The Silver Bullet

Chapter Thirty-four

When in 1765 England imposed the Stamp Act, laying a tax on virtually every document necessary to American life, from newspapers and journals to deeds and custom manifests, the colonies rose en masse against it. But while many commentators date the activities of the various organizations now known as the Sons of Liberty from that year, if should be noted that the Sons were active by 1745 at the latest in New York. They were an effective and innovative group that prior to the open declaration of hostilities was, contrary to British propaganda, a most moderate influence on the populace.

Many instances serve to prove this argument. There was, for example, the matter of Cadwalladar Colden in New York, the lieutenant governor who had armed and reinforced Fort George after the people made their opposition to the stamps known. He intended they would take these ignoble swatches whether they liked them or not, and seemed ready to go about slaughtering anyone who opposed them.

The Sons responded by stuffing an effigy of Colden onto a carriage and parading it to the fort. This was quite a show, with hundreds of seamen as well as local citizens attending. To a man, the British inside feared a horrible slaughter — and not of the citizens opposing them. But the Sons, taking a temperate view, led the crowd to content itself with merely burning the effigy.

They also sacked the mansion of the fort commander, Major James, a disagreeable sort who clearly deserved it.

The stamps were henceforth abandoned, and peace restored without the loss of a single person on either side. Clearly, the Sons have suffered great libels from their oppressor’s pens.

Once the redcoats occupied New York, many of the more notorious members of the group had to flee for their lives to the countryside. Those who remained found it necessary to hide their loyalties. This did not end the organization’s operations in the city, but did make it very difficult, even for those familiar with the group at its highest levels, to identify exactly who was and who was not a member.

It was for this reason that Jake did not know the man who had saved him, even though he had often had occasion to call on the group for assistance. He had no doubt, however, that the man who saved him had been acting on Culper Junior’s orders. As he told van Clynne when they clambered onto the wharf, his gratitude was boundless. The Liberty boy had risked death to save them. It was just this kind of selfless activity that would guarantee the country’s future.

“ I quite agree,” said van Clynne, his legs still wobbly from the journey. “I know of a place just north of the King’s Bridge where we might purchase some food and drink at a fair price. It is run by an old Dutch friend of mine whose sympathies are quite with the patriots, though he has stayed in the neighborhood due to his health.”

“ Fine, we’ll eat there tonight. First we have to retrieve our horses and my bomb. Then I’ve got to find a wagon.”

“ Tonight?”

“ We’ve got to rescue our friend,” explained Jake, leading the way back toward the stable where he’d boarded the horses. “They’ll be taking him to jail on shore before they hang him. I’ll have a plan cobbled together in no time.”

The only plan van Clynne wanted to hear was one to escape the city. Directly.

Van Clynne pointed out that Jake was under orders to return to Albany, that there would be great consternation if he failed to meet Schuyler’s time limit, etc, etc.

Jake never answered. There was no possibility he could be swayed. His sense of duty and honor, his obligation and his gratitude, combined in such a way that he would have swum against Gibraltar had the Liberty man’s rescue depended on it.

It might be said that the Dutchman admired his companion’s resolve and character, realizing that he could all upon them if he were in a similar situation. Nevertheless, it would have been very much against van Clynne’s nature to simply shut up. Thus, he was still arguing when Jake finally found the four-wheeled wagon he wanted. That the wagon was accompanied by a driver was not critical, since the narrow lane in front of the storehouse where it was parked was temporarily deserted. Jake snuck up behind the man and knocked him unconscious in a trice.

Wanting to keep his accounts even, the American agent tucked a few of van Clynne’s continentals — at three percent interest — into the man’s shirt.

“ He’ll have a tough time explaining those if he’s a Tory,” said van Clynne.

“ Truly a shame,” answered Jake, taking up the reins and leading the horse and wagon forward.

They stopped three blocks away at a small but crowded store. Van Clynne stayed with the wagon, grumbling about the difficulty of finding a good parking spot in the overcrowded city.

“ Still talking to yourself, Claus?” asked Jake when he returned a few minutes later.

“ The city was never like this under the Dutch,” van Clynne claimed.

“ The traffic will be lighter near the jail,” said Jake, taking a jug of pitch he’d just bought and pouring it into the back of the wagon.

“ What are you doing?” exclaimed van Clynne as Jake placed a candle in the middle of the sticky black puddle.

“ Just get going — make a left at the end of the block and drive north. Hurry.”

The British inevitably took the same path from the docks to the jail; Jake had scouted it several times previously. That preliminary work proved handy now; they crossed town in the space of five minutes and found an alleyway along the narrow street two blocks from the prison’s portals.

While van Clynne drove, Jake turned the wagon into a mobile fire bomb. His plan was a simple one — van Clynne would light the candle, then drive the burning coach across the roadway, blocking the street. Jake would launch his noise keg from the rear, temporarily paralyzing the British guards.

“ And not us?”

“ You should be far enough away, if you stay with the wagon.”

“ While it’s on fire?”

“ You’re afraid of fire, as well as water?”

“ I’m afraid of dying prematurely.”

“ Here, stop this candle wax in your ears. The concussion can shatter your eardrums.”

“ So we’ll leave the man we’re rescuing deaf?”

“ Just temporarily,” said Jake, jumping down. “Remember to light the wick back here before you pull into the road. It will take a few seconds to flare up, and I want the flames impressive enough to catch their full attention before I launch my bomb. Don’t forget to curb the horse’s reins and when the bomb goes off, grab our men and run up that alleyway. I’ll take care of any guards who are still standing.”

“ Perhaps it would have been better to steal a coach instead of this wagon,” said van Clynne. “A man with strong legs could bolt over this, even if it is on fire.”

“ If he’s unconscious, these salts will revive him,” said Jake, handing van Clynne a small potion bottle he had purchased at the store. Be careful with it — under normal circumstances it’s used as a rat poison.”

“ But — “

“ Just don’t let him drink any,” said Jake, untying their horses from the back of the wagon. He secured them to a side post, and then quickly worked some wax into their ears as a precaution against injuring them.

“ I’ll meet you three blocks north by the church,” said Jake. “I know a place where we can stay until it’s dark. With luck, the commotion will bring a few of our friends forward, so escape won’t be difficult.”

“ Perhaps we should enlist them beforehand,” suggested van Clynne. “In my opinion — “

“ I can’t hear your opinion,” said Jake, stopping his ears. “Wait until the first man passes Kiefer’s there, then pull out. Put your ear stops in!”

Van Clynne’s complaints continued, but Jake was oblivious to them — why hadn’t he thought of this simple expedient days ago?

As he trotted down the street to take up his position, he saw shutters were being shut on the street above — the procession of prisoners, was nearing.

This was a poor street, and before the British invasion, many of the folk here had supported the Revolution. Trapped by the quick occupation, they had learned to keep to themselves, especially during the almost daily marches to the gaol. By the time the patrol and its five prisoners appeared at the head of the block, there was no one on the street.

Except for Jake, who took up a spot in the doorway about ten yards from the alley where van Clynne was waiting. A few strikes of his flint and he had the small candle in his hand lit; his only other chore now as to wait.

The candle was necessary to light the bomb, whose fuse was too short and quick burning to let it be set in advance. Jake could not rely on flint to ignite the fuse at the last moment; he needed his hands free. HE set the candle down on the ledge of a small window that looked into the doorway; the effect was much like lighting a votive at the altar of the cathedral in Paris.

“ Why are you putting a candle on my window, mister?”

Jake turned around and saw a young girl, five or six years old, tugging inquisitively at his leg. He had to take the wax from one of his ears to hear her.

“ You don’t want to burn down my house, do you, sir?”

The prisoners, with their redcoat guards behind, were dragging themselves forward not twenty yards behind her.

Jake could have ignored the small girl, trusting that Fate would keep her out of harm’s way once the small riot he planned began. But there was something in him that could not ignore a child wandering innocently toward danger. He took the wax from both his ears and stopped it in hers, then quickly picked her up in his arms and pushed at the latch on the top of the split door, intending to shut her inside.

The latch would not give way. He had to step back and kick at hi, not once but twice, and then finally place all his weight behind the thrust before sending the top flying inward.

“ Stay inside, sweetheart,” he told her, forgetting that she could not hear him. “The patriots are fighting for Liberty today!”

Have you ever heard such overwrought words? “The patriots are fighting for Liberty today!” With a very large exclamation point at that. In the middle of a fight, when his own safety hung in the balance. At any moment he might be discovered. At any moment he might be killed.

“ The patriots are fighting for Liberty today!”

Corny? But whose fault is that, if that was the reality? Does not everything noble sound, under some circumstances stripped of its context, overwrought?

Such words build revolutions and legends. They inspire minds and warm hearts in the cold realities of the trenches, keeping blistering feet trudging along the line toward the most distant goals.

“ The patriots are fighting for Liberty today!”

Jake jumped back out into the street, right behind the rear guard, just as van Clynne pulled his chariot across the road in all its fiery glory. Jake leaned back and lit the bomb as the troops and their prisoners began shouting in alarm and confusion.

The explosion, loud to begin with, was amplified by the closeness of the buildings to the street. The shock waves were such that the ground trembled and people ten blocks away thought the world surely had come to an end. No glass within a hundred yards remained intact, and two-thirds of the British guard fell over like bugs catching a whiff of Dr. Pete’s Miraculous Fly Powder. The rest were dazed, groping for their weapons as well as their senses, and had been rendered suddenly deaf.

As was Jake.

At least he had been expecting the blast. He shook his head a few times and ran forward, pistol in hand. The disposition of the force was not immediately clear in the smoke and dust, and he moved cautiously, still getting his bearings as he hopped over the prostrate bodies of the fallen guards.

Van Clynne, meanwhile, had been thrown from the wagon by the concussion. Spitting out a mouthful of dirt, he rose and grabbed his musket, standing in the center of a silent street.

More than most men, the squire lived in a universe of noises — a good portion of them of his own making — and for a brief moment he was as dazed as anyone else on the block. But the heat of the nearby fire quickly brought him back to rights; he unpacked the melting wax from his ears and was once more himself.

There were shouts on the next block over, and someone was calling, “Fire!” The smoldering pitch and dry timbers of the wagon combined to produce a flow of dark smoke and flames. The poor horse that drove the wagon had been knocked unconscious, and van Clynne had to step gingerly between its legs as he looked for the prisoner he was to rescue. Before he reached him, he found the four other men lying chained together in a heap on the ground, so close to the burning wagon that they were almost hot to the touch. Fearing the men would combust, van Clynne tried for a moment to rouse them; when that failed, he reached for the potion bottle.

Bottle, as in glass — it had been shattered by the squire’s fall.

Cursing, van Clynne doffed his coat, thinking to wave the sodden corner under the stunned men’s noses. But in order to do so, he had to put down his gun — which left him awkwardly unarmed when he looked up again and found a British sergeant measuring his sword against his belly.

Van Clynne smiled and followed his first instinct, tried to talk his way out of the situation.

Whether that would have worked under other circumstances or not, it certainly could not here — the sergeant had been rendered deaf by the blast. Fortunately, he’d also been knocked a little dull. Van Clynne tossed his jacket into the man’s face and the sergeant stumbled backward, dropping his sword.

The sharp scent of the rat poison in van Clynne’s pocket worked as well as Jake had predicted; after no more than two steps the man had full control of his senses. Fortunately, by then van Clynne had full control of the swords and began tattooing his insignia on the man’s chest. He disposed of him with a swipe so hard, the sword broke at its hilt.

“ Damned inferior British metal,” grumbled van Clynne, scooping up his coat and gun as he returned to the prisoners. “How can they claim to rule the world, when they can’t even find a decent ore deposit?”

At the other end of the confusion, Jake came upon two soldiers who had survived the blast with some shadow of consciousness. HE fired into the chest of one of the redcoats, who was holding his bayonet forward in a stunned, senseless pose. He grabbed the barrel of the gun as the man collapsed to the ground, mortally wounded; then he swung it around for a bayonet duel with another soldier. The sharp knives and metal barrels crashed against each other with heavy clicks and bangs, but both Jake and the soldier were oblivious to the cacophony.

The soldier was shorter than Jake, but he was stocky and strong; the American’s quick victory owed more that the lingering effects of the blast than physical superiority.

Two other redcoats were rushing forward in what looked to Jake as an attempt to kill the prisoners where they lay. He ran the first through the back with the bloody bayonet. Caught by surprise, the redcoat jerked to his right so quickly that the musket flew out of Jake’s hands. The soldier’s own weapon, propelled by his death spasms, caught Jake flat in the chest; it was fortunate indeed that he had been close enough to be struck by the barrel and not the blade, for the blow might well have chopped him in half.

Jake, surprised and with his injured knee hurting again, fell to the dirt on his back. The dying redcoat lunged forward, trying with his last gasp to cut Jake’s throat with the knife at the tip of his weapon.

A sudden burst of energy propelled Jake’s elbow into the ground and levered him out of harms’ way. The soldier fell into his place, destined never to rise until Gabriel sounds his final trumpet.

With a cringe of pain, Jake stumbled to his feet. He found it easier to hop than walk, and took two steps, looking for van Clynne and the Liberty man who had saved his life. The smoke from the fire and dust from the battle combined to turn the roadway almost as black as the night, but there was no mistaking what he saw next — a bright officer’s sword, pointed directly at his nose.