“We have fifteen minutes,” he said.
“I heard.”
“You know what I was thinking, Clete?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“I was thinking that maybe this would be a good place—Argentina, I mean—to live.”
“Right now, Mr. Pelosi, I am of the belief that practically anywhere would be a good place to live. Considering the alternatives, of course.”
“No. I mean it. I was thinking that they probably don’t have a good demolitions company down here.”
“You want to blow up Buenos Aires, Mr. Pelosi? Is that what you’re saying?”
“There’s a lot of old buildings here that have to come down. They probably take them down the way they put them up, one brick at a time.”
“And you could improve on that system?”
“I’m pretty good at what I do, as a matter of fact,” Tony said.
“Yes, Tony, you are.”
“What the hell, it don’t cost to dream, does it?”
“Not a dime.”
“I’m really stuck on Maria-Teresa, Clete. It’s not her fault she had to do what she did with that bastard Mallín.”
“You are speaking of my future father-in-law, Mr. Pelosi.”
“No shit? You’re really going to marry that girl?”
“That thought has been running through my mind.”
“What the hell, why not? If you love her, that’s all that really matters, right?”
“My sentiments exactly, Mr. Pelosi.”
“You be my best man, and I’ll be yours, deal?” Tony said cheerfully, and put out his hand.
Clete shook it.
“Deal.”
After a moment, Tony said, “So we’re pissing in the wind. So what?”
They did not exchange another word for another twelve minutes, when Clete said, “I think you better go get set up, Tony.”
“Yeah, right.”
The first antiaircraft weapon on the Reine de la Mer to come into action was a heavy machine gun mounted above her bridge. It was firing one-in-five tracers. These arched through the sky and then seemed to die a hundred yards or so below the Beechcraft.
After the tracer charge burns out, Clete thought, the projectile—plus, of course, the projectiles that don’t contain a tracer element, four times as many of those—continue on their trajectory.
Clete waited as long as he could after two other machine guns opened fire, and after first one and then the other of the Bofors 40-mm cannon began to fire, before calling, “GO!”
He held the Beechcraft as steady as he could for fifteen seconds, then turned to look over his shoulder at Tony.