Richard Woodman - In Distant Waters

'Where's the commandant?'

'No one seems to be in command, sir, just this handful of peasants.'

'He's a-fucking Indian women, Cap'n, or lying dead-drunk under a redwood tree,' drawled Captain Mack.

'Very well. Let him go.' Drinkwater motioned to the marines and they stood back. He jerked his head at the mountain-man. ' Vamos !'

Mack half-smiled at the irony, but held out his hand. 'My gun, Cap'n.'

'You get out of my sight now. When my boat pulls off the beach I'll leave your rifle on that boulder. You can get it then.'

'You don't trust me?'

'Somebody once told me the Cherokees called you people Yankees because they didn't trust you.'

'Ah, but others called us English then…'

Mack grinned, reluctantly acknowledging an equal and stalked away. He did not look back and his buckskins were soon as one with the alternate light and shade that lay beneath the trees. Drinkwater turned back to the incendiary roar and crackle of the burning fort when there came a shout, the snap of branches and a roar of anger. Drinkwater spun round.

Mack was running back towards them, pursued by a dark figure in an odd, old-fashioned full-length waistcoat. The man had lost his wig and hat but he held out a pistol and, as he took in the sight of the burning fort, he fired it screaming some frightful accusation after Mack. The mountain-man fell full length, his spine broken by the ball, and Drinkwater ran up to him as he breathed his last. Behind Drinkwater the marines brought down the wigless Russian.

Drinkwater bent over the dying Mack. '… Thought… I'd betrayed…' he got out through clenched teeth, and Drinkwater looked at the Russian, rolling beneath the bayonets of the marines. It must have been the returning commandant, misinterpreting the mayhem before him as his post blazed and Mack walked insouciantly away from the scene.

Drinkwater watched as life ebbed from the tumbled goliath, shot so ignominiously by a debauched ne'er-do-well, and felt that sharp pang of regret, that sense of universal loss that accompanied certain of the deaths he had witnessed. He was about to stand when his eye fell upon something bright.

Half a dozen huge nuggets of the purest gold had rolled out of the mountain-man's leather pouch.

'Bury 'em both,' he called to the marines, and scooping up the treasure he swept them into his pocket.

Gold.

It threw off the reflections of the candle flames leaping and guttering as Patrician worked her way off shore in the first hours of the night. Tomorrow she would appear off Point Lobos, but tonight she would hide herself and her prize in the vastness of the Pacific.

Gold.

A king's ransom lay before him. No wonder Mack had scorned the idea of payment for passing Patrician's deserters to the Russians, and no wonder he had not wanted those same men wandering over wherever it was he found the stuff, for that was the only implication that fitted his deed and his character. He would not encourage the Spaniards, for their tentacles would spread inexorably northwards, while the Russians could supply him with those necessities he was compelled to get from civilisation. Powder, shot, steel needles, flints… Drinkwater had no idea how many natural resources the wilderness contained.

But it contained gold.

And what the devil would such an unworldly man as 'Captain Mack' do with such a treasure? That was a mystery past his divining.

'Cleared for action, sir!'

'Very well, Mr Fraser.'

Above their heads the white ensign snapped in the breeze from the north that had blown fresh throughout the night and was only now losing its strength as they came under the lee of the land. From his post on the gun-deck, Quilhampton tried to locate the little cove where he and the cutter's crew had holed up and from where he had seen the Patrician carried off into captivity. Suppose the Suvorov was waiting for them under the protection of the Spanish battery on Point Lobos? What would be the outcome of the action they were about to fight?

He found he dare not contemplate defeat, and felt the atmosphere aboard the ship imbued with such a feeling of renewal that defeat must be impossible, no matter what the odds. Those two raids, little enough in themselves, had patched up morale, made of them all a ship's company again, a ship's company that had endured much. There was talk of going home after the job was done, after the Spanish and the Russians had been made to eat their own shit, and the gun-captains kneeled with their lanyards taut in their fists in anticipation of this event.

'Thou art my battle-axe and weapons of war,' the Reverend Jonathan Henderson had declaimed at Divine Service that morning, 'for with Thee I will break in pieces the nations, and with Thee I will destroy kingdoms,' he had railed, and if no one understood the finer theological points of his subsequent deductions, all made the blasphemous connection between Jeremiah's imputed words and themselves.

'Stand ready, sir,' Mr Belchambers squeaked at the companion-way, 'maximum elevation,' he went on repeating Drinkwater's orders from the quarterdeck, 'no sign of the Russian ships. Target to be the battery, starboard broadside.'

Quilhampton grinned. The boy had the phrases arse-about-face, but he was cool enough. He stooped and peered through the adjacent gun-port. He saw the smoke suddenly mushroom from the end cannon, wafting outwards in a great smoke-ring, but no fall of shot followed.

'Make ready!' Belchambers's squeak came again.

'Make ready there, starbowlines!' Quilhampton roared with mounting excitement.

A second smoke-ring mushroomed from the embrasures of Point Lobos.

'They're bloody well saluting us,' muttered Quilhampton, frowning.

'Hold your fire, sir! There's a flag of truce putting off from the shore.'

A groan of disappointment ran along the gun-deck.

' Capitán , my brother, Don José Arguello de Salas, Commandante of His Most Catholic Majesty's city of San Francisco, extends his most profound apologies for this most unfortunate mistake.'

'Damn you, Don Alejo. Where is your brother? I demand to know more of this affair, this so-called mistake which I know to be nothing short of a towering fabrication, a… a…' words failed to express Drinkwater's angry sense of outrage.

So many half-guessed-at truths had found their answers in the hour since the flag-of-truce had first been seen. But Don Alejo was not a man to concede a thing. As Drinkwater faltered, the wily Spaniard rammed home his counter-stroke.

'We are both guilty, Capitán . You, please, you steal our schooner, La Virgen de la Bonanza .'

'That is an outrageous allegation…'

' Capitán , please, it is one of the confusions of this war.'

'If you had informed me, as you were duty bound to do, that she brought news of our new alliance, I should not have been forced to capture her. You, Don Alejo, acted outside all international law by selling, yes sir, selling His Britannic Majesty's ship Patrician to the Russian power in the person of Prince Rakitin after you had heard that your country was once again an ally of mine. Such an action is the basest and most dishonourable that I have ever heard of.'

'A little mistake, Capitán Drinkwater,' snapped Don Alejo, 'a little… what did your English papers say, eh? Ah, sí , a quibble, like when your ships come under your Admiralty orders and attack Bustamente's frigates and blow up the Mercedes and send women to God before you have a declaration of war! It is nothing! Nothing!' Don Alejo made a gesture of contemptuous dismissal.

'But you traded, Don Alejo, sold my ship. You have been trading with the Russians ever since Rezanov came, eh? Your Most Catholic Master does not approve of his servants trading in his monopolies.'