Commander Sharpe couldn’t seem to come up with a response.
“Lord Nelson would have let them do it,” the Captain said. “And he is our greatest naval hero.”
They’re gonna cut our guts out, Garret thought. They’re gonna break me, just like the creature did. In his mind’s eye, Garret saw again the glowing eyes of the creature, felt its enjoyment of his pain. Felt again it crushing him. Clawing him, delivering scar after scar that he still carried. He felt it flinging him, harder than he’d ever been thrown before. He felt his back hit the wall. He felt his spine break.
Garret managed to derail the train of thought right before his shaking knees gave out and dropped him to the deck in a heap.
“Frightened, are you?” came the furious voice of the captain. Garret looked up. The British captain was talking to him instead of Sharpe. “You should be.”
“We are prisoners of war, sir,” Sharpe said, trying to bring the conversation back to himself.
The British Captain cut him off. “You are turncoats to your own Navy, and honorless saboteurs of mine.” His voice was rising. “You used a sign of distress to dissuade our attack, then you made yourselves appear as a negotiating party when your true intent was a cowardly assault, and now you have the arrogance to ask to surrender! Once more, Commander. What in the bloody hell are you doing on my ship?”
The XO opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He recovered quickly, even though he had paled. “Well sir. Actually… I’m here, uh… sir.” Sharpe had to start again. “I’m here to… negotiate terms of your surrender.”
The captain flushed redder than a beet. He took a measured step closer to the XO. His white gloved fingers twitched in their desire to strangle Sharpe.
“What did you say?” He let the question hang, then resumed his quieter speech. “Your captain is the most treacherous bastard on God’s seven seas, and I’ll have his head for this.”
The XO swallowed audibly. “Sir, we have meant no disrespect to you or the British Navy. We are on a mission of utmost importance.”
The captain sneered at him, or at least as close as his British reserve would let him come to it. “Young man,” he said in the tone of an infuriated father. He pointed to the guns protruding from the turrets on Lion’s stern. “I don’t know what your fool captain said, but let me explain something to you. This is the largest warship in the world, and that,” he spat the words out from under his perfectly manicured white moustache while he pointed at the Kearsarge, “is a pre-dreadnought relic!”
“A pre-dreadnought that can still maneuver, sir.”
Garret heard Captain Shearer’s teeth grind.
Sharpe went on, though his face had lightened another shade. “Yes sir, and it is also a battleship, not a battlecruiser.”
“Do you think that’s going to make one damn difference when I tell my men to open fire?”
Sharpe nodded. He was white as a sheet now, but standing his ground. “Yes sir. Your guns are powerful, and they have better range than ours, but when you closed in on our cutters, you brought the Lion within Kearsarge’s range as well.”
Captain Shearer pressed his lips into a bloodless line. Commander Sharpe went on. “Kearsarge is slow, but that’s because she’s a battleship. She’s got more armor than any battlecruiser ever had, including this one. Lion is badly damaged and vulnerable in that area. Kearsarge is old, but she knows how to take a beating.”
“Your captain is gambling everybody’s life on that?”
This time Sharpe’s answer was quick. “He believes in his ship, and I trust him.”
“Who’s the bigger fool?” Captain Shearer spat. “The fool, or the fool who trusts him? Am I supposed to believe he’s going to fire on us with you standing on my deck?”
Sharpe continued to look straight ahead, but his eyes grew wide. “Yes sir, if you believe nothing else, please believe that. I don’t want to die today.” The Commander swallowed. “Sir, it’s Captain Maxwell.”
Captain Shearer’s eyes narrowed.
Despite their orders, the British enlisted men had drawn close enough to hear. Under Garret’s borrowed uniform, sweat rolled down his back. He’d never been surrounded by so many people who wanted him dead.
The XO looked like he really didn’t want to say what came next. “Sir, Captain Maxwell has ordered me to give you a message, but first, I must tell you that if you do not comply, no quarter will be given. You cannot maneuver. You know he will fire only at Lion’s compromised sections. You have already taken two torpedoes in your engine and boiler rooms.”
Garret blinked as he finally caught up to what had happened. There were quite a few ashen faces among the British enlisted, so apparently, they’d just figured it out too. Kearsarge was completely outmatched, no question. Lion was faster, Lion was newer. Lion was more powerful. Lion’s guns were bigger. They were more accurate and had greater range. It should have been a no-contest, but now they were in close, and Lion was crippled. She couldn’t move. Somehow, though Garret still wasn’t sure exactly how, Captain Maxwell had managed to reduce the battle to a simple matter of steel.
It’s armor now, Garret thought. We’ve both got big guns, so now it’s all about armor. And Kearsarge is a battleship, so she has more of it. Simple.
The damage would be devastating for both ships, but Kearsarge might survive the pounding. Lion wouldn’t.
As if to underline the deviousness of it all, Garret caught Kearsarge out of the corner of his eye. She was on the move, creeping slowly in her dark grey war paint. She looked like she was prowling, much as Garret had once seen a bobcat prowl around a bull with a broken leg, lying helpless in a farmer’s field.
Kearsarge had leveled herself, and she was riding low. Maxwell must have righted her quickly by flooding the port ballast tank to balance the starboard. Now she was moving to broadside the stricken Lion, but off Lion’s port beam. The position would allow Kearsarge to bring her entire main battery to bear, while Lion, unable to maneuver, would be able to return fire with only a portion of her main battery. Kearsarge would tear her apart. As Garret watched, Kearsarge’s turrets were pivoting, lining up all four of her eights, all four of her thirteens, and nine of her starboard side five inch guns on Lion’s charred, broken flank.
Captain Shearer stood still for a long moment, seething and dark, like searing black stone on the shell of a volcano. At last he said, “I’m still waiting for your bastard Captain’s message, commander.”
Sharpe steadied himself and began. Judging by his tone and his pauses to remember, Garret assumed he was quoting, or nearly so.
“Run down your colors, tampion your guns, return my men to me, and let us pass without incident.” Sharpe swallowed. “Refuse and I will gut the British Lion as I would gut a rabbit, and lay her corpse on the cold bottom of the ocean with all hands. Refuse, and every man aboard Lion will die. Yours and mine.”
The XO’s veneer cracked. Maybe the British enlisted were close enough to hear or maybe they weren’t, but Garret heard clearly enough when Sharpe said in a hoarse whisper, “Please sir, I beg you not to refuse Captain Maxwell. He will not give quarter.”
At last, Garret understood why the XO had been pale since they’d left the Kearsarge. Garret understood the fear he’d felt from Sharpe, and Garret realized how sadly mistaken he’d been about the cause of it all. The XO was not afraid of the mighty Lion, nor her deadly guns, nor her captain, nor was Sharpe even afraid of the crazy things he’d been ordered to say to Captain Shearer. Theo was right, Sharpe loved his commanding officer, and he trusted him. But stronger than his love or his trust, was his fear.
Commander Sharpe was terrified of Captain Maxwell.
W
Captain Shearer was livid. Offended in the way only a proud man can be when stripped of his dignity in front of the people he desires most to respect him.
“There’s nowhere you can go,” he said to Sharpe in low tones. “The earth is too small now.” Captain
Shearer swept Garret, the other two American enlisted boys, and each of the three Germans in turn. “The world is closed in,” he said. “Our empire has made it so. The map has become a globe. The sea monsters are slain, because we,” he gestured to his enraged crew, “have slain them. And be it a week, or a month, or a decade from now, we will lay you on the bottom of the deep as well.”
Back home, in what seemed like another lifetime, Garret had known a kindly older British man, the town physician, Dr. Bentley. Bentley had always been a dapper gentleman, and Garret liked him up the moment he’d been murdered. But in this moment, standing on the deck of the crippled giant, Garret began to gain a different understanding of the British nation. He got a single, momentary glimpse of the culture which had given birth to his own.
“The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Garret had heard that in school, years ago. The teacher had explained it as a statement of sheer geography. “At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface. It was the largest empire the world has ever seen. And mark my words, the largest one it ever will see.”
But the statement wasn’t about geography at all, was it? It was a statement of who they were as a nation. The British folk had endured as a unified people for over a thousand years. They had crushed Napoleon and his vast forces while rolling over the American regulars at the same time. They had survived the Black Plague centuries before Garret’s culture even began, and centuries before that, Alfred the Great had driven out the savage Danes and founded an identity upon which they had built for a millennium.
Garret looked at the deck of the Lion.
And now they’ve built this.
They had hurt the British Lion, but that was all they had done. She would not go to the bottom this day because her captain was no fool. She would be repaired, she would roam the ocean again, and she would never forget what they had done to her.
They’ll last a thousand more years, Garret thought, looking at the hate-filled faces around him. I wonder if we will?
And though Garret couldn’t put what he was seeing into words, he dimly recognized a unity of culture that he knew America would never possess.
We’re the upstarts. Why are we out here? What am I doing? Then finally, the whole ridiculous train of thought went somewhere meaningful:
Why did I ever leave Molly and my baby in the first place?
There were no walls to reverberate, nothing to echo Captain Shearer’s statement, yet it seemed to ring on the wind. “The sea monsters are slain because we have slain them. And we will lay you on the bottom of the deep as well.”
And then Captain Maxwell chose that exact moment to act. The British enlisted men were confused when two of their own broke ranks and ran for their captain, so they hesitated. It was only a moment, but it was all Captain Maxwell needed.
Maxwell and the fourth German, wearing British uniforms, broke away from the pack of British enlisted and crossed the space before Garret even recognized them. The Brits quickly realized something was wrong, but Maxwell and the German had gained a small lead, and that was all they needed.
Maxwell had Captain Shearer’s arm twisted behind his back before Garret could blink. “Back to the boats!” Maxwell roared. The four Germans came out of nowhere and formed a screen for Garret, Sharpe, and the others as they scrambled for the side.
British officers and men came in a wave, but the Germans held them off. They were only four against countless, but they were able to fall back quickly as Garret, Maxwell, and company scrambled for the side. The British weren’t able to use their numbers or their guns, for fear of hitting one of their own. There simply wasn’t enough space for them to engage the Germans more than two-on-one, and with those odds, they had no chance.
Garret hadn’t seen anything like it, at least not from human hands. The British men were sailors, just like Garret and his friends. And though some of them looked like they would have been pretty handy in a bar fight, the Germans were something else altogether. They were exact. They were cruel. They were precise as surgeons and barbaric as Vikings.
They moved together, dealing out broken bones, dislocated joints, and impact trauma as if they’d been raised on it. They fought together like a single engine of destruction. Garret and the British boys were sailors. The Germans were soldiers. Now Garret understood the difference.
Then above all the yelling and screaming and running and fighting, a single command rang out, hard and sharp with authority.
“STOP!”
Amazingly, everyone did. The Germans first, then the Brits. But the British cessation probably had more to do with the fact that Captain Maxwell was against the rail, brandishing his boot knife at Captain Shearer’s throat. The British officers and men seethed like a pack of wolves, glaring at Maxwell.
“I have no wish to injure your captain,” Maxwell said. “But without him, you will surely fire on us as soon as we are out of Kearsarge’s range. Let us leave in peace, and your captain will be respected, protected, and returned to the British Admiralty unharmed.” Maxwell leaned forward, and the wary cougar came back over his face again. “Fire on us, and I’ll open his throat.”
One of the American enlisted boys seemed headed for the gangway, but Maxwell shouted, “Over the side!” The guy wearing Maxwell’s uniform was the biggest guy in the lot, but instead of helping the Germans, he charged for the rail like a bull, knocking Garret and the other two boys out of his way as he went. Somewhere nearby, a handgun cracked. One of the torpedo specialists went down, the side of his head making a fan of blood on the deckboards when he hit. Garret knew instinctively there was no reason to go to his side. Somewhere behind the German line of dismemberment, a British officer was screaming something about putting the gun down before someone accidentally hit Captain Shearer. Captain Shearer was screaming for them to shoot anyway. At least he was until Maxwell cuffed him across the jaw.
Garret and one of the boys fairly bounced off the deck and flung themselves Maxwell, but the other boy had hit his head on the way down. Then Captain Maxwell simply threw Captain Shearer over the railing like a sack of potatoes. Garret’s last sight of the deck before they dropped away was of Maxwell snatching the fallen boy up off the deck, pinning him to his own chest in a crushing grip and leaping after Garret. The four Germans followed like a synchronized diving team.
HMS Lion was a big, tall-waisted ship. The fall over the side was a long one. The wind was beginning to scream in Garret’s ears before he hit the water. Momentum carried him down into the Atlantic. He’d been tense for so long that he didn’t remember to take a good breath before he went under. So it was with little oxygen that he sank into dark green water, trying to fight for the surface while Bartram’s heavy uniform waterlogged and dragged on him like lead.
Unlike his foolish attempt to save Theo’s ditty box, Garret had no purpose now other than to stay alive, and so he sank. Sploshes and bubbles filled the sea above him as the Germans hit the water. The light around them began to fade as Garret slipped downward, his arms weakening.
A shape was moving down towards him. A powerful hand grabbed him and hauled him up. His face broke the surface a few moments later, and several sets of strong hands grasped his leaden uniform and hauled him into the cutter. He flopped to the bottom in a ball of soggy wool and spit up water.
I hate the ocean. If I survive this, I’m going to move to exact center of America and never see water again unless it’s mixed into lemonade.
The same hand that had grabbed him rolled him onto his side. Garret wouldn’t have thought of that, or anything other than his hatred for the ocean, but it did make it easier to hack up water.
It was one of the Germans. He paused for thought and then said in heavily accented English, “Are you… kay? Okay?”
“Danke,” Garret hacked reflexively. He hadn’t heard or spoken a word of German since his Grandfather died. The German for “thank you” was the only word that would come to his mind, so he r
epeated it, “Danke, Danke.”
The German raised a mildly surprised eyebrow. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
Garret shook his head and coughed a little more. “Nein,” he said. Again it surprised him how much inhaling water felt like inhaling fire. The German slapped him roughly on the shoulder, grinned and turned his attention elsewhere.
Garret sat up, glad to be alone for a second. At least as alone as he could get in the bottom of a crowded steam cutter, surrounded by people. He shuddered and pushed himself up onto one of the seats. The wind caught his salty wet hair. Maxwell was at the helm, running the cutter as hard as it would go towards the Kearsarge. Between Garret and Maxwell sat a sullen Captain Shearer, surrounded by four grinning Germans.
A few yards behind, everyone else was in the other cutter. Commander Sharpe was at the helm, trying with all his might to keep up with Maxwell. He was falling behind anyway. Garret observed Maxwell’s iron jaw and muscular back, visible through his soaked British uniform. Garret surmised that Commander Sharpe’s inability to keep up probably wasn’t due to an inferior boat. If Garret was a cutter and Maxwell was driving him, Garret would run his own guts out too. He wouldn’t dare do anything less.
A few minutes later, they were all back aboard the Kearsarge, dripping, some of them still shaking. Garret wanted to hit his knees and kiss the deck planks. He settled for standing there dripping on the deck while Maxwell called over four enlisted men who had been mending ropes, and ordered them to haul the raving Captain Shearer to the brig.
Kearsarge started moving beneath them, churning the ocean behind her. Maxwell had no doubt ordered immediate departure upon their return. Andrew Sharpe, who was dripping and grinning ferociously, squelched over to his captain. Maxwell, who was still wearing a British uniform crossed his arms and stared calmly at the Lion as she began to slip behind them. She was still monstrous, and imposing. Garret stared at her too. As far as he could tell, most of Lion’s crew appeared to be standing on the deck, watching them go. What else could they do?
Ironclad Page 25
