Pirate Latitudes

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.