by Ted Bell
Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!
Originally published in THRILLER (2006),
edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.
In this offbeat Thriller Short, New York Times bestselling writer Ted Bell takes his hero Alex Hawke on a different kind of journey.
It’s 1880 and a lovelorn newspaperman journeys to the Channel Islands to learn the true story of the pirate captain Billy Blood’s demise. While there, he learns how a small boy held captive aboard Blood’s frigate is saved from certain death. The boy’s name is Alex Hawke.
His dramatic rescue sets the stage for later adventures.
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The Powder Monkey by Ted Bell
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The Powder Monkey
Ted Bell
CONTENTS
The Powder Monkey
TED BELL
Ted Bell wrote his first novel for children. In the pre-Harry Potter 1990s, Bell lived in London. The generally inclement weather kept his nine-year-old daughter indoors much of the time. Fine reading weather but, in the neighborhood bookstores, the children’s fare was dominated by horror and “message” books. Where was Treasure Island, Captain Blood or their modern equivalents?
So Bell wrote a young-adult novel that recaptured the adventure and romance of his own childhood favorites. In Nick of Time, a boy of eleven and his seven-year-old sister conspire to thwart the Nazi invasion of their small Channel Island just prior to the Second World War. With the aid of a time machine, Nick and Kate also save Nelson’s fleet from the wicked pirate Billy Blood. The book was optioned by Paramount Pictures and ultimately translated into seven languages.
After retiring from advertising, Bell began the Alex Hawke series of adult thrillers. Like his first novel, the new books recapture a lost sense of adventure and glamour. The hero of Hawke is Lord Alexander Hawke. As the series begins, three renegade generals abduct Fidel Castro, and turn Cuba into an immediate and frightening threat to the U.S. In the second of the Hawke series, Assassin, Alex Hawke battles an ancient cult of killers who are eliminating U.S. ambassadors and their families, prior to launching a horrific attack on America. The third Alex Hawke book, Pirate, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. This time, Alex Hawke must stop a French-Chinese oil conspiracy and avert a nuclear showdown with America’s latest global rival, China.
The Powder Monkey is a bit different. Here, we travel back in time to 1880. It’s the tale of a lovelorn newspaperman’s journey to the Channel Islands to learn the true story of the pirate captain Billy Blood’s demise. In doing so, our hero learns how a small boy held captive aboard Blood’s frigate, Mystere, is saved from certain death.
The boy’s name is Alex Hawke.
And his dramatic rescue sets the stage for the further adventures of his later namesake.
THE POWDER MONKEY
London and the Channel Islands, 1880
I’m no hero.
But, I am the proud possessor of a large and rather good nose for news (I scribble for a wretched daily in London) that sometimes leads me to the very edges of peril. I had now the whiff of a cracking good story in my flared nostrils and was doggedly pursuing a most promising lead. Nearing my intended destination, in a freezing downpour, I had the ever-stronger sensation of an appointment with destiny.
At minimum, I believed, this latest venture might have a most happy result, namely, an influx of shillings to feed my woefully depleted coffers.
No, it was not some fleeting sniff of fame or any such nonsense that propelled me forward across that forbidding island’s slippery scree. Rather, it was the fervent hope that I might soon possess sufficient funds to escape a grim warren of offices above Blackfriar’s Tavern in Fleet Street. This was the joyless home to a tawdry little tabloid called the Daily Guardian.
It was there, under the mean and watchful eye of my editor, an ink addict named Mr. Symington Fife, that I pecked out my meager existence at tuppence a word. My accounts reflected my life’s station, I suppose, for I currently had the princely balance of seven guineas, sixpence in the strongbox ’neath my bed. But, salvation appeared to be at hand.
As it happened, the Guardian’s chief competitor, a yellow broadsheet called the Globe, had last month announced a new subscription contest in honor of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s great naval victory at Trafalgar. And, by Jove, I meant to win it!
The contest rules were straightforward enough. Any person who submitted a heretofore-unreported tale pertaining to the victory was eligible. The three most surprising and entertaining stories (they had to be historically accurate, of course) would be printed. The best would win a grand prize of seventy-five quid. A king’s ransom in my humble view.
All I needed was a smashing tale of the battle and some proof as to its veracity. Of course, for the price of a pint, such rousing stories were easily come by in any pub or tavern. Proving them was another matter entirely. And so it was, with a heartful of hope and my nose twitching madly, that I had set out from London to Trafalgar in search of my liberation.
As you may have suspected, I am a city dweller. I am not, by any stretch, what one might call an “outdoorsman.” No, I am hardly one of those stouthearted, broad-shouldered chaps one reads about in the penny novels, off felling trees in the Wild Yukon, scaling Alps or shouting “Sail, ho!” from a pitching masthead. Rather, I’m one who likes his creature comforts and his books.
I reminded myself of this simple fact tripping over a smallish boulder I hadn’t even noticed in my path. I suddenly pitched forward at a dangerous angle. Luckily, I managed to break the fall with my outstretched hands, and came away with only minor abrasions and another lashing of wounded pride.
Every passing minute on this blasted island, it seemed, was meant to test my resolve. The footing was treacherous. Needles of horizontal icy rain stung my face; nonetheless, I pressed on. I stumbled and fell again. I got up. I walked on.
You see? By my lights, a cozy armchair by the fireside is a far, far more suitable environment for adventuring than traipsing across the hostile plains of a frozen wasteland. Yet my trusty proboscis would not be denied, and so I pressed onward. The rain did ease a bit on toward evening, I must say. But, soon, the visibility dropped considerably when tendrils of fog nearly obscured the low-hang
ing sun. It was now merely a hazy yellow wafer sliding toward the sea.
Such dangerous terrain and weather as I encountered only served to fuel my misery and sap my confidence on that trek. Slipping and sliding across the island’s rocky headland, I grew ever more tired and bone cold. Late in the day, more serious doubts about this adventure inevitably crept round the edges of my mind: one truly nasty fall and my frozen carcass wouldn’t be found till next morning.
Still and all, I was determined to reach the old Greybeard Inn before nightfall, for I had arranged a meeting with the proprietor there, a Mr. Martyn Hornby, at the hour of eight o’clock.
At quarter past the hour of seven, I was still on my feet, my face a mask of ice. Uncertain of my next turning, I dug my stiff fingers inside a pocket for my map, but it was soggy and ruined and came away in pieces. My course being westerly, with only the setting sun as my guide, I still believed I might arrive before darkness fell. Time would certainly tell.
The godforsaken place to which I had recently journeyed by sail is a tiny link in an archipelago located off the coast of France. This particular island, by far the smallest of the lot, took its name from the thick, pea-soupy fogs that persistently haunted the place.
It was aptly named Greybeard Island.
The place reminded me a bit of the Skelligs, if you know those two forbidding spires. I once chased down the rare Skellig tern there, the bird flitting about those two rock cathedrals set in the royal-blue Atlantic off the southwest shores of Ireland. The Skelligs are remote places, potent in their discomfort. One visit is enough for most, and more than enough for your faithful armchair correspondent.
But I kept putting one boot in front of another that frigid and gloomy evening for one reason. I fervently believed Mr. Hornby could alter the pitiful circumstances of my life.
Martyn Hornby, I had recently learned from his lovely daughter, Cecily, was one of a very small number of Royal Navy veterans of the Napoleonic Wars still alive. He was, as far as I could determine, the sole living survivor of the crew of the HMS Merlin.
This small forty-eight-gun English man-o’-war had fought a courageous and—I’d come to believe—pivotal naval battle against a massive French seventy-four-gun frigate back in ’05. When I say pivotal, I do not speak lightly. I mean I believed that the Merlin’s victory had changed the course of history.
And no one, to my knowledge, had ever heard tell of it!
Miss Cecily Hornby, a most charming woman in my eyes, had waxed eloquent in her discourse regarding this sea battle. Here, briefly, is what I know of the matter.
Seventy-five years ago now, back in the summer of 1805, a huge French frigate, Mystere, was lurking off this very coast. The reasons for the enemy’s presence here at Greybeard Island were unknown. I did know she sailed under the command of the infamous Captain William Blood, an Englishman and a traitor of the first order.
Old Bill was an infamous rogue who had betrayed Admiral Lord Nelson, not for political reasons, mind you, but for a very large sum of capital offered by the French. Captain Blood’s formidable services were now at the disposal of Napoleon and his Imperial French Navy.
William Blood was Admiral Lord Nelson’s nemesis in those years. And it was only the purest of luck that put that villain at last in British gun sights.
England’s very fate was in HMS Merlin’s hands that day. Sometime in early July, the heavily armed Mystere engaged in a vicious set-to with the much smaller British ship. As I understood the thing, had not an obscure English captain named McIver and a mysterious passenger aboard Merlin known only as Lord Hawke eked out a victory that fine summer’s day, we might all be speaking French.
Surely, I thought, this dramatic encounter, long lost in the swirling mists of history, was the prizewinning tale. For now, I could only dream it were true and hope to prove it.
Subsequent to Cecily’s revelations, I commenced a feverish research at the Royal Navy College down at Greenwich. And, finding no record of the engagement, I had determined that, should Martyn Hornby’s tale prove credible, I, Pendleton Tolliver, lowly chronicler of church bazaars, tea parties and missing felines, might soon be a wealthy fellow. And, one rewriting the history books in the bargain.
My mind was understandably excited.
Distracted by such thoughts, I slipped then, and nearly lost my footing on a sharply angled escarpment, at the bottom lip of which I spied a cliff, one that dropped some four hundred feet to the sea. Well, I clung to a vertical outcropping of glistening rock and paused, trembling on the edge of the precipice. Once my heart slowed to a reasonable hammering, I pressed on.
Darkness was fully upon me now, and I despaired of not bringing some kind of torch to light my way.
Historians, I was rapidly learning, need an adventurous streak. Tracking down and conversing with far-flung witnesses to history is neither for the faint of heart nor weak of limb. The would-be chronicler of forgotten events must be possessed of a degree of zealotry seldom found outside the pulpit or the sacristy. These, then, were my musings as a sudden thunderclap boomed behind me and lightning strokes danced on the far horizon.
Sodden, hungry, but still determined, I reached a fork in the road. In the gloom, I could make out no stone marker to guide me. To the left, a middling road of crushed stone led off through rain-swept fields to where the halo of a lighthouse shone in the far distance. To my right was a narrow, hard-surfaced pathway that angled sharply down. Below me, I heard the rush of unseen waves bursting themselves repeatedly upon jagged rocks.
The kindly ferryman at the village docks had told how the inn stood on a lower western bluff by the sea. So I chose the harder road descending narrowly along the towering cliff. There was little width to be had on this path, and in some spots it was little more than a shaley rock-cut ledge about ten inches or a foot wide.
The sheer face of rock to my right seemed to bulge, animated, as if it wished to push my body out into space. A trick of mind? Frightened well enough by heights, I inched along, trying to ignore the rising bile of panic and the agitated sea far below my feet. Not once, but now twice, I considered turning back, but quickly realized I had passed the point of no return.
Soon, but not soon enough I’ll warrant, I came to a spot where could be seen a jutting arm of rock protruding into the black ocean. At the far end, a warm glow of yellow lights in the rainy gloom. The beckoning two-story house was aglow with promised warmth and food, and my steps quickened.
Realizing what a pitiful sight I would present, I paused outside beneath the pitched eave of the inn and tried to compose myself. I’d worn my one good woolen suit, threadbare but serviceable—at least when dry. My poor shoes, heretofore worn only on Sundays, were now ruined. Ah, well, I thought, pulling myself erect and wringing out my hat, I would just put the best face possible on things and hope for a miracle.
I pushed inside the inn’s heavy wooden door and found the old Jack-Tar himself, clay-piped and pigtailed, sitting in silence by the fire. I pulled up a chair and introduced myself. Had I the good fortune of speaking to Mr. Martyn Hornby? I inquired with a smile.
“Aye, I’m Hornby,” he said, removing his pipe. After a long silence in which clouds of geniality seemed to float above the man’s head, he spoke.
“Weather slowed you up, I reckon,” he asked, looking me up and down.
I admitted as much, apologizing for my tardiness, and, when the barman looked in, I ordered a pint of ale for him and a half of bitter for myself. I shed my oilskins and put my two numb feet up on the hearth. The fire felt welcome and the proprietor seemed a fellow who might warm to a story if well supplied with grog or ale.
He was a sturdy, handsome figure who looked to be in his late eighties. He wore faded breeches and a ragged woolen fisherman’s sweater, much mended. He had a full head of snow-white hair, and his fine, leathered features were worn by years of wind and water. But, in the firelight, his crinkly blue eyes still held a sparkling clarity of youth, and I was glad of my perseverance on t
hat final narrow ledge.
“Ye’ve come a long way, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Indeed, sir, I have.”
“My daughter’s letter mentioned something about the old Merlin. And some newspaper contest you hope to win, I believe?”
I nodded. “I’ve a keen interest in your encounter with the French off this island, Mr. Hornby. I’d appreciate your recollections on that subject, if you’d be so kind. It might help my chances greatly, sir.”
“Cecily said you saved her cat.”
“I penned a short, albeit sympathetic, piece on the plight of foundling cats for my newspaper. Your devoted Cecily, a cat lover of the first magnitude, features prominently in my feline article and the story occasioned much favorable comment. We’ve since met a few times, she and I, and found each other’s company most congenial. Just last month we learned of the contest and she shared the story of the Merlin. Fascinating stuff, sir. I decided I’d best hear the tale for myself.”
“Aye,” Hornby said, and then he fell silent. “I’m the last one…so I suppose I should tell it, if it’s to be told at all. If my memory’s up to it, of course.” He gave a hearty shout for his barman in the next room.
The drinks soon arrived, along with a steaming meat pie for me, and we both sipped, staring into the merry blaze, each alone with his thoughts. Mine, at the moment, were solely of my poor tingling feet, more painful in the thawing than the freezing.
Suddenly, without warning, the man began to speak, eyeing me in a curious manner.
“How much do ye know, then, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Scarcely enough to suit me, sir.”
“Well. You’ve come to the right place then. I seen it all, Mr. Tolliver. I was one of Captain McIver’s powder monkeys, y’see, back in those glorious days, and—”
“Powder monkeys?” I said, unfamiliar with the term.
“Boys who would ferry black powder from the hold up to the gun crews when things got spicy. Listen. I’ll tell you how it all started, Mr. Tolliver, if you want to start there at the beginning…”