by Eric Flint
“It cannot be,” de Orbea croaked.
“My God, how many do they have?” Irarraga whispered.
“Too many for us,” Fadrique declared sharply. “Eugenio is right. We must break off along that heading. Pass the signal to those who see us: crowd sail and follow. Or even run south-by-southeast. As soon as each ship is well clear of their guns, they are to make course due west. We regroup off Vieques and press on to Santo Domingo.”
“And we just leave the others behind?” de Orbea almost blubbered. “The battle is over?”
“So the war can continue,” Álvarez amended with a grim nod. “Now, keep sending those signals. We need to save every ship we can.”
Inlet to Simpson’s Lagoon, St. Maarten
Antonio de la Plaza Equiluz put out a restraining arm before the sapper who was about to swing into the companionway that led down from the savaged pilothouse. “Do not touch anything. Be careful where you step.”
“Sir,” he said, his face a fury of perplexity, “you just told us we must move quickly. That there is a bomb on this ship and we will not have long to find it.”
“That is true. We must move both very swiftly and very carefully. Now go.”
Equiluz was one of the last down. “Report,” he called into the gloom.
Calls echoed along in the thick air of the gun deck. No, the air was more than thick, it was . . . choking. “We must stop the engines. It is possible they might have been set to destroy the rest of the ship.”
“Is that even possible?” asked the same sapper.
“I have no idea,” Equiluz answered, “but we must presume it is until we know otherwise.”
Another sapper coughed. “Besides, we have to stop the engines before they fill the air with their poison! Pope Borja is right! The up-timers must truly be demons, if they can breathe this infernal reek!”
“Do not be foolish,” Equiluz snapped. “They could not work in this. But now we know why, in the fifteen minutes before we came aboard, there was less smoke rising up from where the chimney tube used to stand on the deck. Before they left, they found some way to redirect the fumes into the ship itself. Sergeant, you found the engine just abaft of us, yes? Excellent. Examine it and stop it as quickly as you can. If you have to damage it, that will be understood and excused. Report to me when you have stopped it. The rest of us will continue to search.”
He turned to the others. “We have two tasks. Check the whole ship for bombs, but pay particular attention to the gun deck. The most important part to locate is the magazine. If you find it, do not open it. But come alert me at once. Now, get about it!”
It was not a long job. Although it was a very large ship, it had fewer decks, and with the exception of the orlop deck, they were very open spaces that followed exceedingly clean lines. Equiluz could not completely suppress a persistent sense of envy as he walked its length.
As it turned out, once he reflected on the design of the ship, the uniform bore of all the guns, and the incredible weight of the strange shells—eight inches in diameter and sixteen inches long!—he realized that what passed for ammunition portage in his time would simply not apply here. So he looked for, and found, signs of tracks for carts used to facilitate routine conveyance of heavy objects from one part of the ship to the other. It did not lead him straight to the magazine, but he was the first to find it nonetheless.
No sooner had he arrived than the sergeant he’d sent to deal with the engines found him. “Sir, the engine was fairly easy to stop. The controls are not complicated if you test them gently. Once the pressure in the boiling tank is reduced, it is relatively safe, I think. I also gave orders to open the gunports. Air it out.”
“Excellent idea,” Equiluz mentioned. He’d been so absorbed he’d never noticed the smell after entering. Instead his full focus was now on the object he had encountered directly in front of the door to the magazine: an explosive warhead, a slow fuse burning its way to what looked like some kind of ignition point at the rear.
The sergeant nodded. “We found one of those behind the boiler.”
“Did you leave it, or—?”
“No time to waste, sir. I figured we had only five minutes left.” He shrugged. “We cut the fuse.”
“I told you not to touch anything.”
“Sir, I wouldn’t have, but I could hardly go to find you when the damn—eh, wretched thing might burn down and blow us up before I received your instructions and then returned to it. Besides,” he added with another shrug, “if it’s just a fuse as it seems to be, then the flame can’t reach the bomb. But if it is some other kind of device, we’d none of us have any idea what to do except cutting it—and so, we were going to die one way or the other. No?”
Although Equiluz said nothing, he had to admit the sergeant’s reasoning had an admirably primitive practicality about it. Other bombs were reported within the next few minutes, all of the same design. One by one, their fuses were cut, and no explosions, mundane or magical, occurred.
He cut the fuse on the one in front of the magazine. It seemed they were done. And it seemed too simple. He stared at the defused explosive. The sergeant leaned over. “Sir, what are you waiting for? Why are you staring at that?”
“This was too easy, Sergeant. They leave even this one out here, burning for us to see? It makes no sense.” Equiluz paused. “Unless . . . ”
“Unless . . . ?”
“Unless they wish us to believe that, having disarmed this demon that guards the gate, it is now safe to open the door to the magazine.” Equiluz stood back, glanced at the sergeant’s aide. “You, try the door. Gently.”
The soldier did so. “It’s locked, sir.”
Equiluz nodded. “Of course it is. Probably to keep us from getting to another bomb, locked inside as the fuse burns down.” He sniffed around the jamb of the door. “I can even smell it, I think.”
“How can you smell anything in this air, sir?”
“Do you still find it so foul? At any rate, fuses always leave a smell of niter.”
And at that particular moment, given all the time they had already spent in this crippled hulk, that odor of niter was to his sense of smell what the ticking of a great, spring-driven clock was to his ear. A reminder of every second passing, burning away. Every second that could well be his last. No time to wait.
“Now,” Equiluz said to the sappers who had brought the heavy tools, “you must break the lock so we may open it gently. But be mindful; there could be a grenade rigged to fall and begin burning if the door opens. Sergeant, have your man fetch a pail of water from the gun deck.”
When everything was ready, the men with the tools started at the door’s lock. It proved stubborn, and every moment the niter smell seemed to grow stronger, but Equiluz assumed that was probably his imagination. Probably.
Eventually, the lock succumbed to the tools. He took a deep breath, could tell that the men around him were tensed to sprint away. As if you could outrun an explosion. Fools. Equiluz kept hold on the door so that it could not swing in too quickly, then opened it a crack.
Just beyond the arc of the door’s swing, he saw three fuses lying on the deck, bundled together and burning. He smiled. A clever attempt at misdirection, to make me think there was another bomb, just like the one I disarmed out here, waiting for me inside. When in fact, the real danger is almost certainly . . .
He reached around, probed carefully—and felt a taut cord. “A grenade,” he said with a smile. “I can feel the mechanism. Now, hand me a knife.”
“Sir?”
“A knife, fool! I have my hand on the grenade’s fuse. It is quite short. If we had opened the door all the way and the grenade fell free of its cradle, that would have generated the spark that set the fuse burning. So now, with this knife”—Equiluz gently sawed, sawed more, then success—“I will just remove the grenade.” Sweating heavily, he slipped the small bomb out of the narrow opening. He exhaled deeply, dropped the grenade in the waiting water bucket just to be sure,
sighed, and, with a profound sense of relief and triumph, he pushed the door open.
As it swung past the halfway point, he heard a faint click at the same moment it revealed:
—a box filled with opaque, interconnected bottles;
—from which three wires ran in different directions;
—one of which led to a strange mechanical device;
—which was attached to yet another warhead.
Before the door had swung another fraction of an inch, the strange device sparked.
Off the southern coast, St. Maarten
Almost a mile south of Pelican Point, only Eddie and Rik were still watching Resolve, much as if they were sitting a vigil.
When its magazine exploded, the brightness of the flash made them blink. A mild wind pushed at them, having left behind the ripples that had been resisted and overcome by the currents of the sea. By the time the others in the longboat had turned, the actinic brightness was gone. Now it was just a neural memory pressed briefly on their retina as a diminishing fireball rose like a spinning fist up through the cloud that marked Resolve’s place of death.
Chapter 65
Santo Domingo, Hispaniola
Santo Domingo made Eddie Cantrell conscious of just how tiny and primitive Oranjestad still was. Many of the Spanish port’s buildings were already called “The Old Town” and had been there for over one hundred and thirty years. Just to the east of its mighty stone pier was a winding inlet that led not only to a reasonable hurricane hole but an impressive complex of wharves and ways. And of course there were the forts, both the ones that had been here almost as long as the city itself, and the new constructions which weren’t quite six months old but were leaping upward at an alarming rate. That was the part of Santo Domingo which had their attention today. Well, at least this afternoon. Nighttime would bring a major shift in focus.
Eddie turned to his companion on Intrepid’s flying bridge. Karl Klemm’s face was motionless, intent, as if he was determined to discover something about the city he had not seen over the course of the week that he had spent examining it through the fleet’s best telescopes and binoculars and then calculating, calculating, calculating. So much so that there were rings under his young eyes.
Eddie smiled. “Relax, Karl. This is simple compared to hitting the galleons at St. Maarten. After that gunnery display, you have nothing left to prove.”
Except maybe that you aren’t some kind of demon spawn. Eddie had heard about rare individuals who had that kind of skill with numbers, backed up by an eerie perception of the patterns that resided, invisibly, under the surface of them. Combine that with Karl’s damn near photographic memory, and it added up to the traits associated with certain rare autistic persons. But the Bavarian’s only social and behavioral challenges seemed to be the ones shared by other young people who had never quite “fit in.” Which weren’t half as severe as they might have been, considering that he had been orphaned at twelve and then made Wallenstein’s human fire-control computer toward the end of what hadn’t really become the Thirty Years’ War.
Karl shook his head tightly. “With respect, Commodore, this is a very different set of problems. Hitting Santo Domingo’s fortifications is not the challenge. But hitting them in the right place to cause structural failures, and with the right measure of powder, and to yet ensure that no rounds overshoot and land in the city as per Admiral Tromp’s orders—well, there is very little margin for error.”
Eddie nodded. “Still, if there’s a man alive who can do this job, it’s you. Ready to give the word?”
“Me, sir?”
Eddie shrugged. “You did all the work. Seems only fair.”
Karl nodded, but not eagerly. “I see now why Admiral Tromp was adamant about not having any rounds fall into the city itself. It is one thing to aim and fire a cannon at an approaching enemy.” He swallowed. “It is quite another to fire them at a peaceful city of tens of thousands of people.”
Eddie sighed. “Yeah, except that the peaceful city sitting under our guns right now built some of the fastest ships that were trying to kill us just three weeks ago off St. Maarten.”
Karl nodded, pointed at the speaking tube to gunnery. “I believe it is this one, yes, sir?”
“Yes. Just give the word, Karl.”
The expat-Bavarian set his shoulder, leaned down and said, “Mount One and Two. Commence firing!”
The guns sent thundercracks toward the walls of the newest fortification, following just behind the two solid eight-inch projectiles that slammed into them, tearing immense stony divots out of the sleek-sided glacis. That was the moment that Courser, Harrier, and Relentless, riding at anchor near Intrepid, let their single guns speak also.
They watched as explosions blossomed along the walls like angry gray flowers, but did not even attempt to speak over the unrelenting roar of the guns.
* * *
Larry Quinn almost hit his head as he charged into Amelia’s great cabin. “Am I late? When do the fireworks start?” He glanced in the direction of the mural-sized window that reached almost all the way across the stern. Eddie found his eyes drawn to the tableau framed within it.
Santo Domingo was dark for the second night in a row. That was rather pointless on a night with a full moon; as if the allied fleet was really going to continue their bombardment at night. And anyhow, what was left to shell? Two hundred and twenty-three rounds after Karl started the bombardment, there was little left worth shooting at.
The new fortifications went first and they were a bear. Engineering had come a long way since the first basic harbor forts had been thrown up to protect the city. They held up pretty well at first, but once Karl’s selected target points had all been hit, sure enough, the wobble started showing. After about sixty rounds, all the new construction was coming down in chunks. By one hundred ten or so, it was pretty much leveled, and would take almost as long to clear away the rubble as it had taken to build it.
In all fairness, the real artistes among fortification designers and engineers made their best commissions from rich European kings who wanted to protect rich and valuable European cities. In the New World, it was a crapshoot what kind of designer you had working for you, and Santo Domingo apparently had a pretty uneven history in terms of the qualifications of their engineers, too. But there were still a lot of separate batteries and garrisons and armed towers to knock down before the bombardment finally came to an end.
At least the dust had settled. There hadn’t been much worry about that, though; in order to make sure they’d have good visibility at night, it was agreed that the shelling would not go past 1600 hours. But at just after 1520, even Karl agreed that more rounds just meant bouncing the rubble.
And now, just eight hours later, here they were in Joost Banckert’s ship, sipping wine (or in Eddie’s case, juice) and acting like they were waiting for a sporting event to begin. Which was kinda true if you had a really, really dark sense of humor.
Tromp was in an unusually fine mood. He liked to have meetings in his old ship, and Joost liked to host them. Probably because every time he did, Amelia felt a little bit more like his ship. So it was Banckert who suggested that Larry get some wine or schnapps and join them.
Larry and Banckert had hit it off right away. Neither liked it very much when diplomatic niceties got in the way of operational ease or clarity. Understandable, although Joost hadn’t yet discovered Quinn’s much lower toleration for “moral flexibility,” a trait that had served Banckert and other Dutch captains so well for so many years. Right now, Larry Quinn was simply a rough-and-ready and competent up-timer who had appeared behind the flotilla of galleons facing Joost’s own ships at St. Maarten and reduced them to kindling in just over an hour.
But it hadn’t all gone their way. As Larry pulled out the chair next to Joost, cup of rum in hand, he asked “So, any more news about the wounded from Neptunus?”
Joost toasted the ceiling. “Thank God, it does not look as if any more will die. That Se
phardic physician—Brandão—had to put three of them back under the knife to remove infections or arrest gangrene. And that Danish king’s daughter—Eddie’s sister-in-law, Leonora—has had her own successes, I was told. Spots a wound that isn’t ready to heal almost as readily as the doctor himself.”
While Eddie sincerely doubted that her skills had progressed to that extent, Banckert’s appraisal was consistent with other reports. And it was fortunate for the men who had lived long enough to be returned to St. Eustatius that they were in such unusually qualified hands.
Eddie had seen the final casualty reports just before he’d met Karl on Intrepid’s flying bridge. Banckert’s ships had stood off while Courser and Harrier arrived behind the Spanish formation; uncoordinated maneuver would only block their lines of sight and engagement. After losing a third of their number, including any that turned about in a bid to catch the wind and escape to the west, the remaining galleons had attempted to get in among Joost’s formation. That meant sailing into the eye of the wind, and galleons were among the worst ships for making headway by sharply tacking across it.
They’d lost another six of their number by the time Joost was faced with the choice of either standing in the seaway and complicating the steam destroyers’ gunnery or giving ground by turning southward into a reaching wind and getting out of the destroyers’ field of fire. He had chosen the latter, signaled it to his ships, but before the Aldis lamps bumped it over to Neptunus, two galleons approached, striking their colors.
It was unclear exactly what happened next. The nearer Spaniard closed her gunports in response to instructions from the smaller Neptunus, which then moved alongside to board and take her in hand. However, at thirty yards, lookouts on the Dutch man-of-war saw several of the far more numerous Spanish crew moving aside canvas to better lay hands upon readied petereroes. A confused combat occurred between the two ships, with Neptunus getting the better of the fight on deck because more of her crew were already armed and ready. It was the same below because of the time it took for the Spaniard to open her gunports. By then, the Dutchman had put an extremely accurate broadside into her, inflicting particular damage to her lowest gun deck where the forty-two-pounders lurked.
