1633

He yanked the thoughts away. Gretchen was back there, standing on the wharf and staring into darkness. He was here, in the bow of a thirty-foot fishing boat. And if he couldn't see any Spanish ship in that darkness, he could see the pitch-covered cask full of gunpowder sticking a few feet beyond the bow of the boat.

Spar torpedo, he thought sourly. Seems nifty as hell, reading about it in a book. Seemed nifty as hell, too, when we convinced a buncha crazy CoC volunteers to go in with us on the scheme. Now…

"Reminds me of that wisecrack I read once. Remember, Jimmy? You and me both thought it was funny. At the time."

A frown came over Jimmy's face. At least, Jeff thought it was a frown. It was hard to tell, between the darkness, the falling rain-not to mention the rain on his glasses-and the shapeless hat Jimmy was wearing. But he knew Jimmy well enough to guess that he was seeing a frown of puzzlement. Jimmy was a smart enough kid, but… not fast-thinking. Nothing at all like Eddie Cantrell, that way. Jimmy could and would slowly chew his way through to a problem's right answer, but he always took some time getting there.

"What are you talking about?"

Jeff's lips quirked. "That quote I showed you once. 'Adventure is somebody else having a miserable time someplace far away.' "

"Oh. That one. Yeah." He chuckled. "There was some British actor once-maybe Paul Newman-said kinda the same thing. His idea of adventure was carrying a mug of beer from one smoke-filled room to another."

Jeff rolled his eyes. "Paul Newman's not English. He's American. Why do you always think every classy old actor is English?"

" 'Cause most of 'em are," came the confident reply. "Take a look at Cary Grant. Or Katherine Hepburn. Get past Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney, that's about it. Well… I'm not sure about that Olivier guy. His accent's a little much. I think he might have been faking it. Probably came from someplace in Kansas."

Jeff closed his eyes tightly. Partly to shelter them from the rain, which had suddenly turned into a driving, almost-horizontal sheet. Mostly to dispel the pain.

"There are so many errors in what you just said it makes my head hurt. Besides, I think it was Peter O'Toole who made the wisecrack about the smoke-filled rooms. And if I remember right, it was 'a pint of bitters,' not a mug of beer."

"Um. Yeah, that makes sense. I figure that's why he stuck with Elizabeth Taylor so long. Sure, she's too hefty, but she's English like he is. Or maybe they're Welsh."

Jeff stifled a groan. He started to snarl something, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned his head and saw one of the fishermen who'd agreed to accompany them on this harebrained scheme.

"Push it now, ha?" the man asked, nervously. He gestured toward the torpedo.

Jeff didn't blame him for being nervous. A hundred pounds of black powder perched just a few feet away would make anybody nervous. The fact that the bomb was designed to be set off by a weird American triggering device was guaranteed to make any Dutchman twice as nervous.

That's just 'cause he doesn't understand how it works. I do-which is why I'm twice as nervous as he is.

He felt a powerful urge himself to order the spar holding the torpedo to be run out to its maximum extension. But he restrained it. That extra few feet of distance wouldn't really help that much, in the event of an accidental explosion. Not Jeff and Jimmy, anyway, right in the bow of the boat. And lowering it into the water now, when they had no idea where their target was, would just be foolish.

He shook his head firmly. "Must wait until-" He groped for the words for diversionary attack for a moment. Not long, though. The sophisticated terminology was hopelessly beyond the rudimentary Dutch-German pidgin he was speaking.

"Other sailors," he managed, pointing off somewhere into the darkness to port. "Must wait them."

The Dutch sailor grimaced, but didn't press the point. Instead, he scurried back to the men laboring at the oars. Jeff suspected he'd been sent forward as their emissary. The crew manning the boat was a volunteer force, patched together from a few fishermen, seething at the destruction of their livelihood, and the boldest of the city's apprentices who'd joined the Committee of Correspondence Gretchen had set up in Amsterdam over the past two weeks.

"And that's another thing," Jeff muttered, dragging off his glasses and drying them-well, smearing the water into fresh patterns, anyway-before he jammed them back onto his nose. "In the history books, at least the screwballs pulling off this stunt all spoke the same language."

Jimmy combined a shrug with a shiver. The rain was cold. Naturally.

"What we got. They volunteered. More than you can say for those civic militia assholes."