The white man wasn't as big as Dred had expected. Not bigger than life, certainly.... He was wearing a light-colored suit with a big Panama-style hat. Very flashy. Absurdly so.
On signal, the headlights of both vehicles were turned off. Then the two started to walk toward each other in the dark. In less than thirty seconds they were only a few feet apart. The smell of some kind of fertilizer met that of a strong French cologne.
'Yo' hab dose guns for me?' The revolutionary spoke with a heavy island patois.
Carrie Rose took off the floppy yellow hat. She smiled at Colonel Dred. ' You're a dead man,' she said. 'My husband has you in his sights on an M21 sniper's rifle right now. The rifle has a night sighting device, so he's watching us in a pretty green light. Care to wave?'
'I don't believe dat.' The black man remained calm.
Carrie put her hat back on, and a powerful rifle shot kicked up a clod of grass not three feet away from the guerrilla.
The lights on all the cars around the field shot back on again. The black man froze. Threw a hand up to keep his people in place.
'Our intentions are good. ' Carrie talked as if nothing at all had happened. 'But we wanted you to know that you mustn't try to do anything other than what we agreed on. We agreed only two cars apiece. Not three. Two.
'If you're still interested in guns,' the tall woman continued, 'you'll come to the Charles Codd estate. Tomorrow evening at ten o'clock. Similar arrangements. Two cars.'
'Why yo' doin it?' the black man finally asked. He folded his arms; stood his ground.
'We want to help you take over this island,' Carrie said to him. She shrugged. 'We're being paid to do that. Come to the Codd estate tomorrow. You'll find out everything you want to know. You'll even meet Damian.'
Carrie Rose then turned away. She left the guerrilla leader a little dumbfounded. Beginning to wonder how it happened with Castro up in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Who had come to set him up with guns and bombs?
'He's just a boy,' Carrie said to the Cuban as she got back inside the duk American cu. 'Isn't it funny that they would be interested in him?' 'Solamente tres dias mas,
Just three days more.
is all the Cuban said.
May 4, 1979, Friday 45 U.S. Marshals Arrive
CHAPTERELEVEN
We'd carefully plotted out a funhouse maze of confusion. Confusion on all fronts. Like a blizzard in summer, where it's never even snowed before....
By May 4, ordinary farmers wielding machetes in their fields stimulated heart attacks. A black man wading in the surfeven an unfamiliar black lifeguard-was enough to send piggy little whites scurrying inside their expensive strawroofed huts. Fishing boats that drifted too close to shore were waved away by private guards with rifles. No one shut their eyes sunbathing on the beaches.... And countless tourists spent their suntime in dingy prop airline and government offices. Pan Am, Eastern, Prin-Air, BOAC, all put on extra flights, but even these couldn't accommodate the exodus.... So far, we were pretty much on schedule.
The Rose Diary
The fourth day was much quieter-four island deaths reported. All of them grisly machete murders, however.
Early in the morning, forty-five United Statesfederal marshals were flown in to help keep order in the larger cities of San Dominica. Some of these same State Department marshals had been used during the American Indian uprising at Wounded Knee.
Eight Vietnamese-style HSL-1 helicopters came in from Pensacola, Florida, to help with surveillance and search work.
Because they'd been painted with green-andbrown combat camouflaging, the helicopters provided one of the scarier sights for the rentaining tourists. Suddenly it looked and sounded as if they were in the middle of an undeclared war zone. Army helicopters were continually swooping down out of the lush green hills, as in the opening scenes in M*A*S*H.
More witnesses to the machete murders were being found: 'a veritable anthology of fascinating, conflicting stories,' one French newspaper would eventually write. Five hundred eleven people questioned so far, but no one other than Peter Macdonald claiming to have seen a white man with the raiding parties of blacks.
The chance of Macdonald's story having any effect now seemed rather small, in fact.
There were simply too many chiefs on the scene, too many chiefs prowling around the ghoulish nwrgues, too many hip experts who thought they understood what was going down.
CHAPTERTWELVE
What we did on San D ominica was something like turning loose Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, Speck, Bremer, Manson, and Squeaky Fromme. All in one place at the same time.
The Rose Diary
May 4, 1979; Coconut Bay, San Dominica
Friday Morning. The Fourth Day of the Season.
Lieutenant B. J. Singer, a 1966 Annapolis product, sat on an undersized aluminum beach chair, reading a book called Supership. His wife, Ronnie, lay beside him with The Other Side of Midnight propped up in the sand. Neither of the Singers was a very enthusiastic reader.
Suddenly Supership slipped through B.J.'s fingers.
