The warship closed.
“Three hundred fifty yards,” Lazue said.
Hunter hardly heard her. He no longer cared about the range. He sighted down the crosshairs at the smoky profile of the warship. His eyes stung and blurred with tears. He blinked them away, and fixed on an imaginary point on the Spanish profile. Low, and just behind the bowline.
“Ready about! The helm’s a-lee!” Enders bellowed.
“Ready to fire,” Hunter shouted.
Enders was astonished. Hunter knew it, without looking at the sea artist’s face. He kept his eye to the crosshairs. Hunter was going to fire while the ship was coming about. It was unheard of, an insane thing to do.
“One!” Hunter shouted.
In the crosshairs, he saw his ship swing through the wind, coming around to bear on the Spaniard . . .
“Two!”
His own ship was moving slowly now, the crosshairs inching forward along the warship’s hazy profile. Past the forward gunports, onto bare wood . . .
“Three!”
The crosshairs crept forward on the target, but it was too high. He waited for a dip in his own ship, knowing that at the same moment the warship would rise slightly, exposing more flank.
He waited, not daring to breathe, not daring to hope. The warship rode up a little, then—
“Fire!”
Again his ship rocked under the impact of the cannon. It was a ragged volley; Hunter heard it and felt it, but he could see nothing. He waited for the smoke to clear and the ship to right herself. He looked. “Mother of God,” Lazue said.
There was no change in the Spanish warship. Hunter had missed her clean.
“Damn me to hell,” Hunter said, thinking that there was now an odd truth to the words. They were all damned to hell; the next broadside from the Spaniards would finish them off.
Don Diego said, “It was a noble try. A noble try, and bravely done.”
Lazue shook her head. She kissed him on the cheek. “The saints preserve us all,” she said. A tear ran down her cheek.
Hunter felt a crushing despair. They had missed their final chance; he had failed them all. There was nothing to do now but run up the white flag and surrender.
“Mr. Enders,” he called, “run up the white—”
He stopped cold: Enders was dancing behind the tiller, slapping his thigh, laughing uproariously.
Then he heard a cheer from belowdecks. The gun crews were cheering.
Were they mad?
Alongside him, Lazue gave a shriek of delight, and began to laugh as loudly as Enders. Hunter spun to look at the Spanish warship. He saw the bow lift in a wave — and then he saw the gaping hole running seven or eight feet, wide open, below the waterline. A moment later the bow plunged down again, obscuring the damage.
He hardly had time to recognize the significance of this sight when clouds of smoke billowed out of the forecastle of the warship. They rose with startling suddenness. A moment later, an explosion echoed across the water.
And then the warship disappeared in a giant sphere of exploding flame as the powder-hold went off. There was one rumbling detonation, so powerful that El Trinidad shook with the impact. Then another, and a third as the warship dissolved before their eyes in a matter of seconds. Hunter saw only the most fragmentary images of destruction — the masts crashing down; the cannon flung into the air by invisible hands; the whole substance of the ship collapsing in on itself, then blasting outward.
Something crashed into the mainmast over his head, and dropped onto his hair. It slid down to his shoulder and onto the deck. He thought it must be a bird, but, looking down, saw that it was a human hand, severed at the wrist. There was a ring on one finger.
“Good God,” he whispered, and when he looked back at the warship, he saw an equally astonishing sight.
The warship was gone.
Literally, gone: one minute it had been there, consumed by fire and hot spheres of explosions, and yet there. Now it was gone. Burning debris, sails, and spars floated on the surface of the water. The bodies of seamen floated with them, and he heard the screams and shouts of the survivors. Yet the warship was gone.
All around him, his crew was laughing and jumping in frenzied celebration. Hunter could only stare at the water where the warship had once been. Amid the burning wreckage, his eye fell on a body floating facedown in the water. The body was that of a Spanish officer; Hunter could tell from the blue uniform on the man’s back. The man’s trousers had been shredded in the explosions, and his naked buttocks were exposed to view. Hunter stared at the bared flesh, fascinated that the back should be uninjured and yet the clothing below torn away. There was something obscene about the randomness and casualness of the injury. Then, as the body bounced on the waves, Hunter saw that it was headless.
Aboard his own ship, he was distantly aware that the crew was no longer jubilant. They had all fallen silent, and had turned to look at him. He looked around at their faces, weary, smudged, bleeding, the eyes drained and blank with fatigue, and yet oddly expectant.
They were looking at him, and waiting for him to do something. For a moment, he could not imagine what was expected of him. And then he became aware of something on his cheeks.
Rain.
Chapter 31
THE HURRICANE STRUCK with furious intensity. Within minutes, the wind was screaming through the rigging at more than forty knots, lashing them with stinging pellets of rain. The seas were rougher, with fifteen-foot swells, mountains of water that swung the boat crazily. One moment they were high in the air, riding the crest of a swell; seconds later they were plunged into a stomach-wrenching trough, with water looming high all around them.
And each man knew that this was just the beginning. The wind, and the rain, and the seas would become much worse, and the storm would last for hours, perhaps days.
They sprang to work with an energy that belied the fatigue they all felt. They cleared the decks and reefed shredded canvas; they fought to get a sail over the side, and plug the holes in the ship below the waterline. They worked in silence on the slippery, shifting wet decks, each man knowing that at the next instant he might be swept overboard, and that no one would even see it happen.
But the first task — and the worst — was to trim the ship, by moving the cannon back to the starboard side. This was no easy matter on calm seas with dry decking. In a storm, when the ship was taking water over her sides, with the deck pitching to forty-five-degree angles, with every deck surface and line soaked and slippery, it was plainly impossible and a nightmare. Yet it had to be done if they were to survive.
Hunter directed the operation, one cannon at a time. It was a problem of anticipating the pitch, of letting the angles do the work as the men wrestled with the five-thousand-pound weights.
They lost the first cannon; a line snapped, and the gun shot across the slanted deck like a missile, shattering the hull railing on the far side and crashing into the water. The men were terrified by the speed with which it happened. Double lines were lashed around the second cannon, yet it also broke free, crushing a seaman in its path.
For the next five hours, they battled the wind and the rain to get the cannon in position and safely lashed down. When they were finished, every man on El Trinidad was exhausted beyond endurance; the sailors clung like drowning animals to stays and railings, exerting every last ounce of energy to keep from being washed over the side.
And yet, Hunter knew, the storm was just beginning.
. . .
A HURRICANE, THE most awesome event in nature, was discovered by the voyagers to the New World. The name — hurricane — is an Arawak word for storms that had no counterpart in Europe. Hunter’s crew knew of the awful power of these giant cyclonic events, and responded to the terrible physical reality of the storm with the oldest sailor’s superstitions and rites.