vegetation, in so far and so tight no one could believe a man, much less two, could penetrate that deep. Speshnev's clothes were dark enough and, with his body, he covered the creamy lightness of the boy's thin shirt. Hours seemed to pass. He would not allow the boy any movement at all, and he himself had acquired a stillness that was unto death. Many men can't be still for very long. The blood courses, the muscles tighten, and, moreover, any impingement on the flesh increases thunderously in its sensation. Many cannot endure such a willful torture.
Speshnev could and he didn't care if the boy could or couldn't, the little monster wasn't going to give himself or anyone else up.
Something stung him. Something crawled up him. Some sweat-or was it blood? — ran down from the dark bandanna about his head, tickling him as it went. He took an ascetic's pleasure in tracking each of these discomforts. Locked savagely beneath him, the boy squeaked somehow, shuddered a bit, but could not escape the clench that bound the two together.
The soldiers were only fifty feet away now. Speshnev hadn't looked at them for an hour, but he'd registered them in detail earlier. They had no rifles, no packs, and they had sweated wholly through their khakis in the long, fast, demanding climb upwards. Some had pistols, others had machetes. None had hats. They seemed to have recovered quickly, more quickly than he had anticipated. Possibly the officer beneath, Ojos Bellos, had chosen only athletes for this mission. The man was not quite a fool. Athletes would find their breath faster, focus their vision more sharply, commit more assiduously to the physical demands of the ordeal.
'All right,' an officer screamed in Spanish. 'Another ten feet, and halt. Do not rush yourselves. Look very carefully and methodically, if I catch anyone not paying attention, I will beat him myself, do you understand?'
The line of soldiers edged forward through the heavy brush, wading through a sea of thorns.
'Lieutenant, it hurts and my feet are so delicate,' mocked a man, to much laughter.
'Lopez, you I will personally humiliate with a horsewhip. Now shut that fat mouth of yours, and do your duty.'
More laughter, but still, these boys were professional. Speshnev guessed that it was three-to-two against.
He pressed harder against the boy. A mosquito hummed in his ear. A fly bit him. A new track of sweat or blood coursed down his face.
'So what are we looking for?' asked Frenchy.
'I don't know,' said Earl. 'If I see it, I will know.'
They were about three hundred feet back down the mountain, on the sea side, having backed off the crest as the soldiers came up and established their blocking positions. Earl was locked against a tree trunk, the heaviness of the wood supporting his binoculars as he scanned, steadily, left to right.
'Suppose they don't come this way.'
'They'll come this way. It's the only way.'
'How do you know?'
'Because now he has to come over under cover. So you look at the covered areas. Some are so dense a man couldn't get through. Some are so light, a man, especially two, could easily be seen. So he's got to come over in one of three zones, where the brush is thick enough to cover him but not so thick as to slow him down.'
'It all looks the same to me,' said Frenchy, a few trees away, arranged similarly to Earl, staring into binocs as well.
'I know that,' said Earl. 'That's why I'm doing the looking.'
Frenchy said nothing. He had nothing to say. It was hard for him to pay close attention to the monotony of the crest of the mountain where it was tangled in brush. It was green twisted into a kind of matting atop the spine of the mountain, of unvarying density and coloration.
'How the hell can you see so much?' he complained.
Earl didn't reply. He was too busy looking.
'Maybe he won't even come this way. Maybe he'll go parallel along the mountain to some other spot, and maybe go over tonight. He saw those troops, too. Maybe he had time to get the hell out.'
'Then what's he do?'
'Well, I don't know. Works his way to Havana.'
'Havana's four hundred miles away.'
'Goes back to Santiago.'
'Filled with soldiers and people who'd sell him out in a second.'
'Maybe he just hunkers down in a cave.'
'This kid? With his sense of importance, his conviction of specialness? He's going to hide in a goddamn cave?'
'Well, what's here for him?'
'The boat.'
'Well, we're still not sure there is a boat.'
'No,' said Earl, ' you're the only one who isn't sure there's a boat.'
After a bit Frenchy turned around to regard the deep blue Caribbean, cupped in the arms of a bay, but from this height also yielding a vision of horizon. A tawdry wooden craft seemed to be meandering about, with dirty sails, dragging some fishing netting. A negro crew struggled to look lively on its raggedy, narrow deck.
'Oh,' said Frenchy. 'I hadn't noticed it.'
'Yeah, well, no fishing boat runs that deep in the water and it don't head in to shore, particularly on the one place the map shows is deep enough for it to get in real close by accident. That's the 4 P.M. bus out of here.'
The boot was American. He had seen them in the war, toward the end, in the false peace before he was re- arrested, that one strange month of May 1945, when Americans and Russians mingled freely in the rubble of the Third Reich, and one world seemed gone forever and a new one, a better one, aborning from the destruction and the vodka.
The Americans made fine boots. Unlike Russian boots, which were simply bags of unfinished leather sewn brutally to a sole in the approximately appropriate shape, the American boot was designed exactly to the contours of the foot, it was drawn tight by a netting of laces, it never slipped off or grew wobbly and if lost would be replaced in minutes. Pity the poor Soviet soldier who lost a boot; he'd go without until…well, until.
Speshnev had ample opportunity to study this boot, particularly. It was seven inches from his eyes. It was planted firmly against the rocky ground by a private in the Cuban infantry, presumably a stout farm lad, judging by the evident stockiness of his ankle and the length and breadth of the foot. He put it where he put it, which was just in front of Speshnev's face and that was, actually, quite a lucky thing. Had he placed it closer, he might have stepped on Speshnev's face, felt the give of flesh beneath, and blasted away with the Star pistol he brandished. Had he been farther, he might have had a good angle through the dense thickets of bramble and thorn and caught a glimpse of the non-organic, and done the same ugly deed with his pistol.
But as it was he was simply set against the earth, and Speshnev, on top of his frozen ward, lay concentrating on his boot because he could look no other place. What he could hear sounded like an ax blade whizzing close by, hungry for his scrawny neck. But it was actually the blade of the machete the young soldier wielded as he probed and flicked and stabbed, searching for the bodies of hiding men, unaware utterly, for now, that those men were literally at his feet.
The whisper of the blade waved magically through the brush, and Speshnev felt its breeze, and particles of leaf and branch its edge liberated, as they drifted down upon him.
Then silence.
Then the sound of rush, as an artillery shell comes in, the one that gets you-he knew this, having been blown up twice, once in Spain, once outside Novograd-and the blade struck earth savagely but two inches from the end of his nose, and vibrated ever so gently. The soldier was stabbing randomly into the brush about his feet.
Beneath, the boy squirmed; but Speshnev had iron fingers about his mouth, crushing his lips to deadness, so he could not involuntarily give a coward's squeak and reveal them.
The blade probed, came closer, and withdrew.
'All right,' the sergeant called. 'Move forward another ten feet. He's got to be here somewhere.'
'I think this greaseball has shit himself to nothingness,' came a jeer, followed by laughter.
'If so, you'd smell the shit. I think he's somewhere down the hill and he's put a bullet in his greaseball head.'
