The Invasion Year

quarter, Desmond, and that’ll take us somewhere near Fusee.”

“Aye, sor,” Liam Desmond replied with a firm mutter and a nod. Now they were getting away from their infernal device, he sounded in much calmer takings. By the faint whispers and brief flashes of his sailors’ teeth, the cutter’s crew seemed much relieved, too, some even uttering very soft laughter.

Jesus, what a shitten mess! Lewrie thought, letting out a sigh, relaxing himself, falling into an exhausted lassitude. That happened to him, now and then, at the conclusion of battle aboard ship, or the end of a person-to-person fight with his sword; the intensely keen concentration at either left him so spent of a sudden that he sometimes needed a good sit-down to regain his strength, and his wits. Lewrie shook himself back to full awareness, and groped round the sole of the cutter for his hat. It was soaked, of course, and trampled into ruin, but he clapped it back on his head.

And what was the time when the damned clock began to run? he suddenly thought; You bloody fool, ye didn’t note it! How’ll I know if the bastard blows up on time? Shit, shit, shit!

* * *

“Coffee, sir?” Lt. Johns’s cabin steward offered.

“Aye, more than welcome,” Lewrie replied, accepting a battered pewter mug of scalding-hot black coffee, waving off the further offer of goat’s milk or sugar. They had found Fusee by steering blind ’til espying the long, irregular skirt of foam breaking round the anchored bomb’s waterline. MacTavish and Midshipman Frederick had come along a few minutes later, and lastly, Lt. Merriman’s cutter had approached, coming alongside to starboard, having steered too wide and to seaward for a time.

“Cup for you, too, sir?” the steward offered Merriman.

“God, yes!” the cheerful Merriman (so aptly named) answered.

“Four minutes by my reckoning, for mine, McCloud!” the inventor, MacTavish, said to his artificer in a loud whisper.

“Pardon, sir, but, did you have any trouble with yours?” Lieutenant Merriman softly asked Lewrie. “Mine was a total bastard.”

“A complete shambles, aye,” Lewrie muttered back, “gettin’ it alongside with all those bloody bayonets, gettin’ the tompion out, and fumblin’ in the dark, then gettin’ the bung back in? We got spiked to the damned thing for a bit, too.”

“Aye, sir. I can’t see how the torpedoes can be managed in the dark. And, if we launch them in daylight, it will have to be done so close inshore that the French shore guns and gunboats shoot us all to flinders,” Lt. Merriman told him, shaking his head. “I don’t know…”

“Launchin’ ’em by the dozens,” Lewrie muttered back. “I can’t picture our sailors gettin’ it done right, night or day. They’re too damned complicated t’set and prime.”

“About time, gentlemen! It’s about time!” MacTavish enthused, drawing all participants, officers and sailors, to the bulwarks to peer shoreward. That was anti-climactic, though, for at least three more minutes passed before the first explosion.

There was a distant and dull Boom! as a torpedo at last went off, shooting a geyser of spray and foam into the air, and sounding no louder than the slam of an iron oven door. And much further out to sea than the tide should have taken it, according to MacTavish’s last-minute estimations. It had not gone much more than half a mile.

“Hmmm, I’d have thought…,” MacTavish fretted, then drew out a sheaf of papers from his coat and tried to decypher them in the dark.

Even more long minutes passed before the second torpedo burst, and they almost missed that one, for though this one had drifted in to roughly the proper distance to reach a trot of caiques, the geyser of spray, foam, and gunpowder smoke looked little taller than the splash of a 32-pound shot dapping along from its First Graze, and the sound of its expected titanic explosion was little more than a fumph!

“Not all the charge went off?” Lt. Johns said, crushed. “How could that be?”

“Someone was remiss as to snugly replacing the tompion, and the sea got in,” Mr. MacTavish accused.

Mine, most-like? Lewrie sheepishly thought, but would not allow that to stand.

“If seawater got to the pistol’s priming or powder charge, it wouldn’t have gone off at all, Mister MacTavish,” Lewrie told him. “I expect it was the main charge below that got soaked, somehow, and went off like a squib.”

“Th’ casks’re tighter’n a drum, an’ tested fair leaks, sair!” McCloud the artificer bristled back, twitching his jaws so hard that his scraggly beard rustled. “Paid ower weet tar an’ bound in tarred canvas. They canna leak!”

“Evidently that’un did, Mister McCloud,” Lewrie rejoined. “Or, being stored at sea for a week or so, the damp got to the gunpowder.”

“Two to go, though, gentlemen. All’s not lost, yet!” MacTavish insisted.

But the trial evidently was over, for after a full hour waiting for the other two to explode, long past the time when they had been set to go off, there were no more geysers or bangs.

“I don’t understand,” MacTavish said, bewildered. “According to my calculations…! I am certain that I prepared mine properly, if no one else managed to follow such simple instructions…!”

“Let’s get under way, Mister Johns,” Lewrie ordered, yawning. “I’m amazed the French haven’t found us, yet, and we must be clear of the coast by dawn.”

“Aye, sir,” a crest-fallen Lt. Johns agreed.

“There’s still two to go, I must point out to you, sir!” Mister MacTavish peevishly demanded. “There’s still darkness!”

“Ain’t in the cards, Mister MacTavish, not tonight it ain’t,” Lewrie told him. “I’m charged with keeping you two, your torpedoes, and anyone involved with ’em, out of French hands, and we’ve pressed our luck as far as I think it seemly t’go, tonight. We’re off.”

And I need some bloody sleep! Lewrie told himself.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The morning after their assault on the mouth of the Somme river, Reliant and Fusee were forced to return to Sheerness. Lt. Johns had made an inspection of the remaining torpedoes and found that their clockwork timer’s inner workings were so corroded by salt-air damp that they would not run; likewise for the fire-locks of the igniting pistols. A lack of mineral oil to protect them from rusting would have guaranteed a failure. In private, Lt. Johns had also confided to Lewrie that both the clocks and the pistols were of the cheapest manufacture, cast-offs or rejects of such low quality that they appeared to be the first failed efforts of new apprentices. “Trust Scots to pinch and bemoan a groat, sir, a penny bedamned,” Johns had muttered, most sadly disappointed.

MacTavish and McCloud, he’d also reported, had gone off on each other, each blaming the other for the failures, and the artificer sent off in a huff, sacked from his position. MacTavish would have to see to the construction of new torpedoes himself, find a new artificer to oversee the work, and most definitely not spare HM Government’s money this time on the timers or pistols!

Lewrie had begun his report to Admiralty the morning after the trials off the Somme, and completed it just before Reliant had come to anchor in the Great Nore. He dis-passionately described the complicated method of priming and activating, the difficulty with the tompion and the use of them in the total dark, along with the risks involved if deployed during the day; the shoddy materials used in the first place, and the great risk of damp getting to the powder no matter how snugly the torpedoes were sealed, due to being stored above- decks exposed to weather, then slung over the side and towed long distances all but submerged. It was no way to