Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(74)
Mulryan watched the captain and his all-French entourage depart, and then sidled over toward Hugh and Michael. “My lords,” he said with a quick look over his shoulder, “I may have broken our hosts’ trust.”
Hugh carefully kept his posture unchanged, casual. “In what way, Mulryan?”
“M’lord, I, um, edited my report.”
“Did you, now?”
“Yes, m’lord. There’s one ship I did not mention. She’s directly astern, maybe forty miles, due east. Not much smaller than us, judging from what little I could make of her masts.”
“Saw them against the brightening sky?”
“Aye, but not well. I checked her again when the sun came up.” He looked at the overcast skies. “So to speak.”
“And tell me, Tearlach, why did you choose to ‘forget’ this piece of information that I’m sure would have been of considerable interest to Captain Morraine?”
“Because sir, unless I am very much mistaken, she was putting up a balloon, too. A white one. Like ours used to be.”
Hugh kept himself from starting. “Was it the same design as ours?”
Mulryan grimaced. “M’lord, that new spyglass is a wonder, and my eyes are as good as any in County Mayo, but forty miles is a long way by any measure.”
Hugh smiled. “True enough, Tearlach.”
“But—another ship with a balloon? What do you think it is, Lord O’Donnell?”
Hugh was considering how best to tactfully phrase his speculations when Michael shared his own—bluntly. “That, young Mulryan, is our master’s eye.”
“Lord Turenne? He sent a ship after us?”
“He, or Richelieu, almost certainly,” Hugh confirmed.
“It only makes sense that he’d want to keep an eye on what we do,” Michael conceded. Then, with a smile, “If he can, that is.”
Tearlach cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that ship can’t have seen us today. She was easy for us to spot, silhouetted against the dawn while putting up a white balloon. But, from her perspective, we were against the western predawn darkness, putting up a blue-gray balloon. She didn’t see us.”
Hugh rubbed his chin. “So that’s why you had our balloon painted only after we left Dunkirk. You didn’t want Turenne to know you’d camouflaged it.”
“Right, and that’s why we were four days out before I started running test ascents over three hundred feet. As far as Turenne knows, one hundred yards is as high as we’re rated to go. He’ll have tried pushing that limit a bit himself, but not as aggressively as we have.”
“And he won’t have that little toy you gave Tearlach right before he went up.”
McCarthy nodded. “Yeah, the boost from the natural gas burner doesn’t last long, but it does give you a little extra height. Or time. Which are the edges we need. And by tonight, we’ll be so far off, that he won’t have any chance to catch sight of us again. Now, ’scuse me. I’m gonna show Mulryan here how to take care of my ‘toy.’” And he took the natural gas burner from Tearlach’s hands and led the young aeronaut back to the poop deck.
As they left, O’Rourke sauntered over from the rail.
“Heard all that?” asked Hugh.
O’Rourke nodded. “Every word.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think McCarthy is shrewd. Maybe too shrewd.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know that look, Hugh O’Donnell. You’ve misgivings of your own.”
“But I’ll hear yours first, O’Rourke.”
“As you wish. So, the ship on our tail couldn’t see us today. Bravo. But hardly luck, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that McCarthy has had every step of this game sussed out from the start. From before we left France, it seems.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Not in itself, no. But why didn’t he bring us into his confidence on all this earlier? Because rest assured, he’s been playing this game of chess five moves ahead of the opposition, he has.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he obviously foresaw that Turenne would send a ship after us. And so he saves some special tricks for our balloon, to make it more than a match for the one Turenne has. But in order to have those tricks at hand, he must have anticipated needing them much earlier. So, from the time he started working in Amiens, he must have been expecting that Turenne would be crafting a secret duplicate balloon off-site, even as he and Haas were constructing the original model.”
“Strange, O’Rourke: having an ally with that kind of foresight sounds like a great advantage to me, not a source of worry.”