9

Villa Clara Province, Cuba

The house overlooked the ocean and the group of islands known as the Archipelago de Sabana. It was a large white stucco affair constructed around a central courtyard; moonlit water splashed out of a fountain and cascaded over a statue in the shape of a naked girl. The statue was a fine example of social realism, but the Lider Maximo, who stood on a balcony overlooking the fountain, wasn’t exactly famous for his appreciation of anything artistic, though he always talked otherwise, since nobody ever questioned his judgments. He surrounded himself at times with swarms of words – like a beekeeper of language – phrases heaped on phrases, intricate and often colourful, yet frequently convoluted and downright enigmatic.

He fought with the urge to smoke one of the cigars he’d given up a while ago. He looked up at the sky. It was a gorgeous Cuban midnight with thin, high clouds and the sound of the tide, a night of coolness and clarity. But the Lider Maximo wasn’t in any mood to appreciate such things.

Noises rose from the party in the room below. A piano played. Somebody told a joke to polite laughter. Across the courtyard, beneath arched doorways, armed guards stood in shadows. There were always guards wherever the Lider Maximo went. He even had people who tasted his food before he consumed it.

He turned away from the sight of the statue and walked inside the house, intolerant of this social gathering tonight; the chit-chat, the men who wanted to shake his hand, the requests whispered in his ear, a favour here, a favour there, everything was a bore. He listened a moment to the piano. He had no ear for music – especially now, when he was this impatient.

Where was the Minister of Finance? What was keeping him?

The Lider Maximo went down the stairs. The piano was silent. In the large drawing-room all heads turned as he entered. His unsmiling condition had been noticed earlier and the party had adjusted itself. What might have been loud was muted and discreet. Everybody tried to please the Lider Maximo. They stepped around him as if he lived at the centre of a large pampa of unbroken eggs. Everybody breathed softly in his presence and smiled just a little too eagerly. Women, some of whom underwent a suppressed hysteria in the man’s company, were shrill in their pleasantries. But he was more than a man; he was as much an icon in Cuba as the old plaster Christs and Madonnas one still found concealed all the way from the Golfo de Guanahacabibes in the west to Punta Caleta in the east.

Communist Party officials and military leaders and attractive women filled the room. Some spilled out on to a patio where the remains of a roast pig turned on a spit and charcoals glowed and wine bottles stood in disarray on small tables. The Lider Maximo, stroking his beard, stared through the open door and across the patio.

The car would come from that direction.

He tried to be charming to a handsome silver-haired woman, a Danish journalist, who wanted to know something about political prisoners – but he was surrounded by his attendants and assistants and the usual Colombian novelist with three names who was something of a house pet. The entourage that swirled about him also included a group of Communist functionaries, some of whom had come from Italy and Spain and India, sightseers of Caribbean Communism: fidelismo.

He was too tense for this congregation. He stomped outside and waved his followers away. He wanted a moment’s solitude, which wasn’t such a selfish desire in a life that had not been his own since 1959. For thirty years he’d been public property, as much nationalised as the sugar industry, or the tobacco companies, or the banks. He was very tired and growing old; he knew that the young people of Cuba referred to him as El Viejo, the old one. Where was the stamina of yesterday? where the legendary strength?

In his starched garberdine fatigues he strutted across the patio. He tore a chunk of flesh from the hot pig and thrust it into his mouth. It had the taste of a highly spiced automobile tyre. He spat it out. The piano began to play again, and there was a round of quiet laughter, more of relief than genuine pleasure. He created a black hole wherever he went tonight; his absence from the main room allowed the guests to relax. He sat slumped in a chair and looked absently at a plate of scorched pig skin, left-overs. In an ill-temper he pushed the plate aside and it clattered to the tiles, where it broke, scattering the discarded food. Nobody turned to look. When El Jefe (as he was also called) broke anything, whether a plate or a law, no voices were raised in criticism.

There wasn’t enough food on the island. Every day shortages grew worse. Every day brought some new complaint. Once the criticism had centred around ideology: people asked him questions about the urgency behind universal literacy when reading material was restricted, or why Cuba had aligned itself with the Soviet bloc. Nowadays, ideology wasn’t uppermost in the minds of Cubans; they wanted better food, better consumer goods. They heard US radio broadcasts and saw smuggled movies, videotapes, outlawed magazines, and they felt deprived. Ninety miles away in the USA people had everything. In Cuba stores had empty shelves and useless goods and clothing designed in such centres of haute couture as Varna, Bulgaria, or Brasov, Rumania.

For the first time in many years, the Lider Maximo was afraid.

He’d known fear before. In the Sierra Maestra in the late 1950s when he’d fought the armies of Batista with only a few men. In 1953, when he’d led an unsuccessful assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago. Yes, he’d known el temor, but he’d never been cowardly. What had they always said about him in Cuba? Fidel, he has the largest timbales on the whole goddam island! But this was very different, another stratum of fear; it was as if he could hear the ship of this eight-hundred-mile-long island grind to a halt, the engine broken beyond repair, the fuel tanks empty.

Sometimes, too, the fear yielded to an odd panic. He became easily confused, and amnesiac, and caught himself in the midst of a sentence whose end he’d quite forgotten, or in the middle of an action whose purpose was a puzzle. Now and again he felt slight pains in his stomach, too inconsequential to have his physicians treat. On one occasion, a coldness had seized his heart like a gauntlet of frost, a disquieting sensation that had lasted perhaps for ten seconds. It was age, he thought. Eyesight and teeth went, so did the interior plumbing and the central pump. A man was no more than an intricate machine; and all the blueprints to explain his parts and repair them were incomplete because medicine was still a primitive quasi-science.

Perhaps fear was something else age brought in its merciless wake.

He tilted his head to one side, listening to the croaking of frogs in the distance, so many it was practically a roar. He gazed across the patio, seeing how his armed guards had taken up new positions in the shadows. Inside the house the piano was playing something composed by Silvio Rodriguez, considered a “safe” musician by the regime. The Lider Maximo knew that if he hadn’t been present the pianist would have performed Cole Porter or Irving Berlin or some other Yanqui music. The Lider Maximo was deferred to, even revered. But he knew people carped behind his back and ran him down and accused him of bankrupting Cuba.

There was the sound of a car. He stood up, tugged at his beard. He saw headlights approach. At a point in the road where the concrete twisted toward the ocean, the car lights illuminated white surf. Then the motor died, and a door slammed. The Lider Maximo moved quickly across the patio to embrace the new arrival and whisk him away to a quiet upper room where they might talk, free from the noise of the party.

The room was small, containing only a desk and two chairs and piles of unsorted books. A green-shaded lamp provided the only light. The Lider Maximo said, “You’re very late.”

“There were flight delays,” the visitor replied.

The Lider Maximo waved a hand impatiently. “Speak to me. Tell me the outcome.”

The visitor said, “It’s just as we feared. The well’s running dry.”

The Lider Maximo tossed his head back and looked up at the ceiling where a large motionless fan threw a cross-like shadow; it was possible to see, through the hairs of his beard, the thick double chin. “They want me out, am I right? They want me to step aside.”

“No, Commandante. They expressed no such desire.”

The Lider Maximo scoffed. “They wouldn’t tell you to your face. The Russians don’t operate that way. They smile at you, toast you, and after ten vodkas they hug you. Best of friends. Comrades! Only later do you realise you’ve been lied to and cheated. Make no mistake, compañero, they want me out. I’m too disobedient. Too unruly. They can’t always control me the way they would like. If they had a weak man in my position, they might open their purses more generously to Cuba.”

The visitor said, “I don’t think it has anything to do with you, Commandante. They say they’ll no longer invest money in Cuba at the levels we’ve come to expect. The new Politburo has more on its collective mind than Cuba. They’ll continue to buy sugar –”

“Oh, this makes my heart glad.” The Lider Maximo’s sarcasm was too grim to be amusing. Besides, his sense of humour was always slightly skewed and too heavy-handed to cause much mirth. The charm for which he’d been famous earlier in life had deserted him to a large extent. The world had eroded it.

“– at the present prices. But there will be severe cutbacks in technological help. As many as three hundred advisors will be withdrawn. Joint construction projects already under way, such as the nuclear generating plant at Jurugua, will be halted. No new ones will be started. We can no longer expect – and I quote – favoured treatment.”

The Lider Maximo was angry. “Favoured treatment!” He spluttered. “We’ve always had a special arrangement with them!”

“The Soviets are economising worldwide, Commandante. It’s really that simple. They face economic chaos at home. Their whole economy is rotten and cumbersome. The cost of Afghanistan was too high. Now they’re turning inward. They’re no longer enthusiastic about the spread of Communism in Central America. We’re seeing a new era. The Soviet priority is to look after themselves. Their own people are complaining bitterly about the quality of life in Russia.”

“And the rusos throw their old allies to the dogs?”

“There will be a bone or two. But that’s all. We can’t look forward to a continuation of generous past policies.”

“Cochinos! Perhaps I should make the trip to Moscow myself.”

“It may make no difference.”

The Lider Maximo was too proud to go cap in hand before the Russians. The begging-bowl held out for scraps! Never! Besides, he had no fondness for the General Secretary, whom he considered a capitalist. He had entertained the man during the Secretary’s visit to Havana last spring. Serious talks had taken place on the subject of solving Cuba’s indebtedness to the Soviet Union, and there had been a great deal of smiling camaraderie for the benefit of the world’s press. But now, when the Lider Maximo needed some extra credits, when he needed cash, when he saw his Revolution founder in an ocean of debt and despair, the Soviets had abandoned him.

Nothing was said for a long time. Faintly, the piano could be heard from the lower part of the house. Outside, the breeze picked up, driving the tide a little harder on to the beach. From the courtyard came the sound of a guard sliding a clip inside his automatic rifle. They were always prepared, always checking their weapons. The Lider Maximo put on a pair of glasses and walked to his desk, where he scanned a batch of papers.

“Do you know what these are, compañero? Projections prepared by our finest economists. Graphs and numbers and scientific notations. They were prepared by people in your own Ministry. They forecast continued shortages in basic items. Beef. Fish. Milk. Shoes. Medical supplies. These might be alleviated by an infusion of hard currency. But where is it to come from? Without hard currency, how do we import goods? The shortages will get worse. And our soldiers returning from Angola – how are they to be absorbed into a work force that has no work for them?”

He crunched the sheets in his hands and tossed them up in the air, swatting at them like shuttlecocks as they floated back down. He picked up those that had fallen, balled them even more tightly in his fists and threw them from the window, where they were carried briefly by the breeze. Papeleo, he kept saying with contempt. Papeleo – red tape. Those sheets he didn’t pick up he crumpled underfoot, wiping them back and forth on the floorboards as if they were dogshit that adhered to his soles. Then, his energy spent on this extraordinary display, he sat down at his desk.

“They are out to get me,” he said. “Not just the Russians, compañero. But there are forces in Cuba that would like to see me dead. Outside Cuba, the CIA is still sniffing after my blood. I constantly hear tales of counter-revolutionary armies forming here and there in Central America. And the exile community in Miami – there are a great many who would murder me and feel joy.”

He was quiet. He was remembering the old days when La Revolutión had been his youthful mistress, the love of his heart, when she’d been bright and optimistic and constant. Now she was turning, as many loves do, into a nagging crone whose demands grew more preposterous daily. She’d become brittle, and her breasts sagged, and she was gaunt. She had all the light-hearted humour of a Greek chorus. And yet once, in the delight of her early years, those breasts had been full, and her belly smooth and tight. She had been a glory to behold. Lost inside La Revolutión, he had squandered the very best of his seed.

The Lider Maximo said, “I have few trusted friends. My brother, perhaps. But he’s in Africa. My inner circle – but they’re too ambitious for me to trust them wholeheartedly. My bodyguards, of course. But even guards have been known to turn. And you. My Minister of Finance. Can I trust you, Rosabal?”

There were rare moments when Rafael Rosabal glimpsed the ghost of a younger Fidel, not this curmudgeon who grew resentfully old but another Castro of flinty determination and irresistible charm. He’d once possessed magnetism enough to persuade men to embark on the frail overcrowded craft called the Granma and sail twelve hundred miles on a harsh sea from Mexico to Cuba, the gift of convincing them they could survive not only the voyage but the killing heat and cold and malarial mosquitoes in the inhospitable mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Triumph – you could still see that glint in Fidel’s eyes when they weren’t otherwise darkened by injuries and betrayals, many of them imagined.

Rosabal said, “I am on your side, Commandante. As always.”

The Lider Maximo looked thoughtful. “You see, the problem is simple, but not easy to correct. When we won the armed struggle against Batista, we faced a situation that was beyond our experience. What did soldiers know of the economy? Of government? They could fire rifles, but they couldn’t administer the sugar industry, or the tobacco crop, or the mines. So mistakes were made. Bad mistakes. The wrong crops were planted –”

Rosabal thought: You were personally responsible for those, Commandante. You were the laughing stock of Cuba for your bizarre horticultural ideas.

“ – and essential machinery rotted on the docks in Havana because we didn’t have the necessary moving equipment. And perhaps our agricultural reforms took the initiative away from small farmers. We brought capitalism to its knees, Rosabal. But what did we put in its place?”

Rosabal was very quiet. A quiet pulse beat at the side of his head. He knew this pulse, which was often the harbinger of a rage he couldn’t always control, a dark sensation Castro often inspired in him. He maintained his poise with enormous difficulty, closing his eyes a moment, concentrating very hard on the black spaces inside his head. He made no answer to the Commandante’s question, which had been rhetorical in any case.

The Lider Maximo said, “People live longer nowadays, and they are better educated, and they have brighter opportunities, but none of this is enough for them. Why?”

Rosabal felt the breeze come through the flyscreen and stir his hair. His bad moment passed; that sense of slippage was gone. He had control of himself again. His voice was relaxed. He said, “I wouldn’t presume to know the answer, Commandante.” He thought: Because life is drab, and people feel hopeless. And now not even the Russians will support you. You have driven Cuba into disaster and bankruptcy, you stupid old fucking clown in your idiotic gaberdine fatigues.

Castro said, “The problem isn’t in the system, Rosabal. Of course there are some inefficiencies. But the real problem is that the people are self-centred! They put themselves before the Revolution. If there is a failure, Rosabal, it’s because we haven’t educated the people as well as we might. We haven’t educated selfishness out of them. They still don’t understand that the Revolution requires extraordinary patience and endurance and self-denial. We’ve asked them for an enormous effort in the past, but we haven’t asked for enough. Now we must demand even greater sacrifices.”

“Greater sacrifices?” Rosabal asked. How typical Of the Commandante to turn blame away from himself and apportion it to the people! If only the people had been educated to understand the shortages on the island, there wouldn’t be any complaints! How laughable! The populace hadn’t understood the Revolution, and in the Lider Maximo’s mind that was the real failure!

Castro’s lips contorted slightly. There was a swift arc of pain in his intestines; he wondered if he might have ulcers. He waited until the feeling passed before he said, “In Cuba today, for example, we export all the lobster we catch, and most of the shrimp. As a consequence, the Cuban people don’t have these bourgeois delicacies in their diet. The reverse side of the coin is that children no longer have rickets and malaria is practically dead. And if the Russians are no longer going to assist our Revolution, then we must tighten our own belts one more notch, Rosabal. We must ask for more working hours and cuts in pay. We must have more volunteers in the construction industry and in the cane fields. We must export more beef cattle.”

Rosabal was filled with contempt for the Lider Maximo. He was thinking of the small room in the Palace of Congresses in Moscow where Anatoly Tal, the Minister of Finance, had talked to him at great length about how much money the Soviet Union had poured into Cuba – and he’d emphasised the word “poured” as if he were talking about some precious liquid tossed down the sink. In currency and technical support during the last thirty years, the exact amount was incalculable, but Tal reckoned it in the region of two hundred and fifty billion US dollars. And what had the Soviet Union gained? Hard questions were being asked inside the Politburo. There were members prepared to cut Cuba completely adrift.

Rosabal mentioned none of this to the Lider Maximo. It would prompt a ranting speech that might last for hour after hour, filled with bitter expletives and self-pity, bravado and chest-thumping. One of Castro’s speeches, characterised by non-sequiturs and nostalgic drifts, could imprison a listener for four or five hours, and Rosabal had no desire to be locked into such a monologue. Sometimes these speeches took dangerous turns, and the threats increased with the bitterness, and Castro spoke about bringing destruction to his principal enemy, the United States. You could see it then in his eyes, a certain fiery quality, something that shone with the light of old dangers that hadn’t quite died away. There are still teeth in your head, El Viejo, Rosabal thought. There is still danger in you. But for the sake of Cuba, you must be forcibly removed.

Rosabal glanced at his watch; in one hour and twenty minutes from now, the first act would begin in the depths of the English countryside.

“We will initiate a new propaganda campaign,” Castro said. “Tomorrow, we will announce to the Cuban people that the Russians – who are now friendly with the Yanquis – have deserted their Cuban comrades. There will be a period of patriotic self-denial. Posters. Newspaper articles. I’ll make a speech on television. I’ll talk on radio. I’ll go into the streets and squares.”

Rosabal heard the familiar voice, but tuned out the words. He walked to the window, concentrated on the sound of the piano playing thinly from below. The tune, perhaps inevitably, was “Guantanamera”. He gazed across the courtyard, seeing small huddles of guests.

Here and there he recognised sympathisers – an old soldier who had been with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra but had lost all faith, a female journalist whose critical reports on Communism circulated anonymously, an official from the Ministry of the Interior who despised the police state he had helped create.

Rosabal turned back to Fidel, who was still talking. Did the Lider Maximo use language as a means of exorcising his doubts, of chasing despair away? Did he drown truth with the empty rattle of words? Or was it the poison systematically introduced into his system by his personal physician during the last three months that made him babble so freely and with such confusion? Not enough poison to kill, only to confuse and debilitate the bastard. Rosabal didn’t want him to die that way. He wanted to look him straight in the eyes at the point of his death.

When that time came, Rosabal would kill him personally.

And then the island would be his, wrested from this pathetic dictator whose time had come and gone, whose policies had not only failed but had torn the heart out of sad, dying Cuba; a corpse barely afloat in pale blue water.

Norfolk

The Range Rover travelled slowly down a narrow lane. On either side meadows stretched toward trees. An unpromising morning sun, now white and watery, hung low on the landscape, destined to vanish behind cloud mass again. A church tower eclipsed the sun a moment and headstones in a cemetery, damp still from the recent rain, gleamed gently. It was lovely and serene, a world of quiet, peaceful corners and birds that called softly. Even the sound of the Range Rover was absorbed by the landscape.

Flavell drove. He did so with great care. No traffic lay behind, none came in the opposite direction. The world might have been empty. Ruhr sat in the front; the two Americans and Zapino in the back. The girl, bound and gagged, was cramped on the floor. She lay very still. She’d seen the body of the policeman – barely covered with dead leaves – and the sight had horrified her. If she’d worried about her own death before it had been at one remove, like a very bad dream. But it was different now because there was no awakening. This was the reality. She kept whispering Jesus to herself, over and over.

Ruhr watched the road. He had no need of the map, which lay folded in the glove compartment. He knew where the turns were, the intersections that lay ahead. He checked his watch. It was eight a.m. A signpost announcing the village of Hornside (population 134) approached. A narrow main street, a pub, a grocery, an antique shop, a church and then Hornside, in all its bucolic charm, was gone like an old postcard.

The Range Rover kept moving. Ruhr looked at his watch again. Ten past eight. The narrow lane turned this way and that. A windmill loomed up, its big blades motionless. And then the road forked. Ruhr directed Flavell to drive between trees where the vehicle would be concealed from the sight of anyone passing. Flavell cut the engine and there was silence.

Eight-thirteen.

Ruhr ordered the men to make their weapons ready. Rick, in charge of the tear gas, stepped out and began to remove canisters, which he set carefully in the damp grass. The Argentinians checked the clips in their automatic rifles. Trevaskis fingered his St Christopher for luck, then checked his own rifle. Steffie Brough shut her eyes tightly. She didn’t want to look. Not at the men, not at the guns; she wanted to be blind, freed from everything that encroached on her. Jesus Christ, please help me. I haven’t done anything wrong, not really wrong. I don’t deserve this. Get me out of this and I’m yours for life.

Ruhr looked once again at the time. Eight-seventeen.

The landscape was still quiet. But it seemed sullenly menacing now, as if something long dormant were about to emerge from a crack in the earth. Ruhr stared through the trees at the road. He raised his rocket-launcher to his shoulder. He turned his face up to the sky, from which the sun had disappeared. He listened. He could hear it faintly in the distance. The timing was exactly right. Beautiful.

And now there was another noise, a low rumble of gears that sent vibrations through the still air. It was the sound made by an engine whose enormous power was restrained.

“You all know what has to be done,” Ruhr said. If they didn’t, it was too late to learn. The time for rehearsals was long past.

Ruhr peered through the green enclosures of the trees. He saw a large truck covered by a dark-green canopy. More than thirty feet long and cumbersome, it travelled at fifteen miles an hour. Directly in front were three jeeps, and on either side of the truck, two motorcycles. In the rear a smaller truck carried a dozen armed soldiers. The larger vehicle’s gears groaned, the ground underfoot trembled. Ruhr looked up at the sky once more.

There, like a flying spider, was the black helicopter, the Cobra. Unmarked, windows tinted, it came in at a low angle, barely skimming treetops and sending birds up out of branches. The sky screamed, the day gone suddenly wild; but it was merely a preamble.

Now, Ruhr thought. He pulled his mask over his face.

The first canisters, thrown by Rick, exploded in front of the jeeps. Swirling gas created an unbreathable atmosphere. Ruhr aimed his rocket-launcher and fired at the jeeps even as the occupants, prepared for the contingency of tear gas though surprised by it nevertheless, fumbled for their masks. Trevaskis let his M-60 blaze at the same time. One of the jeeps overturned and slithered into a ditch, where it caught fire.

The blades of the Cobra fanned smoke and petrol fumes. Fire from the guns mounted on the chopper was directed viciously at the motorcycle escort. Fuel tanks on the bikes exploded while the chopper began to fire at the smaller lorry in the rear, where armed soldiers were scattering into the trees and firing their automatic rifles up into the sky.

Ruhr released another rocket, which blew a second jeep apart. Flame, higher than the trees around it, created a vast blue and orange column brighter than any sun. Zapino and Flavell, both masked, ran through the trees toward the long truck. Its drivers were climbing out of the cab and shooting in the general direction of the chopper. The Cobra, hunting the soldiers, eluded the shots and sprayed the woods with quick fire. It was important to wipe out the scattered squadron before radio communication could summon reinforcements. They would arrive sooner or later, of course. Ruhr preferred later. Much later.

He surveyed the action with quiet satisfaction. He saw Flavell and Zapino reach the long truck. He fired his rocket launcher again, setting more trees on fire. And suddenly, emerging from the thick orange smoke, was a green military helicopter, probably part of the original escort, scanning the terrain for just such a contingency as this.

Ruhr watched the Cobra, a huge mysterious raven, churn upwards, drawing the military helicopter clear of the smoke. The Cobra fired its rocket-launchers first and the camouflaged chopper tilted sideways, then downwards, going into an evasive slump. The Cobra persisted like a rabid bat, pursuing the other aircraft with a tenacity Ruhr admired. The air struggle was brief. The military craft exploded and the Cobra wheeled away from the great reaches of flame.

But not quickly enough. Flame and debris blown out of the falling chopper caught the fuselage of the Cobra, which disintegrated with spectacular fury and dropped into a nearby meadow where it burned.

Ruhr, who never allowed himself to be upset by the changing fortunes of war, hurried from the cover of the trees, spraying the area before him with his M-16. He was alive now, attuned to battle, moving, not thinking, running on instinct. Zapino had already gained entry to the cab of the long truck. Flavell, dead, lay directly under the large front wheels. Everything burned – jeeps, motorcycles, trucks, the wreckage of the choppers, trees, an abandoned barn nearby. It was a landscape imagined by a pyromaniac. Everything burned except the one thing that mattered: the large truck with the green canopy.

Ruhr climbed up behind the wheel. He engaged the gears and drove over the body of Flavell and through the wreckage of jeeps and the corpses of soldiers. Gunfire still came from those soldiers concealed in the woods, sporadic, almost indifferent. It was answered by Trevaskis and Rick as they rushed toward the parked Range Rover. Rick was struck in the neck and he fell face down.

In the truck, Ruhr stepped on the accelerator. The Range Rover, with Trevaskis at the wheel, came out of the woodland and followed. Thin gunfire still rattled behind them, growing fainter. Ruhr stamped the pedal to the floor. He couldn’t get the truck beyond forty, forty-five miles an hour because of the weight of the cargo as he drove the narrow, empty lanes that led to the airfield. There was an astonishing density to the trees here. They created a mystery out of the quiet meadows and lonely farmhouses that lay beyond them.

Ruhr looked in the side mirror. The Range Rover was immediately behind. The airfield was one mile away. Ruhr tried to get the truck to go faster. At fifty, it vibrated with asthmatic severity. It began to shudder and skip and threaten to die as the airfield came in view.

At the edge of the tarmac sat the massive transport plane, the C-130, engines already running. Ruhr drove the big truck to the back of the plane where a ramp, hydraulically operated, angled out of a doorway in the C-130’s underbelly. The Range Rover came to a stop alongside the truck and Trevaskis jumped out.

“Let’s get this fucker loaded toot sweet!” Trevaskis shouted.

But Ruhr had something else to do first; he reached inside the Range Rover and lifted out the girl.

“Christ,” Trevaskis said, baffled and angry. Rick was dead and so was Flavell and if somebody had managed to summon reinforcements this whole place would be crawling with soldiers and Ruhr still found time to take this girl along. The sick fuck.

Ruhr carried Steffie Brough to the ramp. Her blouse half undone, small white breasts sadly visible, mud-flecked skirt swept to one side. Her eyes were open, bloodshot from the tear gas. If they expressed anything, Ruhr couldn’t read it. Her lips, dry and cracked, appeared to have lost colour. Ruhr took her school scarf from around her neck, draped it carefully over the back seat, then raised her small body up, passing her to the hands of the men inside the transport plane, who took this unexpected merchandise without question.

Trevaskis, puzzled by the business with the scarf, guided Zapino as he backed the truck up toward the ramp so that the cruise missile and the separate rectangular compartment, some eight feet by seven, that contained the control system, could be loaded into the plane.

It was a precious prize, the stolen property of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.