Takeoff was a little too exciting: it was the rainy season in the Caribbean, and there were gusty winds, too. When they could see the land below, through gaps in the clouds, they glimpsed a collage of brown and green patches crazed with crooked yellow lines of dirt road. The little plane was tossed around in a storm for two hours. Then the sky cleared, with the rapidity characteristic of tropical weather changes, and they landed smoothly near the town of Banes.

They were met by a Red Army colonel called Ivanov who already knew all about Tanya and the article she was writing. He drove them to an antiaircraft base. They arrived at ten A.M., Cuban time.

The site was laid out as a six-pointed star, with the command post in the center and the launchers at the points. Beside each launcher stood a transporter trailer bearing a single surface-to-air missile. The troops looked miserable in their waterlogged trenches. Inside the command post, officers stared intently at green radar screens that beeped monotonously.

Ivanov introduced them to the major in command of the battery. He was obviously tense. No doubt he would have preferred not to have visiting VIPs on a day such as this.

A few minutes after they arrived, a foreign aircraft was sighted at high altitude entering Cuban airspace two hundred miles west. It was given the tag Target No. 33.

Everyone was speaking Russian, so Tanya had to translate for Paz. “It must be a U-2 spy plane,” he said. “Nothing else flies that high.”

Tanya was suspicious. “Is this a drill?” she asked Ivanov.

“We were planning to fake something, for your benefit,” he said. “But actually this is the real thing.”

He looked so worried that Tanya believed him. “We’re not going to shoot it down, are we?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“The arrogance of these Americans!” Paz raved. “Flying right above us! What would they say if a Cuban plane overflew Fort Bragg? Imagine their indignation!”

The major ordered a combat alert, and Soviet troops began to move missiles from transporters to launchers, and to attach the cables. They did it with calm efficiency, and Tanya guessed they had practised many times.

A captain was plotting the course of the U-2 on a map. Cuba was long and thin, 777 miles from east to west but only fifty to a hundred miles from north to south. Tanya saw that the spy plane was already fifty miles inside Cuba. “How fast do they fly?” she asked.

Ivanov answered: “Five hundred miles an hour.”

“How high?”

“Seventy thousand feet, roughly double the altitude of a regular jet airline flight.”

“Can we really hit a target that far away and moving so fast?”

“We don’t need a direct hit. The missile has a proximity fuse. It explodes when it gets close.”

“I know we’re targeting this plane,” she said. “But please tell me we’re not actually going to fire at it.”

“The major is calling for instructions.”