Hull Six-five has sat on the ramp for three seasons under a board reading PUMPS OUT. Her pumps were never out. Now four men are loading her with ammunition, plasma, morphine and two crates of mortar rounds for a district position eleven miles up a canal.
The canal is forty yards wide. That is the whole of it, and everything that happens comes out of it.
Ambushes that stop by themselves after forty seconds. Two swimmers who tie a rope on a shaft instead of putting a charge under it. Cut bamboo fed into the jet intakes a piece at a time. A man standing on the bank in the open, unarmed, three times, closer each time.
Nobody is trying to sink this boat. Somebody is trying to make her slow, and spent, and late.
