stared into her pain-twisted face, he slowly became conscious of a faint light vibrating at the edge of his vision. He couldn’t tell if it was coming up out of the sea, or falling from the sky, or generated somehow by the wind, like static electricity. Darkness surrounded them, yet he could make out outlines and shapes. Strangely grainy, as if he was seeing by the individual particles of light itself, it was just enough to make out the huddled body under the cuddy, the crouching boy aft; enough to sense a wave as it bulged above the stern.

Okay, he thought. First inventory what you have, then you’ll know what you can do. It wasn’t a long list. They had two hard hats, a flashlight that didn’t work, and the clothes he, the kid, and the woman were wearing. They had a grapnel, line, and life jacket, now deployed as a sea anchor. And that was all. Oh, and whatever was in the woman’s bottle — water, probably.

It didn’t sound like much. But the coolness licking his legs told him what he’d better deal with first.

He groped in the bilges, found the second hard hat, and thrust it at the boy. “Bail,” he snarled. The kid took it but didn’t move. Dan picked up his own again and began scooping and throwing. After a moment, the kid slid down and started bailing, too.

Next: the woman. Thank God this wasn’t the first time he’d been around for a birth. He tried to remember the classes he and Susan had gone to before Nan was born. He just hadn’t thought about it for so long, years, and when you piled on the Navy schools and all the stuff you had to memorize … Don’t think about that now. Remember Lamaze classes in the Navy hospital: lying on the prickly thin carpet, adjusting the pillow behind Susan’s back; slides of a baby angled in the womb; a room full of panting women, husbands eyeing wristwatches. Crouched in the heaving, pitching boat, he tried to summon the green-tiled room where they’d awaited the obstetrician.

Only here there was no room, no doctor, no pillow, nothing to work with. He crawled forward on his knees to slump next to her.

“Can you hear me?” he said as gently as he could and still be audible over the storm.

The faint gleam of opened eyes … He put his hands on her shoulders and his cheek against her face. She was panting, gasping for breath. The muscles of her arms were like cables.

“Do you speak any English?”

“No. Mi marido …”

“Okay. You understand, okay? We’re going to help you out here. I’m just going to get you a little more comfortable ….”

He chattered on, not paying much attention to what he said but trying to sound reassuring. He had to get her to relax. Those rigid muscles were burning up energy she’d need later. He started by massaging her shoulders. His hands brushed the bottle and started to shift it. She moaned and pushed his hand away, so he left it.

He massaged down her neck and shoulders to her back, worked on that for a while, then ran his hands gently over her belly. Then he worked her thighs, digging his fingers in, gradually moving down. Susan had said that helped, forcing the tension out. This woman didn’t feel like Susan, though. There wasn’t much on her but skin and muscle. At the same time, his face close to hers, he mimicked deep, slow breaths.

Gradually, it worked. The locked flesh softened under his hands. Her breathing slowed and her eyes sank closed. He glanced back, to see the boy still bailing.

Finally, he ran his fingertips over her face. Then he straightened and pulled his light out again.

Carefully — because if he lost any parts, that was it — he disassembled it. He shook the water off each piece, the batteries, the reflector and bulb combination, the barrel. He held them up to the wind, thinking maybe they’d dry a little, though the spray was still flying. The red filter seemed useless, so he threw it away, then immediately regretted it. He had so little, he shouldn’t be throwing anything away.

When he put them all back together and thumbed the switch, he was rewarded by an orange spark. He shook it and it brightened a bit.

Muttering, “Excuse me, got to see what’s going on here,” he seized the sodden hem of her dress and folded it up over her knees, squeezing the sea out of it.

The red-orange waver showed him a patch of hair above a streaky darkness on the thwart. Something about a mucus plug, bloody show … Susan had spent seventeen and a half hours in labor. The nurse had told him that was longer than average. But it could be more, if there were complications.

Complications. God. He turned and yelled to the kid, “Hey, you speak any English?”

The boy didn’t answer. Dan shone the light at him for a second and saw that he was terrified. Also that he wasn’t seventeen, as he’d thought at first. Now he figured twelve or thirteen, with long spindly legs. “Hey,” he said again, making his voice kinder, “We’re going to be all right here. ¿Comprende? Buenas. Tout sera bien.” He knew that last was French, but Spanish was a Romance language, too; maybe the meaning would filter through. And the boy might have been responding to that or just to his tone, but he grinned a little.

Dan turned back to the woman. He wished he knew her name. He started to ask, but just then she sucked a sudden breath and stiffened. He held her arms, reminded her to relax, talked her through it. This time, her hand left the gunwale and searched for his, gripped it so hard it hurt.

When the contraction receded, she lay there, panting, her head thrown back. He said, “How many kids you have?”

“¿Qúe?”

“How many kids? Children? ¿Niños?” He pointed at her stomach, held up one finger, two fingers, three fingers.

“Este es el cuerto hijo.”

Graciela could only occasionally see the man who talked to her out of the orange light. She didn’t understand who he was or where he’d come from. It had crossed her mind that he was an angel, but this seemed unlikely. She certainly wasn’t dead; she felt too much pain. Still, he was here, talking with her, and he sounded friendly.

Then she had to stop thinking about it as the wave gathered again, first in the back of her mind, then moving down her body like massive steel rollers. She tightened her grip on his hand. The angel-devil leaned into her face, telling her something in his strange slow language that only now and then she caught a word of. Then he was breathing with her, only more slowly now, and she remembered the chant old Aracelia had taught her last time, how to breathe to the rhythm of the chant. She concentrated on that as the wave crashed over her, until she couldn’t breathe anymore at all.

In the absolute dark of midnight, he could see — not only the luminescent hands of his watch, soldered together and pointed straight up, not just the weird emerald fire of the sea as it broke around them. It was as if his sight had been sharpened. He didn’t think he was dreaming, though he was deadly tired. It was as if he had the eyes of a cat, just for one night.

Or maybe somewhere up there, the moon was out, above the riding clouds ….

He and the woman were communicating now. They didn’t share a language, at least not a spoken one. But the language of hands, of help, they shared that. Isolated from the rest of humanity, separate and alone, they had only each other.

The boy bailed. He’d been bailing so long, he must be exhausted, but he was still dragging the helmet up and dumping it over the side. The water came in as fast as it went out, but at least it wasn’t rising. If the seas didn’t get any worse, Dan thought they might make it till dawn.

If they were still afloat when light came, they ought to get picked up. He figured Reska had eventually gotten the engine started again on the whaleboat. If not, they had the radio; the ship would have left station to pick them up.

Conclusion: Barrett knew he was adrift out here with two Cubans; they’d be searching for him. There were other ships out, too. Sooner or later, they’d run into one. If they could stay afloat … He blinked, realizing he was falling asleep, and sat up and looked around. Darkness, that was all, and the flickering light that ran along the tops of the waves. The world had contracted to the limits of the open boat, as if all that mattered was here: himself, the kid, and the woman.

The good news was that she seemed to be doing okay. He even knew her name now. She’d said it several times, guiding his hand to her chest, as if that was where she truly existed. “Graciela,” she’d said. “Graciela Gutiérrez.”

“Daniel Lenson.”

“¿Cómo es tu nombre?”

“Daniel. Dan.”

“Dan,” she’d whispered, eyes sagging closed again.

“Graciela,” he murmured now, still holding her hand. She muttered something back. But her voice was higher. He glanced at his watch. Not much interval now.

Suddenly, she gasped and pointed to a leg. He ran his hands down it, dug into the spasmed knot of muscle. Potassium would help. Wasn’t there potassium in seawater? He decided giving her seawater was not a good idea. Maybe a drink from her bottle? He pointed to it, but she shook her head fiercely.

When the contraction passed, she moved her legs slowly. She seemed uncomfortable on the wood, and he took off his foul-weather jacket and padded the cuddy with it under her back.

She lay exhausted, feeling the sea beneath her. But this wasn’t so bad, she thought dreamily. The sea was warm on her bare legs. Only her lips hurt — cracked, raw, open wounds. She thought of the water again but didn’t reach for it. It was not for her.

The contraction came again. It felt as if she was being forced through the huge rollers they used to crush the cane. The smooth green stalks went in, then came out as an emerald paste as the sweet juice drooled down into the tubs. She remembered the sweet smell, like cut grass and molasses.

The contraction eased, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before another took its place. Only a little while now until the baby came. She could feel it move and shift, feel her body mold itself around the insistent heaviness being forced through it. It hurt so much sometimes, she couldn’t breathe or even think, but it was comforting to know that soon it would be over.

She remembered the first time, with Coralía. How frightened she’d been, and how sick.

Yes, sick, with chills and the vomiting. They hadn’t known what was wrong with her for a long time, and the sanitario at the farm had not known what to say. Then Armando had taken her to the hospital in Minas. They told him she had to have a certain medicine but that they did not have it. And Armando had looked at them with a hard look and said, “I will get it. Give me a prescription so that I may buy it when I find it, and I will get it for her.”

And it had taken him two days to go to Camagüey and get the medicine and come back. Part of the way, he rode on a sugar truck, and the rest he had to walk. He’d walked all night to bring her the medicine. Later when she asked where the radio was, she found he’d had to sell it and borrow money, too, for the medicine; it was foreign and very expensive. Then her time had come, and she’d been so frightened, and then she’d had Coralía. But then she had been sick again and for eight days had not known anyone, so they told her.

The second child, Victoria, she’d come very easily. There had been no problem with her; all the old woman had to do was talk to her a while, then later cut the cord. The only thing that made her sad then was that she knew Armando wanted a man-child, to pass on manhood as it had been passed to him by his father. Who could blame him for that? But he had never said anything or slighted the girls in any way. Yes, a good man. She saw his face again, leathery and lined, the metal teeth startling in his face, as if from another life. But the third child, Tasita, had been difficult again. And when she came, she never breathed or moved at all. So much pain, and then the sweet little face with its eyes closed so peacefully …

Feeling the wave coming again, breathing fast to make up for when she would not be able to breathe at all, she thought suddenly, I can die, too. The last time Tasita, and this time me.

Only it didn’t feel frightening now. Now, in the darkness, it felt reassuring. She wouldn’t hurt any longer if she died. And for another, she believed.

She thought now calmly, waiting for it to reach her, that made all the difference. Who could really be afraid, thinking that if you died, why then you would be with them again? With Victoria and Tasita and Armando, and her mother, Dona Eli, and her father, José. He had not known the revolution; he’d passed away while Castro was in the mountains. And maybe it was better that way; a man with her father’s temper would never have been happy after the revolution. Maybe that was why the revolucionarios said that you should not believe. Because without that, then you were afraid, and if you were afraid, you would do as you were told.

Then the crest pressed her down again, and she stared into the dark, arched helplessly in the crushing grip of something more ancient and more cruel than anything one understood until they had to give birth or die.

And the sea heaved endlessly through the dark hours.

Dan sat beside her, staring into nothingness, and thought, There’s something wrong.

He couldn’t remember how long it was supposed to take. But if the average was twelve, and this was Graciela’s fourth, if he understood what she was saying at all, it shouldn’t be taking this long. It had been almost twelve hours now and the contractions were still coming, the times between them varying, but never more than three minutes apart. For a long time, she’d borne them with courage and held his hand. Then she’d passed gradually into irritable querulousness. She’d begged him for something for a long time, but he never understood what it was …. Now her hand dangled limply in the water, not moving at all.

She was getting weak, dimming, going out, like the batteries of a soaked flashlight.

He had to do something. But what? He thought desperately of a cesarean, but he didn’t have a knife. Anyway, that wouldn’t save her, only the baby.

Suddenly, she screamed, a terrified burst of animal sound followed by rapid, agonized Spanish.

He took a deep breath, fighting panic. He’d hoped it would be a normal birth, that he could just coach her and catch the baby when it came. But it seemed it wasn’t going to work that way.

Okay, boy, he told himself. It’s time to see what’s wrong.

He turned the flashlight on and thrust it between his teeth. The feeble glow was no brighter than a lighted cigarette. Leaning swiftly so as not to capsize the boat, he washed his fingers in the clean seawater outside. Not touching anything else, he bent close to her opened legs.

Her hot, strained flesh opened easily to his searching fingers. Inward, inward, sweat prickling on his back. Her inner flesh was slippery with blood and fluid. He set his teeth and kept probing in.

Something hard — hard and smooth and slightly gritty. He moved his fingertips along it and felt the curving.

He remembered watching Nan emerge in the bright green-tiled room: the obstetrician’s big gloved fingers showing him the crown of the baby’s head; Susan’s legs shaking, shaking; and Dan swallowing with sudden terror. He could see the top of the baby’s skull. But it was too small. Microcephalic! He glanced around at the nurse’s face, the doctor’s, searching for the horror and shock and pity. But their eyes were unconcerned, routine, and he gulped back his fear and watched as Susan groaned and pushed again and the baby moved forward an inch or two. He saw then that the head wasn’t too small after all; it was just pointed, like the end of a football.

This came back to him, and he remembered Dr. Carter’s casual deep voice as he “just widened the canal a little, make it a little easier.” How Susan had screamed, then cursed him wildly, but Carter hadn’t taken offense, just smiled and patted her leg and said she was doing fine.

“Bueno. Mucho bueno. You’re doing fine,” he murmured now, and slipped his fingers around the crown of the baby’s skull.

Something tough and only yieldingly elastic was holding it back. He pried it outward, pressing down on the hard yet at the same time yielding bone, till he got his middle finger under the lip. Graciela was rigid, making no sound at all. Maybe she’d passed out. That would be good … or maybe it wouldn’t, if she went into shock. Sweat broke down his back again as he started working around it, pulling outward at the membranous ring. The baby’s head was jammed against it with enormous force. But he pulled steadily, closing his eyes, concentrating all his attention on the tips of his fingers, trying not to tear anything, just gradually working his way all the way around, top to bottom to top again.

Graciela screamed again, suddenly, coming out of whatever syncope or absence she’d been in. Her muscles tightened around his hand. At the same instant the baby slid forward, jamming his finger against the edge of the cervix, or whatever it was. Then the boat bucked upward under his knees and a deluge of warm water smashed down on them. The deck dropped away, and he cursed wildly and jerked his hand out and pushed himself back, scrambling aft.

When he pulled the line in, there was nothing at the end. The life jacket was gone. The nylon strap dangled ragged where the stitching had torn out of the kapok. He held it, mind desolate. He didn’t have anything else to put on it. Already the skiff was drifting around, presenting its beam to the sea. When that happened, they’d go over. His foul-weather jacket? No way to make a scoop out of that.

Out of nowhere, he remembered a light-filled afternoon at the Naval Academy: in the natatorium, fifty guys in the pool treading water, the instructor telling them to listen up, the Navy didn’t give you a fifty-thousand-dollar education so you could drown and waste it. He was going to show them how to abandon ship safely, how to swim through burning oil, and how to stay afloat.

How whenever you were in a cotton uniform, you had your own life preserver with you.

He pulled his wallet and keys out, stuffed them into his shirt pockets, and buttoned them. Then he stripped his pants off and tied knots in the ends of the legs. He pulled the belt out of its loops and rove the line through them. Then he bent and put it carefully over the side.

He opened the makeshift drogue with a jerk on the line, then paid out as the stern skidded around. Better, but they were still going downwind fast. By now, the wind should have backed to north or even northwest. They were headed south, right back toward Cuba.

Back to Graciela, to find her into another contraction. He waited till she was done, breathing with her, saying whatever came into his mind — that she was doing fine; they’d be picked up soon; the ship would find them at dawn. Then, when it passed and she sagged back, he dilated her a little more. Warm fluid trickled over his fingers.

He jerked himself awake, feeling instantly confused, then frightened, then guilty — as if he was responsible for this, for everything.

Graciela moaned again, and he sat up and pressed the switch on the flashlight. The filament didn’t even redden. He dropped it into the water that sloshed back and forth across her opened bare legs.

Then realized he didn’t need it.

The sky was still dark, but here and there were streaks lighter than the rest, faint rays, not yet what you’d call dawn, but like the ribs of a fan unfolding behind the gray clouds. The seas rolled endlessly toward them, black and gray in the distance, then translucently emerald as they towered. They crested but didn’t break, passing silently beneath the boat. It took a while before his slowed mind realized the reason.

The wind no longer roared, no longer drove the sea mad with its siren song. Only a steady breeze cooled his face as they rose once again, and he looked across a world of water toward a distant black bank of departing cloud. He lifted his wrist and licked greasy salt film off the face of his watch.

Dawn crept toward them across the sea.

Graciela lay sprawled in her nest under the cuddy. Her hair straggled wet and tangled from beneath the cloth. It covered her face. Her cracked lips were bloody, and blood and shit darkened the water that rolled between her open legs.

The kid was sleeping, too. In the growing light, he looked even younger than Dan had thought last night. Dan looked back at the sky. Was that blue? He stared at it, unable to decide if it was clear sky or just a glimpse of a higher, paler cloud cover. If it was blue

… He suddenly felt a surge of hope. It was barely possible that they might make it through this. Stay in the Stream; try to attract somebody’s attention, either a Coast Guard cutter or even one of the larger refugee boats.

Then he saw the shark.

It must have been circling them for a while, because when he first noticed it, it was quite close. It slid down the side of the skiff, the tip of its fin making a faint rippling noise. He could have reached out and seized it. Instead, he just watched, sitting on the spongy floorboards in the growing light, watching it move past and off until he could no longer see its dark long form beneath the green sea.

Then he noticed something else. Looking down to where his weight rested on the bottom. As the boat surged, filaments of green light opened along the boards. There wasn’t anything holding the boards together, and when the frame of the boat worked, they opened up. He put his hand down and felt the cool upwelling current between them.

“Ayúdame,” Graciela whispered.

He crept forward on his hands and knees, trying to keep his weight on the thwarts, afraid to put his feet on the rotten bottom. The boy slept on. When he took her hands, they were icy.

She lay spent, empty, melting into the blackness beneath her.

She knew dimly that she was dying. The child was not going to be born. She’d held back a little strength, husbanding it for what she knew would come: the last, incredible, impossible task of pushing the baby out. But that time had come and gone, and the baby had not. It was locked inside her, and together they would die.

She’d thought that if this happened, she would call on the Virgin, but she knew now that no one could help her. The life was being crushed out of her, like a dog caught beneath the wheels of an oxcart. She’d seen that once at the cooperativa. She opened her mouth to scream, but she had no breath left in her. She couldn’t see. The red mist blinded her.

Her last conscious thought was of her own mother. So many years before …

Then there was nothing but the mist — no thought, no body, only something that watched without self, without anything but the watching. As it gazed, the red mist slowly began to whirl. As it gathered speed, a black opening appeared at the end of it. It grew swiftly larger, with nothing beyond but the black. She hurtled toward it with incredible velocity, knowing that this was the final and utter obliteration only in the last instant before it occurred.

When he turned back her clothing again, he could see the baby. The top of its scalp showed wet and glistening, with little dark whorls of plastered-down black hair. But that was all. All these hours and it hadn’t emerged. He didn’t know how long it could stay like that and still be alive. Maybe it was dead already. Kneeling, he ran his fingers again around the taut barrier of restraining flesh. It locked the child in no matter how hard the uterine muscles shoved. He tried again to pry it apart, but he couldn’t even get his fingertip under it now. If that was all that was holding it back … Graciela was exhausted, her breathing almost invisible. Blue shadows lay under her jaw. Her wrists looked bruised and bloodless, fragile against the swollen bulk of her body. He could see she was dying. “A knife,” he muttered, rubbing one hand uncertainly against his chin-stubble. His dry lips were caked with salt. Christ, he was thirsty.

But he didn’t have a knife. He didn’t have anything sharp at all. The baby was stuck, and it and she were going to die here, and probably all four of them when the rotten planks split apart. Their fishy friends would see to that. His hand slipped down from his chin — and stopped.

An instant later, he was fumbling with his collar. The little nipples that held his collar insignia popped free and sank, to shine quietly brassy on the dark submerged wood.

Two pointed pins glittered in the glowing light.

He bent one back on the thwart, leaving the other sticking out, and gripped the silver bars firmly between thumb and forefinger. He didn’t want to do this. He was no doctor. But she’d been in labor since the night before. She was exhausted. Like what they said about tactics: When it was time, you had to act, whether what you did was right or wrong. Or you’d inevitably lose as your opponent acted and you did not.

Now, at this moment, he knew his opponent was Death himself. A moment later, blood welled up, dripping into the water and uncoiling like falling silk. It dripped, then trickled, then gushed out.

“Shit,” he muttered. He’d cut it and the baby still wasn’t moving. Graciela didn’t react at all. “God damn you! Don’t do this. Help us! For once—”

The baby turned slightly under his clutching fingers.

He panted, set the pin again, and bit his lips as he cut deeper. Then he stopped, horrified as the split suddenly widened of itself. A fresh burst of blood came from the tearing flesh. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to do that …. But the head moved again. It was turning, as if the baby was trying to burrow its way out. He adjusted her legs, moving them as far apart as they’d go, and lifted her hips.

Suddenly, the baby’s entire head slid out amid the blood and mucus. It was blue. Little eyes bulged beneath closed lids. Graciela groaned and threw her head back. Lenson dropped the pin and seized the little shoulders, eased them to the left.

With another gush of fluid and blood, the baby squirted out onto his lap, all at once, in a tumbling rush. It was very small and an astonishing shade of blue-green, with a pointed large head and tiny closed eyelids. It slid off his leg and into the water, slick as a fish. He grabbed desperately and got it, then dropped it again from clumsy numb hands. Finally, he captured the small body across his lap. One tiny froglike leg was tangled in the cord. He unlooped it, then stared down at perfect little fingers, a flat nose, tiny lips. It was a boy. And it didn’t move. Shreds of dark tissue and streaks of blood, a bluish discoloration on the neck. He glanced at Graciela, but she looked dead. Blood trickled from between her legs. He stared at the flow, trying to think of some way to stop it. Blood in the water, leaking through the bottom, all those fucking sharks … But nothing came to mind.

He opened the baby’s lips and cleaned the mouth out gently with his little finger. There was material in the nostrils and he got that out, too. Then he fitted his mouth over its face. The taste of salt and blood. Blow in. Just a puff or he’d rupture the tiny lungs. The little chest rose under his hands. Let go. The little ribs sank. I waited too long, he thought savagely. If only I’d thought of that, the pin, hours ago.

The little boy shuddered under his lips, struggled to suck in a breath.

A thin catlike meow, a piping, querulous cry pierced the rush of wind.

36

When the sun rose at last, it looked down on a great wrinkled canvas of emerald and turquoise and indigo. The seas drifted across it, and seabirds dipped along their crests. Only the occasional shadow of a high cloud obscured the surface.

Below its searching rays, a half-sunken boat drifted in silence, tossing slowly, like the torn fragments of sargasso weed that marked the wake of the storm. Its occupants didn’t move. They lay in motionless bundles as the light grew steadily brighter.

Dan woke to the baby’s cry, thin and piercing as a seagull’s. For a long time, he just left his eyes where they were when they opened: on the sky. How marvelous it was, clear and so pale it looked as if it had been scrubbed with abrasive cleanser.

Later, he lowered his eyes to the waves. He examined their shape and counted the seconds between the passage of two crests. Down to four feet, he thought. A good long period. And judging by the wind, they’d drop a lot more this morning.

The storm was over.

A pilot flame of hope ignited. He sat up, testing the balance of the half-submerged skiff, then cautiously stood. When he had his balance, he pivoted slowly, searching all around the horizon. The added height of eye gave him a horizon of about three miles, though of course he’d see anything that projected above the surface, such as a ship’s upperworks, at a much greater distance. But to his disappointment, his eye snagged on only a single sail far to the west. To the south, clouds, and below them a flat smudge that could only be the Cuban coast.

Sitting down again, he did a little dead reckoning in his head. He came out with a position somewhere in the Nicholas Channel.

He didn’t see any sign of Barrett, or of the whaleboat, or of anything else that looked like help.

That was the bad news.

The good news lay snuggled in the woman’s arms, covered with her drawn-up skirt. The baby’s eyes were closed. One tiny hand was curled knuckles and all into its mouth, and its cheeks worked slowly. Beneath it, he noted with pride the slow rise and fall of Graciela’s chest.

She opened her eyes as if feeling his. They looked at each other across the length of the boat. Then she smiled faintly and her lids sank slowly closed again.

He must have slipped away again then himself, because the next thing he knew, the boy was shaking him. The sun was in his face and very hot. The baby was crying, and Graciela was rocking and humming to it. He grunted, sat up, and checked the horizon again. Nothing at all this time; the sail had sunk into the west.

“Bail?” The boy made a motion with the hard hat.

“Yeah, go ahead, buddy. Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”

When he got across what he meant, the kid said his name was Miguel. Dan told him his. That about exhausted the conversation. He swallowed, realizing again how thirsty he was. He eyed the water that swirled around his feet. Clear as it looked, it was salt.

When he turned back to Graciela, he saw she’d unbuttoned her dress and was nursing. The baby’s head was small and still pointed, covered with swirls of dark hair. It reminded him of Nan just after she’d been born. He swallowed again on the sharpness of memory, remembering her learning to crawl … to speak … the way she hugged him in the morning on the rare days he’d been home. Maybe it would have worked out if he’d just been around more ….

He had to put that aside. He’d screwed it up, or maybe Susan had, or maybe it was just accident or fate and no one’s fault, but whatever it was, he couldn’t alter it now. At least if he didn’t make it back, they were taken care of. His serviceman’s life insurance was still made out to Susan, and she’d get his pay and allowances. So Nan would be taken care of. That was the important thing.

From aft came the regular splash as the boy bailed. Jesus, it was actually getting calm. The wind just kept dropping. He watched the water roll within the confines of the gunwales. He put a boot cautiously on the floorboards and saw clearly now how the boards separated under the weight. The only thing keeping them afloat was the residual buoyancy of the wood. But wood didn’t float forever. It got waterlogged, and by the looks of it, that wasn’t far away. He toyed for a while with various schemes for making it watertight again, but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t require stuff they didn’t have, plastic sheeting, or fiberglass, or canvas.

God, it was quiet. The waves made lapping sounds as they struck the boat. The muffled sucking snorts of the baby made his cracked lips curve. Then he licked them. It had rained last night, but he’d been too busy to think about collecting it.

“How are you doing?” he asked Graciela.

She understood what he asked, not the words, but what he meant. So she didn’t try to answer in words, just smiled. The child tugged on her breast, and she shifted, making it more comfortable.

She’d been thinking again about Armando. Right after they’d met, she’d been so jealous. He was older and had been married before. That woman was white and attractive, so people said. She’d gone away; no one knew where, just that one day she was gone. Armando might have known why, but he always said he didn’t.

They’d met at the dance, and matters had progressed from there. But she’d been jealous, maybe because he’d been married before, or more likely just because she was so much in love, she wasn’t thinking right. Yes, you didn’t always think straight when you were young. Afterward, you saw that, but by then it was too late to make things right again.

Anyway, she remembered a few months after the ceremony at the registro civil, he’d said he would be out till very late, and she’d thought instantly, El tiene otra mujer. She knew who, too: the telephone operator, the new girl sent from Havana when the man who ran the phones had left for the north—“el Norte revuelto y brutal,” as the propaganda called it. And suddenly, rage had possessed her. She’d gone to his mother’s and taken down the machete from the wall, the one his grandfather had used when he fought to free Cuba from the Spanish. It was old but still sharp, and she hid in the reeds along the road Armando would have to take to come home that night. She’d waited, trembling with rage, imagining how he would come walking along with her and she’d kill them both, hit them both so hard that blood would flow like a red river.

She’d been so angry that when she saw the shadow moving along the road, even though it was just one person, she’d leapt out and screamed at him. A terrible thing — she did not like to think now what it was she had screamed. Then she’d rushed at him, swinging the machete, trying to kill him. She would have, too, only he took it from her somehow, right out of her hand, and then ran. Yes, he had run from her, silently, without speaking, without explaining, along the dark road, until she became exhausted and had sunk down into the dirt, weeping in frustration and rage.

Only when they’d come for him and taken him away had she understood that what he’d been doing that night and all the other nights had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with love— for her and for their country. She’d had to live with that, till years later he came back so strange and silent, back covered with scars.

The baby lost the nipple and snuffled and moved his head in little jerks, searching like a blind kitten until she guided him to what he needed. Then she lay back in the sunlight and closed her eyes, feeling its need and glad to give, yet anxious lest she not have enough. She remembered nursing Coralía like this … and then, suddenly, the pain of memory: Victoria. Victoria had had understanding from the day she was born. Graciela could speak to her and see in the baby’s eyes that she understood. The child spoke perfect Spanish when she was a year old. She could not help feeling that Victoria was watching her now with her blue eyes. Yes, blue eyes for the child. She still couldn’t believe she was dead. Because she could talk to her right now, in her heart, and Victoria replied in her perfect Spanish, Mama, el niño es muy lindo. Tengo un hermano.

Yes, you have a brother. Your father must be proud. You know he was proud of you, but a man wants a son, just as a mother wants a daughter. It is natural; no one can blame us in this.

She thought, Truly, what does it all mean, Victoria’s death, Armando’s, this great suffering that has come to our country? We were never rich. We always worked hard. Why had this great trial come to them, that they were imprisoned and starved, driven to trust themselves to the merciless sea? She didn’t understand it. And what lay ahead for her and the small greedy one at her breast? Death, or life? More suffering, or perhaps in America a little bit of happiness — for the government in all its might and power simply to leave them alone ….

She was rocking and humming to the baby when she felt something jolt against the bottom of the boat, directly under her. She looked down but caught only a sliding glimpse of something dark.

Great, he thought, staring over the side. Half an inch of rotten wood between us and them. He sat up carefully, so as not to disturb the boat’s precarious equilibrium, and searched the horizon again. Flat, blue, empty. Where the fuck was Barrett? Or had Leighty given him up? Decided he’d read the wrong diary, and so — no, he couldn’t believe that.

The shark came back and bumped them again, harder. He swallowed. Something heavy had lodged in his gullet, like a sodden lump of undercooked pancake.

The boy had stopped bailing. Dan reached over for the hard hat and set to work scooping out the clear water. Shit, it was coming in as fast as he dumped it out.

The worst of it was that he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He couldn’t stop the leaks, couldn’t go anywhere. They had no sail, no motor, not even a scrap of wood to paddle with. He couldn’t signal for help; they had no matches and nothing that he could burn if they did, no mirrors, nothing. All he could do was wait and bail. And he really wasn’t sure if doing either wasn’t just a waste of time.

When he looked back, he was surprised to see she was crying. There was no change in her expression. Not a line of the weathered face had altered. But tears made glistening tracks on her cheeks, slowly drying to white salt. He looked at her in the immense silence, the brightness dazzling off everything, so that his own eyes burned, but he didn’t think that was what was making her cry. What could he say? So much separated them. He knew nothing of her life, why she’d left Cuba on this crazy venture, in a rotten, leaking boat.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said. Her eyes flicked to him, then dropped again.

She tried again to recall where this man had come from. In a brown shirt and no trousers. An insignia of some kind on one point of his collar and another on his chest. Gustavo was gone. Julio and Aracelia were gone, too, but she remembered what had happened to them. She remembered the boat turning over, the terrible storm — though already it was fading, as if it had happened years before. She seemed to remember this man helping her, too. Hadn’t he helped her in the night?

She thought then, Why wonder? Why not just ask? “Miguel.”

“¿Sí, Tia?”

“Where is Gustavo?”

“The motorboat took him, Aunt.”

“The motorboat … yes.” She didn’t know what boat he meant or what had happened to the old man. The baby sucked harder, and she shifted it to the other breast, hoping it was getting something. “Who’s this?” She pointed furtively.

“That’s an American sailor.”

“But how has he come to be with us?”

“He came from the motorboat, during the night.”

She nodded, giving up. She still didn’t understand, but it wasn’t important. Everything that mattered, she held in her arms. She bent and kissed the close dark wet curls, nuzzling the soft, sweet-smelling head over and over.

He started awake again sometime later and realized he was burning. His face and the backs of his hands and most of all the tender flesh of his bare legs itched and flamed. His throat ached with thirst. The sun glared down from directly above, a soundless white flame that covered a quarter of the sky. He had to do something, cover himself at least. He leaned and looked over the side.

When he pulled in on the line, his trousers came sagging wetly out of the water like a long-drowned body. He expected shreds, but they were unharmed except for a broken belt loop. He coiled the line carefully on the floorboards. You could do a lot of things with fifty feet of line. Then he pulled the wet material on over his burned legs. He glanced at the sun again, then immediately away. Its heat was incredible, reflected and focused off the calming sea into their faces. At last, he pulled off his shirt and draped it over his head and arms in a tent effect. That helped, and he sat back, looking again at the others. The boy lay on his stomach, motionless, the bottoms of his bare brown feet toward Dan. Graciela sat propped against the cuddy. She was still nursing, the little dark head nestled against her.

She brought the child away and looked down at it, then kneaded her breast, looking anxious. She glanced at him quickly. Dan stayed motionless, the cloth shading his eyes.

She reached behind her, felt back into the cuddy, then slowly drew out the bottle, glancing at him again as if confirming he was asleep. He swallowed involuntarily as his eyes fastened to the clear liquid sloshing inside the plastic.

Quietly, she unscrewed the cap and lifted it to her lips. And a sudden cynical anger tightened his jaw, followed, a moment later, by a cynical voice in his head asking him what else he expected. She was just like everybody else, thinking of herself first. What was so surprising about that?

But when she lowered the clear plastic, her cheeks were still distended. She glanced at Dan again, then handed the bottle to Miguel, prodding it against the boy’s legs till his hand came up. Then, still not swallowing, she turned the edge of her skirt back from the baby’s face.

Bending her face down over it, she put her lips to its mouth.

He felt suddenly shamed, disgraced, as if he’d accused her and been proven wrong. He’d thought she was hoarding the water, keeping it for herself. While actually she hadn’t taken any. She’d given it all to the baby and the boy ….

She lifted her head, looked again at the bottle, now back on the thwart where Miguel had set it. She licked her lips slowly. But when she reached out, it was to place it firmly behind her again.

Then her eyes caught his, saw that he was awake and watching.

She brought the bottle back out and held it out to him.

And quite suddenly, staring at what she was offering him, he understood something he hadn’t before: what love was, stripped to its barest and most essential elements.

Sitting there motionless, he saw abruptly through a surface that only partially made sense into a depth of meaning that underlay and explained everything. It was like unexpectedly comprehending a language you’d heard spoken around you all your life but had never learned. As he never had. Had never understood, or only glimpsed for a second or two. Only now, in this silent moment, did he finally comprehend how he had denied the best part of himself, the only portion that could regenerate all the rest, to Susan, to Beverly, to his parents, to all those who had loved or tried to love him.

It was as if a light had been turned on back in the dark corners of his soul, and he saw with sudden clarity the dust and rubbish that had accumulated there.

She still held the bottle out to him, and he couldn’t stop himself from taking it. He yearned to swallow it all, down to the bottom, and lick the drops out from inside. Instead, he took one mouthful and made himself hand the bottle back.

He took his shirt and dipped it in the water at their feet — the evaporation gave a cooling effect — and draped it carefully over Graciela’s and the baby’s bare heads.

“Gracias,” she whispered.

“It’s nothing. Thanks for the water.”

“¿Cual es tu nombre?” she whispered.

He didn’t speak Spanish, but he understood that. “Daniel.”

“Daniél.”

“That’s right. Call me Dan.”

She smiled faintly and pointed to the baby. “Armando Daniél,” she said, and let her eyes drift down, drift closed against the harsh, brilliant sunlight.

He was still looking at her, still dwelling in that timeless place of understanding, when the boat rasped and bumped as something grated again against the frail disintegrating boards.

The sun dwelt at the height of the heavens, burning down remorselessly, sparkling off the waves. They rocked lazily in the center of a bowl of light. Gradually, the insight, the sense of peace and happiness ebbed as heat and thirst reoccupied his thoughts. Where the hell was Barrett? And where were all the other ships and planes that were supposed to be out helping the refugees? Where was the fucking Coast Guard when you needed them?

He was nodding again when suddenly the boy was at his elbow, shaking him, crying, “¡Ay, mira! ¡Mira! He grunted and raised his hand to brush him away, like a fly.

“Barco,” the boy said. Then, in English, dredged up from where Dan had no idea: “A ship. A ship!”

He jerked upright and craned around, stared upward at what was closing on them. Gray and huge, it towered up into the pale sky. Brown haze boiled the air above its square stacks.

Behind him, the Cubans talked excitedly, happily. The boy pointed to him, talking rapidly to the woman as he touched Dan’s insignia. Dan shook his hand off, still staring upward.

It was a ship all right.

But he didn’t stand, as the boy did, and tear off his torn T-shirt. He didn’t wave or shout.

He felt suddenly cold as he looked up at the sheer flaring bow, the high pyramidal gray superstructure, each level crowded with fire-control directors and search radars. From forward to aft, his eye moved slowly over antisubmarine missile launchers, rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, torpedo tubes, guns.

He knew that silhouette well, had studied it in the recognition manuals. It wasn’t Barrett, or any other U.S. ship.

It was a Soviet Krivak-class destroyer. At first, it had been crossing their horizon and the extension of its course in a straight line would have sent it past a mile away. But someone had noticed Miguelito’s excited waving. Pitching deliberately, the long gray hull shortened as it came around, sharp, high bow still throwing up a creamy wave that glowed in the sunlight as it steadied, heading directly for them.

37

Even through his shock, he had to admire their shiphandling. The sea crinkled aft along the hull, then a backwash at the stern told him they’d backed engines. The high gray block of the forecastle slid between them and the sun, casting a shadow that sank slanting into the sea. He lifted his eyes unwillingly.

A Krivak—a new class, the most advanced destroyer type the Soviets had. He noted the distinctive break halfway up her sheer and the large white Bloc-style hull numbers: 812. Krivaks were officially frigates, not destroyers; they were half Barrett’s displacement, but as usual with Soviet combatants, they were very heavily armed. He noted through numbness the four-tube surface-to-surface missile launcher flat along the forecastle deck; the two reloadable antiair launchers; two 100-mm guns on a low afterdeck. This smaller ship matched Barrett missile for missile, gun for gun. The intel data said they had advanced electronics and sonars, too.

His memory’s prattle ceased as the boy grasped his arm again. Dan shook him off, still staring up. The bridge: looking down from it were impassive men in blue. Binoculars glinted. Sailors stared curiously from the rail. A party of men stood around a launcher. Yeah, midmorning, about time for the daily systems tests …. Suddenly one of the men on the bridge pointed. The binoculars came up again, and several more officers emerged onto the wing.

A puff of topaz haze emerged from the stacks, hovered for a moment above the upperworks, then blew down. It smelled just like Barrett’s turbine exhaust, familiar, yet in these surroundings disorienting and disturbing. Unable to move, he watched the bow nudge closer. Was that the stir of a bow thruster under the surface?

As gray steel eclipsed the sky, he heard shouting, then looked up again to sailors with AK rifles lining the rail. He half-rose, then saw the ladder. A sailor tossed off the last lashing and put his foot to it. It fell, unrolling, splashed into the water a few feet away from the bobbing boat, and swayed, clattering tantalizingly against the hull.

The man on the bridge pointed down, directly at him, then swept his arm up in a broad gesture of invitation — or command.

“Daniél?”

He half-turned, to see Graciela and Miguelito staring at him, puzzled. Obviously, they thought this was his ship. Crap, he couldn’t think, couldn’t decide what to do. Which was better, to stay out here, possibly to drown, or to be rescued by the Soviets? Two Krivak s had been reported with the battle group to the west. This was either one of them or a reinforcement steaming to join. Either way, once on their deck, Graciela, Miguelito, and the baby would be headed for Cuban soil again. He couldn’t see them wanting that. Then, too, she was in no shape to climb that ladder. He turned back, spread his arms, and shook his head. He made signs for eating, signs for drinking.

His answer was a threatening shout, followed by a clacking rattle of bolts charging the first round. Then the short barrels came over the lifeline to steady on them, like cold black eyes on steel stalks.

“Wait here,” he said to Miguel. “Here. In the boat. Comprenez?”

“Aquí, sí.”

At least, he thought as he slipped over the side, the shark had glided off as the ship made up on them. It was probably hanging around a few hundred yards off, waiting its turn.

The sea was a warm bath. He crawl-stroked clumsily in his soaked clothes the few yards to the end of the ladder, seized it, and started pulling himself up. He felt either astonishingly heavy or incredibly weak. The ladder swayed under his weight. It didn’t really seem as long a climb as it ought to be. In fact, he reached the deck above too soon for his taste. The sailors were falling back in a semicircle, and one was helping him over the lifeline.

He stood dripping on the fantail, looking around. Scared as he was, mouth dry and heart pounding, he reminded himself to observe. No one he knew had actually stood on the deck of a Soviet warship. Anything he could describe — if he ever returned, that is — would be valuable. He stared into the eyes of the sailors. Only one had on the old-style blue jumper. The rest were just wearing flat white hats, rather grimy red-and-white-striped undershirts, leather belts with big tarnished buckles, paint-stained, scuffed boots; obviously they’d been working on deck just before the ship hove to. The Kalashnikovs looked serious, though, short rifles with big curved magazines.

Here came the brass: a paunchy gray-haired man in a white undress shirt and a combination cap, looking angry, and a younger officer trailing behind, blond, mouth anxious. Dan made the older one as either the captain or the exec. He started talking at once, glaring at Dan.

“Good morning,” said the younger officer, translating.

Dan cleared his throat to keep his voice from shaking. He felt wet and dirty and slovenly, but he came to attention. Out of nowhere came the thought, I’m glad I got my pants back on before these guys showed up. “Good morning,” he said, and saluted the older man, who hesitated, then returned it.

“The commander would like to know, this uniform, you are U.S. Navy?”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing in boat with criminals?”

“My ship was rendering assistance to these refugees. We were separated in the storm.”

“Your ship, her name?”

He stared at the guy — call him a lieutenant; they were about the same age — then at the “commander.” What was the Geneva Convention rule about this? The Code of Conduct? Hell, he thought then, we aren’t at war. How could the Russians get them to Barrett if he didn’t tell them he belonged to her? Finally, he said, “What do you plan to do with us?”

“Your ship, her name.”

“USS Barrett,” he said. Then, hearing a shout from below, he stepped to the rail and waved down at Miguelito. The kid waved back, looking, Dan thought, scared now, as if he realized something was wrong. He turned back to the Soviets. “See that woman in the boat? She had that baby last night. She can’t climb a ladder. You need to lower a boat, put her in it, then hoist her aboard. That’s how I’d do it.”

As the lieutenant was translating this, a black man in fatigues pushed through the sailors. He had a pistol on his hip and a red star on his fatigue cap. And his Russian had a Hispanic sound. He and the commander had a short, rather angry talk. Fatigues looked over the side, sneered in disbelief at the skiff, then at Dan, who thought, I’ve got to learn some Russian, I really do.

“Can we get them aboard?” he asked the lieutenant. “They have no water and no food.”

When the Cuban heard this, he seemed about to burst. He spat something short and angry at Dan, then stepped to the lifelines. The holster unsnapped and he whipped the pistol out.

He was actually aiming down when Dan lunged. He didn’t have anything definite in mind, just to stop him from shooting, but somehow as they were wrestling there at the rail, the Russians so taken aback that for a moment they did not react, the gun squirted free, escaped both their hands, and spun away and down, making a modest-sized splash between the frigate’s hull and the skiff. As they watched it vanish, a small dark shape tumbling down into the blue, Dan gulped.

The Cuban swung around and punched him in the stomach, and he bent over, gagging. Then there was a lot of shouting and hands grabbed him. When he got his head up again, the sailors were holding him and the Cuban apart. Shit, he thought, I didn’t exactly make a foreign friend with that move. The Cuban looked ready to kill him. Maybe he’d just been bluffing, or showing off. But then, maybe not. Maybe he had orders to shoot deserters, or whatever the regime considered people who tried to escape.

While he was thinking all this, the commander shouted up to the bridge. A hand lifted in reply, and a moment later Dan heard the whine of the turbines spinning up. “No!” he yelled, lunging against the arms. He tried to drag them with him toward the lifeline, not really thinking what he was going to do, maybe jump overboard to Graciela and Miguelito and the baby. But five Russian sailors didn’t drag. Still struggling, he saw the sea begin to move past, the skiff drop aft and whirl bobbing in the pale green whirlpools of the wake, saw a thin dark arm lift, fingers splayed out in pleading, or farewell.

No one hit him again, but they kept their hands on him as they prodded him forward along the starboard side. Still breathless — the Cuban had gotten him right where it paralyzed you, just below the breastbone — he tried to keep observing, as much to counteract panic as anything else. His legs were shaking and he couldn’t see too well, yet at the same time he saw and heard everything very clearly indeed. He kept listening for shots but didn’t hear any.

He noticed the raised fantail structure first — all the way aft, rather awkwardly situated in the line of fire of the number two gun at depressed elevation. So a small boat would have a good chance of surviving a run in from directly astern. Markings for a helicopter pad on top of the structure, but its purpose was unclear — an enclosed mine-laying rail, possibly. Past the guns, he noted wide decks, nonskid in good condition. Sailors turned from painting to watch him being paraded by. They looked young. There didn’t seem to be many senior enlisted around.

Up a deck, his escort releasing his hands so he could climb. Now he got a close look at the SA-N-4 launcher. Soviet antiaircraft missile launchers were usually dropped into a well to protect them from weather and ice. Even the type drawings in Jane’s, studied during slow hours in CIC, showed them retracted. But this one was being worked on. No cover plates off, just plug-ins, so it wasn’t major repair. Probably just what he’d thought at first, an operability test. A mass of equipment midships … no, he wasn’t going to see that; one of the seamen was undogging a door.

Inside the skin of the ship, the impression changed rather abruptly from modern arsenal to something both oddly cozy and less technologically impressive. The air was warm and laden with the strong smells of Slavic food. The overheads were low and he noted more exposed cabling than U.S. practice tolerated. Partitions were riveted instead of welded. Everything seemed to be steel or wood, even where American designers used aluminum or composite to save weight. The wood surprised him. It wasn’t permitted aboard U.S. ships at all. The bulkheads looked like they could use a good scrub-down and fresh paint, but damage-control gear was complete and the hoses new and the fittings glistened with fresh grease. A general announcing system spoke hollowly, and he heard the men with him discussing it. They pointed him at a ladder, clattered after him, and continued down two more decks.

Deep within the ship now, in a narrow white-painted passageway. He caught quick glimpses through successive doors of a machine shop, what looked like a stores office, a fan room. Blue flash curtains stirred as the ship rolled. Then a door was unlocked with a jingle of keys and he was pushed in. When he tried the knob, it was locked.

He looked slowly around at a small windowless compartment that was all too obviously a brig. Most U.S. ships didn’t have them anymore. But modern Soviet frigates obviously did. It was as bare as any bread-and-water disciplinarian could wish. A narrow pipeframed bunk was chained up to a bulkhead, and there was a sink, but no mirror, no can, no towel. A single bulb burned under explosion-proof glass. He unlatched the bunk and let it down and sat on it, feeling suddenly weak and sick.

The door unlocked and he caught a glimpse of an armed sailor outside as a skinny, pimpled Mongolian-looking kid in a stained apron slid a steel tray onto the floor, giving Dan a curious glance as he backed out.

It held black bread, thick and still warm; six slices of salami, the chunks of fat thicker than the chunks of meat; and a heavy mug that when he gulped thirstily from turned out to be not water, as he’d assumed, but straight raw vodka. He coughed it out explosively and peered into the cup. Actually, he wanted it, but maybe he’d better keep his head straight till he found out where things were going. He set it aside and ate the bread and salami dry.

Then he waited.

While he sat on the bunk, a lot of things went through his mind. Would Graciela and Miguel and Armando Daniel make it without him? Unless someone picked them up today, he didn’t think so. He wasn’t in such a great situation himself. Would the Soviets torture him if they thought he had useful information? Unfortunately, he knew quite a few things that fell into that category — details about Navy sonar processing, the complete weapons load-out of Kidd-class destroyers, ranges and characteristics of sensors, the tactics carrier battle groups practiced against multiple Backfire attacks.

Yeah, he knew some things that might interest them. Making it worse was that no one knew the Russians had him. As far as the U.S. Navy was concerned, Daniel V. Lenson was currently missing, presumed lost at sea. The Soviets could keep him, take him back to the USSR. And no one would ever know.

Half an hour later, he heard voices outside. Dan stood up, clenching his fists, expecting the Cuban in fatigues, an angry confrontation. Instead, it was six sailors with cameras. He smiled rather foolishly as they glanced at the light above his head, set their apertures, clicked away. Then the guard started yelling, obviously telling them that was enough, get the hell out now they had their pictures. The door locked again.

When it opened an hour later, the guard was at attention, assault rifle gripped stiffly across his chest. The blond officer, the one who had translated on deck, looked curiously in, then said something to the guard and stepped inside, nodding to Dan. The door stayed open. He felt grateful for that. One thing was quickly becoming evident, that Soviet combatants didn’t have very good ventilation.

“I am sorry, the fight. Our Cuban comrade was angry to lose his pistol.”

“Uh, I can understand that.”

“He will have much papers, much explanation to make on return, why he lost it.”

Dan nodded. He felt like saying that if the bastard hadn’t threatened women and children, he wouldn’t have lost his gun, but that might lead to renewed disputes, and he didn’t want those. If at all possible.

“That is why the captain has forbidden him to see you; he is angry. You understand?” He picked up the mug, glanced at Dan. “You don’t like vodka?”

“I’d rather have water.”

“Voda. Skaray,” the lieutenant yelled out to the guard, who looked startled and vanished. To Dan, he said, offering his hand, “I am Captain-Lieutenant Gaponenko. First name, Grigory. Your first name?”

“Daniel.”

“Very good, your family name and rank please?”

“Lenson, Daniel Lenson, Lieutenant, U.S. Navy.”

“Your serial number and unit, please.”

Dan told him and Gaponenko noted it down in a black wheel book, writing out the roman letters rather laboriously. “Now. Again, what you were doing in boat with worms.”

“With what?”

“Our Cuban comrade, that is what he calls those who desert their motherland. Why were you in boat with them?”

“I told you. We were rendering assistance in the storm. By accident, I was separated from my ship’s whaleboat and left with the boat you saw.”

“Your ship does not search for you?”

“I’m sure they are, but you found me first.”

“So you are adrift, you say. You have papers proving you are U.S. officer?”

Dan recalled his wallet, still buttoned securely into his shirt pocket. Odd that they hadn’t searched him. He took it out and opened it carefully. From a mashed wad of cards and receipts, he extracted his green ID. Laminated, it had held up to the water pretty well. Gaponenko examined it curiously, then turned it over and looked at the back. His lips moved as he read.

“So, what do you plan to do with me?”

“With you?” The Russian shrugged. He held up the card. “I take, make copy. All right?”

Dan had been steeling himself for an interrogation on Barrett’s combat systems, speed, and capabilities. He’d already decided that he was going to present himself as the supply officer. After going through the audit, he figured he could fake being Norm Cash. But Gaponenko hadn’t asked him what his job was aboard ship or whether Barrett carried nuclear weapons. He just wanted to copy his ID card. “I guess that’s all right,” Dan said cautiously.

“This Barrett, she is where?”

“You mean her station?” He reflected on this and again couldn’t see any good reason not to answer. “On the north side of the Old Bahama Channel. Due north of Cayo Caiman Grande.”

“That is far distance east of here.”

“The storm must have taken us west, that and the current.”

“How long you adrift?”

“Me? Overnight. Maybe … fifteen hours.” Jesus, now that he thought back on it, it seemed like a hell of a lot longer. Then, with a stab of anxiety, he remembered they were still out there, no food, no water at all now …. “The others in the boat, the ‘worms’ you call them, you didn’t help them at all.”

Gaponenko scowled at the bunk. “We did not help them, or hurt them.”

“But international law requires you to assist people in distress at sea.”

“We assisted you,” Grigory pointed out, slightly nastily, Dan thought. “Although I do not hear you even say thank you. Why should we help those who abandoned their country? Let them do for themselves; that is the way they wanted it.” He stood up as the guard reappeared. “Here, this is gasified water.”

Dan said, “Thanks. And, uh … thanks for picking me up.”

“Anything you want else?”

“No, I guess not … except, when do the political people arrive?”

“Who?”

“The secret police. The commissar. Isn’t there one aboard every ship? Is he going to interrogate me?”

“Oh, commissar. Yes, I am the politruk. You want to be getting more interrogation, that is what you say?”

“You?”

“Yes, you want me to interrogate you more so? I can do, you want.” Then he saw Gaponenko was joking, and he smiled and shook his head. “All right,” the Russian said, beckoning to the guard. “Now, no one is going to harm you, but we don’t expect you, you see? The captain has to inquire instructions, you understand? Otherwise, there may be trouble. Cannot let you out. I saw you looking at things. You would allow Soviet officer to look around your ship, the Barrett? If I come aboard someday?”

He was starting to understand Russian humor. “No, probably not.”

“How is the Barrett? She is good ship, happy ship?”

“Oh, relatively,” said Dan, thinking, I sure as hell would like to be back aboard her, happy or not.

“We have dinner later. You sleep now.”

“Just a minute,” Dan said. Gaponenko halted but glanced at his watch. “This ship, it’s a Krivak, right?”

“That is the NATO designation. Not what we call it, of course.”

“Of course. It’s very attractive, well maintained. Uh, what is its name? I told you the name of my ship—”

“Oh, that is what you want?” He shrugged. “It is written on the … on the … it is written on the back part of the ship; it’s no secret. This is the Razytelny you are aboard. All right? How hot it is here …. I leave this door open, but don’t go out. Don’t talk to the guard. Now, you sleep.”

He slept, eventually, but his dreams were crazy mishmashes of Nan being attacked by tigers, himself defending her with his bare hands. Of being back in the boat — a knocking against the bottom, then the black fin breaking through …. He woke in rigid terror, to find the overhead light still burning but turned down from outside to a dull red heat, like a waterlogged flashlight. He stared at it for a long time, sweating, till finally, without foreknowledge or even expectation, he fell again into the black.

“Prehadetye! Edeetee skaroy!”

Before he was really awake, his reflexes shot him out of the bunk and dropped him to the deck. One of his legs cramped and he almost fell as it buckled under him, but he caught himself on the bunk frame and hobbled out into the passageway as the sailor with the gun gestured angrily. What was going on? Now, the midnight interrogation? Still groggy, he let them half-lead, half-push him down the passageway to the ladder well.

Outside, he blinked and lifted his arm to shield his eyes from the morning. He couldn’t believe he’d slept the night through. The flood of brilliance actually hurt them, like tacks pressed into his corneas. The overarching sky was intense blue, and Razytelny was cutting through it at a brisk pitching pace, blowers whining and flags snapping in the breeze. Steaming into the wind. Then, as the guard led him aft and down toward the stern, he saw why.

“Z’dayss. Na prava!”

The flutter-clatter of rotors grew louder as the helicopter made another pass only a couple of hundred feet above their heads. A flag broke on the mast, and the aircraft banked sharply left. He shaded his eyes, thinking perhaps it was an SH-2 or a Huey, but then his heart faltered as it came out of the sun and he saw that it wasn’t an American helicopter at all. But as it closed, he saw the Dutch roundel, blue and white and red, and his heart started beating again.

Gaponenko was standing by the after mount, hat under his arm, watching the helo steady up. He caught Dan’s eye and nodded curtly. He didn’t seem nearly as friendly with others watching, Dan noticed.

The copter settled in a clattering roar that backed the watching sailors and officers away. Gaponenko gestured angrily at him, and Dan set his face, too, catching on to his role, and ran, bending into the rotor wash, and hauled himself up into the helicopter. He’d expected fair Dutch faces, but the passenger compartment was solid Cubans. More refugees, he suddenly understood. But his weren’t among them. Then the blades sliced the air and the horizon tilted and Razytelny and the knot of stolidly watching Russians slowly slid off and away into the rolling, tossing sea.

“Barrett,” he yelled to a crewman, who nodded and spoke into his chin mike. They stayed low, and the seas flashed by. He wedged himself next to a window and looked down, anxiously searching for a half-awash skiff. But nothing showed on the furrowed sea except one lonely inner tube, adrift all by itself. Twenty minutes later, the helo landed on a ship that Dan guessed to be Van Almonde, the Dutch frigate. They hot-refueled, with everyone aboard and the engines still turning, took off again, and shortly thereafter the familiar silhouette of USS Barrett poked over the curved sea. As she wheeled, growing quickly larger, he saw a crowd of people moving off the helicopter deck, another throng in varicolored clothing covering the stern.

After he’d explained everything to Leighty and Vysotsky in the captain’s cabin, he stood momentarily irresolute in the passageway. The air-conditioned, filtered air felt great; the faint smells of paint and ozone smelled like home. Even the slow roll of the deck under his damp boots was familiar and reassuring.

He’d stepped out of the helo, to see the open hangar filled with watching faces. And Vysotsky, there to meet him, had explained. Barrett was packed with refugees to the extent that right now they outnumbered the crew. These were the people he’d seen crowding the deck and fantail as the Dutch Lynx came in to land—471 old people, men, women, children, babies, plucked from dozens of foundering craft or the water itself and flown or boated to Barrett from the other ships involved in the relief effort.

And more were coming. In his cabin, the captain told him that Commander, Seventh Coast Guard District, had ordered all ships to transfer their rescuees to Barrett, except for those needing immediate medical care; the latter would be flown directly to Miami from the small airport at Key West. Barrett would detach tomorrow morning and head up the Straits to Miami, where Customs and Immigration was making arrangements to concentrate and process the refugees. Straight shot from Area B to Port of Miami was 190 nautical miles, an awkward distance, so Leighty had decided to proceed relatively slowly, stay out overnight, and go to sea detail around 0700 day after tomorrow. Their orders called for refueling at the terminal and a night of liberty for the crew, then they’d probably come back on-line, since the human flood showed no signs of abating.

The scuttlebutt hummed beside him, the compressor starting up, and he bent to it, sucking icy water till the back of his throat ached so badly he had to stop. He was thinking now of the strained and oddly formal interview that had just concluded. The captain seemed embarrassed as he explained how he’d searched through the night, finally finding and recovering the whaleboat but losing the skiff in the darkness and the storm. Dan said he understood; visibility had been nil. Both officers frowned as he told them about Graciela’s delivery and nodded as he’d explained what he’d had to do.

Things chilled, though, when he told them who had picked him up. But after an exchange of glances, Vysotsky had seemed interested in his impressions of the Krivak, and Leighty had directed him to draft a message summarizing his evaluation of Razytelny’s combat and damage-control readiness, his descriptions of the interior, his sense of the relationship among officers and crew, and the attitude of the Soviets toward an American.

He straightened from the bubbler, conscious now that his thirst was slaked that he was hungry, too. But most of all he wanted a shower, a shave, and dry clothes. What he had on chafed painfully, and the salt crystals didn’t make things more comfortable. A water depletion be damned, long, hot freshwater shower, clean khakis …

Instead, he went down and aft, through the interior passageway, and came out inside the helo hangar. It was a mob scene. He picked his way through spread-out blankets, crying children, the sad bundles and wet crumbling suitcases that represented everything someone had managed to salvage of a life. A dolorous Latin refrain throbbed on a guitar. Then Dan saw him, sitting alone. He stood in front of him for a moment before the old man looked up.

“Gustavo?”

The old man stared blankly at him before Dan realized he didn’t recognize him. He said, “I’m the one who was in the boat with Graciela and Miguelito.”

“¿Qué? ¿Graciela, Miguelito?”

Okay, he had his attention now, but he didn’t speak any Spanish. Dan glanced around, and a young woman got up from her blanket. “You want to speak to him? Tell me what you want to say. But slowly, please.”

“Thanks. Please tell him … tell him I was left in the boat, after he was picked up.”

She translated and the old man immediately stood, pouring out a torrent of questions. “Are they alive? Where are they? Did they come back to the ship with you?”

He explained lamely, conscious of the old eyes gradually turning disappointed, of the others who had gathered to listen. When he got to the part where he’d been forced to leave them, the old man looked at the deck and sighed.

“He thanks you for the news, and for helping with the birth. He knew the baby’s father, he says. He will continue to pray for them all. Perhaps God will still bring them safely to land. You will pray with him? he asks.”

Dan nodded, bowing his head. And the people around them quieted, too, some crossing themselves as the old man looked up into the dim overhead of the hangar, speaking to his God.