1633

home, crashing the full length of her hull in maiming, mangling fury. An entire twenty-four pounder slammed forward, flung two-thirds of the way out its port as a screaming roundshot dismounted it and shattered its carriage. Even as Tromp realized in horror that the attack was deliberate, Brederode's foremast toppled like a weary tree. It pitched over the side while the ship wallowed in agony, and Tromp heard English voices baying in triumph.

The Americans were right, a small, numb corner of his brain told him. Richelieu's offer was too good to be true.

He spun around as fresh, concentrated broadsides thundered, and his belly knotted as more of his 'allies' poured fire into his own ships. The French flagship surged past Dordrecht, firing as she went, and Dordrecht staggered. Her already damaged mizzen mast toppled into the smoke, splinters flew from her 'disengaged' side, and she began to fall away to leeward as the French fire killed her helmsman and smashed her wheel.

From triumph to despair. The transformation required no more than a minute-two, at the most. That was how long it took Maarten Tromp to realize that the Dutch Navy had just been destroyed. It might take some time still to accomplish that, but the outcome was inevitable, and he knew it. Everywhere he looked, as far as he could see through the smoke and spray and splinters, French and English warships vomited flame and fury as their fresh, carefully aimed broadsides crashed into his weary, already damaged vessels. And he understood now why the Spanish fire had been so 'badly aimed.' With their rigging mangled and crippled by Oquendo's gunners, his ships would be unable to outrun their undamaged 'allies.'

Fresh cheers went up, this time from the Spaniards' bloodsoaked decks as they saw the trap they had paid so much in life and limb to bait spring. And then Tromp flinched in shocked disbelief as Revenge's fire found Brederode's magazine and de With's flagship vanished in a single, terrible explosion.

The explosion, and the sudden blow of realizing his friend and Brederode's entire crew had just died, shocked Tromp out of his immobility. He shook himself savagely and spun away from the horrible vision while broken fragments of Brederode's hull were still rising in lazy arcs above her fireball death. Mastenbroek stood no more than fifteen feet from him, but Amelia's captain was frozen, mesmerized by the spectacle of Brederode's destruction. He didn't seem to hear the lieutenant-admiral when Tromp shouted at him, didn't even blink until Tromp seized him and shook him brutally.

'Get under way!' Tromp barked.

Mastenbroek shook his head, fighting his way up out of his own confusion.

'Make more sail-now!' Tromp commanded harshly. Mastenbroek stared at him for a moment longer, and Tromp flung out an arm, sweeping it in an arc which indicated the ruin encompassing their fleet. 'All we can do is try to run for it,' he grated. 'So make sail, Captain! Make sail now!'

Chapter 20

'And so, while the final reports have yet to come in, I have no doubt what they will tell us.' Armand Demerville, comte de Martignac, smiled thinly at Don Antonio Oquendo. 'So far, over sixty of the enemy have been definitely accounted for.'

'I see.' Oquendo sat on Santiago's poop deck in the only one of his chairs to have survived the action intact. Well, not entirely intact, he reminded himself, his face taut with pain. Its cushioned leather back was split in three places, and one arm had been entirely removed. Which made it an appropriate seat for him at the moment, since the surgeons seemed so eager to amputate his own left leg at the knee.

Of course, that decision would be his.

It was hard to believe, even now, that they had truly gotten away with it, he thought. The trap had required that the Hollanders suspect nothing until the moment it actually sprang, and that had been impossible on the face of it. Even assuming that none of the French or English officers had been in the pay of the Dutch-or Swedes- there were the crews to consider. However bloodthirsty the threats intended to keep them from letting the secret slip, they would have failed. No navy could keep its men from drunkenness once they went ashore, and all it would have required was a single drink-addled seaman-or a sober one, boasting to a whore-to alert the Dutch beforehand.

But Richelieu had had an answer for that, as well. 'Sealed orders,' he'd called them-another notion borrowed from the future. No one in the Franco-English force, except for the fleet commanders themselves and one or two of their most senior, most trusted captains, had known a thing about the true plan. All the others had discovered what was going to happen only when Oquendo's ships actually came into sight and they opened their sealed orders as they had been instructed to do when that moment came.

And so it had worked, he told himself grimly… however much it had cost.

'And your own losses?' he asked Martignac after a moment.

'None,' the Frenchman assured him, then made a small throwing-away gesture with one hand. 'Oh, we've lost a few dozen men, but nothing of significance.'

'Would that we could say the same,' Oquendo said flatly, and even Martignac had the grace to look briefly abashed.

All of Oquendo's ships had survived the battle, but five of them were so savagely damaged that he had already ordered them abandoned and burned, and he would be extremely surprised to discover that even a dozen of the others remained fit for further action. When the Dutch had realized what was happening, many had been too damaged-or too enraged-to even attempt to disengage. Instead, they'd set their teeth in their foes' throats like wounded wolves and continued to hammer their enemies until they were literally overwhelmed. Their casualties had been horrendous… and Oquendo's were little better.

The Hollanders and we have paid a bitter price for your master's plans, my friend, he told Martignac silently from behind his expressionless mask. The Frenchman's ship had taken no more than a half dozen hits as he and his English allies crushed the Dutch from behind, and his clean clothing and perfect grooming stood out against the wreckage and bodies littering Santiago's battered decks like some alien creature from an undamaged world. I hope it was worth it.

Maarten van Tromp slumped in the chair at the head of the table. Darkness pressed close and hard on the shattered glass of the cabin windows, but the lamplight was more than sufficient to show the smoke stains on the overhead deck beams… and the wide, dried bloodstain under his chair.

Five other men sat with him, their faces gray and stunned, overwhelmed by the disaster which had engulfed them. They were the captains of every ship he knew-so far, at least-to have escaped Richelieu's trap. Mastenbroek wasn't one of them; Amelia's captain had been turned into so much mangled meat by an eighteen-pound shot as Tromp's flagship clawed her way free of the crippled Spaniards, and Tromp had taken command in Mastenbroek's place with something very like gratitude. Desperate as Amelia's predicament had been, grappling with cutting her way out of it had been almost a relief from thinking about the catastrophe which had devastated his fleet.

Now he could no longer avoid those thoughts, and his jaw clenched as his memory replayed Brederode's apocalyptic end.

He lifted his head to survey the other five men at the table. Five ships-six, counting Amelia-out of seventy-four. It was possible, even probable, that there were at least a few other escapees, but there couldn't have been many of them. He supposed it would be called the Battle of Dunkirk, if it mattered. By any name, it was the most crushing defeat Holland had ever suffered at sea-and with the destruction of the fleet, the United Provinces' coasts lay naked before the threat of Spain. The ring of fortresses guarding the southern border could be outflanked any time the Spanish wished. And…

With the treachery of England and France-especially France-there would be nothing to stand in Philip IV's path. For decades, whenever the Spanish army had pressed the Dutch too hard, the intervention of the French forces perched on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands had relieved the pressure. Even when the French had not intervened, the simple threat of intervention had been enough to tie down a large portion of the Spaniards' forces.

'Why?' he heard one of his officers croak softly. 'Why did they do it? Insane.'

Tromp did not answer aloud, because he was still chewing on the problem in his own mind.

The motives of the English seemed clear enough, in retrospect. King Charles' desperate need for money to keep control over England with mercenary troops was probably enough in itself to explain it. Money which, Tromp was quite certain, had been quietly emptied out of French and Spanish coffers. But there was more, now that he thought about it. In fact, in many ways the English king's treachery would probably increase his popularity with his own subjects.

Certainly with English seamen and merchants! The Dutch had often been their greatest commercial rivals. And Tromp was well aware that Englishmen, especially seamen and merchants, were still bitterly angry over the Amboina Massacre of 1623, when the Dutch East India Company had tortured and murdered thirteen English merchants in the Spice Islands.

It was the French role in the betrayal which was so puzzling. Religious affinity be damned. For decades, Catholic France had opposed the ambitions of Catholic Spain and Austria-supporting Protestants against them, more often than not-because the Bourbon dynasty which had ruled France since 1589 was far more concerned about the threat posed by the Habsburg dynasty than they were over problems of Christian doctrine. As had been the Valois dynasty before them.

Now…

'What was Richelieu's thinking?' muttered the same officer. 'It's crazy!'

On the surface, the man was quite correct. If the Spanish could reconquer the United Provinces…

Then France-already faced with a Habsburg threat from Spain itself, not to mention the threat which the Spanish possessions in Italy posed to French interests there-would be faced as well with a Spanish Netherlands on their northeastern frontier which had grown far mightier. The population and resources of the entire Low Countries, reunited under the Spanish crown, would truly be something for the French to fear.

Tromp reviewed in his mind the secondhand reports he'd gotten of the warnings the American delegation in The Hague had tried to pass on to Dutch officialdom. With hindsight, he now realized that the reports he'd been given had undoubtedly been distorted by the prejudices and preconceptions of the officials who had received them directly. And he felt a moment's anguish that Frederik Hendrik had chosen not to listen to those warnings in person. The prince himself, for all his canniness, would have been misled by those same self-satisfied official distortions.

Damn all fat burghers, anyway! And damn-twice over!-all religious fanatics. Where is your 'Predestination' now, O ye sectarians?

Despite the distortions and the fragmentary nature of what he had been told, Tromp was now almost sure he could see the French cardinal's strategy. Enough of it, at least.

'We were not Richelieu's true target,' he said grimly to the officers assembled around the table. 'We were just in the way-a sacrifice to obtain the free hand he wanted elsewhere.'

His mental chuckle was harsh. You were right, Cornelisz. The Americans were dangerous. We simply didn't recognize how. And we should have. If anyone should have remembered how twisty Richelieu's scheming mind truly is, it should have been us.

The same officer who had muttered about Richelieu's sanity stared at him. Tromp tried to remember his name, but couldn't. One of the newer and younger officers of his fleet, recently promoted and in command of a ship for the first time.

But Tromp had seen the condition of the man's ship for himself. He was satisfied that whatever the officer might lack in the way of strategic acumen, he did not lack courage. So, despite the effort not to snarl, he forced himself to provide a calm explanation.