To Honor We Call You: A Florida Action Adventure Novel (Scott Jarvis Private Investigator Book 9)

by Scott Cook

  For all of that, though, the two ships were outmatched. The British frigate was wreaking terrible damage on her two adversaries. If this were a battle at long musket shot or even long pistol shot, the outcome would be a sure run thing. However, both ships were no more than biscuit toss away and the French frigate was already drifting down upon the British warship. The corvette was backing her tops’ls as well to work up close. Their primary goal was clear.

  Had these been national ships, the total compliment of both might have been roughly equal to Indefatigable’s three hundred and twenty. However, Pellew had seen clearly enough from the number of men on deck that these were privateers more likely than not. Their gun decks and lower decks crammed with men. Extra men to fight the ship and more importantly, to pour over the bulwarks of a potential prize and to carry her by boarding. By the swiftness and eagerness of the two French captains to come to grips yardarm to yardarm with a much heavier vessel, there could be but one aim. They couldn’t overwhelm the Indi by sheer force, so they’d overwhelm her crew through the application of sheer numbers.

  “Mr. Albury!” Pellew called over the din. “Are we ready to repel boarders?”

  “Aye, sir!” The first lieutenant hollered back, turning to his captain, his face already gritty from smoke. “Cutlasses, pikes and boarding axes served out.”

  Pellew nodded and gazed around, taking in the scene. Although they were in a bit of a pickle, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion by any means. His crew was well worked up and upon the whole, a very dedicated and professional set of men. Certainly he had his share of hard bargains aboard, but even these men would lay into a Frenchmen with unyielding zeal.

  And then there were the other two ships. The small but evidently fast and handy schooner and the tubby brig that was even now working her way up astern of the French frigate. Either the French hadn’t noticed them or they didn’t care. Certainly they must be aware of the schooner. The beautiful American built vessel was even now hauling up off the frigate’s larboard bow and pouring a broadside of six pound shot into her. A mere five pop guns, but at close range and with a raking fire, they could certainly do some mischief. It was possible that the schooner was wounding more men than equipment, and that was very well in Pellew’s book.

  “On the down roll now…” Braiscirtle shouted. “Fire!”

  The big frigate shivered as both broadsides went off at once, the sound of gun trucks rumbling and the twanging of breeching ropes coming taught were met by a universal cheer as the French Frigate’s main tops’l was snapped nearly at the partners and went by the board, falling to looward and blocking at least three of their own gun ports.

  “Silence fore and aft!” Pellew roared out. “What’s this capering, Mr. Braiscirtle!? Is this the deck of a man o’war or a goddamn bawdy house! Attend to your duties, there! Fine shootin’ lads, but you’ve not earned a celebration yet! The damned French intend on setting their teeth into your hides!”

  The gun crews, most of them stripped to the waist and their bare backs already shining with sweat plied their pieces quickly and efficiently. None of them appeared very much chastened by Pellew’s harsh rebuke. They knew it was more to keep them focused than any real expression of displeasure. If his compliment hadn’t revealed this, the men who could see his pleased grin would know the truth all too well.

  The French guns barked out their reply. Pellew was pleased to note that they weren’t reloading near as fast as his own crews. His pleasure was short lived, however. A thirty-two pound ball passed through the hammock netting on the larboard side of the quarterdeck, ricocheted off the muzzle of one of the carronades, dismounting it and causing the overset gun to crush its crew’s captain to death. The very same shot rebounded from the carronade and struck Captain Collins of the Marines, cutting him in two before it settled against the starboard bulwarks leaving a trail of destruction, death and pools of blood in its wake.

  Hot on the heels of this shot was a twelve pounder that entered through the very same gap in the rail cap and hammocks, struck the wheel, reducing it to flying splinters. These struck both the quartermaster and the helmsman, killing one outright and neatly severing the other’s right arm at the elbow.

  Even as the man fell to the deck, screaming and writhing in agony, Pellew heard the screams of other men forward. There were wounded and dead now, and the butcher’s bill would only mount. Part of him wished the ships would come to grips. At least then every man jack would have his chance to fight an opponent rather than simply waiting for a random shot or a lethal splinter of oak to end his life or to maim him.

  To Pellew, being crippled and suffering with the result for the rest of one’s life might in truth be a far crueler fate. Images of the horrors of the cockpit… arterial blood spraying every which way and the shrieking of men having necessary but horrific atrocities visited to their persons filled his mind and elicited an involuntary shiver of revulsion.

  Suddenly another broadside rippled out. This one close but not as powerful. It wasn’t his own and it couldn’t be the French, not so soon…

  Pellew turned to see that the merchant brig had joined the fight. The vessel, with her sails shortened down to the barest fighting set, had ranged up no more than fifty yards astern of the French frigate and had just fired a full broadside into her. Although Pellew could only see half a dozen six pounders on her gun deck, and those manned by only a crew of three each, he saw that once these guns had fired, several of the crews had raced to the unmanned carronades and had set these off as well. The brig continued to move past, ghosting across his own stern now. Through the swirling clouds of powder smoke, Pellew saw a tall man on the quarterdeck wearing white britches, Hessian boots, a white shirt, cocked hat and a blue coat.

  Was that a Navy uniform after all?

  No… it merely appeared similar. Whoever he was, though, Pellew was grateful. The man waved at him, a sword flashing in the dwindling afternoon sunlight.

  The three ships, now so close together as to barely allow a boat to pass through the narrowing gap between, seemed to loom gigantic in Catherine Cook’s mind. Even the French frigate, whose lovely stern rose fifteen feet or more over the Whitby Castle’s quarterdeck appeared monolithic in her minds’ eye. She almost laughed out loud when she read the painted name board just below the stern windows of her great cabin. It said Résoudre and was trimmed in gold.

  Resolve.

  Good name for a ship… a warship especially… and a good test of her own resolution at that moment. It had been one thing to work the guns of the brig when the schooner first attacked. It had been one thing to fight elbow to elbow with her crew against the French to defend and then to retake their vessel. Yet now, the total and raw import of her decisions and if she were to be honest with herself, the focus of her entire life was staring at her with an unblinking and unyielding eye. It was an entirely different scenario altogether.

  She’d wanted to command a ship since she was just a wee girl. Now, her training, her preparation and her hopes were being realized in vivid sound and color. She was about to take her little brig into combat against a far superior force…

  “Why are you cryin’ little’n?” The tall, handsome twenty-one year-old newly minted Lieutenant asked as he bent down. The four year-old girl, her long brown hair a tangle and her new pinafore caked with grass stains and mud had huge tears running down the grime that covered her angel face.

  “They says I couldn’t play with them because I’m just a girl!” The child declared, half bawling and half sniffling.

  “Then how did you contrive to cover yourself so liberally in filth?” The young man asked.

  The girl, already tall for her age, stiffened her back, wiped her nose and said. “I thrashed em, sir! I said I wouldn’t tolate abuse from a pack of lubberly buggers and that if they didn’t tip at the civil and allow me to climb the tree as well, then I’d serve them out and they’d cop it somethin’ cruel!”

  “How many girls were there?” The Lieutenant asked, t
rying to hide his amusement and maintain an officer-like and fatherly appearance.

  “They wasn’t girls, they was boys!” the girl exclaimed. “A pack of miserable Goddamn sodomites, they was! But I learned em’! Brought em’ up with a round turn and clapped a stopper over their capers, I did! Told them they could take their soddin’ tree and stuff it up their asses and see how it suited!”

  It took a tremendous amount of fortitude for the young man not to convulse with undisguised mirth. The little dirty girl who stood with her arms crossed in defiance before him was his own daughter. And in spite of the new French governess and the training in the ways of a lady, the girl hadn’t lost the vocabulary of the lower deck. A vocabulary she’d picked up on the crossing from New England that very same winter. She’d spent a considerable time with the hands, who adored her and cosseted her to the point of spoilage. She could emulate the fine manners of an English maiden certainly enough, yet whenever she grew cross or upset in any way, the coarse language of the foremast jack… the looseness and vulgarity an irresistible draw to any child… and in no small part gleefully encouraged by the men themselves… would bubble over. It was a constant source of worry and intense amusement to her father.

  He knelt beside her, “Come now, sweetlin… we mustn’t use that sort of talk. It ain’t genteel and you know it. Even at your age, it’s necessary to observe the forms.”

  “The back of my hand to the forms!” The child stated. “I don’t want to be a bleedin’ proper miss. I want to be a jolly tar! I want to go to sea like you and like grandfather!”

  He knew that she’d fallen head over heels in love with the sea on their way back from America. He could see it plainly in her young eyes. He knew it had taken root in her tiny heart and it was a desire that couldn’t be quenched. It was a desire once again readily encouraged by the lower deck hands who’d instantly fallen in love with little Katie, trundling her about the decks as if she were their queen, carrying her up to the most prodigious heights in the ship to her unspeakable joy and taking every spare moment they had to teach her knotting and splicing, the innumerable parts of a ship and their proper workings and anything else her sharp budding intellect could absorb… and how she’d absorbed! It was as if her mind were ravenous for knowledge and that all things nautical were particularly welcome and imminently satisfying.

  James Cook knew the signs all too well. It had been born in his own father, himself coming up from the lower deck to become an officer. Coming in through the hawse hole as the sailors said. And in James himself, named for his illustrious father, the seed had taken root and bloomed at just about the same age as his little girl.

  “Why are you so angry, Katie?” James asked softly.

  She took in a shuddering breath and met his eyes, her huge sea blue ones bright with tears and ferocity, “Because why? Because they said I couldn’t climb or play with them because I’m just a girl!”

  “Is that true?” He asked gently.

  “Well… no… I can climb a tree. I’ve done it scores of times, daddy. Tis nothin’ against goin’ aloft to reef tops’ls in a gail, for all love!”

  “Then why do you believe them?” James asked. “Why would you believe anyone who tells you that you can’t do something when you know full well that you can?”

  Katie sniffed. That was a hard question for a girl four years old. There was a lot of philosophy back of that concept.

  “I… I don’t know… because girls are meant to drink tea and play with dolls. Boys are meant to run and play and climb…”

  James took the little girl in his arms and hoisted her up to his bosom, “My darling, I’m going to tell you something. You won’t understand it completely now, not at four… but someday you will and I want you to keep this in your heart always. It isn’t others who will stop you from being what you want to be. It’s what’s in your own heart and in your own mind that decides it. You can achieve anything you believe you can achieve. Do you mind me, now?”

  “I can?” She asked with the innocence and total trust that only a child not yet marred by the cruelty of the world can command.

  “Yes, little Katie,” he said. “And I’ll do my part to see that you get on whatever path you desire.”

  “Even becoming a sailor? Even… even becoming a captain!?” She asked this with such hope and such yearning that not for the first time and certainly not for the last, young James Cook’s heart was moved beyond words. This child, who he hadn’t even known existed a year before, had entranced him entirely. Even from the first, he recognized a girl of unusual parts and with such charming ways that he couldn’t conceive of any father loving a daughter more completely.

  He looked into her earnest eyes and smiled, “Even that and more, Katie girl. If you work hard, study, make your body and your mind strong and if your heart is truly made of oak… then nothing can ever defeat you…”

  Catherine Cook stood on her quarterdeck and felt a lump rise in her throat. She had to steel herself in order that the tears didn’t flow. She missed her father something cruel. He was kind, honorable and strong and a man far beyond his time. His dedication and belief in her had produced a woman further beyond it still. She hadn’t fully understood his words at the tender age of four, yet she did now and she’d certainly carry them and him with her all the days of her life.

  She was a Cook, by God, and finally, after a lifetime of hoping and waiting, she was faced with an opportunity to prove it!

  “Gun crew’s, there!” She roared forward to the men who waited anxiously at their pieces. “Make every shot count now! Right up her ass! Let’s show these frog eatin’ shits what happens when you fuck with any true British heart of oak and the Royal Navy, eh!”

  The men let fly a heart-felt cheer. They were in tearing high spirits and it warmed her heart to them. They were ready and so was she.

  “Wait for it!” She called out, narrowing her eyes as the stern of the French frigate came into line. “Pour it into her, lads! Fire!”

  The six pounders barked out. A pitiful sound compared to the prodigious thunderclap of the larger ships’ guns, but the small shot did gratifying damage from close range. The entire range of the Frenchman’s sash windows vanished in flying glass and splinters.

  “To the carronades, now!” Kate roared, leaping across the deck to the nearest eighteen pound smasher.

  Palander appeared at her side along with Wade. Between the three of them, they elevated the stubby barreled gun. It, unlike the long sixes, did come with a modern flint lock. Kate held the lanyard, sighted along the barrel, stepped aside and jerked the cord.

  The ugly short barreled weapon, good at long pistol range or less, roared out and slammed inward along it’s slides. Its ball hurtled into the very vitals of the French ship, smashing through the transom and joining its brethren as it carried along the ship’s gun deck, killing and maiming and wrenching.

  “Reload the barkers and then back to your great guns!” Kate roared, shoving a sponge into the piece. “We’re going to give the same treatment to the corvette! Good show, lads!”

  Kate spotted a man high up on the British ship, the Indefatigable’s quarterdeck. She had a copy of Steel’s navy list and knew that the man dressed in his full uniform with two gold epilates on his broad shoulders and a red sash indicating his Order of the Bath could be none other than Sir Edward Pellew himself. Kate grinned and waved her sword high in the air and shouted to him, although Pellew couldn’t have heard.

  As her vessel crept past the Indi’s wide stern, Kate hoped she’d get a chance to shake his hand when the din settled down.

  They were nearly in line with the corvette’s stern now and still the French were taking no notice of them! It seemed impossible that this could be so. Granted, the British frigate was certainly occupying the majority of their attention, but…

  Another tremendous exchange of fire and then small arms fire as well. From all three ships, muskets cracked in a rippling fire that when combined with the cannon blazed like
Guy Faux night.

  “Point your guns!” Kate roared out.

  She could see the men along the battery hauling on the train tackles, levering the barrels with crow’s and hand spikes and adjusting their quoins. The length of even the brig’s six larboard gun battery was wider than the corvette, so the forward and aft crews were forced to train their pieces around so that everyone would hit.

  Finally, someone aboard the corvette seemed to gather their wits about them. A row of men appeared along the vessel’s taffrail and leveled half a dozen muskets at them. Smoke puffed from their barrels and Kate could hear the thwack of seventy-five caliber balls striking wood and even one of the carronades. No screams, though. No one had been hit by the grace of God!

  “Fire!”

  The six cannon spat smoke and flame and like the frigate, the corvette’s stern windows vanished in a twinkling. The six men at the taffrail hadn’t even had time to move before a shot that was elevated a bit too high swept them all from the rail, the deadly grape shot and ball murdering the entire group in a single blow.

  “Hard to starboard!” Kate called. “Men, standby to board! All Castle’s to me!”

  Wade threw the wheel hard to starboard and the brig swung sharply over to range alongside the corvette. The French flush decked warship wasn’t much larger than the brig herself. The railing just about head height from Kate’s perspective.

  “When we go aboard, Palander, you veer off and head away to the nor east!” Kate snapped as she heaved herself up onto the railing and beneath the boarding netting. “Keep the corvette’s quarter on your stern!”

  “But Captain…” Palander protested. She could see that the bloodlust had finally alighted in his eyes as well.

  “We must think of the passengers,” Kate cut him off. “You won’t be able to change sails, with just you and Wade, so the set you have now will have to do. Should we be successful, we’ll signal you!”