The Cruise of the Albatros

by E. C. Williams

General Hunter was concise and to the point, very flic-like. “We were already concerned about these pirates when we received word of the disaster on Mauritius. That prompted us to finalize and put into action some plans we had already been discussing.

  “Every able-bodied male on the island between the ages of seventeen and sixty has been enrolled in the Defense Force, either as a part-time reservist or as a full-time soldier. The older men are armed and trained to serve as static defense forces – they will man selected points, well inland, which we are in the process of fortifying and stocking with food and arms. These will serve as refuges for the coastal population, who will be evacuated to the nearest one at the first indication of an impending pirate attack.

  “The best of the younger soldiers form a mobile rapid-reaction force. We’ve earmarked every motor vehicle on the island to be called into service to move this force quickly to any point threatened by a pirate landing.”

  “Are your roads good enough to support this kind of mobile force?” Kendall interrupted, no doubt remembering how, outside of the towns and villages on Nosy Be, the ancient roadways were rough and sometimes completely overgrown.

  “The pre-Troubles road network on Reunion made a complete circuit of the island, following the coastal plain. During the period of Kerguelenian settlement here, we’ve repaired long stretches – those most useful, given settlement patterns. We’ve made an effort, since the declaration of an island-wide emergency, to make passable those unrepaired stretches likely to be required to move the mobile force.”

  Hunter moved to the map of the island, and gestured toward it. “The mobile force is divided in such a way as to take advantage of those parts of the network in the best condition.” He pointed out the locations of mobile force bases, and the roads they would use to move in either direction, and showed how the entire force could meet and converge on any point on the coast.

  “To try to assure the earliest possible warning of an impending attack, we maintain an offshore patrol of sloops and ketches taken up from fishing or trade,” Hunter continued. “We’ve equipped as many of them as possible with simple radio transmitters – we’re still in the process of doing that, and training skippers in their use, but nearly all are now so fitted. In order to equip every vessel as rapidly as possible, the transmitters are very simple, with only a single frequency, and the skippers are trained in radio only so far as to be able to send an alert, their position, and the direction from which an attacking force approaches.”

  “Aren’t all these measures highly disruptive to normal life on Reunion – to its economy?” Sam asked.

  “Very much so, Captain,” replied the President. “But much less disruptive than the kind of attack Mauritius suffered. We may not be able to prevent such a disaster here, but we – the people and the government – are determined to make the fils de pute pay heavily if they try it!” The President’s voice rose on this last statement, allowing his passion and anger to break through the statesmanlike facade he had so far maintained.

  “What about arms for your soldiers, General – how did you find so many guns?” asked Kendall, who as leader of the Albatros’ landing force had been intimately involved in the challenge of arming them.

  “Our gunsmiths put their heads together and devised a simple, breech-loading, single-shot smooth bore that could be made easily and quickly – basically, a shotgun. We improvised shops around the island, and the gunsmiths and their apprentices trained people to turn them out in assembly-line fashion. Our women and girls turned out to be especially good at gun-making. We also fitted these guns with bayonets, for hand-to-hand fighting.”

  Kendall and Sam looked blankly at one another. “Bayonets?” Sam asked.

  “A bayonet is a sort of dagger, a way to turn a long gun into a spear, in effect – well, it would be easier to show you than tell you.” Hunter excused himself and left the office. He returned quickly, carrying a long gun in one hand and a thing like a spike in the other, thirty-five or forty centimeters long, pointed at one end and the other twisted into a ring, the plane of which was at a right-angle to the long axis of the spike.

  “A bright young man on my staff – a recent immigrant from the Rock – remembered reading about this in an old book, in the Institute,” Hunter said. “Here’s how it works: the ring fits over the end of the barrel like this – you have to line up the front sight with this notch on the inside of the ring, then give the bayonet a twist to seat it in this groove.”

  The shotgun now had the spike rigidly fixed to the end of the barrel. The blade was offset so that the weapon could be safely fired with the bayonet in place. Hunter handed the weapon to Sam, who examined it closely. The spike was triangular in cross section, tapering to a wickedly sharp point. He was impressed by the simple ingenuity of the arrangement, and especially how it gave its users a considerable advantage in reach over pirates armed with their short, curved blades.

  Sam handed the weapon on to Kendall, who hefted it, and gazed enviously at the bayonet. “Wah! How I wish we had thought of this!” he exclaimed.

  He was less impressed by the gun, which was simple to the point of crudity, and would be significantly inferior to either of their types of rifle in range and accuracy. Still, it would probably be deadly at close range, depending upon the type of ammunition used. This last thought prompted Kendall to ask, “What sort of ammo do you use – a slug, or shot?”

  “We experimented on the range with both. We decided on a combination we call ‘ball-and-shot’, a cardboard cartridge with a lead slug and a dozen pellets. It’s a unitary round – it combines percussion cap, powder, and shot in one unit. It’s a mix that’s deadly out to nearly 100 meters, and should inflict nasty wounds at between 100 and 200 meters – as a practical matter, the maximum effective range of the weapon.”

  “How did you accumulate the raw materials for all this – the guns, ammo, radios – in so short a time?”

  General Hunter looked at his President and shrugged. “It was a challenge, of course.”

  The President added, “We scrounged every bit of metal scrap we could, and people donated their spare kitchen utensils and farm tools. We even resorted to mining old privy sites for saltpeter – potassium nitrate—for gunpowder manufacture. The Reunionnais have made many sacrifices for the defense effort.”

  There was a brief silence, as the four men considered the magnitude of those sacrifices – Sam and Kendall could only guess at them, but knew they must have been great and painful.

  “General, I have no criticisms to offer about your defense planning – you seem to have thought of everything. This ‘bayonet’ gadget of yours is particularly clever. You can be sure we’ll copy that as soon as we’re able.”

  “Not ‘our’ gadget, Captain,” Hunter replied modestly. “It’s apparently a very ancient weapon – we merely copied it from our distant ancestors.”

  “In any event, it looks as if the pirates are in for a very unpleasant surprise if they attack Reunion Island,” Sam said, while pulling out his watch. He didn’t want to appear rude to their hosts, but he was more anxious than ever to be under way for Pirate Creek.

  “And now, Mister President, I very much regret that we have to leave you. As I mentioned earlier, we have some intelligence – the merest hint, nothing firm – that a pirate force is returning to the creek where our first battle took place. It’s not much to go on, but we have to follow it up – and there’s no time to waste.”

  “But of course, Captain. Go with God. Remember that you and your ship are always assured of a warm welcome on Reunion.”

  Sam and Lieutenant Kendall said their goodbyes, and were politely accompanied to the sloop by both President Petit and General Hunter. The lines were quickly cast off, and the sloop was underway immediately, headed out of the harbor toward the Albatros, visible in the distance, hove-to.

  “Captain, I've thought of a way to win this war in a hurry,” said Kendall, once they were well away from the pier. “We should somehow entice th
e pirates to attack Reunion with all their force.”

  Sam laughed heartily. “I don’t think that’s a great exaggeration, Al. The Reunionnais are fire-eaters, for sure. That General Hunter is one scary mec – I’m glad he’s on our side.” The two were silent for awhile as the motor sloop thrashed through the waves toward the waiting schooner.

  “Captain, I take it your intent is to put the landing force on shore at Pirate Creek to search for the captives…?”

  “Yes. You’ll be in charge of that evolution, Mister Kendall. The schooner will wait off the mouth of the creek. We’ll have a council of war with the XO once we’re back on board, and decide on the details.”

  Once they had reached the Albatros and the motor sloop had been recovered, Sam strode aft and said to the officer of the watch, “Mister Schofield, sheet in and set a course for Pirate Creek. Mister Mooney will have laid out the track on the chart.”

  The wind had backed more southerly, so the course to the creek mouth was now a close reach rather than a beat directly to windward. It had also freshened nearly to force 6, so the schooner could make much better speed onward than she had in the passage from Mauritius to Reunion.

  The schooner began to accelerate as the sails were trimmed in, and started the exhilarating lift and plunge of a vessel sailing close to the wind, sheets of spray thrown up by the bone in her teeth and blown aft – refreshing in the tropical heat.

  “Mister Schofield, pass the word for the XO and Mister Kendall – their presence is requested in my dining saloon at their earliest convenience.” From the Captain, that meant: Why aren’t they here already?

  “And ask the Pilot to send down the chart of the south-eastern coast of Madagascar.” Sam then went below.

  Shortly after he had reached his cabin, and was shifting out of his shore-going rig, with its stiff tunic collar, back into his more comfortable at-sea slops, the XO arrived, followed closely by Lieutenant Kendall, slightly out of breath.

  “XO, Mister Kendall, thanks for coming so quickly. Have a seat, will you, while I finish shifting my rig.”

  The midshipman of the watch, Murphy, arrived soon thereafter with the chart Sam had requested. “What took you so long, Mister Murphy? I could have fetched it myself faster.”

  “Sorry, sir,” replied Murphy, face reddening. “Had to track down the Pilot, Mister Mooney, sir. He was in the head, sir.”

  “Well, never mind. Off you go, then.” The Mid scampered away, grateful to be delivered from the lion’s lair.

  Sam grinned at the other two officers. “Gadgets should be kept on their toes – leaping about constantly. Builds character.” Kendall and the XO both laughed. They were in complete agreement with their Captain on this subject.

  “Sit down, gentlemen. Here’s what’s on my mind: my tentative intention is to proceed as fast as possible to Pirate Creek, where I will send the Landing Force, along with Mister Andri, ashore to search for any evidence of the captives. The schooner will wait off the creek mouth.

  “There are some risks with this plan, as I see it. For one thing, we also have some indications, however vague, that one or more pirate vessels may be planning to arrive off the creek. If that happens while we’re there, of course we’ll engage them. But a considerable portion of our crew will be ashore, in the form of the Landing Force and the sloop’s crew, so we would find ourselves fighting with less than our full force.

  “There are many uncertainties we have to take into account. For one thing, the discovery of more than a hundred additional survivors of the Mauritius settlement, most of them women and children, with the possibility of still more scattered throughout the bush, suggests that there are fewer captives than we first thought. There may be none at all, if the pirates in fact took no prisoners on Mauritius, and have murdered all of the crews of the vessels they’ve taken. The Kerg clothing and the wedding band we found at the pirate camp may simply have been loot. If that’s the case, I’ll have divided my force uselessly, risking the defeat or even the loss of the Albatros – if, in fact, pirate vessels show up while the landing force is ashore.

  “I should stress that I’m not trying to divide the responsibility for making a decision – I’m just sharing my thought processes with you, and hoping you’ll see something I’ve missed”.

  There was a brief silence as Ennis and Kendall digested what Sam had said.

  Bill said, “I think there’s a very small probability that the Albatros will encounter enemy vessels off Pirate Creek while our search party is ashore. We don’t know whether or not the position in the intercepted message refers to a rendezvous, and if it does, when the rendezvous will take place. We’re not even completely sure that the number group is a geographic position – although if it isn’t, the fact that it plots right off Pirate Creek is a hell of a coincidence. And something I’ve just thought of: the group doesn’t include the usual notation indicating whether north or south latitude, or east or west longitude – I just assumed it was south and east. This is a long shot, mind, but it could be a position north of the equator.”

  All three reflexively looked at the chart, but of course, if the position was in north latitude, it was far outside this chart’s limits. Sam tried to call up a mental vision of the globe. “If it was north latitude, and the same longitude, it would be somewhere in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf, I think. And if so, perhaps useful information for the future but irrelevant to this discussion, so let’s ignore that possibility for now,” he said.

  “And, as you said before, Skipper, we have no evidence on which to base a search for the captives, if there are any, and they are still on Madagascar, and near Pirate Creek,” Kendall interjected “The existence of far more huts than would have been necessary for the pirate crews alone, some of them located inside a stockade, does suggest that the pirates had captives there at one time, and took them away when those left ashore fled into the bush on our approach.

  “We won’t know until we get ashore, find some locals, and Mister Andri interviews them. I'm afraid the likelihood that we’ll find where the pirates are holding any captives is low. Of course, we’ll have to try.

  “But my point is this: we don’t necessarily have to put the entire landing force ashore. We have no idea how many pirates may have been left to guard the captives, if there are any and we find them, so half the landing force may be more than adequate to deal with them.

  “And it’s just about as equally likely that our entire landing force would be greatly outnumbered – in which case, discretion being the better part of valor, we'll fall back toward the creek and scream for help.”

  “Speaking of Mister Andri,” Sam said, “Is he okay? I’ve hardly seen him since we sailed from Nosy Be.”

  The XO looked concerned. “Unfortunately, our diplomat is prone to seasickness – he’s spent most of the voyage so far in his – my—bunk. Luckily, he managed to eat something, and keep it down, while we were alongside in Port Louis. I was beginning to fear he'd become so sick as to need Doctor Girard’s attentions.”

  “Did you tell him he’d feel better up on deck, in the fresh air, where he could see the horizon?”

  “I did, but he couldn’t make it topsides – he was too weak to leave his bunk.”

  “Have Doctor Girard see to him, Bill – I never heard of anybody dying of seasickness, but sometimes chronic sufferers get so weak they need days or weeks ashore to recover. We need him healthy when we reach Pirate Creek.”

  The XO looked abashed. “Aye aye, Skipper. I should have thought of that – I’ll pass the word to the Doctor as soon as our meeting is over.”

  “I think it’s over now, Bill. You two have given me food for thought – we may meet again before we reach Pirate Creek, but for now I’ll just continue to mull over the problem.”

  Some time later, Sam was doing just that while, as usual, pacing up and down along the windward rail when he was approached by Dr. Girard. She simply breezed up to him directly, as always. Sam continued to ignore this – it was
hardly a rule, after all, merely a bit of respectful politesse that had evolved among his officers. But he sometimes wished the Doctor paid more attention to these niceties of shipboard life.

  “Captain, I’ve moved Mister Andri to sick bay. He is seriously dehydrated due to continuous vomiting – to the point of being delirious when my SBAs came to Commander Ennis’ cabin to fetch him.”

  Sam was shocked. “Goeie Here, I had no idea it was so bad!”

  “Mister Andri is one of those unfortunate people who suffer from chronic, violent seasickness,” she said. “Perhaps it is some deformation of the inner ear. At any rate, he will never become used to the movement of the ship; will never “get his sea legs”, as the sailors say.”

  “What can you do for him?”

  “Not a lot, unfortunately. Another apt saying of seamen is that the only cure for seasickness is to sit on a rock – go ashore, in other words. The hanging cot he is in, in sick bay, helps by diminishing the sense of movement, and we are giving him fluid intravenously, a solution of glucose and saline in distilled water to restore the electrolytic balance and give him some nourishment.”

  Sam had only the vaguest notion what any of this meant – blessed with robust good health, he had never himself required the attention of a doctor before his recent wound. “What is glucose?” he asked.

  “Sugar, basically – a way to provide nourishment to a patient directly into the bloodstream, when he can’t take anything per os – “by mouth”, that is.”

  “And this will cure him?”

  “There is no cure for his condition, Captain, as I said,” the Doctor replied. Sam heard in her voice the suppressed irritation that he always seemed to arouse in her – and that, of course, irritated him.

  “But going ashore will.”

  “Yes. But he will be very much weakened if we don’t put him ashore soon.”

  “Why didn’t he speak up earlier? The XO just assumed he’d get over it eventually, like everyone does. And I wonder how the hell he survived crossing the sound between Madagascar and Nosy Be in a pirogue!”