In three hours' time they were winging their way north on a commercial flight out of Montevideo to Miami. Sitting in first class, Squires was folded into the seat next to him sleeping easily after consuming several brown bottles of Cerveza Especial at the airport bar and then reading some Cuban novel he'd purchased called Adios, Hemingway and passing out. Harmon, though, was nervous, but his anxiety had nothing to do with the bit of trouble they'd had at the pipeline. He and Squires had been in such situations before. It would pass. When they were still in the helicopter on the ground at the airport, Harmon had said his good-byes to the pilot by handing him a brick of ten thousand dollars in bills from the briefcase. There would be no mention of what he may have witnessed during the routine ferrying of the Americans. Harmon knew the pilot was a player by the way he'd stared straight ahead after banking into the quick pickup and then quickly lifting back out of the clearing, never hesitating over the fact that Squires was still hanging out of the open side door with his MP5 covering the increasingly agitated group of fuel thieves, some of whom by then had magically produced weapons of their own. The extra cash in his pockets in addition to his professional fee would ensure that no report or even a vague memory of the incident would remain. Harmon's only regret was that in the interest of the company's unwritten policy-what happens there stays there-he'd had to instruct the pilot to sweep low over the middle of an inland lake where he and Squires wrapped their used weapons in Harmon's bullet-pocked jacket and tossed the bundle out the door. He hated having to do that with the little Colt. He only had one more like it at home.

No, Harmon's nerves were twitching because while Squires had been drinking at the airport bar he'd been watching a satellite news station, concentrating on the reports of a tropical storm that was moving westward from the open Atlantic through the southern Caribbean.