fingers loose. Then she started to fall forward, the soldier's body under her in the darkness of the deck. She let go of the knife, fighting to breathe. He was strong.
With both hands she pried at his fingers, the grip loosening a little. She reached behind her, catching up the flashlight, hammering the flashlight against the hand, the fingers falling away from her throat.
The flashlight slipped from her fingers. As she picked it up, she saw red-fingerprints on the lens, like something over an illuminated microscope. Her fingers were sticky with blood.
She started to get up, then stopped. Crouched, leaning against the bulkhead, she spoke:
'God...'
She dropped the flashlight, closing her eyes. Her knife blade had sliced down through the soldier's cheek and imbedded in his throat. Those dead eyes— she could still see them in the darkness, staring at her.
Chapter 24
Natalia found her way beyond the veranda to the beach, looking up and down its length and not seeing Diego Santiago. She smiled. It would have amused her if after she had intentionally solicited the swim he stood her up.
'Diego?' she said, looking at the dark, white-crested surf. 'Diego?' There was no answer.
She turned, starting back up the beach, then heard a shout from behind her and turned back to look toward the water. 'Here, Natalia, here!'
She raised her right arm for a long, lazy wave toward the figure she saw emerging from the surf, running up the beach toward her. There was enough moonlight that she could see him well. It was Santiago, wet from the swim, his black, curly hair plastered to his forehead. He stopped a yard away from her.
'Turn around so I can look at you,' he commanded. She smiled. As she turned a full 360
degrees, she opened the white jacket belted around her waist; the jacket dropped from her shoulders and back to her elbows as she faced him again. 'Do you approve, Comrade General?'
'Si— yes, I do indeed, Comrade Major.'
Santiago laughed and so did Natalia. He started toward her and she took a step nearer to him. As he reached out his arms, she turned around. 'Thank you,' she said and shrugged the rest of the way out of the white terry cloth jacket. There was a white-painted metal chair a few feet away by the seawall and she pointed toward it. 'Would you?'
'Of course,' Santiago said, his voice less filled with enthusiasm. She handed him the bag. He looked at her. 'This is very heavy.'
'I have my gun in it,' she told him, smiling.
'Ha-ha! Honest— I like that.' Santiago laughed, then strode across the sand. She watched him as he set the jacket and purse on the chair, then turned to face her.
'I will race you into the water!' she shouted, running across the sand, her shoes kicked away.
Natalia hit the water, hearing the heavy breathing of Santiago beside her. Throwing herself into the surf as the waves flowed around her legs, she then swam out over the first ridge of breakers. The water felt cold to her. She hadn't swum in an ocean for more than a year, she recalled. She turned toward the beach, swimming until she could stand, then walking from the surf, hugging her hands against her elbows, seeing Santiago coming out of the water a few feet away from her.
'Senorita Natalia, por favor...
She turned back and looked at him, brushing hair back from her forehead. 'What is it, Diego?' Natalia said.
He walked toward her and this time she did nothing, standing there, waiting for what she knew was inevitable. 'What is it, Diego?' she repeated.
'Are you trying to seduce me, or to make me seduce you?' he asked, water dripping from his mustache and from the dark hair on his chest.
'Don't be silly,' she told him.
'Then why are you here with me, now?'
'I like the ocean,' she told him honestly. Then, looking into his eyes, she said softly, 'I'm cold now.'
He took a step closer and she let him put his arms around her, felt his hands on her wet back. She closed her eyes as she felt him kiss her. It was not as easy as it had been before, she thought, when she had only been married but not yet in love.
Chapter 25
Rubenstein muttered, 'God!' The thing crawling quickly around the base of the palm tree behind which he was hidden looked to be the largest roach he'd ever seen in his life. 'Eyuck!' he hissed to himself. He'd read an article once about roaches, and it surprised him not at all that they survived the Night of the War. Some scientists theorized that if all other life on the planet were to be killed, roaches and rats might still thrive. This was a wood roach or American cockroach, he thought.
Smiling, pushing his glasses up off the bridge of his nose, he saluted the creature, muttering, 'My fellow American...' He stared beyond the palm now where his real fellow Americans were. Some of the faces he had observed for the last few hours were Hispanic-looking, probably anti-Communist Cubans; some of the faces looked Central European in origin; and some, he thought, were Jews, like himself. The barbed wire was the part that nauseated him, with people living behind it.
He had left the motorcycle about a mile back in a wooded area, then come the rest of the way on foot. After scouting the perimeter of the camp, he had selected the spot least visible between the guard towers and decided on it as his point of entry. He had brought the big Gerber knife, the Browning High Power and the Schmeisser and spare loaded magazines for each of the guns.
