“Everybody okay?”
“Felipe might not be.” I told him, “Go below and check him out. Get the first aid kit, and get life jackets on everybody.”
“We abandoning ship?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s still floating, Mac.”
“It’s a fucking target, Jack.”
“So you wanna get eaten by a shark, or you wanna die in an explosion? Which?”
“I want to get into the water before the Stenka blows up The Maine.”
“Okay. You think we’ll be picked up by a luxury liner or by the Stenka?”
“Go below!”
“Don’t forget the sharks.”
He moved aside, I took the wheel, and he retreated below.
I continued the evasive action, cutting the wheel from port to starboard, and I also varied the time between turns. I left the throttle alone, so we were making maximum speed in the hard turns, but the maneuver caused the boat to heel sharply. I didn’t know how best to confuse the radar that was directing the guns, but I had to assume there was some mechanical lag time between the radar locking on and the gun turret moving left or right as the twin guns elevated or lowered to follow the radar-acquired target. Also, there’d be some lag time as the projectiles traveled four thousand meters. I also didn’t know if the guns were fired automatically with the lock-on, or if they were command-fired by the captain or a gunner. All I knew for sure was that the twin 30mm cannons could be outmaneuvered. That’s why we were still alive. But we’d gotten hit, and the odds were that was going to happen again.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t see any rounds impacting on the water, and just as I thought the asshole may have run out of ammunition, I heard what sounded like a flock of wild geese with rockets up their asses streaking overhead. Shit!
Jack stuck his head up the stairwell and said, “Felipe’s okay. But he has a suggestion.”
“What?”
“Transmit a surrender to the Stenka, come around, and head toward him.” He added, “He says he’ll do it in Spanish.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself in English.”
“Sara sort of told him that already.”
“Good.”
Jack also informed me, “It’s a fucking mess down here.”
“Everybody have life jackets?”
“Yeah.”
“Everybody topside.”
“You want a drink?”
“Later. Move it.”
Jack, Sara, and Felipe came into the cabin and I said, “Go out to the deck, and if we get hit again and if there’s a fire, or if we start taking water, we all go over the side.”
Sara said to me, “I told you, I will not let them capture me.”
I assured her, “They won’t see you in the water.”
She seemed to recall my spiel on our sunset cruise and said, “I will not be eaten by sharks.”
Felipe looked like he was in a daze, but he said to me, “You have to surrender. I’ll transmit—”
“Forget it!” We seemed to be running out of bad options — surrender, abandon ship, get eaten by sharks, or get blown up. And when you run out of bad options, it’s okay to do nothing and let fate do something. I said, “Move out to the deck—”
I heard the explosion at the same time that I saw it, and the top of the bow erupted into a ball of fire. Debris flew into the windshield and I instinctively ducked as I held on to the wheel and held the boat in a sharp port turn.
I stood and looked at the damage. A hole the size of a pie plate had appeared in the white fiberglass bow deck a few feet in front of the hatch. If anyone had been in the cabin below, they’d be dead or badly injured.
Jack ran below to check for fire, then came up and said, “We’re okay.”
Relative to what?
I realized I’d been in my port turn too long, and I could almost see the barrels of the twin cannons tracking me. I cut hard to starboard, knocking Sara and Felipe off their feet, and sending Jack tumbling back into the cabin below. Again, I heard the flock of wild geese, but this time they were off my port side and I knew they’d have caught me broadside if I’d continued into my left turn. I resumed my evasive zigzagging, thinking of that alligator on my ass. Alligators never give up, because they’re hungry, so you can never give up, because you want to live. Eventually somebody makes a mistake and loses. It can’t go on forever.
Sara and Felipe were on the rear deck now, lying face down with their arms and legs spread to keep from rolling as I took The Maine through its wild maneuvers. Jack was in the chair next to me, lighting up. It occurred to me that I’d missed an option, which was to just cut the throttle and drift until a full salvo of 30mm rounds obliterated The Maine and us. I looked at the throttle and Jack saw what I was thinking.
He asked, “You want a cigarette?”
“No.”
“They’re gluten-free.”
“I gotta tell you, Jack, your sense of humor is annoying.”
“You shoulda said something.”
“It just occurred to me.”
“Yeah? And you know what just occurred to me? It occurred to me that I told you this Cuba shit was fucked up.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Yeah. Lotsa shit seems like a good idea at the time.”
“Why don’t you go out on the deck and keep our passengers company?”
“I like it here.” He added, “Pay attention to what you’re doing, Captain.”
“You’re distracting me.”
“And don’t even think about touching that throttle.”
I didn’t reply.
I kept at my escape-and-evasion game, trying to vary my maneuvers, but I realized that by trying to veer away from a salvo of cannon shells, I could just as easily run into them. This was not as skilled a game as I was trying to convince myself that it was; a lot of this was just luck. This was really my lucky day.
Felipe had apparently come to a different conclusion, because he was in the cabin now with the Smith & Wesson in one hand, hanging on to the door frame with the other. “Give me the mic.”
Jack said to me, “Ignore him and he’ll go away.”
I ignored him, but Felipe said, “I’m counting to three. If you don’t give me the mic—”
“Felipe,” I said calmly, “I am not giving you the mic. We are not surrending the ship. We are—”
“One.”
Jack said, “Put the gun down.”
“Two.”
Jack added, “You get one shot, asshole, then the guy you didn’t shoot is going to take you down and shove that gun so far up your ass that the first round’ll blow your tonsils out.”
Felipe processed that and I glanced back to see his gun hand shaking. “It’s okay, amigo. We’re all scared. But we’re doing okay.”
Well, not that good. The Stenka captain had changed to tracer ammo, probably to add a little mind-fucking to the game, and we all saw the streaks of green tracers flying along our starboard side, not twenty feet away. I saw them drop into the dark sea in front of us, and I counted eight explosions. Holy shit...
I turned hard to starboard and the next flight of green streaks sailed about five feet above the cabin. I liked this game better when I couldn’t see how close they were coming.
Another flight of eight green tracers streaked toward us and hit the water about ten feet from the stern.
Jack said to me, “Just keep doin’ what you’re doin’ and pay no attention to the incoming.” He reminded me, “You can’t stop it and you can’t change its trajectory. You just gotta keep runnin’ and swivelin’ your hips.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
I didn’t look back at Felipe, but Jack was keeping an eye on him and I assumed Felipe was having a catatonic moment. I did glance back at the deck and saw Sara still sprawled out, blissfully unaware that the Stenka was now showing us what we couldn’t see before. As I was about to turn my attention back to the wheel, I saw streaks of green coming right at our tail and two cannon shells impacted in the stern and I heard a muffled explosion, followed by the sound of the sea, but not the sound of the engine. We were dead in the water.