Cayos in the Stream by Harry Turtledove Page A

look much different, though.
    Now they are out to grab everything they can reach. And their arms have grown scarily long. U-boats show up off the East Coast. They torpedo one fat freighter after another. American cities are only half blacked out. Doing it right would be bad for business. Ships marked against the lights ashore make hunting easy for subs.
    And U-boats show up in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean. No one expects them there. No one has imagined they will be there. The Gulf is even less ready for them than the East Coast. They send ships to the bottom by the dozen.
    You want to do something to the Germans. You want to grab Hitler’s stupid Charlie Chaplin mustache with a pliers and yank, hard. You cannot do that.
    So you do what you can do. The older you get, the more you start to wonder if that is not what life is all about. There are advantages to being a world-famous writer. Especially, there are advantages to being a world-famous writer who is not broke.
    You have a boat, for instance. The Pilar . Pilar is what you used to call your second wife, Pauline, when you were running around on your first wife with her. You did not give Martha a pet name when you were running around on Pauline with her. You figured Pauline would be wise to those tricks. The pet names Martha gave you . . . Binglie. Warp. Dimpie. Rabby. She still throws them around. One more thing to set your teeth on edge.
    But the Pilar . Thirty-eight feet. All wood, so she gives with the sea like a lover. Black hull. Dark green superstructure. A flying bridge you can see a longish way from. Two engines, a 75-horsepower Chrysler and a 40-horsepower Lycoming. She will make sixteen knots—just about the speed of a surfaced U-boat—on both of them, five knots on the little guy alone. She sleeps six pretty well, eight if she has to.
    And you have strings you can pull. People want to know a world-famous writer, especially a world-famous writer who is not broke. People like the American ambassador in Havana. People like the local FBI agent. Yes, there is one. It is not just that the Mob gets a cut from the local casinos, either. Not these days, it is not.
    There are 770 Germans in Cuba. There are something like thirty thousand Spaniards. Most of them belong to the goddamn Fascist Falange. Only a baby fifth column, but a fifth column even so. Any cancer starts with a few cells going haywire. Leave it alone and it will kill you.
    People say the fifth column in Cuba has set up supply dumps and fuel stores for U-boats to use. Maybe that is true, maybe not. Even your FBI buddy in Havana does not know for sure. But he worries about it. He gets paid to worry about things. So does the ambassador.
    Damn few Navy ships patrol the Florida Straits. Damn few warplanes fly over the deep blue of the Gulf Stream there. When you say you want to take the Pilar out to hunt for German submarines, the ambassador and the local FBI man put their money where your mouth is. They pay you five hundred dollars a month for fuel and food. They get the boat a fancy radio rig.
    And they help you get hold of weapons. When you first have this idea, you want twin .50s for the Pilar . The FBI man is the one who talks you out of it. If the Germans see the boat sporting machine guns, what will they do? They will sink it. If they think it is only a fishing boat, they may surface instead. Stealing the other fellow’s marlin and mackerel is easier and safer than fishing for them yourself.
    So the Pilar does not mount those lovely machine guns. She does carry Tommy guns—one for every crewman and a couple of spares for anyone to grab in a hurry. She carries grenades. And she carries a charge a lot bigger than a grenade disguised as a fire extinguisher. Chuck that down the conning-tower hatch and watch the fur fly in a U-boat!
    You are proud of the disguised bomb. Well you might be, since you thought of it. It is the ace up your sleeve, if you can get close enough to use it. If. You hope