The Emerald Storm

Chapter 37

As we made preparations I belatedly realized we’d slipped into a new year, 1804, and that I’d entirely missed Christmas. Martel did give three chances to play with my son, the two of us under guard. So Harry and I dug a cave, crept through the shrubbery, and threw rocks at the pond. But I was mostly kept busy in boatyard and workshop. Astiza oversaw the sewing of leather air bags.

As the moon waned, Martinique’s dazzling sunshine also darkened, giving way to sultry haze. Jubal watched the sky for omens. “It’s bad weather coming, more like September than January,” he muttered. “We must hurry.”

“A squall could give us cover,” I reasoned.

“This kind of storm is no cover,” Jubal warned. “It upends the sea. We want to dive before it begins, and be done before it climaxes.”

“A little rain to blind the British. Pray for that.”

“And I’ll pray for the success of your plan to checkmate the French.”

Our scheme was necessarily complicated. We needed daylight to dive. But with England atop the rock, we could approach only under cover of darkness.

Our strategy, then, had three steps. Jubal, Martel, and I would be the treasure divers, and we’d approach Diamond Rock at night. Antoine and the rest of Jubal’s men would join Crow, Vulture, Buzzard, and the rest of Martel’s men on a bomb ketch, a sailing ship designed to fire at the summit of the rock by using a high, arching mortar mounted in the bow. The ketch had two masts astern of the huge gun, with both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails, and would be skippered by a few seasoned sailors on loan from the governor of Martinique. My wife and son would sail as hostages.

A French bombardment of the captured rock would commence the next day, and we’d use the distraction to begin our dive. Any treasure would be found, removed, and stored on the sea bottom. Then the ketch would return under cover of darkness, and we’d retrieve the loot from the bottom sand before escaping.

In other words, everything had to happen perfectly.

Leon Martel came readily with Jubal and me-he had arrogant courage, so long as my family was pawn-and the three of us rowed toward Le Diamant on a moonless night, taking a bearing because the course was ink except for the dazzle of phosphorescence in our wake. I worried that the English might see our sparkle, but then decided our longboat was so small that the danger was remote. We pulled in silence, nothing in the universe except our tail of blue fire. The wind was warm, my mood anxious. There was swell, the kind that heralds a distant storm.

In the middle of our longboat were the converted rum barrel and air skins.

An hour at the oars brought us to within sound of waves slapping against Diamond Rock. Looking up, I could see the glow of British lanterns at the summit. We coasted to a small indention on the cliff that faced Martinique and pulled into a “cove” that was little more than a crevice the width of our longboat. An overhang shielded us from easy view by the garrison. We tied off, arranged the diving bell for quick deployment, and settled down to wait for dawn.

Sleep was elusive.

“So, Ethan, what will you do as a rich man?” Jubal finally asked.

I shifted, uncomfortable and nervous. “As little as possible.”

Martel snorted. “No one would bore more quickly than you, Monsieur Gage. You don’t know your own character.”

“So what would you do, Leon? Whores and horses?”

“Money is power, and power is rule. I want men answering to me instead of my answering to them.”

“Another reason to keep my distance. And you, Jubal?”

“I want to rebuild my homeland. Haiti was the most beautiful country in the world before the war. It could be again.”

“Doesn’t that sound nobler than our motives, Martel?”

“So noble that I want to buy your black friend and put him to work. His race can restore our plantations.”

“No longer, Frenchman.”

“Mark my words, your damned revolution will prove a mistake.”

“It was your own revolution that gave us the idea. Freedom and equality, France preached! And now planters on every island lay awake in the dark of the night, waiting for their throats to be cut for liberty.” He gave our temporary ally a ghostly grin.

“Are you going to cut mine?”

“No, because I’m already a free man and we’re partners, as you say. This is much better than having a slave, is it not, for both you and me? That’s what your race must understand.”

Martel rolled to one side to doze. “All right, then. Ethan, be bored. Jubal, throw your money away on a country that will never appreciate it. I’ll buy status and position in France and rule like a lord.”

“At least you’re candid,” I allowed.

“I’m honest. Everyone is corrupt, but only I admit it.”

The sun came over Martinique, flooding our little crack but also shining into the eyes of any English sentries who happened to look in our direction. Unless they climbed down on some improbable mission, I felt us reasonably invisible. As light came, Jubal quietly slipped over the side with a wooden buoy holding an anchor and line. He swam to a spot directly in front of the submerged cave, dove down to set the anchor, and adjusted the length of the line so that the marker was just underwater. Then he led a rope from the buoy back to our boat. When the time came, we could swiftly pull ourselves to the anchored buoy to deploy the diving bell.

The sun climbed higher, the sea turning from black to blue, and then to aquamarine. I watched Martel lazily watching me. He was waiting for me to try to kill him, while thinking of any number of ways to betray me. Corrupt indeed. Jubal lounged between us like a referee before a prizefight.

Finally we heard shouts from above, and even a trumpet.

“The tide has turned, and they’ve spied your wife’s present,” Martel whispered. “By afternoon, we can act.”

As much as I hated to admit it, Martel and I had things in common. We were both instinctual opportunists and clever improvisers. It wasn’t easy assaulting the English on their rock because their new gun battery was higher than the masthead of any ship, Accordingly, the renegade policeman had used my papers from Rochambeau to enlist the governor of Martinique in an elaborate diversion. We refit an eighty-foot vessel into a bomb ketch christened Pelee, copying the habit of naming such weapons after volcanoes. Workers removed its foremast, reinforced the deck with timber cribbing, and installed a massive mortar. The gun was so heavy that the new ketch listed slightly at the bow. In theory, the mortar could lob shells high enough to reach the summit, but Pelee was a clumsy sailor, its canvas set too far back to properly balance. Distraction was its real mission.

We told the governor nothing about treasure but assured him that one lucky hit on a British magazine could blow their entire garrison to hell. “We’re using the expertise of the doughty mercenary and sage savant Ethan Gage, hero of the Pyramids,” Martel said, Governor Lambeau entirely missing his ironic sarcasm. The chance of success was enough to persuade the loan of a fortress mortar that weighed more than a ton; victory over this British “ship” on a French rock could lead the governor to promotion back in France.

Lambeau, too, wanted to escape home before taken by fever.

That manipulation by my criminal ally was clever enough.

Even better was Astiza’s suggestion of a preliminary ruse, so calculated that I wished I’d thought of it myself. The same night we rowed to the rock, the ketch drifted between Le Diamant and Martinique to drop several half-filled kegs into the sea. By dawn they were bobbing past the rock opposite our hiding place. We heard excited cries when the garrison scrambled to salvage this flotsam. Everybody loves to beachcomb.

Even better, the kegs were half full of rum.

“Obviously you’ve studied the English navy,” I told Astiza.

“I’m a student of human nature and know how lonely and stupefyingly boring it must be to be stationed on that rock. Those half-full kegs will be a quarter full by the time they’re hoisted to where the commander can inspect them, and British aim will be degraded accordingly. Nor will their lookouts be as alert. The first goal in any battle is to help the enemy destroy itself.”

“You sound like Napoleon, my lovely.”

“I’ve studied with you, my devious electrician.”

So how could I get Martel to help destroy himself, when the time came?

It was hot and boring while we bobbed, waiting for the gunnery duel to begin. Orbiting birds, clearly annoyed by this human interest in their castle, occasionally spattered our boat with retaliatory guano. The sky turned grayer. As rum was sneaked, voices from the top of the rock increased in volume. Laughter, songs, angry commands, heated lectures… yes, the liquor had gone to work. Then more shouts when the bomb ketch was spotted bearing down on the rock opposite us, the mortar on its deck a gaping mouth.

Maybe this insanity would really work.

What if the treasure wasn’t here?

Then either Martel or I would never emerge from the cave alive, I guessed.

At two o’clock we heard the bang of the mortar and then a crash as a bomb erupted somewhere above. Fragments of stone and shell flew wide and pattered the sea around like a rain of gravel. Martel smiled. “It has begun. All eyes will be on the ketch.”

There was another thud, answering the first, and another, and another, as English guns replied. An artillery duel was soon fully under way. We expected that even drunken English gunnery would eventually drive away our ship, and I worried a lucky shot might hit my wife and son. We had to be quick.

Casting off from Diamond Rock, we swiftly pulled ourselves out to where Jubal had set the buoy and readied our makeshift diving bell. “The guess that we’re in the right place is mine, so the risk is, too,” I said manfully. I’m not really that brave, but I wanted as much control over our situation as I could manage.

So I slipped over the side holding our longboat by one hand and a sack of musket balls in the other. The leaded rum barrel was upended over my head, its leather harness keeping me in position when I let go the side of our boat. My head and shoulders were above water, my body immersed, and my only view was through the small glass we’d fashioned. The weight of lead and musket balls sank me like a sack of grain, and I plunged about fifteen feet before my feet landed on an underwater rock. I looked out at the sea. I was in a bubble of breathable air inside the diving bell. I swayed and steadied. A line led from our contraption to the buoy, through a ring, and on to the stern of our longboat. The leather air bags were tied behind me. My companions would pull themselves back out of sight while I explored, but in a quarter hour would haul back on the keg, whether I was attached or not.

If things were going well, I was to tack a white handkerchief, like the white cloths we’d tied onto the powder barrels on Saint-Domingue. It would be a sign I’d found the treasure. Then Martel could decide whether to follow me inside the Diamond.

I gave myself half odds, so I made Martel swear a promise. “If I drown, you must release my wife and son.”

“Agreed. They’ll then be of no use. See? I am a gentleman.”

“You’re a schemer.”

“Yes. We’re brothers, you and I.”

Now I took stock at the bottom of the sea. I could see, barely, the triangular opening of the cave and the glorious sea fans at its entrance that undulated as if waving encouragement. Ethan, in here! Was it Ezili speaking, or some other siren luring me to my death?

The thud of artillery carried through the water.

I spilled some of the musket balls to give myself more buoyancy. Trimming the diving bell was like operating the altitude of a balloon, and I hovered a few feet off the rock I’d initially landed on.

Then the current caught me, and I was pulled toward the dark opening. The barrel scraped a side, caromed toward the other, bounced again, and slid into blackness. It was like falling into a hole, with no way to climb back out.

But what was inside might change the world.