Clete looked at Ettinger.
“I finally found one of the Jewish refugees with some balls,” Ettinger explained. “He told me that an agent of the Hamburg-Amerika Line contacted his firm—he works for a ship chandler—and asked them to furnish an extraordinary quantity of meat, fresh and frozen, plus other foodstuffs and supplies, for delivery by lighter to the Reine de la Mer in Samborombón Bay, where she is at anchor with ‘mechanical difficulties.’ The name matched the list. I figured this had to be the ship.”
“It is,” Clete said. “She’s anchored twenty miles offshore in Samborombón Bay.”
“How did you find her?” Tony asked.
“I went looking for her in my father’s airplane.”
“So what’s this all about?” Tony asked. “If we know where it is, why don’t we just go sink the sonofabitch?”
“This isn’t the movies, Tony, and I’m not John Wayne, and neither are you two,” Clete said.
“Well,” Tony said. “Maybe Dave isn’t John Wayne, but I always thought that I…”
“Tony,” Clete said, smiling, “I got a good look at the ship. Not only is she twenty miles or so offshore, but she’s equipped with searchlights and machine guns, and probably with twenty-millimeter Bofors autoloading cannon. There is no way to get near her. Or none that I can think of.”
“A small boat, at night?” Ettinger suggested.
“You can hear the sound of a small boat’s engine a long way off from a ship at anchor, Dave,” Clete said. “And they’re certainly taking at least routine precautions; I’m sure that they sweep the area with floodlights at night, post lookouts, that sort of thing.”
Ettinger shrugged, accepting Clete’s arguments.
“I went to see Nestor as soon as I could when I came back,” Clete continued.
“You didn’t say anything to us,” Tony interrupted, and looked at Ettinger for confirmation.
“I didn’t have anything to tell you, except that I’d found her. And that could wait until I talked to Nestor, and listened to what he had to say when I told him there was no way we could damage the ship where she lies—not with just twenty-odd pounds of explosive.”
“I can do a lot with twenty pounds of explosive,” Tony said.
“Presuming you can lay your charges, right? I’m telling you, there is no way to get close enough to that ship to do that.”
“What about the airplane you found her with?” Ettinger asked. “Lieute
nant, I don’t want to sound like I’m questioning your judgment, but I really would like to put that ship out of action.”
“The airplane I found her with is my father’s Beechcraft stagger-wing. It’s a small civilian airplane. I couldn’t carry in it more than three or four hundred-pound bombs—if I had three or four hundred-pound bombs—and I don’t think I could hit…”
“Then what was Nestor talking about? He said you had some wild idea about torpedoing the Reine de la Mer.”
“What I told Nestor was that if he could get me a TBF from Brazil…”
“A what?” Tony asked.
You don’t know what a TBF is either?
“A torpedo bomber. A single-engine Navy airplane with a bomb bay that can handle a torpedo.”
“They have them in Brazil?”
“We’re equipping the Brazilian Navy. It seems logical to me that we’d give them TBFs.”
“You could sink the ship if you had one?”
Clete nodded. “Yeah. I think the reason they haven’t thought of putting out the Reine de la Mer with one is that they don’t have the range to reach here from Brazil.”
“You’re thinking of refueling it where we were in Uruguay?” Tony asked.