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Page 25
He leaned against the steel of the low conning tower and tried to quiet his stomach. I may have my death in me already, he thought. Nobody really knew how much plutonium contamination one could stand.
There have been too many deaths already. The divers in the water in Canada. The unknown pilot of the floatplane. The seven sailors on the voyage south. And how many more before this nightmare cruise ends?
Captain Lieutenant Krasny appeared atop the sail and began searching the horizon to the southeast with large binoculars. Karmann remained hidden against the black steel tower. He resented the very idea of having to explain to Krasny that he had permission to be on deck. Krasny would order him below for no reason other than sheer bloody-minded beastliness.
Krasny could see Karmann only if he should look directly down over the aft spray shield on the submarine's sail. His attention, however, was elsewhere.
Karmann rested his head against the humming steel of the sail and studied the wake. Though the Pravda had come from the northeast, the wake curved to the west. There was a strong current in that direction, running through the Windward Passage between the southeast tip of Cuba and Hispaniola. Karmann, whose mathematically oriented academician's mind took note of such things, estimated that the boat was now close to latitude 18 north. The winter sun was very near the zenith. To the southeast lay the islands of the Spanish Main.
Behind the Pravda lay the Yucatan Channel; to the southwest at a distance of over four hundred kilometers of winter sea was the bent hock of Central America: Nicaragua and the Mosquito Coast of Honduras.
Krasny's open contempt of Karmann had led to continuing harassment. Krasny, of course, had heard the whispers. The Karmann family was descended from one of Peter the Great's Prussian mercenary officers, the illegitimate son of a Jewish mother, forced by his racial "taint" to take service with a foreign monarch.

 
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