The Emerald Storm

Chapter 43

Now the wind rose above comprehension, and visibility vanished with hope. Rain and spray combined into a kind of soup you could almost drown in, and the seas were cresting mountains. They broke with thunder that competed with the ceaseless trumpeting of the sky, and green water smashed down on Pelee as if to drive us to the bottom. The ship staggered, the mast tips cutting great arcs, and the weight of the mortar held the bow under for agonizingly long submergences. Then we’d slowly stagger to the surface again, water pouring off, each watery pummel stripping away parts of our vessel like a remorseless rasp. Boats, barrels, lines, and guns broke and disappeared. I feared the bomb supply below would break loose and roll like marbles until a strike and spark set them off, blowing us to pieces. I waited for ropes to snap, chains to break, anchors to carry away. We raced across the Caribbean with only sheds of flapping canvas, steering down swells like a sled before a force that was terrifyingly implacable.

I clutched the wheel with Captain Brienne and Jubal. “I thought the worst was over.”

“The hurricanes make a great wheel, and we’ve simply gone from one rim to another. Now it will get worse.” He pointed. “We’re too sluggish.”

I looked at the mortar. Its muzzle had become a pot, seawater slopping out. Pelee was dangerously unbalanced. The huge gun yanked against the deck every time we rolled, planks bulging and seams working. The ship wouldn’t point as intended, or ride as designed.

“What can we do?”

“Everything’s a risk. Wait, I think.”

So except for us at the wheel, everyone else retreated below. We lurched for an hour in the gloom, timbers groaning as the waves grew higher.

Then the decision was made for us. Jubal pointed. “Surf!”

I squinted. The compass was spinning so wildly as we bucked and plunged that I had no idea of our true heading, or what land we might be near. But through the miasma I could see a menacing line of white on some lee shore, marking a reef, cliff, or beach. We had to steer around it or we’d wreck, but the hurricane was pushing us remorselessly toward disaster.

I turned to Brienne. “Can we claw off the land by sailing into the wind?”

“A jib might do it, but only if we aren’t so bow heavy. We can’t sail as close to the wind as we need. The mortar is a millstone.”

“I thought you said it too dangerous to get rid of.”

“And too unwieldy not to, now. We need to chop or saw.”

“I’ll get the men!” Jubal had to shout it inches from my ear. Such was the fury of the storm.

“There’s a carpenter’s locker in my cabin,” Brienne instructed.

Jubal dropped to the main deck below. I staggered into the captain’s cabin and explained to Astiza why I was breaking out axes and saws. “We’re going to get rid of the mortar.”

She nodded, clutching a listless Harry with one arm and holding on to a ship’s rib with the other. She was seated with legs askance on the deck to brace herself as the vessel gyrated, my wife and son both physically ill. The floor was littered with smashed ceramics, flung captain’s hats, and a tin pot that rattled like a toy as it tumbled from one side to the other. Sheets of water obscured the stern windows. The roar of the waves in here was like the boom of surf in a sea cave.

“Throw away the treasure, Ethan. That will lighten us more than the mortar.”

“We can’t survive on superstition.” I wasn’t giving the loot up, not after what we’d all endured. I looked at my son, half unconscious. “We’re just having an elephant ride, Harry!”

He pressed his face to his mother’s breast in response.

Pushing aside the fear we were all doomed, I grabbed an armful of tools and went below. The hold was almost black, lit by one wildly swinging lamp. Water leaked from above and churned from the bilges below, with an ungodly stench of sewage and vomit. The noise was less catastrophic, but the blind motion was terrifying; the deck would drop as if were levitating and then lurch to slam like a bucking bull. I had to slap some of Jubal’s men to get them out of catatonic panic.

“We’re going to get rid of the mortar!” Stiffly, tentatively, holding on to the deck beams overhead, men began to rise.

I turned to a sailor. “Who’s the ship’s carpenter?”

He pointed to an older man crouched in the gloom.

“Stir yourself! Show us where to use these axes and saws, or we’re all going to drown.”

“That’s a big gun to move even in dry dock,” the carpenter muttered.

“If we chop out the pins, we can lever it overboard while timing the roll.”

“A sweet trick if you can manage it, and disaster if you can’t. If it gets away, it will crush the ship like a boot on a wedding cake.”

“And if it stays in place, it will take us down like an anchor on a balloon.”

We divided into two crews. Those in one group began hacking at the foundation of the mortar from the bottom, wielding their tools overhead as best they could. Others crawled to chop and saw at the gun base from the exposed deck above, tying themselves to a line that we stretched from mainmast to bowsprit to keep the men aboard as waves washed the deck.

“Hurry, hurry!” I shouted to them as they climbed up the ladder to the outside. “We’re nearing a reef! But time the final release to a wave when we can safely roll the monster.”

“Monsieur Gage, what about us?”

It was Martel, sitting in the hold in chains where the former slaves had locked him. He seemed more alert now and pointed to his fellows.

“Just stay out of our way.”

He grimaced from the pain of his wounds. “It will go faster with more help, and four of my men are still fit enough to labor. Chain me like a dog if you must, but for heaven’s sake use stout backs to save your wife and son.”

I hesitated. I trusted Leon Martel about as much as an arthritic earl should trust the flexible filly of a wife he bought with ill-gotten inheritance, but time was of the essence. Every second we saved getting iron off our bow gave us a better chance to steer away from that lee shore. I had a pistol and a knife, and he and his scoundrels did not.

“Don’t leave us here to drown, American!” one of his men added.

Well, some of the bastards were dead, others wounded, and the starch had been beaten out of everyone.

So I unlocked the four healthiest ones, including Crow. They wept with gratitude. “You have chosen as a saint would,” Crow assured.

“Then work to save your life and ours. Rocks are near.”

The hammering and rasping had become more frantic. I turned to join the others on deck.

But I’d promised Martel a fatal meeting with Dessalines, hadn’t I? The last thing that bastard wanted was a successful conclusion to our voyage. And the only way his henchmen would get freedom and the treasure was by dooming the rest of us, they figured. All this I realized later. They’d plotted with the desperation of the condemned.

So I was clubbed from behind.

I fell and skidded, dazed, the shackle key ring leaving my fingers. Someone snatched it up, and I heard the rattle of more chains unlocking. I rolled and tried shooting, but my pistol was soaked and snapped uselessly. A wounded ruffian staggered at me, and an ax fell toward my head. I jerked to one side just in time. The weapon thunked into the deck, sticking, which gave me time to heave up and shove a knife into the bastard’s ribs. He was Buzzard, I think. He gasped, stiffened, and fell.

Everything was in awkward slow motion from the sickening heave of the deck. The other gang members were ignoring me, crawling forward to frantically knock open strongboxes and stuff their pockets with treasure.

Where was Martel? I yanked out the ax from the floorboards, the bloody knife in my other hand.

The Frenchman was crawling the opposite way, making for the stern. A length of chain was still hooked to one ankle and dragging like a lizard tail. Was he trying to hide?

No, he’d seized a hatchet. With horror, I realized what he meant to do.

“Leon, stop!”

He turned, eyes haunted, lips a crooked sneer. “Mercy is always stupid.”

“If you don’t work the ship, we’ll die!”

“And if I do, I’ll still die, but slowly and in a great deal of pain for the long, cruel pleasures of the Haitian rebels. Good-bye, Ethan Gage. I’ll take my chances with the sea.”

He wriggled into the compartment where the wheel’s cables led down to pulleys and the straining rudder.

“No!” I cried. “There’s a shoal…” I scrabbled desperately after him.

Perhaps his plan, if he had one, was to throw the vessel into such chaos that his own men could retake the ship.

More likely, he simply wanted to take us down with him.

“I won’t let you kill my family!”

“You killed them by defying me,” he called. “You killed them by letting your wife shoot me. Me, Martel, your only hope.”

I threw the knife, but he was too far away and wedged tightly amid the wheel ropes. The blade bounced harmlessly off a timber. I charged with the ax, but couldn’t reach him in time. He swung his hatchet, grunting against the pain, and chopped one of the rudder cables. “For Bonaparte!”

The rope was already tight as a harpsichord wire, strained against the relentless push of the ocean. Now it snapped like a whip, lashing him as it did so. He was flung like a toy, ribs audibly cracking, and smacked against the slack cables of the suddenly useless rudder, evil satisfied. Martel glanced up toward the deck where my wife and son waited.

Instantly we lost steerage. The ship spun and everyone tumbled, screaming as they realized we were lost.

If our orientation to the waves couldn’t be controlled, a loose mortar could be catastrophic.

“I’ll see you in hell, Gage!”

I grabbed the ladder to ascend to the quarterdeck to shout warning. The storm was catastrophic as we yawed. I dimly saw Jubal and his fellows in front of me, clinging for purchase, each wave that cascaded down the deck’s length washing wood chips with it. The mortar was rocking violently, its foundation loose. But instead of tipping it carefully, we’d created a one-ton peril. Now the ship was turning broadside, entirely out of control. Captain Brienne clung to the wheel, looking at me with horror.

“What have you done?”

“It was Martel.” And then, calling ahead, “Jubal! Don’t loosen the mortar! Get back!”

My friend heard his name. He pulled himself by line toward the mast, one ear cupped.

The entire ketch began to tilt. We were broaching, sideways to the seas. A monster comber rose, a cathedral of water, and because we were at the far edge of the storm now, a watery sun thrust beams of light on the chaotic sea. For just a moment, the crest of the wave glowed green as an emerald.

Then it broke, an explosion of foam, and rushed down like a mountain avalanche. Jubal grabbed the mast just in time. I braced myself in the hatchway.

The breaker hit.

We rolled completely sideways, masts parallel to the sea, and light vanished. We were underwater, or rather smothered in a mattress of foam, tons and tons of seawater slamming as if to drive our vessel to the bottom.

Even submerged I heard a snap as the mortar, its pins half chopped through, broke loose. It tore out of the deck and smashed overboard, plunging for the bottom like a stone. A ragged mouth in the deck marked where it had been.

Water surged through the sudden gap and poured into the hull. The gun had also broken the stays holding up the foremast so it went over, lines jerking like dancing snakes.

The ship’s rigging was broken, and all hope of controlling the vessel was gone.

Several of Jubal’s companions and French sailors vanished into the sea with the gun, pulled underwater by the rope they had tied to.

Miraculously, Pelee ’s ballast worked its leverage and we rolled upright again, staggering. Then another crack, like a tree falling in a forest, and the mainmast went over. A broadside wave, and the mast and my black friend were washed away like driftwood.

I looked back at the wheel. It had disappeared, too. So had Brienne.

With water pouring in, the loss of the mortar had the opposite effect we’d intended. The ship settled at the bow even more sluggishly than before, and pitched in the seas as aimlessly as a piece of driftwood. The angle of the deck was steepening as the vessel began to sink.

I crawled toward the captain’s cabin, fighting through surf.

All was lost, and there was only one thing left to accomplish now.

I had to save Astiza and Harry.