ass and taking care of business.
Least he had Ross. Even wounded, you want Ross on your side. Tough as it was, bouncing around like this, Cubans had a medical corpsman trying to get some kind of splint on Ross’s busted lower left leg.
“Hey, Ross,” Stoke said, shouting at the man over the roar of wind and engines. “How you doin’ back there, my brother? Ok?”
Ross smiled and gave him the thumbs up. Man was stone badass. He was lying down on a thwart seat in the stern, holding onto the guy who was working on his leg by the scruff of his neck, trying to keep the medic from bouncing out of the boat. Every time they pounded through a wave, a wall of seawater washed over the boat. “Hoo-hah,” Stoke shouted into the salty spray. Just then, the outboards sputtered and he looked down at his fuel gauge.
“Shit, Pepe, what were you thinking about? We’re about to run out of gas, man! How you plan to catch this asshole without fuel? You ain’t even got extra jerry cans aboard?”
“In the other boats! We only plan for enough to get back to Port of Miami, senor!” Pepe shouted, holding on to the windscreen with his left hand, and the Night Vision binocs with his right. “Not this!”
“Plans don’t always work out, do they, Pepe?”
Stoke thought about the situation for a second.
“Listen up, Pepe, I got a thought.”
“Si, Senor Stokely.”
“We don’t need the other boats, they’re only slowing us down. We can deal with this all by our lonesomes, we got enough gas. I’m going to slow down, let ’em catch up, off-load those extra jerry cans. You keep your binocs on Rodrigo.”
Stoke hauled back on the throttles, back to idle, let the boat settle, ride up the front of the big waves, crest, and slide down the back. In a couple of minutes, the other three boats had reached them. Stoke waved them in close, ready to throw lines and raft up. Start the fuel transfer. He knew the three boatloads of commandos wouldn’t be too happy about this but—
“Senor!” Pepe said. “We will not need the gas! Look!”
He handed Stoke the night-vision binocs. The boat had slid down to the bottom of a trough so he had to wait till they crested to get a look. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing through the luminous green lenses. Seven or eight ramshackle old wooden houses rising up on stilts, ’bout twenty feet over the water. Old, looked like, and deserted. Stiltsville! Yeah, he’d read about the place on the plane down. Old gambling and rum-running settlement, built in the ’30s. Been a ghost town since the last big hurricane. But, the really weird thing? Rodrigo’s sixty-foot speedboat was moored to a ladder going up to one of the bigger houses. Boat looked empty, just bobbing up and down. Now, why would he want to do that?
“Fantastico! Lo tenemos! La rata! We got the rat!” Pepe shouted, looking at the troops in the other boats and pointing to the Cigarette. “Vamonos!”
“Hey! Hold up, Pepe!” Stoke said, quickly grabbing a lifeline on the nearest boat before the guy driving it could take off. He pulled the boat alongside and pointed at two large jerrycans of gas in the stern. “Dos mas, por favor,” he said to the young commando. Kid was built like a small gorilla. He picked up the two heavy gas cans like a couple of super-sized Pepsis and handed them over to Stoke. By the time Stoke had them, the three inflatables had already gunned their motors and raced away.
“What you wait for, senor? Let’s go get him!”
“This is a major goatfuck, man, I’m tellin’ you. Get on the damn radio and call ’em back. Pronto if not sooner!” Stoke turned his back on the guy and started filling his tanks.
“This is my operation, senor, not yours! I take my orders from el comandante, not norteamericanos. Now, go!”
“You always this stupid, or you just making a special effort today?” Stoke said, shaking his head in wonder.
The other three flat-bottoms were still racing towards Stiltsville and closing fast. Total and complete fuck-up, you could see it coming a mile away.
Stokely had the Cuban commander’s Glock nine sidearm out of its holster and jammed up against Pepe’s head before the guy even knew how or even if it might happen.
“How you say ‘mutiny’ in Spanish, jefe? ’Cause that’s what’s happening. First thing you do? You tell your guys here to hand their guns nice and slow to Ross, comprende? ’Less you want your brains in the water.”
Lieutenant Alvarez gave the order, and Stoke knew enough Spanish to know the man wanted to keep his brains intact, though, from what Stoke could see, there wasn’t a whole lot to go around. Ross, sitting up now, accepted the weapons and stowed all but one, an AK-47 Chinese assault rifle, under the thwart seat. The AK he cradled loosely, but his finger was on the trigger.
“Assault knives?” Stoke asked the guy.
“Si.”
“Feed ’em to the fishies.”
Four knives splashed into the bay.
“Yours, too, comandante. I’ll keep it safe for you.”
After the guy had handed him the knife, Stoke took the gun away from his head and pushed him down into the seat. The three assault boats were now closing to within maybe a couple hundred yards of the nearest stilt house, the big one where Rodrigo’s black Cigarette boat was moored.
“One last chance, amigo,” Stoke said, handing Pepe the radio. “Call ’em back.”
The guy shook his head no.
“Ask you a relevant question, Pepe,” Stoke said. “You seen much combat? Or you just a special ops guy? Dragging folks kicking and screaming out of their houses in the middle of the night and shit. Kidnapping their children? Or, maybe you just got a sinus problem? Your nose so stuffed up you can’t smell a trap stinks to high heaven right in front of you?”
“My men will take him, you will see.”
“Well, look at it this way, Comandante, however it goes down? We sittin’ tight. We got us a front row seat. Ain’t that right, Ross?”
“Trap, Stoke.” Ross said quietly, eyes following the three boats, going slowly now, ghosting up to the ramshackle house where the black boat was tied. Troops on their feet, weapons all trained on the Cigarette.
“Bet your ass, trap. Nothing else makes sense, Ross. Rodrigo, he knows we after him. Why he stop? Tie up? Take a nap? Catch him some bonita? He got Fancha with him. Maybe catch a little trim?”
“The boat doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I’m working on, too. He can’t be in it. He knows he’s outnumbered. Twelve guys with automatic weapons, RPGs. Shoot his boat up, sink it. So, then, what, he’s up in one of the houses? Lure them in? House-to- house? Twelve against one? Make any sense to you?”
“Better off running, Stoke. Head south for the Keys. Bags of hidey holes down in the mangrove swamps.”
“What I try to tell the military genius here.”
“Right.”
“Rebel without a clue. Boy like to snatch his troops from the jaws of victory.”
“His call.”
“Keep your eyes open, Ross. Looks like Senor McHale’s Navy is going in without him.”
“Here’s a thought,” Ross said, rubbing his stubbly chin. “Maybe that Cigarette’s not Rodrigo’s only boat.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Suva Island
HE TOOK A SMALL SIP OF THE ICE-COLD GIN, AND SAVORED the juniper bite of it on his tongue. In no aspect of his appearance or attitude was there any hint that here was a man about to ignite the fuse of what could conceivably be World War Three.
