The sound of waves, and a mild rush of breeze, came at them for a moment.

“Sounds like one hell of a story,” Laramie said.

“You’ve got no idea,” Cooper said, and commenced to killing time with his tale, careful to clarify how he thought it may well connect to the intended wrath of the suicide sleepers she hoped to thwart.

40

Cuba’s Revolutionary Navy, Cooper knew, wasn’t particularly adept at protecting its own coast, with the notable exception of a few ruthless attacks on Cuban citizens, conducted during the citizens’ attempts to flee the regime. Castro’s army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, was nearly as ill-equipped, essentially operating on a zero-budget basis since the COMECON money train-the Soviet Union’s foreign-aid package for communist partners-derailed in the early nineties. The FAR, as it was known, had succeeded in shooting down the occasional Cessna, and its army managed to keep Fidel alive-but such expensive tools of modern warfare as effective coastal radar installations were, for the Republic of Cuba, the stuff of nostalgia.

San Cristóbal was part of the Pinar del Rio province, on the southern side of the island, just over a hundred and twenty miles from the western tip. They made good time on the flat seas, coming in around two-thirty A.M. to a beach Cooper had used before. He’d navigated tonight strictly by compass, thinking, as he flicked on his flashlight and aimed it toward the beach, that the old Cuban fisherman in Hemingway’s famous book couldn’t have worked his way to San Cristóbal any better. He killed the engine as they hit shallow water and drifted in; after a few seconds the twin hulls made a dull scraping noise. Cooper secured the outboard and slipped over the side into the shallow water. He’d left his Reefs in the boat and felt the grainy sand noodle up between his toes as he touched bottom. He pulled the boat onto the beach and told Laramie she could jump out.

They unloaded their gear-two Mongoose touring bikes and a pair of tall backpacks, the backpacks outfitted with a variety of equipment, food, and drink. Then Cooper pushed the boat back into the water and guided the catamaran to the eastern end of the beach where he dragged it behind a mound of driftwood. Laramie watched as Cooper vanished into a thicket of bushes, broke off some branches, and came out again to lay them across the boat. He came over and pulled the bikes and backpacks up the beach, tucked them too behind some driftwood then came back down to Laramie, who’d stayed firmly planted in the sand in order to shake off the last of the effects of the sea.

“Made good time,” he said, peeking at his watch. “Sun’ll be up in three hours. May as well catch some zzzs while we’re here at the Mambo Beach Resort. Road’s right past those trees, but it won’t do us any good heading out on our little Tour de Cuba before we get some light.”

Cooper got busy doing some things behind the driftwood. When he was done, he poked his head over one of the upended stumps and saw that Laramie was seated in exactly the same place as before. Wordlessly, he came out from behind the logs, strolled down the beach, extended a hand and, when Laramie took it, pulled her to her feet.

He turned and let go of her hand once she was up, but Cooper thought he caught a glimpse of a hard-edged kind of stare as the pale moonlight glinted off the whites of her eyes. He wondered whether it might only have been the angle of the light. But if it hadn’t, and the glare had been real, it struck Cooper that he had seen that look before.

Laramie crawled out of her sleeping bag and found the backpack he said was hers. She dug through two compartments before finding the place he’d stored her toiletries. She withdrew a tube of toothpaste and her toothbrush and took them east along the beach with her, over where Cooper had hidden the boat. Still wearing the khaki shorts and sweatshirt she’d used for the voyage over, she stuffed the toothpaste and toothbrush in her pockets, made her way carefully into the brush, and pulled down her khakis to take a leak.

Then she came back down the beach and brushed her teeth. She brushed for a while. She thought about the things Cooper had told her he’d found, but she’d been thinking about those things, and what they might have meant, for most of the trip. Scraping the brush against her teeth, looking out at the Caribbean-or listening, at least, in the darkness-she thought about some other things. They were there during the darkest moment you found in the West Indies, the sky in that predawn, moonless state of blackness beneath the blanket of the morning cloud cover, and Laramie couldn’t see too far beyond her wrist. But she could hear the waves lapping and breaking in their relentless approach and retreat, and there was another sound out there too, a distant sound that resembled a gently clanging bell. Might, she thought, be nothing more than a piece of metal banging somewhere in the wind-maybe on a dock fallen into disrepair a mile or two down the coast.

As far as Laramie was able to tell, Cooper remained asleep in his sleeping bag.

When it became apparent her eyes would never quite adjust to the darkness, she closed them and let the sounds of the water, and the tradewinds, and the tapping piece of broken metal sing to her. It wasn’t, she decided, much different from the sounds of the trains she used to watch in San Fernando, back home, where she’d sneak up to a bluff and close her eyes while the freight trains rumbled by in a wash of hot wind.

Laramie supposed she should have expected what was occurring to her, sitting on this beach. She even supposed she’d brought it on herself by coming on this trip at all. She thought through some more things, then got sick of thinking through all the possible scenarios.

“Goddammit,” she said, and opened her eyes.

She stood and kicked off her khaki shorts. She was already in bare feet, and kicked off her panties next. Pulled her T-shirt over her head and flipped it onto the sand behind her. Standing there in the darkness and breeze, she first walked, then jogged into the water, feeling the sand squish beneath her feet with every step, and then, when the water had reached her waist, she pushed off and dove into the warm blanket of the Caribbean.

She swam around in the shallow water, mostly balancing on her knees or floating around on her back, the water feeling like a hot bath in the cool night. She might have swum for fifteen minutes, or half an hour, Laramie losing track by intention as, after a while, she stood erect, leaned forward against the drag of the water, and walked out of the sea and up the gentle slope of the beach. She flicked her fingers through her hair to shed most of the water from her head, but otherwise didn’t bother to dry off. The warm wind was already doing it for her anyway.

She passed by her rumpled mound of clothes, turned the corner past the driftwood, and, mostly without grace, located her empty sleeping bag by dropping down and feeling around on all fours. Once she found the soft mat of her own sleeping bag, she aimed left and kept crawling along until she encountered the bulky form of Cooper, hidden beneath the folds of his own bag. She found his zipper, opened the bag until she had enough room, then slipped in beside him and zipped the bag back closed behind her.

She knew from the way their skin touched that he had never actually fallen asleep.

In the tight quarters of the bag, she managed to get her arms around his chest. She rolled him over on his back, lay her body on his, and found his lips with a long, heavy, salty kiss.