“Mac?”
“Well... it’s doable.” Which didn’t sound like a sure thing. I added, “If The Maine can’t get to us, we can swim to her.”
“What about our cargo?”
“Well... I don’t see why we can’t use this dock for a raft and meet the boat in deeper water.”
She nodded.
I was tempted to point out that Felipe was more of an optimist than a sailor, but this may have been his only option. And I didn’t like to second-guess men under my command when they showed initiative — even if they had a stupid solution to a problem.
“We’ll see how it goes at ten-thirty.” I looked at my watch. It was now 8:45. We had a long wait. But I’d rather wait here for The Maine than wait in the Melia for the police.
I checked out the ropes that tethered the floating dock and saw they were one-inch hemp lines, easily cut with my Swiss Army knife.
Sara stood on the dock and asked, “If we have to make this dock into a raft, how do we move it into the swamp?”
Good question. The dock seemed too big and heavy for us to move it by hanging on and paddling with our feet against the incoming tide, but I suggested we could do that if we waited for the tide to start running out.
Sara replied, “I don’t want to wait... Maybe we can do what the balseros do when they’re launching their rafts from the wetlands.”
“Which is?”
“They use poles — to push off into the deeper water.”
Right. I think Huck Finn did that. “Okay. Good solution.” I suspected she was smarter than her young boyfriend. Anyway, if we had seven feet of water here at high tide, as per Felipe, we needed at least a ten-foot pole.
I was about to go look for something in the bush, but I noticed that toward the end of the floating dock were two pilings — actually long poles, rising about six feet above the dock, and about the thickness of a baseball bat. The poles had been driven into the swamp mud to tie up boats and to keep the floating dock from swaying in the currents. I went over to one pole and Sara joined me. Together we pulled on it, trying to free it from the muck. We pushed it from side to side, and pulled again, and finally the pole started to rise out of the swamp floor.
We freed it and laid it on the dock. It was about twelve feet long, fairly straight, but waterlogged, so it had some flex in it, which was not good for raft poling. But if we had to use it, it would have to do.
We went to the other piling and after about ten minutes of sweating and swearing we got the pole out of the sucking mud and onto the floating dock. Teamwork makes the dream work.
We wiped our muddy hands on our pants, and I said, “Okay, we’re all set to unload the trunks onto this dock, cut the lines, then pole into the swamp to meet The Maine. But we’ll do that only if The Maine can’t get to us.”
“Should we unload the trunks now?”
“I want to hear my diesel engine before we do that.”
She put her hand on my shoulder and we looked into the swamp, where an evening mist rose off the water. Tree frogs croaked, and night birds made weird sounds, insects chirped, and something leapt out of the water.
“It’s spooky,” she said.
But no spookier than the spidery caves I crawled through looking for UBL. Who knew the asshole was in Pukeistan? But at least in the caves, everyone had everyone’s back. Here, I wasn’t so sure.
She said, “Let’s sit in the wagon.”
I think I promised her a ride in the back seat, but now that I was here, I was reevaluating the situation, and I thought we should keep our pants on. “We need to keep alert. But you go ahead. I’ll keep watch.”
She walked to the station wagon, opened the rear window and tailgate, and pulled out the black tarp that covered the trunks. She spread the big tarp on the muddy ground between the wagon and the dock and invited me to lie down and relax awhile.
There might not be a next time for this, so we made love on the tarp — quickly, quietly, and with our boots on — listening to the sounds of the swamp and the mosquitoes buzzing around my butt. While we were going at it, Sara said, “Keep alert,” and laughed.
Afterward, we sat on the tarp with our backs to the station wagon bumper and shared a bottle of water that she’d gotten from the Ranchón Playa. I thought about the remains of the men that were a few feet from the back of my head. If we all weren’t soldiers once, I might think that I had somehow dishonored the dead; but it could’ve just as easily been me who didn’t make it home. And those who did make it shouldn’t feel guilty about anything. We all understood that.
Sara asked, “What do we do now?”
“We wait.” I looked at my watch: 9:46. We had a long forty-five minutes before I heard the familiar sound of my Cat 800 diesel. Or longer if Felipe and Jack had decided to wait for high tide. Or never, if Felipe had left Jack at the marina and was now on his way to Miami. What I knew for sure was that Jack Colby would not leave Cuba without me.
Sara said, “Tell me that everything is going to be okay.”
I assured her, “Within a few hours we’ll be in open water, on a heading for Key West.”
She took my hand. “That sounds nice.”
Sara Ortega was not a clueless idiot, and she knew this was a very dicey plan. The mangrove swamp could damage the fiberglass hull of The Maine, but not as badly as a rapid-fire cannon. “Do you see that water?”
“Yes.”
“That water is a road that will take you anywhere you want to go.”
She nodded, and stayed quiet for a minute, then asked, “What if they don’t... can’t come?”
Well, that was the other problem. “Jack knows — you never leave a man behind.” I wasn’t so sure about Felipe, however. I mean, without the sixty million... But I was forgetting about Sara. I hoped Felipe still loved her enough to come for her.
She got quiet again, then said, “I’m thinking about the last week...”
“When we get back, we’ll have some good laughs. Even Antonio was—”
“What’s the matter?”
“Quiet.”
We listened and I heard something out in the swamp. It got louder, and we could both hear voices carrying across the water.
Sara whispered, “There’s somebody out there.”
I pulled the Glock from my belt and got into a prone firing position facing the water, trying to peer through the darkness. Sara lay down beside me.
The voices got louder and it sounded like two males, speaking Spanish. I could hear oars splashing in the water.
I saw a movement, then suddenly a boat emerged from the mist, coming toward the shore.
As it got closer, I could see that it was a square-bowed swamp boat, and sitting in the flat-bottomed craft were two men. They saw the big Buick before they saw me and Sara lying on the black tarp, and they started jabbering.
Sara stood and called out, “Buenas noches.”