I sat up late listening to the radio, thinking I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway. After James went to sleep I packed my few things into the brown suitcase and left it by the door, hidden under my overcoat. I smoked three of the cigarettes he always kept in a silver box by the window, listening to an orchestra play. A woman’s voice trilled up ahead of the band from time to time. I had seen couples dancing the tango in the bars in San Telmo, and was struck by the way they handled each other, as if they were made of bone china. They didn’t look at each other much. They kept their eyes down, looking at their hands or the floor, as if lost in separate thoughts. They sometimes leaned on each other, and sometimes pulled apart, examining each other’s faces briefly and then pressing close again.
At two o’clock in the morning I went into the bedroom and climbed in beside James. He stirred but didn’t wake.
At four I woke up again, pulled on my crumpled skirt and blouse, and washed my face in the cramped bathroom. At the front door I took the pistol out of the packed suitcase and stood looking at it. It was so heavy in my hand, even though it was unloaded. The radio was still playing, very low; I turned it off. The box of bullets was in the suitcase.
I put six bullets in the gun. As I finished I glanced up and saw my reflection in the window, a girl dressed like a legal secretary holding a gun without authority. I straightened my blouse with my free hand. I tried to clear the anxiety out of my face. It didn’t help. The girl in the window raised the gun and aimed: she looked ridiculous. I clicked the chamber open and emptied the gun, let the bullets rattle back into the box, and put the pistol in my purse.
Outside the streets were hushed, the sky still dark. I walked out to the avenue and hailed a cab, and then sat rigidly alert in the back as the driver murmured and chattered. Dawn was breaking; the sky over Puerto Madero was turning gray, and then the pink of the inside of a shell. Soon we had left the density of the city and turned onto a straight two-lane road that rolled on for miles past rows of leafless young tipa trees, their branches sinuous and black against the sky. Flocks of black birds were beginning to stir. After all this time I was unprepared for the quiet outside of the city, which I could feel even through the grumbling of the car. My stomach had become dense and hard. I hadn’t eaten in hours but couldn’t imagine making any attempt at breakfast, even when the driver stopped with apologies at a gas station to fill the tank and asked gallantly if I wanted a hot biscuit or empanada from the whitewashed cantina at the edge of the lot.
The airport that Victoria had mentioned was small and alone in a vast open space. Lights twinkled from a low sheet-metal building at the far end of a long dirt runway; in the distance, poplar windbreaks divided fields of tall grass, and black cows huddled beside the brush of a stream. On a pitted tarmac half a dozen small planes waited, painted cheerfully with stripes.
I couldn’t go into the building because that was where Victoria and Román and their friends would be, and I couldn’t let them see me until the last moment. I paid the driver and pulled my suitcase out of the trunk, and he reversed and turned slowly and bumped over the holes in the asphalt back to the main road. I watched him go for a long time. Nothing interrupted the view out here. He was probably forgetting me already, his mind back in Buenos Aires, even while I could still see his car.
There was a bench on one side of the metal building. I sat there with my suitcase and watched the sun coming up behind the row of airplanes, which had an alert, doglike quality in the stillness. At any moment Victoria and Román would come out of the building and head for the plane, along with the rest of their little party and the pilot, some friend of theirs with a license that he had earned flying a four-seater over the province of Santa Fe. They would be cheery with relief to be escaping Buenos Aires. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had once hidden out in Patagonia for a while. They robbed a bank in Río Gallegos and then crossed the empty steppes and found a cabin in the foothills of the Andes. I had seen a comic book about it at a newsstand in Palermo Chico. There was optimism in the thought.
As a child I had taken a train with my parents out to Omaha for the funeral of my great-uncle, and the waving grass and tireless sky of the Argentine campo reminded me of Nebraska. There was little to interrupt my thoughts. I was expanding and contracting with anxiety, and there was nothing to anchor me. The sun was free of the horizon now and the silence was complete, apart from the rustling and clinking I could hear through a steam vent in the wall behind me and the flitting and chirping of small birds.
A door on metal hinges screeched open behind me and there was Román in a shabby camel coat, cupping his hands to light a cigarette. It took him a moment to see me there, sitting with my knees together beside my brown suitcase, hunched against the morning chill. His eyebrows went up slowly, and he took the cigarette from between his lips.
“Anne,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Román.”
“What are you doing here?”
I sat up, relaxed my shoulders, pushed my hair out of my face. “Victoria didn’t tell you?”
He had gone white. I needed Victoria to come out of the building as well. I needed the whole party to be here, and no one else, so this could be accomplished quickly, smoothly. I could hear pounding and rushing in my ears, like waves on a pebble beach.
“I really don’t know about this,” he said.
I put my hand in my bag and let it rest on the handle of the unloaded gun. I smiled carefully at him. “I won’t be any trouble at all,” I said. “I just need a lift. You know?”
“This won’t work,” he said.
The door opened again, and out came Victoria and a girl with a dark pixie cut. Victoria’s face was uncharacteristically grim. There was a tightness to her jaw, and then she looked over and saw me and her mouth dropped open, as if she had seen a ghost.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I told you.”
The girl with the pixie cut looked back and forth between the two of us. A young man came through the door, turning up his collar against the breeze.
“Is this everyone?” I said.
Victoria and Román were staring at each other silently. Victoria was shaking her head. The second young man looked puzzled.
“Is this everyone?” I said again, more loudly, my hands closing around the handle of the gun.
“Yes, just us four. Not you,” Victoria said.
“You can’t be here,” Román said. “You don’t understand. This is a very stupid thing you’ve done.”
“I’m coming,” I said. “I’m sorry. There’s no other way.” My throat was so dry that it was difficult to form the words. At any moment someone else might come through the door, another pilot or passenger or anyone at all, and then there would be too many to manage and there would be witnesses. I drew the pistol from my bag and aimed at Victoria. A chorus of obscenities rose from the other three like sparrows from tall grass.
“Anne,” Victoria said, and I was not prepared for this, the sight of real fear in her eyes. I had never threatened anyone before. But my hand was steady.
“You’re taking me with you,” I said. “Quickly. Now. Which plane?”
Victoria and Román looked at each other again, and this time there was despair on both faces.
“What have you done?” Román said to her.
“She has to come,” Victoria said. “I don’t see any other way. We can’t draw attention.”
“Look at me, not at him,” I said. “Which plane?” I waved Victoria toward the row of planes with the barrel of the gun, the way people did in films. She shook her head briefly at Román and walked toward the second plane in the lot. The other three followed her.
“Don’t run and don’t yell,” I said to their backs. Behind us the building was quiet. The second man climbed into a small plane with a blue stripe and started the engines. The roar filled the air, and through the cool air churned up by the propellers Victoria looked at me with derision and pity.
“You should really have listened to me,” she said.
Our hair was battered back from our faces. My skirt flapped violently around my legs. Victoria stood with her back to this whirlwind, her arms crossed tightly across her body, and there was something I couldn’t plumb in her expression.
“Get in,” I said, and then shouted it again over the noise of the propeller. She climbed into the plane and I went just behind her, shoving my suitcase ahead of me and then clambering in. I had to bend and shuffle to squeeze past the first and second rows of seats, and there was no way to do it but to bluster through those moments of vulnerability, elbows in, as if I had planned it this way. The handle of the gun felt hot in my hand. I sat in the third row with my suitcase by my feet and rested the gun across my knees. The pilot began a long and careful review of the control panel. Victoria leaned over the back of her seat and looked into my eyes.
“Put this on,” she said finally. She held out a pair of headphones.
“What for?” I said.
“So you don’t go deaf,” she said.
I put out my hand for them, and then pulled it back and shook my head. I needed to hear as much as I could. Victoria shrugged and put the headphones on herself. The engine was loud but not deafening, and I could hear stray words passing between the pilot and Román in the seat next to him. Time and weather, fuel, the sun; storms somewhere to the south. Once or twice the pilot glanced back at me. I wondered if I looked frightening. Once we had taken off I would be able to relax. Our disparate aims would resolve into one. I wouldn’t matter anymore, and the bullets that my gun did not contain wouldn’t matter either. The way I had forced myself onto the plane would look, in retrospect, like an embarrassing but forgivable lapse in manners, as if I had gotten too drunk at a dinner party. Maybe there was even something droll in Victoria’s expression, as if she were pleased at my spirit.
The plane rolled along the packed dirt. The pilot and Román had put on their own headphones; the girl with the pixie cut kept twisting around in her seat to stare at me and chew her nails. I could see out through the windshield to the perfectly straight lines of the runway, which ended in the sea of grass.
I had never been in a plane as small as this eight-seater Britten-Norman. It rattled and bounced lightly on the runway, like a pinewood derby car. It smelled like fuel and hot grease and the old fabric that covered the seats. The window beside me was broad and square like the window of a bus, and I looked out at the grasses sliding by. The engines kicked into a higher gear, and I began to feel the suspension and pressure that had always thrilled me on airplanes. There was a sand-colored dog running through the long grass at the edge of the strip. I watched it run joyfully, falling farther and farther behind, blurred and indistinct and the color of the earth, and then the plane lifted off from the runway and I watched the dog raise its head to follow us.
The fact of being airborne was always astonishing. The chatter between the pilot and Román had stopped. There was only the engine and the gleam of the sky through the windshield, and for a few moments we banked left and the ground disappeared. I had not expected the steep angles of flight in such a small craft. My stomach was unsettled. I was happy to be free of the city that had been closing in on me for months but I felt that I would miss it too. I hoped we would fly over it, or near it. I wanted to see it spreading out across the sodden low earth, and then the immense breadth of the Río de la Plata overtaking and dwarfing it, as I had seen it from the plane when I landed nearly nine months before.
Victoria turned again and watched me over the back of the seat. With the headphones on she looked vaguely like a wartime telephone operator. She was chewing gum, probably to keep her ears from popping, but it made her look bored, and I wondered again if I was misunderstanding which one of us was the dangerous one at this moment.
“How long will it be?” I said.
“Four or five hours,” she said. “It depends on the wind. We’ll have to refuel.”
Below us a town knitted itself together out of prairie roads and railroad tracks. The ground was a dull winter color. A meandering river shone up at us, flat and immaculate.
“Are you really a student?” Victoria said.
I felt impatient. “Hush,” I said, and then, in English to myself, “Christ.” She rested her head on her hands on the back of the seat, looking at me with her wide doll’s eyes. She had gotten her roots touched up.
“Are you really from Toronto?” she said. “Where did you get that gun?”
I laughed. She stared steadily at me, but I kept laughing.
“Why not be honest now?” she said.
“Why not, indeed?” I said. If she had been anyone else, she might have blushed. I couldn’t guess what she was hiding now, but there was something, and she knew that I knew it.
“You wouldn’t really shoot me,” she said.
“You’re free to take your odds,” I said.
The girl with the pixie cut tugged on Victoria’s jacket, giving me a frightened look, as if trying to guide a child away from a tiger enclosure at the zoo. I wondered if they were lovers. What had Román said—What have you done? That was the complaint of a cuckold if I ever heard one. There had been fatigue in his voice as well as panic. It must be hard for him, I thought now for the first time, trailing around after Victoria in a frothy wake of bewitched girls, listening while she went glassy-eyed talking about Argentine territorial integrity or whatever it was that was keeping her awake these last months. I had always been puzzled by her politics, the way she was enthralled by the symbolic but seemed so bored by the day-today. She disliked Onganía but seemed to see the coup as occurring on a plane of events that was fundamentally not relevant to her. She was bare-breasted Liberty astride a barricade in one of those old French paintings. Liberty carried a sword and was illuminated with heavenly light; she didn’t care about beef tariffs or excise taxes.
I could see a storm now in the distance to the west, soft and gray, quite low over the land. When would I have a chance to eat again? When we stopped to refuel, I guessed. I twisted a button on my coat back and forth, trying to think what dangers the pit stop might raise and how I could manage them. Victoria might try to lose me, given the chance. Strand me on an airstrip somewhere in the upper margin of Patagonia. I would have to insist on staying in the plane while they refueled. But what if they went away and brought back the police, and I was sitting there placidly in the third row of seats with the gun across my knees? But they wouldn’t. They were as afraid of the police as I was. If I could stay in the plane, I would be all right.
Back in the States I had heard of girls hitching rides on twin props, charming one pilot after another. The pilots were like truckers: they liked company, and conversation helped them stay awake. I had known a girl from Seattle who spent the summer seasons in Alaska that way, working her way from timber camps to canneries along the Pacific coast and into the tundra. Some of the California girls who came from the ranches did it too. It was exotic to me. The landscape we passed over now was the ordinary gray of a temperate winter in a rainy climate, but in a few hours we would reach the edge of one of the great cold deserts of the world.
“Will we fly over Buenos Aires?” I said to Victoria.
“Of course not,” she said. “We haven’t filed our charter. We would crash into someone.”
I said nothing.
“You’ll miss it?” she said.
I glanced at her.
“You’re funny,” she said, shaking her head. “Even after all this?”
I thought of Nico. The intricacy of his knowledge, his connections, his commitment. Our peculiar alignment. I felt a rush of humiliation again at his betrayal. It must have been so easy for him to do it. I was never a real part of his world. No foreigner ever could have been. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be rooted anywhere as deeply as Nico Fermetti was rooted in Barracas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Do you have a boyfriend back home?” Victoria said.
“No.”
“You are a lonely girl,” Victoria said.
This seemed like an insolent way to talk to a woman holding a gun. She read this thought, also, in my expression. “A lot of people are lonely,” she said quickly.
“Are you?” I said.
“Never,” she said. “I have a purpose.”
She looked very placid when she said it. This was the kind of thing that made her seem much younger than twenty-seven.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “A purpose doesn’t keep you company.”
“Mine does,” she said.
I disliked her certainty. “Do you love Román?” I said. I had to say it loudly to be heard over the droning of the plane. But the other passengers were wearing headphones, and it felt like a long way from the back of the plane to the front where the two men sat.
“Of course,” she said.
“But you lie to him. You do things behind his back.”
“Not the important things,” she said. “With the important things we are 100 percent together.”
“What are the important things?”
She was silent again. She smiled slowly. She was pleased and jittery, as if containing some great news. I couldn’t understand it. I was aware again of the gun resting on my skirt. When I reached up to smooth my hair, my skin smelled like hot metal, like a handful of change.
“Why did you come here?” Victoria said.
“To this plane?”
She rolled her eyes. “To this country.”
“To study,” I said.
She leaned closer to me over the back of her seat. “I should have known you were lying,” she said.
I looked out the window. The sky was a weak, shining color. I could see feathery shapes on the ground that were the long shadows of leafless windbreaks.
“When I called your apartment the first time, you sounded guilty,” she said. “I told myself it was nothing.”
“Guilty of what?” I said.
She shrugged and subsided into her seat. That was the last we spoke for hours. The drone of the plane was hypnotic and I struggled to stay awake. The earth beneath the plane was nearly featureless, and the chill inside the Britten-Norman got into my blood and slowed me down, making me feel heavy and faintly despairing. After two hours I would have given a hundred pesos for a hot cup of coffee and a ham sandwich. I spent a third hour regretting, in great detail, my moody refusal of breakfast from the taxi driver. The fact that I was hungry made me feel incompetent. In fact, there was a heavy cloak of incompetence over everything that had happened over the last few weeks. Agents in retreat were supposed to have a certain kind of savoir faire. I had often felt competent and necessary in the Confitería del Molino, but this kind of thing, the gun and the airplane, was not my scene. Victoria’s head was bent, and when I leaned forward I saw that she was reading a book of patriotic poems. This struck me as insane, perhaps the first truly insane thing I had seen her do.
The plane was so small that its transitions were abrupt; several hours into the flight we dropped steeply through a cloud bank and approached a streak on the horizon that resolved into a runway. I shook Victoria’s shoulder.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Refueling,” she said.
“But where are we?”
“Comodoro Rivadavia.”
One of the oil cities of Patagonia. The airport we were approaching was stranded alone on a plain at the foot of a ridge, and a low city spread out to the south. Beyond was the ocean. It was late morning by now, but there was a dark cast to the air. The humid spring that had already begun in Buenos Aires was not evident here. The mountains below were olive drab. The plane bounced in the air, which made me feel sick.
The descent was turbulent, and I discovered that I could remember most of the words to the Lord’s Prayer. Victoria was cursing softly to herself as the runway tilted and swung into view. The landing knocked me forward into the back of her seat. Nausea threatened. I collected myself while the plane taxied, checking my mouth for blood with one hand and finding my grip on the gun with the other. The young pilot was on the radio. I climbed awkwardly out of my seat and tried to reach him. I was tangled in a belt of some kind.
“Tell him not to say a word!” I yelled to Román, who was in the copilot’s seat. “Not a word!”
Román looked alarmed. “He won’t,” he said. “He won’t say anything.”
“The police would take you away as well as me,” I said.
“He won’t say anything,” Román said again.
“Calm down, mi amor,” Victoria said to me. “No one wants police. Please don’t be agitated.”
“I’m staying in while you refuel,” I said.
“We all are, except the boys,” Victoria said.
I smoothed my hair. “Bring food,” I called to the pilot and Román, who were climbing down from the plane. “Do you hear me?”
The refueling took a long time. I had to pee. There was no good way to take care of it. The men were gone for thirty minutes, maybe forty-five. Could I climb down and crouch on the tarmac under the plane? Out across the long runway, crews of luggage men went to and fro with carts. A group of mechanics in green coveralls worked on a Boeing a hundred yards away. I would look crazy, squatting under the plane. It would draw attention. The airport terminal loomed.
“Victoria, do you have to use the bathroom?” I said.
She looked back at me with intense relief. “In the most terrible way,” she said.
“Okay, we both go,” I said. “You stay with me. All right?”
“Anything, anything.”
The girl with the pixie cut wanted to come too. We climbed down and began the long walk to the terminal. I put the gun in my purse but kept my fingers on it. The mechanics in the green coveralls waved at us, blew kisses. The sun had nearly come out; it was a hot white spot in the low sky. The two girls walked ahead of me.
The inside of the terminal was bustling, tidy. A row of navy officers in uniform sat along the bar of the café, reading newspapers. We found an empty ladies’ room at the far end and, after some hesitation, I hung my purse with the gun in it from the hook on the back of the stall door. Everything I did while in possession of the gun was made ridiculous by it.
I washed my hands at the basin alongside Victoria and the other girl, the weighted purse sliding insistently down over my hip. Victoria studied herself in the polished steel mirror and adjusted the pin in her hair.
“I saw a stand with croissants,” the girl said.
“Can we?” Victoria said.
We bought bags of chocolate croissants and beef empanadas. I paid. “My treat,” I said. I felt delirious. The girls were both glassy-eyed. We pushed through the revolving doors and walked back to the plane, tearing into the bags as we went. The sun had come out and we seemed to be walking into an utterly empty planet that had nothing but the bare mountains and the little Britten-Norman in it.
The boys were waiting for us in the plane. They had bought pastries as well, and we sat in silence for a few minutes, eating. I felt warm again, and hopeful. There were crumbs in my hair. I decided that when we were in the air again I would tell them there were no bullets in the gun.
We taxied, waited twenty minutes for the all clear from the tower, and took off. The mountains below us looked velvety in the sunlight, wrinkled and soft like the hide of an animal. The plane banked and I was blinded by the sun streaming in the window. I thought again that I might vomit, and groped around under my seat for the paper bag that the croissants had come in. I bent down to look for it and felt cold air streaming in through a bolt-hole at my heel. I tried not to think too hard about it. The plane turned east. The bay of Comodoro Rivadavia, ringed with white, disappeared behind us. I looked down into the deep blue of open ocean. I felt a rush of fear.
Victoria was looking at me over the back of her seat again.
“Why don’t you give me that pistol,” she said.
“Why are we over the ocean?”
She held out her hand. Her nails were painted pink.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“There are four of us,” she said. “There is one of you. Just give it to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said. Over her shoulder I could see the girl with the pixie cut, whose name seemed to be Silvia, watching the two of us. “Just tell me where we’re going.”
“You can’t fly this plane,” Victoria said. “So you can’t kill anyone.”
“That’s ridiculous. I can kill everyone but the pilot.”
I tried to see what Román and the pilot were doing. The backs of their heads gave nothing away.
“You know you won’t shoot anyone,” she said.
“Tell me where we’re going,” I said.
“It may upset you.”
“Why aren’t we going to Ushuaia? Where are we going?”
“No one’s destiny is in Ushuaia,” she said.
“Mine is,” I said. “My destiny is absolutely in Ushuaia, you lunatic.”
There was a lurch and a crash of pain. When I opened my eyes again I was on the floor, or not quite on the floor but wedged between the seats, with blood in my hair and on the left side of my face, and my head was throbbing. I turned with great difficulty and looked up. Victoria was framed against the white light at the window. In one hand she held a wrench with my blood on it, and in the other she held my gun.
“This is too light,” she said, waving the .22.
“Ow,” I said.
She opened the chamber and gave me a look of deep disappointment.
“Aahh,” I said. I had forgotten Spanish and most of English. “You hit me.”
“There are no bullets in the gun,” she called over her shoulder to the others. She dropped it on the seat and leaned over me. She was kneeling, like a child on a school bus craning to see a fight. “We are going to the Malvinas. You should not have come.”
“What—what for?” I said.
“To tear down the English flag,” she said, and then she smiled, and she was radiant.
For an hour I lay in the back seat, lifting my hand every so often to feel the blood coagulated in my hair, assuring myself it had not begun to bleed again, and trying to think what to do. I lay dreaming like that, defeated.
“How will you get away?” I said finally.
Victoria glanced over at me. “They will take us away.”
“Who?”
“The English Navy, you idiot.”
“That’s what you want?”
“We want to tear down the flag. Sacrifice ourselves for la patria.”
“Sacrifice?”
“Revolutionaries often go to prison.”
I thought again about vomiting.
“I think you’re a spy,” Victoria said.
I wondered if I was about to die. Would they do it here, on the plane? It would be messy in a small space.
“I told you not to come,” Victoria said. “You didn’t listen to me.”
“I’m not a spy,” I said weakly. “What flag, anyway?”
“We’ll find one. We’re landing in Stanley. It’s the capital. There must be flags.”
For another hour I said nothing. I was trying not to fall asleep. I probably had a concussion. I could see that the English would arrest us instantly when we arrived. Everything depended on whether I could get separated from the others and convince someone to let me get Gerry on the phone.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” I muttered to Victoria. “I don’t see what it’s good for.” Why does the KGB care about restoring the Falklands to Argentina, was what I meant to say. What does it matter to them?
“I said you shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Why would they help you do this?”
She looked back at me over the seat. “They?”
I said nothing further. Everything was off, tilted to the side.
“You’ve behaved very badly,” she said. “Back at the airport, I thought you might ruin everything. But now I see it doesn’t make any difference that you’re here.”
She picked up the book of poems again. The sun was going down by then, and the light in the plane was honey-colored. She looked like a government poster for literacy.
She was not KGB. None of them were.
I propped myself up, drawing in a deep breath. Victoria didn’t look up, and I lay down again. The pain in my head made it hard to think.
None of them were KGB. They were just students, acting out a fantasy about la patria. The only agent on that plane was me, and I was fighting a proxy war against no one.
“There it is,” Silvia said. “I see it.”
I pushed myself up and looked out the window. Below us, in the slanting light, a new horizon rose from the sea. The tension in the airplane lifted. They were joyful. Afraid, but also joyful. The plane bumped through the air as if over a country road. We were beginning to drop.
Victoria hummed to herself. I touched the crusted blood over my ear again.
The Falkland Islands, the Malvinas, opened up beneath us. Dusk was gathering over the ocean and a few lights twinkled already along the coast. A port and a handful of white houses appeared, and then steadily drifted away beneath us. Two white roads threaded through a dun expanse like an English moor. For a few minutes we seemed to be following one of the roads, meandering slightly to match the way it curved through a low mountain range. The land was empty. I remembered that there were only a few thousand people living here.
“What is all this for, Victoria?” I said. “Don’t you see there’s nobody here?”
“It’s for Argentina.”
“What does Argentina need this rock for?”
“It’s not for the rock,” she said. “It’s for the idea.”
We were passing over the interior. Far to the south I could see the Atlantic gilded by the sunset, but the land below us seemed to swallow light. I thought I could see a single white truck on the road beneath us. It rolled and rolled through low, treeless mountains. There were no buildings anywhere.
At last Stanley appeared. There was a narrow bay like a fjord, gleaming in the late sun, and beside it, when my eyes adjusted, there was a patch of gridded streets where tiny yellow lights were beginning to come on. The plane droned on. The town looked lonely and small with the dimming interior at its back. I wondered if Victoria and company might be foiled in their mission by a sheer lack of witnesses. What if they got out of the plane and found a flag to tear down and no one noticed? I stared intently at the town. We were beginning to bank. I couldn’t see much on the water. No ships at anchor in the bay. A few jetties reached into the water, flanked by boats. I searched the ground for signs of the airport. The Britten-Norman was circling, corkscrewing lower, but I couldn’t tell where we were headed.
“Where’s the airport?” I shouted to Victoria. The engines were growing louder as we descended.
“There is none,” she said.
“What?”
“There is none,” she said, as if this information were not at all interesting. “There’s no airport on the whole island. Everything comes by sea.”
All the blood rushed to my face. “Where the hell are you going to land?” I said.
“We’re looking for a place,” she said. “Someplace flat,” she added.
I hadn’t considered that I might die in this particular way. I gripped the vinyl seat and thought of my mother.
“Are you trying to kill yourselves?” I said.
“Of course not,” Victoria said.
Silvia was fishing under her seat. She straightened up and brushed her hair out of her face; she was holding a square blue-and-white package, the Argentine flag folded so that the golden sun showed. The boys in the front were chattering excitedly to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. We were circling lower and lower. I could see cars now, and the shrubbery in front yards. The spire of a church passed beneath us. An ambulance—a red cross painted on the roof—crept along a narrow street.
“But if we can’t—” I offered, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
We headed out over the bay, then inland again. The pilot shouted something, and Victoria said, “There’s a soccer field.” She leaned forward. “On a soccer field there won’t be any flag to tear down,” she said. “But we can lay this one out, anyway.”
I couldn’t see a soccer field. Through the right-side window I could see only blocks of houses. The plane shuddered. I covered my face with my hands.
“Nacho is a great pilot,” Victoria said. “Once he landed on a lake in Bariloche.”
The soccer field slid into view from the south, a brown rectangle bordered on one side by the last houses of Stanley, on the other side by a hurricane fence that faced into the rolling plain. The pilot would have to set the plane down between the houses and the fence; it was a distance of perhaps a hundred yards. My mind was blank with fear. Victoria was holding my hand. The view through the windshield of the Britten-Norman was only earth now. A blue car turned onto the narrow street that girded the field, and then stopped, and a person got out and looked up. We were so low that I could see he was wearing a scarf. The nose of the plane jerked upward. My head started to bleed again. A torrid sunset filled the windshield, and then two white houses, side by side, in ordinary human scale, and then we hit the ground and rolled.
I was thrown to the floor by the landing and struggled to get into my seat again while Nacho wrestled with the plane. It took only a few seconds to come to a stop. I crawled up onto the seat, but I was dizzy, and I sank forward and pressed my face into the back of Victoria’s seat. My feet were braced on the floor. I began to be aware of my body again, feet and hands, seething gut. The engines cut out. Silence descended over all of us.
Victoria was saying something but I couldn’t make it out. I could hear her voice in the ringing quiet, but her words wouldn’t resolve. I watched her turn toward me and back toward Román, who was clambering back over the seats. She looked frightened and thrilled. They were all talking at once now and none of it made any sense, like the chatter of birds. Victoria pulled a handkerchief from her coat, balled it into my hand, and pressed it to my head. I looked down at my dress. My left shoulder was stained black with blood.
We climbed down out of the plane onto the soccer pitch. My knees were shaking. Our faces were filled with orange light. Silvia and Victoria and Román spread the flag out on the cold ground, singing and crying. Their shadows were twenty feet long, reaching toward the darkness that came over the hills behind us. A small crowd was forming in the street that edged the field to the north. I could see them gathering, conferring. There was a woman in a kerchief, two men in overcoats. I thought I was cold, but I still couldn’t feel my body very well.
The four young Argentines linked arms. They must have looked striking from the street, standing behind the flag, ten feet of pale blue nylon spread out on the ground, the white plane at rest behind them on the pitch. I stood off to the side, thinking, breathing quickly. It had been five minutes now since we had landed. The cluster of men and women were beginning to come across the street. Neighbors were coming out of houses up and down the block. Victoria and Román and Silvia and Nacho swayed back and forth, singing the himno nacional. I folded the handkerchief that was in my hand and tied it over my head so it covered the wound on my temple.
“Who are you? What is this?” a man called out. English voices. There was a sharp evening wind in our faces that smelled like the ocean. In the distance, a siren was going off.
“Vinimos por la patria,” Victoria called out.
“Who are you?” called a woman. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“A derrotar el imperialismo inglés,” Román shouted.
There were two dozen people on the pitch now, and more coming. I clutched my coat around myself. A tremor was running down my back and legs.
“The police are coming,” a man said.
“This stupid bloody business,” said a woman near me.
Victoria and Román and their friends sang and shouted in Spanish, pink-cheeked, euphoric. The woman closest to me was staring at me curiously, as if I were a member of a species not only alien to her but also clearly alien to the four young Argentines on the pitch. She wore glasses with thick frames and a man’s wool hat, pulled on hastily over curled hair.
“Hello,” I said. She started.
“You speak English,” she said. Then, “What’s happening here?”
It seemed pointless to try to answer that. Behind her, a dark sedan with a flashing light on the roof turned off the road and drove slowly onto the grass, followed at a block’s distance by a second. Victoria raised her arms and crossed her wrists, as if to welcome her arrest. A man came up behind the woman in glasses and peered at me.
“You could have killed someone,” he said, “flying that damn thing in here.”
My head was bleeding again. I pressed my hand to it. Policemen climbed out of the two cars, which were parked at angles to each other, their lights flashing silently. A third car appeared at the end of the street. I was dizzy.
“She’s bleeding,” somebody murmured.
The policemen were handcuffing Nacho and Román. Victoria was the last to go, and just before they put the cuffs on her she dived at the ground and snatched up the flag. The wind caught it, and it billowed like a sail. Then someone pulled it out of her grip and twisted her arms behind her back.
The woman in glasses put her hand on my sleeve and stared into my face. “Harry,” she said, and the man with her stepped forward and grasped my other arm. The three of us gazed solemnly at each other.
“It’s all right,” I said, and then, without knowing that I was going to say it, “I just want to lie down.”
“She’s American,” the woman said. “Harry, I don’t understand it.”
The tallest and heaviest of the policemen cuffed me. “Where’s this blood coming from?” he said, turning my hand palm-up, which twisted it uncomfortably against the small of my back.
“She’s bleeding from the head,” the woman said.
The policeman walked me toward the last car. Strands of my hair blew across my face, into my mouth. The other four had been driven away already. Dark was falling quickly.
“Is this a joke?” a male voice said, but I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to me.
In the car I stared silently at my knees. The ringing in my ears hadn’t stopped, and I felt sweaty and faint. The officer in front kept looking at me in the rearview mirror. I could feel blood pooling in my ear.
“Where do you come from?” said the officer on the passenger side.
I said nothing. I remembered the story of the U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union. He ejected from the plane and a group of villagers found him sitting in a turnip field, having fallen thirteen miles with a silk parachute.
“She’s in shock,” said the driver.
“Is the doctor in?” said the other.
“He’ll have heard by now.”
We got out of the car in front of a small gray building, identified over the door with the word HOSPITAL. The emergency ward was a little room divided in two with a curtain; I was the sole patient. A ruddy doctor examined me, speaking in an odd Falklander burr to the two policemen, who waited respectfully on the other side of the curtain. A nurse appeared with a thermos full of tea and a blanket. The doctor shined a light in my eyes.
“She’s concussed,” he said. “She’ll need a rest and fluids. A few stitches as well.” He clicked the light off and considered me. “Well, that’ll be a story,” he said.
He shaved a patch above my ear so he could stitch up the cut. Afterward, while I lay back in the bed with my scalp numb and my brain beginning to throb again, the nurse would not let me go to sleep. “Dangerous,” she said. She was small, gray-haired, her smock hastily buttoned over a housedress. “I was roasting a chicken. Wasn’t expecting this tonight.” She sat beside me for an hour, reading a magazine, while an IV bag dripped into my veins. I started to return to myself, although the lights in the room were bleary, and voices in the hallway had a warped quality.
The policemen came back, and the nurse excused herself.
“Perhaps you could explain what happened here this evening,” said the taller one. He was standing against the light, which was much too bright; I squinted painfully at him.
“Call the CIA,” I croaked.
“The what?”
I pushed myself up on my elbows and felt the tug of the IV. “Is this an English jurisdiction?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Call Gerald Carey,” I said. “I’m CIA.”
They looked at each other. The shorter of the two men walked slowly to the door that led to the hallway and pulled it shut.
“The other four say they’re here to take back the islands for Argentina,” observed the taller man.
“When I got on the plane with them,” I said with great deliberation, “I was mistaken about the purpose of the trip.”
I tried to start at the beginning, but the story was filled with switchbacks and the two men kept interrupting me with questions. The shorter man was taking notes in a book, and he kept scratching out what he had written and turning to a fresh page. The nurse appeared with sandwiches for them, the smell of which turned my stomach, although I was hungry. She had not yet given me anything to eat.
“Why does the CIA give a damn about these kids?” said the shorter man finally.
“We thought they were KGB,” I said.
“KGB? This nonsense with the flag?”
“Well, it looks like we were wrong,” I said, closing my eyes.
It wasn’t until years later, when all the statutes of limitations had expired and the Falklands Invaders were being frank in interviews, that I learned what the target of the July bombing plot had been. It was a statue of Sir Francis Drake that was under construction at that time in one of the parks along the waterfront. Román had felt that to honor an English pirate while Argentine islands were under the yoke of the English Navy was too much to bear. They had planned to set off the bomb on Argentina’s Independence Day, the ninth of July.
By the next morning, when I woke in the Stanley hospital with the worst headache of my life, the incident was in the international pages all over the world under the heading FALKLANDS INVASION. There was a picture of Victoria mugging happily at the camera from the single jail cell in Stanley she shared with her co-conspirators, the flag wrapped around her shoulders. I didn’t see it until later. A cable came from the State Department overnight, requesting safe passage home for me, and that my name and photo be withheld.