Glory In The Name

already over the orlop deck. It was over.

Someone shouted, out in the night, something made a clattering noise, then the report of a rifle and the water spit up, ten feet astern of the boat.

“Son of a bitch!” Wise shouted. “Lean into it, you men,” he called, but the bluejackets needed no command, and like the experienced sailors they were they picked up the speed of their stroke without missing a beat.

Another rifle went off, and another, little shoots of water coming up around the boat. A ball thudded into the bows and then the boat moved into the shadow of the sloop-of-war Plymouth and was lost from sight of the mob.

The USS Plymouth, which had been perfectly serviceable that morning, was down by the stern and sinking slowly into the mud.

“Hold your oars,” Wise ordered, and the men stopped rowing, let the blades drag in the water, and the boat slowed until it was nearly stopped. From out of the night he could hear the clank of Pawnee’s anchor chain coming on board, the chugging of the steam tug Yankee, come to take the Cumberland in tow. She was all that they could save.

“Not long now, boys…” Wise said.

“Till what, sir? Till the secesh come over the wall?” one of the men asked, and got a chuckle from the others.

“No, till we blow this place to hell and the secesh with it,” Wise said. “Give way, all.”

Once again the sailors leaned into the oars and the boat gathered way. They glided down the long black side of the Plymouth and came out under her bows. He could see the mob again, in the shadows and the pools of light. They moved and swayed like a wheat field, and their shouts punctuated the night.

“Pick up the stroke,” Wise said, and the bluejackets leaned into it again and the boat shot forward just as the first rifle fired at them. Here and there muzzle flashes pricked the darkness and the balls whizzed around them, but they would be no more than a dark shadow on the water and it would be a lucky shot indeed that did any damage.

Now the once mighty Merrimack loomed up over them, and with one pull they were behind her protective wooden walls. She reeked of the turpentine with which Wise and his men had doused her decks hours before.

“Hold your oars.”

Over the noise of the Pawnee’s anchor chain he heard a voice, clear and loud, call, “Up and down!” Pawnee was nearly underway.

Wise shifted in his seat, turned to look in Pawnee’s direction, and as he did a rocket lifted off from her deck and streaked up into the sky. The yellow tail made a slash of light against the backdrop of the stars, and then the rocket exploded in a burst, its fragments trailing fire down to the water and hissing out.

“That’s the signal, boys. Toss oars. Bowman, ease us along to the powder train.”

The oars came up in two straight rows, and the man in the bow hooked onto the sagging Merrimack with his boat hook and pulled the boat along her black side. Ten feet above their heads the white band along her gundeck made a ghostly trail the full 275 feet of her massive hull. At regular intervals along the white band, the empty gunports gaped open, like mouths trying in vain to protest. One of the Wabash class, the most powerful, most valuable men-of-war in the United States Navy. She seemed too substantial to be destroyed.

“Here, sir.” The bowman had reached the gunport to which they had earlier run the train of combustible material-rope, ladders, grating, hawsers-which they had laid in the form of a big letter V forward of the mainmast and then doused with turpentine.

The bowman gave a final pull of the boat hook and then checked the motion as Wise came up level with the gunport. Cotton waste and frayed rope hung out of the square hole in an unsightly fashion. Wise sighed, looked around one last time, tried to put off doing that terrible thing, but there was no delaying it.

He pulled an oilskin pouch from his pocket, fished out a match, and struck the match on the gunnel of the boat. It sputtered and flared and caught, and Wise held it to the cotton waste. The flame jumped onto the spirit-soaked cotton, consumed it, moved inboard along the flammable trail.

“All right…shove off, give way, all.” The bowman pushed the boat off from Merrimack’s side and the oars came down and the boat pulled away. Wise pushed the tiller over and turned to look back at his own handiwork. His foot kicked a binnacle lantern lying in the bottom of the boat. He had saved it out of Merrimack earlier-why, he did not know. Because he had to save something, perhaps.

The oarsmen dipped their blades and pulled, dipped and pulled. They were twenty feet from the steam frigate when Wise turned back again to see if the flames had taken, and as he did the decks and gunports, the masts and rails seemed to explode in flame.

The shock of light and heat slammed into the boat, and Wise threw his arm up over his eyes.

He heard one of the men curse, and the confusion of an oar crabbing, oars banging on oars. Flames burst from each of the Merrimack’s gunports. Fire mounted up the lower masts, like the stakes in an old-time witch-burning. From over the high bulwarks they could see the flames run fore and aft along the deck, they could hear the low roar of the inferno, and now from the shoreline they could hear shouts of outrage, the sounds of the mob spurred to action, but it was too late for them.

“Well hell, sir,” the bowman called. “Reckon she’s afire now.”

“Reckon. Very well, let’s get a move on. We got more to do like her.” Wise turned his back on the burning Merrimack. He was blind now in the dark, after staring into those wicked flames. He pushed the tiller over and headed for where he knew the Germantown to be.

Paulding had ordered him to see about firing the Merrimack and he had done it, done it damned well, and now that honorable ship, the pride of the United States Navy, was engulfed in flames. In his stomach he felt physically sick. It was the most shameful duty he had ever been ordered to perform.

Together, as if they were puppets on one string, the heads of Samuel Bowater, Thadeous Harwell, and Hieronymus Taylor all moved right to left as they traced the line of the rocket streaking up, almost directly overhead.

“Well, now, that’s got to mean some damned thing…” Taylor observed.

Bowater pulled his eyes from the sky just as the rocket burst into flaming fragments. The three of them were standing on the roof of the deckhouse, where they could get an unobstructed view all around.

He looked to port and the town of Norfolk, and to starboard at the Gosport naval yard, two hundred yards away. If something was acting, Bowater had guessed it would be at the naval yard, and it seemed he had guessed right.

He could hear a ship winning her anchor, he could see boats moving, men on shore, their rifles gleaming. The occasional smattering of gunfire. There was a powder-keg atmosphere, ready to blow, and Bowater was not sure where to put his ship to keep her clear of the blast.

“Look here, sir,” said Harwell, and Bowater looked where he was pointing. A line of flame, a ship on fire, perhaps, it was hard to tell.

“Now, what in hell…” Taylor began and then suddenly the line of flame exploded into a great sheet of fire, illuminating the ship fore and aft, spilling out of the long line of gunports, climbing up the lower masts.

“Ho-ly…” Taylor muttered.

“That’s one of the Wabash-class frigates,” Bowater said. He could see her perfectly in the flames of her own destruction.

“I think she’s Merrimack, sir,” Harwell offered. “They’ve fired Merrimack.”

For a brief instant Bowater considered coming alongside her, wondered if the Cape Fear’s pumps were equal to the task of saving the burning ship. He opened his mouth to speak, and then the whole world seemed to explode into flames.