Glory In The Name

keeping it from collapsing into the engine room Taylor could not tell.

The destruction energized Burgess and Jones. They flung shovels and slice bars aside, leaped for the ladder, scurried up.

Burgess reached the top, paused, looked back, Moses one step below, Taylor a step below him. One last look at their fiefdom, and as they looked the starboard coal bunker exploded in a spray of planking and frames and anthracite coal. The engine room rang with the sound of metal striking metal, of red-hot ballistic shards of steel shell slamming into the boiler.

“Son of a…!” Taylor managed to get out. Burgess leaped through the door and Moses leaped after him. Taylor took the steps, flew up the steps, leaped headlong out of the engine-room door as if diving in the water, hit the deck, rolled, scrambled.

Behind him, the door blew clean out of its frame, flew twenty feet outboard, pushed by a great white cloud of condensed steam that blasted the window out of the sides of the engine room and shot like a geyser through the gaping hole in the boat deck.

Metal clanged on metal, the air was consumed with a great whooshing sound, the muffled sound of an explosion below as the boiler blew apart. Taylor tried to make himself as small as he could, lying prone on the deck, pressed against the deckhouse, arms over his head. He waited until the whooshing and the clanging were gone and then he looked up.

There was an odd quiet now. The Cape Fear did not vibrate, the engine did not thump. Dead in the water. Probably filling fast.

He scrambled to his feet. “Burgess, Jones, y’all still alive?”

They nodded, so Taylor reckoned they were. “All right, git yerselves some weapons. Cutlass, whatever y’all want. I’ll go see the cap’n.”

He staggered forward, rounded the remains of the deckhouse. A Yankee steamer was bearing down, fifty yards away, the son of a bitch that put a shell in their boiler, no doubt.

Taylor grabbed on to the ladder, pulled himself up. The angle was not right, the Cape Fear was listing. Must have blown a hole in the bottom. He came out on the boat deck. Bowater was there, sword in one hand, his engraved.36 Navy Colt in the other. He looked surprised.

“Chief! You’re alive!”

“If you care to call it that.”

“I saw that cloud of steam, I thought y’all were done for.”

“Almost. Next time, I reckon. Shell right in the boiler. I think we are sinkin.”

“We are no doubt sinking. And soon we’ll be fighting these bastards here.” He nodded to the Yankee gunboat, coming on fast.

“Might you have a weapon of some sort handy?” Taylor asked. Tanner stepped out of the wheelhouse, the useless wheel abandoned. He held out a cutlass and a rough sea service pistol. “Here, Chief,” he said. Taylor took the weapons. He glanced at Bowater and Tanner, the easy way they held their weapons, as familiar as a wrench was in Taylor’s hands. He felt awkward, like an amateur. He had not spent the past decades in the naval service, handling such things.

Damned navy, stupid damned navy…

The Yankee was twenty yards away, throttling down, marines and sailors on her bow, ready to board. “Let’s go meet our guests,” Bowater said and led them down the ladder to the foredeck, where Harwell had his men assembled, ready to repel.

Ten yards and the Yankees opened up with small arms, rifles and pistols, and the Rebels huddled behind the bulwark and the silent Parrott and fired back. The gunnel of the Yankee gunboat was ten feet or more above the Cape Fear; it was like firing up at the top of a castle wall.

The Yankee came dead in the water, bumped against the Cape Fear, and suddenly there were shouting, cursing blue-clad men leaping down from the deck above, landing on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, men climbing down the Yankee’s side, finding footholds in hawse pipe and wale, falling on the Cape Fear, wielding swords and pistols.

Wild! Taylor lifted his pistol, held in his left hand, shot a U.S. marine, five feet away. A bullet grazed his arm. A sailor was aiming a pistol at him, so close he could touch him. Their eyes met. Taylor swung his cutlass, knocked the gun aside just as it discharged and blasted its.38-caliber round into the deck. The sailor tried to raise the gun again but Taylor stepped into him, slammed him in the face with the hand guard of the cutlass, and he dropped.

The chief looked around. The fighting was hand-to-hand all over the deck. There was Bowater, firing, parrying, lunging, right in the thick of it. Taylor felt that weird fighting energy he knew so well, not from combat, but from more waterfront tavern brawls then he could ever recall.

He saw a gun aimed at Bowater, ten feet away, saw the finger squeeze the trigger, the trigger deflect, and he raised his cutlass and chopped down. He felt the blade hit bone, the gun go off, the man scream.

He felt a punch in the shoulder, as if someone had hit him hard, but there was no one there. It spun him half around. He clapped a hand over the spot; it came away red.

Taylor staggered, almost fell. Just my shoulder… he thought, did not know why that should affect his balance. And then he realized-it was the Cape Fear. She had lurched, rolled. She was going down.

Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell, for the first time in his charmed life, led his men forward into the face of a boarding enemy. Such heroics were supposed to have gone out with John Paul Jones, with Decatur and Collingwood. They were not part of modern naval warfare. But now he was given the chance to do it-ancient, noble warfare in modern times.

They were marines, but Harwell was not afraid. He shouted as he ran, waved his sword to urge the men on, though it was only twenty feet. He came sword to sword with a graybeard, an old salt, felt bad for the old man. A lifetime at sea, and Harwell, young, strong, quick, turned his blade aside, thrust, ran the sword into the man’s belly.

He pulled it free, did not watch the man fall. A marine aimed his pistol, fired. The ball burned a trail through his side, but Harwell raised his pistol, shot left-handed, knocked the man down.

Bowater was there, heroic Bowater. Harwell wished he could achieve the captain’s quiet stoicism, that lofty air. Sometimes he felt like Bowater’s puppy, wondered if Bowater felt the same.

Another cutlass-wielding sailor, climbing over the Parrott. Harwell met him, blade to blade. He tried to raise the pistol but the sailor did not give him the opening to do so. Their weapons rang against one another, and Harwell felt the shivers down his arm. This one was good.

Harwell pressed the attack, tried to throw him off. The sailor took a step back, came up against the Parrott. Trapped, fending off Harwell’s blade. The opening would come. One stroke, two strokes.

Harwell was flung forward. He thought he had been shoved. He fell, off balance, past the surprised sailor with whom he had been fighting, down to the deck. He hit the hard yellow pine planks, came to a stop. Tried to move but could not.

He opened his eyes. He was looking at the front wheel of the Parrott’s gun carriage. He was jammed up there in the bow and he could not seem to move. He could feel nothing but dull warmth from his waist down, and he was confused.

Get back…in…the fight… The words ran though his head, but somehow he knew he would not be able to do so. He felt a warm, sticking something on his cheek.

Dear God…I have been hit! He tried to cry out but he could not make a sound. He had had dreams like that, where he was trying to shout but could not. This was the same thing. Was it a dream?

Then the pain came, a wave of agony shooting out along legs, arms, head, and he knew it was not a dream. He did not know what was wrong, but he knew that this was it. He was going to die. Frightening and comforting all at once. The pain was so very great, he saw death as a warm blanket pulled over him.

There was terrific excitement on the deck. Men were shouting, guns going off, but not as many. He thought that the deck was at an odd angle, but he was not sure. The Parrott lurched a bit, slid toward him. The pain swelled, eased off, swelled again. He felt cold.