I might have wondered how she knew this, but I was rather more concerned with satisfying their curiosity than the small matter of how they satisfied their sexual desires. “It’s what Eisenhower calls the domino effect. When some guys lay one down they like to make a big show of it.” I jabbed my thumb back at the cabin door. “Look, they’re outside. They just want to check their men aren’t hiding under the bed or anything. I said they could as soon as I checked you were decent.”

“That’s going to take a lot more time than might seem reasonable.” She shrugged. “You’d better show them in anyway.”

I went back up on deck and nodded them below.

They shuffled in through the cabin door, their faces pink with embarrassment when they saw Melba still in bed, and if I hadn’t been enjoying that, I might not have noticed the NCO lay his eyes on her and then lay them on her again, only the second time wasn’t for the obvious reason, that she belonged in a picture on a bulkhead above his hammock. These two had met before. I was sure of that and so was he, and when the Amis came back to the wheelhouse, the NCO drew his officer aside and said something quietly.

When their conversation became a little more urgent, I might have got involved but for the fact that the officer unbuttoned the holster of his sidearm, which prompted me to go to the stern and sit in the fisherman’s chair. I think I even smiled at the man on the fifty-caliber, only the fisherman’s chair looked and felt too much like an electric chair for my liking, so I moved again and sat down on the icebox, which had room for two thousand pounds of ice. I was trying to appear cool. If there had been any fish or any ice in the box, I might even have climbed in beside them. Instead, I took another bite from the bottle and did my best to keep a grip on the thin line holding my nerves. But it wasn’t working. The Amis had a hook in my mouth, and I felt like jumping thirty feet into the air just to try and get it out.

When the officer came back to the stern he was carrying a Colt .45 automatic in his hand. It was cocked, too. It wasn’t pointed at me yet. It was just there to help make a point: that there was no room on the boat for negotiation.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you both to accompany me back to Guantánamo, sir,” he said politely, almost as if there wasn’t a gun in his hand at all and like a true American.

I nodded slowly. “May I ask why?”

“It will all be explained when we get to Gitmo,” he said.