enough to hear would have been easily visible, even for a man plunging
from trough to crest over the waves.
A smaller boat, then any boat, he didn’t care. Anything to get out of
the ocean. In the last four hours, he’d seen a dorsal fin pop up at
irregular intervals in the surrounding water. Once, he’d thought he’d
felt something brushing at his leg, and it was only by the most
forceful act of will that he had not panicked.
One moment the sea was empty, the next he had company. The fishing
boat was hardly impressive by any standards, but to Thor it was the
most wonderful sight in the world. The hull had been white once,
although it had faded to some colorless shade speckled by seagull
droppings and scars. The superstructure looked rickety, as though it
were shifting back and forth independently of the hull. Two large
booms trailed out from behind, supports for the massive fishing nets
the boat would be dragging behind it.
“Hey! Hey, over here!” Thor raised himself as far out of the water as
he could and started waving his arms frantically, pumping his legs to
lift his upper torso out of the water. Damn the sharks if he didn’t
get this boat’s attention, in another couple of days it wouldn’t
matter.
At first he thought they hadn’t seen him. The boat continued on a
steady course, the noise of its diesel engines growing louder. Thor
sucked air into his lungs, took another deep breath, and then screamed
with all of his might, “Over here!”
Some vagary of the wind picked up his words and wafted them over to the
fishing boat Just before he slid down into another trough, Thor saw one
of the men look up sharply, then approach the rail to scan the ocean in
his direction. The seconds before he slid up to the top of another
wave were the longest ones of his life.
When the boat came into view again, he saw that it had changed
course.
Its silhouette had shortened and narrowed, indicating that it was now
bow-on to him. Thor was too dehydrated to cry, but he’d never felt
more like it in his life.
Five minutes later he was on the deck of the fishing boat staring into
four brown, impassive faces and wishing he had taken Spanish in high
school instead of Latin.
1900 Local (+5 GMT) Fuentes Naval Base “Muy interesante,” Santana
murmured. He tapped a message with his finger, then glanced across the
room at his companion. Libyan Colonel Kaliff Mendiria showed no
reaction. “It could be that this is the final element of our plan.
God flies, does he not?” Santana said, intentionally goading the
devout Muslim.
Tall, too tall for a Cuban, reaching almost six feet in height,
Mendiria was a peculiar dusky color. Brown without looking Cuban, dark
without looking black Santana tried to place the coloration and drew a
blank.
The Libyan’s hair was short and dark, straight from the looks of it,
and clipped close to his head. A few gray patches showed through in
odd spots on his head. Not gray from aging, but the peculiar
patterning of hair growing back in after a war injury. The Libyan’s
face was pockmarked, dominated by a massive nose slightly off center,
and a too-full lower lip. The eyes were a startling yellow-green,
almost luminescent under anything other than bright sunlight.
The skin around Mendiria’s mouth whitened slightly as his muscles
clenched. “As Allah wills,” he said sharply. “It does not matter what
happens with this pilot. Our plans are already in place.”
“But don’t you see?” Santana pressed. “The Americans have an
obsessively sentimental attachment to their military personnel.
Remember the forces that were downed during their Desert Storm
fiasco?
Their pictures were in every newspaper, on every television station for
hours on end.
They will be very interested in the fate of this one pilot.”
Mendiria snorted. “If they find out you have him. If you had a proper
security program in place, that would not be possible. Now, however,
your headquarters leaks like a sieve.”
Santana bolted to his feet. “A sieve that Libya has found more than