“You are relieved of your command,” said Dimka.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Show him, please.”

Colonel Pankov took a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Kats.

Dimka said: “As you see from the document, I have the necessary authority.”

Filipov’s jaw was hanging open, Dimka saw.

Dimka said to Kats: “You are under arrest as a traitor. Go with these men.”

Lieutenant Meyer and another of Pankov’s group smoothly positioned themselves either side of Kats, took his arms, and marched him to the limousine.

Filipov recovered his wits. “Dvorkin, for God’s sake—”

“If you can’t say anything helpful, shut your fucking mouth,” Dimka said to him. He turned to the missile regiment major, who had not said a word so far. “Are you Kats’s second-in-command?”

The man looked terrified. “Yes, comrade. Major Spektor at your service.”

“You are now in command.”

“Thank you.”

“Take this train away. North of here is a large complex of train sheds. Arrange with the railway management to stop there for twelve hours while you repaint the crates. Bring the train back here tomorrow.”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Colonel Kats is going to a labor camp in Siberia for the rest of his life, which will not be very long. So, Major Spektor, don’t make a mistake.”

“I won’t.”

Dimka got into his limousine. As he drove away, he passed Filipov standing on the quay, looking as if he was not sure what had just happened.

• • •

Tanya Dvorkin stood on the dock at Mariel, on Cuba’s north coast, twenty-five miles from Havana, where a narrow inlet opened into a huge natural harbor hidden among hills. She looked anxiously at a Soviet ship moored at a concrete pier. Parked on the pier was a Soviet ZIL-130 truck pulling an eighty-foot trailer. A crane was lifting a long wooden crate from the ship’s hold and moving it through the air, with painful slowness, toward the truck. The crate was marked in Russian: CONSTRUCTION-GRADE PLASTIC PIPE.

She saw all this by floodlights. The ships had to be unloaded at night, by order of her brother. All other shipping had been cleared out of the harbor. Patrol boats had closed the inlet. Frogmen searched the waters around the ship to guard against an underwater threat. Dimka’s name was mentioned in tones of fear: his word was law and his wrath terrible to behold, they said.

Tanya was writing articles for TASS that told how the Soviet Union was helping Cuba, and how grateful the Cuban people were for the friendship of their ally on the far side of the globe. But she reserved the real truth for the coded cables she sent, via the KGB’s telegraph system, to Dimka in the Kremlin. And now Dimka had given her the unofficial task of making sure his instructions were carried out without fail. That was why she was anxious.

With Tanya was General Paz Oliva, the most beautiful man she had ever met.

Paz was breathtakingly attractive: tall and strong and a little scary, until he smiled and spoke in a soft bass voice that made her think of the strings of a cello being caressed by a bow. He was in his thirties: most of Castro’s military men were young. With his dark skin and soft curls he looked more Negro than Hispanic. He was a poster boy for Castro’s policy of racial equality, such a contrast with Kennedy’s.