by James McGee
Attempting to adjust his eyes to the sudden gloom, Hawkwood launched a foot strike at the crewman’s groin. He felt his boot connect and as the man collapsed, he transferred the pistol to his left hand and turned to face the last crew member who was plunging towards him, arm drawn back.
Hawkwood used the pistol to parry the downward blow. Sparks flashed as the hatchet blade caught the side of the flint and drove down against the pistol’s lock plate, knocking the weapon from Hawkwood’s hand. Before the axe could rise again, Hawkwood drew the knife from his right boot and drove it into the attacker’s thigh. A scream pierced the cabin as the blade sank in and Hawkwood felt the warm rush of blood across his wrist and forearm. Releasing the knife hilt, he scrambled to where he thought Stagg’s pistol had fallen. But as he turned he sensed the hatchet cleaving towards him for a second time.
The axeman, grievously wounded and losing blood, was already off balance. Hampered by his injury, he missed his target. The blade shaved Hawkwood’s arm by a hair’s width and thudded into the table. Hawkwood kicked out again, felt the hard edge of his heel connect with something pliant and was rewarded with another ghastly shriek.
As the axeman fell away, a cry of alarm rang out from the pair who’d remained on deck. A clatter of boots sounded as, alerted by the commotion below, one of the two men left his mate on the tiller and raced towards the open hatchway.
A scraping sound came from just above Hawkwood’s head. Fearing it was the axe on its way down again, he lifted his arm in a futile attempt to ward off the blow and felt something solid strike his shoulder. For one awful moment he thought it was the blade, but then he realized it was the discarded musket sliding from the tabletop. Pulling the weapon towards him, he pawed back the hammer. A crouching shape loomed into view: the smuggler whose pistol shot had broken the lantern. Hawkwood rammed the musket into the crewman’s chest and pulled the trigger.
A flash and another loud report and the man was punched backwards, limbs flopping.
Several violent thuds and a stream of muttered invective came from the other side of the cabin.
“Major!” Hawkwood called, as a fresh shadow arrived in the well beneath the hatch: the topside man coming to his captain’s aid.
“Here!”
“Stairs!” Hawkwood yelled.
There was a sharp crack and a pistol ball thudded into the bulkhead at the base of the ladder. Splinters flew. The crewman swore, ducked out of sight and retreated back on deck.
Hawkwood, his eyes now adjusted to the gloom, rose cautiously to his feet, musket in hand.
The cabin lay in chaos. Stagg’s body was wedged between the floor and the bulkhead, his once-broad bulk diminished and made insignificant by death. The axeman showed no signs of life. The stiletto had punctured his artery and the deck beneath him was slick with blood. Lawrence’s victim was sprawled in the corner of the cabin, his side-turned face a bloody ruin after repeated blows from the pistol butt gripped in Lawrence’s right hand. The fourth body was huddled at the foot of the companionway, having been flung there by the force of Hawkwood’s musket shot.
The air that had once reeked of tar and sweat was now heavy with the scent of black powder, blood and death.
Hawkwood turned to Lawrence. “You hurt?”
“Nothing a stiff drink wouldn’t fix.” Lawrence’s chest heaved as he regained his breath and stared about him. His clothing was dishevelled and there was a graze across his forehead. The pistol hung down by his side. “Christ, we were lucky. What a bloody mess.”
Luck might have had something to do with it, Hawkwood thought, but mostly their survival had been down to his and Lawrence’s military experience and their willingness to seize the initiative when it was presented to them. Stagg’s crew might have had the weapons and the muscle, but they lacked the brains to make full use of them when under threat.
Setting the musket to one side, Hawkwood resumed his search for Stagg’s pistol. He found it on the floor by the table leg. After checking the flint, spring and contents of the pan, he ratcheted the hammer back to half-cock. “There are two left.”
“Means we’ve levelled the odds,” Lawrence muttered. He looked towards the companionway. “I doubt either of them’ll be too eager to play the hero.”
“Maybe not, but the fact remains, they have the advantage. They’re up top and we’re trapped below. There’s only one way out and that’s through the hatch.”
“We can try bargaining. With Stagg and the rest of their crew down, they’re more likely to see reason.”
Hawkwood bent, withdrew the stiletto and wiped it unceremoniously on the dead man’s shirt. “Or we attack,” he said quietly. “Take the fight to them while their wits are still addled. If we wait, all they have to do is keep us pinned down here until we dock. We need to seize this vessel, and the sooner we do that the better.”
While Hawkwood returned the knife to his boot, Lawrence considered the notion. “With one loaded pistol between the two of us?” he asked dubiously.
“They don’t know that. We cut one of them down and that puts us in the majority.”
“Well, I can’t fault your logic, but there’s one other small snag; can you sail this boat?”
“Don’t have to sail her. There’s a rowboat.”
“Jesus,” Lawrence said, sounding mortified. “It’s a bloody long row. To anywhere.”
“Better than the alternative: ending up in the stockade with nooses around our necks.”
“Point taken,” Lawrence conceded. “So, what’s it to be? Slow and cautious, or do we go out in a blaze of glory?”
Hawkwood drew back the hammer of Stagg’s pistol.
“Last one up the stairs is first at the oars.”
“Easy for you to say – you’re the only one with a full load. All I’ve got is a bloody club.” Brandishing the empty pistol, Lawrence clicked his tongue and then grinned. “So, after you.”
Hawkwood was half a step from the ladder when the scrape of a boot at the top of the companionway made them both pause.
“Remus?” a rough voice called tentatively. “You down there?”
Not any more, Hawkwood thought. Despite the accepted view that those commanding the high ground inevitably had the advantage, he was confident that the crewman would hold his fire for half a second for fear of shooting his captain.
It helped also that Hawkwood and Lawrence were partly in shadow at the bottom of the companionway, whereas the crewman, in his anxiety to establish who had survived the fight, had allowed himself to be silhouetted against the open hatch.
Half a second was all it took.
Hawkwood’s shot struck home before his target could correct his mistake. Clutching his pistol, the crewman fell back with a cry. By the time he’d released his last breath, Hawkwood and Lawrence were on deck, Hawkwood swapping the dead man’s pistol for his own on the way.
“Don’t!” Lawrence aimed his empty gun at the helmsman’s chest. “Whatever you were thinking of doing – don’t. It would be most unwise.”
The helmsman’s face dropped. Fear moved across his features as his hands hovered on the tiller bar.
“Seeing as there’s only one of you,” Hawkwood said.
“If you don’t believe us,” Lawrence said, “ask yourself how come we’re the only ones on deck holding guns.”
“If you’ve a weapon to hand, tell us,” Hawkwood said. “Now.”
There was a pause as the helmsman considered his options. Then: “Knife. Back of my belt.”
“Toss it over the side,” Hawkwood instructed. “You even think of throwing it anywhere else and Mr Jones here will put a ball through your brain. What’s your name?”
“Walter … Walter Maddox.”
A faint splash sounded beyond the boat’s hull as the knife hit the water.
“All right, Walter,” Lawrence said as Hawkwood moved to the rail. “Both hands on the tiller, there’s a good lad. And make sure you keep them there.”
The angle and lack of
movement of the boat should have been an indication, Hawkwood supposed, but in the mayhem that had followed his awakening it hadn’t occurred to him that the Snake’s progress might have slowed due to weather conditions rather than as a result of Stagg’s orders.
The muted light that had he’d seen filtering down the stairwell was not the pale glow of dawn. No sun could penetrate the bank of fog that surrounded them. Visibility was restricted to half a cable’s length on all sides. From the slight curve in the mainsail above him, Hawkwood could see that a small breeze was trying its level best to push them along, but it was a futile effort. They were barely moving.
He turned. “What’s our position, Walter?”
“He’s talking to you,” Lawrence said.
The helmsman dragged his eyes from the bloody corpse at the top of the ladder to the binnacle compass in front of him. He nodded nervously towards an unseen point off the starboard bow. “Remus reckoned we were comin’ up on the Two Sisters.”
Hawkwood had no idea what the Two Sisters were. Presumably a pair of rocks or islands, not that it mattered. It wasn’t as though they’d be landing on either of them. He moved to the compass and saw that they were on a north-easterly heading.
“How well do you know these waters?” he demanded.
Unsure as to what was expected of him, the crewman replied, “Well enough.”
“Good. You’ve just saved yourself a swim.”
The crewman glanced at the rail and then back. “You ain’t goin’ to kill me?” he asked, his voice breaking with relief.
Hawkwood shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet. The day is young. Put it this way: you getting us to the border won’t do your cause any harm. Do we understand each other?”
The helmsman nodded though there was doubt in his expression.
“Good. Maintain your course.”
“And that?” Lawrence indicated the body.
“We’ll put it over the side.”
“The others, too?”
“Soon as we can bring them up.”
“You and me?” Lawrence asked.
Hawkwood shook his head. “Me and Walter. You can take the helm.”
Lawrence looked sceptical.
“Just try not to hit anything or run aground,” Hawkwood said with a grin. He turned to crook a finger, only to discover that the helmsman’s attention was fixed on the area of fog lying off the Snake’s starboard transom.
Hawkwood followed the man’s gaze. At first, there was nothing and then his ears caught it; a pounding sound, vaguely muffled.
Thunder? There had been no suggestion of a storm brewing, and there was nothing in the benign motion of the wash beneath Snake’s keel to indicate anything amiss. Other than an inability to see more than a few yards in any direction, the weather conditions seemed unremarkable.
He listened carefully. The thumping noise was growing louder. Although distorted by the fog, it was maddeningly persistent. It was only as he listened for a further second or two, trying to identify which direction it was coming from, that he realized it was too rhythmic to be thunder. And the tone kept alternating, like waves dashing against a rocky shoreline, one after the other, in quick succession.
Hawkwood’s blood suddenly ran cold. His mind flashed back to the cross-Channel voyage he’d taken aboard the Royal Navy cutter Griffin, when, engulfed by mountainous seas during an appallingly violent storm, both the cutter and his mission had come close to foundering on the Pas de Calais coast.
“What the hell is that?” Lawrence whispered.
Hawkwood was too intent on trying to pierce the curtain of fog to reply. There was something profoundly unsettling about not being able to see what lay beyond their bow. And with each second the sound – whatever it was – was getting louder.
The helmsman gasped.
Hawkwood turned to see a dark and monstrous outline materializing at the edge of his vision. And then, just as quickly, it was gone, back into the murk, leaving him with no clear idea of what it was he’d glimpsed. His first thought was that it had been part of a rockface, like the one they’d passed the previous evening. Stagg had referred to the feature as the Palisades, an apt name for the huge granite wall that had risen sheer out of the water to a height of some seventy or eighty feet on the New York side of the lake.
Was that what he’d glimpsed? To add to his confusion, in the brief moment before the shape had melted back into the shadows, Hawkwood could have sworn that high above it he’d seen sparks and an ember-like glow, as if someone was stoking a fire, which made no sense at all.
He was on the point of bellowing uselessly at the helmsman to get them the hell out of there when abruptly the noise changed. Hawkwood knew then that he was not listening to a natural sound, but something else, something man-made, something mechanical.
Something familiar.
And as the realization hit him, the helmsman screamed.
The steamboat was not travelling at maximum speed, but given the Snake’s sluggish rate of progress it seemed to erupt from the fog bank with the force of a battering ram, smoke belching, paddles churning furiously. Bright tongues of orange flame shot from the vessel’s stack, creating demonic flashes within the swirling vortex of smoke and fog.
As Hawkwood thrust the pistol into his belt and leapt to add his weight to the helm, Lawrence shouted a warning, only to have his words eclipsed by an ear-splitting howl as steam was blasted through the steamboat’s hooter vent. Vomiting fire and ash, the vessel bore down upon the Snake with the fury of a nightmare come to life, disproving the myth that fire-breathing dragons were only the stuff of fairytales.
The smaller boat stood no chance. Her matte-black hull, dun-coloured sail and lack of running lights meant that she’d been invisible to the steamboat crew until the moment the fog had parted, thus rendering it impossible for evasive action to be taken, by either craft.
The steamboat struck the sloop on her starboard quarter, some ten feet forward of her mainmast.
A thousand tormented souls could not have produced a more terrible sound than that made by the sailboat’s timbers as they took the full brunt of the charge. The grinding and splintering almost drowned out the hiss and rumble of the steamboat’s engine as her bow surged through what remained of the sloop’s exposed foredeck and jib.
As the shock ran through the hull, Hawkwood, flung aside, made a grab for the tiller. By some miracle he managed to hang on. The crewman was less fortunate. With a despairing wail, he was gone, pitched backwards over the starboard gunwale. Limbs thrashing, his mouth opened in one last frenzied plea for help as his struggling body sank beneath the surface.
Arms clamped around the tiller bar, Hawkwood saw that Lawrence had also managed to remain upright and was trying to clamber his way aft. But then, as he watched helplessly, the deck shifted again and as the mast, shorn of its braces, toppled across the thwarts in a confusion of broken spars and torn canvas, the major’s legs gave way and he disappeared from view.
The Snake’s stern rose sharply. Boots braced against the binnacle, and with the water rushing towards him along the already half-submerged scuppers, Hawkwood knew his only chance lay in abandoning ship. He closed his eyes.
Christ, not again.
He’d been in similar straits back on the Griffin. Convinced she’d been on the point of capsizing, he’d consigned himself to the mercy of the Channel, only to discover later that the cutter had in fact survived the storm. The thought of making the same mistake filled him with dread even though it didn’t take a master mariner to see that the Snake, unlike the Griffin, was beyond salvage.
He let go of the tiller and clambered to the rail.
Coat! he thought suddenly. Realizing that the added weight would surely drag him down, he scrabbled at the buttons. As he did so, a loud groan came from deep within the sloop’s stricken hull and the deck rose sharply. The Snake was turning turtle. Forget the damned coat. No time left.
As he launched himself over the side, he heard a fresh thudding
sound. He didn’t have to look to know where the sound was coming from. But as he hit the water and as the shock and the cold drove the air from his lungs, he looked anyway.
The steamboat’s paddle blades were creating such a froth it was like staring into a boiling cauldron. A dark object appeared within the turbulence and Hawkwood realized it was a body. Whether it was Maddox or another of Stagg’s crew, or even Lawrence, he couldn’t tell. Within seconds it was drawn down beneath the revolving blades.
In desperation, he kicked out but his legs felt as heavy as lead. The coat and the water in his boots were pulling him down. He tried moving his arms, but that proved just as difficult. His limbs were refusing to obey the signals sent by his brain. With the cold sapping his strength at such an extraordinary rate, swimming any distance was out of the question. Energy was leaching from his body with each expelled breath. And the paddlewheel was getting closer. Its pull was sucking him towards the maelstrom.
Then his head went under.
Water surged into his mouth and nostrils. He clawed for the surface. This time, his arms were able to obey the command and his head broke through. Coughing out water, he gulped in air.
And something hit him on the shoulder.
One of the paddle blades was his first thought. Terror took over. Without any rational thought of how ineffective such a gesture would be, he tried to bat it away.
And a voice that seemed to come from nowhere yelled, “WHORE!”
He felt another thump, harder, this time against his arm, and the cry came again, clearer this time and much closer.
“OAR!”
A dark shadow materialized above him. He flinched.
“Christ’s sake’s, man! Grab the bloody OAR!”
Lawrence? He thought weakly. How?
Something struck the water in front of him. He lunged towards it, found it was the oar’s shaft and fumbled his way along its length. The oar was reeled in and the back of his collar was gripped.
“Reach up, God damn it! Here!”
