It took fifteen, but only because they kept making the same glaring errors. They were practically begging Mike to attack.
He barked his men back to work and watched the windsock more than he did the Corsairs. If the wind slackened he would pounce, knowing how to play the tide and currents better than his opponents. But the wind blew on and on.
The Corsairs eventually gave up the ruse and went back to exploring the bay. By three o’clock, the repairs had been completed on the new ships. Their crews were chosen and their holds stocked for battle. Then they too were forced to wait as their young commander did nothing but sit and watch.
“Mike?” It was Shaina Hale, looking like a stork as she picked her way carefully down the slope. “I mean Captain Mike? The Queen would like to see you.”
He expected to find her being harangued by Commander Walker, and he was indeed with her in a nearly empty operating room. There were no patients, only the commander, Bishop Wojdan and a tired-looking Denise Woodruff, were with the Queen. “Where is everyone?” he asked. “I thought you’d be going at it all night.”
“And look weak in front of their commander?” Jenn asked, with a raised eyebrow. “You’re their leader and they follow your example. Let’s have a look at that arm.”
He flexed the arm. “This? It’s nothing.”
“Is that so?”
He was thinking up a nonchalant answer when she punched him in the shoulder. The pain made him gag and his arm dropped to hang limply. He couldn’t resist as Jenn and Denise pulled his coat off and began cleaning out his wound. The Bishop watched, going up and down on the balls of his feet.
“They’ll attack tonight? Where?”
“Angel Island,” Mike answered at once. The Corsairs had been ferrying men to the fleet all afternoon. They were stripping men from their defensive positions on the bridge to prepare for the attack.
“And to think we just abandoned it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Mike said through gritted teeth.
Commander Walker smirked at the answer; it was the same one he would have given. “So, when do we fight?”
“That depends on the wind. Until it changes, we can only react to what they do. They’ll go for Angel Island first. Once they unload their men, their ships will be free to go after their secondary target: the Floating Fortress. If they can sink it, then we’ll be completely divided.”
“And will they be able to sink it?” Jenn asked.
Mike tried to shrug. “Ow, jeeze. Possibly. Maybe. One way or the other, they’ll pay a hefty price for even trying.” He quickly outlined a simple plan that would take advantage of the Corsair’s desire to fight at night.
Walker grinned, liking the idea. The Bishop wondered if it was right to pray for half the Corsair fleet to be destroyed. And Jenn wanted very badly to forbid Mike from leading the defense.
It tore her heart to shreds every time he left the safety of the island. She couldn’t, however. It would undermine him both as a leader and as a man. Not only was the Fortress a naval asset and thus fell under his command, he was also the best man to defend it.
He saw the worry in her eyes. “Don’t worry. It’s a fortress. It’s bullet proof. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
But was it torpedo proof? She didn’t think so.
Chapter 33
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay
The wind decided to stay neutral and blew steadily from the northwest even through what was an amazingly long sunset. Even the twilight lingered to the point that the Guardians actually prayed for the night to come.
Once it did, the Queen turned to Mike, sucked in a long breath and sighed out reluctantly, “You can begin.”
During the long twilight, the Corsairs had hauled their wind and set sail for Angel Island. It really hadn’t been a secret. While they were occupied, Mike was going to put his plan into effect—his secret plan. No one outside Jenn’s office knew the details.
The two, Captain and Queen, stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, both wishing to say more, wishing they could kiss one last time. Mike would have settled for a hug, but that was out of the question. She would’ve felt the thrum of his muscles. He was somewhere between nervous and scared. The plan he had concocted was far from foolproof and the risk was very high.
“Your Highness,” he said, with a dip of his head.
“My…Captain,” Jenn answered, faltering. A crow had taken that moment to let out a harsh caw in the darkness. Hearing a crow at night was as bad an omen as there ever was. Her smile went wooden. It’s not for Mike, she told herself. He always lives. He lives every time no matter what the signs say. It was just a bird.
To be on the safe side, she turned to the Bishop. “Could you bless them or something? You know, to keep them safe.”
Wojdan was neither blind nor deaf. He had heard the crow and had seen the Queen’s response. He didn’t like the idea of competing: faith versus the malleable “supernatural” but in this case he made an exception. “Lord heavenly Father, please bless this man and his men. Guide them and protect them body and soul so that they may deliver us from our enemies. Amen.”
“Amen,” Jenn said, looking relieved.
“Amen,” agreed Mike. Having God on his side couldn’t hurt, though he would’ve rather had Jillybean there instead. God was love, while she embodied destruction.
When Mike left Jenn’s office, he shrugged out of the sling she had demanded he wear and marched down to the dock with Commander Walker at his side.
“Are you sure it won’t be Treasure Island?” Walker asked. As much as Mike loved the waterborne side of warfare, Walker hated it. Nothing was straight forward. Everything depended on the wind, and even then half the time they were tacking away from their enemy instead of going right at them. He had hoped to defend Treasure Island. It was wide and flat, good for maneuver. In his mind, a good place to lure the enemy in and destroy them while they were still off-loading from their boats.
“It’ll be the Fortress first. Maybe tomorrow they’ll go for Treasure Island.” Mike wondered about that. If he was the Corsair captain, he’d wait for the Queen to make a mistake before committing any more land forces. Anything could happen while shuttling men back and forth or during supply runs. A treacherous wind could separate the small fleet, leaving it completely vulnerable. A storm could blow it down to the end of the bay. A winter fog could spring up, leaving the ships blind and isolated.
“You can wait here if you wish,” Mike told him. “Trust me, we’ll still have plenty of enemies when morning comes.”
Walker blew out, angrily. “No, I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines. The men need to know their commander is willing to risk his skin as well as theirs. Remember that. Men don’t follow a man who keeps them safe. They follow a man who knows how to win. We are going to win, aren’t we?”
“We won’t win the war tonight, but I’m hoping to sting them again. Ah, look at this. Hopefully, they haven’t been out here too long.” In the street in front of the crowded docks was a formation of men standing at attention, their shining spears pointed at the stars above. “They’re going to need to leave the spears behind. They’ll just get in the way out on the Fortress.”
When all hundred spears were set aside, the men clambered over the rail of the last two ships on the dock. They had both been Corsair ships and neither was very large. To make things more crowded for the poor soldiers, the decks and holds of the ships were piled with huge coils of rope thick as a man’s arm. All told, there was sixteen-hundred feet, enough to reach from Alcatraz to the Floating Fortress.
Once the men were crammed down below deck, and the great web of torpedo netting opened up, the two ships sailed slowly out onto the bay. The moment they did, a green light began to blink on the highest point of the Fortress. It could be seen across the bay. The Fortress was no longer just a black shadow on the water. Its position could be pinpointed exactly.
Mike wanted, no, he needed the Corsairs to come right
at them.
With teams spilling the rope over the side, one length at a time, it took an hour to cover the distance and during that time, the Corsair army was making an unopposed landing on Angel Island. Hundreds of black-garbed men struggled ashore and then hurried to secure a toehold against an enemy that wasn’t there.
The ships were quickly off-loaded and once they were, their kettle fires were extinguished one by one. Then a horn blatted, brassy and loud. It was taken up by dozens more. There was nothing musical about the sound. It was an angry noise—the Corsairs were coming.
“We have a trumpet on board,” one of the Guardians remarked. “Should we blow it?”
The soldier was punched in the arm by Ren Finnemore. Once again, she had managed to find her way onboard Mike’s ship. “And give away our position? Don’t be stupid, Morty.” The trumpet had already been found and had been passed up from the galley; it was quickly set aside again.
“Full sail?” Ren asked Mike.
They were a hundred yards out and had one more link to go. If they screwed up the last connection and lost the rope, Mike’s plan would be ruined. It was better to make sure. “No, we have time, but you can tell ’16 to go on.” The 316 had made the last connection and her deck was finally clear. She shot forward to unload her men.
Seven minutes later, the Floating Fortress loomed up out of the dark. Its appearance was far less impressive than its name. It was nothing more than a hundred-foot long barge on which twenty or so steel cargo containers were arranged like a low pyramid. The entire structure was soot-black from a fire attack leveled against it by the Corsairs during the last battle of the bay. The attack had done little besides scorch the paint.
Although the men were eager to disembark, Mike cried for the last of the ropes to be passed over first. Once it was tied off, the green light that had been shining atop the highest container was changed to red. Seconds later, the rope was pulled tight.
“Slip the anchor!” Mike called out in a hushed voice. “Boats away. Wish us luck, Ren.”
Next to Mike, Commander Walker stared around dubiously. “Is it working? I would have thought we would have felt something.”
“It should be working,” Mike answered. “It’ll just take a little time to notice. It is a big boat.” It was indeed big. Including the steel cargo containers, the weight of the Fortress was 260 tons or just over half a million pounds. Back on Alcatraz, every available person was heaving on their end of the rope.
While they did, Mike’s Guardians were trying their best to add another layer of netting. They weren’t after fish with the nets, they were hoping to catch torpedoes. For the last week, Mike had teams running all over the city collecting the rope that was being used to haul them along, foot by foot, and also fishing nets, poles and foam buoys.
Now all they had to do was put together a second layer of netting in the dark on a gently rolling bay. It wasn’t easy, not even close. It could have been done during the day in a third of the time, however Mike had wanted to lure the Corsairs in with an apparently weak defense.
Unfortunately, the first thing the new string of nets caught was a zombie. It was a great aquatic leviathan that had grown immense on a diet of seaweed and seal pups. It came up out of the darkness and tried to catch a Knight by the name of Billy Barfield by the arm as he leaned far out away from the barge with a long pole in hand.
Billy was too fast and pulled back, however the netting got caught up in his armored forearm and before he knew it, he and another man were pulled overboard. Walker and two others jumped in to try to rescue them and were nearly pulled in as well. The beast was as strong as ten men and anyone on the netting was swept over the side. There were shouts and coarse bellowing. The stout wooden poles snapped like twigs.
Their entire defense was in danger of being destroyed when Mike raced up. “Get some light! Cut away the netting! Cut it!” he yelled. It was mayhem. Men were running into each other trying to find a lantern. Others were cutting perfectly fine nets and ropes that didn’t go anywhere near the beast. Still more were playing tug of war with Billy, who was being pulled in half.
There was a scream and a roar that could be heard across the waters. A sudden, near-blinding light showed Billy being torn limb from limb as the other soldier who’d been caught up in the net was trying to stab the thing in the face with a shard of wood. Mike spun his rifle from his back and fired at the creature. Eight other soldiers joined in. Twenty seconds was all it took to turn the zombie into a featureless horror. It was no more than a grey ooze in a black soup.
It was only when the echoes of the guns died away that they realized that the other soldier was still screaming. Physically he was unhurt, mentally he had become unwound. His eyes were great circles of unblinking whiteness and his mouth was stretched open in a silent scream.
His friends tried to quiet him as they cut him loose. He wouldn’t shut up. Not that it mattered. The light from the lantern was equal to a thousand screams. “Finish in the dark,” Mike ordered. “And everyone else, get back to your battle stations.”
When the light was turned off and the darkness rushed in to take its place, they saw a blinking light low on the water a few hundred yards away. Someone yelled, “Torpedo!” A dozen rifles were pointed at the light.
Even Mike was fooled for a few seconds before he realized it was one of their own buoys that he had moved out of its original position a few days before. “Don’t shoot. It’s just a buoy. Get back to your stations.” This was easier said than done. Even though the Guardians were disciplined men, the barge was unfamiliar and in the dark one blackened side looked like the rest.
By the time Mike pushed the last of the soldiers into position, a soft cry went up on the east side of the barge: dark shapes were passing in front of the buoy.
“Here they come,” Walker called out from the east wall.
“Too soon, damn it,” Mike muttered. The nets on the north side were still in complete disarray. “Just shove it all out as far as possible,” he told them. As he handed over one of the poles, he caught a whiff of a familiar acrid smell. “Smoke,” he whispered. The Corsairs were using the smoke bombs Jillybean had made before leaving ages ago.
Where there was smoke, there was fire. “Everyone get down! We have incoming.” The smoke rolled over the barge from the north and in a blink, visibility was down to inches.
“Are they going to try to board us?” someone asked. “No one can use torpedoes in the dark, can they?”
“They can if they have thermal scopes,” Mike told them.
This silenced the soldiers and in the quiet that followed, a gurgling sound could be heard. It was the first of the torpedoes running at them, powered by compressed air from scuba tanks. It came in from the east and when it struck the nets, its gurgling went into high gear, but only for a second, then it exploded with a flash and a tremendous thundering boom.
Shrapnel sparked off the containers and the side of the barge as water rained down on the cringing soldiers. The echo from the explosion masked the sound of the next two torpedoes. One was set off prematurely and knocked the second off at an angle. It still did damage to the netting and a piece of its tank cut a groove in the scalp of one of the Guardians who had poked his head up at the wrong time.
After that the torpedoes came in waves, lighting up the smoke like thunderbolts. Mike had no idea how long his netting was going to last. He waited until the third wave had exploded before leaping up and crying, “More nets on the north and east!”
Once again the smoke played havoc. Some of the soldiers were turned around and flung their nets sideways, covering other soldiers, some threw their netting on top of other netting that hadn’t been touched. Others were hit with a barrage of metal from a delayed blast.
Even though the netting was imperfectly placed, it stopped the next twelve or so torpedoes from reaching the edge of the barge. With each explosion the torpedoes got closer and closer, sending up great fountains of water and sending shockwaves runn
ing through the deck. Eventually one got through and detonated against the side of the barge with a tremendous DOOOOM! Those who were closest felt a stinging shock run up through the metal. They flinched back, hesitating, afraid that the barge would sink beneath them in a matter of seconds.
“More nets!” Mike bellowed as he felt his way forward through the smoke. “North side! More…” A second torpedo exploded, jarring him off his feet. Pain raced up his injured arm but he shrugged it off and climbed to his feet. “More nets!”
“That’s all we…” DOOOOM! A third blast. “That’s all we have,” a soldier with a high, strangled voice answered.
“No. We had at least twenty.” Mike scrambled around on top of the container and discovered the soldier was right. “Okay, there are more on the south side.”
One of the guardians ran to get them and promptly fell off the edge of the container and thudded onto the deck below. “Aw, jeeze! Someone find out if he’s okay and someone else get those…”
Ting! Ting! Ting! Bullets began to whine and sing off the metal all around them. Mike threw himself down and nearly tumbled off the edge of the container himself. Others started shooting back, uselessly punching holes in the smoke. One man began demanding “Are they close! Where are they? Which way?”
No one knew.
Mike yelled for the men to stop firing and for a few seconds, there was an eerie silence. Then seven explosions went off on the northeast side of the barge. They were accompanied by a shout of pain. The next wave struck the corner and the eastern edge. Mike began think his plan wasn’t going to work. Keeping low so he wouldn’t be thrown overboard, he hurried to the west side of the barge where he found the rope was as taut as ever.
They were still being pulled along and even as he watched, someone yelled and pointed. “A fire!”
It was a little raft with a barrel lashed to it. The barrel emitted great torrents of black smoke. The soldiers closest to it used poles to tip it over. The barrel hissed like a dragon as it sank. Just like that, half the barge was free from the smoke. Bullseye lanterns were lit and in their weak light, they could see a swarm of torpedoes head in at them.
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 40