1637: No Peace Beyond the Line
Page 67
Once the jachts were still—well, as still as boats ever got, even in a calm bay—the figures on their poop decks began fussing with some kind of framework. At the same time, the sail handlers were reefing the canvas and drawing the yards as far away from the stern as they could. For no apparent reason, all the activity stopped.
After three seconds, Banckert asked impatiently, “Well?”
As if in answer, a rocket shot up from each of the jachts, not high like fireworks, but in a much lower and faster arc that carried them toward the general area where the dirigible had dropped its payload.
But it was truly only the “general” area; one went over a hundred yards farther into the moonlit waters of the anchorage, the other into the city itself. Tromp stirred at that, but made no sound.
They waited silently as correction advice made its way down the wire from the balloon to the radio room in Intrepid and then to the radio aboard Dolphijn. Two more rockets leaped toward the aimpoint; two more misses, but much closer. Another seemingly endless wait, and then two more rockets.
One exploded at the apex of its flight: a malfunction. But the other’s arc terminated near the aimpoint. The explosion was bright but relatively small. Banckert seemed about to complain again . . .
The target area erupted into a sudden sheet of flame that raced along the wooden wharf with startling speed.
Two more rockets; two more misses. But the rocketry teams on both jachts kept at it, and by the time both had fired five rockets each, the city’s protected wharves, docks, and ways were all ablaze, the fire climbing high into the night sky.
“And there goes Santo Domingo’s contributions to the Spanish fleet, thanks to a little modern science and about seventy gallons of naptha mixed with avocado and palm oil.” There was a knock at the door, and Banckert called for the visitor to enter. “They will rebuild, of course,” he added as he turned back to smile at the glow.
The runner who’d slipped in went straight to Eddie, a flimsy in hand.
“Of course they’ll rebuild their facilities,” Tromp nodded. “But during that time, they will not be launching or laying down new ships. We cannot ask for more than that. And now it is time to make ready to return home.”
“Admiral,” Eddie said, double-checking what he’d just read, “I don’t think heading back to St. Eustatia is such a great idea.”
“Why not?” Banckert snapped. “And why does my runner bring a message to you?”
“Because I am currently the first recipient of all communiqués from our weather stations.” He remembered to breathe. “There’s a hurricane coming.”
Chapter 66
Santo Domingo, Hispaniola
Tromp folded his arms. “How close is this hurricane?”
Eddie swept a hand toward the map on the table. “Still hasn’t reached Barbados, the observation station that spotted it.” And thank God they were happy to host a station and get a radio in the bargain.
Banckert scowled. “Barbados? How can they even tell its direction?”
“Because they’ve been tracking it for thirty minutes. Not a lot of data yet, and they’re still working to get a speed estimate. But the initial position change, as well as the local wind speed and direction, makes it reasonable to project that it’s going to follow the standard hurricane path. But right now . . . ”
“Right now,” Tromp said with a nod, cutting off any further quarrelsome observations from Banckert, “we must prepare to get underway with all speed.”
“All the ships are ready,” Joost growled.
Tromp grimaced. “Yes, but not all are with us. Crown of Waves can remain where she is, since we’ll be going that direction, anyway.”
Larry frowned. “To the east? Against the wind? When we’re trying to outrun a hurricane?”
Banckert shrugged. “Heading east means we will be slower at first but faster later. If I’m right about what Maarten has in mind, that is.” He faced the admiral. “Unfortunately, the new Danish frigate, Triumferende, is a pig with its ass stuck in the fence. She’s fifteen miles downwind.”
Larry cocked his head. “I don’t know, Joost. She seems like a pretty fast ship.”
“She is, my up-time, land-loving friend, but she also has to wait for the airship to land. And then the ground crew has to break it down and load it, ja?” He finished by looking at Eddie.
Who nodded. “We can radio the dirigible’s pilot to push the engines, but I’m not sure the minor increase in speed is worth the risk of pushing it harder. That could cause a malfunction. Which would really complicate matters.”
“I agree,” said Tromp, leaning over the map. “I know you chose the best landing site, Eddie, but I also remember you complaining that it was not a very good one.”
“You remember correctly, sir. It’s here.” Eddie touched the map. “The airship’s LZ is also where breakdown will occur, about a mile south of this spot labeled Playa Los Cuadritos.”
“What’s there?” Larry asked.
“Nothing. Not even in our time. No roads down to the shore. Some of the slaves that Calabar liberated from Hispaniola a few months back say it’s not a good spot for boats unless you know where the rocks are. And there are plenty of rocks.”
Banckert was frowning like an ogre. “Then why did we choose it?”
Eddie sighed. “First, we never thought we’d be racing the clock. Second, being a crappy spot for us means it’s also a crappy spot for the locals. There’s no beach and no good fishing, so it was never developed: not in our time and not in yours. That’s what we wanted: a stretch of coast with no easy path and no good reason for locals to be wandering around where we mean to land, break down, and pack for removal.”
“Which is accomplished how?” Larry was frowning, chin resting in his hand.
“Boat crews from Triumferende go in with skiffs and a purpose-built catamaran, all on towlines back to the frigate. Their draft is shallow enough to get in next to the shore. Envelope and engines are loaded and then they both row and are towed back out to the frigate.”
Larry looked at him. “Towlines, huh? Sounds like you were expecting a hot extraction, after all.”
Tromp shook his head. “That is to ensure that such heavily loaded boats can get beyond the breakers.” He turned to Eddie. “Time until Triumferende is ready to sail?”
Eddie thought for a moment, adding the dirigible’s remaining flight time, the average breakdown time, and the estimated time to get it out to the frigate. “Best case is one hour and forty minutes. Call it two hours.”
“And we must presume Triumferende will take six hours to reach us, even if she hugs the coast and sails close-hauled. So we cannot leave any earlier than eight hours. And no, Eddie, I will not send the tugs after her. We need to conserve their fuel to help our slowest hulls keep as good a pace as long as possible as the fleet tacks its way eastward.”
“About that . . . ” Larry started to ask.
Tromp shook his head. “You will see why we are likely to sail east, since you are going to help us decide which is our best option. Now, I understand you have a particularly gifted mathematician aboard Courser?”
Larry smiled, winked at Eddie. “You could say that.”
* * *
As Karl Klemm leaned back from the charts and laid the protractor aside, Eddie checked his watch: they were two hours into the hurricane countdown.
“Well?” asked Larry Quinn.
Karl sounded genuinely apologetic. “I am sorry, Herr Major, but of the two hurricane holes that we may reach before the hurricane is certainly upon us, Culebra is the far inferior choice. It would require tacking two hundred and ninety nautical miles due east. Even if we were to assume an optimistic average tacking speed of one and three quarters knots, the journey would require approximately one hundred and sixty-eight hours. And I am compelled to point out that we should not travel eastward any more than absolutely necessary, since that places us into an earlier part of the hurricane’s probable track. Also, the clos
er we approach, the more likely that we would experience even stronger headwinds, which would make tacking both slower and more difficult.”
Larry threw his hands up. “Well, it sure looked like the shorter trip. I guess this is one of those times when you just can’t trust a map.”
Tromp smiled. “You cannot trust a map alone,” he amended gently. “So, Karl, what course are we committing to, then?”
“The plot to the hurricane hole at Bahia de Gracias is a much better alternative.” He smiled faintly. “It is also the only one, Herr Admiral. Given a more realistic average tacking speed of one and a half knots to the eastern strip of Isla de Saona, and then a three-knot average given the various speeds we are likely to experience afterward, we would reach Bahia de Gracias in one hundred hours. If, that is, all our wind and current estimates are correct and there are no unforeseen variables. Which there always are.”
Tromp nodded. “I agree. Opinions?”
Larry studied the map carefully. “So, once we turn due north just beyond this, uh, this Isla de Saona, the winds pick up?”
“Not exactly,” Joost said, arms crossed. “And that’s why you don’t want to plot a course due north. You’d regret that.”
“Joost is right,” Tromp added. “The moment we round Saona, we are in a seaway where there are likely to be breezes from both northeast and due east. We will have to feel our way there. If the wind is strongest out of the northeast, following the coast would put us in the eye of the prevailing wind, but if the wind is strongest from the east, then that same course would allow us to sail close-hauled all the way, rather than tacking or beating.”
Larry was trying to keep up. “So what do we do if the wind is strongest from the northeast?”
Joost’s smile took on some of the piratical cast Eddie mostly associated with “Peg Leg” Jol. “Then we gird our loins and continue fifteen miles further east of Saona. A slow-going tack with a fickle close reach. And endless waiting to see if winds and fate are with you or not. Sure to tighten your nut sack.”
“However,” Tromp continued with a glance at Banckert, “once fifteen miles beyond Saona, we turn north. Now, any wind from the east is reaching, and we can even sail a northeast wind close-hauled, all the way to Cap del Engano. From there, the prevailing wind becomes our friend. It would rarely be worse than a broad reach until we round Cap de Samana. From there, it should be over our starboard quarter the rest of the way.”
Quinn stared at the map. “So any extra time we spend tacking at first will be more than made up as we continue along the east and then north coast of Hispaniola.”
“Larry,” Banckert said in a cautioning tone, “a sailor never uses the word ‘will’ when speaking of the wind and its moods. That’s tempting fate. ‘Should’ is better, but ‘might’ is the word I’d recommend.” He glanced at Eddie. “Any further word on the storm? Has it hit land yet?”
Eddie shook his head. “That probably won’t happen for another, umm, four hours, maybe more.”
“What? How far off was it when they first detected it?”
“About one hundred and forty nautical miles, Admiral.”
Joost stared. “That is not possible—unless, did you have a man in a balloon on Barbados?”
Eddie smiled. “No, we don’t have that many. But we didn’t need one: the weather outpost on Mount Hillaby is about three hundred thirty yards above sea level, and this storm system is at least a mile and a half high. So they started seeing a thin gray line poking over the horizon at a range of almost one hundred and forty miles. They couldn’t be sure until it came closer. Now it’s about eighty miles away and heading northeast.”
Larry frowned. “So it’s clocking in at about twenty miles an hour?”
“A little less, they think, but it fluctuates.”
“Hey,” Larry said with a resigned shrug, “it is a hurricane.” The runner came in holding a message out toward Banckert.
“So the first projections remain reasonable,” Tromp commented as the admiral sent the boy back out and scanned the flimsy. “Approximately eighty hours between first sighting and landfall at or near Culebra, one hundred hours to Luperón, the port in Bahia de Gracias.”
“And it seems,” Banckert sighed, “we shall have fewer hours to reach it, now.” He passed the report to Eddie. “Add an hour until Triumferende reaches us. The boats capsized after they were loaded.”
Eddie didn’t curse much, not even inside his head. Now, he did. Like most operational plans that sounded easy, the retrieval of the airship had proven to be anything but. The landing had been okay, despite a shore breeze that kept trying to push the dirigible inland. The wind had continued being a nuisance as the ground crew deflated the envelope, folded, and secured it with straps. But when they finally had it and the gondola and the engines on the boats, they were still running on time.
But, according to the report, the chop along the surf line had become more lively than it was when the boats had run in, and the catamaran turned out not to be up to the task. The weight of the engine had her lower in the water than the tests reported, so her bottom was running closer to the rocks. One particularly lively swell lifted her up and when she rode down its back into an equally deep trough, her portside hull caught in the rocks. Before the crew could free her, another swell came along, tore the snagged hull partially away from the main beam. Crippled and with her bow in the water, the next swell flipped her.
Flipped a cat? How often did that happen? Then again, how often did you get your first genuine hurricane a week or two after the season for them? But at least the lashings held, and they were able to keep the catamaran afloat until more boats from Triumferende arrived to assist and bring the load aboard. However, the main components of the dirigible were so waterlogged that it wouldn’t be safe to operate without a full refit.
Unfortunately, the captain of Triumferende had been a bit optimistic; the total delay was closer to two hours. So, eight hours after Eddie had started his mental countdown clock running, the Danish frigate rejoined the fleet, and Tromp gave the order to weigh anchor and begin tacking to the east. At which point, Eddie glanced at his wristwatch.
Ninety-two hours left.
Off Isla de Saona, Hispaniola
Two days later, almost to the minute, Intrepid’s taffrail pulled beyond Isla de Saona and her bow faced open water to the east. Eddie was on the flying bridge, Tromp alongside him.
“Well,” the admiral said, “I am glad I am not on Courser right now.”
Eddie smiled. “Yeah, Larry will be pacing like a caged tiger and twice as grouchy.” Quinn had hoped that, at this point, they’d either be steering northeast for sure, or tacking fifteen miles west, for sure. But as the Dutch mariners had warned, the wind here was not merely irregular, but capricious. The moderate breeze that was coming out of the Mona Passage from the northeast continued to battle the usually stronger wind that ran westward along the southern extents of the Greater Antilles’ largest islands: Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico. Finding the correct way to court the two winds would be an ongoing and uncertain process. Just the kind of situation likely to give Larry waking nightmares.
“Well,” Maarten temporized, “he can console himself with the excellent job he did managing the firewood for the tugs. Without them, we’d not have kept to the one and a half knots we needed to stay on schedule. With Neptunus’ repairs incomplete and Prins Willem being the slow sailer that she always is, they would have slowed us considerably.”
Of course now, with the wood expended, it was the tugs that were being towed, one by Harrier, one by Relentless. But to be fair, Larry’s anxiety wasn’t just over the state of their wind and steam. He and Eddie shared another concern, one that now had to be voiced and resolved.
Eddie cleared his throat. “We’re at a crossroads here, Maarten.”
The admiral kept his eyes on the eastern horizon. Several long seconds passed. Then: “You mean, whether we should continue to send position updates to St. Eustatia?”
“Do you really think the Spanish would come into the teeth of a hurricane to find us?”
“No. But if they’ve learned that it’s coming, they’ll sit in their home ports, wait until it blows over, and then come after us. And whereas they’ll be in places where they can effect repairs pretty quickly, we’ll be on our own, improvising. And hoping they don’t find us until we can leave Luperón.”
Tromp shifted his gaze to the southeastern sky, which had only a hint of atypical darkness. “I agree. I have been thinking about the same issue. Not sending another update is the safer course of action, certainly. But it means that after we send the cipher for, eh, ‘going dark,’ our own communities and forces will not know what has become of us. And soon after we turn north, our radio will not reach the relay at St. Croix anymore. So we will not even be able to, eh, squelch break to assure them that we still exist.” He paused. “It will be very hard on the people of St. Eustatia. And for any who hope to have some word of the loved ones they may have in this fleet.” He looked directly at Eddie. “It will be very difficult for Anne Cathrine.”
And Leonora and Simpson and hundreds of others, but: “If we live through this, then at least we haven’t told the Spanish where to go in order to finish us off. And if we don’t survive this storm . . . well, then it doesn’t really change anything, does it?”
Tromp smiled. “No, I don’t suppose it does. Very well. I am glad we are of a like mind, on this.”
Me too, thought Eddie as he checked his watch.
Forty-four hours left.
Off Cap de Samana, Hispaniola