Dewey Lambdin - The King

• Название: The King
• Автор: Dewey Lambdin
• Жанр: Морские приключения

Fresh from war in the Americas, young navy veteran Alan Lewrie finds London pure pleasure. Then, at Plymouth he boards the trading ship Telesto, to find out why merchantmen are disappearing in the East Indies. Between the pungent shores of Calcutta and teaming Canton, Lewrie--reunited with his scoundrel father--discovers a young French captain, backed by an armada of Mindanaon pirates, on a plundering rampage. While treaties tie the navy's hands, a King's privateer is free to plunge into the fire and blood of a dirty little war on the high South China Sea.Ladies' man, officer, and rogue, Alan Lewrie is the ultimate man of adventure. In the worthy tradition of Hornblower, Aubrey, and Maturin, his exploits echo with the sounds of crowded ports and the crash of naval warfare.

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"Reg'ment!"

" 'Tal'ion!" came the chorus.

"Halt!"

Rather a lot of 'em, Sir Hugo thought, surveying his enemies. The village had come to a boil, and what seemed a brigade of pirates had emerged, swords, spears and antique muskets waving, each done up in gold, silk and batik-printed cotton as sleek and shiny as an army of poisonously colorful sea-snakes.

"Reg'ment will load!" he shouted, stepping back toward his color party. "Skirmishers, engage!"

The light companies broke off into skirmishing pairs, one man standing, and one kneeling. With a howl of rage, the Lanun Rovers lurched forward, thousands of them in an avenging mob. The flat crack of muskets sounded from the light companies as they opened fire. Once a man had discharged his piece, he would retreat a few paces behind his rear-rank man, who would cover him while he reloaded, and take a shot of his own. Back they came, giving ground slowly and raking the leading pirate ranks with ball, dropping a man here, a man there. The pirates checked, shying away from being the first man to die, while their leaders urged them on.

"Light companies, retire!" Sir Hugo howled. "Reg'ment! First rank, kneel!"

Emboldened by the seeming retreat of the skirmishers, the pirates found their courage again, and started walking forward. At first uneasily, then with greater boldness. Some began to trot, to save their lungs and strength for hand-to-hand combat later. Some braver souls broke into a run.

Sir Hugo stepped forward again, to ascertain that both light companies were safely out of the line of fire on the flanks.

Brown Bess was a hideously inaccurate weapon. Massed gunfire shoulder to shoulder settled the day, delivered at a man-killing sixty yards. To strike a man in the middle, one aimed high for the neck at that range, even so. With his regiments deployed in only two ranks Sir Hugo had to wait to let them come even closer.

"Cock your locks!" Sixty yards, and mechanical crickets sang.

"Present!" Fifty yards, and barrels were leveled with sighs.

Forty yards. "Fire!"

The long line of musketmen erupted in a wall of gunpowder and the crackling reports of priming pans and rammed charges sounding like burning twigs. Pirates screamed in surprise, and went down like wheat.

"Second rank… cock your locks! Present… fire!"

He could hear the rattle of ramrods just before the second rank pulled their triggers and the snapping and crackling rang up and down the line. More pirates howled, with pain this time, and he saw men driven backward, thrown off their feet and back into their mates by the sledgehammer blows of.75 caliber lead ball.

"Guns!" he yelled, turning to glare at Captain Addams. And the artillery went off, rippling from the center half-battery of six-pounders out to the flanks where the converted boat-guns barked and reared on their trails.

"Well, Goddamn!" Sir Hugo spat. He'd never seen the like, not in the last war certainly, not at Gibraltar for sure. The air was so moist with humidity that when the artillery discharged, those brutal barrels not only flung out a huge cloud of spent powder and sparks, they split the air with their loads, leaving a misty trail behind.

The best one could expect from any field gun loaded with canister and grape was about five hundred yards, and one usually saw the end result, but not the passage of shot. But this time, it was as if each barrel had flung out a giant's phantas-magorical fist of roiled air that went milky as the shock wave passed through it. Like a row of shotguns, the artillery cleaved great swathes from the enemy ranks. Densely packed as they were, they went down by platoons. Before each piece, there was a mown lane of dead and dying twenty yards across and three times that deep!

"Platoon fire!" Sir Hugo roared. Now for the grim business to continue in normal fashion, to create a continuous rolling volley of fire up and down the line. No one could fire faster and with more effect than an English-trained regiment.

The pipes had been skirling out something Sir Hugo had never heard before. Now, with no need to set a marching pace, they broke into civilian strathspeys and reels. "The Wind That Shook the Barley," "The Devil among the Tailors" and "The High Road to Linton." Hard-driving, frightening in their hurried pace, for all their gaiety, dance tunes turned to the Devil's business amid the rattling of musketry and the deeper-bellied slamming of the guns.

"They're breaking!" Major Gaunt shouted. "They're retiring!"

"Cease fire! Load! Fix bayonets!"

"Fix… bayonets!" the officers repeated eerily, and the sudden silence was broken by the slither of steel, steel that winked and glittered in the dawn.

"The 19th will advance!"

The pipers cut off their latest reel, extemporizing themselves back into a march as the coehorn mortars began to fire. Explosively fused round-shot lofted overhead to burst in mid-air above the wavering hordes of pirates, who had just begun to screw their courage back to the sticking post, and were ready to charge once more.

It was the guns that decided the matter. Slow to roll between the company ranks, the regiment had to stay to a half-step pace even with the pipes urging them on, so that they looked as if they minced forward, but with both ranks bearing musket-stocks held close to the hip, barrels and wicked bayonets inclined forward. And for bayonet work, the sepoys had to be closer together, shoulder to shoulder, reducing their front to a bare two hundred yards.

With an unintelligible shout, the native pirates came forward to meet them once more, sure they could sweep around both flanks and encircle them this time, and chop them to bits at last.

"Reg'ment… halt!" Sir Hugo screamed. "First rank, kneel! Cock your locks! We'll serve 'em another portion of the hottest curry they've ever tasted, by God!"

Chiswick pulled back the fire-locks of his two pistols, stuck his smallsword into the turf in front of him, and stood ready, with his nerves singing a gibbering song as that manic horde came on.

"By volley… first rank… fire!"

Twenty muskets discharged at sixty yards. Perhaps nine foe-men went down, trampled by their fellows in their rage to get at Sir Hugo's men.

'Too damned soon!" he cursed himself. "Second rank, present! Fire!" Another eight or nine pirates were hammered backward.

Too few once more! The artillery subadar looked at him, and he waved his arm vigorously. Both boat-guns bucked and reared, slashing the front of that implacable mob with grape and canister, and finally they checked their headlong rush, shying away for a second.

"Goddamnit!" Chiswick moaned. He had shot all his bolts, and there was nothing left. Although his immediate front was cleared, there were at least a hundred foe sweeping his right flank. He fired both his pistols, and took down one man, then cast them aside and drew his sword from the earth. "Bayonets! Charge!"

His troops went in at a rush, weapons fully extended, to be met with shields, spears and sword blades. At first, they carried all in front of them with bayonet and musket-butt. Chiswick carved a spearman's face open, reversed and ripped the belly from another to his left. Nandu gave a great scream as he was shouldered backward and stumbled under the point of a third. Chiswick hammered the edge of his blade across the foe's back; the man screamed like a rabbit with his spine cut in half, then twitched uncontrollably.

"Dahnyavahd, sahib, dahnyavahd!" Nandu shivered as Chiswick helped him to his feet. "Achcha!"*

*"Thanks, sahib, thanks! Good!"

"Bloody young fool!" Sir Hugo grumbled. "Captain Yorke, face right, double time and reinforce the right flank! Support the guns! Nineteenth! Charge!"

Once again, two slim ranks of musketeers had shattered pirate ambitions, and the guns had strewn the ground with howling, broken wounded. It was time to go in with cold steel, or be driven back.

"One more charge!" Choundas insisted.

"No tuan, boats!" his interpreter shouted back as the pirate chieftain raved and slobbered with wrath. "He want go now! No good this place no more! No good fight on land!"

"He'll sail off and leave all his treasure?" Choundas sneered coldly. "Sail off and abandon all my gifts? All the muskets and shot?"

"He say, you want, you stay and keep, tuan" the interpreter finally replied. "He go Illana. Steal more nex' year."

"Filthy cowards," Choundas whispered. "Filthy pagan brutes!" He turned on his heel and stalked off for the waiting launch, his face burning with anger at this final failure of his ally, this final proof of their utter uselessness. And with his own failure as well. He had no hope now of a raiding season. He'd seen the two regimental colors and the massed bands, all the artillery that only two one-battalion units could array. Where had the heretical English gotten so many ships to carry that many troops, and then land them on the eastern shore, where he had not expected them? Only an overt operation with the full strength of the Royal Navy could put such an expedition at sea and support it this far from India. Something had happened to force the English to take the lid of secrecy off. Had another war broken out back home of which he was unaware?

"To the ship," he snapped at his waiting boat crew as he sat down in the stern. "And quickly!"

"He', merde alors!" his new coxswain groaned, pointing out to sea. "Les Anglais!"

Chapter 13

Have we the depth to stand in closer?" Hogue asked.

"And a quarter less four!" the leadsman shouted from up forward as if in answer.

"Captain's Ayscough's recollections say we do, sir," Lewrie replied with a happy but fierce grin on his features. "Helm down to larboard, quartermaster. Ease her up as close as she'll lie to the wind, full and by."

"Full an' by, sir!"

"How we got this far, I don't know, sir," Hogue enthused as they swept into the harbor in Telesto's wake. "I was sure that was a battery on the point, but nary a peep from them did we hear."

"Most thoroughly in the barrel, drunk as lords, I expect," Lewrie said, clapping his hands with anticipation as he strode to the quarterdeck nettings to look down upon his gun deck. "Mister Owen, I give you leave to open fire as you bear!"

"Thankee, sir!" Owen shouted back. "Wait for it, lads, wait for it!"

Culverin could work her way much closer to the beach than any of the other vessels, where her short-ranged but heavy car-ronades had the advantage. There was a mushrooming pillar of smoke coming from beyond the native settlement. He could see a coehorn mortar shell burst in mid-air, most excellently fused, against the rim of sunrise on the horizon over the trees. And on that wide beach was a gunner's fondest dreams- stationary targets drawn up with their prows resting on the sand, their guns pointing inland and useless! At least twenty blood-red praos abandoned by their crews engaged against the troops on the far side of the little town.

Telesto opened fire first, followed by Lady Charlotte. Sand flew into the air as eighteen- and twelve-pounder balls struck the shore. Boats twitched and thrashed as they were hit, their sterns leaping out of the water to fall back downward and flail the shallow waters like a beaver's slap. Masts and paddles went spinning in confusion, and hulls split open as they were flayed with iron.

"Two cables, sir!" Owen shouted. " 'Ere we go, then! Number one gun… fire!"

Lewrie stood amazed as the flower of smoke and flame gushing from the muzzle expanded into an opening blossom larger than any he had ever witnessed, the air torn apart with weapons' song, and the twenty-four-pounder ball's progress marked by a misty trail of shock and turbulence as if they were firing combustible carcasses. The ball hit a prao on the beach, square on the stern-posts, ripped right through the light wood and flung a shower of broken timbers and laced-together planking into the air. There was a sudden, screeching rrawwrrkk! as the ball rivened her from stern to stem, to topple her in ruin.

"Huzzah, lads, do us another!" Lewrie cheered his gunners as they took aim with the rest of the starboard battery. "Quartermaster, luff us up a mite. Slow our progress to give the gunner more time to aim."

Smoky, belching crashes as the carronades spewed out their loads, thin dirty trails of roiled air emerging from the sudden mists of burned powder and then the slamming screech of ravaged wood ashore as another prao, then a third, leaped like frightened birds at being touched with iron, screaming their rrawwrrkk, rrawwrrkk! as if in their death-agonies.

"Carry on, Mister Owen," Lewrie said, picking up a telescope for a better view. In the distance, he could see villagers running one direction, pirates in their gaudier clothing falling back into the village and down to the beach to save what they could of their ships, to fall in irregular clots of terror as iron shattered and keened in clouds of sharp shards and splintered wood.

He directed his glass forward to see Telesto take Poisson D'Or under fire. The French ship had cut or slipped her cables, abandoning her anchors, and was getting underway, even as several ship's boats thrashed oars in her wake to catch her up.

"By God, I do believe that's our bastard Choundas in one of those boats!" Lewrie crowed aloud. "Can't even fight from your ship this time, can you, you pervert? Have to let some more of your people do your dying for you, you poxy whoreson Frog?"

Poisson D'Or had gotten her jibs and stays'ls set, her spanker over the stern hoisted, and had let fall her tops'Is, but they were a-cock-bill and not yet fully braced round to draw the wind. She was not yet under full control, but her larboard gunports flew open in unison, and muzzles emerged. She would fight it out.

And right in Telesto's wake sailed Lady Charlotte, paying off the wind a little as if in trepidation of getting too close, but her guns crashed out a solid broadside, and the sea around Poisson D'Or erupted in feathers of spray, and several balls hit her low, "twixt wind and water."

A hefty explosion drew Lewrie's attention back to the task at hand. A ball had hit one of the praos on her foredeck where her guns were seated, igniting a powder store, which had blown up in a great dark bulb of smoke and flame. The prao had disintegrated and was cascading down in smoldering chunks onto two other boats to either side, setting them alight and scattering the pirates around them.

"A guinea for that gunner, Mister Owen, my word on it!" Alan vowed.

"And a quarter less five!" the leadsman called out over the roar of the battle.

"Damme, sir, we could get inshore even closer!" Hogue shouted. "We're dead astern of Poisson D'Or's anchorage. Deep water, sir!"

"Luff up again, quartermaster. Pinch us closer inshore!" Alan commanded. "Mister Owen, load your next broadside with canister and grape-shot! Put an iron hail on the beach and skin the bastards!"