A couple of minutes later they decided they were all ready to go—Shandy and the unhappy officer had the dead captain and the swords and a set of fancy dueling pistols rolled up in a portable position that would allow Shandy to keep his pistol both concealed by a flap of fabric and aimed at the officer, and Davies had struggled into the unconscious officer's bloody-sleeved jacket—when someone knocked on the cabin door.
Shandy jumped in surprise and nearly dropped his pistol.
"It's the surgeon," hissed Davies tensely. He crossed the cabin and leaned on the bulkhead beyond the door's hinges, then beckoned to Nourse with his sword point. "Let him in." Nourse was trembling even more than Shandy, and he rolled his eyes miserably as he unbolted the door and drew it open. "We carried the captain to his bunk," he stammered as the surgeon bustled in. As neatly as if it were a dance move they'd been practicing, Davies stepped out and punched the old surgeon in the head with the knuckle-guard of his sword, and Nourse caught the man as he fell.
"Great," said Davies with satisfaction. "Off we go."
Chapter Eight
No more than a minute later Shandy and the trembling officer were dragging the blanket-wrapped corpse and swords across the deck. The long bundle had proved to be too heavy and awkward to carry — especially if Shandy was to keep his concealed pistol aimed at the officer, who had the feet-end of the burden—and so they'd had to simply drag it in this awkward, crouching, torturingly slow way. Shandy was sweating heavily, and not just because of the hot tropical sun that beat down on his head and glared on the white deck—he was as acutely aware of each armed sailor as he would have been of a scorpion clinging to his clothing, and he tried to keep his mind on the task of lugging the unwieldy bundle to the forecastle, and not imagine what would happen when the powder magazine exploded, or when the sailors caught on and opened fire on them, or when it occurred to the whitelipped officer at the other end of the blanket that when pandemonium erupted he'd be caught squarely in the crossfire.
As they scuffed and shambled along, passing the midships hatch cover now, both men panting through open mouths, the officer's eyes never left Shandy's concealed right hand, and Shandy knew that if his cramping grip of the sweat-slick weapon should slip, his corpse-carrying partner would instantly be sprinting away, shouting the alarm.
The disarmed captives up on the forecastle watched their approach. They had heard that this was the corpse of Philip Davies being dragged over to them, and they were bitterly glad that Shandy was being made to bring it.
"Come just a bit closer, Shandy, you boasie raasclaat!" shouted one man. "It'll be worth missing my hanging to get my hands on your neck."
"This is how you thank Davies for letting you live?" put in another. "There'll be zombies sent after you, don't doubt it."
Some of the Navy sailors, mostly younger ones, snickered at this bit of superstition. A long, scuffling minute later—just as they were hobbling past the forward hatch cover—Shandy actually saw his unwilling companion finally work out what would happen in the next couple of minutes.
"I won't hesitate," Shandy gasped, but the officer had suddenly dropped the captain's feet and was running back the way they'd come.
"It's a trick!" he was yelling. "Davies is below rigging a fuse to the magazine!" Shandy breathed a sigh of what was almost relief, for at least the tight, silent suspense was over. Quickly but carefully he crouched, flipped the blanket open and rolled Captain Wilson's body flopthudding onto the deck, kicked the weapons back onto the cloth, bundled it all up like a sack … then paused for an instant, looking around.
Only one of the surrounding Navy men had grasped the situation and was leveling a pistol at him. Shandy fired at him without aiming—missing, but spoiling the man's aim so that the ball splintered the rail behind Shandy—and then, waving the bundle of weapons around his head, he ran headlong for the forecastle.
Gunfire banged and cracked, and he heard pistol balls buzz past and felt one whack against his whirling bundle. Just short of the raised forecastle deck he flung the bundle up at the astonished pirates, and let the momentum of the contortion carry him into a leap sideways toward the companion ladder.
Sounding like quick strokes of a hammer, two pistol balls punched the bulkhead he'd been in front of. One foot touched a ladder rung and then he was up on the forecastle, wrenching open the duelingpistols case. "Onto the Jenny!" he gasped, snatching the two pistols out of the velvet-lined case and turning back toward the waist.
But before he could decide who to shoot at he was flung to his knees as the whole ship lurched violently forward and a basso profundo thunderclap shook the air all the way up to the mast-tops and the entire stern of the ship swelled incredibly upward and outward, dissolving into a towering cloud of dust and smoke and spinning timbers. The boiling sea was shadowed for dozens of yards to port and starboard by the sudden, churning cloud, and pockmarked by the splashes of things falling into it, and the prolonged thunder rolled away across the waves.
Then masts started coming down, first with a snapping of lines, which, though loud as pistol shots, could scarcely be heard over the continuing roar of the explosion, then with a ponderous rushing through the smoky air, finally culminating in the twangy yielding of the safety nets and the bonejarring crash as the timbers hit the deck. The deck Shandy crouched on wasn't level anymore—it was tilted down toward the stern, and even as he noticed it, the tilt became more pronounced. He scrabbled around, dropping both pistols, and on his hands and knees crawled up the slanting forecastle deck to the port rail and grabbed one of the stanchions.
He looked aft, which was down. The stern half of the ship was probably under water, but the torn and crumpled sails, and beyond them the thick smoke, made it impossible to be sure. Captain Wilson's corpse had apparently rolled away while he wasn't looking, but he saw one of the unfired dueling pistols cartwheel into oblivion. All around him he could hear air hissing up out of the hull, and bits of wood and metal still clattering down out of the black sky.
Someone was shaking his arm, and when he looked up he saw that it was Davies, his Navy jacket hacked to tatters, straddling the rail and shouting at him. Shandy couldn't make out the words, but it was clear that Davies wanted him to follow him, so Shandy scrambled up onto the rail. In the choppy water below rocked the Jenny, freed of all but one of the lines mooring her to the stricken man-of-war, and even as he noticed it he saw one of the pirates chop the last line through with a saber and then jump from the ship's up-tilted bow to the water thirty feet below.
"Go!" yelled Davies, giving Shandy a hard slap between the shoulders and then leaping from the rail after him.
The first few minutes aboard the Jenny were a scrambling nightmare—a dozen men, half of them wounded, struggled to hoist sails, half of them torn by shot, in a desperate effort to get headway and tack clear before the man-of-war sank, creating a turbulence powerful enough to founder bigger vessels than the Jenny.
At last, when the Navy ship had sunk to her middle, and her vast, dripping bow was raised entirely out of the water, and her two boats, crowded with sailors, had rowed thirty yards to the south, the Jenny's mainsail stopped luffing and flumped out taut. A few moments later the sloop began moving through the water and Davies ordered the tiller eased. They were a hundred yards southeast and picking up speed when the man-of-war's bow, spurting smoke as the explosion-fouled air in her was forced out, disappeared and was replaced by a white commotion of boiling and splashing.