That’s what I want, Jason had replied.
The truck passed the town of Naranja now, darkly shrouded at the side of the road, and moved steadily southward on U.S. 1, the speedometer needle nudging forty-five, the wind lashing at the tarpaulin cover, a wind that worried Goody. The men’s faces were intent in the light of the dashboard, Goody’s lean and drawn, with gray eyes and blond hair that almost faded completely in the feeble illumination; Clay’s a rougher face, with a harsh cleaving nose and massive cheekbones, dark bushy brows over brown eyes.
“You reckon they asleep back there?” Clay asked.
“Not with Jason watching them,” Goody answered.
In the back of the truck, beneath the tarpaulin cover lashed by strong winds, twenty-one silent men sat opposite each other on two long benches. Jason Trench was the only man wearing khaki. The rest wore dark blue dungaree trousers and pale blue chambray shirts.
He lifted his wrist and peered at his watch in the darkness.
There were hours to go yet.
There were hours to go.
The feeling of isolation was intensified by darkness.
The headlights of the truck picked out the narrow ribbon of road ahead, two lanes that spanned coral and water and sand. On one side of the truck were Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. On the other side was the Atlantic Ocean. There was the persistent feeling that an overelaborate engineering feat had been performed only to link civilization with a scarcely inhabited wilderness. There were forty-two bridges between Key Largo and Key West, but the bridges seemed to connect islands that sometimes supported only a single small house hidden in the mangroves, or a cluster of a half-dozen dwellings along the beachfront, or at best a real community of shops and restaurants and houses complete with a post office and a Chamber of Commerce but built flanking the highway like a two-bit honkytonk town erected overnight. In the darkness the uninhabited keys seemed the same as those that were populated. The truck pushed south and west over the black highway, the water black on either side of it, the towns, the small clusters of dwellings, the uninhabited strips of sand and coral and twisted mangroves all presenting an identical impression of flat silent blackness somewhere at the farthest reaches of the earth.
The water was the first thing to come alive with light.
Long before the sun was up, the water began to take on color, brightening from its total black to a deep and velvety blue, and then changing blue tones steadily as dawn approached, moving upward through the spectrum so that by the time they reached the Seven Mile Bridge there was visible on either side of the truck a vastness of ocean and bay that was overwhelming.
Jason Trench threw back the flap of the tarpaulin cover and looked out at the miles of bridge they had already crossed. The sun had not yet cleared the horizon, but the water on either side of the bridge was now touched with predawn silver, each separate ripple looking like the filigree on a fine medieval tool or weapon. The bridge spanned the sea relentlessly, the highway falling behind the truck as it maintained its steady speed, driving away from the approaching dawn.
Jason looked at his watch. It was five minutes after six, and they had come halfway across the bridge, and dawn would light the sky in twelve minutes. He felt a sudden lurch of excitement as he thought of what lay ahead, and then he lowered the tarpaulin as though reluctant to watch the sky turn pink. Dawn would be the beginning, and he hated beginnings. The departure from the Miami warehouse, the long drive down to the bridge — these were preliminaries to the real beginning that would take place when they crossed those three small uninhabited keys to the west, and then Bahia Honda, and then Ocho Puertos and the sign for S-811, the sharp turn to the left; that would be the beginning. That would be dawn, a dawn in every sense of the word, and he anticipated this beginning with a high excitement that was somehow coupled with a cold gnawing dread. If anything went wrong.
Nothing would go wrong.
And yet, as he allowed the tarpaulin to drop from his hand, as he turned to look at the other twenty men in the rear of the truck, he wondered if this should not have been a nighttime maneuver. Why had he decided on dawn? Suppose the people of that creepy damn town all got up at five in the morning, and were standing there in the road, waiting with pitchforks?
The people of that town don’t get up at 5 A.M., he reminded himself. We know the getting-up and sleeping habits of every person in Ocho Puertos, and we know that on Sunday morning nobody’s stirring before 7:30 A.M. Dr. Tannenbaum and his wife Rachel get up at seven-thirty on Sunday morning and drive all the way to Marathon to have breakfast and to buy the New York Herald Tribune. Only this morning they are going to be awakened by twenty after six at the latest, and they are not going to drive to Marathon or anyplace else. The next person to wake up in that town on a Sunday morning is Lester Parch, and he lives in the first house on the beach, and he sets the alarm for eight o’clock. The waitress and the short-order cook both drive in from Big Pine by eight o’clock, in separate cars, but Lester doesn’t open his diner to customers until nine, too late to catch Dr. and Mrs. Tannenbaum who are usually in Marathon having their breakfast by then. Lester Parch’s wife, Adrienne, sleeps until ten on Sundays. By that time all of Ocho Puertos is usually wide-awake, except for Rick Stern, the bachelor in the third house on the beach, who generally has some poontang with him, picked up in Marathon the night before. He wouldn’t roll out of the hay until eleven, and then he’d roll right back in again ten minutes later to polish off a morning matinee. This morning he was in for a slight surprise.
Jason smiled.
He looked at his watch again, and briefly wondered how many times he had stared unseeingly at its face since they had left the warehouse three hours ago. Then he looked across the width of the truck to where a redheaded youth with a crew cut was sitting staring at the floor, and he said very softly, “Benny, I think it’s time we armed up. We’re almost there.”
Without a word Benny rose and glanced at a huge Negro sitting three places away from him on the bench, toward the rear of the truck. With practiced balance, they both moved spread-legged toward the front of the truck where a painter’s stained dropcloth covered an angular pile beneath it. Benny pulled off the cover and began handing out rifles to the big Negro.
Some of the rifles were new and some of them were used, but they had all been purchased over the counter in gunshops in different states, because there was not a single state in the union that required a license for the purchase or possession of a weapon other than a handgun. The rifles varied in model and caliber from a Mossberg.22 with a seven-shot clip magazine to a .30–06 Savage with a staggered box-type magazine, and ranged in price from a low of $17.25 for a single-shot Springfield.22 to $155.00 for a.243 gas-operated Winchester. The rifles were tagged, and Benny and the Negro — whose name was Harry — handed each rifle to the man whose name tag was on it. As they walked between the benches facing each other, Jason got to his feet.
He could hear the rattle of bolts being tested, of clips being slammed home, of cartridge belts being clasped into place around waists. He cleared his throat.
“We’re approaching Ocho Puertos,” he said.
The men fell silent. A single clip rattled, the rifle was shifted, the clatter of metal, silence.
“In a few minutes this truck is going to swing off the main highway and onto S-811 into the town,” Jason said. “We’ll make all the stops we’ve been rehearsing this past week, but this time is for real. This time we are setting our plan in motion.”
Benny and Harry had handed out all the pieces by the time Jason had finished this part of his speech, and were giving Colt .45s to the two group leaders in the truck, Johnny and Coop. Only nine states in the union required a permit or a license to purchase a handgun, and so it had been comparatively simple to buy the two .45s and the various other revolvers and pistols that were needed. A total of twenty-five handguns of varying calibers had been bought, seventeen for the men who would hopefully be coming up from Key West later, two for the group leaders in the truck, three for the crew of The Golden Fleece, and one each for Jason, Goody, and Clay. Jason’s personal preference had been for a .45, only because he felt the gun looked lethal and would be psychologically effective against small-town hicks.