“You could turn around and go north.”
Santana was looking at the chart.
“Surely that’s better than getting killed?”
“Go sit down. Stay out of the way.”
Yocke didn’t have to be told twice.
After a quick conference around the helm, everyone except Santana went below. He took the wheel.
Yocke was watching the lights, which were truly closer, when he saw the flash. Santana saw it too and spun the wheel. The nose of the boat slewed to port. Yocke heard the rumble as the shot went over and, after a moment, the splash. Then, finally, he heard the boom of the shot.
Santana spun the wheel again, turning starboard, then steadied up after thirty degrees or so of heading change. The next shot was short, though much closer.
The stars seemed to be brighter. Yocke checked his watch. A few minutes after five a.m. He looked down toward the south. Lights. Towns, perhaps. Or villages. Cuba. God, it would be a long swim! And sharks — these waters were full of sharks.
He was thinking of sharks and wondering about the current when he saw the third flash. The gunboat was definitely closer.
This time the shot fell just in front of the bow.
“The next one’ll be the charm,” Yocke said loudly enough for Santana to hear.
“Pray,” was the response.
The other Cubans rushed up from below. Two of them went forward and two settled on the port side of the bridge. They each had a dark pipe on their shoulder, something like a World War II bazooka.
“Get over here, Yocke! By me!” Santana ordered.
“Ready?” Santana shouted.
“Sí. Adelante!”
Santana spun the wheel and the boat heeled to starboard as her nose came port. She had completed forty-five degrees or so of heading change when the gunboat fired again. Santana held in his turn until he was heading only ten or fifteen degrees south of the gunboat, running toward her at full throttle. “Not yet,” he shouted.
The swells were smaller and farther apart here in the lee of Cuba and the boat rode more steadily on the step.
Jack Yocke peered through the bridge glass trying to estimate the distance. Ahead of him, on the deck, the two men lay prone, on their elbows, each with a tube across his shoulder and pointed toward the charging gunboat.
The gunboat fired again. Santana swerved port, bringing the gunboat dead onto the nose. Just when Yocke concluded the Cuban Navy had again missed, the platform above the bridge exploded, showering the fantail with debris.
Santana chopped the throttle and slammed the transmission into neutral.
“They’re gonna hit us with the next one,” Yocke shouted.
“Everybody down. Take cover!”
“They’ll kill us,” Yocke shouted at Santana, infuriated at the man’s composure.
“They’re not in range yet.”
“Oh, damn,” Yocke muttered, and got facedown on the floor.
The seconds passed. Miraculously, the next explosion didn’t come. Yocke lay on his belly waiting, sweating profusely, and when it finally seemed that the shooting was over, he got up on his knee for a look. The gunboat was closer, much closer.
Another flash. This time the bridge glass to Yocke’s right exploded. He felt the sting of something hitting his face and instinctively raised his arm.
“Fire!” Santana shouted.
One of the men behind fired first. A whooshing crack and a great flash of light and the rocket shot forward, illuminating the surface of the black sea with the fire from its exhaust.
Then the man beside him fired. Another report and flash.
The men up forward fired no more than a second apart.
Half blinded by the flashes, Jack Yocke tried to look anyway.
One of the missiles hit a swell and detonated. Well short.
Another hit the gunboat with a flash. A second impacted almost in the same place. The fourth must have missed.
Yocke turned. The two men behind him were going down the ladder, heading below. Santana shoved the transmission lever forward and firewalled the throttle. As the stern bit into the sea he cranked the helm over.
In thirty seconds they were back, carrying more rocket launchers.
They squatted and waited.
The gunboat was obviously hit badly. Her bow turned northward and the smear of fire was visible.
Santana veered off to the south, to pass under the gunboat’s stern, perhaps a quarter mile away, Yocke guessed.
As they approached to almost abeam, tracers reached from the gunboat. The man behind Yocke fired another missile. This one impacted the Cuban gunboat just above the waterline.
Then they were by, the distance increasing.
“What the fuck are those things?” Yocke asked.
“LAW rockets.” Yocke had heard of these, though he had never seen one. Light antitank weapons.
“How many you got down there?”
“Not as many as we started with.”
“Where’d you get ’em?”
“You never stop asking fool questions, do you?”
“Sorry.”
The gunboat was on fire, dead in the water, rapidly falling astern when Yocke saw her last. His face was stinging. It was blood.
The back end of the port side of the bridge was a mess. The shell had blown out the window and passed through the supporting structure that held up the roof. Luckily the stuff offered too little resistance to activate the fuse or everyone on the bridge would have been cut to bits by the shrapnel of the exploding warhead. And the fiberglass had been cooked by the exhaust of the missiles getting under way.
To hell with these idiots!
Jack Yocke went below and found the cabin he had slept in leaving Miami and turned on the light. He was shaking like a leaf. He sat on the bunk and tried to get his breathing under control while blood dripped off his chin onto his shirt and trousers.
Ten minutes later he was looking in the mirror above the washbasin and using a towel to extract the glass shards from the cuts in his face when Hector Santana came in.
“How do you feel?”
“You want the truth or some macho bullshit from a B movie?”
“Whatever pleases you.”
“I damn near shit myself.”
Santana grinned. The grin looked wicked on that tight, death’s-head face.
Yocke averted his eyes and concentrated on raking a glass splinter from a cut over his eye. When he got it out, he said, “Why’d you let me come along?”
“Tomás and Jesús wanted to kill you in Miami. You were obviously a plant. Even if you were a reporter, you might talk, talk far too much, much too soon. I don’t like to kill unless it is required. So we brought you.”
“A great bunch of guys you are! What would you have done earlier this evening if you had run into a U.S. Coast Guard cutter? After you picked up the weapons?”
“Probably scuttled.”
“My ass! You’d have shot it out.”
“Think what you like.”
“If we had survived that encounter, you would have killed me.”
Santana shrugged. “A lot of time, effort, and money went into acquiring these weapons. Three men lost their lives. We desperately need these weapons to fight the Fidelistas. Much is at stake. Many lives. Yet you came to our office and stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong. You wanted a free ride to the revolution, as if a revolution against Castro would be some kind of a Cuban circus that you had improvidently forgotten to buy a ticket for. You wanted to sneak in under the tent flap!”
Santana snorted. “You Americans! You persist in thinking the world is a comfortable little place, full of comfortable, reasonable people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If only everyone would buy a Sunday edition of the Post and read it carefully, perhaps write a thoughtful, well-crafted letter to the editor, then everything would be okay.”