“Fulton, explain to them who I am!”
“I already have. He’s a scoundrel American who threw in with the Barbary rogues like another Benedict Arnold. I don’t care how badly Omar tortured you, Ethan—how could you go back on your pledge to keep the mirror secret? Are you coward, or traitor?”
“Likely both,” Sterett said, sizing me up.
“Dammit, man, who do you think got you sprung free from that Tripoli hellhole?”
“By a devil’s bargain! Didn’t you just aid yonder pirates in stealing an infernal machine from Syracuse, when we expressly promised each other not to?”
“I did it to save your life!”
“Death before dishonor, Ethan. That was our pledge. It’s your bad luck I volunteered to help these brave Americans intercept your mission, and my bad luck we were a few hours late.” He turned to Sterett. “Hanging may be too good for him. He has very few principles at all.”
“Then the devil will finish the job for us.”
I struggled against the sailors holding me. “I’m stuffed full of principle! I just fall in with the wrong kind of women! And spend a little too much time looking for treasure, since I don’t have what you’d call a proper career. I drink, I gamble, I scheme, but I do know something of electricity and firearms. And I mean well.” It seemed a feeble defense even to me.
“Do you deny you’re a turncoat to the United States of America and every man on this ship?” Sterett had his sword out and looked like a farmer who has cornered vermin in a larder. Excitable people should never be armed.
“On the contrary, I’m trying to be a hero!”
“By throwing in with pirates?” cried Fulton. The rope cinched against my throat.
“By trying to save my son!”
That stopped them.
“My boy, who I didn’t even know I had until a few days ago, is still aboard that pirate ship and in the clutches of the weirdest bunch of cultists, fanatics, magicians, mesmerists, and megalomaniacs this side of the House of Representatives. His mother is captive in Yussef’s harem, and if I hadn’t played along they’d both be sold into the worst kind of slavery. And you, Cuvier, and Smith would already be dead! While you were running for the reef, I just killed one of the more annoying of the bunch, that Osiris I met in Marguerite’s Palais Royal brothel. I gave Aurora Somerset a bloody nose, and was plotting how to sink their whole scheme when one of your cannon balls knocked me overboard. You and I and the fiery lieutenant here are the only ones who can fix things now, but only if you stop pulling on this damned noose!” It was getting hard to talk.
“You and us how?”
“By using your genius and my pluck, Robert, to slip back into the heart of Tripoli and destroy that mirror once and for all!” I nodded eagerly, as if going back to that den of slavers and extortionists was the brightest idea I’d ever had.
The crew was grumpy about having no one to hang, but a length I got Fulton and Sterett settled down enough to hear me out. By the time we kedged off the reef there was no chance of catching Aurora and Dragut anyway, and the ambitious lieutenant was interested in any proposition to erase the ignominy of running aground, which is a mortal sin for any captain. The navy reasons that with so much ocean, it shouldn’t be that hard to avoid the shallow parts.
“How are you going to get into Tripoli?” Sterett asked skeptically. “Commodore Morris won’t risk our squadron in those reef-strewn waters for the exact reason we’ve seen tonight.”
“It’s time we harnessed the ingenuity of our new nineteenth century,” I said, my clothes stiff with salt as they dried. “I’ve been thinking about how to defeat this peril for a long time, but it’s really Robert here who offers the solution.” Actually, I’d only been thinking since they put the noose around my neck, but the prospect of execution does focus concentration.
“What solution?” Fulton asked.
I addressed Sterett. “My scientific colleague here has invented a vessel so revolutionary that it threatens to make all other ships obsolete,” I began.
“You said that’s not the way to sell the thing!”
I ignored Fulton. “It’s called a submarine, or ‘plunging boat.’ It sinks deliberately, like Bushnell’s Turtle during our American Revolution, and could deliver a crew of intrepid saboteurs directly into Tripoli harbor.”
“The Turtle failed to sink any British vessels,” Sterett pointed out.
“But Fulton has advanced the technology a full generation. Why, he told me he stayed underwater off Brest a full three hours!”
“This submarine really exists?”
“It’s called the Nautilus, and is so remarkable that it may someday end war entirely.”
Sterett looked skeptical, and Fulton bewildered that I had stolen his sales pitch.
“Or make wars more terrible than ever,” I added.
Suddenly, Fulton saw his opportunity. “Ethan, this is the way to prove myself to Napoleon!”
“Yes. I remember you told me the French want to break the Nautilus up, but you couldn’t bear to and sent the pieces to Toulon to test in the quieter Mediterranean. Here’s your chance, thanks to me.” I could still feel the abrasion on my throat where the rope had cut, but I don’t hold grudges except against true villains. “We pack the Nautilus down to Tripoli, sneak into the harbor beneath Yussef’s palace, and rescue Astiza and little Harry.” I nodded. “All we have to find is a set of adventurers willing to risk their lives in a metal sausage and cut their way through an army a thousand times their number.”
Sterett was looking at me with new respect.
“That, at least, is no problem at all,” Fulton said.
“You have some volunteers in mind?”
“Cuvier and Smith, of course. They’re reconditioning my plunging boat. They decided to wait in Toulon in hopes of hearing news of your hanging, before daring to face Napoleon again.”
“Ah. It’s good to be remembered.”
“And me, gentlemen,” Sterett said. “You’re not going to romp among the pirates without my ship in support. My bully lads will say the same.”
“We may have to have a lottery,” I predicted. “Just how many can we squeeze into this craft of yours, Robert?”
“Three, if we want room aboard to get your wife and son out. Of course some of us will most likely be cut to ribbons when we venture ashore, so we might want four or five to start. But then we need room for explosives, too.”
“Explosives?” I massaged my throat.
“To blow up the mirror and the navy of Tripoli. Maybe that damned dungeon, too.”
“Five against the janissaries and cutthroats of the bashaw of Tripoli!” Sterett said. “Perfect odds! By God, gentlemen, I am heartily tired of lurking at Malta with Commodore Morris, and positively thirsting for action. Gage, I’d heard you were quite the hero, but didn’t quite believe it until now.”
“I have a hard time believing it myself.” My plan had been to sneak quietly about, but Sterett and Fulton apparently wanted a noisier demonstration of American might. Well, a battle tomorrow was better than hanging today. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get my family out of the line of fire first.”
“It is fire that will save your family, Mr. Gage,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll so light up Tripoli with hell and pandemonium that you’ll be able to rescue half a harem if you want to.”
That didn’t sound bad at all. But no, I had Astiza, hang it, and no more business with harems except to get her out of one. By the devil, it’s complicated to be a father and suddenly responsible! Oddest thing in the world, really.
But not entirely bad to have someone to rescue.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I’m not sure what I expected of Fulton’s beloved Nautilus, but the copper coffin he unveiled in a Toulon warehouse did not inspire confidence. It looked like a patchwork of green plating, odd bits of dried seaweed, and conspicuous holes where the leakiest of the iron bolts had been removed for replacement. The contraption was twenty-one feet lo
ng, six wide, and in cross section was the shape of a “U” with a short keel. A propeller projected from the rear of the craft, and a folding mast with booms and odd, fanlike sails was lashed to the flat deck on top. A round turret three feet high, with thick glass windows, jutted from the top. Its roof was a hatch allowing entry. From inside the vessel came an unholy banging.
“I’ve no doubt your invention will sink as planned, Robert,” I said. “The question is whether it will rise back again, as prayed for.”
“It worked splendidly on the Channel coast. We might have torpedoed a British frigate or two, if they hadn’t slunk away.” He glanced at Smith. “Sorry, William.”
“No offense taken,” the Englishman replied cheerfully. “Our nations are at peace now, and here we are united against infamy and extortion. And the day a British ship waits around to be sunk by a contraption like this is the day we might as well start speaking French.”
Our quartet had been reunited when Sterett, not waiting for orders from his unaggressive commodore, rushed us to Toulon to pick up Fulton’s secret weapon. Cuvier and Smith began as suspicious of me as Fulton, but eventually I persuaded them that I’d been faced with an impossible choice. Now we were cautious allies again.
“It was destiny, perhaps, which left Fulton unsuccessful at Brest so he had the chance to prove himself at Tripoli,” Cuvier said optimistically. “And perhaps Bonaparte had the foresight to predict we four would make an effective fellowship?”
I thought it more likely Napoleon had been happy to get rid of four eccentrics on a mission with slim chance of success, but opportunity has a way of turning into inevitability. “Your vessel does look a little worse for wear,” I judged. “Are you sure it’s going to be ready?”
“I’ve got a clever little fellow working on it,” said Fulton. “Said he was something of an expert on all things nautical. He even mentioned that he knew you, Gage.”
“Me?” I knew no submarine mechanics and tend to stay away from people capable of honest work, lest they make me feel inferior. “He probably heard you say I’d gone over to the pirate side and figured he could claim anything he liked, since you’d never see me again. Let’s catch the look on his face when he pops up and spies me in the flesh!”
Cuvier stepped over and banged on the hull. “Foreman! Your old friend has shown up after all!”
The hammering stopped and there was a long silence. Then a shuffling inside, and finally a head with dark, wiry hair raised above the lip of the little tower like a mole.
“Donkey?” He inspected me critically. “They told me you’d turned pirate, or were dead.”
It was I who was thunderstruck, not this “mechanic.” In fact, I was so shocked that I took a step backward as if seeing a ghost. “Pierre?” First Astiza, then a son I hadn’t known I had, and now this?
“But why am I surprised?” the little Frenchman said. “Here I am readying a cylindrical death trap, a perfectly absurd excuse for a boat, and I have been asking myself, who would be crazy enough to set out in an anchor like this? And I thought, well, Americans, because I have met Americans on my journeys to the wilderness and not encountered a snuff of sense in any of them. And which American do I know who is the craziest of all beyond Fulton there, who is already the laughingstock of Paris? And of course such an imbecile would be my old companion Ethan Gage, who conjures calamity wherever he goes. Yes, a metal boat designed to sink? It sounds absolutely like something donkey would be involved in.”
“This is no mechanic,” I sputtered.
“More of one than you!”
“This is a French voyageur from Montreal’s North West Company! I last saw him in St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. He’s a canoe man! He doesn’t know any technology more complicated than birch bark and beaver tail!”
“And what do you know, besides thunderbolts you can’t control and sorcery you can’t perform? Plus the worst taste in women imaginable?”
So we held each other’s stare, and then began to grin, and finally at last we laughed, and he sprang from the submarine so that the two of us could lock arms in the kind of dance the North West Company’s Scots do over crossed claymore swords, chortling over our mutual resurrection. We’d survived, and were together!
This was a good omen.
Cuvier cleared his throat. “This confirms, then, that you have met before?”
“On the American frontier. Pierre was my companion when I searched for Norse artifacts and explored the West. He’s the only man I know impervious to bullets.”
“Well, one bullet.” A ball from Aurora Somerset’s gun had been stopped by an Egyptian Rite medallion that Pierre Radisson had stolen from her sadistic brother, Cecil. He’d seemed to have risen from the dead then, but later disappeared from our room in St. Louis. I’d assumed he’d gone back to the wilderness but here he was, thousands of miles from where I’d left him. “I may have used up my luck,” he said.
“But I’ve not used mine, given that I meet you again. What are you doing in Toulon? By Poseidon’s spear, this is sweet chance beyond anything I expected!”
“You made me curious about the world, donkey. It was too late in the season to catch the fur brigades, so I decided to paddle home to Montreal. Then there was a ship that needed a hand, even though depending on sail is a woman’s way. So I found myself in Europe. Peace gave me the chance to get to France, and by the time I learned where you’d gone, you’d already gone there. Ah, I thought, but donkey has a way of drawing attention! I decided that if I got to the Mediterranean coast I’d hear of you soon enough. And indeed, a Barbary ship deposits three ex-slaves in the middle of Toulon, cursing a mixed-up American. And I think to myself, ‘This sounds like the donkey.’ So I go to work for that sorcerer there”—he pointed to Cuvier—“and suspect you’ll be along, too, by and by. And here you are.”
“Why does he call you donkey?” Cuvier asked.
“Because Gage can’t properly paddle, although the great Pierre was beginning to teach him. You’re a donkey, too. All men who can’t paddle a North canoe are donkeys! And this craft! Mon dieu, only sorcerer donkeys would come up with an idea as lunatic as going underwater!”
“And hire a French voyageur to reassemble it,” I said. “If this boat wasn’t a sarcophagus before, it certainly is now.”
“No, I’ve been plugging the holes that the rust has left, and using brass and copper instead of silly iron. Even better would be birch wood, if we had proper trees. Yes, Pierre and his donkeys, out to revolutionize warfare. It makes perfect sense.”
Fulton was walking around his craft. “Actually, his work is not entirely awful. We can finish making it seaworthy on the deck of your Enterprise, Sterett.”
“We’re in a hurry then?” asked Pierre.
“I have a woman in danger,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Of course.”
“And a son, not yet three years old.”
“I told you to think about what you were doing.”
“And we’ve got to stop an ancient machine that could give Aurora Somerset power over all the world’s navies.”
“Aurora Somerset! That harridan is here, too? Is this another Grand Portage rendezvous?”
“She followed me, like you. I am oddly popular.”
“And how long do we have to rescue this new woman and son of yours from that witch?”
“Once we draw close, only before the sun rises, I suspect. For when it does, they can set the Enterprise on fire.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
By the time we repaired and loaded the Nautilus on the American schooner and approached Tripoli, it had been more than a month since Aurora had escaped Sterett in Sicily, taking little Harry with her. Time enough, in other words, for the mirror to have been erected and tested. Could something two thousand years old, possibly inspired by Atlantean designs thousands of years older yet, actually work? We didn’t want to be surprised by a beam sweeping out to sea.
Confirmation came a different way. As
we approached the African coast we spied a wisp of smoke in the distance and cautiously closed, realizing that some ship had been burning. What we saw was a small brig low in the water, her rigging gone and her masts blackened like trees from a forest fire. The smoke drifted from a charred hull.
“Fire can start from a hundred reasons,” Cuvier said uneasily.
“And be put out in a hundred ways,” Sterett said, “unless the entire ship ignites at once.”
We lowered a boat and rowed across, confirming what we suspected. There was an awful smell of ash, putrefaction, and roasted flesh emanating from the vessel, with burned bodies on the deck. The name, Blanca, suggested Spanish origin, although jack and staff had been incinerated. On the starboard side was a circular hole, three feet in diameter, where the fire had eaten entirely through the wooden hull and caught the inner decks and timbers. Nothing stirred, inside or out.
“So it’s true then,” Cuvier finally said.
“By Lucifer, the mirror cuts like a cannon ball,” Fulton added.
“Rather than test their infernal machine on a derelict they aimed it at an innocent merchantman, crew still aboard,” I guessed. “It must have gone up like a torch and then drifted out to sea. Look at the helmsman there, welded to the wheel. He died where he stood.”
“This is utterly barbaric,” Smith said. “There’s nothing more painful than to die by fire.”
The Barbary Pirates Page 24