The Armada Legacy

Chapter Fifty-Eight

‘It was Rumi who had the jewellery,’ Brooke was saying. ‘If Serrato found it when he captured him, you can be sure he’s on his way here to find me.’

‘These people are tough as old boots,’ Ben said. ‘You don’t know that Rumi would have told them anything.’

‘I do know Serrato,’ Brooke answered. ‘Better than you, Ben. I’ve seen the things he’s capable of.’

‘She’s right, man,’ Nico said. ‘If Serrato got him, he talked. No question. Forget all your interrogation resistance bullshit. Nobody holds out. Not even the toughest.’

The three of them were grouped together with Pepe at the far end of the sick bay. At the other end, Father Scally was lying on the bed that had been Brooke’s. He was asleep, completely worn out from his sprint through the jungle. Tica and Kusi were sitting with him. Tica was sobbing quietly in mourning for Uchu and her missing friend Chaska. It wasn’t generally expected that she or her father would ever return.

‘And that means he’s on his way,’ Brooke said. ‘In fast boats, with all his men. I counted about thirty of them. Could be more. And they could be here any minute.’

Pepe shook his head. ‘Maybe not that soon. I know this river. Look.’ He crouched down and used the tip of his machete to trace a curving line on the earth floor. ‘See how the river bends? This is us’ – marking the spot with his finger –‘and this is more or less where the preacher said the attack happened. Get what I’m saying?’

‘It’s a lot farther round by river than by land,’ Ben said.

‘Miles and miles farther. And these guys don’t know the terrain the way the preacher does,’ Pepe added. ‘By cutting cross-country he gained a whole lot of time on them. I’d say that even if it didn’t take the fuckers long to get Rumi to talk, we still have at least an hour before they get here. Maybe two. The landing place ain’t exactly easy to find.’

‘You’d better move your boat upriver a way and make sure it’s well hidden,’ Ben advised him.

‘An hour or two still ain’t long,’ Nico said. ‘And time isn’t all we don’t have. What are we supposed to fight with, bows and arrows?’

Ben thought for a moment. ‘I need to go and see Tupaq.’

The chief was alone in his hut when Ben was shown inside by the surly Waskar. Pepe, Nico, Brooke and a crowd of other tribespeople filtered in behind him until the hut was teeming with bodies. The Sapaki people were all looking to Ben and Pepe in hushed anticipation.

‘War is coming,’ Ben said to Tupaq. ‘You asked for my help against these men. Now you have it. But without weapons, there’s little we can do to resist them. You understand?’

‘We have weapons,’ was Tupaq’s response after Pepe had translated for him.

Ben shook his head. He pointed at an ornate blowpipe that hung from the hut wall. ‘I respect your traditions. But these things your people have used for centuries, they’re useless against automatic rifles.’

‘I don’t think they have a word for “automatic rifles”,’ Pepe said.

‘That kind of sums up the whole fucking problem we’re facing here,’ Nico grunted.

‘Ask him if he has any other weapons in the village,’ Ben told Pepe. ‘Any kind of gun at all.’

Tupaq reflected solemnly with his lips pursed. After some deliberation he pressed his hands to his knees, slowly rose from his seat and motioned for them to follow him out into the night. A few steps away was another hut, longer and narrower than the normal tribal dwellings. As the chief led them inside, Ben saw that that was because the hut wasn’t for habitation, but a private storeroom for the village’s head man.

Tupaq spent a few moments bustling about, shifting things from place to place. Then he gave a grunt and beckoned Ben over to his side. He was standing over a wooden box, battered and aged, over five feet from end to end, less than a foot deep or wide.

Pepe translated as Tupaq talked: ‘Uh, he says it was his father’s, and his father’s before him, going back and back.’

The box was decorated in tribal style, but Ben could instantly tell that it hadn’t been made here in Peru, or anywhere else in South America. It was a British Royal Navy ordnance crate dating back some two centuries.

Tupaq lifted the box’s lid. Inside was a five-foot-long slender object wrapped in cloth. He lifted it out and set one end of it on the ground with a heavy ‘clunk’. It was almost as tall as he was. He looked at Ben, then unwrapped the cloth and handed it to him.

Ben blinked. He remembered something he’d once read: how during the struggle for Peruvian independence in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, British military and naval intelligence had been involved in a complex web of intrigue aimed at helping to loosen the ages-old grip of the Spanish on the country. Royal Navy frigates had landed on the east coast of South America around 1815 – and what he was holding in his hands was one of the relics left over from that time. God alone knew how it had found its way out here into the jungle, but it had.

It was a flintlock musket. The flint was sharp, the action was tight, with the date 1801 engraved on its pitted lockplate; a weapon that in its day had been the standard-issue longarm of soldiers and sailors throughout the whole British Empire, known as the Brown Bess. It fired a one-ounce lead ball that could take off a man’s leg at two hundred yards. In volley fire, the Brown Bess could mow down an infantry division like weeds. Rudyard Kipling had even written a poem about it.

But …

Ben was lost for words.

Nico found them for him. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. What’re we supposed to do with that piece of antique crap? Throw it at the fuckers?’

‘This is no good to us,’ Ben said with a sinking heart. ‘Maybe if we had fifty more of these, with enough powder and ball and the time to train up a militia of Sapaki men to use them, it would help even the odds a little. But this is hopeless.’

Tupaq’s look of pride had faded to a frown as he sensed the negativity of their reaction. He made an impatient gesture and snapped a few words at Pepe.

‘Uh, he says to come and look over here,’ Pepe said. Ben handed him the musket and followed Tupaq to the back of the hut, where layers of old blankets and animal hides were draped over something stacked against the wall. By the light of a burning torch held by one of the warriors Tupaq wrenched one of the hides aside. Ben peered underneath, and his eyes opened wide when he saw the rows upon rows of open kegs. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered.

He was mightily glad he hadn’t chosen that moment to light up his one and only remaining Gauloise. Because if he had, the whole hut – the entire village – might have blown sky-high, leaving nothing but a giant crater in the jungle. ‘Get that flame away from here,’ he said quickly.

He dipped his hand into one of the kegs and let the fistful of coarse black powder trickle through his fingers. The grains were as dry as the day they’d been made. ‘You know what this is, Tupaq?’

Tupaq replied, miming the action of tossing a pinch of the stuff. ‘He says it makes the fire go well,’ Pepe translated.

‘I’ll bet it does,’ Ben said. ‘This is gunpowder. Boom. Explosive.’

Tupaq drew aside another few blankets to reveal barrels filled with shiny grey-black balls. Ben picked one out and rolled it between his fingers. The loose ammunition for the Brown Bess. Pure lead. Three quarters of an inch in diameter. There were thousands and thousands of them.

And now he was thinking. Thinking hard and fast.

‘Nico,’ he said. ‘Listen to me.’ Away from the others, he spoke quietly in the Colombian’s ear.

Brooke pushed forward through the crowd of Sapaki people, trying to hear. ‘What is it, Ben?’

Nico shook his head and grinned. ‘Oh, boy. You really are one crazy motherfucker. But yeah. It might work. It might just work, if there’s still time.’

‘Then we have none to lose,’ Ben said.