The Barbary Pirates

entirely.”

Sterett looked skeptical, and Fulton bewildered that I had stolen his sales pitch.

“Or make wars more terrible than ever,” I added.

Suddenly, Fulton saw his opportunity. “Ethan, this is the way to prove myself to Napoleon!”

“Yes. I remember you told me the French want to break the Nautilus up, but you couldn’t bear to and sent the pieces to Toulon to test in the quieter Mediterranean. Here’s your chance, thanks to me.” I could still feel the abrasion on my throat where the rope had cut, but I don’t hold grudges except against true villains. “We pack the Nautilus down to Tripoli, sneak into the harbor beneath Yussef’s palace, and rescue Astiza and little Harry.” I nodded. “All we have to find is a set of adventurers willing to risk their lives in a metal sausage and cut their way through an army a thousand times their number.”

Sterett was looking at me with new respect.

“That, at least, is no problem at all,” Fulton said.

“You have some volunteers in mind?”

“Cuvier and Smith, of course. They’re reconditioning my plunging boat. They decided to wait in Toulon in hopes of hearing news of your hanging, before daring to face Napoleon again.”

“Ah. It’s good to be remembered.”

“And me, gentlemen,” Sterett said. “You’re not going to romp among the pirates without my ship in support. My bully lads will say the same.”

“We may have to have a lottery,” I predicted. “Just how many can we squeeze into this craft of yours, Robert?”

“Three, if we want room aboard to get your wife and son out. Of course some of us will most likely be cut to ribbons when we venture ashore, so we might want four or five to start. But then we need room for explosives, too.”

“Explosives?” I massaged my throat.

“To blow up the mirror and the navy of Tripoli. Maybe that damned dungeon, too.”

“Five against the janissaries and cutthroats of the bashaw of Tripoli!” Sterett said. “Perfect odds! By God, gentlemen, I am heartily tired of lurking at Malta with Commodore Morris, and positively thirsting for action. Gage, I’d heard you were quite the hero, but didn’t quite believe it until now.”

“I have a hard time believing it myself.” My plan had been to sneak quietly about, but Sterett and Fulton apparently wanted a noisier demonstration of American might. Well, a battle tomorrow was better than hanging today. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get my family out of the line of fire first.”

“It is fire that will save your family, Mr. Gage,” the lieutenant said. “We’ll so light up Tripoli with hell and pandemonium that you’ll be able to rescue half a harem if you want to.”

That didn’t sound bad at all. But no, I had Astiza, hang it, and no more business with harems except to get her out of one. By the devil, it’s complicated to be a father and suddenly responsible! Oddest thing in the world, really.

But not entirely bad to have someone to rescue.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I’m not sure what I expected of Fulton’s beloved Nautilus, but the copper coffin he unveiled in a Toulon warehouse did not inspire confidence. It looked like a patchwork of green plating, odd bits of dried seaweed, and conspicuous holes where the leakiest of the iron bolts had been removed for replacement. The contraption was twenty-one feet long, six wide, and in cross section was the shape of a “U” with a short keel. A propeller projected from the rear of the craft, and a folding mast with booms and odd, fanlike sails was lashed to the flat deck on top. A round turret three feet high, with thick glass windows, jutted from the top. Its roof was a hatch allowing entry. From inside the vessel came an unholy banging.

“I’ve no doubt your invention will sink as planned, Robert,” I said. “The question is whether it will rise back again, as prayed for.”

“It worked splendidly on the Channel coast. We might have torpedoed a British frigate or two, if they hadn’t slunk away.” He glanced at Smith. “Sorry, William.”

“No offense taken,” the Englishman replied cheerfully. “Our nations are at peace now, and here we are united against infamy and extortion. And the day a British ship waits around to be sunk by a contraption like this is the day we might as well start speaking French.”

Our quartet had been reunited when Sterett, not waiting for orders from his unaggressive commodore, rushed us to Toulon to pick up Fulton’s secret weapon. Cuvier and Smith began as suspicious of me as Fulton, but eventually I persuaded them that I’d been faced with an impossible choice. Now we were cautious allies again.

“It was destiny, perhaps, which left Fulton unsuccessful at Brest so he had the chance to prove himself at Tripoli,” Cuvier said optimistically. “And perhaps Bonaparte had the foresight to predict we four would make an effective fellowship?”

I thought it more likely Napoleon had been happy to get rid of four eccentrics on a mission with slim chance of success, but opportunity has a way of turning into inevitability. “Your vessel does look a little worse for wear,” I judged. “Are you sure it’s going to be ready?”

“I’ve got a clever little fellow working on it,” said Fulton. “Said he was something of an expert on all things nautical. He even mentioned that he knew you, Gage.”

“Me?” I knew no submarine mechanics and tend to stay away from people capable of honest work, lest they make me feel inferior. “He probably heard you say I’d gone over to the pirate side and figured he could claim anything he liked, since you’d never see me again. Let’s catch the look on his face when he pops up and spies me in the flesh!”

Cuvier stepped over and banged on the hull. “Foreman! Your old friend has shown up after all!”

The hammering stopped and there was a long silence. Then a shuffling inside, and finally a head with dark, wiry hair raised above the lip of the little tower like a mole.

“Donkey?” He inspected me critically. “They told me you’d turned pirate, or were dead.”

It was I who was thunderstruck, not this “mechanic.” In fact, I was so shocked that I took a step backward as if seeing a ghost. “Pierre?” First Astiza, then a son I hadn’t known I had, and now this?

“But why am I surprised?” the little Frenchman said. “Here I am readying a cylindrical death trap, a perfectly absurd excuse for a boat, and I have been asking myself, who would be crazy enough to set out in an anchor like this? And I thought, well, Americans, because I have met Americans on my journeys to the wilderness and not encountered a snuff of sense in any of them. And which American do I know who is the craziest of all beyond Fulton there, who is already the laughingstock of Paris? And of course such an imbecile would be my old companion Ethan Gage, who conjures calamity wherever he goes. Yes, a metal boat designed to sink? It sounds absolutely like something donkey would be involved in.”

“This is no mechanic,” I sputtered.

“More of one than you!”

“This is a French voyageur from Montreal’s North West Company! I last saw him in St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. He’s a canoe man! He doesn’t know any technology more complicated than birch bark and beaver tail!”

“And what do you know, besides thunderbolts you can’t control and sorcery you can’t perform? Plus the worst taste in women imaginable?”

So we held each other’s stare, and then began to grin, and finally at last we laughed, and he sprang from the submarine so that the two of us could lock arms in the kind of dance the North West Company’s Scots do over crossed claymore swords, chortling over our mutual resurrection. We’d survived, and were together!

This was a good omen.

Cuvier cleared his throat. “This confirms, then, that you have met before?”