Cyclops (Dirk Pitt 8)

"What did you do with him?" she asked.

"Stashed him a ways inland under a bush." Pitt's voice betrayed a sense of urgency. He pointed at a tiny beam of light about a quarter of mile down the beach. "They're coming. No time for a volleyball game. Get a move on."

He roughly pushed her toward the trees and followed, walking backward brushing away their footprints with the palm frond. After nearly seventy yards, he dropped the frond and they hurried through the jungle growth, putting as much distance between them and the beach as possible before daylight.

They had covered five miles when the eastern sky began to brighten from black to orange. A sugarcane field rose up out of the fading darkness, and they skirted its border until it ended beside a paved two-lane highway. No headlights played on the asphalt in either direction. They walked along the shoulder, ducking into the brush whenever a car or truck approached. Pitt noticed that Jessie's steps were beginning to falter and her breathing was coming in rapid gasps. He halted, placed his handkerchief over the lens of the flashlight, and shone it in her face. He didn't require the credentials of a sports physician to see that she was done in. He put his arm around her waist and pushed on until they reached the steep sides of a small ravine.

"Catch your breath, I'll be right back."

Pitt dropped down the slope into a dry creek bed that threaded a jagged course around a low hill littered with large boulders and scrub pine. It passed under the highway through a concrete pipe three feet in diameter and spread into a fenced pasture on the other side. He scrambled back up to the road, silently took Jessie's hand, and led her stumbling and sliding to the gravelly bottom of the ravine. He flicked the beam of the flashlight inside the drainpipe.

"The only vacant room in town," he said in a voice as cheerful as he could make it under the circumstances.

It was no penthouse suite, but the curved bottom of the pipe held a good two inches of soft sand, and it was a safer haven than Pitt could have hoped for. Any pursuing guards who eventually came on their trail and followed it to the highway would assume the landing party met a prearranged ride.

Somehow they managed to find a comfortable position in the cramped darkness. Pitt set the gun and flashlight within easy reach and finally relaxed.

"Okay, lady," he said, his words echoing through the drainpipe. "I think the time has come for you to tell me what in hell we're doing here."

But Jessie didn't answer.

Oblivious to her clammy, ill-fitting uniform, oblivious even to aching feet and sore joints, she was curled in a fetal position sound asleep.

"Dead? All dead?" Kremlin boss Antonov repeated angrily. "The entire facility destroyed and no survivors, none at all?"

Polevoi nodded heavily. "The captain of the submarine that detected the explosions and the colonel in command of the security forces sent ashore to investigate reported that they found no one alive. They retrieved the body of my chief deputy, Lyev Maisky, but General Velikov has yet to be found."

"Were secret codes and documents missing?"

Polevoi was not about to put his head on the block and take responsibility for an intelligence disaster.

As it was, he stood within a hair of losing his lofty position and quickly becoming a forgotten bureaucrat in charge of a labor camp

"All classified data were destroyed by General Velikov's staff before they died fighting."

Antonov accepted the lie. "The CIA," he said, brooding. "They're behind this foul provocation."

"I don't think we can make the CIA the scapegoat on this one. The preliminary evidence points to a Cuban operation."

"Impossible," Antonov snapped. "Our friends in Castro's military would have warned us well in advance of any ambitious plan to attack the island. Besides, a daring and imaginative operation of this magnitude goes far beyond any Latin brain."

"Perhaps, but our best intelligence minds do not believe the CIA was remotely aware of our communications center on Cayo Santa Maria. We haven't uncovered the slightest indication of surveillance. The CIA is good, but its people are not gods. They could not have possibly planned, rehearsed, and carried out the raid in the few short hours from the time the shuttle left the space station until it suddenly veered off our programmed flight path to Cuba."

"We lost the shuttle too?"

"Our monitoring of the Johnson Space Center revealed that it landed safely in Key West."

"With the American moon colonists," he added flatly.

"They were on board, yes."

For seconds, too furious to react, Antonov sat there, his lips taut, unblinking eyes staring into nothingness. "How did they do it?" he growled at last. "How did they save their precious space shuttle at the last minute?"

"Fool's luck," said Polevoi, again relying on the Communist dogma of casting blame elsewhere. "Their asses were saved by the devious interference of the Castros."

Antonov's eyes suddenly focused on Polevoi. "As you've so often reminded me, Comrade Director, the Castro brothers can't go to the toilet without the KGB knowing how many squares of paper they use.