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over my ears while I finished fueling. After all, the film-at-eleven newshounds hadn’t been exactly strangers in Key West lately. The motels were full of them, all strutting up and down Duval, wearing their press tags, looking bored and officious and getting sloppy drunk on expense accounts. The exodus of refugees from Mariel Harbor had brought them on the run to Key West with the same fervor of a shyster lawyer chasing an ambulance. Blood is news. And news is money.
    So I ignored them while I paid Harry at the docks for my four hundred gallons of diesel, then throttled Sniper on down to the cement wharves at the old submarine base where I was to meet Fizer and pick up Santarun.
    And by the time I had thrown a couple of half hitches around the big brass bollards, the two of them were there again, pulling into the parking lot in their rental Chevy. I watched the biggest one as he put a fix on me from the corner of his eye while the smaller one rounded up a couple of weary-looking Cuban-American men to interview. Same ploy.
    The short, stocky one held the microphone in the face of his “interviewee” while the remote unit swept across me and Sniper.
    It didn’t make any sense. They had to have proper press credentials or the guard wouldn’t have let them on the naval base. But why in the hell would anyone want film of me?
    I didn’t like it. Not a bit. So I went below and began stowing away the boxes of canned goods and beer I had brought for the trip, giving them time to make a move. Key West seems to get stranger and stranger every year; an island that has become so gaudily faddish, so populated with the weird and undecipherable that you stop trying to find motive in the actions of others. Overhead, I could hear the chopping ignitions of a Coast Guard helicopter—escorting in another load of refugees, probably. And from the nearby docks where the immigration people were processing the new arrivals came the frenzied, heartfelt chant:
    Libertad, libertad, LIBERTAD . . .
    Through the starboard port I could see the refugees standing in a long line across the docks, barefoot and worn by their struggles to get out of Cuba, but smiling as they chanted in the heat of the afternoon sun.
    I watched them, wondering all the while if America would, indeed, become the land of liberty for them. And as I wondered, I wished them well—all but the Castro agents I knew stood among them; those who had come to America seeking nothing but the opportunity to destroy.
    Back on the wide cement loading runway which fronted Trumbo Annex, the two Cuban guys with the television equipment were still at it. They moved among the steady rush of the departing and the arriving, conspicuously staying within viewing distance of me and Sniper —and equally as conspicuously trying to pretend as if they weren’t.
    I climbed up on the wharf and began to amble toward them. I still had about fifteen minutes before Fizer was supposed to arrive with Santarun, and I had decided to make the most of it. When the big guy with the gold chains and the vee of black chest thatch saw me coming, he immediately swerved the camera away, trying to ignore me. About ten feet from them I stopped, studied the sky, studied my worn Topsiders, a sham attempt to look inconspicuous, turning the tables on them. The stocky anchorman was interviewing an elderly man who, apparently, had just arrived. The exchange was in rapid Spanish. I don’t know why, but people who speak Spanish seem to talk faster and louder than people who speak other languages.
    So I had no problem hearing what they were saying, and, even with my bad Spanish, understanding what they were talking about.
    Typical broadcast questions. And typical broadcast answers.
    But that still didn’t explain why they had been trying to get some film of me and my vessel.
    But they would explain.
    You could bet the bank on that.
    The big guy with the gold chains was all attention now,