A fool who had allowed himself to be manipulated onto playing politicians’ bullshit games. Maybe even set up for this, although he couldn’t figure out how, or by whom. Chino? At least his memory was working again. In her childhood her father had called her The Turbocharger Blond.

“You don’t know Latin America at all, do you?”

“Just its ports and navigable rivers.”

“Never had a real revolution. Bolivar was about securing the privileges of the European émigrés over the natives and Africans. As a result the whole place is a living hell. Cocaine is only the tip of the iceberg. If you can still believe in God after a good look in Colombia, you’re a better man than I am. Colombians are the most savage criminals the world has ever known. Have fun. Send me a postcard.”

Merrill was watching the Cuban coast assume form and detail, villages and roads, fields and woodlands, tree shadows stretching long and dark in what looked like a humid afternoon. From an altitude of fifteen hundred feet at five hundred miles an hour people were almost invisible, unless they were moving – - and, Merrill noted with alarm, some were running in all directions like children. “I see them,” O’Malley said. He turned up the radio and rotated the turning knob. Spanish balladeers, Salsa, rock and roll from Miami. O’Malley stopped at a man’s voice speaking Spanish so rapidly Merrill couldn’t differentiate between individual words. “That’s us. According to him, we’re an American spy plane.”

“But not the other.”

“Right. I know how that happened. The Cubans picked up both of us on the radar. They asked the other pilot to identify himself and us. Latinos have ways of talking to each other that exclude us. Figure the other pilot knows the drill. And imagine his surprise at learning that somebody’s behind him. And the Cubans’ at seeing somebody actually trying a low-level overflight in daylight.”

“What do we do now?”

“Ride it out. Hope a farmer with an old Enfield doesn’t get off a lucky shot. The other side of the island might be a different story. The Cubans might decide to launch a surface-to-air at us even though they think this is just some kind of a dope deal. From their point of view, there’s only one thing better than making Americans look bad, and that’s making Americans dead. But that’s only if they still have enough operational equipment. Hang on, I’ve got to take us down to the deck. Up here, we’re just meat for the monkeys.”

The different language snapped Amy to consciousness, up through a fierce pain, the cause of which took her a long, labored moment to piece together. The language was Spanish, spoken as rapidly as she had ever heard it. Amy remembered that, too, from language class, that many Spanish-speaking peoples took pride in hammering it out as quickly as possible. The Argentines were at the top of the list, and next were the Cubans.