Reborn in 1970 INDIA

September 2 – September 4, 1979

The Cuanza Line, Angola • José Martí Airport, Havana • Hotel Habana Libre • The Palacio de las Convenciones, Havana

In war, a miracle is a non-renewable resource.

In the third week of August 1978, when an unseasonal equatorial cloudburst had washed away the concrete spans of the Cuanza River bridge and trapped an entire Cuban mechanized battalion and three MPLA infantry regiments against a ten-knot flood torrent, the Forças Democráticas de Angola (FDA)—trained in the bush for three years by Devraj Nair, Ranjit Kapoor, and Subedar Major Prakash Rao Deshmukh—had cashed in that miracle for everything it was worth. Over forty days between August and October 1978, before Moscow or Havana could comprehend that a guerrilla nuisance had mutated into a combined-arms army equipped with wire-guided missiles and frequency-hopping radios, the FDA had overrun the Bié Plateau, captured Huambo, severed the Benguela railway to the Atlantic coast, and punched north into the copper-transit corridors of Zaire's Shaba province.

Then the rains stopped, the dry season hardened the red laterite clay, and the unforgiving laws of logistics reasserted themselves.

A fourteen-thousand-man infantry vanguard marching on foot and captured trucks cannot conquer a country twice the size of France without an air force, and it cannot repeat a surprise ambush once the enemy knows you carry three-thousand-metre anti-tank missiles in your packs.

By November 1978, facing the total, humiliating annihilation of the Soviet-Cuban enterprise in southern Africa, the Kremlin and Fidel Castro had thrown everything short of nuclear weapons into holding the coastal bastion of Luanda and the oil-producing enclave of Cabinda. Over four frantic months, seventy flights of Soviet Antonov An-22 heavy transports and sixteen roll-on/roll-off military cargo ships from Odessa and Havana had poured two hundred T-62 tanks, forty MiG-23ML fighter-bombers, thirty-six armoured Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, and twenty-two thousand fresh Cuban regular soldiers into the Luanda perimeter—bringing total Cuban troop strength in Angola to forty-eight thousand men.

Devraj Nair and Subedar Major Deshmukh were professionals; they did not send lightly armed African infantry charging across open coastal plains into the teeth of Soviet Mi-24 gunships and massed BM-21 Grad rocket launchers just to take a capital city they would then have to feed.

Instead, sixty miles southeast of Luanda, along the jagged escarpment where the central highlands dropped down toward the coastal plain and the Cuanza River basin, the FDA had stopped advancing and started digging.

Throughout the twelve months from September 1978 to September 1979, the war in Angola had hardened into a brutal, semi-conventional partition across the Cuanza–Benguela Line. South and east of that line—across a territory the size of West Germany encompassing Huambo, Bié, Kuando Kubango, the port of Lobito-Benguela, and the southern Shaba rail junctions—the FDA governed an unrecognized, de facto sovereign republic with its own civil administration, copper-exporting toll roads, and training academies. North of that line, penned inside a fortified three-hundred-mile coastal pocket around Luanda, Malanje, and Cabinda, sat Agostinho Neto's bankrupt MPLA government and forty-eight thousand Cuban soldiers.

Every time a Cuban mechanized brigade attempted to push south up the escarpment passes toward Huambo during the spring and summer of 1979, it ran into ten-mile-deep belts of plastic bounding mines, pre-registered 122mm artillery boxes, and crossfires of wire-guided anti-tank missiles fired from deep granite dugouts that the Mi-24 gunships could not crack. And every week, a chartered East German Ilyushin-62 landed at José Martí International Airport in Havana after midnight with the runway lights dimmed, unloading thirty or forty zinc-lined coffins and a hundred maimed nineteen-year-old boys from Santiago de Cuba and Matanzas who had left their legs on the red dirt roads of the Cuanza valley.

For Fidel Castro—who had planned the Sixth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana for three years as his personal coronation as the undisputed revolutionary leader of the Third World—the bleeding ulcer in Angola was a private torment that kept him pacing his office until four in the morning.

Cuban military intelligence (DGI) and the Soviet GRU had never caught a single Indian officer in Angola, and they had never found an Indian factory stamp on a single cartridge case along the Cuanza River. Every rifle, mortar tube, and missile casing recovered at the front was sanitized Eastern Bloc, Chinese, or European commercial surplus routed through a labyrinth of Mozambican, Swiss, and Panamanian shell companies.

Yet Castro was not a fool. He knew that only one power in the Indian Ocean possessed the bottomless liquid capital, the merchant shipping syndicates, and the cold geopolitical motive—after the April 1978 coup in Kabul—to quietly turn Moscow's African showcase into a slaughterhouse.

He could not prove it in a court of law. He could not put it in a diplomatic note without Moscow ordering him to stay quiet to protect the secret Tashkent accords that Castro himself didn't even know existed.

So when the first week of September 1979 arrived, and ninety-two delegations began landing in Havana for the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement—forty-eight hours after the Republic of India had shocked the earth by marching forty thousand troops across the Kunlun Mountains to partition Xinjiang and proclaim the "Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim"—the Comandante en Jefe of the Cuban Revolution decided to take his revenge in the only currency he had left.

He decided to take it out on the hide of the Indian Envoy.

Sunday, September 2 – Monday, September 3, 1979

José Martí International Airport • Hotel Habana Libre, Havana

*"A diplomat's power comes from his country's power."*

For thirty years, since he had entered the Indian Foreign Service in the autumn of 1949 fresh from Balliol College, Oxford, with a First in Modern History and three trunks of Savile Row linen suits, Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen had carried that maxim inside his breast pocket like a gold sovereign.

During the first twenty-two years of his career—in the long, lean decades of the 1950s and 1960s, when he had served as First Secretary in Washington, Counsellor in Bonn, and Joint Secretary in Delhi—that maxim had been a source of quiet, daily humiliation.

Devendra Sen possessed the intellect of a cardinal, the manners of an Edwardian duke, and a command of English, French, and German prose that put his European counterparts to shame. Yet for two decades, whenever he had walked into the State Department in Foggy Bottom or the Treasury in Whitehall, he had seen the slight, patronizing smile at the corners of the Western officials' mouths before he even opened his leather portfolio. Why? Because they knew—and he knew—that behind his exquisite Oxford syntax stood a country with eighty crore rupees in foreign exchange reserves, a navy of second-hand British sloops, and a cabinet waiting on American PL-480 grain ships to prevent a famine in Bihar. When your country carries a begging bowl, even Talleyrand is treated like a butler.

And then had come the eight years between December 1971 and September 1979.

Serving first as Ambassador to Paris from 1974 to 1977, and since 1978 as Senior Plenipotentiary at Large with the personal rank of Cabinet Secretary, Devendra Sen had watched the posture of the human race toward his person transform with a speed that was positively intoxicating.

He had watched French cabinet ministers sprint down the front steps of the Quai d'Orsay in the freezing rain of November 1977 without their overcoats just to open the door of his Citroën and beg for twenty thousand tonnes of Jamnagar heating oil. He had watched the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Governor of the Bank of England wait forty minutes in his anteroom in Geneva while he finished his morning soft-boiled egg and The Times crossword puzzle. He had grown accustomed—deeply,viscerally, and unapologetically accustomed—to the quiet hush that fell over a diplomatic reception in Zurich or Tokyo the moment the tall, silver-haired representative of the Third Superpower walked through the double doors in his immaculate cream raw-silk bandhgala.

As India's power had become continental and terrifying, the ego of the Indian Foreign Service had expanded to match the displacement of INS Viraat.

Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan and Foreign Minister Sardar Swaran Singh had had no intention of wasting five days in Havana listening to Third World speechmakers while the 14th Corps was fortifying the Tian Shan passes and the US trade mission was flying into New Delhi and Kashgar. They had designated Ambassador Devendra Sen as Special Envoy and Head of the Indian Delegation to the Sixth NAM Summit, accompanied only by two junior First Secretaries and a cipher clerk.

*"Go to Havana, Devendra,"* Swaran Singh had told him lightly in Delhi before the Xinjiang operation kicked off. *"Sit in the chair, drink a mojito, veto anything ridiculous in the drafting committee, and come home on Friday."*

When his chartered Air India touched down at Havana's José Martí International Airport at two-fifteen on the afternoon of Sunday, September 2nd—twenty-four hours after the news of the Tian Shan Line and the birth of the Republic of Tarim had hit the world's front pages—Ambassador Devendra Sen stood behind the forward cabin door smoothing his silk pocket square, fully expecting to see the Cuban Foreign Minister, a red carpet, a military guard of honour, and a fleet of black Mercedes-Benzes waiting at the foot of the stairs.

Instead, as the cabin door swung open to admit a blast of thirty-six-degree Caribbean steam bath air smelling of rotting sugarcane and low-octane tractor diesel, Sen looked down onto the tarmac and froze.

Two hundred yards to his left, in front of the main VIP terminal pavilion draped in giant portraits of Marx, Engels, and Che Guevara, stood Fidel Castro in his olive-green uniform, surrounded by a sixty-piece military brass band, four hundred cheering Pioneers waving red kerchiefs, and a red carpet fifty yards long. Castro was currently locked in a bear-hug with Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, having twenty minutes earlier fired a twenty-one-gun salute for the Prime Minister of Grenada and the Foreign Minister of South Yemen.

At the foot of the Air India , parked half a mile away beside an aluminum crop-dusting shed on the secondary freight apron, there was no red carpet. There was no brass band. There was not even a covered mobile staircase—only a rusted yellow iron maintenance ladder pushed up against the fuselage by two shirtless airport mechanics chewing on unlit cigars.

Waiting at the bottom of the iron ladder stood a single, short, bald man in a sweat-stained white guayabera shirt, holding a clipboard.

Ambassador Devendra Sen descended the iron steps slowly, holding the hot, grease-smeared railing with two fingers of his white linen handkerchief so as not to soil his palm, his silver eyebrows arched to the hairline.

"I assume," Sen said in his frigid, cut-glass Oxford baritone as he reached the concrete, "that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has been detained by a sudden medical emergency?"

The short man in the guayabera did not bow. He spat a shred of tobacco leaf onto the tarmac and squinted at his clipboard.

"I am Comrade Ernesto Pérez, Third Deputy Director of the Department of Citrus and Sugar By-Products," the man said in heavily accented Spanish-English. "Foreign Minister Malmierca is busy welcoming the anti-imperialist liberation delegations at the main pavilion. Follow me to the shed for luggage inspection, please."

Behind Sen, the two young Indian First Secretaries—Raghavan and Joshi—went pale, looking at their boss as if they expected him to summon a nuclear strike from INS Viraat on the spot.

"Luggage inspection?" Sen repeated. His voice dropped ten degrees below freezing. "My good man, this is the sovereign plenipotentiary delegation of the Republic of India. Our baggage carries the Vienna diplomatic seal."

"Security orders of the Revolutionary Ministry of the Interior," Pérez shrugged, walking toward a corrugated-iron customs shed where ceiling fans hung dead for lack of electricity and four sweating Cuban border guards in olive fatigues stood behind a wooden trestle table. "Many mercenary plots in the Caribbean this week. Open the suitcases."

For twenty-two minutes inside that corrugated-iron oven—while the brass band two hundred yards away played the Internationale for the delegation from São Tomé and Príncipe—Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen stood in silence, his jaw clenched so hard his molars ached, watching a nineteen-year-old Cuban corporal with dirty fingernails rummage through his tissue-wrapped Turnbull & Asser silk shirts and tap the heels of his handmade John Lobb oxford shoes looking for false compartments, until Sen quietly informed Comrade Pérez that if a single finger touched the wax seal of the red diplomatic cipher pouch, the Air India 707 sitting on the apron would take off in five minutes and Cuba's three-hundred-thousand-tonne sugar-machinery spare-parts credit at the Bombay clearing window would be cancelled before the landing gear retracted.

The corporal backed away from the cipher pouch hastily.

Then came the motorcade.

Outside the shed, waiting in thebroiling sun while sleek black Soviet Chaikas and air-conditioned Mercedes sedans whisked African and Arab delegations down the Rancho Boyeros highway into Havana, sat a single, dented 1958 Moskvitch 407 painted the colour of pea soup, with a cracked front windshield and upholstery patched with brown parcel tape.

"The protocol limousines were all allocated to the frontline revolutionary states," Comrade Pérez said without a flicker of apology, opening the rear door, which gave a loud, rusted shriek like a bayonet scraping a tin plate.

Inside the Moskvitch, the air-conditioning consisted of a six-inch rubber-bladed fan bolted to the dashboard that did not work. The back seat smelled overpoweringly of rancid pork lard, wet canvas, and cheap local cigars. For the forty-minute crawl into Havana, every time the driver shifted from second to third gear, the exhaust pipe beneath Sen's feet backfired with a report like a 37mm anti-aircraft gun, sending puffs of blue oil smoke curling up through the floorboards around the Ambassador's ankles.

When they finally sputtered up the driveway of the Hotel Habana Libre in Vedado—the former Havana Hilton, whose twenty-five stories were festooned with giant banners reading THE NON-ALIGNED AND SOCIALISM: NATURAL ALLIES!—Sen discovered that while the delegations of Egypt, Syria, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam had been housed in the air-conditioned marble protocol villas of Miramar and Cubanacán, the delegation of the Republic of India had been assigned Rooms 412, 414, and 416 on the fourth floor above the hotel kitchen's garbage loading bay.

The main passenger elevators were out of order "due to the Yankee blockade."

Walking up four flights of humid concrete service stairs behind a porter carrying his valise, Ambassador Sen unlocked the door of Room 412.

The room was thirty-four degrees Celsius. Above the narrow iron bed, a three-bladed ceiling fan rotated at roughly twelve revolutions per minute, emitting a rhythmic, metallic scree-clack, scree-clack on every turn. On the formica dresser sat the official host welcome basket: two bruised, green plantains and a single warm, unlabelled bottle of brown TropiCola whose cap was rusted onto the glass neck.

Sen took off his silk bandhgala jacket, hung it carefully on a wooden hanger that immediately snapped in half, and walked into the bathroom to wash the Moskvitch exhaust soot from his hands and face.

He turned the porcelain tap marked F (Fría).

For ten seconds, the pipe inside the wall shuddered and hammered like a machine gun, emitting a series of dry, flatulent belches. Then, with a sudden explosive splort, a jet of thick, dark-brown rust sludge shot out of the brass faucet under sixty pounds of trapped air pressure, splashing off the bottom of the washbasin and spraying a pattern of reddish-brown mud spots straight across the starched white front and French cuffs of Sen's bespoke linen shirt.

In the outer room, First Secretary Raghavan heard a dead, terrifying silence from the bathroom.

Raghavan walked nervously to the doorway.

Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen was standing in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, looking down at the brown rust-water dripping from his French cuffs while the ceiling fan in the bedroom went scree-clack, scree-clack and the smell of frying plantains and garbage drifted up from the alley below.

"Sir?" Raghavan whispered, terrified. "Shall I... shall I lodge a formal protocol protest with the Cuban Foreign Ministry?"

Sen slowly pulled a clean linen handkerchief from his trouser pocket, wiped a drop of brown rust off his chin, and looked at his young First Secretary in the mirror. His face was as calm, pale, and still as a marble bust of Lord Wellesley.

"No, Raghavan," Sen said in a voice of terrifying, glacial gentleness. "Do not say a single word to the Cuban Foreign Ministry. In fact, if Comrade Pérez asks you how I find the room, tell him the water pressure is vigorous and the view of the garbage trucks is most instructive."

"Sir?"

"When a host goes to this much meticulous,choreographed trouble to insult the Republic of India, Raghavan," Sen said softly, unbuttoning his ruined cuffs, "it would be the height of bad manners to interrupt him before we reach the microphone."

Tuesday, September 4, 1979 — 0930 Hours to 1430 Hours

The Main Plenary Amphitheatre, Palacio de las Convenciones, Havana

By nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, the great circular plenary hall of the newly built Palacio de las Convenciones in west Havana was ablaze with television floodlights and filled with the kings, presidents, prime ministers, marshals, and liberation commanders of ninety-two nations.

When Ambassador Devendra Sen—impeccably dressed in a fresh charcoal-grey bandhgala, his silver hair brushed back without a hair out of place—walked down the side aisle with Raghavan to take India's seat, he discovered the final masterpiece of Cuban protocol choreography.

By long-standing convention since the Belgrade Summit of 1961, the founding fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement—India, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana—were seated in the central front curve of the amphitheatre directly facing the podium.

Today, through an ingenious rearrangement of the French-alphabetical and regional-bloc seating chart devised by the Cuban Secretariat overnight, the placard reading INDIA had been exiled to Row Five, Far Left Wing, Sector D—wedged tightly into a narrow wooden desk at the very edge of the wall between the delegation of Equatorial Guinea and the delegation of the Comoros Islands, sixty yards from the podium and at an angle so acute that Sen could see only Fidel Castro's left ear.

Better still, directly above the Indian placard in Row Five ran a boxed galvanized-sheet-metal main air-conditioning duct that was struggling mightily against the humid Havana morning.

Every forty-two seconds, with the regularity of a water-torture clock, a single large drop of condensed, rusty water formed on the seam of the sheet-metal duct twenty feet overhead, trembled for a second, and fell straight down onto the centre of the Indian desk:

Plip.

The first drop landed on the green blotter at 0934. The second drop landed on the sleeve of First Secretary Raghavan's jacket at 0935. The third drop landed squarely on the crest of the Four Lions of Sarnath embossed on the cover of the polite, twelve-page speech that the United Nations and Non-Aligned Division of the Ministry of External Affairs had drafted for Sen to read before he left Delhi.

Raghavan reached out to move the speech folder out of the drip line.

Ambassador Sen placed two fingers lightly on Raghavan's wrist, stopping him.

"Leave the folder right where it is, Raghavan," Sen murmured without turning his head. "Let it soak."

Up on the vast mahogany podium beneath the giant bronze emblem of the Sixth Summit, Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro stepped to the bank of microphones to deliver the opening Chairman's Address.

At fifty-two, dressed in his crisp olive-green field uniform with his black beard jutting aggressively toward the hall and his heavy combat boots planted wide behind the lectern, Castro was at the height of his oratorical fury—and at the breaking point of his strategic desperation. With forty-eight thousand Cuban soldiers bleeding along the Cuanza River in Angola and the Soviet Union demanding that he whip the Third World into line behind Moscow's intervention in Northern Xinjiang and Afghanistan, Castro did not speak like a neutral chairman. He spoke like a prosecutor at a revolutionary tribunal.

For the first hour, his booming baritone thundered across the amphitheatre, declaring that the Non-Aligned Movement could never be "equidistant" between imperialism and socialism—that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the socialist camp were the natural, historical allies of the Non-Aligned Movement, and praising the "fraternal, selfless intervention of the Soviet Armed Forces on September 1st to rescue the working people of North Turkestan from Maoist chaos."

And then, at ten-forty-five, Castro turned his head to his right and pointed a thick, trembling forefinger directly up toward Row Five, Sector D.

"And yet," Castro roared into the microphones, his voice echoing off the concrete rafters while every television camera swung toward the far left corner of the hall, "as we gather in revolutionary Havana to defend the sovereignty of small nations against capitalist exploitation, we are forced to confront a bitter, shameful betrayal within our own house!

"What does it mean to be Non-Aligned, comrades?! Does it mean sitting at the gilded tables of the G8 in Tokyo alongside the imperialists of Washington, London, Bonn, and Paris to divide the financial markets of the earth?! Does it mean operating monopolistic banks that lock developing nations into thirty-year resource chains to feed private billionaire conglomerates?!

"And worst of all—" Castro's fist slammed down onto the lectern so hard the water carafe jumped, "—three mornings ago, on the first of September, while the world watched in shock, one of the founding members of this very Movement marched forty thousand armoured troops across the mountains of Central Asia to invade and occupy Southern Xinjiang—what they dare to call the 'Republic of Tarim'—and immediately invited the oil monopolies of the United States of America to fly into Kashgar and share the plunder!"

Across theradical benches of the hall—among the delegations of Cuba, Vietnam, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria, and Benin—a loud, orchestrated roar of desk-thumping and shouts of *"Shame!"* erupted.

"How can a state that acts as the junior military partner of Washington in partitioning Asia," Castro thundered, glaring straight at Devendra Sen's silver head in the fifth row, "how can a state that parks nuclear aircraft carriers off the coasts of sovereign nations and sends covert weapons to reactionary bandits in the jungles of Africa, dare to sit in this hall and claim the mantle of Non-Alignment?!

"As Chairman of this Sixth Summit, Cuba places before the Political Committee Draft Resolution One: demanding the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian military forces from the Tarim Basin and the Gulf of Oman, and condemning the alignment of New Delhi with Western monopoly imperialism!"

Castro stepped back from the microphone to a two-minute standing ovation from the Soviet-aligned radical bloc.

Up in Row Five, plip went the air-conditioning duct, dropping another bead of rusty water onto the damp cover of Sen's Delhi speech. Sen did not move a muscle; he sat with his legs crossed at the knee, his hands folded loosely in his lap, watching Castro with the serene, clinical detachment of an entomologist observing a particularly noisy beetle under a glass jar.

Before the applause for Castro had died down, the side door of the podium opened, and two Yugoslav aides helped an eighty-seven-year-old man in an immaculate white marshal's uniform walk slowly, heavily up the three steps to the lectern.

It was President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.

He was the last living titan of the 1956 Brioni declaration and the 1961 Belgrade conference—the man who had defied Stalin in 1948 and had flown to Havana at the end of his life specifically to prevent Fidel Castro from turning the Non-Aligned Movement into a Soviet auxiliary.

The hall rose in respectful silence for the old Marshal. Gripping both edges of the mahogany lectern to steady his trembling legs, his face lined like ancient oak bark, Tito began by delivering a stern, unmistakable rebuke to Fidel Castro's "natural ally" thesis.

"The Non-Aligned Movement," Tito rasped into the microphone in Serbo-Croatian, "was not founded at Belgrade to become the reserve army of any military bloc, or the 'natural ally' of any superpower! We reject all spheres of influence! We reject the military intervention of foreign forces in Kampuchea, in Afghanistan, and in Northern Xinjiang!"

Along the moderate benches—Singapore, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Oman, and Peru—delegates applauded warmly.

And then the eighty-seven-year-old Marshal turned his pale, watery blue eyes toward the fifth row on the left—and the moderate applause died away into a tense, suffocating hush.

"And because we reject all great-power politics without exception," Tito said, his voice heavy with the sorrowful, moralizing grandeur of a last surviving prophet, "I must speak today with profound grief of the path chosen by the Republic of India.

"Twenty-three years ago, on the island of Brioni, I sat with my dear friend Jawaharlal Nehru to give birth to this Movement. Nehru's India was not a power of aircraft carriers, of nuclear warhead ratios, of secret territorial partitions, or of financial hegemony! Nehru's India was a moral beacon—a nation that sought to abolish power politics through peaceful coexistence and disarmament!

"When we look at New Delhi today," Tito said, shaking his heavy white head slowly at the fifth row, "we no longer see the moral republic of Jawaharlal Nehru. We see a ruthless military and industrial superpower that plays the same cynical game of force, spheres of influence, and territorial aggrandizement in the Tarim Basin and the Indian Ocean as Washington and Moscow! To betray the moral legacy of Nehru for the seductions of superpower muscle is a tragedy not only for Asia, but for the soul of the Non-Aligned Movement!"

Tito stepped back from the lectern and returned slowly to his seat.

And immediately after Tito, before the afternoon recess could be called, the Chairman recognized the third speaker on the list: President Anwar Sadat of the Arab Republic of Egypt.

Unlike the real history of 1979—where Sadat had signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and been threatened with expulsion by the Arab states at Havana—in this world, Sadat was the undisputed, tragic hero of Arab rejectionism: the man who had torn up his peace speech in November 1977 and united Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad in a blood-feud against New Delhi and Jerusalem.

Five weeks earlier, when India's eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier INS Viraat and her eighteen-ship battle group had dropped anchor at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, Sadat had been forced to sit inside his Abdeen Palace war room in Cairo and threaten his own generals with firing squads if they so much as pointed a pair of binoculars at an Indian ship—because Hosni Mubarak had reminded him that a single scratch on an Indian hull would cause New Delhi to open the warehouses of Gorakhpur and tell Menachem Begin to wipe Egypt off the map.

On the ocean and in the sky, Anwar Sadat was a terrified, impotent prisoner of Indian military supremacy.

Here on the carpeted floor of the Havana convention hall, surrounded by ninety flags and television cameras where no S-35 Starlighter or S-27 Pinaka could fire a missile at him, two years of swallowed bile, public humiliation, and David Frost's broadcast of Karan Shergill laughing at his "skill issue" boiled up out of Sadat's throat like acid.

Dressed in a dark blue double-breasted suit, his forehead shining with sweat under the television lights, Sadat gripped the microphone stand with both hands and leaned toward Row Five.

"Comrade Chairman, Marshal Tito, heads of state!" Sadat's voice boomed across the hall in resonant, theatrical English, trembling with volcanic rage. "Marshal Tito asks what has happened to the moral legacy of India! In Egypt, and in Syria, we do not need to look at the map of Kashgar this morning to know what India has become! We learned what India had become in October 1973, when one hundred and nine of our sons were murdered in the sky over their own land by fighter jets forged in Indian factories and sold for Zionist gold!

"And when I stood before my Parliament in Cairo to mourn our dead," Sadat shouted, his voice cracking as he pointed a shaking finger straight at Ambassador Devendra Sen in Row Five, "how did the architect of New Delhi's empire respond on global television?! He laughed! He sat on his lawn in Lucknow and laughed at the dead pilots of Egypt and Syria, and told the Arab nation to 'build our own wings'!"

On the Syrian, Iraqi, Algerian, and PLO benches, delegates leapt to their feet, roaring *"Allahu Akbar!"* and *"Down with the merchants of death!"*, while on the Omani, Emirati, and Saudi benches, the foreign ministers stared fixedly at their desk blotters in acute, sweating discomfort, praying that the cameras in New Delhi were not panning across their faces.

"And look at what this 'Non-Aligned' impostor has done in the past forty days!" Sadat thundered over the din. "In July, they sailed an eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear aircraft carrier and two amphibious invasion ships carrying thousands of shock troops to the gates of the Arab Gulf off Muscat to hold a gun to the head of Arab oil! And on Saturday morning, they marched forty thousand troops and two hundred tanks across the Kunlun Mountains to swallow five million Muslims of Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan into an Indian empire—and then cut a backroom deal with Washington to split their oil and uranium!

"I ask this assembly!" Sadat roared, slamming his fist down on the mahogany podium. "By what right does a nuclear superpower that sits in the G8 with the Western imperialists, that arms the Zionist occupier of Jerusalem, that parks nuclear armadas in Arab seas, and that conquers Muslim lands in Central Asia still occupy a chair in the Non-Aligned Movement?!

"Egypt seconds the resolution of Cuba—and goes further! Either the Republic of India withdraws its troops from Kashgar and its warships from the Arab Gulf immediately, or this Summit must expel New Delhi from the Non-Aligned Movement today!"

The hall exploded into pandemonium.

Half the amphitheatre—the Arab rejectionist states and the Soviet-Cuban radical bloc—was on its feet shouting, clapping, and pounding the desks, while the other half—the thirty-eight Asian and African partner states of the Asian-African Development Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative, from Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Burma to Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Nigeria—sat in stony, furious silence or shouted back across the aisles at the Cuban chair.

Up on the rostrum, Fidel Castro struck his heavy wooden gavel three times, a wide, triumphant wolf's grin spreading through his black beard as he looked up toward Row Five, Sector D.

"The chair recognizes that certain criticisms have been directed at the delegation of India," Castro said into the microphone, his voice dripping with mock parliamentary magnanimity. "In accordance with our rules of procedure, before we recess for the afternoon, the chair grants the representative of India ten minutes to exercise his right of reply—if he has anything to say."

In Row Five, beneath the galvanized air-conditioning duct, plip went the forty-seventh drop of rusty water, landing with a soft splat on the soaked, illegible blue ink of the Ministry of External Affairs draft speech.

First Secretary Raghavan looked at Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen with wide, desperate eyes. "Sir—the draft speech is ruined, and if we ask for a recess to cable South Block for instructions—"

Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen did not look at the wet speech on the desk.

Slowly, unhurriedly, the fifty-four-year-old mandarin stood up to his full six feet two inches. He fastened the middle silver button of his charcoal bandhgala, flicked a microscopic speck of lint from his left cuff, and looked down at his young First Secretary with the serene, terrifying calm of a Bengal tiger that has just been poked through the bars of its cage by three noisy monkeys with a short stick.

"Leave the paper on the desk, Raghavan," Ambassador Sen said quietly. "And go down to the lobby and tell our driver—if his Moskvitch can start without exploding—to load our suitcases from Room 412 into the trunk. I shall be with you in twenty minutes."

Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen walked down the long, carpeted side stairs from Row Five to the floor of the amphitheatre.

He did not carry a folder. He did not carry a single note card. He walked with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, his chin level, his handmade Oxford shoes making no sound on the carpet as ninety-two heads of state, prime ministers, and foreign ministers quieted down to watch the lone, empty-handed Indian diplomat ascend the steps of the podium.

Fidel Castro sat in the high leather Chairman's throne ten feet behind the lectern, leaning back with his legs stretched out and a thick Cohiba cigar unlit between his fingers, waiting to hear the usual defensive, legalistic excuses that diplomats read out when cornered at an international conference.

Devendra Sen stepped up to the mahogany rostrum. He grasped the two gooseneck microphones in both hands, adjusted them upward three inches to suit his height, and looked out across the semicircular tiers of the Palacio de las Convenciones for five full, unblinking seconds of absolute silence.

When he spoke, his voice—amplified through the high-wattage sound system and carried live via satellite to newsrooms across the globe—did not sound angry. It was worse than angry. It was the resonant, effortlessly patrician, razor-honed English of an imperial proconsul addressing a room of unruly provincial clerks.

"Mr. Chairman," Ambassador Sen began, without addressing a single revolutionary title or fraternal salutation to the hall.

"Twenty minutes ago, the seventy-sixth drop of rusty condensation from the defective air-conditioning duct above Row Five landed upon the twelve-page diplomatic address that the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi kindly prepared for me to read to this assembly. Having found the plumbing of this hall to be of the exact same engineering quality as the arguments I have listened to for the past four hours, I have left that speech under the drip where it belongs.

"Since our hosts and several speakers this morning have dispensed with diplomatic polite fictions to speak what they call 'the plain truth,' the Republic of India will now oblige them by doing the same."

Sen turned his head forty-five degrees to his left and looked directly down at Fidel Castro sitting in the Chairman's throne ten feet away.

"Let us begin with our host," Sen said, his voice cutting across the silent auditorium like a cold surgical scalpel.

"For two hours this morning, we have been treated to a sermon on global economics, anti-imperialism, and sovereign morality by an upjumped Caribbean dictator in an unwashed olive-drab costume—nothing more, and nothing less."

In the front rows, a collective, strangled gasp sucked the air out of the room. Behind the rostrum, Fidel Castro froze with his cigar halfway to his mouth, the colour draining from his cheeks before rushing back in a livid purple wave.

Sen did not raise his voice by a single decibel; he kept right on going over the stunned silence.

"When my delegation landed at Havana's airport on Sunday afternoon," Sen continued conversationally, "after Comrade Castro's protocol officers had finished hugging every petty military strongman who could fit onto the red carpet, the representative of seven hundred million citizens of the Republic of India was met on a freight apron by the Third Deputy Director for Sugar By-Products, driven into town in a twenty-year-old Russian automobile that backfired like a siege mortar and smelled of dead goat, and placed in a fourth-floor room at the Habana Libre where the elevator does not work, the ceiling fan screeches like a bayoneted pig, and the cold-water tap ejects brown mud!

"At first, I confess, my junior secretaries thought this was a calculated diplomatic insult," Sen said, a thin, devastating smile touching the corners of his lips. "And then, after walking through the streets of Havana for twenty minutes, I realized the truth: it was not an insult at all. That is simply the highest standard of engineering and public administration that twenty years of Comrade Castro's socialist paradise has managed to achieve!"

From the Singaporean, Omani, and Kenyan benches in the middle of the hall, three delegates choked violently into their hands trying to smother their laughter, while on the Cuban bench, Raúl Castro half-rose from his chair, his hand going to his hip before two protocol aides grabbed his sleeve.

"Look at the man who presides over this hall and presumes to lecture the Republic of India on how to run an economy and how to govern Asia!" Sen's voice rang out, hard and clear as crystal.

"Here is a ruler who inherited one of the richest agricultural islands in the Western Hemisphere, and after twenty years of six-hour speeches, has reduced it to a bankrupt sugar-cane plantation that cannot refine its own oil, cannot manufacture a single ball-bearing or microchip, cannot keep the water running in its hotels, and survives from Monday to Friday solely because the Soviet Union pours eleven million dollars a day of Russian charity into Havana to keep the streetlights from going dark!

"A man who famously consumes eighteen scoops of Coppelia ice cream at a sitting while his own citizens stand in ration queues for four ounces of black beans and a bar of soap—and who pays his rent to the Kremlin by shipping forty-eight thousand young Cuban boys across the Atlantic Ocean to die in the mud along the Cuanza River in Angola!"

Behind the lectern, Fidel Castro leapt to his feet, his face purple, grabbing at his auxiliary microphone switch. "The Chair calls the Indian delegate to order—"

"Sit down, Comandante!" Ambassador Sen thundered, his baritone suddenly booming through the hall with such overwhelming, aristocratic ferocity that Castro actually froze with his hand on the switch. "You took two hours to insult the Republic of India; you will sit in that chair and take ten minutes of the arithmetic!

"You dare to demand that the Republic of India withdraw from the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim while praising the Soviet invasion of Dzungaria in the same breath?! Why? Because the owner of the dog whistled from Moscow and told you to bark! When Cuba pays off the forty crore rupees of overdue sugar-machinery credits it still owes to the State Bank of India in Bombay—and when Havana can put a glass of clean water on a hotel table without begging Moscow for the pipe—then, and only then, may you lecture New Delhi on sovereignty!"

The hall was in a state of petrified, electric shock. No one in the twenty-year history of Fidel Castro's rule had ever spoken to him like that on Cuban soil and lived—yet because the speaker represented the power that controlled forty-dollar global oil, eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarriers, and the bank accounts of half the hall, Castro's security guards stood paralyzed in the wings.

Sen turned smoothly from Castro and fixed his cold, silver-browed gaze squarely on the first row—where President Anwar Sadat of Egypt sat rigid in his dark blue suit.

"Which brings me," Ambassador Sen said, his voice dropping back into its silky, lethal drawl, "to the second moral philosopher who addressed us this morning: President Anwar Sadat of the Arab Republic of Egypt."

Sadat's jaw locked, his knuckles turning white on the edge of his desk.

"For two years," Sen said, looking straight into Sadat's eyes across thirty feet of carpet, "from the floor of his assembly in Cairo to this rostrum in Havana today, President Sadat has entertained the world with a tragic opera in which every failure of his career, every lost battle of his army, and every square mile of sand he forfeited in the Sinai Peninsula is the fault of an Indian aircraft factory in Gorakhpur.

"Today, he has the breathtaking audacity to stand here and call the Republic of India an 'expansionist power' and demand our expulsion from this room!

"Let us speak the unvarnished truth about Anwar Sadat that every Arab leader in the Persian Gulf whispers behind his back once the doors are closed!" Sen's voice rose, slicing through the silence of the amphitheatre. "Why are Israeli tanks sitting on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal today, Mr. President? Not because of India! They are sitting there because you are a chronic, theatrical military failure who could not keep his own greed and incompetence in check when the shooting started!

"In October 1973, you had total strategic surprise! You had three thousand Soviet tanks and the densest surface-to-air missile wall on earth! And what did you do with it? You politicized your General Staff, you lied to your Syrian allies about your operational reserves, you ordered your armoured divisions to advance straight out from under their air-defense umbrella without mobile radar coverage, and your battlefield communications were so archaic that it took six hours for an order to travel ten miles!

"Perhaps, Mr. President," Sen said, leaning over the mahogany lectern and delivering each word like a hammer-blow on an anvil, "if you had spent half as much time over the past ten years teaching your generals how to read a contour map, how to maintain a jet engine, and how to coordinate combined-arms logistics as you spend tailoring your uniforms and weeping into microphones about Indian airplanes, the Egyptian military might have actually achieved something on a battlefield!"

On the Syrian and Iraqi benches, two generals involuntarily looked down at their shoes—because every professional soldier in the Middle East knew that Sen's dissection of the 1973 Egyptian command collapse was word-for-word what Damascus's own post-mortem reports had said for six years.

Sen paused for one beat, looking at Sadat's trembling, ash-grey face, and then delivered the coup de grâce.

"In fact," Sen said in a tone of calm, clinical measurement, "our Military Operations Directorate in New Delhi recently conducted a comparative technical audit of the combat readiness, officer training, and logistical discipline of the major armed forces of the developing world.

"And I regret to inform President Sadat of the conclusion of our generals: even the Pakistani military is stronger, better led, and more competent in the field than the Armed Forces of Egypt!"

A collective gasp—followed by an involuntary, horrified snort of laughter from three African defence ministers—echoed across the hall.

"And I invite this assembly to reflect deeply upon the gravity of that assessment," Sen added dryly, raising one silver eyebrow, "because nobody on God's green earth knows better than the Republic of India just how dreadful, bankrupt, and utterly pathetic the Pakistani military is!"

Sadat half-stood from his chair, his hand shaking violently as Foreign Minister Butros Ghali grabbed him by both arms to keep him from collapsing or charging the podium.

"Notice, ladies and gentlemen," Sen continued effortlessly, sweeping his hand toward the Middle Eastern benches, "how loudly President Sadat screams at India here in a conference room in Havana—ten thousand miles away from the Arabian Sea!

"Five weeks ago, when the eighty-five-thousand-tonne Indian nuclear supercarrier INS Viraat and the eighteen warships of our First Expeditionary Fleet dropped anchor at the gate of the Strait of Hormuz, did President Sadat send a single Egyptian warship or a single squadron of fighters to challenge us? No! He issued strict secret orders to his Navy not to come within a hundred miles of an Indian flag! And meanwhile, the realist rulers of the Gulf—in Muscat, in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai—opened their ports, their bunkering lines, and their supply wharves to the Indian Fleet on Day One, because they know that while Cairo exports empty noise, New Delhi guarantees the peace of the ocean and the forty-dollar oil that keeps the world alive!"

Sen turned his gaze next to the centre of the front row, where the eighty-seven-year-old Marshal Josip Broz Tito sat surrounded by the Yugoslav delegation.

"And finally," Sen said, his voice shifting from biting derision to a cold, monumental historical gravity, "I must answer the delegation of Yugoslavia, which saw fit this morning to invoke the sacred name of Jawaharlal Nehru and accuse the Republic of India of betraying the 'moral soul' of Non-Alignment because we now build nuclear carriers, microprocessors, and armored divisions instead of preaching unarmed sermons.

"Marshal Tito knew Pandit Nehru well. And so did we who buried him.

"In the 1950s, India practiced the exact unarmed, pious, sermonizing 'moral Non-Alignment' that Belgrade praises so nostalgically today. We neglected our steel mills, we starved our weapons laboratories, we trusted in paper declarations of peaceful coexistence, and we lectured the world on morality from an empty treasury.

"And what was our reward in October 1962?" Sen's voice dropped an octave, vibrating through every microphone in the hall. "Our reward was to watch foreign armies pour across the Himalayas and slaughter four thousand brave Indian soldiers in the snow because we had given our sons bolt-action rifles and summer cotton uniforms to fight a modern war! And when we looked around the world in November 1962 for the 'moral solidarity' of the Non-Aligned Movement that we had co-founded—how many divisions, how many aircraft, how many rounds of ammunition did this Movement send to save India? Not one! You sent us polite telegrams urging us to negotiate away our own mountains!"

The hall was so silent you could hear the hum of the television cameras on the balcony.

"We learned our lesson in the snow of 1962, Marshal Tito," Ambassador Sen said quietly. "We learned that in the real world of nations, morality without iron is merely an invitation to be butchered.

"Over the past eight years, the seven hundred million people of the Republic of India stopped preaching sermons to the world and went to work. We repealed the socialist laws that strangled our factories. We gave our factory workers ten percent of the profits. We drilled our own oilfields, forged our own titanium, fabricated our own three-micron computers, launched our own satellites, and built our own nuclear supercarriers!

"When fifty-one Indian engineers and workers were murdered in Mizoram in December 1976, we did not file a tearful resolution at a Non-Aligned conference—we marched to Rangoon in forty-five days and erased the junta that killed them! When the people of Tibet were starving and massacred in Lhasa in 1977, we did not pass a committee paper—we sent our divisions over the passes and gave them back their country under the Treaty of Dharamsala! And three days ago, when the collapse of China and the advance of five Soviet divisions threatened to turn the Tarim Basin into another totalitarian slaughterhouse on our northern border, we moved forty thousand troops across the Kunlun Mountains in twenty-four hours, saved five million people in Kashgar and Khotan, gave them a democratic parliament and fifty percent of their own oil and mineral wealth, and drew a line at two thousand six hundred metres on the Tian Shan mountains that no army on earth will ever cross!

"And as for the distinguished delegation of Yugoslavia lecturing the Republic of India on how to hold a continent together—"

Sen paused, looking past the frail eighty-seven-year-old Marshal at the six squabbling Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Bosnian communist party bosses sitting in two rows behind him.

"—perhaps the politicians in Belgrade should spend a little less time worrying about the soul of Mr. Nehru in New Delhi, and considerably more time worrying about how they intend to keep six quarrelling Balkan republics from tearing each other's throats out the morning after their eighty-seven-year-old Marshal is no longer sitting in that chair to hold the glue together!"

On the Yugoslav bench, Foreign Secretary Josip Vrhovec went white as a sheet, half-rising in outrage as the Serbian and Croatian delegates beside him froze in mortified silence at hearing the unspoken terror of every dinner table in Belgrade spoken aloud before ninety-two nations.

Ambassador Devendra Sen placed both palms on the edges of the mahogany lectern and looked out over the entire amphitheatre.

"Look around this hall today," Sen said, his voice ringing with cold, unsparing finality.

"In this room sit two completely different kinds of countries.

"There are the builders—nations like Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Oman, the Emirates, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, and our thirty-eight partners in the Asian-African Development Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative—who understand that national dignity comes from building ports, electrifying railways, educating children, and trading in a stable currency. With those nations, the Republic of India stands shoulder to shoulder, investing twenty billion dollars of sovereign Rupee capital at three percent interest with zero political interference.

"And then there is the noisy majority that applauded Comrade Castro and President Sadat ten minutes ago!" Sen swept his arm across the radical and rejectionist benches.

"What is this forum to you?! It is a theatre of the weak and the bankrupt! You govern countries that cannot pave a road, cannot balance a budget, and cannot feed their own people—and you fly to resorts every three years in first-class cabins to spend from nine in the morning until lunch debating whether to nationalize a local shoe shop or a bicycle factory, and from lunch until midnight drafting four-hundred-page revolutionary manifestos against capitalism that nobody in Washington, Moscow, or New Delhi ever bothers to read!

"And then, on Monday morning, after you have finished cheering speeches calling India an 'imperialist monster,' half of your finance ministers instruct your ambassadors in New Delhi to take the morning flight to Bombay, walk into the Nariman Point tower of the Asian-African Development Bank, and beg AADB for a three-percent Rupee credit line and forty-dollar Indian oil to pay for your imports!

"Perhaps," Ambassador Sen said, stepping back half a pace from the microphones and buttoning his collar with a single flick of his fingers, "instead of spending the next three days arguing over what resolution to pass against the country that keeps your tankers moving and your treasuries solvent, you should go home and start doing some real work.

"The Republic of India has railways to lay in Kashgar, uranium mines to drill in Yarkand, and an ocean to guard from the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore. We have neither the time nor the inclination to sit under a leaking air-conditioning pipe and listen to beggars lecture the bank.

"You may keep our chair in Row Five, Comrade Castro—give it to someone who needs the free lunch. Good afternoon."

Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen did not wait for the translation to finish in the earpieces.

He turned his back on Fidel Castro's frozen, open-mouthed face on the rostrum, walked down the three mahogany steps into a hall so petrified that not a single delegate dared to boo, clap, or breathe, and strode unhurriedly up the center aisle toward the tall double doors at the rear of the amphitheatre.

As he passed Row Five, Sector D, First Secretary Raghavan and First Secretary Joshi snapped their leather briefcases shut—leaving the soaked, rust-spotted draft speech from the Ministry of External Affairs lying squarely under the dripping air-conditioning duct—and fell into step two paces behind their Ambassador.

Plip, went the duct onto the empty desk.

Forty minutes later, back on the fourth floor of the Hotel Habana Libre, with his leather valises already strapped shut by the door and a chartered taxi hired with twenty US dollars waiting at the curb downstairs to take them to the five-fifteen British Airways flight to Kingston, Jamaica, Ambassador Sen sat down at the portable Chanakya-Link burst-cipher typewriter that his cipher clerk had set up on the formica dresser beside the two bruised plantains.

"Shall I encode the transcript of the plenary intervention under Top Secret priority for the Foreign Secretary, Sir?" the cipher clerk asked, his hands still trembling slightly with adrenaline and awe after what he had just witnessed at the Palacio de las Convenciones.

"Encode the transcript of the speech as an attachment, yes," Ambassador Sen said calmly, slipping on his half-moon reading spectacles. "And on top of it, transmit the following personal cable from me to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister's Principal Secretary."

Sen dictated in a brisk, cheerful voice as the clerk's fingers flew across the keys:

FROM: AMBASSADOR D. N. SEN, SPECIAL ENVOY, HAVANA TO: FOREIGN SECRETARY / PMO, NEW DELHI PRIORITY: IMMEDIATE — PERSONAL 1. HAVING ENDURED TWO DAYS OF DELIBERATE PROTOCOL INSULTS, UNWASHED SOVIET AUTOMOBILES, BROWN TAP WATER, A DRIPPING AIR-CONDITIONING DUCT IN ROW FIVE, AND FOUR HOURS OF SANCTIMONIOUS ABUSE FROM MESSRS. CASTRO, TITO, AND SADAT, I EXERCISED THE RIGHT OF REPLY ON BEHALF OF THE REPUBLIC AT 1340 HOURS TODAY. FULL VERBATIM TEXT ATTACHED. 2. FOLLOWING COMPLETION OF MY REMARKS, I VACATED THE HALL AND HAVE CHECKED OUT OF THE HOTEL HABANA LIBRE. I AM NOT ATTENDING ONE SINGLE MINUTE MORE OF THIS CIRCUS. 3. IF THE MOTHERLAND CONSIDERS IT NECESSARY TO MAINTAIN A SEAT AT THE REMAINDER OF THIS SUMMIT, NEW DELHI MAY DISPATCH SOMEONE WITH A HIGHER TOLERANCE FOR BAD PLUMBING AND WORSE SPEECHES. I AM BOARDING BA FLIGHT 264 FOR KINGSTON AT 1715 HOURS TO OBTAIN A HOT BATH AND A GLASS OF SINGLE MALT. 4. IF THE MINISTRY WISHES TO REMOVE ME FROM THE INDIAN FOREIGN SERVICE, SUSPEND MY PENSION, OR TRANSFER ME TO COUNT YAK-SKINS IN SIKKIM UPON MY RETURN, YOU HAVE MY CHEERFUL PERMISSION IN ADVANCE. IT WAS WORTH EVERY RUPEE. SEN.

The cipher clerk hit the transmit key, tore off the green confirmation ribbon, and handed it to the Ambassador.

Devendra Sen folded the ribbon into his breast pocket, picked up the warm, unopened bottle of TropiCola from the dresser, set it neatly on the pillow of the unmade iron bed as a tip for the Stasi-trained floor microphone technicians listening in the attic, and picked up his umbrella.

"Come along, boys," Ambassador Sen said, opening the door to the stairwell. "If we hurry, we can be out of socialist airspace before dinner."

End of Chapter 393