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Page 249
His recent memories were scrambled. He remembered the crossing from Mexico into Texas. Before that there had been the Mexican coyotes. And long, long ago, there had been the steaming heat of the Mosquito Coast and Russian bodies floating in the sea among feeding sharks.
He sometimes wondered if those memories were real. Certainly the Pravda was gone, and with it, all those murdered shipmates. How could it have happened? Far, far away, in another life, he had been a marine biologist, a diver, a scientist. He remembered that clearly, and yet how was it possible? This room, this place, was in America.
Somewhere to the north, in deep, dark water, there lay a monstrous thing that he had helped to put there. He could not remember why he had done this terrible thing. Since the shark had taken his hand, he had been beyond memory, almost without identity. But he remembered the look of the great dark thing at the bottom of the bay. He had helped to awaken it. Now it must be killed.
Karmann closed his eyes and dozed fitfully. His dreams were haunted by images of Krasny, shooting at him from the sail of the doomed submarine. In each dream, he threw himself into the water to escape the bullets, only to be faced with the horror of the sharks, circling, frenzied, in the bloodstained water. Each time, he saw with dread that it was his own bloodhisstaining the sea. He forced himself to stay awake, hoping for surcease from the terror.
But soon he slept again, and this time he dreamed of the illegals drowning in the flash flood, the hovering helicopter with its spear of blue-white light . . . He came awake with a strangled cry, only then realizing that the sounds he heard were made by the machine monitoring his vital signs.
Sick as he was, he had accomplished a very difficult thing. He had survived Krasny, survived the sea and the sharks, survived the weeks on the Mosquito Coast, then three thousand kilometers of solitary travel. He had done it, mostly without funds or assistance, save from unsavory characters like the

 
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