FIFTY-FIVE

RASCAL TACKED EASTWARD, THEN MADE LONG BOARDS SOUTH FOR MOST of the day, making what distance she could against building wind and seas. Barclay estimated they would be off Tipasa past midnight the next day, whereupon Beauty planned to heave-to until it was time to leave in order to be off the mole at dawn. On time per Fallon’s note, but for what was unclear.

The volunteers were all sitting on deck cleaning their muskets and sleeping after the cook had served up a sailor’s feast of stewed pork with vegetables and, to top it off, duff pudding. The pudding had been Barclay’s idea, for he was a particular pudding aficionado.

As evening approached Beauty checked the course and speed, noted the increase in wind, and retreated to her cabin for a late dinner of her own and to read, for perhaps the hundredth time, Fallon’s message. She had not looked at it since leaving Gibraltar, preferring to put it out of her mind and concentrate on things at hand so as to see it again later with fresh eyes. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat at her desk, the message open before her. As she touched the sea dog around her neck her eyes fell on the oft-read passage:

Upon receipt of this message you will take aboard any additional crew that you need in Gibraltar and prepare to be off the mole at the harbor in 10 days’ time. That’s where a pilot boat will meet you.

She had certainly taken aboard all that she needed, at least to her own satisfaction, by getting the colonel’s volunteers.

From what she could see, all that was left was to meet the pilot ship and be guided into the harbor. How the hell was that going to rescue anybody? What was supposed to happen after that?

And then, as she read the passage again, her hand froze as she raised the wine glass to her lips.

The last sentence didn’t say anything about being guided into the harbor.

Morning found Fallon and Aja working side by side on the mole, Fallon straining to see Wilhelm Visser laboring on the docks across the harbor. But he was not to be seen in the glare of the sun or the shadows cast by the big ships. For the past several days Visser had been unloading only grain, so there had been nothing to smuggle back to the pen. Fallon prayed that he would bring back something useful that night that they could build a plan around. If not, they would have to try to overpower the guards at dinner, a risky move because one guard stayed back, outside the pen, while the other guard delivered the dinner inside. Visser said the outside guard always held a cocked musket.

Dinner was the only time the pen was unlocked in the evening; the guard who came around midnight just looked inside through the stockade walls to see that all was well.

The wind began to strengthen in the afternoon and the flags and bunting on the ships at anchor stood out stiffly. It was a furnace of a wind, blown across hundreds or thousands of miles of desert, full of dirt and grit. It became untenable to work with bare faces and eyes closed against wind. The guards came for them early and they were taken back to the pens.

It was not much better there. The wind came hot and dry through the stockade walls, and Fallon, Aja, and Little Eddy all huddled with their heads down and their eyes closed to keep the debris at bay. But they could hear the lock snap open and squinted to see Wilhelm Visser being shown into the pen by his guards.

He entered the pen with his head down. Fallon looked closely at him, hoping for a hint of success, but the old man’s bearing didn’t change even after the guards had walked away.

“I have brought very little from the docks,” Visser said dejectedly. “Today there was much work to do and the guards were unusually vigilant with us. We were unloading some gifts to the dey from an Italian merchant.”

He reached under his tunic and brought out a cloth sack. From within it he withdrew a wooden ladle used to serve out shipboard gruel, and a silver urn with curved handles.

“It was all I could scrounge from the holds of the ship we were unloading,” Visser said softly. “It isn’t much to work with, I know.”

Fallon looked at what Visser had smuggled from the ship and his heart sank. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it was more than this. Whatever disappointment he felt, however, was doubled on Visser’s face, and he forced himself to smile.

“It’s perfect,” he lied, and then in spite of himself he laughed out loud.

The little group looked down at the purloined objects, the dust swirling around them, and they all laughed, laughed like madmen in a mad world. Then Aja stopped laughing and picked up the wooden ladle. He looked at it a moment, and then broke it over his knee. The wooden handle snapped off with a sharp, splintered tip.

“I have an idea, captain sir,” he said. And Fallon and everyone else leaned in to hear it above the shrieking wind.

Just after midnight the guard made his rounds of the pens, holding a lantern aloft, checking the locks and looking in at the sleeping bodies. Most of the straw pallets had blown apart and the prisoners were asleep on the dirt floor. The guard counted them as best he could in the shafts of light thrown through the stockade walls before going on to the next pen.

At Fallon’s pen the guard paused, for near the middle of the floor, just a few yards inside the gate, the lantern’s light seemed to glint off something silver. Something like a vase or urn. Yes, an urn, and one of the prisoners seemed to be praying over it, or chanting something unintelligible. The other prisoners seemed to be asleep along the sides of the pen. This was all very strange to the guard, and he debated with himself over what to do. How could the urn have come here? he wondered. If it was silver it was worth more than a thousand days of working!

Now Aja, who had been chanting, lifted the urn into the air, into a shaft of light from the lantern, seemingly ignoring the guard. He said a few more words, put it back on the floor and backed away to the rear of the pen.

The guard hesitated, but greed was a powerful emotion. He decided it would do no harm to open the gate to see better. The lock snapped open and he stepped inside, the lantern held high in one hand, his scimitar in the other.

The urn glowed brightly in his lantern’s light.

The guard stood still a moment and looked around the pen, but no one moved. One of the men seemed to be snoring, in fact. Three more steps and he could reach the urn.

He took the first step before Little Eddy dropped out of the sky onto his back and he stumbled to the ground. Immediately, Fallon rose and leapt on top of the guard and drove the ladle’s splintered handle into his neck.

It was over so quickly that Fallon and Aja were momentarily speechless. It was Wilhelm Visser who pounded on their backs and brought them around to reality. Little Eddy whooped before they quieted him. Slowly they dragged the guard to the rear of the pen and wrapped him with a blanket. Then, with a last look around, they locked the gate behind them.

Once outside the holding pen area they bent low and crept along the quay to where the pilot boat was tied. The slaves were all ashore, presumably exhausted from rowing back and forth all day at the mouth of the harbor, and the crew would not return with them until just before dawn. The full force of the wind could be better felt on the quay and Fallon wondered briefly if the pilot boat would even go out past the mole in those conditions. Indeed, it felt like a gale had blown up since yesterday, but pilot boats went out no matter what the weather around the world, he decided. He knew Beauty would be on time and the dey would expect Rascal to be shown into the harbor. That put his mind to rest and he led the little group aboard.

It was so dark he had trouble locating the hatches that opened to the holds. The boat was shallow and the holds were not deep, but they were empty. There were two hatches on the centerline of the boat, fore and aft, and he motioned to Aja to open the forward one.

“Be ready to come up quickly when you hear me yell,” he said as quietly as he could and still be heard above the shriek of wind. “Put Little Eddy in first and you go after.”

Next he asked Visser to climb into the aft hatch and Fallon climbed in behind him. Both hatches were closed and the four of them lay uncomfortably in the darkness on the floorboards to await dawn.

The boat jerked at her lines and pitched like a tethered wild thing yearning to be free. The air in the hold was stuffy and hot and Fallon thought at least one of them might be sick; he only hoped it wasn’t him.

By his estimate there was still several hours before dawn.

Barclay brought Rascal a mile from the mole well before daylight in the early morning, and Beauty ordered the ship to heave-to for an hour. Cully had loaded both batteries with grapeshot and the hands were at stations armed with pistols, muskets, and cutlasses. The volunteers were glad the ship had settled down as many had been retching in the scuppers for some time. They held their rifles and looked into the blackness.

And still the wind continued to rise, black and malevolent, picking a fight. Beauty had ordered the topsails furled and then the topmasts struck altogether. Barclay had been right, there was a dirty day ahead. The dust was beginning to coat the decks with fine grit, and the volunteers put their hands over the ends of their rifle barrels to keep the sand out.

Barclay approached the binnacle and handed Beauty her favorite weapon, a boarding pike.

“You might need this,” he said. “I expect you will.”

“Thanks, Barclay,” she said. “As Fallon would say if he were here, we’re about to see what we see.”

Barclay nodded, though she could only see his white head moving up and down.

“I think we’re getting a sirocco,” he said in a raised voice. “It’s a sand-storm they get in this sea. Comes off the Sahara. I wonder what kind of visibility we’ll have at dawn. Might not be much.”

Beauty gave an unseen nod of her own. She’d heard of siroccos; every sailor had. But few sailors had ever experienced one. The tales she’d heard said the winds could reach gale or even hurricane force. As much as her face was stinging from the sand now, she wondered what in God’s name would that feel like?

The alarm was raised just before dawn when the guards came to get the slaves from the holding pens for the day’s labors. The gate to Fallon’s cell was locked but clearly no one was there. Well, excepting the dead guard with the splinter in his neck. How could that be?

The word went up and down the narrow streets and a general search of the town was begun immediately. Zabana was in his home near the palace in the upper city and was awakened by the trumpeting janissaries and hurriedly dressed. What was this? Prisoners had escaped!

He knew immediately who it was.

As he stepped outside, the wind almost blew his door off its hinges. The sirocco was building to its full force and it seemed it had brought all the sands of the Sahara with it. No one was outside except the janissaries, and each one of them had his face wrapped more or less completely.

At first, Zabana assumed the British captain would try to escape the city the same way he had entered it, through the gate to the west. But as he turned to rush towards the gate a new thought struck him. The sea. Fallon was a sea captain, after all. He would try for a boat.

Zabana reversed direction and began running to the harbor, calling to the janissaries he passed to follow him.

The pilot boat lurched more than usual, and Fallon could hear the crew come aboard. They were yelling above the wind but their words were unintelligible. Then more feet on the deck with a softer step, barefooted slaves no doubt. The hatches groaned and creaked over Fallon’s head as the men on deck moved around, and he could hear chains being handled. He figured the slaves were being chained to their oars. Poor sods, he thought. If they were naked as usual he could only imagine the sting of the sand on their bare bodies.

Fallon found himself praying that the crew didn’t have anything to stow below decks. He hadn’t thought of that. There was more yelling, and probably cursing in Arabic if he could have understood it. The prospect of taking a shallow draft boat even a hundred yards off the dock in that wind and sea must be daunting, thought Fallon. But they had probably seen it all and sailed it all before.

Now a different motion, steadier, and Fallon supposed the slaves were rowing. The pilot boat was still swooping but he could feel the thrust through the water with each pull of the oars. He had no experience with lateen sails but he wondered if a reef or two could be taken, and how, and whether they could be taken before the sail was raised. He was working out the complexity of the maneuver to keep himself occupied in the closed black world of the hold. He could hear Visser breathing behind him, labored and wheezy. We’ll only get this one chance, he’d said.

It seemed like a long time, perhaps an hour, before the motion of the boat changed and Fallon suspected they’d been able to get some sail up. Now he could feel the heel of the boat as it rolled him back onto Visser. It was impossible to tell which direction they were sailing, but as the wind was out of the southeast and they were heeling to starboard he figured they were heading west.

Was Beauty out there somewhere?

He tried to imagine Rascal sailing close-hauled towards them. The ship would be on starboard, the men at their stations, the sails deeply reefed. In his mind he could see Barclay at the binnacle shielding his eyes against the blowing dust, with Beauty beside him, her peg planted securely in a ring bolt to hold her steady.

And she would be steady.

Rascal had been underway for half an hour when Beauty saw the pilot boat sailing towards them, dipping and plunging in the sea, her streamers blowing stiffly off the tip of the raked mast and long boom upon which the lateen sail was gathered in a deep reef. She’d ordered the soldiers to sit or lay down hours ago as a precaution, for there was no way of knowing how this was going to play out.

“Barclay,” she yelled above the sandblast of wind, “let’s heave-to again, please. Then we’ll see what the next move is.”

The schooner turned into the wind as if to tack and then intentionally stalled, the foresail backwinded and the mainsail brought to center-line, where the motion died considerably and the ship went neither here nor there.

The pilot boat was now about a half mile away and still swooping over the seas like a gull. The sky behind her was brown, a rusted wall of air and sand that abraded everything it touched. Beauty squinted into the wind; it looked to her like there were four crewmen as well as a number of slaves at the oars in the small boat. At two hundred yards one of the crewmen, no doubt the captain of the pilot boat, began waving his arms for the schooner to follow.

Damned if I will, thought Beauty.

At a hundred yards the captain was still waving, this time more insistently, and yelling. Beauty looked at Cully standing by the larboard battery, the slow match sizzling in a bucket next to each cannon. The soldiers were still hidden on the deck as ordered. Now the captain of the pilot boat steered directly towards Rascal, and Beauty saw he would have to veer soon or he would run aboard the schooner.

At that moment there was confusion on board the pilot boat as it spun around on its axis and nearly capsized in a breaking sea. Beauty could see ragged men fighting and two of the crew were thrown overboard. Then three. A scuffle near the stern and now four! The little boat was nearly swamped and after the sail was taken in completely the remaining men began bailing furiously—and the rowers began rowing for Rascal.

The air was so thick with dust that it was nearly impossible for Beauty to look into the wind, but standing at the tiller was someone who looked an awful lot like Nicholas Fallon.

You fucker! Beauty said under her breath. You did it!