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submarines in the Cuban fleet.
    By 2000 that fleet was down to one active submarine doing occasional coastal patrols, and by 2004 the last sub was rated as inactive, although there were some rumors that it had sunk somewhere in the Windward Passage and had been lost with all hands. For Arkady during that time there had been a brief marriage of no account to a woman named Marina Gelfriel, who worked as a junior curator at the Hermitage, but since most of his time was spent in the northern bases like Vidyaevo, a hundred miles north of Murmansk beyond the Arctic Circle, the marriage was doomed to icy failure from the start. Thankfully there had been no children.
    Arkady Tomas looked toward the headland a mile or so away. Dense jungle, and even this far out in the water he could taste the stink of it in his nostrils, like hot steam pouring off some cooking broth. He smiled, feeling the sweat in his armpits and along his spine, still able to remember the white, frozen hell of the Kola Peninsula; the place he’d once thought of as his home. He ducked his head and lit another Popular. He held the cigarette between his teeth against the wind and turned the wheel another couple of points to round the headland and guide the boat into the next bay.
    Ahead of him now, half a mile away, was the rusting hulk of a ship, a sour jarring geometry against the wall of convoluted, color-splashed jungle that served as its backdrop. The wreck stood two hundred yards or so off the ragged empty shore, stern in, torn in half when she foundered. The bow section was ripped away, sunk into the deeper waters beyond the shoals where the wreck now lay.
    Arkady Tomas Cruz knew the ship’s history well. She was the SS Atlantic Champion, also known as the SS Angela Harrison in her later years, built by the Welding Shipyards in Kure, Japan, in 1954 for National Bulk Carriers and the largest tanker afloat at the time of her construction. She was originally 854 feet long and 125 feet wide, with a spindly four-story-high navigation bridge in the forward section and a lower deckhouse aft. Luckily, at the time of her demise in 1974, she had been under tow to the scrap yards in Spain and had spilled no cargo on the Golfo de Guacanayabo shore. Her owners, by then a Panamanian company, had made no attempt to salvage her, given the difficulties of dealing with the Cuban government. After having anything of value stripped from her by local entrepreneurs, she languished for a decade, slowly settling, becoming part of the landscape, invisible except to fresh eyes.
    The Panda grumbled slowly into the looming shadow of the massive tanker and Arkady Tomas breathed in the scent of iron and peeling paint that had baked in the hot, unrelieved sunlight throughout the daylight hours. He grinned; the interior of the hull would have been a furnace for most of the day, only now cooling to a reasonable temperature. The privileges of rank.
    He turned the wheel a few degrees, disappearing around the flank of the tanker on the windward side. The huge wall of rotting steel now stood between him and possible watching eyes on the shore. Twenty yards along he saw the gaping hole in the ship’s side, turned the wheel slightly once more, and guided the Panda inside the yawning cavern of the old ship’s hull.
    With almost idiotic irony the idea had come from a James Bond movie. Produced in 1977, three years after the grounding of the SS Angela Harrison off the beaches of Baracoa, the film’s plot revolved around a giant supertanker that swallowed submarines. The idea that a supertanker could open up its bow section and inhale a couple of nuclear subs was obviously science fiction. The idea that a wrecked tanker on an isolated coast could camouflage an active base for a Russian-Cuban Foxtrot-class submarine was not. In the mid ’80s, while there was still money in the Soviet coffers, the hull of the old tanker had been gutted and refitted as a staging base for covert submarine patrols. By