He forced himself to turn around, look back. The timberclads' dense black funnel smoke merged with the dirty-gray clouds of powder smoke, billowing like some brimstone-born fog bank shot through with the lightning of muzzle flashes. At least two of his ships were on fire now, he noted grimly, and three more were obviously in severe distress. Under the circumstances—
"Fire!" Captain Markus Bollendorf barked, and SSIM Monitor's starboard carronades thumped deafeningly.
Alain Lacrosse's head jerked around in sheer, shocked disbelief as the low, squat ironclad almost directly across Justine's bows opened fire. The abrupt appearance of the enemy vessel stunned him. His attention—like that of every other man aboard his ship, a corner of his brain realized numbly—had been focused on the carnage astern of them, where the American timberclads and ironclads were now moving steadily in pursuit. The weight of their fire had been significantly reduced as they were forced to turn end-on to follow in the fleeing fleet's wake. That wasn't preventing them from scoring hits steadily, if not in enormous numbers, however, and they didn't need a lot of hits. Not when the accursed things kept exploding inside their targets!
But perhaps at least some of us should have been looking the other way, he thought with a clear sort of shock-induced detachment. If we had, we might have noticed where the other ironclads had gotten to.
The thought was still running through his brain when the first two eight-inch shells crashed into his command. One of them struck just to one side of Justine's cutwater. It ripped into the cable tier and exploded deep inside the coiled heap of anchor hawsers, and a few, potentially deadly tendrils of smoke began to curl upward.
Lacrosse never noticed. He was still staring ahead, still trying to wrap his mind about what had happened, when the second shell streaked aft, somehow missing masts, spars, and rigging until it crashed directly into Justine's poop deck.
The resultant explosion killed Jerome Bouvier, both helmsmen, and the sailing master. It did not kill Alain Lacrosse . . . but only because the shell itself had cut him cleanly in half before it detonated.
"It worked, Admiral!" Halberstat announced gleefully as he listened to Bollendorf's radio reports. "I never thought they'd get that close before anyone even saw them!"
"Neither did I, Franz," Simpson admitted.
The admiral tried to match his flag captain's jubilation, but it was hard. Constitution reeked of gunsmoke, despite the high-powered blowers he'd installed. She hadn't fired all that many shots, perhaps—certainly not for the amount of damage she'd inflicted—but each carronade shot spewed out truly extraordinary amounts of smoke.
And why are you thinking about that right now, John? he asked himself harshly. Could it be to keep you from thinking about just how many dead and mangled men that "damage" represents?
Perhaps it did. But whatever he might feel at the moment, it wasn't going to stop him from doing his duty.
"Let's get this over with, Franz." He'd thought his voice sounded completely calm, completely normal, but the expression in Halberstat's eyes told him that he hadn't. There was nothing he could do about that, and so he simply met the flag captain's gaze levelly.
"Take us in among them," he said.
"Aye, aye, sir," Halberstat acknowledged.
The flag captain turned to his helmsman, and Admiral John Chandler Simpson returned to his conning tower vision slit, gazing out into the hellish murk of gunsmoke and burning ships as his squadron closed to finish off its crippled, demoralized prey.
Please, Overgaard, he thought. Please order your men to surrender before I have to kill them all.
Chapter 53
London
Rita Simpson had been half-petrified that she wouldn't be able to pull it off. She'd always been a lousy actress, and she knew it. Leaving aside her one brief stab at amateur thespianism her sophomore year in college—what a disaster that had been!—there was the accumulated evidence of all those years as a kid and a teenager when her parents invariably saw through her fibs and lies while her brother Mike got away with everything.
But, by the time she got out from under the heavy staircase leading up to the White Tower's only entrance, she was in fact so thoroughly disgusted and angry that she had no trouble at all.
"You'll be lucky if you don't get an epidemic!" she snarled at Sir Francis Windebank. She half-turned and pointed a rigid finger at the staircase. More precisely, at the dark interior below the construction. "It's a cesspool in there! I don't care if the so-called toilets in the keep are completely inadequate for the number of soldiers you're billeting in it. They have got to start using the latrines! It's insane to have them shitting right underneath the main entrance—no, I take that back! the only entrance—to their own lodgings. Are you all crazy? Do you have any idea how much bacteria that's generating?"