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carefully on its hilt.
    “Monkey Dred,” Johnson whispered.
    “Pee-ter! Pee-ter!”
    The calypso singer’s sweet voice drifted across the Cricket Lounge.
    “Tell me dis one ting, mon? … What be de difference be-tween Irishmon wedding an’ Irishmon wake?”
    Sulking, a little embarrassed, Peter resisted. He didn’t want to be a part of the show tonight. Not tonight. Not with the image of the mutilated nineteen-year-olds crawling through his mind like bloodworms.
    “So what’s the difference?” someone called out from the dark bar.
    Peter looked at Jane and could see the same— what? distaste? nausea?
    “One less drunk?” The chestnut-haired man finally gave in; yanked the asinine bicycle bell, felt—, very strangely, dumbly—a little homesick.
     
    May 3, 1979, Thursday
    Tourists Flee Resort Hotels!
     
    “Go from Slush to Lush!’
    Magazine Ad for
    San Dominica
    Nine murders were reported around the resort island on the third day.
    Two knifings; two pistol shootings; a forced drowning; four machete killings.
    Sophisticated TV news crews began to arrive on San Dominica in the early afternoon: hippie cameramen, soundmen who looked like NASA engineers, “California Dreaming” directors, assistant directors, reporters, and commentators. Crews came from ABC, CBS, NBC. They came from local stations in New York City, Miami, and Chicago. Apparently the machete murders were an especially popular item in Chicago and New York.
    Reporters and crew members were given hazardous-duty pay just as they received for covering combat assignments, urban riots, or madmen on the loose.
    Newspaper correspondents—quieter types, less Los Angelese—started to arrive, too.
    They came from the States, of course, but they also began to come in from Western Europe; from Africa and Asia; and especially from South America. The Third World countries were particularly well represented.
    The newshounds smelled a revolution!
    Meanwhile, police and army experts were predicting that the sudden, mind-boggling violence would either die down completely—or flare up all over the Caribbean.
    So far—even with Colonel Dred as an obvious target—it was a hell of a mystery.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    We had learned long before we ever saw the Caribbean that beautiful scenery provides the most chilling background for any kind of terrorism.
    The Rose Diary
    May 3, 1979; Titchfield Cove, San Dominica
    Thursday Morning. The Third Day of the Season.
    Dressed in loose-fitting blue jeans and a blue cotton T-shirt, Damian Rose climbed hard and as fast as possible. He moved toward huge outcroppings of black rock poised above the Shore Highway.
    High up in the rocks, the lazy island trade winds had chiseled two primitive heads over centuries and centuries—neither of which, Rose was thinking as he moved along, had been worth the hot air and bother.
    His fingers curled into small cracks, Rose pulled himself up over countless tiny ledges toward the sea blue sky. He could feel his boots crunching loose rocks as he ascended; he could taste his own salty sweat.
    After fifteen minutes of hard climbing, he pulled himself onto a barren ledge of flat rock. The small jut of rock was about four feet long, less than three feet wide. Close up, the black rock was loaded with specks of shiny mica. Mica and tiny seagull bones.
    From the gull’s high burial ground, Damian could see everything he needed to see.
    The morning after the Turtle Bay murders had turned out crisp and pure, with a high blue sky all over the Caribbean. A hawk flew directly over his head, watching the empty highway and watching him, it seemed.
    Far below, the sea was choppy in spite of the pacific blue skies. Brown reefs were visible on the outskirts of Titchfield Cove.
    There was a long, dramatic stretch of crystal beach that ended in another hill of high black rocks.
    Damian Rose began to concentrate on a slightly balding dark-haired man and his two children as they walked down the perfect beach.
    The