by Steve White
“They also send messages to Madrid asking for money and engineers to build new fortifications,” said Roche Braziliano in the lugubrious tone for which his face was so well suited.
“But that takes time! What could they have done in two years?” Morgan’s eyes twinkled with his infectious pleasure at his own cleverness. “And besides . . . getting there will mean dropping due south, with the trade winds to port. An easy voyage.”
Summoning up his map display and enlarging its scale to include the entire Caribbean, Jason saw that Morgan was right. The proposed target lay across the Caribbean on the northern coast of South America. There, the great Gulf of Venezuela was connected by a narrow channel to the almost equally large Laguna de Maracaibo, a lake—actually a fresh-water lagoon—measuring eighty-six miles from north to south and sixty miles east to west. He zoomed the map in on the lake and saw that the town of Maracaibo was situated near the southern end of the channel. On the southeastern shore of the lake was another substantial town, called Gibraltar. The surrounding country was a fertile lowland plain, encircled by mountains.
The lake, he thought, bore a striking resemblance to a bottle. What happens, he wondered, if somebody plugs it while we’re inside?
But he could see that Morgan’s last point had swayed the doubters. There was little further discussion.
* * *
The southward voyage was almost as uneventful as Morgan had promised. They stopped at the island of Ruba, the future Aruba—a Spanish possession whose Indian inhabitants nevertheless habitually did business with passing buccaneers. They did so now, and after buying supplies from them Morgan continued on to the Gulf of Venezuela, sailing at night, keeping to the middle of the entrance to stay out of sight of Spanish watchtowers. The French pirate guided them through the shallow, sandbar-laced waters of the gulf, and on the night of March 8 they anchored outside the narrow twelve-foot-deep channel that gave entry to the lake.
At first light, they began to cautiously negotiate the entrance to the channel, working their way between the two small islands of San Carlos and Zapara. It was tricky navigation. But the morning light revealed that that was the least of their problems.
“Well-positioned fortress,” Mondrago commented dispassionately, studying the battlements on the eastern shore of San Carlos, looming over a sandy beach, barely three hundred yards from the channel.
“And one which the Spaniards have evidently built since L’Ollonais was here,” said Jason, glancing at Lilly’s quarterdeck where the Frenchman was making embarrassed excuses to Morgan.
“Here’s where we could have used Oxford’s thirty-four guns,” he heard Morgan rumble. “As it is, there’s only one way. We’ll have to land on that beach and take it by storm.”
Jason didn’t listen to whatever else Morgan said, for at that moment his attention was distracted by a blue dot at the edge of his field of vision. He activated his map display to confirm something he decided to keep to himself for the present.
* * *
Half of the company went ashore that afternoon, in a stiff breeze which gradually developed into something resembling a squall. The boat carrying Jason and Mondrago capsized, and they splashed through the surf with viciously blowing sand stinging their eyes and Spanish cannonballs, fired from above, kicking up sprays of sand and water around them.
But not many balls. Mondrago had counted eleven cannon muzzles protruding from the crenels above, but they were being fired slowly, one at a time. That, and supporting fire from the ships, enabled the buccaneers to fight their way to the ridge of sand that provided the only cover available.
“What’s wrong with them?” Mondrago wondered aloud as they hugged the sand. “They could murder us, given a decent rate of fire. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“I suspect that fort is seriously undermanned—a typical result of the Spanish crown’s peso-pinching, as Roderick once mentioned. They haven’t got enough men to serve all the guns. And the ones they have got probably aren’t all that well-trained.”
Morgan, who believed in leading from the front, had come ashore. “All right,” he called out. “We wait here until dusk. Then we’ll rush for the walls. We won’t be able to run very fast, uphill in the sand, but under cover of dark we ought to be able to cross the open space. Make sure of your weapons.”
Jason and Mondrago complied. Their wonderful muskets, of course, lay at the bottom of the sea off Cow Island with HMS Oxford—Mondrago had never entirely gotten over that—but Morgan had given them flintlock pistols from a common store of surplus equipment. Not that they could have used the muskets at the moment, for the battlements were beyond effective range. Everyone had to lie low and take it. So when the abrupt tropical darkness fell, just after a final volley from the fort’s guns, it was a very frustrated line of buccaneers that rose from behind the sand ridge on Morgan’s command and surged forward.
Strangely, there was no fire from the fort. They reached the base of the rough stone wall and hugged it, staring at each other in the moonlight, bewildered.
“Where the devil’s a gate?” demanded Morgan.
They soon found one. “We need a ram,” someone said.
“Faugh!” Morgan reared back and, with all the force of his large body, kicked the gate with his sea-booted foot. It swung open. After an instant of stunned immobility, the buccaneers swarmed in with a roar.
The fort was deserted. They all burst out laughing.
“The buggers must have slipped away just before dark, after firing that last volley!” someone crowed, slapping Jason on the back.
“After the visit by L’Ollonais, they were probably pissing in their pants with fear,” opined the Frenchman. “Now the way to Maracaibo is open!”
“Wait!” thundered Morgan. “Wait, you swabs! I don’t like this—it’s too easy. I want every inch of this fort searched.”
The buccaneers began to fan out across the courtyard into the buildings, where they struck flints to light torches. Jason and Mondrago attached themselves to a group that Morgan led into the largest structure, which they began to search room by room.
It was then that Jason smelled an acrid aroma.
Mondrago must have detected it at the same instant. “Isn’t that—?” he began.
But Jason had already locked eyes with Morgan . . . and Morgan had broken into a run. They followed him down a short stony corridor into the chamber at the far end, where they stopped, paralyzed.
It was the fort’s powder magazine. A long, slow-burning fuse led straight to a mountain of piled gunpowder barrels. The flame was just short of them.
For an eternal instant, Jason knew himself to be a dead man. It was the same knowledge that held them all immobilized.
All but one. Henry Morgan didn’t really look like he was built for speed, but he sprang forward without a second’s hesitation, straight for the powder barrels, and stamped a foot down on the fuse. The flame went out.
In dead silence, the rest of them shuffled forward. Another smell was now added to that of smoke. Someone had had a little accident.
They all looked down. There was no more than an inch of fuse left. With a collective whoosh, everyone breathed again.
“Huzza for Captain Morgan!” somebody shouted in an unsteady voice. The rest of the buccaneers whose lives had just been saved came running to see what the cheering was about.
* * *
In addition to the huge store of powder that was to have been their death, the abandoned fort proved to contain a wealth of weapons. Jason and Mondrago got new muskets—not as good as the ones they’d lost, of course, and they would have to get along without laser target designators.
The next morning Morgan ordered the cannons spiked and, for good measure, buried in the sand. He had no intention of leaving any of his small force behind to garrison the fort, and he didn’t want any Spanish reoccupiers to be able to contest his fleet’s departure when they came back through this channel. The supplies of arms and ammunition were the
n loaded aboard the ships and they set sail. But then they came up against what was known as the Maracaibo Bar: a shallow bank of quicksand around which the ships couldn’t find a way without spending more time than Morgan wanted to waste.
So they fell back on a Morgan hallmark: the forty-foot, single-sail canoes that his ships always towed or carried. They were able to inconspicuously go places the seagoing ships couldn’t. In Morgan’s epic two-year ravaging of Central America, and in his taking of Portobello the year before, they had been his secret weapons. And so they proved now, as the men crowded aboard, sat at their benches and manned the paddles. Despite the handicap of paddling into the wind, they soon reached the shore at the foot of Maracaibo’s Fort de la Barra. It turned out to be another empty fort, but this time without any traps.
“I’ve got to give that crazy bastard L’Ollonais credit,” Morgan admitted as they walked down the deserted main street of Maracaibo. “Thanks to him, most Spaniards are so terrified of us they don’t even try to resist. The more we have a reputation for doing the kind of things he did, the less we have to actually do them.” He laughed. “They even make up stories about us, and come to believe the stories. I’ve heard that some of them even expect us to eat them!”
Jason and Mondrago exchanged an uneasy glance.
“According to one of our few prisoners,” Morgan went on, “the captain of the garrison here called a muster of all able-bodied men. He had drums beaten, flags flown and bells rung. The poor sod found himself standing all alone in the square, looking stupid.”
As they walked on, buccaneers were searching the houses on either side, alert for ambushes. But the houses were empty, their doors ajar. Just off the town square they passed a Catholic church where the buccaneers were amusing themselves by smashing crucifixes, desecrating icons and urinating into fonts like the good Protestants they were. A musket-shot rang out and the head of a saint’s statue exploded. “Belay that!” Morgan shouted. “You might hit somebody.”
Nesbit spoke up timidly. “Ah, Captain, how will you obtain any, well, loot now that the inhabitants have fled and hidden their valuables?”
“Oh, they always do that,” said Morgan, serenely unconcerned. “Starting tomorrow, we’ll start going out into the countryside to round people up. They’ll ransom themselves, after questioning with the usual ceremonies.” Nesbit, who now knew what that meant, blanched. “It ought to take us two or three weeks to clean out the region here around Maracaibo. Then we’ll sail south to Gibraltar, at the other end of the lake.”
As soon as Morgan had moved on, Nesbit turned to Jason anxiously. He had surprised Jason with his capacity to endure privations and hardships, but this was something else. “Commander, surely we are not going to be expected to . . . that is, actually participate in . . .”
“I’m going to do my best to arrange things so that we aren’t directly involved,” said Jason. It was an issue he had always hoped would not arise. He now saw that hope had been unrealistic. “But I’m afraid you may see some things that . . . well, we just have to stay in character.”
All at once, Grenfell spoke up. He had been walking as usual with Nesbit, who since their escape in Hispaniola had more and more become his caregiver. “Anyone who shies away, or questions the methods, is suspect.” His voice was hollow but alive.
“That’s right, Roderick,” Jason said immediately and enthusiastically, for he always tried to encourage the historian’s increasingly frequent awakenings into full awareness.
“Well,” Nesbit said, somewhat reassured, “however unpleasant our proximity to Morgan’s historically attested exploits may be, at least your theory about the Observer Effect seems to stand confirmed.”
“So it does,” Mondrago nodded. “Ever since we rejoined Morgan, the Transhumanists haven’t tried any funny business with us.”
“Yet.” Jason saw the dampening effect that one word had on his companions, but he had to be honest with them. “I didn’t tell you before. But as we were entering the channel, just before our landing at the fort at San Carlos, the gravitic sensor feature of my brain implant picked up something just north of us,”
“So Romain is shadowing us,” Mondrago stated rather than asked. “Have you picked it up since then?”
“No. They must have inadvertently strayed into the very short range of my sensor for that instant. So they’re biding their time, hovering over the Gulf of Venezuela in the Kestrel’s refraction field, totally undetectable in this era, awaiting an opportunity. We have to be on the alert for anything.”
It was a very subdued group that returned to the waterfront.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa was, for the first time in years, a happy man.
He was, after all, vice admiral in command of the Armada de Barlovento—the “Windward Fleet” which was permanently stationed at Havana for the protection of Spain’s colonies and the suppression of the heretic pirates. But for literally decades it had only been stationed there on paper, as was so often the case with things in the Spanish empire. The navy and the Council of the Indies had bickered endlessly while influential royal favorites had siphoned off one ship after another for their own use. Finally the depredations of the pirates—and especially that demon in human form, Henry Morgan—had grown to such proportions that the queen-regent Mariana and her regency council who governed for the mentally incompetent Carlos II had been forced to order the armada to actually set sail from Spain. But by then only five of its original dozen ships remained. That had been a year ago. Its arrival should have instantly tilted the balance of power in the Indies, for its powerfully armed ships could have obliterated the pirates’ small, lightly-armed vessels without breaking a sweat. But at once the deadening tentacles of the overcentralized Spanish bureaucracy had begun to close over him, limiting his freedom of action. As always, the protection of the treasure fleets had come first, for they carried the stream of silver that prevented—or at least postponed—yet another bankruptcy of the Spanish monarchy. He had been shackled to that task, gnashing his teeth with frustration, while that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Morgan had plundered Portobello and gotten away with his swag.
After six months of this, lack of results—although no fault of his—had caused the queen-regent to order two of his ships back to Spain. So his “fleet” was now down to three ships. Unable to effectively patrol the vast area for which he was responsible, he had come to depend more and more on a network of informers. They had reported tavern gossip of Morgan’s plans to descend on the Main. Reasoning that the pirates would head east in order to take advantage of the trade winds, he had set sail for Puerto Rico and then back to Hispaniola. There, in late March, he had learned of the repulse of Morgan’s men from Santo Domingo after their various cattle hunts. He had also been able to question a Dutch trader who had sold meat to pirates who had blabbed the word “Maracaibo.”
Afire with eagerness, he had immediately sent his ships racing south. And now he lay at anchor in the Gulf of Venezuela, and savored the knowledge that, at long last, Morgan lay inescapably in his grasp.
He stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship, the mighty forty-eight-gun galleon Magdalena. Looking out over the water, he surveyed his other two ships: San Luis and Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, with thirty-eight guns and twenty-four guns respectively. Even Morgan’s flagship was a mere fourteen-gun sloop. The rest of the pirate ships were little more than glorified ketches, not a real warship in the lot. In a sea-fight, Morgan would stand no chance at all.
And it now appeared that the only way Morgan would be able to avoid such a fight—and under the most unfavorable circumstances, at that—would be by surrendering. After which he would die.
Don Alonzo turned back to the mestizo, a corporal in the local militia, who had just finished relating to him the tale of Morgan’s capture of Maracaibo. “And so you say that the people here ran away and made no resistance?”
“That is true, Almirante,” the mestizo stammered, fidg
eting and wringing his hat in his hands as he addressed a man so many strata above himself in the social hierarchy of the Spanish empire as to seem almost an angelic being. “The pirates are more like ferocious beasts than men! They can appear from nowhere by sorcery! They would have devoured us all! They—”
Don Alonzo waved the wretch to silence, disgusted. His position required him to be diplomatic, whether dealing with colonial governors or cultivating informers, but privately he despised everyone in the New World. Corruption and rot were everywhere. The administrators sent out from Spain were bad enough: they bought their positions and then recouped their investment by graft and bribe-taking. Still worse were the Creoles, Spanish-descended but born in the colonies and unworthy of the blood in their veins. They had sunk into a sensual tropical torpor, devoid of ideals or honor and utterly lost to the stern crusading spirit that had swept the Moors back into Africa and conquered whole heathen empires in Mexico and Peru. Instead of laying down their lives for their king and their faith, they preferred to grovel in the mud and let the pirates walk over them in the hope (usually vain) of preserving their material possessions. Yes, they were beneath contempt. And mestizos like this one were simply beneath notice. Not to mention Indian peons and black slaves and the zambos that resulted from mixing the two.
“And afterwards,” he resumed, “Morgan sailed on down the lake to Gibraltar, and is there now?”
“Yes, Almirante. He has been there for weeks, torturing and pillaging.”
“Ah.” Don Alonzo turned away, for it would not do to let this lowborn lout see eagerness trembling on the chiseled features of an hidalgo of Spain. Behind him, he heard Magdalena’s captain hustle the corporal off the quarterdeck.
“Have the local pilots been brought aboard?” he demanded after a few moments.
“They have, Almirante,” reported the flag captain. “They assure me that they can guide our ships through the hazards of the Gulf. But,” he cautioned, “they tell me our ships are so deep-drafted that they cannot promise to bring us safely past the Bar of Maracaibo into the channel.”