Corsair Read online

  He staggered back, and the pirate pressed his advantage, swinging wildly, keeping Henry on his back foot and always on the defensive. Decatur had been adamant during their planning that the raid was to be as silent as possible because of the massive pirate armada lying at anchor in the harbor. With his strength quickly waning, Lafayette had no choice but to yank his pistol from the sash around his waist. He pulled the trigger even before he had acquired his target. The small measure of powder in the pan flashed, and as the gun came up the main charge blew with a sharp report. The .58 caliber ball smashed into the pirate’s chest.

  The shot would have dropped a normal man to the deck before he had time to blink, but the giant kept coming. Henry had just an instant to raise his sword as the scimitar swiped at him again. His blade saved him from having his arm cut off, but the stunning momentum tossed him bodily across the gun deck. He fell against one of the Philadelphia’s eighteen-pounders. With Decatur’s orders about silence still ringing in his ears, Lafayette fumbled for the lit oil lamp slung in a pouch around his waist and held the flame to the bronze cannon’s touchhole. He could smell the powder charge burning, although the sizzle barely registered above the sounds of the fight still raging across the ship. He kept his body between the great gun and his attacker, trusting that with his years of experience manning naval cannons his timing would be perfect.

  The pirate must have sensed his opponent was spent by the way Lafayette just stood there, as if accepting the inevitable. The pirate raised his Saracen sword and started to swing, his body anticipating the resistance of the blade cutting through flesh and bone. Then the American leapt aside. The Arab was too committed to check his swing or to notice the smoke coiling from the back of the cannon. It roared an instant later in a gush of sulfurous smoke.

  There were thick hemp lines designed to retard the force of the recoil and keep the gun from careening across the deck, but they still let the cannon rocket back several feet. The butt of the gun hit the pirate square in the groin, shattering his pelvis, crushing his hip joints, and splintering both thighbones. His limp body was flung against a beam, and he collapsed to the deck, folded in half—backward.

  Henry took a second to peer out the gunport. The eighteen-pound cannonball had smashed into the fortress across the harbor, and an avalanche of rubble tumbled from the gaping hole.

  “Two with one shot. Not bad, mon ami Henri, not bad at all.” It was John Jackson, the big bosun.

  “If Captain Decatur asks, it was one of these rotters who fired the gun, eh?”

  “That’s what I saw, Mr. Lafayette.”

  The cannon going off had acted like a starter’s pistol at the beginning of a race. The Arab pirates abandoned their defense and began rushing for the gunports, leaping and falling into the calm waters of the harbor. Those scrambling up the ladders for the main deck would doubtless run into Decatur and his men.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  The men returned to the starboard side of the ship where crew-mates aboard the Intrepid were standing by, ready to start passing combustibles up to the raiding party. Followed by Jackson and six others burdened with kegs of black powder, Henry Lafayette descended a ladder, passing crews’ quarters where hammocks still hung from the rafters but all other gear had been scavenged. They dropped lower still, to the orlop deck, the lowest on the frigate, and entered one of the ship’s holds. Most of the naval stores had been taken, but enough remained for the men to start burning the frigate.

  They worked quickly. Henry decided where they would lay their fuses, and when they were set he lit them with his oil lamp. The flames grew quickly, much quicker than any of them had anticipated. In an instant, the hold filled with reeking smoke. They started back up, holding their sleeves over their mouths so they could breathe. The ceiling above them suddenly burst into flames with a roar like a cannon blast. John Jackson was knocked off his feet and would have been crushed by a burning timber if Henry hadn’t grabbed one of his legs and dragged him across the rough planking. He helped the bosun up, and they started running, their team at their heels. They had to leap and duck as chunks of flaming wood continued to crash down from above.

  They reached a ladder, and Henry turned, urging his men upward. “Go, go, go, damn you, or we’re going to die down here.”

  He followed Jackson’s ponderous rump as a jet of fire raced down the corridor. Henry rammed his shoulder into Jackson’s backside and heaved with everything he had. The two emerged from the hatch, rolling to the side, as a volcanic eruption of flame bellowed up from the hold, hit the ceiling, and spread like an unholy canopy.

  They were in a sea of fire. The walls, deck, and ceiling were sheathed in flames, while the smoke was so thick that tears streamed from Henry’s eyes. Running blindly, he and Jackson found the next ladder and emerged on the gun deck. Smoke streamed out the ports, but enough fresh air reached them that for the first time in five minutes they could fill their lungs without coughing.

  A small explosion shook the Philadelphia, knocking Henry into John Jackson.

  “Let’s go, lad.”

  They clambered out one of the ports. Men on the Intrepid were there to help them settle in on the small ketch. Crewmen slapped Henry’s back several times. He thought they were congratulating him on a job well done, but in fact they were putting out the smoldering cloth of his native shirt.

  Above them on the rail, Stephen Decatur stood with one boot up on the bulwark.

  “Captain,” Lafayette shouted, “lower decks are clear.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant.” He waited for a couple of his men to climb down ropes and then descended to his ship.

  The Philadelphia was engulfed in fire. Flames shot from her gunports and were starting to climb her rigging. Soon, the heat would be intense enough to cook off the powder charges in her cannons, eight of which were aimed directly at the Intrepid.

  The forward line holding the ketch to the frigate was cast off easily enough, but the stern line jammed. Henry pushed men aside and drew his sword. The rope was nearly an inch thick, and his blade, dulled by combat, still sliced it clean with one blow.

  With the fire consuming so much air, the ketch couldn’t fill her sails, and the jib was dangerously close to tangling with the Philadelphia ’s burning rigging. The men used oars to try to force their vessel away from the floating pyre, but as soon as they pushed free the conflagration drew them back in again.

  Bits of burning sail from the frigate’s mainmast fell like confetti. One sailor’s hair caught fire.

  “Henry,” Decatur bellowed, “unship the boat and tow us free.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  Henry, Jackson, and four others lowered the dinghy. With a line secured to the Intrepid’s bow, they pulled away from the ketch. When the rope came taut, they heaved against the oars, straining to gain inches. When they pulled the paddles from the water for another stroke, half the distance they had gained was lost to the fire-born wind.

  “Pull, you sons of dogs,” Henry shouted. “Pull!”

  And they did. Heaving against the sixty-four deadweight tons of their ship and the powerful suction of the fire, they fought stubbornly. The men hauled on the oars until the vertebrae crackled in their backs and veins bulged from their necks. They pulled their ship and crew away from the Philadelphia until Decatur could get sails up her mainmast and fill them with the slight breeze now blowing in from the desert.

  There was a sudden bloom of light high up on the castle wall. A moment later came the concussive roar of a cannon. The shot landed well beyond the ketch and rowboat, but it was followed by a dozen more. The water came alive with tiny dimples—small-arms fire from lookouts and guards running along the breakwater.

  Aboard the Intrepid, men manned the oars, rowing for everything they were worth, while behind them the Philadelphia suddenly flared as the remainder of her canvas caught fire.

  For twenty tense minutes, the men pulled while, around them, shot after shot hit the water. One ball passed through the
Intrepid’s topgallant sail, but other than that the ship wasn’t struck. The small-arms fire died away first, and then they were beyond the reach of the Bashaw’s cannons. The exhausted men collapsed into each other, laughing and singing. In their wake, the walls of the fortress were lit with the wavering glow of the burning ship.

  Henry brought the dinghy about and slipped it under the davits.

  “Well done, my friend.” Decatur was smiling, his face reflecting the ethereal glimmer behind them.

  Too exhausted to do anything but pant, Henry threw Decatur a weak salute.

  All eyes suddenly turned toward the harbor as the raging towers that were the Philadelphia’s masts slowly collapsed across her port side in an explosion of sparks. And then, as a final salute, her guns cooked off, an echoing cannonade that sent some balls across the water and others into the castle walls.

  The men roared at her act of defiance against the Barbary pirates.

  “What now, Captain?” Lafayette asked,

  Decatur stared across the sea, not looking at Henry when he spoke. “This won’t end tonight. I recognized one of the corsairs in the harbor. It was Suleiman Al-Jama’s. She’s called the Saqr. It means falcon. You can bet your last penny that he’s making ready to sail against us this very moment. The Bashaw won’t take vengeance on our captured sailors for what we did tonight—they are too valuable to him—but Al-Jama will want revenge.”

  “He was once a holy man, right?”

  “Up until a few years ago,” Decatur agreed. “He was what the Muslims called an Imam. Kind of like a priest. Such was his hate for Christendom that he decided preaching wasn’t enough, and he took up arms against any and all ships not flying a Muslim flag.”

  “I heard tell that he takes no prisoners.”

  “I’ve heard the same. The Bashaw can’t be too happy about that since prisoners can be ransomed, but he holds little sway over Al-Jama. The Bashaw made a deal with the devil when he let Al-Jama occasionally stage out of Tripoli. I’ve also heard he has no end of volunteers to join him when he goes raiding. His men are suicidal in their devotion to him.

  “Your rank-and-file Barbary pirate sees what he is doing as a profession, a way to make a living. It is something they’ve been doing for generations. You saw tonight how most of them fled the Philadelphia as soon as we boarded. They weren’t going to get themselves killed in a fight they couldn’t win.

  “But Al-Jama’s followers are a different breed altogether. This is a holy calling for them. They even have a word for it: jihad. They will fight to the death if it means they can take one more infidel with them.”

  Henry thought about the big pirate who had come at him relentlessly, battling on even after he’d been shot. He wondered if he was one of Al-Jama’s followers. He hadn’t gotten a look at the man’s eyes, but he’d sensed a berserker insanity to the pirate, that somehow killing an American was more important to him than preventing the Philadelphia from being burned.

  “Why do you think they hate us?” he asked.

  Decatur looked at him sharply. “Lieutenant Lafayette, I have never heard a more irrelevant question in my life.” He took a breath. “But I’ll tell you what I think. They hate us because we exist. They hate us because we are different from them. But, most important, they hate us because they think they have the right to hate us.”

  Henry remained silent for a minute, trying to digest Decatur’s answer, but such a belief system was so far beyond him he couldn’t get his mind around it. He had killed a man tonight and yet he hadn’t hated him. He was just doing what he’d been ordered to do. Period. It hadn’t been personal and he couldn’t fathom how anyone could make it so.

  “What are your orders, Captain?” he finally asked.

  “The Intrepid’s no match for the Saqr, especially as overcrowded as we are. We’ll link up with the Siren as we planned, but rather than return to Malta in convoy I want you and the Siren to stay out here and teach Suleiman Al-Jama that the American Navy isn’t afraid of him or his ilk. Tell Captain Stewart that he is not to fail.”

  Henry couldn’t keep the smile off his face. For two years, they had seen little action, with the exception of capturing the Intrepid and now burning the Philadelphia. He was excited to take the fight to the corsairs directly.

  “If we can capture or kill him,” he said, “it will do wonders for our morale.”

  “And severely weaken theirs.”

  An hour after dawn, the lookout high atop the Siren’s mainmast called down, “Sail! Sail ho! Five points off the starboard beam.”

  Henry Lafayette and Lieutenant Charles Stewart, the ship’s captain, had been waiting for this since sunup.

  “About damned time,” Stewart said.

  At just twenty-five years of age, Stewart had received his commission a month before the Navy was officially established by Congress. He had grown up with Stephen Decatur, and, like him, Stewart was a rising star in the Navy. Shipboard scuttlebutt had it that he would receive a promotion to captain before the fleet returned to the United States. He had a slender build, and a long face with wide-apart, deep-set eyes. He was a firm but fair disciplinarian, and whatever ship he served on was consistently considered lucky by its crew.

  Sand in the hourglass drizzled down for ten minutes before the lookout shouted again. “She’s running parallel to the coast.”

  Stewart grunted. “Bugger must suspect we’re out here, number one. He’s trying to end around us and then tack after the Intrepid.” He then addressed Bosun Jackson, who was the ship’s sailing master. “Let go all sails.”

  Jackson bellowed the order up to the men hanging in the rigging, and in a perfectly choreographed flurry of activity a dozen sails unfurled off the yards and blossomed with the freshening breeze. The foremast and mainmast creaked with the strain as the two-hundred-and-forty-ton ship started carving through the Mediterranean.

  Stewart glanced over the side at the white water streaming along the ship’s oak hull. He estimated their speed at ten knots, and knew they would do another five in this weather.

  “She’s spotted us,” the lookout shouted. “She’s piling on more sail.”

  “There isn’t a lateen-rigged ship in these waters that’s faster than us,” Henry said.

  “Aye, but he draws half the water we do. If he wants, he can stay in close to shore and beyond the range of our guns.”

  “When I spoke with Captain Decatur, I had the impression this Suleiman Al-Jama isn’t afraid of a fight.”

  “You think he’ll come out to meet us?”

  “Decatur thinks so.”

  “Good.”

  For the next fourteen hours, the Siren doggedly pursued the Saqr. With a greater spread of canvas, the American brig was several knots faster than Al-Jama’s raider, but the Arab captain knew these waters better than anyone. Time and again he would lure the Siren dangerously close to shoals and force her to tack off the chase in search of deeper water. The Saqr also managed to find stronger winds close to the shore, winds driven off the searing desert beyond the cliffs that towered over the coastline in unending ramparts.

  The gap between the ships noticeably shrank when the sun started to set and the inshore breeze slowed.

  “We’ll have him within the hour,” Stewart said, accepting a glass of tepid water from his cabin steward.

  He surveyed the open gun deck. Crews were standing by their cannons, the keen edge of expectation in their eyes. Shot and powder charges were laid in and at the ready, though not too much in case a gun took a direct hit. Powder monkeys—boys as young as ten—were ready to scamper back and forth to the magazine to keep the weapons fed. Men were aloft in the rigging, ready to alter sail as the battle dictated. And pairs of Marine marksmen were making their way to the fighting tops on the foremast and mainmast. Two were brothers from Appalachia, and while no one on the crew could understand them when they spoke they both could load and shoot four times a minute and score bull’s-eyes with all four shots.

  Two white
plumes suddenly obscured the Saqr’s fantail, and a moment later came the boom of the shots. One ball landed fifty yards off the Intrepid’s port bow while the other landed well astern.

  Stewart and Lafayette looked at each other. Henry gave voice to their mutual concern. “Her stern chasers are long guns. Double our range at the very least.”

  “Mr. Jackson, come about to port ten degrees,” Stewart ordered, to throw off the Saqr’s gunners. “Standing order for a similar maneuver with every shot fired. Turn toward where the closest ball falls.”

  “And your orders if we’re hit?” the big bosun asked before he could stop himself.

  Stewart could have had Jackson lashed for such an insolent comment; instead, he said, “Dock yourself a day’s pay, and hope we have more ship than you have salary.”

  The wind close to shore suddenly died. The Saqr’s large triangular sails lost tension and flapped uselessly while those aboard the Intrepid remained taut. They came in astern of the pirate ship at a slight angle, so as to avoid her aft guns. At a hundred and fifty yards, three of the Saqr’s cannons fired, blowing a wall of smoke over the corsair’s flank that completely hid her from view. Two rounds went high, while the third struck the Siren’s hull but didn’t penetrate.

  Stewart remained silent, closing the distance, increasing his chances of a hit with each foot gained. He saw they weren’t yet targeted by any of the other guns, so he waited until the Arab crew was running out the weapons they had just cleaned and reloaded.

  “Fire as you bear!”

  Four carronades went off with one throaty roar that beat in on Henry’s chest as if he’d been kicked. The bow was enveloped in smoke that whipped along the length of the Intrepid’s hull as she charged the Saqr. On the fighting tops, the Marines were busy with their muskets, picking off pirates on the Saqr’s deck who thought they were invisible behind the ship’s railings.