The plane nosed up higher in the light of an explosion behind Merrill as another rocket headed toward it from the jeep, its plume crossing the plume of the first, hitting the plane in the cabin just behind the windshield. The plane disappeared in a roaring fireball, a thousand pieces still flying upward and the engine tumbling in flames upward end over end.

Merrill saw the men from the jeep turn to him as the light of the explosion faded. He ran the last few feet to the fence. He was up and over it with his right hand sinking into the bared wire and he kept running on the other side through the hot field that smelled of smoke from the fire in the building on the other side but mostly of oil and creosote and industrial waste, as hot and intense as anything Merrill had ever smelled, he was thinking as he squeezed his bloody hand, picturing O’Malley and that last instant when he knew he was dead but hadn’t died yet,

O’Malley had said this place was a living hell. Merrill kept running.

Three

THREE

Amy kept her head covered as the last of the debris bounced on the runway and the echo of the explosion rolled back from the hills, diffuse and hollow, into the cloud of smoke boiling upward from the space in the air where the plane and its pilot had died.

She had seen it coming. She could have seen it from the start, in fact. She had begun to understand it coming from the Caribbean, the pilot wrangling over the radio in the language finally identified in Spanish as Polish. Then he had switched to Spanish, Amy picking up one word at a time about “a plane” and “the Cubans.” It began to dawn on her that the plane below and behind them earlier had not been shot down by the missile that had lit the clouds. Was that possible?

She had finally been hit over the head with it when another voice had filled the cabin, in accented English, so that the others had frozen with fear:

“Just do it the way you were told! Shoot down the fucking plane!”

Shoot down the plane at a public airport? No. She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe one person could have the audacity, the skill or the wherewithal.

This was Chino?

And so she had watched from the floor of the big Mercedes limousine into which they had herded her, as the little silhouette appeared low in the deepening charcoal darkness behind it; the silhouette becoming the little white dart she had seen earlier now rolling across her field of vision, the first question she had asked herself earlier remaining unanswered because of the darkness of the cockpit: Was this Sam? Was he still alive?