“Twenty-four,” Tony replied, his tone of voice suggesting he was puzzled by the question. That number was agreed to after much discussion and a few practical experiments, and Clete knew that.
“How many do we have? Now?”
“We had eighteen, maybe nineteen this morning, that we can trust.”
“How long does it take to take five or six more apart?”
“That depends on who’s doing it. Chief Daniels is taking his time. He doesn’t like the look of the explosive charge,” Tony said. “The goddamned shells were loaded in 1935, can you believe that?”
“The powder’s old?” Graham asked.
“Yeah, and it’s sort of like TNT, which is trinitrotoluene. It gets unstable if it settles—the nitro sort of leaks out of the fuller’s earth—and then you’ve got nitroglycerin, which is unstable
as hell.”
“Out of the what?” Clete asked.
“Think of dirt mixed with sand,” Tony explained. “This is special stuff. I don’t know what the Navy calls theirs; but in commercial TNT, it’s fuller’s earth. It’s uniformly porous, so it absorbs the nitroglycerin evenly. You understand?”
Clete nodded.
“OK. That makes it stable. And when it burns, it burns uniformly. So when it’s improperly stored—in too much heat, for example; or for too long, like these shells, loaded seven years ago—the nitro seeps out, and you have nitroglycerin again.”
“And you didn’t think you could help Chief Daniels?” Colonel Graham asked.
Tony didn’t like the question.
“Yes, Sir, I could have helped him. But he said there was no point in both of us getting blown up; and he ran me off.”
“You’re an officer,” Graham said, not pleasantly. “Daniels is a chief.”
“Just a minute, Colonel!” Clete protested angrily. “You’re talking to somebody who was willing to make his own magnetic mine and stick it on the goddamned Reine de la Mer.”
Graham looked coldly at Clete, then said, “No offense, Pelosi.”
Pelosi, perhaps encouraged by Clete’s defense, had a reply of his own.
“The way it works when you’re fucking around with high explosives, Colonel, when you have a fuck-up like this one, is make the guy responsible fix it. The Navy fucked these shells up, let a sailor fix them. If he blows himself up, don’t worry. If I have to, I can go into those ancient shells and get out what I need, and I know I won’t blow myself up.”
“Señor Cletus,” the housekeeper announced behind him. “If it is convenient, luncheon is served.”
“Saved by the bell, Colonel,” Clete said.
“You look as if you belong there, Clete,” Colonel Graham said a minute or so after they took their seats at the dining room table.
“Excuse me?”
“At the head of the table, in the Royal Chair, approving the wine.”
What is he trying to do, charm me?
“Do I?”
“Have you ever considered that it will be yours one day—the Royal Chair, the whole estancia?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”
“The law is quite clear. Unless your father marries, when he dies, it’s yours—lock, stock, and barrel.”