The itching started a week after the first flight. It began on his scalp and a few days later, as the wounds on his arms, legs, and genitals healed, Tucker would have stripped off his skin to escape it. If there had been some other distraction, something to do besides sit in his bungalow waiting to be called for a flight, it might have been bearable, but now the doctor came only once a day to check on him, and he hadn’t seen Beth Curtis since they landed. He read spy novels, listened to the country western radio station out of Guam until he thought that if he heard one more wailing steel guitar, he’d rip the rest of his hair out. Sometimes he lay under the mosquito net-ting, acutely aware of his comatose member, and tried to think of all the women he had had, one by one, then all the women he had ever wanted, including actresses, models, and famous figures from history (the Marilyn Monroe/Cleopatra double-team-in-warm-pudding scenario kept him dis-tracted for almost an hour). Twice a day he cooked himself a meal. The doctor had set him up with a double hot plate and a pantry full of canned goods, and occasionally one of the guards dropped off a parcel of fruit or fresh fish. Mostly, though, he itched.

Tuck tried to engage Sebastian Curtis in conversation, but there were few subjects about which the missionary was not evasive, and most re-minded him that he had left some pressing task at the clinic. Questions about Kimi, the guards, the lack of cargo, his personal history, his wife, the natives of the island, or communication with the outside world evoked half-answers and downright silence.

He asked the doctor for some cortisone, for a television, for access to a computer so he could send a message back to Jake Skye,

and while the doctor didn’t say no outright, Tuck was left empty-handed except for a suggestion that he ought to go swimming and a reminder of how much money he was making for reading spy novels and scratching at scabs. Tuck wanted a steak, a woman (although he still wasn’t sure he could do anything but talk to her), and a chilled bottle of vodka. The doctor gave him some fins, a mask and snorkel, and a bottle of waterproof sunscreen.

When, one morning, Tuck spent an empty hour trying to will his member to life by mentally wrapping his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, in Saran Wrap, only to find his fantasy foiled by her insistence that he had no lead in his Number 2 pencil, he grabbed the snorkeling gear and made his way to the beach.

Two of the guards followed at a distance. They were always there. When he looked out the window, if he tried to take a walk, if he wanted to check on the Lear, they clung to him like stereo shadows. They stood over him as he sat in the sand, pulling the fins on.

“Why don’t you guys go put on some trunks and join me? Those jumpsuits have to be pretty uncomfortable.” It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to talk to them, and it wasn’t the first time he’d been ignored. They just stood there, as silent as meditating monks. Tuck hadn’t been able to discern if they understood a word of English.

“Okay, then, I’m going to do the Cousteau thing, but later let’s get together for some raw fish and karaoke?” He gave them a wink.

No reaction.

“Then let’s play some cards and talk about how you guys recite haiku while blowing each other every night?” Tuck thought that might do it, but still there was no reaction.

As he started toward the water, Tuck said, “I heard the Japanese flag was modeled after a used sanitary napkin. Is that true?” He looked over his shoulder for a response and his fin caught and bent double on a rock. An instant later he was facedown on the beach, sputtering to get the sand out of his mouth, and the guards were laughing.

“Asshole,” he heard one say, and he was on his feet and looming over the Japanese like a giant rabid duck.

“Just back off, Odd Job!”

The guard who had spoken stood his ground, but his companion backed away looking lost without his Uzi.

“What’s the matter, no submachine gun? You chickenshits so busy crawling up my back that you forgot your toys?” Tuck poked the guard in the chest to punctuate his point.

The guard grabbed Tuck’s finger and bent it back, then swept the pilot’s feet out from under him and drew a Glock nine-millimeter pistol from a holster at the small of his back and pressed the barrel to Tucker’s forehead hard enough to dent the skin. The other guard barked something in Japanese, then stepped forward and kicked Tuck in the stomach. Tucker rolled into a ball in the sand, instinctively throwing one arm over his face and clenching the other at his side to protect his kidneys as he waited for the next blow. It didn’t come. When he looked up, the guards were walking back to the compound.

Getting them to leave him alone had been the desired result, but the process was a little rougher than he’d expected. Tuck wiggled his finger to make sure it wasn’t broken and examined the boot toe print under his rib cage. Then the anger unlocked his imagination and plans for revenge began. The easiest thing to do would be to tell the doctor, but Tuck, like all men, had been conditioned against two responses: You don’t cry and you don’t rat. No, it would have to be something subtle, elegant, painful, and most of all, humiliating.

Tuck almost skipped into the water, running on his newfound energy: adrenalized vengeance. He paddled around at the inside edge of the reef, watching anemones pulse in the current while small fish in improbable neon colors darted in and out of the coral. The ocean was as warm as bathwater, and after a few minutes with his face in the water, he felt de-tached from his body and the color and movement below became as meaningless as the patterns in a campfire. The only reminder that he was human was the sound of his breath rushing through the snorkel and the images of cold revenge in his mind.

He looked down the ragged curve of the reef and saw a large shadow moving across the bottom, but before fight-or-flight panic could even set in, he saw it was the shadow of a loggerhead turtle flying through the water like a saurian angel. The turtle circled him and cruised by close enough for Tuck to see the movement in the creature’s silver-dollar-sized eye as it studied him, and a message there: “You don’t belong here,” it said. And that part of Tuck that had recognized the saltwater as its mother re-belled and he felt alien and vulnerable and cold, and a little rude, as if he had been attending a black-tie dinner only to realize as dessert was served that he was wearing pajamas. It was time to go.

He lifted his head, took a bearing on the chain-link fence that ran to the edge of the beach, and started a slow crawl toward shore. As the water went shallow, he banged his knee on a submerged rock,

then stood and slogged through the lapping surf as his fins tried to drag him back off the beach. Once clear of the water, he fell in the sand and tore the fins off his feet. He threw them up the shore without looking and a half a breath later a deafening explosion lifted him up and he landed ten feet away, stunned and breathless, as damp sand and pieces of swim fin rained down upon him.

Tucker stormed through the clinic door trailing sand and water across the concrete floor. “Mines! You have fucking land mines on the fucking beach?”

Sebastian Curtis was seated at a computer terminal. He quickly clicked off the screen and swiveled in his chair. “I heard the explosion, but birds and turtles have set them off before. Was anyone hurt?”

“Other than I’m going to hear a high-pitched wail for the rest of my life and my sphincter won’t relax until I’m dead a couple of years, no, no one was hurt. What I want to know is why you have mines on the beach.”

“Calm down, Mr. Case. Please sit down.” The doctor gestured to a folding metal chair. “Please.” He looked sad, not at all confrontational, not like the kind of man who would mine a tropical beach. “I suppose there are some things you need to know. First, I have something for you.” He opened a drawer under the keyboard, withdrew a check, and handed it to Tuck.