Tale of the Thunderbolt (36 page)

“It's over, my David,” came a familiar bass.

“Oh, dear God,” Post added, looking at the casings scattered on the deck. Valentine met his lieutenant's gaze, looking for understanding. Instead he saw disgust. Post could see only pitiful figures in the wreckage being murdered for no reason. Several Kurians had to have been on board the submarine for that many Reapers to attack at once, and it would be easy for one of them to pose as a sailor. As long as the Kurians lived, the Reapers that might still be on board the
Thunderbolt
could kill, plant a bomb, or otherwise sabotage the ship. He could no more risk a Kurian deciding to achieve a Pyrrhic victory by destroying the
Thunderbolt
that he could have let Alistar live back in New Orleans.

Valentine tossed the gun to the deck and left the bow. Ahn-Kha trailed him. Valentine was thankful for his comrade's silence. Ahn-Kha would listen and give his opinion sometime in the future, but now there was too much to do. He did not look over his shoulder to see Post, but he heard him unload the gun and pick it up.

“How many of your Grogs are left?” Valentine said.

“A hand-and-two.” Ahn-Kha had forgotten himself in the crisis and used Golden One phraseology for six. “It was desperate, even with the crossbows and the quickwood. There were many of them. We hunted the last of them from the stern with the pikes. When we wounded one in the leg with a pike, it managed to tear its own limb off and escape. They've learned to fear wounds from these weapons.”

“So the ship is clear? Will she be able to continue?” They descended to the Grog-deck.

“I do not know. That is for the captain and the Chief to say. I was thrown off my feet by the collision, but I was belowdecks and saw no water. She does not seem to sink.”

“Mr. Post,” Valentine said when Post joined them on the well deck. “We have to get the guns manned and ready while we're motionless. The submarine wasn't the only ship the Santo Domingans had. You'll be in charge of that. But leave me enough for a party to search the ship. Ahn-Kha with his crossbow, a couple of pike men, men with shotguns, four should do it. We'll look for any of our people who are wounded, of course, but we have to be ready for a fight. A Reaper or two may still be holed up somewhere on board. We'll check every corner big enough to hold a dog. Once we know the ship is safe, the Chief can go to work and see if she'll be able to move again.

“After that, we'll clean up the dead, and the ship. I don't want everyone walking over bloodstains for the rest of the trip. Any questions?”

Post shook his head. “No, sir. I think they already pulled up a sailor from the submarine portside, sir. Shall I shoot him, just in case?”

Valentine ignored the rebuke. “Let me talk to him.”

 

The sailor was a Cuban by birth, but his mother had been taken to Santo Domingo when she and her family were captured in a raid. He sat by the entryway, trembling and wet from head to toe, with a blanket around his narrow shoulders. Valentine's Spanish wasn't up to the dialect, so Carrasca translated his story.

“I served on the
Sharkfin
four cruises, as a mechanic. I had just been called forward to get gas masks, because the damage from your gun was filling the engine room with smoke, when the collision came. Some of the men tried to get out through the old torpedo room, but those doors long since quit working. I made it out through the forward deck hatch — ” Carrasca quit translating when the submariner howled in pain as Valentine grabbed his wrist and twisted it, dropping the wretch to his knees. The prisoner was human. A Kurian's disguise would have flickered.

“Val, stop!” Carrasca said. “He's just telling us what happened to him.”

“I'm making sure he is who he says he is. Tell him I apologize. See if he'd like to join up with us — we could use him.”

The Santo Domingan sailor seemed willing. Through Carrasca, he relayed why.

“The White Captain of the north, he was a madman. He convinced the Kur that if they got this ship, they could take over all the islands south of here. He promoted men he trusted, and to gain his trust they had to treat us badly. We worked like mad and were still punished. I had planned to swim away the first chance I could get, let the Haitians castrate me and use me as a slave in the fields. At least I would live.”

“What about this last trip? Who was on board?”

“Seigneurs from the Samaná Peninsula. They had their eye on the lands west of Cape Haitian, and with this boat they could have ruled the coast. I had no love for them, I am glad they are dead.”

Valentine silently commended the dead Saunders for his final throw of the dice. With the right men under him, he would have been able to snatch the
Thunderbolt
away from the Hispaniolan Kurians in the manner Valentine took it away from the rulers of New Orleans. A man of strange contradictions. Long ago he had quit asking himself why so many talented men chose to devote themselves to serving the enemies of their blood.

 

After the ship had been searched and re-searched, Valentine returned to his cabin, feeling an itchy burn from the Reaper-blood. He'd wiped it off quickly enough, but needed a thorough cleansing with pumice.

Post was rinsing his mouth out with baking soda in their cabin. Ahn-Kha had moved forward with the ship's remaining Grogs.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Valentine asked, scrubbing hard and working up a lather.

Post did him the courtesy of not playing dumb.

“Sir, you've pulled this whole thing, the ship, the quickwood, the Jamaicans and the Haitians together like a . . . like a magic trick, something out of nothing. I respect you for that. I'm not sure I can serve under you anymore. When we get to Texas, it's good-bye.”

“It's what happened at the bow?”

Post nodded. “I can't stop thinking about the bodies in the water, sir. When you got those Santo Domingans away from their plantations, I thought that you pretty much walked on water. Woulda died for you then, if it meant accomplishing something you were trying to achieve. Never thought I'd want to die for anything or anyone. Maybe to get away from them, but not for anything.”

It took Valentine a moment to regain his equilibrium. “You shouldn't have to die for anyone. Least of all me. Risking your life, weighing it against what you are trying to do — it's something any man does.”

“Any man worth the iron in his blood.”

“But you feel differently now.”

Post waited a moment, but Valentine made no gesture to hurry him. The words would come when his lieutenant was ready.

“If your idea of the right thing to do is machine-gunning sailors who've had their ship sunk from under them, I want no part of it. You can cite precedents all you want, wrong is wrong.”

“I had to make sure all the Kurians were dead. For all we knew, there was a Reaper squatting in the magazine with a hand grenade, just in case the
Thunderbolt
got the upper hand in the fight. If a Kurian has his puppet pull the pin and hug a couple of shells in his arms with the grenade under its chin, it's going to do it. Sometimes it is just as dangerous to beat the Kurians as it is to run from them. They'd rather destroy than let another own something that was theirs. The Reapers were clawing through to the Chief in the stern. I had to disorganize them, quickly, and that's the only way I had to do it.

“Remember, Post, they were serving the enemy. That's war.”

Post shook his head. “I was serving the enemy. As soon as you gave me a chance, I switched. I bet a lot of those sailors would have done the same as that fellow we pulled out of the water. When you were shooting them, it was like you were shooting me.”

“I understand. But I don't know how I'm going to get along without you. But go with my friendship. Shake on it?”

His lieutenant pursed his lips, then took his hand. “Could be you have what it takes for the kind of war this is and I don't. Sorry, Val, but I can't see death like that again. I'm afraid I'd shoot you, or myself, or maybe both.”

“Drop it, Will. Serving our side's different from working for the Kurians. I'll give you your choice, and wish you well when the
Thunderbolt
sails away. One thing, though: even if I did the wrong thing, the quickwood has a better chance of getting back to Southern Command if you come with it. Having it could turn things around, make a difference in a lot of innocent lives being saved. What happened at the bow was wrong, I'll grant you. But weigh it on the right scale. How wrong is it when a Reaper takes a six-year-old girl, because the Kurian running the show wants a different-flavored aura?”

Post shook his head. “That's a maybe. I'd rather deal in certainties, and those bodies floating in the diesel fuel were real, not supposition.” He turned away.

“Will, if you're going to hate me, hate me for a good reason. Ask me sometime how I became a captain in the Coastal Marines.”

Post would not, or could not, see that Valentine would have preferred to rescue the
Sharkfin
's survivors. But the risk to the mission, to losing all their lives and even more time in the quest to get the quickwood into the hands of Southern Command required him to act as he did. Valentine had learned long ago not to second-guess himself where matters of life and death were concerned, or he would never be able to make a decision again. He had made right decisions and wrong decisions, and sometimes had to bury the bodies of those who died for no other reason than his bad judgment. Like Gabriella Cho, the night he left her alone and wounded in the confusion of a battle, or his old company's Master Sergeant Gator, lying in a hilltop grave in eastern Oklahoma.

Struggling with his own memories as much as he had with the Kurians, David Valentine went to bed.

 

Carrasca, Valentine, and the Chief decided the ship should be refitted before exploring a potentially hostile coastline, and two months in drydock at Jayport would allow the Chief to consummate a long-desired overhaul. There was the added incentive of replacing the losses from the encounter with the
Sharkfin,
so in the end Valentine agreed with yet another delay in his return to El Norte.

They returned to the harbor to a mixture of cheers and curiosity over their topiary. There were the inevitable problems with safely storing their precious cargo and finding living space for the crew during the refit, hampered by the occasional tropical storms and hurricanes brushing the island.

Valentine, Post, Narcisse, and Ahn-Kha were left with the leisure to recruit Jamaicans to join his marines, reduced to a bare handful in the fight against the Reapers. Valentine was shocked to see a soccer field filled with Jamaicans who wished to follow the Crying Man to sea, off their sunny island and into peril. In the end, he selected fifty for the short run to the coast; the
Thunderbolt
would be cramped, but it gave him a core of willing men to accompany him on the long trip back to the Ozarks.

There was also time with Carrasca as the Chief worked on the bow. Long rides into the countryside, talks with the locals, trips to sporting events and lunches made of market-square purchases filled the mornings. In the afternoon when the rains came, they talked or laughed or made love as the mood struck, and waited for the cool of the evening to walk back to the ship. Sometimes they spent the night at the commodore's house, joining him for mah-jongg or cribbage depending on the availability of players. The weeks passed like a dream. Valentine had never known so many idle days in all his years serving Southern Command. There was time to know another person, not as a comrade, superior, or underling, but as a friend and lover.

He learned her moods, and in turn she learned his. They pretended that the respite would never end by not discussing it, talking instead of the perfect hillock for a beach house or whether Valentine would make a better fisherman or planter. Valentine was more than half-willing to take these conversations at face value.

Reality intruded when the Chief refloated the ship, and they had to make ready for the last voyage. Then the idyll was over.

“You're a wanderer, too,” she said as they lay together.

“What's that?” Sex always made him wool-brained.

“You wander. Is it so you don't have to put down roots?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I'm not blown around. It's more like a current.”

“Even coconuts wash up, by and by. What keeps you at sea?”

“Same as you. Duty.” He would have added something about his dreams of a better future, dreams made almost realistic-sounding thanks to the quickwood, but his lover sighed.

Valentine turned on his elbow. The whites of her eyes caught the night sky coming through the window. They looked wet.

“Are you saying I should wash up here?” He half hoped she'd say yes. He'd get the quickwood back to the Ozarks and return.

She didn't say anything for a moment, but her mouth twitched.

“What then?” he insisted.

“Nothing. Nothing important. Important as our duty.”