Cisco clutches the steel cowling and breathes hard, like he’s just run a record-fast mile.
“This is bullshit,” Cisco says. “I’d rather take my chances on the streets.” He turns, looking for land, but the night is dark in every direction, with the Azores already far astern.
“Your father disagrees,” Rainy says. “Anyway, you’ll get used to it.” But she herself is far from used to it. It takes the sudden access to cold night air to make her realize just how enclosed and cramped—trapped—she has felt down inside that steel tube.
A tube is what it is: a cylinder. The curves of the ballast tanks, the external tubes, the superstructure, the rudder and the screws and the hydroplanes are all added onto that essential steel tube, which is just a sort of long tin can, really, though built to take far more pressure without collapsing. A long tin can crammed with diesel engines and electric motors, batteries, stores of water and food, sixty-one men—and one woman now—and some rather large and extremely explosive torpedoes.
The trip from the Azores to Sicily is better than 2,200 miles. At a steady eleven knots (just under thirteen miles an hour) they can make it in about a week. Seven days in a steel tube full of men and head-bashing obstacles. Seven days with a panicky gangster. She shudders and tells herself it’s only the cold air.
“I ain’t going back down there,” Cisco says defiantly.
“You’re going to have to,” Rainy says.
“The hell I do. I’m okay up here. Maybe a blanket or—”
A jet of icy spray slaps them both in the face.
“A raincoat. A poncho,” Rainy says, completing his thought. “Look, Cisco, I know you’re scared—”
He snarls. It’s an animal sound accompanying an animal expression of bared teeth. “I’m scared of nothing!” Then he softens it just a bit. “At least no man. And sure as hell no skirt. It’s just . . . I don’t like tight spaces, never have, not since I was a kid.” He finishes in a lower tone, a haunted tone that hints at some past nightmare.
“If you don’t go down peaceably when the commander orders, they will not let you come back up. Consider that.”
“I need a drink. I’ve got a bottle in my things, but that won’t last long. They must have some aboard, right?”
But rum, while served on board Royal Navy ships, is doled out in precise amounts at prescribed times, and does not amount to much more than a single cocktail. The boat’s medical officer has a better solution. After a long while, when it becomes clear that brute force will be required to get Cisco down, the medic climbs to the con and hands Cisco a small glass of amber liquid.
“What’s this supposed to be?”
“Laudanum. Tincture of opium. Drink it down, now. It will settle your nerves.”
Cisco swallows it and grimaces. “Damn, that is bitter.”
Suddenly a klaxon sounds. A-roooo-gah! A-roooo-gah!
The loudspeaker comes on with a tense but controlled voice. “Battle stations, battle stations, dive, dive!”
The men on the gun disappear down their hatch in seconds, but it takes the medic and both lookouts—plus a moderate punch in Cisco’s kidneys from Rainy—to shove Cisco, inconveniently bent in half at one point, down to safety. They close the hatch and spin the lock seconds ahead of a rush of water that gurgles over the hastily closed hatch.
The crew has already reached battle stations so the corridor is relatively clear as Cisco is dragged, literally kicking and screaming (and cursing), to his hammock.
Finally the laudanum kicks in and Cisco’s movements become less powerful, less focused, his flow of curses and threats slows, and he offers only ineffectual resistance to being tied down again.
“This is going to be a very long trip,” Rainy mutters under her breath. “And all of it probably a fool’s errand.”
Amateur.
12
RIO RICHLIN—OFF GELA BEACH, SICILY
It is not Rio’s first rodeo.
It’s an expression she has appropriated from Cat Preeling. Ain’t my first rodeo, Cat likes to say when someone, generally a man, explains something in a patronizing tone.
Ain’t my first rodeo. Ain’t my first amphibious landing on a beach.
Rio’s landing craft has been loaded and circling for the better part of a half hour. Dawn is breaking ever so slowly it seems, allowing just enough light to see that the boats of the first wave are reaching the beach and disgorging their troops.