Alexander Kent - For My Country’s Freedom

The deck tilted slightly, the topsails flapping in protest while the ship came as close as she dared into the wind.

"Fire!"

It was like watching an invisible avalanche as it roared across Baltimore’s tall side, splintering gangways and timbers alike, upending guns and clawing every sail so that some ripped open, tearing into long ribbons as the wind completed the destruction.

"Signal Zest, Mr Avery! Attack and harry the enemy’s rear."

Tyacke glanced round. "He’ll need no second order, sir!"

"Stop your vents! Sponge out! Load!"

Along the deck each grubby gun captain held up his fist.

"Ready, sir!"

"Run out!"

A few flashes burst through the thickening smoke, and Bolitho felt the enemy’s iron smash into the lower hull.

Men peered at one another, looking for friends and messmates. Not a single man had fallen and Bolitho heard a ragged cheer: defiance, pride, and the overwhelming madness of a fight at sea.

"Fire!"

Allday exclaimed, "The bugger’s mizzen is goin’, sir!"

The Baltimore’s steering must have been damaged or its helmsmen smashed down in that last broadside. A few guns were still firing, but the timing was gone, the ability to change tack destroyed with it.

Bolitho wiped his face with his sleeve, and saw the long orange tongues spitting through the smoke beyond the big American. Steady and merciless, gun by gun, into the drifting Baltimore’s unprotected stern. Bolitho could imagine Adam sighting and firing each gun himself. Remembering what he had lost and could never reclaim.

Scarlett called wildly, "Reaper’s struck, sir!" He sounded half mad with disbelief. "The bastards!"

Bolitho lowered his glass. Reaper had been overwhelmed. All but dismasted, her sails like blackened rags, she was falling downwind, her ensign gone, her upper deck like a slaughterhouse. Smashed guns, men and pieces of men, her brave captain, James Hamilton, in a game made for others far younger, killed on the quarterdeck where he had fought his ship to the end. He should have remained in the H.E.I.C. This was not for him. Bolitho looked at his hand on the rail, gripping until it was bloodless. Not for me either.

"Run out! Take aim! Fire!"

Bolitho coughed as more smoke swirled inboard through the open ports. Acrid, savage, blinding.

Reaper had had no chance. A small sixth-rate of 26 guns against Beer’s powerful artillery.

He wiped his eyes and saw Avery watching him, surprisingly calm. Distancing himself from the shattered ships and the floundering bodies that marked Woodpeckers sudden end, as he did from many other experiences.

"All reloaded, sir!" Scarlett was staring from Tyacke to his admiral.

A silence had fallen over the ship; even the wind had lulled for the moment. Drifting through smoke as dense as fog, with only the muffled sounds of musket fire and swivels, and the smells of burning timber. Like the gateway to hell itself.

Then he saw Unity’s topgallants, her sky-scrapers, punctured here and there but strangely serene above the smoke and carnage it concealed.

"Stand by, lads!"

Bolitho watched Tyacke’s sword, wondering in those few seconds why fate had decided that this vital meeting was to be.

But the sword fell from Tyacke’s hand as the smoke exploded in one huge broadside. A world of screaming madness, of falling rigging and razor-edged splinters.

Men dying, or being pounded into bloody gruel even as they stood mesmerised by the enormity of the bombardment.

There were twisting, unreal shapes as the maintopmast thundered down over the side, the corpses of some marines tossed from the nets and into the sea like human flotsam.

Hands pulling him to his feet, although he could not recall having fallen. His hat was gone, and one of his proud epaulettes. There was bright blood on his breeches, but no pain, and he saw Midshipman Deane staring at him from the rail, half his young body pulped into something obscene.

Bolitho heard Avery calling, but it seemed far away, although their faces all but touched.

"Are you hit, sir?"

He gasped, "I think not." He dragged out the old sword and saw Allday crouching near by, his cutlass already drawn while he peered half blind into the smoke.

Somebody yelled, "Repel boarders! Stand-to, marines, face your front!"

Bolitho wiped his face again with his sleeve. There was still order and life in the ship. Axes flashed through the trailing cordage and shattered spars alongside, and he heard the boatswain bellow, "More men on the forebraces ’ere!"

Tyacke was also on his feet, his coat badly torn by the trailing halliards which had almost clawed him over the side.

But the guns were still loaded, waiting to fire when Tyacke dropped his sword.

"Now!" Bolitho would have fallen but for Allday’s grip on his arm. The deck was slippery and the sweet smell of death was stronger even than the burned powder.

Tyacke stared at him and then waved his blade. "Open fire!"

Unity’s shadow seemed to tower above them, sails already being brailed up as the Americans lined the gangway and prepared to board the drifting Indomitable.

Tyacke’s voice seemed to rouse a memory, a discipline which had all but gone. With the hulls barely yards apart the roar of Indomitable ’s twenty-four-pounders sounded like the climax to a nightmare.

It seemed to give individual strength where before there had been only the raw fury of war. Wild-eyed, the Indomitables remaining men and the marines from the nettings charged, yelling and cheering, blades clashing and stabbing as they swarmed on to the enemy’s deck. Musket and pistol-shots brought down a few of them, and one hot blast of canister cut down Captain du Cann and some of his marines before the frenzied mob overwhelmed the swivel, and hacked the solitary gunner to bloodied rags.

Suddenly there were more cheers, English voices this time, and for one dazed instant Bolitho imagined relief had arrived from the convoy.

But it was Zest, grappling the big Unity from the opposite side. Adam and his new company were already swarming across the gap.

Allday parried a cutlass to one side and hacked down the man with such a powerful blow that the blade almost severed his neck. But it was too much for him. The pain seared through his chest, and he could barely see which way he was facing.

Avery was trying to help, and Allday wanted to thank him, to do what he had always done, to stay close to Bolitho.

He tried to shout but it was only a croak. He saw it all as if it were a series of pictures. Scarlett yelling and slashing his way over the blood-red deck, his hanger like molten silver in the misty sunshine. Then the point of a pike, motionless between two struggling seamen: like a snake, Allday thought. Then it stabbed the lieutenant with the speed of light. Scarlett dropped his sword and clung to the pike even as it was dragged from his stomach, his scream silenced as he pitched down beneath the stamping, hacking figures.

He saw Sir Richard fighting a tall American lieutenant, their blades ringing and scraping as each sought the other’s weakness. Avery saw it too, and dragged a pistol from beneath his coat.

Tyacke shouted, "The flag! Cut it down!" He turned and saw another officer running at him with his sword. Almost contemptuously, he waited for the man to falter at his terrible scars and momentarily lose his nerve before he ran him through, as he would have done a slaver.

There was one great deafening cheer which seemed unending, ear-splitting. Men hugging one another, others peering round, cut and dazed, not knowing whether they had won or lost, barely knowing friend from foe.