The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I’m not sure what I expected of Fulton’s beloved Nautilus, but the copper coffin he unveiled in a Toulon warehouse did not inspire confidence. It looked like a patchwork of green plating, odd bits of dried seaweed, and conspicuous holes where the leakiest of the iron bolts had been removed for replacement. The contraption was twenty-one feet long, six wide, and in cross section was the shape of a “U” with a short keel. A propeller projected from the rear of the craft, and a folding mast with booms and odd, fanlike sails was lashed to the flat deck on top. A round turret three feet high, with thick glass windows, jutted from the top. Its roof was a hatch allowing entry. From inside the vessel came an unholy banging.

“I’ve no doubt your invention will sink as planned, Robert,” I said. “The question is whether it will rise back again, as prayed for.”

“It worked splendidly on the Channel coast. We might have torpedoed a British frigate or two, if they hadn’t slunk away.” He glanced at Smith. “Sorry, William.”

“No offense taken,” the Englishman replied cheerfully. “Our nations are at peace now, and here we are united against infamy and extortion. And the day a British ship waits around to be sunk by a contraption like this is the day we might as well start speaking French.”

Our quartet had been reunited when Sterett, not waiting for orders from his unaggressive commodore, rushed us to Toulon to pick up Fulton’s secret weapon. Cuvier and Smith began as suspicious of me as Fulton, but eventually I persuaded them that I’d been faced with an impossible choice. Now we were cautious allies again.

“It was destiny, perhaps, which left Fulton unsuccessful at Brest so he had the chance to prove himself at Tripoli,” Cuvier said optimistically. “And perhaps Bonaparte had the foresight to predict we four would make an effective fellowship?”

I thought it more likely Napoleon had been happy to get rid of four eccentrics on a mission with slim chance of success, but opportunity has a way of turning into inevitability. “Your vessel does look a little worse for wear,” I judged. “Are you sure it’s going to be ready?”

“I’ve got a clever little fellow working on it,” said Fulton. “Said he was something of an expert on all things nautical. He even mentioned that he knew you, Gage.”

“Me?” I knew no submarine mechanics and tend to stay away from people capable of honest work, lest they make me feel inferior. “He probably heard you say I’d gone over to the pirate side and figured he could claim anything he liked, since you’d never see me again. Let’s catch the look on his face when he pops up and spies me in the flesh!”

Cuvier stepped over and banged on the hull. “Foreman! Your old friend has shown up after all!”

The hammering stopped and there was a long silence. Then a shuffling inside, and finally a head with dark, wiry hair raised above the lip of the little tower like a mole.

“Donkey?” He inspected me critically. “They told me you’d turned pirate, or were dead.”

It was I who was thunderstruck, not this “mechanic.” In fact, I was so shocked that I took a step backward as if seeing a ghost. “Pierre?” First Astiza, then a son I hadn’t known I had, and now this?

“But why am I surprised?” the little Frenchman said. “Here I am readying a cylindrical death trap, a perfectly absurd excuse for a boat, and I have been asking myself, who would be crazy enough to set out in an anchor like this? And I thought, well, Americans, because I have met Americans on my journeys to the wilderness and not encountered a snuff of sense in any of them. And which American do I know who is the craziest of all beyond Fulton there, who is already the laughingstock of Paris? And of course such an imbecile would be my old companion Ethan Gage, who conjures calamity wherever he goes. Yes, a metal boat designed to sink? It sounds absolutely like something donkey would be involved in.”

“This is no mechanic,” I sputtered.

“More of one than you!”

“This is a French voyageur from Montreal’s North West Company! I last saw him in St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. He’s a canoe man! He doesn’t know any technology more complicated than birch bark and beaver tail!”

“And what do you know, besides thunderbolts you can’t control and sorcery you can’t perform? Plus the worst taste in women imaginable?”

So we held each other’s stare, and then began to grin, and finally at last we laughed, and he sprang from the submarine so that the two of us could lock arms in the kind of dance the North West Company’s Scots do over crossed claymore swords, chortling over our mutual resurrection. We’d survived, and were together!

This was a good omen.

Cuvier cleared his throat. “This confirms, then, that you have met before?”

“On the American frontier. Pierre was my companion when I searched for Norse artifacts and explored the West. He’s the only man I know impervious to bullets.”

“Well, one bullet.” A ball from Aurora Somerset’s gun had been stopped by an Egyptian Rite medallion that Pierre Radisson had stolen from her sadistic brother, Cecil. He’d seemed to have risen from the dead then, but later disappeared from our room in St. Louis. I’d assumed he’d gone back to the wilderness but here he was, thousands of miles from where I’d left him. “I may have used up my luck,” he said.

“But I’ve not used mine, given that I meet you again. What are you doing in Toulon? By Poseidon’s spear, this is sweet chance beyond anything I expected!”

“You made me curious about the world, donkey. It was too late in the season to catch the fur brigades, so I decided to paddle home to Montreal. Then there was a ship that needed a hand, even though depending on sail is a woman’s way. So I found myself in Europe. Peace gave me the chance to get to France, and by the time I learned where you’d gone, you’d already gone there. Ah, I thought, but donkey has a way of drawing attention! I decided that if I got to the Mediterranean coast I’d hear of you soon enough. And indeed, a Barbary ship deposits three ex-slaves in the middle of Toulon, cursing a mixed-up American. And I think to myself, ‘This sounds like the donkey.’ So I go to work for that sorcerer there”—he pointed to Cuvier—“and suspect you’ll be along, too, by and by. And here you are.”

“Why does he call you donkey?” Cuvier asked.

“Because Gage can’t properly paddle, although the great Pierre was beginning to teach him. You’re a donkey, too. All men who can’t paddle a North canoe are donkeys! And this craft! Mon dieu, only sorcerer donkeys would come up with an idea as lunatic as going underwater!”

“And hire a French voyageur to reassemble it,” I said. “If this boat wasn’t a sarcophagus before, it certainly is now.”

“No, I’ve been plugging the holes that the rust has left, and using brass and copper instead of silly iron. Even better would be birch wood, if we had proper trees. Yes, Pierre and his donkeys, out to revolutionize warfare. It makes perfect sense.”

Fulton was walking around his craft. “Actually, his work is not entirely awful. We can finish making it seaworthy on the deck of your Enterprise, Sterett.”

“We’re in a hurry then?” asked Pierre.

“I have a woman in danger,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Of course.”

“And a son, not yet three years old.”

“I told you to think about what you were doing.”

“And we’ve got to stop an ancient machine that could give Aurora Somerset power over all the world’s navies.”

“Aurora Somerset! That harridan is here, too? Is this another Grand Portage rendezvous?”

“She followed me, like you. I am oddly popular.”

“And how long do we have to rescue this new woman and son of yours from that witch?”

“Once we draw close, only before the sun rises, I suspect. For when it does, they can set the Enterprise on fire.”