The Cruise of the Albatros Page 8

  Kendall noticed how the men’s off-white working uniforms, so dull in direct sunlight, seemed to glow in the shade of the trees, and against the mottled dark-green backdrop of the forest. He made a mental note to tell Landry to have the men find a way to dye their clothing a dull green or brown, to blend into their surroundings better when ashore.

  Then Zafy stopped dead abruptly, and held up his right hand. Kendall and Lyons immediately copied the gesture, and the file of seamen also stopped, although not without, accordion-like, closing the intervals between them. Kendall started to say something and Zafy hissed insistently: as clear a demand for silence as if they shared a language.

  A long, tense period ensued. Kendall supposed it was only a matter of minutes, but it seemed longer.

  A rustling of undergrowth was heard further up the trail; then footsteps, and voices as well, speaking in a guttural language Kendall didn’t understand, except that it didn't sound like a Malagasy dialect.

  Then, with shocking suddenness, several things happened all at once: a bearded man in a long, loose garment and wearing a head wrapping of fabric, with a long gun on his shoulder, appeared around a bend in the trail ahead. Zafy vanished into the undergrowth – “vanished” wasn’t hyperbole: one instant he was there and the next he wasn’t, like the girl in a magic show Kendall had once seen, except without the puff of colored smoke.

  The bearded man froze in surprise momentarily, as did everyone else, then began to fumble frantically at his weapon. Lyons, rifle at the ready, instantly shot him through the body.

  “Down! Everybody down!” yelled Kendall as loud as he could, and dropped flat onto the ground.

  The gunshot was shockingly loud in the forest, causing a great cacophony of birds shrieking in alarm, and the rustle of hundreds of wings as they took flight. Firing burst out, the sharp cracks of the Kerguelenian rifles and the duller bangs of the pirate weapons. Rounds tore through the brush overhead.

  “Cease fire, you stommerike! Cretins! Fire only when you can see a target!” Landry shouted from the end of the column. Kerg firing ceased, but the pirates continued to let off rounds apparently at random.

  “Take cover in the brush! Odds left, evens right!” The seamen-gunners wormed their way on their bellies off the path and into the dense undergrowth on either side.

  So far, only LPO Landry had issued any orders. Kendall felt the need to do something, if only to demonstrate to the squad that he was still there and in command.

  “Pass the word – LPO Landry, come forward. But carefully! Staying low!” he told the man behind him.

  Kendall now heard shouts in what he assumed was Arabic and the wild firing from the pirates also died down. Apparently someone was taking charge on the other side, as well. But with mixed results: occasional shots still came from the pirates, high and wide. In the relative silence, they could hear the groans of the dying pirate Lyons had shot, who had fallen back into the undergrowth next to the trail.

  Landry arrived alongside Kendall, crawling on his belly, after what seemed like an interminable interval, but was probably only a few minutes.

  “We have any casualties?” Kendall asked.

  “No, sir – none. I checked on each man as I crawled up the trail.”

  Kendall thought that was incredibly good luck, given the volume of pirate fire that had burst out on first contact. But now he wondered what to do next.

  When in doubt, attack. He remembered reading that in an old book. But could his men mount an organized attack through this thick brush? They were brave enough, but did they have the skill?

  “LPO Landry, I’m considering spreading the men into a line at right angles to the trail, then rushing the pirates. Can they do that?”

  “Sir, they’ll try to do anything you ask of them, but I’m afraid they’ll get disoriented in this dense bush. Any man who becomes separated is likely to get lost—you can’t see anybody who is even a couple of fathoms away. And if we bunch up we’ll just make better targets.”

  Kendall saw the truth of that, but he had no alternatives to offer. Providentially, the pirates saved him from having to admit to his noncom that he was out of ideas.

  A burst of firing came from the direction of the enemy, with loud shouts of “Allahu Akbar!”, and a great rustling in the brush as of many men forcing their way through the undergrowth.

  A few shots rang out in reply, from the Kerguelenian side, and Landry cursed violently. “Shoot only at what you can see, aartsdome!”

  A wild-eyed, shouting pirate swinging a short, curved sword rushed around the curve in the trail ahead, and Landry and Lyons fired simultaneously, hitting him in the head and the chest. He dropped, killed instantly.

  Firing – more deliberate this time – begin to grow in volume back down the trail, as the seamen found targets. Landry said, “By your leave, sir,” and crawled back toward the rear of the column. The seaman-gunner next behind – an ordinary named Austin – moved up to take Landry’s place near Kendall. He was comforted by the fact that he was flanked by two armed men; why, why par tout les saints had he failed to provide himself with a firearm? If only a pistol? If God allowed him to survive this, he would certainly rectify that mistake.

  The shooting gradually died away, and after a few minutes Landry wormed his way forward back to Kendall. He was now carrying two rifles and an extra ammo pouch.

  “We beat off that attack, Lieutenant. Lots of dead pirates – and wounded, too. You can hear ‘em moaning, off in the bush.”

  “We have any casualties?”

  “Just one – Jacob, AB. A cut on his right hand by a raghead swinging a sword. His mate killed the raghead. Martin’s seeing to Jacob now, and says he’ll be fine – but he can’t shoot no more. So I brought you his rifle, seeing as how you’re not heeled, sir.”

  “Bless you, Landry – you read my mind! I was just thinking how really, really shitty it feels to be shot at and not be able to shoot back.”

  “I could not agree with you more, Lieutenant!” interjected Andri, his first words since the attack had sent him burrowing into the undergrowth. All three men laughed in an explosive release of tension.

  “Happy to be of service, sir,” Landry chuckled.

  “By the way – what’s this ‘raghead’ business?” Kendall asked curiously.

  Landry shrugged. “Just what the boys are callin’ ‘em now – on account of they have cloth wrapped around their heads, you know, sir?”

  “I see. How many pirate casualties – could you estimate?”

  “A bunch, sir, but that’s as close as I can get to a number. If you listen to the lads, each one of ‘em kilt at least a hundred, of course. Can’t see the bodies in the bush. We can hear moans from the wounded, though.”

  “Well, the casualty exchange rate favors our side so far, but we have no idea how many they started with, or how many are left. Question is, what the hell do we do now?”

  “And what will the ragheads do now?”

  They pondered this for a minute. Kendall’s mind raced – he needed to make a decision, quickly – but it needed to be the right decision.

  “If I was the pirate commander,” he mused aloud, “Depending on how many fighters I had left, I’d try to filter men wide around us through the bush, and surround us.”

  “We’d hear ‘em doin’ that, wouldn’t we, sir? They don’t seem able to move any quieter in this jungle than we can.”

  “Not if they distracted us somehow while they did it.”

  The two men stared at each another, and a thought occurred to both at the same time. Landry gave voice to it first.

  “Maybe that’s what that last attack was about!”

  “We’ve got to haul ass out of here, Landry. Let’s get back to the clearing where the pirate camp was – it’s more open. We lose all our advantage of more accurate long-range shooting in this dense brush. We can fort up there...”

  “And send up a red rocket, sir?”

  “My thought exactly, LPO! Make it happen.
”

  Landry passed the word down the column to prepare to fall back by the numbers, the even numbers dashing to the rear for 15 meters or so and then hitting the deck, while the odd numbers covered them. Then repeat on command, alternately, in a sort of leap-frog evolution, until they were back at the campsite. They waited until the instruction was passed back up the line, word for word, to be sure that it was accurately received, then Landry shouted “Now!”

  Kendall was an even, and Mr. Andri didn’t count, being a passenger, as it were, so Kendall grabbed Andri’s arm and tugged him in a mad dash rearward for what he thought was the right distance, then they both took cover in the brush again. Kendall checked to be sure his rifle was loaded. It wasn’t, so good thing I checked, he thought. He loaded quickly and trained it down the trail. He was now out of sight of Landry and Lyons – the path was so narrow and overhung with growth that the sight lines were short even on a straight segment. He heard a few shots from ahead, and could distinguish the sound of the Kerguelenian rifle from the duller bang of the pirate weapon, which apparently was a smooth-bore of some kind. Then silence for a long moment.

  “Now!” again came Landry’s shout, and he and Lyons appeared, pounding down the trail past Kendall and Andri. Kendall pushed Andri, and yelled in his ear, “Go with LPO Landry!”

  He brought the rifle to his shoulder and waited tensely for a target. He saw a movement out of the corner of his left eye and quickly tracked and fired. He couldn’t tell if he hit the target, or even if there was a target. He reloaded, trying to be both quick and deliberate in his motions – he had fumbled and dropped the first round he tried to load, and he wanted to be sure that didn’t happen again.

  Especially if there was a pirate bearing down on him at the same time.

  He sensed another movement in the undergrowth, and fired again, with the same result – or lack of visible result.

  He wondered if an officer ought to be acting as a rifleman, rather than devoting all his attention to leading. He then wondered if this was just his sense of self-preservation speaking.

  After a period that seemed like all day, but was in reality only time enough for him to fire two more rounds at movements in the undergrowth, he heard Landry’s shout of “Now!”, leaped to his feet, and ran down the path past Lyons for what he hoped was the right distance, and hit the deck again. By now, the front of his off-white working rig was a mottled brown and green from wallowing on the jungle floor – he had achieved a bit of the camouflage he had thought about earlier.

  They repeated this process until they were back in the clearing on the creek bank. The pirates had tried several times to make a coordinated rush on the head of the column just as Landry shouted the order – they caught on to the maneuver fairly quickly – but they were driven back, with multiple casualties, each time. The landing force suffered one more casualty, but this time a death, an AB named Dunn. It pained both Kendall and Landry deeply to order his body left on the trail, but trying to retrieve it would only have cost them more casualties.

  They did recover his rifle and ammo pouch, for Mr. Andri – now all the able-bodied members of the party were armed. Since Andri had never so much as held a rifle in his life, this did not add much to their effective firepower, but Landry gave him a one-minute lesson on how to load it, followed by an even briefer but much more emphatic lesson on firearms safety after Andri carelessly allowed the barrel of his (now loaded) rifle to point at his instructor. They could only hope that Mr. Andri, armed, would be a marginally greater danger to the enemy than to his shipmates.

  Once they reached the creek bank, at the point of the pirate camp site, the immediate problem was cover. The clearing gave them a clear field of fire, but at the same time offered little protection from sharpshooters hiding in the forest.

  “The creek bank!” Landry shouted, and Kendall saw the point of this immediately; with the tide out, the muddy slope of the bank formed a natural trench, a bend in the watercourse, upstream, offering a defense against enfilading fire. Landry ordered the thirteen unwounded survivors of the party to spread out along the bank and dig in, using their mess tins as shovels, to create firing positions. For now, against a frontal assault mounted across the clearing, they were well positioned to hold out unless attacked in overwhelming force – numbers Kendall did not think the pirates could muster.

  This advantage was only temporary. The rising tide would either drive them off the creek bank or force them to fight lying in water up to their chests. Also, it would almost certainly occur to the pirates that the creek must be fordable somewhere upstream, above tidewater, and the landing force would be very vulnerable to fire from the dense growth that came right down to the water on the right bank of the stream. But before either of these things could happen, Kendall would have the support of the motor sloop, firing deadly canister shot into any source of pirate fire, and breaking up any enemy rush across the clearing before it could gain momentum.

  “Let’s get a red rocket up, LPO Landry,” said Kendall. “Better yet, two red rockets.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Landry replied, and shouted for the seamen carrying the pyrotechnics.

  Kendall then took a careful look around, a three-hundred-sixty degree survey to familiarize himself with the battle space. What he saw when he looked seaward jolted him. He stared incredulously for a moment.

  “Never mind the rockets, LPO,” he then said dully.

  Out to sea, a red rocket was clearly visible, ascending, flaring brightly in spite of the tropical sunlight.

  Albatros was recalling the motor sloop.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sam paced along the windward rail of the schooner as she cruised a couple of miles off the mouth of Pirate Creek. They had been doing this uneventfully for hours, long enough for Sam to begin expecting a green rocket from the shore party.

  There came a shout from the forward lookout: “Sail in sight – dead ahead.”

  Albatros was, at that point, on the northerly tack of her back-and-forth circuit off the creek mouth. Sam snatched his telescope from the midshipman of the watch, one of whose duties was to hold it in readiness whenever the Captain was on deck, and focused it ahead. He saw nothing at first, then a tiny blur of white on the northern horizon.

  The XO, who had been conferring with the Boatswain amidships, strolled aft at the lookout’s cry.

  “Commend that lookout for his alertness, Bill,” Sam said. “I can barely make it out with the glass.”

  “Aye aye, sir. That would be Grange, a good man. I’ll pass it on as coming from you – he’ll like that.”

  Bill fetched his own glass, and they watched the approaching vessel as it gradually turned from a white blur, to a set of sails on a vessel hull-down, to a fully-revealed schooner, a two-master.

  Sam relaxed a little – but only a little – when the strange sail revealed herself as schooner-rigged.

  “Have the number one ensign hoisted to the foretop, Mister Schofield,” he said to the officer of the watch.

  “Aye, sir,” Schofield replied, and sent the Mid dashing to the foremast with the ensign bundled under his arm. Once there, he bent it to the newly-rigged flag halyard, sent it racing up the foretop, and broke it out. It streamed off to leeward, and would be clearly visible to the approaching schooner.

  It was the national flag of the Republic of Kerguelen, and this probably marked its first appearance on a ship at sea, even though it had been adopted by the first generation of Kerguelenians, centuries before, when the Republic was created and national flags were still, in living memory, a required symbol of sovereignty.

  Kerguelenian merchant vessels had never bothered with flying the national flag, since any vessel of modern rig encountered at sea must necessarily be Kerguelenian. But the pirates' use of captured Kerguelenian vessels prompted Sam to broadcast a requirement for Kerg ships in the Indian Ocean to show the flag when challenged.

  The flag was the ancient tricolor of France, but with the central white stripe somewhat wi
der than the red and the blue, and a stylized rattlesnake rendered in black, coiled as if to strike, centered on the white. Rattlesnakes were creatures as mythical to modern Kerguelenians as dragons or unicorns, but this serpent had apparently been a potent political symbol for a segment of the original settler population. The tricolor, of course, represented the French heritage of the island.

  Sam thought that Sails and his mates had done a creditable job of making their country’s national flag, since they had almost certainly never seen one other than the illustration in their Kerguelenian history text, at school. His only reservation was the rattlesnake – he thought it looked a little odd, its segments more like oblique angles than smooth curves – but it would do.

  He than trained his telescope on the approaching schooner, waiting for it to reply to the challenge implied by Albatros’s hoisting of the ensign by raising its own flag.

  After some delay, a flag broke out at the strange schooner’s foretop. It was a fair rendering of the Kerguelenian flag, the rattlesnake perhaps even cruder than Albatros’s, but acceptable. After all, vessels receiving Sam’s broadcast had had to improvise with whatever fabric they had on board, unless they happened to be in port.

  So this vessel appeared to be an innocent Kerg trader, homeward-bound. She was too close to the Madagascar shore, well to the right of the direct course to Kerguelen, which would have taken her closer to Reunion than Madagascar, but her master’s insecurity about his navigation could explain that; perhaps he wanted to hug the coast until he could take a firm departure fix with a tangent off Cape Saint Marie – Madagascar’s southernmost point – crossed with a sun line. Still, it was unusual.

  Something about the schooner struck Sam as familiar. It wouldn’t be surprising if he had seen her before, of course, in port back on the Rock, or at one of the Indian Ocean settlements.