The Invasion Year (43 page)

“Wouldn’t want water gettin’ in and ruinin’ it, right?”

“Perish th’ fackin’ thought, sor!” Desmond assured him.

“That should do it, I think,” Lewrie decided, passing the borrowed oar back forward. “Let’s free the gaff and the tow-line and get away from it. Bugger the bayonets. Just toss ’em over and get a way on.”

Only the forward-most larboard oarsmen could get their oars in the water, whilst the starboard-side rowers were free to work. The tow-line was tossed free, and the cutter began to move again.

“It’s followin’ us!” someone cried.

With only the full bank of starboard oars at work, the cutter was circling round to its left despite Desmond holding the tiller hard over to larboard to steer away; they were circling the torpedo, and it was still right alongside!

“We’re spiked to it!” Furfy pointed out, most anxiously.

“Must’ve spun about and stuck a bayonet into the hull,” Lewrie said, hoping that MacTavish had spent a
goodly
sum on his clocks! “Get us free. Gaff, here! Shove the bastard off!”

“Un-screw the bayonet from the barrel stub!” another suggested.

“Won’t come free! Th’ bitch’s rollin’ too much t’get a grip!”

“Arms and legs, over the side and push, lads!” Lewrie snapped. “Heave, heave, heave!”

“ ’At done it, sir!”

The torpedo at last drifted a few more feet away, bobbing like a gigantic cork, the lights from the town and anchored invasion boats glinting off its painted top and steel grapnels and bayonet blades.

“Ain’t natural…’tis Devil’s work, them things!” a sailor whispered to his mate as they got both banks of oars working in unison and made their escape. Lewrie opened his pocket compass and held it close to his face but could not quite read it. On the way in, before they had left
Fusee,
the course had been Sou’-Sou’east, and the reciprocal to take them back near the converted bomb vessel
should
be Nor’-Nor’west, but … he looked astern to the lights of St. Valery and Le Crotoy. “Keep the towns on our starboard quarter, Desmond, and that’ll take us somewhere near
Fusee.
”

“Aye, sor,” Liam Desmond replied with a firm mutter and a nod. Now they were getting away from their infernal device, he sounded in much calmer takings. By the faint whispers and brief flashes of his sailors’ teeth, the cutter’s crew seemed much relieved, too, some even uttering very soft laughter.

Jesus, what a shitten mess!
Lewrie thought, letting out a sigh, relaxing himself, falling into an exhausted lassitude. That happened to him, now and then, at the conclusion of battle aboard ship, or the end of a person-to-person fight with his sword; the intensely keen concentration at either left him so spent of a sudden that he sometimes needed a good sit-down to regain his strength, and his wits. Lewrie shook himself back to full awareness, and groped round the sole of the cutter for his hat. It was soaked, of course, and trampled into ruin, but he clapped it back on his head.

And what was the time when the damned clock began to run?
he suddenly thought;
You bloody
fool,
ye didn’t note it! How’ll I know if the bastard blows up on time? Shit, shit, shit!

*   *   *

“Coffee, sir?” Lt. Johns’s cabin steward offered.

“Aye, more than welcome,” Lewrie replied, accepting a battered pewter mug of scalding-hot black coffee, waving off the further offer of goat’s milk or sugar. They had found
Fusee
by steering blind ’til espying the long, irregular skirt of foam breaking round the anchored bomb’s waterline. MacTavish and Midshipman Frederick had come along a few minutes later, and lastly, Lt. Merriman’s cutter had approached, coming alongside to starboard, having steered too wide and to seaward for a time.

“Cup for you, too, sir?” the steward offered Merriman.

“God, yes!” the cheerful Merriman (so aptly named) answered.

“Four minutes by my reckoning, for mine, McCloud!” the inventor, MacTavish, said to his artificer in a loud whisper.

“Pardon, sir, but, did you have any trouble with yours?” Lieutenant Merriman softly asked Lewrie. “Mine was a total bastard.”

“A complete shambles, aye,” Lewrie muttered back, “gettin’ it alongside with all those bloody bayonets, gettin’ the tompion out, and fumblin’ in the dark, then gettin’ the bung back
in
? We got spiked to the damned thing for a bit, too.”

“Aye, sir. I can’t see
how
the torpedoes can be managed in the dark. And, if we launch them in daylight, it will have to be done so close inshore that the French shore guns and gunboats shoot us all to flinders,” Lt. Merriman told him, shaking his head. “I don’t know…”

“Launchin’ ’em by the dozens,” Lewrie muttered back. “I can’t picture our sailors gettin’ it done right, night
or
day. They’re too damned complicated t’set and prime.”

“About time, gentlemen! It’s about time!” MacTavish enthused, drawing all participants, officers and sailors, to the bulwarks to peer shoreward. That was anti-climactic, though, for at least three more minutes passed before the first explosion.

There was a distant and dull
Boom!
as a torpedo at last went off, shooting a geyser of spray and foam into the air, and sounding no louder than the slam of an iron oven door. And much further out to sea than the tide should have taken it, according to MacTavish’s last-minute estimations. It had not gone much more than half a mile.

“Hmmm, I’d have thought…,” MacTavish fretted, then drew out a sheaf of papers from his coat and tried to decypher them in the dark.

Even more long minutes passed before the second torpedo burst, and they almost missed that one, for though this one
had
drifted in to roughly the proper distance to reach a trot of
caïques,
the geyser of spray, foam, and gunpowder smoke looked little taller than the splash of a 32-pound shot dapping along from its First Graze, and the sound of its expected titanic explosion was little more than a
fumph!

“Not all the charge went off?” Lt. Johns said, crushed. “How could that be?”

“
Someone
was remiss as to snugly replacing the tompion, and the sea got in,” Mr. MacTavish accused.

Mine, most-like?
Lewrie sheepishly thought, but would not allow that to stand.

“If seawater got to the pistol’s priming or powder charge, it wouldn’t have gone off at all, Mister MacTavish,” Lewrie told him. “I expect it was the main charge below that got soaked, somehow, and went off like a squib.”

“Th’ casks’re tighter’n a drum, an’
tested
fair leaks, sair!” McCloud the artificer bristled back, twitching his jaws so hard that his scraggly beard rustled. “Paid ower weet tar an’ bound in tarred canvas. They
canna
leak!”

“Evidently that’un did, Mister McCloud,” Lewrie rejoined. “Or, being stored at sea for a week or so, the damp got to the gunpowder.”

“Two to go, though, gentlemen. All’s not lost, yet!” MacTavish insisted.

But the trial evidently
was
over, for after a full hour waiting for the other two to explode, long past the time when they had been set to go off, there were no more geysers or bangs.

“I don’t understand,” MacTavish said, bewildered. “According to my calculations…! I am certain that I prepared
mine
properly, if no one
else
managed to follow such simple instructions…!”

“Let’s get under way, Mister Johns,” Lewrie ordered, yawning. “I’m amazed the French haven’t found us, yet, and we must be clear of the coast by dawn.”

“Aye, sir,” a crest-fallen Lt. Johns agreed.

“There’s still two to go, I must point out to you, sir!” Mister MacTavish peevishly demanded. “There’s still darkness!”

“Ain’t in the cards, Mister MacTavish, not tonight it ain’t,” Lewrie told him. “I’m charged with keeping you two, your torpedoes, and anyone involved with ’em, out of French hands, and we’ve pressed our luck as far as I think it seemly t’go, tonight. We’re off.”

And I need some bloody
sleep! Lewrie told himself.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The morning after their assault on the mouth of the Somme river,
Reliant
and
Fusee
were forced to return to Sheerness. Lt. Johns had made an inspection of the remaining torpedoes and found that their clockwork timer’s inner workings were so corroded by salt-air damp that they would not run; likewise for the fire-locks of the igniting pistols. A lack of mineral oil to protect them from rusting would have guaranteed a failure. In private, Lt. Johns had also confided to Lewrie that both the clocks and the pistols were of the cheapest manufacture, cast-offs or rejects of such low quality that they appeared to be the first failed efforts of new apprentices. “Trust Scots to pinch and bemoan a
groat,
sir, a penny bedamned,” Johns had muttered, most sadly disappointed.

MacTavish and McCloud, he’d also reported, had gone off on each other, each blaming the other for the failures, and the artificer sent off in a huff, sacked from his position. MacTavish would have to see to the construction of new torpedoes himself, find a new artificer to oversee the work, and most definitely not spare HM Government’s money this time on the timers or pistols!

Lewrie had begun his report to Admiralty the morning after the trials off the Somme, and completed it just before
Reliant
had come to anchor in the Great Nore. He dis-passionately described the complicated method of priming and activating, the difficulty with the tompion and the use of them in the total dark, along with the risks involved if deployed during the day; the shoddy materials used in the first place, and the great risk of damp getting to the powder no matter how snugly the torpedoes were sealed, due to being stored above-decks exposed to weather, then slung over the side and towed long distances all but submerged. It was no way to treat gunpowder, if one wished it to stay dry and go
Bang!

His clerk and one of his Mids with a good copper-plate writing had made copies, one for MacTavish. Lewrie expected he would hear the fellow’s screeches all the way down-river from Woolwich once he read
his
copy!

In the meantime, though …

*   *   *

“Excuse me, sir, but I wonder if I might have a word?”

“Aye, Mister Merriman?” Lewrie said, looking up from his stroll of
Reliant
’s quarterdeck to savour the Summer sunshine.

“It’s about the torpedoes, sir,” Lt. Merriman began.

“
Those
bastards!” Lewrie said with a dismissive snort.

“Indeed, sir,” Merriman said with a wry grin of agreement. “I and Mister Westcott were talking things over last night, and we were wondering if there would be any more trials with them. If so, we think we’ve come up with a way to improve them. Sea-anchors, sir!”

“Sea-anchors?”

“One uses a sea-anchor to keep a ship’s head to wind in stormy weather, but … was a sea-anchor used in a strong tideway, would not a drogue
pull
the torpedo shoreward faster? Just bobbing about like they did, we had to get within a mile, with the timer set for fourty-five minutes, but … if we could launch from farther out, we could almost do it in daylight, and be out of range of most shore guns,” Lt. Merriman said, bubbling over with enthusiasm.

“Might as well put a mast and a lugs’l on ’em, sir,” Lewrie rejoined, feeling gloomy of a sudden to imagine that there
would
be one more round of trials with the damned things! “Or, just shove tons of powder into a fireship and let it
sail
itself in.”

“The First Lieutenant brought the idea up, too, sir,” Merriman replied, falling alongside of Lewrie’s in-board side as he paced aft to the taffrails. “If the drogues won’t improve the torpedoes, then perhaps a
small
fireship, a fire-
boat,
might serve the purpose.”

“There’s the problem of damp, though,” Lewrie pointed out.

“Aye, sir, and on that head we asked Mister Mainwaring the Surgeon if he knew of any earth or element that would absorb damp,” Lieutenant Merriman rushed on, all eagerness. “He cited sodium chloride, sir … whatever that is.”

“Fire-boats … as in
ship’s
boats, Mister Merriman?” Lewrie asked, pausing in mid-stride.

“Exactly so, sir! Every dockyard’s full of them, or they can be readily bought,” Lt. Merriman continued. “One could place a floor above the ribs and keels, a bulkhead forward in the bows, and deck it all over, with just a cuddy to allow for setting the timer and priming the pistol igniter just before the crew abandons it. Perhaps even construct interior beam partitions to form a box cabin which would secure the powder charge, sir? Fill the voids between the hull and partitions with this sodium chloride whatever to soak up the damp, perhaps even line the entire box with tin, or lead, or … something … to keep it all dry, and a cheaply purchased fire-boat could sail in under its
own
power. Why, they might not even
have
to be set alight, and could sail in in the night with the French none the wiser ’til they explode … and a cutter or barge could carry a lot more gunpowder than one of the cask torpedoes, sir!”