by Zugg, Victor
Finally Mason dunked under the surface a final time, stood in a shower of droplets, and used his fingers to comb his hair back. He shuffled his feet along the sandy bottom to the water’s edge and quickly slipped into his jeans, t-shirt, and boots. He rolled his dirty linens into a ball and walked back into camp. He nodded at Dorothy and Manny still talking around the fire, entered his hut, and curled up on the mat envisioning Karen lying beside him. He fell asleep to the loud rackety hum of the crickets.
◆◆◆
The next morning Mason was up early. He could see a glow on the eastern horizon which told him sunup would be in about thirty minutes. Wanting to get an early start, he slipped into his shoulder rig, holstered the Glock, and went about rousting everyone from their slumber.
Reluctantly, everyone was up and ready just as the sun broke free. They all grabbed what they were taking and headed for the beach.
Mason took one final glance around the camp, kicked a little extra sand on the smoldering camp fire, and walked off to catch up with the others.
As soon as he broke through the tree line at the beach, he came to an abrupt stop behind everyone else. They were all staring out across the water.
There, in the dim light of early morning, stood a large sailing ship. Two masts. Sails down. A bit of jib was visible. It just stood there about a mile or so off shore with its port side facing the land. There didn’t appear to be any activity on deck, but a black flag with a speck of red tossed in the breeze from the stern. It was too far away to see what emblem was on the flag.
“What are they doing?” Nathan finally asked.
“Waiting,” Dorothy said.
“For what?”
“For us,” Manny replied.
Mason nodded. “Yep.”
Dorothy turned around and locked on Mason’s eyes. “The ship we saw in the dark.”
Mason shrugged his shoulders.
Manny turned around to face Mason. “Now what?”
“We head for the sloop,” he said. “Maybe they’re sleeping.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Dorothy said.
The group began hurrying down the beach with everyone’s head facing the sailing ship.
The hulk continued to undulate, like a skeleton standing on the water. Its masts rocked gently back and forth.
Mason caught up to Dorothy. “The black flag?”
“It’s a pirate’s vessel,” she said. “Each pirate had their own emblem, almost always on a field of black. Sight of the flag alone often brought the prey to their knees, to just give up without a fight.”
“Maybe we should do that,” Nathan said.
“Most people didn’t fair very well when they came in contact with a pirate,” Dorothy said, “whether they gave up or not. The only thing that gave most pirates cause for alarm was a large British ship of the line.”
Mason scanned the horizon. “I think we're fresh out of ships of the line.”
Somehow the sloop seemed smaller than before when Mason came around the bend and could see it in full view. John and Tom already had the jolly boat brought around. Tom was climbing in to row it to shore.
It took two trips to get the fifteen survivors on board. No one spoke and they rowed as quietly as possible. John secured the jolly boat to the stern and removed the lashings from the mainsail.
The pirate ship remained unstirred during the entire process.
“What are they doing?” Manny asked, standing next to Mason on the deck.
Everyone, except John and Tom, watched the ship in the distance.
“They’re trying to scare us,” Mason replied. “And I’d say it’s working.”
Mason, followed by Manny, stepped to where John and Tom were working the sheets to hoist the mainsail. He glanced at Mason. “Let’s see if the current will ease us out. The tide is up and we have plenty of water under the keel. As soon as we clear the sandbar, we raise the sail and make a run for it.”
“Can we outrun that ship?” Manny asked.
“If we had a clean hull, maybe,” John replied.
Manny looked at Mason. “Did you guys clean the hull while you were gone?”
Mason tightened his lips and shook his head.
As the sloop started to move with the current, Mason spotted activity on the pirate ship. He gestured in the direction of the hulk. “They’re up.”
Mason watched the crewmen, tiny in the distance, scurry about the deck, climb the rat lines, and begin hoisting the sails. Within minutes, the large ship was moving.
“They’ll have to turn out, into the wind, to come about,” John said. “Maybe we can slip past them on the inside, but we’ll need all the sail we have including both jibs.”
Mason nodded, motioned to Manny to follow, and then dashed off toward the bow.
Just past the opening to the inlet, only a few yards past the sandbar, John turned the wheel and motioned for Tom and Nathan to hoist the main.
Mason and Manny began to unfurl the jibs.
The men pulled with all their might to raise the sails as quickly as possible.
As the boat came around to starboard, the main and both jibs filled with close reach air. The craft leaned to starboard as it picked up speed and gradually pulled away from the coast.
The pirate ship was nearly full circle with its crew still releasing sail when the sloop passed its bow with three hundred yards between them.
Mason watched as the sloop increased its lead, but each agonizing yard seemed to take forever. Within minutes, with the big ship at full sail, the separation began to fade. Mason tightened his fists as he stood at the gunwale and subtly shook his head. Helplessness is a terrible thing, he thought. He felt the muscles in his neck tighten and the hairs stand up signaling that sense of anxiety when control is slipping away. He turned to face John at the helm; they locked eyes. Mason saw John’s chin move subtly back and forth.
Mason gazed up at the full and perfectly trimmed sail. He glanced at the jibs, also trimmed perfectly in the morning’s breeze, at least according to his meager understanding of sailing. He stepped across the slightly pitched deck to the helm. “Anything we can do to increase speed?”
“If we turn more into the wind to gain ocean, we’ll lose speed. And we obviously can’t turn into the coast. We’re doing the best we can.”
“It’s not enough,” Mason said, as he glanced at the big ship off their port quarter.
“I know,” John said. “We’re dragging a boat load of barnacles.”
“How many guns on that thing?” Mason asked.
“It’s a large schooner. Ten guns in total.”
Mason scanned the sloop’s deck. Everyone stood at the gunwale watching the big ship match their pace. The expression on everyone face told the story. Scared would be an understatement.
Mason thought of throwing a few rounds of 9mm at the big ship, but at three hundred yards on a moving deck, he doubted he could even hit the thing. There was literally nothing he could do, except what everyone else was doing. Watch.
After an hour at their best speed, the sloop was about two miles off shore. The pirate’s ship was still three hundred yards off, but it had pulled abreast of the sloop. The pirate captain could open his doors and fire a broadside anytime he wanted. Mason was sure the pirate would have done just that if there was any chance the sloop could outpace the bigger ship. Mason wondered if the captain intended to take the sloop undamaged. Not likely, he thought. The sloop was probably too small for their purposes, and worse, it had no armament. More likely he was just trying to terrorize the people on the sloop, like a cat playing with a mouse.
“Prepare to come about,” John yelled. He turned his head to Mason. “This sloop, even with the extra drag, has two advantages over that schooner.”
“I’m listening,” Mason said.
“We can turn tighter and we can probably head into the wind faster,” John said. “We come about to starboard, continue almost full circle, and head due south into the wind across her stern.”
“Tell me what to do,” Mason said.
John gave Mason, Nathan, Tito, and Tom precise instructions on what to do and when. With everyone in position he turned the wheel.
The sloop immediately turned downwind, toward the shore, and continued the circle until it was headed almost due south, close hauled against the wind.
Mason and the others did their part to trim the sail and jibs precisely as John had instructed.
Just as expected the sloop cut across the schooner’s course line two hundred yard to aft.
Mason saw a scurry of activity on the schooner’s deck as the ship began to turn to port, directly into the wind away from the coast.
The sloop’s maneuver alone put an extra hundred yards between the two vessels, and for the first time since they started out that morning Mason thought they might have a chance. The only bad part was they were now headed directly out to sea away from Charles Town.
CHAPTER 25
As the schooner’s bow came around, there were a few moments when the big ship’s broadside was directly lined up with the sloop’s starboard quarter.
Mason noted that the gun doors on their port side were already open. “They’re going to fire,” he yelled. “Get down!”
A beat later a loud boom echoed across the water followed by four more in rapid succession. Thick smoke bellowed from the schooner’s side.
The first cannonball splashed fifty yards in front of the sloop. The next hit the water twenty-five yards in front and skipped across the surface. The third put a cannonball sized hole, more of a split, in the sloop’s mainsail. The other two balls fell harmlessly to stern.
Mason raised his head above the gunwale. The schooner’s bow had come around which meant they would not be able to fire again. At this point it was a race against the wind. Mason peered at the hole in the sail and made his way to the helm. “Any other tricks up your sleeve?”
“If we can maintain a lead until dark we might have a chance,” John said.
“That’s eleven or twelve hours,” Mason reminded him.
“All we can do now is hope that hole doesn’t get any bigger.”
After two hours of maintaining the optimal angle on the wind, Mason gauged that the gap between the two vessels had actually widened.
“They must be dragging some barnacles too,” John said. “And they’re having to tack a little with those square top sails.”
After five hours the gap had widened even more. The schooner was still there and still coming on strong, but it was being out paced by the sloop’s lighter hull and sleek lines. Barring a catastrophe, the sloop would be well ahead by dark.
With Tom at the helm, Mason and John stood in the shadow of the mainsail and sipped water.
Dorothy and Manny joined them.
“This might work,” Manny said, as he glanced at the schooner in the distance.
John nodded his chin up and down. “We might get lucky at that.” He glanced up at the sail and suddenly the optimistic expression disappeared from his face.
Mason looked up. The split had grown longer, not by much but definitely longer. “Can we climb up there and put in a couple of stitches?”
“Not under sail,” John said. “We’d have to heave to for that.”
“We have a pretty good lead,” Manny said.
“Not enough,” John said. “We keep going and hope we run out of daylight before that hole gets much bigger.”
“Would it help to tack?” Mason asked.
“We don’t want to put a sudden strain on the cloth,” John said. “We’ve gone this long without a significant change in speed; let’s hope she can stay together a bit longer.”
“That’s a lot of hoping,” Dorothy said.
John lifted his chin in agreement.
Manny turned in a circle scanning the open ocean in all directions. “Can you find your way back? I have no idea which way is land.”
“North,” John said. “We can use the North Star at night or wait for the sun tomorrow.”
“You don’t seem all that worried,” Manny said.
“It is what it is,” John said. “All we can do is our best. Beyond that, it’s out of our hands.”
Mason clapped John on the shoulder. “I’m just glad you survived that plane crash.”
“God, that seems so long ago,” John said.
Mason nodded. He left the others as he made his way along the rolling deck. He stopped at each person or group of people to reassure them, let them know the plan, and to answer their questions.
He found Mildred, her dog, and Lana inside the aft cabin.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about his,” Mildred said. Her face was pale, and she didn’t look so good.
“You might feel better out on deck,” Mason said.
“With cannonballs flying around, I’ll stay right here,” she said.
Mason glanced at Lana.
“We’ll be fine here,” she said.
Mason stepped over to the stern window. He saw the schooner still behind them with no sign of them giving up. He wondered what kind of captain commanded the vessel. He turned to Mildred and Lana. “Did either of you see what kind of emblem was on that ship’s flag.”
“A full length skeleton in red,” Lana said.
Mason nodded as he turned back to the window. He didn’t know what that meant, but Dorothy mentioned every pirate had a distinct flag. He gazed at the schooner in the distance a few moments more and turned to leave. “If you start feeling worse, it will help to be on deck,” he said to Mildred.
Mildred sat on the deck with her back reclined against a bulkhead and her eyes closed. She didn’t bother to answer.
Lana smiled.
Mason exited the cabin and joined Manny and Dorothy at the bow. “Full length red skeleton,” Mason said, “any idea whose flag that would be.”
Dorothy snorted. “There were only so many pirates in this area at this time. That would be Edward Low. Ned to his friends. I wrote a paper on him.”
“Anything we need to know?” Mason asked.
“He was ruthless, tortured his victims,” Dorothy said. “He normally operated farther north, New York and Boston.”
“Why is he after us?” Manny asked.
“It wouldn’t be for this sloop or its potential cargo,” Dorothy said. “I can think of only one reason.”
“That was his silver,” Mason said.
Dorothy nodded.
“At least two crewmen steal the chest and scurry away in the night on the jolly boat,” Mason said. “They die at sea, and the boat washes up on our shore.”
“Lucky us,” Manny said.
“Sounds reasonable,” Dorothy agreed. “Probably heard about us spending Spanish dollars in Charles Town.”
“His Spanish dollars,” Manny said.
Mason nodded. “So he’s pissed and ruthless.”
“We’ve got a problem,” John yelled. He pointed to the mainsail.
The rip had grown. And then, as Mason watched, the rip tripled in size. Mason rushed aft and peered over the gunwale to the rear. The large schooner was still in sight but just barely. He turned to John at the helm. “Are we slowing?”
“Yep,” he said, “we’ve lost our advantage in speed. The schooner will be on us in two or three hours at this rate.”
“So we heave to and fix the sail,” Mason said. “We can be underway again in half an hour.”
“We don’t have that much thread,” John said. “And even if we did, it wouldn’t hold.”
“So we’re helpless,” Manny said, as he stepped closer.
“Pretty much,” John said.
“How many crew on that ship?” Mason asked, as Dorothy arrived at the helm.
“Forty or so,” Dorothy said.
Mason nodded his chin up and down. “As I see it, we have to stand and fight. We drop the sails to eliminate any reason for them to fire at us, let them approach, and bam.” He patted the Glock in its holster.
“Forty men, with mu
skets, swords, and daggers,” Manny said. “And we have one pistol.”
“One pistol with ninety eight rounds that fire very quickly,” Mason said. “It’s all we have.”
Manny tightened his lips and nodded. “Let’s heave to.”
◆◆◆
The sloop bobbed on a nearly flat ocean. The moderate wind was enough to fill a sail, but it wasn’t enough to stir up significant waves.
The survivors watched and waited at the port gunwale, broadside on the approaching schooner.
Two hundred yards out the schooner’s crew began reducing sail as the big ship continued forward. It was moving much too fast to stop anywhere near the sloop.
Mason glanced at John standing next to him. “Either the captain intends to veer off at the last minute or—”
“—ram us,” John said. “Given his reputation, according to Dorothy, I’m guessing the latter.”
Mason swiveled his head. Everyone except Mildred, Lana, Koji, Asumi, and Hana were on deck. “You’ll be safer in the cabin or down below,” Mason said in a raised voice.
Everyone except John and Manny began moving.
“There’s nothing you two can do up here.”
“Just the same, I’m staying,” Manny said.
Mason looked at John. “We might need you later.”
John took in a deep breath and exhaled. He tightened his lips, turned, and started off toward the cabin.
Mason glanced at Manny. “Stay with me,” he said, as he dashed off toward the bow.
The two of them ducked low as they slid into the tight spot.
“Better angle from here,” Mason said, as he lifted his head enough to see over the gunwale. He pulled the Glock, removed the magazine and slammed it back home. He extended both arms over the top of the railing.
