The Monsoon (49 page)

Hal looked back over his shoulder and saw that, even after the long, hard run through forest, the column of seamen was closing up behind him, with few stragglers. He led them on and found Big Daniel waiting at the edge of the trees.

Across a hundred and fifty paces of open ground the white walls of the fort stood fifty feet high. The arched gates were closed, heavy beams of mahogany reinforced by iron studs. There were no defenders in sight on the battlements. They must all be on the west wall facing the sea. As the last shots of the bombardment died away, Hal heard their thin, distant cheers as they saw off the squadron of attacking ships.

“We have them at a disadvantage, Hal told Big Daniel, “but we must work quickly if we are to keep the element of surprise.” Behind him the men of the column were still coming up, bowed under their loads.

Sweating and panting they flopped down and raised their water-bottles, gulping down long draughts greedily. Hal strode among them, rallying them and sending them to take up their positions along the edge of the treeline.

“Keep your heads down. Keep out of sight. See to your priming, but do not fire until I give the order!” The teams carrying the five heavy powder-kegs had fallen back to the rear of the coluMN, but at last they came staggering up with each of the fifty-pound kegs slung on a pole between two men. They stacked them under the palm trees and Hal and Daniel set to work to prepare the fuses.

Hal had cut slow-match as short as he dared, and this was always a delicate business, for no two pieces of match would
BURN
at the same rate. They tapped each length of fuse with the handle of a knife to try to spread the fulminate evenly, then they threaded a fuse through the bunghole of each cask. Every second was precious now and they could not spare time to make certain that each fuse was perfect. If one failed there were four others to set off the explosives.

“Hal looked up from his task.

Big Daniel plugged the final fuse in place with a handful of soft pitch.

“Ready as we’ll ever be.”

“Light the slow-match!” Hal ordered, and Daniel struck the flint with the steel. The under caught. One after the other they touched a short length of slow-match to the flame, and watched it smoulder and smoke.

“Shoulder the kegs!” Hal ordered, and five fresh men, each chosen for his brawn, rose from where they had been squatting and came forward. Another rank was waiting behind them, ready to run forward and take up a keg if one of the porters was shot down by enemy musket fire from the walls of the fort.

Hal drew his sword, and strode to the edge of the forest. He peered from the cover across the open ground.

There was still no sign of any defenders on the walls. He drew a deep breath and steeled himself.

“Quietly, lads!

Follow me!” Without a shout or cheer they ran forward in a group.

The bare feet of the heavily burdened seamen sank deep into the sandy soil with each pace, but they covered the ground fast and were almost to the gates when there was a yell and a shot from the battlement above the gates. Hal saw a turbaned head in the stone opening and the muzzle of a smoking jezail aimed down at them. The range was short and the ball took one of the running seamen squarely in his naked chest. The wounded man sprawled full length in the sand, and the keg rolled from his shoulder.

Big Daniel was running only a pace behind him, and scooped up the keg as lightly as though it were a ninepin.

With it tucked under his arm he jumped over the dying man and was the first to reach the gates. He dropped the keg against the hinges, and beckoned to the men coming up behind him.

“Here! Bring them here!”

As the first man came up, snorting and panting with the effort, Big Daniel snatched his burden from him.

“Get back to the trees!” he barked and laid the keg beside the other.

“Well done, lad.” He grabbed the next keg and stacked it in a pyramid upon the first two.

By now a crowd of shrieking Arabs was on the battlements above them, and a ragged fusillade of musket shots rang out as Daniel’s men tried to reach the cover of the treeline. Another was shot down and lay groaning in the open ground, with spurts of dust kicking up around him as the musketeers on the wall tried to finish him off. From the trees the seamen hidden there opened answering fire.

Their musket-balls cracked against the stone blocks, and rained chips of coral down on the men crouched at the foot of the massive gates.

Hal knelt beside Big Daniel as he placed the fifth powder-keg on top of the stack. He blew on the smouldering end of the slow-match in his hand, and it flared up redly.

“Get you gone, Danny,” he told the big man.

“I’ll see to the rest of it.” But Daniel had his own slow@ maTCh smoking in his hand.

“Beg your pardon, Captain, but I’ll give you a hand to kiss the devil’s daughter.” He knelt beside Hal and touched the match to the fuse of one of the powder-kegs.

Hal did not waste words in argument and bent to the same task.

Working without haste, they lit each of the five fuses and waited to make certain that they were burning evenly.

By this time half the garrison of the fort was swarming along the wall above them, firing as fast as they could reload into the edge of the forest. Four hundred British sailors were yelling and cheering and sending in a withering fusillade over the battlements.

Hal and Daniel were protected from the fire of the men above them by the slight overhang below the battlements, but as soon as they left its shelter they would be fully exposed during their return across the open ground.

Hal took a last look at the furiously burning fuses, only an inch or so protruded from the bunghole of each keg and rose to his feet.

“I think the time has come to leave.” can see no reason to linger, Captain.” Big Daniel grinned at him with his bald gums, and the two launched themselves side by side into the open.

Immediately the shouts from the battlements behind them redoubled, and every Arab on the walls turned his fire upon the running pair. The heavy lead balls whirred about their heads and ploughed into the soft sand at their flying feet. From the trees the seamen yelled encouragement an fired as wildly as the Arabs on the walls.

“SeraphP they screamed.

“Come on, Danny! Run for it, Captain!”

Time seemed to slow down for Hal. It was as though he was under water, each stride seeming to last many minutes. The line of the forest seemed to come no nearer, and the musket-balls flew around them as thick as hail.

Then Big Daniel was struck, not once but almost simultaneously by two balls. One hit him in the back of the knee, broke the bone, and his leg folded under him like a carpenter’s rule. The second ball struck him in the hip and shattered the neck of the femur. He went down in the sand with both legs twisted and useless under him.

Hal ran on four paces before he realized he was alone.

Then he paused and looked back.

“Go on!” Big Daniel yelled at him.

“You can’t help me.

Both my legs are GOne.” His face had dived into the sand, and his eyes and mouth were filled with it. Hal whirled and ran back to him through the storm of musket fire.

“No! NO!” Big Daniel bellowed, sand and spittle flying From his mouth in a cloud.

“Go back, you fool. Go back.”

Hal reached him and stooped to seize his shoulders.

He tried to lift him, and was appalled by the weight of the great body. With both his legs shot away, Daniel could not help him take the strain. Hal took another deep breath and readjusted his grip, then heaved up again. This time he lifted the top half of Daniel’s torso clear of the ground and tried to get his shoulder under the other man’s armpit.

“It’s no use”

” Big Daniel gasped in his ear, swamped in agony as the shattered bones in his hip grated against each other.

“Go on, save yourself!” Hal had no breath to reply, so he gathered the last ounce of his strength and lifted, straining with every sinew and fibre of his body. At the effort his vision darkened and starred into whirling comets of light, but slowly Big Daniel’s huge frame lifted clear of the sandy earth and he threw his right arm around Hal’s shoulders. They stood there for a long moment, locked together, unable to move another step.

You’re mad,” Big Daniel whispered, his lips an inch from Hal’s ear.

“The powder’s going to blow-” On the high battlements behind them an Arab musketeer poured a handful of coarse black powder into the muzzle of his jezail, and rammed down a wad on top of it.

He was holding the ball between his teeth. It was an irregular lump of soft pig-iron that he had hand-forged to a rough fit in the barrel. He spat the ball into the muzzle and used the long wooden ramrod to drive it home. Then he reversed the weapon and laid the forestock across the stone sill of the embrasure. With shaking fingers, he poured a fine stream of powder into the pan of the lock, snapped the friz zen closed and drew back the hammer to full cock.

When he lifted the stock to his shoulder and peered down the long brass-bound barrel, he saw that out in the open ground the two infidels were still struggling helplessly, clinging to each other like lovers.”

He aimed carefully at their heads, which were close together, then pulled hard on the stiff trigger. The hammer dropped and the flint struck a starburst of sparks from the steel of the friz zen The powder in the pan ignited in a puff of white smoke, and for a moment it seemed that the jezail would misfire but then, with a deafening bellow, it leaped in his hands, kicking the barrel head high.

IF The beaten slug of pig-iron started to tumble end over end as soon as it left the muzzle. It whirred through the air to where Hal and Big Daniel were dragging themselves away. It had been aimed at Hal’s head, but it dropped so sharply in flight that it almost missed him completely. In the end it struck him with a loud thump on the side of his ankle, tore away his heel and shattered the fragile bones of his left foot.

As his foot was knocked out from under him Hal dropped under Big Daniel’s weight and the two lay side by side, flat upon the ground.

“Run! In the name of God!” Big Daniel shouted into Hal’s face.

“The kegs are going to go up at any moment!”

“I can’t!” Hal blurted through the pain.

“I’m hit! I can’t stand!” Big Daniel heaved himself up on one elbow and looked down at Hal’s foot. He saw at once that the wound was crippling, then glanced back at the pyramid of powder kegs under the arch of the gate, only thirty yards from where they lay. One of the burning fuses reached the bunghole and flared brightly in the plug of soft pitch. It was on the point of exploding.

Big Daniel seized Hal in a smothering bear-hug and rolled on top of him, forcing his face into the soft earth, covering him with his own great body.

“Get off me, damn you!” Hal struggled beneath him, but at that instant the bottom keg blew up, and set off an instantaneous sympathetic explosion in every one of the four others piled on top of it.

Two hundred and fifty pounds weight of black powder was consumed in a single flash and the blast was cataclysmic. It ripped the heavy doors from their splintered beams across the courtyard beyond. It collapsed the stonework of the arch and brought the battlements rumbling down in an avalanche of coral blocks, mortar and dust. A score or more of the Arabs on the wall were brought down with it, crushed and buried in the rubble.

The smoke and dust shot two hundred feet straight up into the air, then boiled into the anvil head of a thundercloud. The shock-wave blew out across the open ground in front of the walls and struck the edge of the forest, bringing heavy branches crashing down, bowing the palm trees and thrashing through their fronds like the winds of a hurricane.

Big Daniel and Hal lay full in the path of the blast. It swept over them in a rolling wave of dust and debris. It sucked the air from their lungs and hammered them into the earth like the hoofs of a herd of sTAmPeding buffalo.

Hal felt his eardrums balloon, and the shock clubbed his brain.

His senses were driven from him, and he seemed to hurtle through black space with the stars bursting in his head.

He came back slowly from that far away dark place, and his damaged eardrums roared and sang with the memory of that terrible blast, but through it he heard the thin, disembodied cheers of his seamen as they charged forward from the forest. In a pack they raced past where he lay and reached the destroyed gateway. They scrambled and shoved each other over the piles of rubble that blocked it, then they fought their way through the dust and the smoke, and swarmed into the courtyard of the fort. With their cutlasses in their hands, giving tongue like a pack of deer hounds when the stag stands at bay, they fell upon the dazed defenders in a savaGe orgy of battle lust.

Blinded with dust, Hal tried to sit up but there was an immense weight on his chest that suffocated him and hinges and blew pinned him to the ground. He coughed, choked, and tried to blink the grit out of his streaming eyes. Though he clawed feebly at the huge slack body above him he did not have the strength to free himself Gradually Hal’s vision cleared and the roaring in his ears faded to the buzz of a hive of bees trapped in his skull.

He saw Big Daniel’s face above him: his eyes were wide and staring and his head rolled from side to side as Hal tried to push him off.

His toothless mouth gaped open, and his tongue lolled. A mixture of his blood and spittle dribbled warm over Hal’s cheek.

The horror of it goaded Hal, and he made a supreme effort and wriggled out from under the great slack body.

Groggily he raised himself into a sitting position and looked down at the other man. By shielding him, BiLy Daniel had taken the full force of the blast. It had strippe@ away his clothing so that he was naked except for his boots and sword-belt. The driven sand had blasted away the skin from his back and buttocks, so that he looked like a freshly flayed deer. Chunks of stone and flying debris had ripped through his back and flanks, exposing the white bone shards of his ribs and broken spine.