The Flag of Freedom (34 page)

On she came.

‘Stand by,' he murmured to Tully, more like a prayer than an order. ‘Any moment now.'

From where he stood he could see along the length of her gundeck and it was crowded with men. So many, there must be ten to each gun and as many in the tops with their muskets and their swivels. He had doubted Spiridion's figures, wondering how they could cram so many into such a small vessel, but somehow they had, and here they all were, standing by to fire their broadsides or to board. Or both.

And on she came …

Surely Lisle would not risk coming too close for fear of grounding. She would cut across their bows and rake the
Swallow
with her broadside until she struck, or was so knocked about there would be no fight left in her.

Nathan waited, with every nerve screaming at him to give the order. But he had to let her come so close there was no turning back: back into the shoals of the bay where he could not follow. Two hundred yards. One hundred … He could see the faces of the gunners at the long nines in her bow. They fired again – at point-blank range now, the long plume of flame almost scorching the
Swallow
's rail. One shot came straight through it, showering the quarter-deck with splinters and striking the 6-pounder on the larboard side, knocking it clean from its mount. Another came so close to Nathan it thrummed the air about his ear, and as he looked round in clownish bemusement, he saw that it had taken off the head of one of the quartermasters behind him, the body still standing upright with the blood spurting from the severed neck, until the knees
buckled and the corpse collapsed onto the deck like a puppet whose strings have been cut.

Nathan looked back at the advancing schooner.

‘Now,'
he said softly – almost resignedly, to Tully.

It had taken them the best part of the day to prepare, hove to in the heat of the midday sun just out of sight of the shore.

‘Just like a keelhauling,' he had said to Tully, as if he did it all the time.

He had seen it done only once, in fact, when he was a midshipman in the South Seas – carried out on a Dutch ship, for it was illegal in the King's Navy. A terrible business, the memory of which had stayed with him for days: the victim tied to a line and dragged under the keel and up the other side, emerging like some nightmare creature of the deep with the skin hanging in shreds from his back, lacerated by the barnacles on the ship's hull.

But it was a lot easier to keelhaul a man than an 18-foot gig.

First they had dropped four cables over the bow, working them aft until they were hanging under the middle of the ship. Then they had hauled the gig up from the stern, tying more lines to the thwarts on both sides and opening the seacock until she filled with water. Then they dragged her under the keel, half the crew pulling on one side, the rest letting out the cables on the other – constructing a false keel that extended their own by a good few feet.

It took them four hours to make it secure. It took less than a minute for the axemen in the waist to cut it free.

Nathan felt the movement instantly as the
Swallow
shed her false keel, and the topsails, instantly loosed from the yard, flapped and filled. He was alive now, all dullness gone, as alive as his ship, rushing to the quarterdeck rail to shout encourage ment to his men as they leaped to their feet and bent over the waiting carronades.

Slowly but surely the wind brought their bows round to larboard, the
Meshuda
so close now Nathan could have thrown a stone and hit her bow. He had a moment's doubt – thinking about the two women, hoping they had been stowed safely below the waterline, but it was too late to worry about that now.

He gave the nod to Tully. ‘Fire as you bear!' and heard the command echoed down the length of the gundeck before he was deafened by the roar of the first carronade.

It is doubtful if anyone aboard the
Meshuda
realised the corvette had come free of the sands. The smoke was still wreathing about her bows as the first shot hit her. And as the wind continued to bring the
Swallow
's head round towards the open sea, all twelve of her starboard carronades poured their fire into the schooner.

It was not until the smoke had cleared that Nathan was able to see the damage they had done. The hollow shot fired by the carronades was designed to break up on impact, showering the enemy deck with wood and metal. But at such close quarters it had punched jagged holes in her hull, knocking several gunports into one. The devastation on the gundeck must have been dreadful. Some of the guns had fired back, but not many, and Nathan could see no obvious signs of damage aboard the
Swallow
.

Someone on the schooner's quarterdeck – Lisle himself, perhaps – must have finally realised what had happened and ordered the helmsmen to bear away. She answered well enough at first, but the
Swallow
was still coming round with the wind, gathering pace as she did so, and the two vessels were running side by side when the corvette fired her second broadside.

If Nathan still entertained a prejudice against carronades, he suspended it for the duration. At close range they gave the little sloop almost as much firepower as a ship of the line – which presumably was the purpose of installing them in pre ference to long guns. Mr Wallace was dancing with glee or astonishment – or both – and Nathan was about to issue a sharp reprimand when he remembered that this was the first time the man had seen his precious ordnance fired in anger. Thankfully, George Banjo was dashing from breech to breech, in that curious gait beloved of gunners, like a large ungainly bird, unused to walking, constantly doubling at the waist to peer through the gunports or check a powder charge or a flintlock. Lamb was doing the same thing, up with the forward guns, and Lieutenant-Captain Belli – where
was
Lieutenant-Captain Belli? Then he saw him, or rather what was left of him, stretched out on the gundeck with half his head missing and two of his Russians wailing over the ruin. Nathan opened his mouth to shout at them to carry him below, and then snapped it shut. They would not understand him, nor would they be able to carry the officer below, not unless they took a half-dozen men from the guns.

The
Meshuda
was drawing away from them now. Nathan doubted if she was a faster sailor, not with the
wind on her beam, but the
Swallow
was still struggling to gain momentum from her standing start. Lisle clearly sought to take advantage of this, for instead of veering further to leeward, the schooner began to turn into the wind, and Nathan saw that he planned to cut across their bows and rake them with his remaining guns.

‘But two can play at that,' Nathan said to himself. He grabbed the sailing master by the shoulder to catch his atten tion, for they were both deafened by the guns, and shouted instructions in his ear. Tully heard enough to have the gun crews racing across the deck, and they already had the larboard guns run out and aimed as the
Swallow
cut across the schooner's wake. This time the smoke was blown forward and Nathan had a clear view of the effect, as one by one his cannonades discharged into the
Meshuda's
stern.

The first six were double-shotted and at that range they simply blew the stern apart, smashing through the windows and the ornate gilt scrolling and hurtling the length of her gundeck. The next six fired grapeshot – 200 musket balls to every gun, released from their canvas bags at the moment of firing. Nathan could see clear through the gaping holes, and even in the fury of battle he winced at the havoc they had caused.

But ironically it was the 6-pounders on the quarterdeck that did the most damage, for one of them carried away the helm, killing or maiming the two quartermasters and cutting the cable between wheel and rudder so she could no longer steer.

The
Swallow
came up on her starboard side and Nathan ordered his men to hold their fire, willing the schooner to
strike for it was plain that she could not bring her broadside to bear. Lisle's men were still firing back with the swivel guns in the tops – and with some effect, for they were firing straight down onto the corvette's exposed gundeck. Men were going down like skittles and with a shock that was like a physical blow, Nathan saw that one of them was Lamb. He started forward but Tully reached the boy first and lifted his head gently from the deck.

‘Load up with chain,' Nathan ordered, almost sorrowfully. ‘Maximum elevation.' And they fired the next broadside into the masts, clearing the marksmen out of the tops and tearing through the rigging like a gale through a forest.

And so the
Meshuda
drifted, rudderless, her sails in tatters, onto the bank.

N
athan backed the mizzen and they lay off the
Meshuda
's bow at a distance of a pistol shot, while they swabbed out the
Swallow
's guns and reloaded. But there was no fight left in in the schooner, and the wailing of the wounded, carried across to them on the wind, was piteous to hear. Nathan had Cathcart hail them in English, Turkish and Arabic, calling on them to strike. And to his immense relief the green flag came down from the mizzen and it was ended.

He left Tully in command and took his barge over, with the launch and the cutter, all loaded to the gunwales with armed men for fear of treachery, but it was not guns they needed now, and all the swabs in the world would not have mopped up the blood on that benighted deck. Nathan had never seen anything like it, not even in the two great battles he had fought with Jervis and with Hood.
He stood gazing around him, stupefied, at the debris of dismounted guns and shattered timbers. The bodies and body parts, the severed heads, arms, legs … And the crawling, crying wounded, the arms stretched out, the screams and lamentations, the frantic petition to Allah, Allah … Allah the merciful. And the others who simply looked at them, dully or accusingly, helplessly or with eyes filled with hate.

He remembered Mr Wallace dancing with joy when he saw the effect on the schooner's timbers. Well, he should see the effect now on human flesh.

And yet Wallace could not be blamed for this. Wallace was as much a machine as the carronades themselves. It was the ship's Captain who gave the order.

Nathan stumbled towards the quarterdeck, watching where he put his feet, avoiding the eyes of the men who still had eyes to see.

Imlay was already there, talking to someone – and in English – a short, stocky man with a reddish beard, dressed all in white: white shirt, white pants, even a white turban round his head, spotless white amidst all that blood and gore. Nathan stared in astonishment and something like awe, as if he had been chasing a myth all that way from Tripoli, and not a living man.

Murad Reis, Admiral of the Fleet, formerly Able Seaman Peter Lisle of His Britannic Majesty's Navy.

He gave Nathan an elaborate bow that might have been ironic, and Nathan nodded stiffly, wondering if he should hang him now or later, for he was a deserter and a renegade – and someone had to pay for the carnage on that ship. But Peter Lisle could wait. There were other priorities.

They found her in the orlop, beneath the waterline, where she had been stowed for the duration of the battle. Louisa Jane Devereux of Virginia. Dressed, for some reason, in men's clothing and, in contrast to Lisle, all in black, with a turban wound round the blonde tresses that Nathan had last seen hanging down from the balustrade of the American Consul's house in Venice. Her face was less perfect now – rather grubby, in fact – and she was crouched against the bulwarks like a trembling animal, a fist pressed into her mouth and her eyes uncommonly bright. An animal, or a creature from Bedlam.

Imlay spoke to her gently. He was an American, he said, sent by her father and the President to rescue her. She was safe now, in good hands, and soon she would be reunited with her father in Naples. This was the first Nathan had heard of it, but he gave Imlay the benefit of the doubt for once.