“Really. Now we know what it’s like to have a firecracker up our asses. We were too close to the deck for that missile to maneuver.” Out over the water again, O’Malley waggled the tail to check behind them and then throttled back. In despair Merrill watched the indicator drop until the air speed was under two hundred and fifty knots.

“We can’t go faster?”

“Not a chance. We’re still where the guys up above can’t see us, and the more ground we lose, the more they might believe that the Cubans scored a hit that took us down. That’s probably what the Cubans are saying anyway. Our ETA Cartagena is going to be around sundown, not as dark as I would like, but long after the other guys touch down. That alone may give us the edge we need. And we do need one.” He opened the laptop, pressed A and Enter. A color image, nearly a photograph, of New Orleans came up. “I was going to stop at Lucy’s for dinner. Ah, well. Are you watching?” Two keystrokes got him back to the main menu. He typed South America, then Colombia, then Cartagena, and hit Page Down, which brought a section of a city up close. “The next step in computer cartography is to let us get down to street level so you can do a virtual walk-around. The real thing is coming on the Internet. Virtual tourism. You ever play golf on one of these things? You can do that at Augusta National right now, turn around, hit the ball in the woods, and go in after it.”

“I don’t have the time for any golf since my wife began to hit all the greens in regulation.”

“You’re at sea too much.”

“No, she’s just that good.”

“I saw her on television. A very pretty lady. That Senator schmuck thought so, too.”

“Ivar Ward.”

“She holds people’s hands when they die. The doctors are too grand and God-like for that sort of thing.”

“With Chino that could work against her. He likes them docile.”

O’Malley worked Merrill through a tour of Cartagena, the fortress that still surrounded a hundred blocks of the ancient city, the area that served as Cartagena’s Combat Zone, Halfmoon Street, the nearby Hotel Tropicana, the location of a restaurant where he could get the best smoked salmon in Colombia. Colombia would be famous for its smoked salmon if not for its emeralds, coffee – - or cocaine.