“Then we will shoot it.”
“Which will alert the people fighting the fire,” Joe said. “And probably get somebody killed by a ricochet.”
“We will move fast.”
“How fast can anyone move with sixty boxes of rifles and grenades?”
“We’ll have thirty men. Thirty more men, if you provide them.”
“They’ll have three hundred,” Joe said.
“But they won’t be three hundred Cubanos. The American soldier fights for his own pride. The Cubano fights for his country.”
“Jesus,” Joe said.
Esteban’s smile got even more smug. “You doubt our bravery?”
“No,” Joe said. “I doubt your intelligence.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Esteban said.
“I am.” Joe lit a cigarette. “And if I wasn’t, I’d like to die for a better reason than this. It takes two guys to lift a crate of rifles. That means sixty guys would have to make two trips onto a burning naval ship. And you think this is possible?”
“We only learned about the ship two days ago,” Graciela said. “If we had more time we could have more men and a better plan, but that ship leaves tomorrow.”
“Doesn’t have to,” Joe said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said you can get a guy on the ship.”
“Yes.”
“That mean you already got an inside guy on there?”
“Why?”
“Jesus, because I fucking asked you, all right, Esteban? Do you have one of the sailors on your payroll or not?”
“We do,” Graciela said.
“What’re his duties?”
“Engine room.”
“What was he going to do for you?”
“Cause an engine malfunction.”
“So your outside guy, he’s a mechanic?”
A pair of nods.
“He comes in to fix the engine, starts the fire, you raid the weapons hold.”
Esteban said, “Yes.”
“As plans go, it’s not half bad,” Joe said.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. If half a plan isn’t bad, it means the other half is. When were you going to do this?”
“Tonight,” Esteban said. “Ten o’clock. The moon’s supposed to be quite weak.”
Joe said, “Middle of the night, more like three in the morning, would be ideal. Most everyone will be asleep. No heroes to worry about, few witnesses. That’s the only chance I see of your man making it back off that boat.” He laced his hands behind his head, gave it a bit more thought. “Your mechanic, he Cuban?”
“Yes.”
“How dark?”
Esteban said, “I don’t see—”
“Does he look more like you or more like her?”
“He’s very light-skinned.”
“So he could pass for Spanish.”
Esteban looked at Graciela, then back at Joe. “Certainly.”
“Why is this important?” Graciela asked.
“Because after what we’re about to do to the U.S. Navy, they’re going to remember him. And they’re going to hunt him.”
Graciela said, “And what are we going to do to the U.S. Navy?”
“Blow a hole in that ship, for starters.”
The bomb wasn’t a box of nails and steel washers they bought for short money off a street-corner anarchist. It was an object of much more refinement and precision. Or so they were told.
One of the bartenders at a Pescatore speakeasy on Central Avenue, over in St. Petersburg, guy named Sheldon Boudre, had spent a fair portion of his thirties defusing bombs for the marines. Back in ’15, he’d lost a leg in Haiti because of faulty communication equipment during the occupation of Port-au-Prince and he was still irate about it. He made them a honey of an explosive device—a steel square the size of a child’s shoe box. He told Joe and Dion he’d packed it with ball bearings, brass doorknobs, and enough gunpowder to punch a tunnel through the Washington Monument.
“Make sure you put this directly under the engine.” Sheldon pushed the bomb, wrapped in brown paper, across the bar to them.
“We’re not trying to just blow up an engine,” Joe said. “We want to damage the hull.”
Sheldon sucked his top row of false teeth back and forth against his gums, his eyes on the bar, and Joe realized he’d insulted the man. He waited him out.
“What do you think’s going to happen,” Sheldon said, “when an engine the size of a fucking Studebaker blows through the hull and into Hillsborough Bay?”
“But we don’t want to blow up the whole port,” Dion reminded him.
“That’s the beauty of her.” Sheldon patted the package. “She’s focused. She ain’t scattering all about on you. You just don’t want to be in front of her when she goes.”
“How volatile is, um, she?” Joe asked.
Sheldon’s eyes brimmed. “Hit her with a hammer all day, she’ll forgive you.” He stroked the brown paper wrapping like it was the spine of a cat. “Throw her in the air, you don’t even have to step out of the way when she lands.”
He nodded to himself several times, his lips still moving, and Joe and Dion exchanged a look. If this guy was less than sane, they were about to put a bomb of his making in their car and drive it across Tampa Bay.
Sheldon held up a finger. “There is one small caveat.”
“One small what?”
“Detail you should know about.”
“And that is?”
He gave them an apologetic smile. “Whoever lights her better be a runner.”
The drive from St. Petersburg to Ybor was twenty-five miles, and Joe counted every yard of it. Every bump, every lurch of the car. Every rattle of the chassis became the sound of his immediate death. He and Dion never discussed the fear because they didn’t have to. It filled their eyes, filled the car, turned their sweat metallic. They looked straight ahead mostly, occasionally off to the bay as they crossed the Gandy Bridge and the strip of shoreline on either side of them was sharp white against the dead blue water. Pelicans and egrets took flight from the rails. The pelicans often seized up in midflight and then fell from the sky as if they’d been shot. They’d plunge into the flat sea and swoop back out with contorting fish in their bills, open their mouths, and the fish, no matter what the size, vanished.
Dion hit a pothole, then a metal road bracket, then another pothole. Joe closed his eyes.