Oh, how Cork had ranted and raved when he heard of Washington’s loss of interest! “What would a tobacco farmer know of seamanship?” he had bellowed. “Here he has a formidable weapon to put fear into the hearts of every British seaman afloat, and he brushes it aside!” (He truly respects Washington’s field ability, but finds him weak in naval acumen.)
“Well, it did fail on three occasions,” I reminded him. “No sense throwing good money after bad.”
“You’re as big an ass as he is, Oaks. The Turtle would have worked if only that diver had moved a few inches to the left or right under the Eagle. That auger struck the iron bar connecting the rudder fitting to the sternpost. They don’t have rudders or sternposts on tobacco plantations, so they’re a mystery to Washington.”
As I stood there looking at this gigantic reproduction of Bushnell’s idea, a new sense of poverty came over me. If Congress wouldn’t provide funds for submersibles, I could guess who did.
He walked over to it and rapped on its oak hull. “Sound as a dollar,” he said, knowing the full worth of the American shinbuck. “And ready just in time.”
Suddenly I saw his plan, and I felt a goose walk over my grave. War does strange things to men’s minds. It turns some into jellied cowards and inflates others to heroic proportions. Then there are those souls who lose all perspective in their blood lust and turn fiendish. I feared Cork had now joined that depraved regiment.
“You can’t!” I shrieked. “I’ll axe that hull myself before I’ll let you commit this atrocity.”
“What the devil are you babbling about?”
“Captain—” I pleaded with him “—you will be blowing up hundreds of innocent prisoners — our own men! You would do this to silence a spy?”
That smirk-a-mouth of his is the most annoying habit he has. It says multitudes, and this time it told me that I should be dragged off and locked in an attic like a looney relative.
“Oaks, my friend,” he said in mock patience, “you have the singular ability always to miss the point. In the bawdy house of life, you waste your precious time listening to the piano player. I want that agent alive and talking, you twit. I need two words.”
With this, he took a ladder from the corner and propped it against the submersible. Bawdy house, indeed! He is our resident authority on such places. And I am not partial to piano music at all. Fiddles are my meat.
At the top of the ladder, Cork opened the hatch of his contraption and I ventured to open the one on my face.
“So you’re going to sail up to the hulk and have our man jump aboard, are you? I assume they have guards posted.”
He was climbing down inside the egg and his voice echoed out to me. It was like talking to the Oracle at Delphi, which I believe Cork thinks he is at times.
“There are guards.” His voice reverberated from the hatch. “Probably a Lieutenant, two mates, and a dozen seamen.”
“Well, that’s not too many!” I shouted up to him.
“And thirty soldiers, probably Hessians, since the Jersey is new to the Wallabout.”
“Well, when do we leave?”
Now the Oracle was erupting. “We? What in hell do you mean, we?” His words flowed like molten lava, but I was undaunted. We argued most of the afternoon and into the evening, and finally I hit upon a subtle but effective premise.
“It’s in your best interest to take me, and, by the way, that submersible will carry three men. I checked.” We were at a late supper of cold potatoes and cod. “Captain, if you leave me here in enemy territory I am bound to be captured sooner or later — if something happens to you, all the sooner, I fear. A fellow of my constitution would not stand up long to the brutalities of interrogation. Heaven forbid I would be tortured beyond endurance. They would extract my finger- and toe-nails one by one, then hot oil would be applied in insidious places, drop by drop. Failing that — and I shudder to think of it — the Squaw’s Revenge. No, Captain, I would break, and I’m the only person outside of yourself who knows the full fabric of your spy network — names, locations, plans, everything — hide, hair, and tallow.”
The mention of the Hairbuyer was my master stroke. He is Cork’s British counterpart, his nemesis. Cork has laid a personal £10,000 bounty on his head. Even if we do win the war, it will be cold potatoes and cod forevermore. The point that rasps Cork’s soul is that he doesn’t know this cruel butcher’s identity, while the British are fully aware of Cork’s — at least his name, if not his location.
The Hairbuyer got his name from the savage Indians who serve the British. I commented earlier on what evil things war can do to men, and he is its most fiendish example. He buys the scalps of the wives of American officers and manages to have them delivered to their unfortunate husbands in the field. Cork calls it warfare of the soul. I call it gruesome.
“We leave tomorrow night,” Cork said, to my astonishment. I had expected at least six hours more haranguing.
“We do?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said in triumph, “I am most happy to learn that I am of some importance to this organization.”
“Oh, you are. You’re pedalling the paddlewheel. Now shut up and bring me the East River charts.”
Two days later, I lay exhausted in a dank salt marsh in the center of Wallabout Bay. My legs ached with pain from treadling The Tortoise up the river all the way from Governor’s Island to the Bay. After much preparation, we had left the safe-house dock after sunset the previous night in a “Tory” fishing smack, slipped across Great South Bay and into the open Atlantic with the submerged Tortoise in tow.
When the tide turned, we tacked landward again, entered the Narrows, and crossed over Upper New York Bay past the unsuspecting British patrol barges. Off Governor’s Island, Cork and I cast off in The Tortoise, he at the glowing foxfire-coated instruments, I at the treadle.
Although my legs were soon numb as we made our way upriver, I actually had the easier task. Cork had plenty to do keeping us on course. When I felt I could not move a leg one more time he said, “All stop, Oaks,” and The Tortoise started to rotate.
“Now pedal like hell,” he commanded, “we are going into Wallabout.”
We sat in the submersible until the tide drained the water-covered mud flats and then we emerged into the sunlight to find ourselves safely hidden amid the tall reeds.
The skeeters were infernally happy to have us among them, while overhead the scavenger gulls squeaked like unoiled hinges. In the oppressive heat of the noonday sun, the whole place reeked of fish. Across the tidal pond lay the hulks, grim and foreboding. Through blurry eyes, I watched these once-proud mistresses of war barely moving in the low tide of their degradation. I could not help but think they were like some once gay king’s courtesans, now toothless and haggard, sent to the putrid castle dungeons belowstairs.
Cork lay against a small hummock, studying his prey through a long glass.
“Well, that’s a bit of luck,” he whispered to himself.
“Luck?”
He handed me the glass and I trained it at the Jersey on the outside anchorage. The magnification, to my eyes, made her all the more gruesome. Her rotting hull had been stripped of her proud fittings — the useless whore’s jewels returned to the sovereign’s treasury — leaving only the flagstaff and bowsprit. Even the rudder was gone, rendering her an aimless cripple to be abused by jailers. A spar amidships supported a derrick which probably hauled aboard the awful swill the prisoners ate and, I suppose, the poor devils relished. There were rude cabins, more like shacks, fore and aft and, for a touch of homeyness, a clothesline was strung with washing. About the decks milled ragged men under the wary eyes and ready muskets of soldiers.