Thieves Of Mercy

She saw the reticule in Molly’s lap, felt the weight of the pistol still strapped to her thigh. The nearest sailors were thirty feet away in the wheelhouse, and they were not armed. She had it within her power, with one simple motion, to alter forever the tide of history. A clandestine move of her hand under the table, the squeeze of a trigger, and she could, at the cost of her own life, change entirely the fortunes of her new nation. She remembered the feel of the little gun’s recoil, jerking her arm back as it discharged, the sense of lethal potential that the loaded weapon embodied.

She reached out her hand and picked up her glass and savored the secret knowledge that the hand that held the glass might just as easily have picked up a gun, that it was her decision whether Abraham Lincoln lived or died, and he did not even know it.

Oh, God, save me from such hubris!

She glanced at Molly, but her aunt was staring like a sightseer at the shore beyond and did not appear to have assassination on her mind. Molly looked back at Lincoln. “But today you take a boating holiday?” she asked. Stanton translated.

“No, ma’am. Today I am looking for a suitable place to land troops.”

Molly nodded, as if the news was only of vague interest to her, like hearing a story about someone you do not know. Wendy took a long drink of her lemonade because it seemed to her the best way to disguise her elation.

Looking for a suitable place to land troops! She and Molly had managed to land in exactly the right place. Had they been on board the flagship they could not have uncovered nearly as much information as they would in the next hour, their source the most unimpeachable of informants.

They would return to Captain Tucker with just the information he needed to make the best use of the ironclad Virginia. Tucker would be grateful, and beholden to them.

Wendy felt a pride, a sense of accomplishment, unlike any she had felt before. For the first time, she was not just supporting the cause of the Confederate States, she was fighting for it.

Lincoln is a fool, she thought, to be so free with his information. One never knows to whom one is talking.

And then she remembered, and her elation collapsed like a bonfire burned through. Lincoln was not a fool. He knew perfectly well that even if she and Molly were Confederates, there was nothing they could do with the information. He had seen to it. They had no way to get off the tug.

TEN

U.S. Flag-steamer Benton Off Fort Pillow, May 11, 1862 SIR: I have the honor to inform the Department that yesterday morning, a little after 7 o’clock, the rebel squadron, consisting of eight ironclad steamers, four of them, I believe, fitted as rams, came around the point at the bend above Fort Pillow and steamed gallantly up the river, fully prepared for a regular engagement.

CAPTAIN C.H.DAVIS, COMMANDING MISSISSIPPI FLOTILLA, TO GIDEON WELLES

Second Master Thomas B. Gregory, United States Navy, in command of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, was not entirely at ease. The early morning was lovely, the air cool and just a little damp, the sky clear blue. The birds had resumed, in a tentative way, their chirping in the trees, protesting the intrusion of the second master and his ilk. Perfect, the stretch of the Mississippi River at Plum Point Bend, idyllic, like a bit of Eden. It seemed, somehow, disloyal to Second Master Gregory that he should find such beauty and tranquillity in Tennessee. Coming from Amesbury, Massachusetts, he had expected to find the depravity of Southern rural poverty, squalid slave quarters stuck behind grand plantation houses, barefoot people sharing dilapidated cabins with their pigs in the Mississippi mud. He had not expected to find the South as lovely as it was, as peaceful. He had to remind himself of why, and how much, he hated the Rebs.

He was standing on a wooden crate marked FUSES and looking over the casemate wall of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, tied by a half-dozen lines to trees on the shore. Number Sixteen, like all its brethren, was an odd-looking thing. Its hull was no more than a barge, twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. On top of the barge was built an iron casemate, the sides angled slightly inward to deflect shot, so that the whole affair looked mostly like a small ironclad without a roof or any means of self-propulsion.

The area within the walls of the casemate was mostly empty, save for the short, thick mortar mounted in the center of the deck. With its muzzle tilted straight up, it looked like a stew pot with fifteen-inch-thick sides. It sat on a low, heavy carriage. No wheels, there was no need of them. The gun was moved by boat, and when it fired, the water absorbed the recoil.

Aft of the mortar, a tent was set up, the kind of tent used by soldiers in the field, but here it was used to keep the powder for the mortar dry. Mounted on the sides of the casemate were the various implements for loading and servicing the gun. Arranged on racks along the edge of the deck sat the round shells, thirty-nine inches in circumference, that the mortar would lob a mile or so into the air, and that would, through the judicious application of science, experience, trial, and luck, land amid the Confederate troops holed up at Fort Pillow, out of sight on the other side of Plum Point.

The gun was the center of the mortar boat, literally and spiritually, and the men were there to service its needs. They did so that morning, slowly, lethargically, but Second Master Gregory did not mind. It was early morning, a morning that seemed to resist any effort to move quickly, and the men were moving fast enough that he could not call them beats.

The gun captain clipped the lanyard to the friction primer and stretched it out. Gregory automatically clapped a hand over the ear nearest the gun. The captain jerked the lanyard. The birds, the river, the sky, everything was obliterated by the gut-pounding roar of the mortar going off. The deck shuddered, the mortar boat was pushed down into the water, the air was filled with smoke and a noise that was like a physical presence, that seemed to go on and on long after the gun had fired.

Gregory’s eyes traced the upward flight of the shell, a black dot against the blue sky. Up, up, up it went, hanging at the zenith of its flight, and then down, to drop beyond Plum Point. He listened for the detonation, though he knew there was no chance of hearing it. The first and second shell of the day he could hear explode, sometimes the third. But that was number five for the morning, and by then his hearing was so numb that even the men’s voices a dozen yards away were muted and dull-sounding.

The gun crew set about swabbing the gun and preparing for the next shell, a slow, steady rhythm they would keep up all the daylight hours. The morning breeze carried the smoke away, and soon, one by one, the birds would set in again until the next blast silenced them. It seemed like a lazy, lethargic sort of warfare to Second Master Gregory, not at all the kind of dashing naval action he had envisioned when he volunteered.

He looked away from the mortar-there was no need for him to oversee the loading, the men knew the drill as well as he did- and looked off downstream, down the nearly mile-wide, brown, lazy water of the Mississippi, to where it was lost from sight around Plum Point. Mortar Boat Number Sixteen represented the southernmost point of Union control of the northern part of the Mississippi. Everything downriver from them was Confederate country, clear down to Vicksburg.

As he stared south, Gregory saw plumes of black smoke rise up over the wooded point like a line of campfires and his first thought was that the mortar had managed to set Fort Pillow on fire. But the smoke did not look like smoke from a fire, more like smoke from a smokestack, or a number of smokestacks. The dark columns were not stationary, but moving steadily toward them. One, two, three, four, Gregory counted. Hallo, now what in the world could this be?

Fifty yards upriver, also made fast to the trees on shore, lay the United States gunboat Cincinnati. She was one of the seven City Class gunboats, also known as “Pook Turtles”: “Pook” for their constructor, Samuel Pook, and “Turtle” for their undeniable resemblance to that creature. A thin trail of smoke rose from her twin funnels, the output of fires that were banked and nearly out. Most of her crew were on hands and knees, holystoning the wooden deck that formed the roof of her iron casement. A lazy morning, playing nursemaid to the mortar boat downstream as it lobbed its shells at the invisible Confederates beyond the point.

In his cabin below, in his shirtsleeves, sitting behind his desk, Commander Roger Stembel fretted over his paperwork and dreamed of commanding a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, going toe-to-toe with two French first-