land sounds good—wading for it, dragging rafts or not,” Claire said.
“Piece of cake,” Jace added with a sarcastic snort. “All of this.”
“You can say that because you’ve been in combat,” Claire told him.
Nick said, “Nothing may be what it seems here, just like other things we’ve been through. To quote another wise man, ‘All for one and one for all,’ so let’s remember that—live by that until we all get out of here.”
In a small, lovely inlet edged by a narrow band of blinding white sand, the rescued party sloshed ashore in the late afternoon. Since the crystal clear water where Nando let them out was waist deep, Jace carried Lexi. Nick and Bronco tugged the two orange rafts in to shore, hoping they could find a spot in the lush greenery to deflate and hide them until Nando could find buyers.
It was the least that they could do for him, Nick thought. He didn’t want to tip off the man or his family that he had a lot of cash on him. It was obvious that money was tight on the island, at least for average people. He’d heard things had been tough after Castro’s 1950s revolution and got worse when the old USSR then Venezuela and China abandoned supporting Cuba. Evidently, Raul Castro had finally eased up restrictions on some small, private businesses. And, of course, if international billionaires like Clayton Ames were here, all cozy with the Castros while most Cubans had it hard, well, that was obscene.
“Strange, but this scary place seems like paradise,” Claire said to him, her voice shaky. “It’s so beautiful and serene, but evil lurked in Eden and led people astray.”
“We’ll be careful,” he assured her, but he was on edge too. Surely, if Ames was in Cuba, he would not have hired that rickety boat to come out to bring them into his latest realm, using Nando so they wouldn’t suspect a trap. But he put nothing past his father’s murderer, a master manipulator with long arms.
Nick flinched as a brown pelican dived so close it splashed them when it scooped up the unsuspecting fish in its bill, swallowed it whole and wagged its tail in delight. Yeah, even this Eden had its dangers.
Waiting for dusk, when they would head for Nando’s house, they hunkered down in a patch of sun as their clothes dried stiff and salty against their skin. At least they weren’t cold now. When Lexi kept asking to play in the sand, things almost seemed normal. They didn’t want to be spotted, but finally they let her, over on the side of the little inlet, partly hidden by the cliff. Claire was with her. Would Lexi’s light hair and Claire’s red tresses draw attention? Obviously, some non-Cubans lived here, surely redheads, but his wife was a striking woman. Thank God, they had Heck and Nita to act as translators and buffers.
As if he’d read his mind, Heck said, “’Cording to what Nando said, we’re going to have to go into Havana to get to the internet. How else we gonna tell Patterson we’re not lost? Surprise! We are here, come get us—somehow.”
“I know,” Nick said. “We could try the British Embassy, where I read there’s a so-called American desk upon request. But some of us would stand out like sore thumbs there, and we need to stick together. The Brits might not believe us, and we’d have to go through red tape, declare who we really are to get American help. Then there’s Gitmo.”
“Guantanamo? The US prison for terrorist enemies here?”
“Everything’s up in the air right now, a long shot. At least there would be Americans there, officers and soldiers who go back and forth to the States. Let’s just take this one step—one very careful step—at a time.”
* * *
When the shadows grew long, Nick and Jace decided it was time to hike to the road above the beach and head for Nando’s house. Claire and Nita walked with Lexi between them up the curving path since they couldn’t get around the cliff to the thin stretch of shore under Nando’s home.
“Look at that red soil with all this tobacco,” Heck said.
Lexi piped up. “I thought tobacco was bad for people, Mommy.”
“Cuban cigars are famous, and a lot of people like them,” Claire said only. She was exhausted. She’d taken one of her earlier meds with a gulp of water from Nando’s canteen. She hoped she’d warded off the chance of a narcoleptic nightmare, but she feared falling asleep in the middle of a step or word. All she needed was a psychotic bad dream now when reality was so awful.
“Hate to admit it, but this is real pretty land,” Jace said. “I see patches of tomatoes and what might be coffee besides the tobacco. I could use a good cup of java right now.”
“It’s the Castros and their cronies who are bad,” Heck put in, “not Cuba or its people—most of them, I mean.”
They found Nando’s house just where he’d said they would. It looked like a kind of stucco with a slightly slanted, orange tile roof, but many of the tiles were cracked or broken. Nando stood in the door watching for them. Beside him stood a short woman, her long white hair in the setting sun such a contrast to Nando’s salt-and-pepper look. His skin was much bronzer than hers.
“Maybe his mother live here too,” Heck said. “Generations, the old ones, at least, stick together, even if he said his daughter lives in Havana, goes to university.”
Though no other houses or people on the road were in sight on this western edge of the village, Nando quickly herded them inside. Despite the warm breeze and fingers of red setting sunlight stretching through the glassless windows and door before Nando closed it behind them, Claire shivered.
Inside, standing in the small, central room with its table and few chairs, Nando introduced them—with Heck’s help—to Carlita, his wife, not his mother. Nando whispered something to Heck, who in turn told them in a hushed voice, “Her hair go white real fast when the sharks take their only son.”
Claire bit her lower lip and blinked back tears. Lexi had been abducted once and that had been a near-death experience for her. As different as she was from this woman, Claire immediately sympathized with her. Their names even seemed an echo of each other. Yet they were so far from home—wherever that was now—and so far from safety.
* * *
Sleeping on a tile floor with only a piece of canvas under him didn’t bother Jace. In Iraq, he’d been through worse, even though pilots were usually housed in the best of the worst places. His stomach was full of fish, black beans and rice, though he sure could have used a beer or something stronger than some sugary drink called guarapo, made from sugarcane juice. The coffee, though, had been home-ground, hot and strong.
With the other men, he’d sat outside after dark on the small back patio, hearing the sound of the sea. The patio was eroding from sea salt air and age, but just a few steps away served as a urinal for the men while the women used a chamber pot inside. Nita, who didn’t speak much but to Claire, Lexi and Carlita, had told them that it was Carlita’s dream to have a toilet with running water and a drinking spigot someday soon, just like the ones in the village that had better pipes. At least they had running water from a cistern in the small kitchen. But the stunning view out the back of the little place—wasn’t that worth something?
Jace shifted onto his side. Bronco, lying next to him, looked like he slept the sleep of the dead. Except he snored. Nick had insisted
