“Jack, what say ye? I know yer pot’s simmerin’ and we best let you vent the steam a’fore you bubble over,” Quince said.
“How about we give them a reason to come at us with their emotions instead of their brains? Why not raid that damned pinnace they came to Yatoo’s meeting in, and have the Papaloans help us?”
Jack knew the Papaloans already knew of him; his reputation as Dyak, one of Yatoo’s foreign warriors, had grown with the retelling. The Papaloans would respect a man who had attacked a boatload of their warriors and fought with skill and ferocity.
Quince eased back against his backrest.
“It’s plain to anybody that the Dutchman’s purpose is to nail us and Yatoo,” Jack continued. “They don’t need him to help gather slaves. This isn’t Africa—nowheres to run—and they have plenty of native help from other islands anyway. Partly thanks to us, Yatoo’s been the first serious threat to their profits, and they’re not about to let it go unavenged.”
“Go on, lad,” from Mentor.
“We need to make sure they don’t get a chance to train their guns on the village and—we need to take that damn ship.”
“Yer daft,” from Smithers. “Once we—”
“Hear me out.” Jack’s tone was that of a request, but his eyes burned a warning that stilled Smithers in mid-sentence. “We’ve spoken already of maybe taking a ship. Why not this one now? She’s a beauty—fast, well built—”
“We know. But she’s also armed,” Quince said. “When we spoke of taking some ship before, we were thinking more of borrowing a lamb than attacking a lion.”
“True, Skip. But these men have no intention of letting us live—if not for what we did, then, as Paul has been hinting, for what we know. I don’t think the Dutch want anyone seeing what they’re up to here—it’s not going to go down well in Europe. We either run, leaving the Belaurans to the wrath of the Dutch, losing the remains of our ship, and risk being caught anyway—or we turn the tables on them. From all that’s been said, I think they’ve seriously underestimated both us and the Belaurans.”
Jack spent the night convincing the council of his plan. It was daring, he agreed, but nothing short of some daring move could get them out of their predicament.
“What if we insist the parley take place in the hook, the sandy spit just south of the village?” Jack asked. “Then the village wouldn’t be under their guns.”
“They’d cut us to pieces—” Smithers interrupted, but Quince cut him short with a wave of his hand.
“Where you going with this, Jack?”
“We need to sting them. Make them mad, put them in a lather to come after us even if it means meeting at the spit, where it’s harder to maneuver their ship and they can’t cover the village. We set a trap for them when they position for their broadside and cut their lines, so they run aground. Then their cannon won’t do them any good, and more importantly we have a chance of getting their ship.”
“How in hell are you gonna cut their stern line?” Smithers asked. “Ya figger they won’t have a half dozen muskets and a swivel gun ready to maul any boat or swimmer that gets near to it?”
“What if they can’t see us?”
“You gwin’ ta make us invisible, Jack?”
“What if we were already positioned underwater, on the path the ship’s stern would have to swing to?”
“The bell? But it would stick out like a sore thumb against that white bottom.” Paul voiced his concern.
“I’m thinking we could cover it with a blanket that we dunked in something sticky and stuck sand and coral to it somehow.”
“Tar’d do it,” Coop said. “We got least a barrel of it.”
The council went late into the night. The seamen were hardened to a world of risk and had weathered storms and survival by being tough once decisions were made. They were under their greatest threat yet, but once they resolved to follow Jack’s plan, no further bickering would be tolerated.
The meeting that followed among Quince, Yatoo, Jawa, and Jack also went well. Jawa’s usually impassive face broadened into a brief flicker of pleasure when he understood the crux of the plan. In turn Jawa explained to Yatoo that “the Dutch think we’re animals and that we and the Americans have the hearts of women for battle.” Yatoo said nothing but his jaw muscles tensed below the skin.
“Also,” Jawa continued, “Gan Roba of Papalo lives.”
Yatoo seemed surprised at the news that the Papaloan warlord was still alive and uncaptured. “He offers his allegiance to you and vows to fight to the death by our side. He has about thirty men left who can still wage war.”
For the next week, twenty men—twelve Americans and eight Belaurans—practiced from sunup until midday shooting the rifles salvaged from the Star. They picked an islet south of Belaur where there was no chance of the sound reaching the Dutch. Jack marveled at how quickly the group made progress. Unlike even the best-equipped European armies, the stranded Americans had a virtually unlimited supply of powder and shot with which to acquaint themselves to their weapons, and the only limits on their ability to train was eye fatigue and noise—even with wadding stuck in their ears, the sharp, brisk reports of the long rifles were painful after a while.
Jack taught them to lay the barrels on forked sticks like his father had shown him to do when testing arms. He helped each man sight-in his piece and fire at objects at varying distances, getting the sense of elevation necessary for long shots. By the end of the week the men were consistently hitting man-sized targets from distances as great as three hundred yards. With the day of the parley approaching, Jack shifted the emphasis to moving targets, showing them tricks he had been taught by his young hunter friends back in New England. Native children dragged thatch and wooden targets for the shooters and even pushed canoes by with makeshift targets erected in them.
Each day Jack blindfolded the riflemen and had them practice reloading and firing their weapons. The young American was tireless and his enthusiasm infectious. The Belaurans included some men Jack’s age; they treated Jack much as they did their own warlord, with deference and awe. Yanoo and Matoo, stepsons of Yatoo, were particularly dedicated and quick to learn.
Jawa, for his part, treated Jack as an equal, and took his own turn at firing the weapons, though he opted not to be one of the marksmen because of the amount of time it would require to train properly. He needed his spare hours to work with his own men in their reconnaissance of the Dutch camp, and spent long evenings with Jack hunched over a fire with Brown as interpreter, refining their strategy.
Jack became more at ease. Action was in the offing. The defense of his new family against a despicable enemy calmed him in a strange way. In the evenings Jack and Paul let the Belauran children dunk them in the shallows and sneak up on them, breathing through hollow reeds. Even his time spent with Wyalum had been more enjoyable. They had not made love, but one evening she had come into his hut and had placed his head in her lap; he had fallen into a dreamless sleep with her stroking his hair and cheek. But all these activities were simply a respite from thinking of the work ahead, and ultimately of his main mission—Jack O’Reilly had business half a world away that still consumed him.