“No. We’re taking a heading of . . . three hundred degrees.” I turned the wheel to port and picked up a heading that would take us northwest, toward the Straits of Florida. This heading would keep us a little closer to the Cuban coast than I wanted and keep us in Cuban territorial waters longer than I liked. But it was the most direct route home.
Felipe began broadcasting, first in English, then in Spanish. English is the international language of the sea, but I wanted to make sure that the Guarda Frontera understood, in Spanish, that we were ratting them out. So even if we didn’t make it, they couldn’t claim, “No comprende.” But to put myself in their position, they were justified in pursuing and firing on a boat full of murderers.
Meanwhile, the Zhuk had changed course in response to my change of course, and so had the Stenka. The Zhuk was gaining on us a bit. Now that I’d changed course and was moving almost directly away from the Stenka, he wouldn’t be in firing range for about fifteen or twenty minutes if my calculations were correct. All we could do now was maintain this heading and hope that the Guarda Frontera boats received orders to give up the pursuit. I mean, hopefully the regime wouldn’t want to cause an international incident on the high seas. True, we were no longer innocent tourists—we were wanted killers—but the bastards in Havana had to decide how to deal with that problem at one in the morning—militarily or diplomatically. I hope they were having as bad a night as I was.
* * *
I turned on my chart plotter for the first time and pulled up a view that took in Key West, which was about three hundred and fifty kilometers away—about two hundred miles. I corrected my heading and hit the autopilot, which would continue to correct for drift caused by the weather and currents.
I had the wind at my back, riding ahead of the storm, which I assumed was still tracking on a northwesterly course, and I was getting a full twenty-five knots out of The Maine.
The chart clock said it was 1:57 A.M. I should be in Key West by 10, maybe 11 a.m., and in the Green Parrot for lunch. If anyone had an appetite.
The only problem with this plan was the two Cuban patrol boats, which I assumed still wanted to blow us out of the water.
I glanced at my radar screen. The Zhuk was still gaining on me, but he’d have to follow me halfway to the Keys before I was in range of his machine guns. And he might do that. I didn’t think I wanted to take him on again. God gives you only one miracle to save your ass. The next one is on you.
The real problem was still the Stenka. He was doing about forty-five knots, and I remembered him anchored outside the marina—a big bastard, bristling with mounted machine guns, and two gun turrets, fore and aft, that housed the twin rapid-fire cannons. I also pictured him now, cutting through the waves, and the captain staring at his radar, watching the distance between him and me beginning to close.
I looked again at the chart plotter. I was already too far west to shoot for Andros Island. I would have had to do that soon after I’d exchanged fire with the Zhuk. Now I was in the middle of nowhere, committed to my heading for the Keys, which was the closest land—if you didn’t count Cuba.
We’d crossed into international waters about fifteen minutes before, and as I suspected, the Guarda Frontera boats also crossed that line without a pause. They were in hot pursuit, and international waters didn’t mean much except that anyone could go there without permission. U.S. territorial waters began twelve nautical miles off the coast of the Keys, and no matter how I did the math, it didn’t look like we were going to get that far before the Stenka caught up to us.
Jack came into the cabin. “How we doing?”
“What’s the radio frequency for Dial-a-Prayer?”
He looked at the radar. “I think you need a higher frequency.”
“Right.”
“You got any more tricks up your sleeve?”
“I’m thinking.” I asked him, “What’s happening below?”
“Sara’s in the port stateroom, maybe catching some Zs. Felipe’s in the galley lightening our load of rum.”
“He earned a drink.”
“You want one?”
“No. But you go ahead.”
Jack remembered one of his T-shirts and said, “I only drink a little, but when I do, I become a different person, and that person drinks a lot.”
I smiled. “I’ll take a smoke.”
He fished his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, and I could see he was in some pain from where the AK round smacked his vest.
I took a cigarette and he lit me up with his Zippo, then lit himself up and said, “These things are gonna kill me.”
“You should live so long.”
He looked at the fuel gauge, checked out the radar again, then the GPS and chart plotter, but didn’t say anything.
The seas were getting calmer as we traveled west, and outside the windshield I could see stars peeking through the racing clouds. We had the wind at our backs, and The Maine was making good time. But not good enough.
My radar was set for six miles, to keep a close eye on our pursuers, whom I’d code-named Asshole A and Asshole B. Asshole A—the Zhuk—actually seemed to have lost ground, and it occurred to me that he may have a fuel situation. If he wasn’t topped off when he left Cayo Guillermo for his nightly patrol, he’d need to calculate how far he could follow me before he ran out of gas in the middle of the ocean.
I glanced at Asshole B—the Stenka—and saw he was chugging along, making maybe forty-five knots, and closing the gap. This asshole wanted to kill me.
I adjusted my radar to take in the whole fifty-mile radius of its range, and Jack and I looked for other ships out there, but I saw only two—one to the west heading west along the shipping lane through the Straits of Florida. The other ship was on a heading that would put it into Havana Harbor. The storm had pretty much cleared out the sea to the east and no one was in our vicinity. Even the drug runners were taking the night off.
I said to Jack, “Broadcast a distress call.”
He took the mic and began broadcasting, giving our position and heading, and who we were, and the nature of our problem, which he described as two fucking Cuban gunboats trying to kill us.
I advised him, “Say we also have a fuel situation and an injured crew member.”
“Who’s injured?”
“You, asshole.”
“Right.” He glanced at the fuel gauge, then continued his transmission.
The rules of the sea—the customs and traditions—say that you need to come to the aid of a ship in distress. But if the distress is a shoot-out on the high seas, there might be a lot of sea captains who’d rather avoid that, on the theory that your distress was not the elements, or an act of God, and not the kind of distress that obligated them to risk their own asses or the asses of their crew or passengers. The fuel situation, however, and the injured crew member might awaken a captain’s sense of brotherly obligation. I suggested, “Tell them we’re running out of booze.”
Jack, whose dark humor is darker than mine, asked me, “Should I say we came in second in a Cuban fishing tournament?”