Cayos in the Stream Read Online Free PDF Page B

some of the sailors. Better to take no chances.
    The Pilar smells none too fresh. The breeze brings you whiffs of badly washed sailor. Short showers with saltwater soap do not get a man clean.
    But as you come up alongside the U-boat, you decide the Pilar might as well be drenched in Chanel No. 5 by comparison. The rusting German boat is a Sears, Roebuck catalogue of stinks. The poor, sorry swine aboard her cannot shower at all. They have to make do with basins and wet rags. Food spoils, all the faster in these latitudes. Better not to think about the heads, especially late in a long cruise. Bilge water traps all the stenches and makes sure they never go away.
    No wonder the white-capped skipper smiles, up there on the conning tower. The foul air still wafts up out of the hatch. You can smell it, so he can, too. For now, though, he is not trapped inside that stinking steel tube with the hatch dogged shut.
    He says something in German, too quick for you to follow. You tense. Does it all go sour here? Then two sailors step away from the deck gun and toss lines so the Pilar can tie up to the U-boat. You wave to the skipper. He does not suspect a thing. You have played the big, smug, famous idiot well enough to win an Oscar.
    Maybe you have even played the big, smug, famous idiot well enough to live.
    Waving still, smiling fit to break your face, you yell, “ Now! ”
    Things seem to happen very slowly. Only piecing them together afterwards do you realize everything that matters is over in a few seconds. If it were not, you would be much too dead to worry about piecing things together afterwards.
    All the Tommy guns start chattering at once. As if in slow motion, the Germans at their machine gun tumble away from it. Red splotches—darker than movie blood—spread across one man’s dirty white tunic. A .45-caliber round blows out the back of the other bastard’s head.
    Both sailors from the deck-gun crew who tossed lines to the Pilar ’s men are down and bleeding. A glance shows you the rest of the Nazis at the 88 have fallen, too. Good. None of them had time to duck behind the mount. Thank you, Jesus . You remember your religion at times like this. Times like this are what religion is for. And one shell from that ugly chunk of steel would have mashed your boat and everybody on her.
    As soon as the German sailors at the guns are out of action—maybe even before they all are—your guys hose down the top of the conning tower with the niños . The skipper goes down. Away flies his white-crowned cap.
    “Follow me!” you shout. “Frags!” You jump from the Pilar to the U-boat. The false fire extinguisher is still in your arms. The damned thing is heavy. Your breath sobs in your lungs as you scramble up the iron ladder at the rear of the conning tower. You are getting—no, you have got—too old for this kind of craziness.
    But here you are anyway, square in the middle of it.
    Blood and bodies on top of the tower. A couple of the bodies thrash. The Tommy guns did not kill clean. Human beings are harder to kill clean than anyone who has never tried it thinks. But the Nazis are out of the fight. That is what counts.
    A German sailor pops up from the hatch like a jack-in-the-box. He has a Schmeisser in his hands, but he never gets to use it. He needs to look around for a second to find out what the hell is going on. You already know. And your time in the ring pays off. You catch him smack on the button with the sweetest right uppercut you ever threw.
    His eyes roll up. He falls down the hatchway. A yell from below says he falls on top of the squarehead coming up behind him. They both fall the rest of the way together. More yells say they land on other people.
    You yank the fuse on the fire-extinguisher bomb. A frag arcs past you and down the hatch. It blows up no more than a second later. The yells down there turn to screams.
    You drop the bomb down the hatch. “Get away!” you shout. There is a lot more explosive inside that