Tale of the Thunderbolt (20 page)

“Maybe if we whispered — ”

“I tend to shout at the top of my lungs, when I'm really interested in the subject.”

Valentine laughed. “We couldn't have that.”

Carrasca bit her lower lip. “You speak French. Perhaps we could have a short — ”

The ship's Klaxon went off. They froze. At the second screaming blast of the alarm, they hurried out of the cabin to the bridge, just a few steps away.

Carrasca killed the Klaxon and picked up the ship's squawk-mic. “Battle stations, battle stations.” Aspin spoke to the engine room, asking for maximum revolutions.

Valentine stepped aside for men rushing to their stations. He looked to the shoreline from the wing of the bridge. Five great bonfires lit up the beach outside Cape Haitian. Wide fishing boats with double-banked oars approached like giant water beetles, men crammed inside. Pot shots from shore zipped through the air or
ting
ed harmlessly against the steel sides of the ship.

He went to the opposite side of the bridge, heart in his throat, and searched the darkness. The stars went right to the horizon in the clear tropical night. No ship sailed out there; that much could be seen. He heard Carrasca shouting orders for the anchor cable to be cut. Valentine went to a searchlight and threw the switch. He began a slow sweep of the seaward approaches of the harbor, the searchlight's electric buzz filling his ears.

He probed the darkness with a knife of light. The beam fell across something small and gray, approaching like a sea monster with part of its snout showing. Orange light flashed, and a shell howled as it landed just in front of the ship. Water fountained into the air. But the cannon's flash told him what hunted the
Thunderbolt
from the sea.

It was not Boul's wooden Drakkar, but a submarine! The commodore had mentioned some old diesel ships in the hands of the Haitian Kur. It had a low profile like something from the Second World War. He hardened his ears in that direction even as the second shell approached and picked out the sound of churning engines.

He grudgingly congratulated Boul for a clever poker game. The thought stayed frozen in his mind as the second shell hit forward, beneath him. Time faded; the next thing he was aware of was a disembodied floating feeling.

David, I'm not going to hold you up anymore
, his mother said.
You'll have to swim for yourself.

Cool, slightly slimy Minnesota lake water engulfed him as she let go. Fear . . . He kicked hard and spun his arms like wheels until he broke the surface and felt air on his face again. The panic changed to triumph.

Swimming, Mom! By myself! Look!
he sputtered.

His mother's bronze face split into a smile under its wet tangle of glossy black hair.
You're a regular motorboat.

David Valentine spat out a mouthful of Caribbean as he came to his senses, disoriented. Distant and muted sounds echoed over a roaring in his brain.

He bobbed in the ocean, the waves adding to his sensation of drunkenness. Woolly-brained, he watched the
Thunderbolt
cut her cable and get under way. Someone had the presence of mind to turn the Oerlikon from the shore boats to the attacking ship. Red tracers crossed overhead, seeking the exposed figures on the bridge of the submarine. The deadly fireworks played across the deck of the submarine, tearing the conning tower's men and machinery to pieces. The submarine's gun fired again, and its shell detonated in the wake of the now-moving target. The Oerlikon's tracers shifted, and this time tore through the thin shield of the submarine's cannon. The thirty-millimeter shells blasted the gun's crew from the deck in a series of whipcrack explosions.

Valentine noted, rather dully, the
Thunderbolt
turning to escape the harbor — leaving him behind. She and the submarine traded machine-gun fire; the bullets scrabbled against the respective port sides of the two ships. The ineffectual fire reminded Valentine of a pair of crabs battling with their oversize fighting claws, both too well armored to be damaged by the exchange.

Hard hands grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him into a boat. He looked around at a mass of black faces, eyes and teeth shining in the night. A few pointed their guns at him. He could make out voices now.

“Put those things down, you fools,” Valentine barked in French. “I'm not going anywhere.” He consoled himself with the sight of the
Thunderbolt
's churning wake as she escaped the harbor.

 

They landed and trooped up the beach and past the wounded Haitians. The soldiers' screams and lamentations struck Valentine as surreal, with soft sand beneath his feet and a breeze licking his skin as though he were just back from a pleasure swim. A few of the women from the town tended to the men in a haphazard fashion, caring only for the faces known to them and ignoring others.

The soldiers moved him along with words and gestures rather than the blows he expected, especially after the brief, intense fight. They escorted him to the stoutest building off the market square, a cinder-block three-tiered structure with a collonade and a few friezes that reminded him of an elaborate wedding cake he'd once seen back in New Orleans. They brought him into the basement by way of an exterior stairway and metal door broken only by a narrow gun slit. A navy-uniformed warden led him to a cell. Its ten-by-ten concrete floor supported no furniture, and only a drain hole and dirty ring on the floor around it hinted that there had once been plumbing fixtures.

Cockroaches scuttled for the corners at their entry. What light there was came in through the face-size window in the door, where tiny shards of reinforced glass and wire still stood in the broken pane like the teeth circling a lamprey's mouth. He stood in the holding cell, wet and uncomfortable, while they searched him. Finding him weaponless, they took only his belt.

He waited what he thought to be an hour or so, and a familiar eye appeared in the circle of jagged, stained glass. It widened in surprise.

“My God! So it's true — the bargainer himself,” Boul exclaimed in French.

“That sounds like the man who told me not to fear treachery.”

A melodious chuckle came from the hall. “I know which side of the bread my butter rests on, my friend. Or in this case, on which side of this door I wish to be standing.”

“Funny thing, buttered bread,” Valentine said, emotion facilitating his command of his mother's tongue. He sat and rested his back against the wall. “If it is dropped, life always arranges for it to land butter side down.”

“My bread is brought to me, so I wouldn't know. Listen, my friend. You'll have buttered bread, decent food, as long as you stay here if you'll tell them the whole truth. That through me your captain was convinced to stay.”

“Are you sure you want to take credit for tonight's fiasco? Your prize got away.”

“Your sailors were more alert than we thought, for all the illicit rum and tequila they bought today. But your ship was damaged, my friend, damaged. Whatever you sought to do here is at an end. The Lords of Santo Domingo still rule, and they know now that you play a false game.”

“Thanks to those who would sell their countrymen's lives. For what? A uniform? Someone to bring you your buttered bread?”

“I must put an end to this pleasant exchange, though in the future we'll have freedom and leisure to talk. Well, just leisure in your case. But first a comrade of yours will join you. It seems he wished to see you again a great deal, so much that he risked his life to be in the harbor tonight. One moment please.”

So they had Victo, too. Valentine waited, and rested.
So close, and you blew it at the end.
He closed his eyes and his mind and tried to reduce his lifesign. Not that it was necessary in this particular heart of darkness, but the mental discipline would calm him for whatever lay ahead.

A heavy tread outside the door, and a rattle of a key in the lock made him open his eyes again. He readied an apology for Victo, whose life had also been on the table in this mad gamble. Valentine felt a flash of resentment at the superiors, Lifeweaver and human, who pushed men to their deaths, sacrificed like pawns. But it wasn't Victo who stood in the doorway, glowering at him.

Captain Saunders.

“By Kur and the Catastrophes, I owe the devil his due. It
is
you,” Saunders rasped. His skin was darker, his hair lighter, and the wattles on his neck more pronounced with weight loss. He wore loose butter-colored cotton clothes and rope sandals.

“Good morning, Captain,” Valentine said.

“Stow it, renegade. Boul, put this man in shackles. He's slippery.”

Boul yelled something to his men outside the door, who rushed to comply with the Haitian Creole. Valentine submitted to his boots being stripped off, and his wrists and ankles being clamped in steel. A second chain linked the upper and lower segments of the restraints.

“That's better,” Saunders said, looking over the fittings with a careful eye. He snickered. “So young, so sure of himself. Plotting behind my back. I found you out still, clever man.”

“Shouldn't you be getting back to the
Thunderbolt
, sir? It is your command, after all.”

A paroxysm passed over Saunders's face, and he reached into his shirt. Valentine saw a sheathed knife under his arm. Saunders clutched the hilt with a trembling hand, then relaxed.

“You should be congratulated for being in the right place at the right time, Captain,” Valentine admitted. “Was it dumb luck or evil fate?”

“It took some doing,” Saunders said. “I got away from those bastards off Jamaica by only the thinnest margins. I jumped in a raft with Peatwo and my pistols while the fighting was still going on. We rowed for shore.” Saunders still enjoyed talking about himself, and he began to pace the cell.

“Nobody noticed a missing raft. But we've been busy killing a Kurian,” Valentine said.

“I rowed for shore, but it turned out there was a third ship there. Didn't know that, did you? A little fishing boat, just a wheelhouse and a deck really. From the other pirates in Montego Bay. The scoundrels on board were hoping one or both of the ships would be so damaged by the fight, they could get in on some salvage.

“Their sailing master, for he wasn't fit for the word
captain,
was a crafty one, lurking there. Pointed a bunch of guns at us, bobbing there in the raft. I saw him watching Peatwo with a look I'd seen before, so I took my pistol and put it to Peatwo's head. Promised to blow the boy's brains out if they didn't put down their guns, but I'd trade the boy for my life. The sailing master chuckled and brought me on board.

“He meant to murder me, of course, so as soon as I got on deck, I shot him and another who moved clean dead. I made the others throw their guns overboard, and between me and Peatwo, we got five into the raft. That just left us with three, enough to handle the ship but not too many to watch.

“I couldn't go back north, but I knew the only Kurians with ships nearby were here. We made for Santo Domingo. I ended up shooting another of those Montego dogs on the trip. I stayed awake two days at one stretch, promising myself with every breath that I'd see you again and avenge myself. I offered the Devil my soul for this moment.”

“Not much of a bargain for either of you.”

“Hold that tongue, or I'll cut it out — by Kur, I will. We got to this island, and I found the local Lords. I gave them the Jamaicans, and Peatwo for that matter, for the promise to let me serve them at sea. That came hard. Felt a bit like that guy in the Bible who had to sacrifice his own son. I couldn't have made it that week at sea without Peatwo. The Kurians didn't know what to make of me. But they had that submarine working; they used it at sea because it was almost unsinkable. The cannon's sights were wrecked. I fixed it up for them, and they gave me the command.

“We heard about what happened in Jamaica. At first I thought you had ideas about setting yourself up in style there. When the good Boul radioed Santo Domingo that you were seen off the coast, I knew the Devil had kept his part of the bargain. You'll rot here until I get the
Thunderbolt
back, and then what's left of you will go back to New Orleans for disposition. Dispossession, more like, of your traitorous hide. As slowly as I can make it last.”

In a way, Valentine was relieved. He wouldn't be killed outright, and so far no one had bothered to wonder just what he was doing off the shore of Hispaniola.

“Better get that gun fixed, sir,” Valentine suggested. “Otherwise the
Thunderbolt
will sink your pigboat under you.”

“I intend to. The damage is repairable, within even the capabilities of the joke of a machine shop they have here in Haiti's wet asshole. But help is on the way.”

Valentine feigned disinterest and said no more in the hope that Saunders would brag out further details. But his former captain turned to leave.

“Oh, Captain, one more thing,” Valentine said. “Suppose you do get the
Thunderbolt
back. Are your new masters here just going to let you sail off in an armed ship that size? Our mutual friend Captain Boul, he may just have orders to shoot you in the back of the head once the
Thunderbolt
's safely taken.”

“A traitor judges all others by his traitorousness,” Saunders sneered, as if he had hit upon an important point of philosophy. “Kur keeps her bargains with those useful to them.”

“What about with those who are no longer useful to them? What happened to Peatwo when you didn't need a second set of eyes, Captain?”