Jack Iron (26 page)

Other guns came to the couple’s defense as Iron Hand O’Keefe led Nate Russell and Harry Tregoning into the fray. Cesar Obregon limped along after the others; he had broken an ankle falling from the wagon and was using his musket as a crutch. Even injured, the Hawk of the Antilles proved himself a formidable foe. He managed to brace himself against the side of the wagon and fire his musket one-handed. The musket’s recoil nearly toppled him. He cheered as one of Navarre’s henchmen stumbled and fell back into the dust, clutching his side. Obregon tossed the musket aside and drew his cutlass as Rico Amidei tried to bring him down with a quick thrust. Cesar Obregon parried the shipwright’s blade and buried his own length of steel in the pirate’s abdomen, dispatching him to perdition. Harry Tregoning sang hymns while he loaded and fired, loaded and fired. Nate Russell stood abreast of his English companion and matched him shot for shot.

Navarre’s crewmen staggered out of the settling dust, stumbled, clutched their wounds, some returned fire, while others sank to the ground and died or turned tail and ran for cover. Musket balls and pistol shot gouged holes in the earth around the wagon and thwacked into the wooden bed and siding. Suddenly Nate Russell rose up on his toes and clutched at his chest, then sagged against Tregoning, who lowered the Choctaw to the ground. O’Keefe noticed his friend was hurt and knelt at the warrior’s side. Nate was trying to speak, but the noise was too great. He shook his head and sighed and then settled into death. It was over in a matter of seconds; one moment the Choctaw was alive and defiant, the next, dead.

“You poor bastard,” said O’Keefe. “Come all this way to die.” He squeezed Nate’s shoulder until he felt the warrior go limp. Then Iron Hand O’Keefe rose up in his fury and charged into the smoke, scattering pirates before him like so many leaves in a hurricane. The hook rose and fell and soon was drenched with blood. Harry Tregoning took his stand by Obregon and began to calmly load and fire his rifled musket with uncanny accuracy.

The gates… we need to open the gates, Kit thought as he rammed a powder charge down the barrel of his flintlock. Suddenly, NKenai loomed out of the sooty gray smoke that drifted over the compound from the burning ruins of the magazine. The African lunged straight toward Kit and swung a scimitar in a vicious arc that McQueen barely avoided by ducking beneath the flashing steel. The blade clanged off a wheel rim. Kit dropped his unprimed pistols and reached for his Arkansas toothpick. NKenai tried to back away to give himself the advantage with his longer blade, but Kit stayed with him.

NKenai slashed with his curved blade and carved a chunk of flesh from Kit’s shoulder. The American lieutenant entangled his legs with the African’s and both men went down. Kit landed on NKenai’s chest and drove his knife into his enemy’s torso once, twice, a third time, while the African clawed at the lieutenant’s throat.

“Enough. You have killed me,” NKenai moaned. His ebony features were a mask of hatred as his hand fell from Kit’s neck, tearing his shirt in the process.

“Where’s Navarre?” Kit asked, glancing around for the Cayman, gritting his teeth against the pain of his shoulder wound.

NKenai tried to laugh, but only managed to choke on his own blood. He no longer saw the smoke or McQueen’s face. Instead he was standing in his village on the coast of East Africa and he was a child seated before his grandmother’s lodge. He held the
udi
his father had made for him, a small wooden boxlike instrument strung with gut strings. NKenai coaxed a discordant tune from the instrument and watched for the old woman who had raised him. He thought he saw her stirring in the shadows of the lodge. “
Nyanya
,” he called out. Was she inviting him into the cool shadows? Of course. He was always welcome. The boy, NKenai, stood and entered the darkness.

Kit crawled to his feet and searched the acrid smoke for some sign of Navarre. He shouted the Cayman’s name and heard laughter in reply. The flesh-eating son of a bitch was taunting him, daring Kit to follow him into the black mist. The front gate was somewhere ahead. Kit heard gunfire and instinctively ducked before realizing the shots weren’t meant for him. Several of the pirates had returned to the walls. The swivel guns began to blast away, wreaking havoc with their grapeshot on a force of men approaching up the town road. Navarre or the front gate, Kit resolved to reach one or the other. He charged through the screening black smoke toward the entrance.

“No,” Raven called to him from the overturned wagon. The medicine woman held the Quakers primed and loaded in her hands. She stamped her foot and mentally decried all such brave and foolish men who were so awfully quick to sacrifice their lives. She and Kit had just found one another, for heaven’s sake. Raven was not about to lose him again.

The young woman not only realized the front gate must be opened, she had just the key—one of the Congreve rockets her father had pilfered from the magazine. Harry Tregoning noticed her struggling to dig the rocket out from underneath the wagon.

“I think I can help you with this, missy.”

“Do you know much about these rockets?” she asked him.

“English rockets, missy. And I’m an Englishman. Me and Lord Congreve here be old chums.” Harry put his back against the wagon, Obregon helped as best he could, but the wagon bed was too heavy for them. Then all of a sudden, a third back was added to the effort. Strikes With Club had rejoined his beleaguered companions. The Choctaw had risked life and limb to fight alongside his comrades at arms. His had been a grueling climb over a treacherous mound of rocks and timber and the grisly broken bodies of the wall’s former defenders.

Together the three men raised the wagon bed enough for Raven to drag the six-foot-long rocket free. Strikes With Club spied Nate Russell’s body in the dust and a flicker of emotion crossed the Choctaw’s stoic features. He looked away, wiping the tattered bloody sleeve of his buckskin shirt across his soot-streaked face. The young warrior had come to respect Russell and he vowed there would be time for grieving. Strikes With Club shouldered his rifle and loosed a shot in the direction of several wounded pirates who had taken to sniping at anyone who moved in the vicinity of the wrecked wagon.

“Bloody hell! The fuse is damaged,” Tregoning muttered. “But I can fix it. I need a small blade.”

“Will this do?” asked Obregon. He slipped one of the daggers from his wrist sheath and tossed it to the ground at the marine’s feet. A musket ball glanced off a wheel spoke and dusted the privateer with splinters. Obregon cursed and answered with a pistol shot. “Whatever you’re about, you had better hurry. They’ll be on us again any second.”

A sudden increase in musket fire preceded Iron Hand O’Keefe’s arrival back behind the wagon. The big man slumped against the wood and tried to catch his breath. His pistols were gone, as were his cutlass and tomahawk. But his iron hook was sticky and crimson. O’Keefe was bleeding from half a dozen wounds, none of which appeared to be fatal. He saw what Raven was up to and grinned.

“No man ever had a better daughter. Smart as a whip, too. She takes after her pa.”

“Talk yourself blue in the face, for all I care, but if you ever run off like that and try and get yourself killed, best you don’t come back or I’ll shoot you myself!” Raven scolded. She glared at the silver-haired war chief and then, despite her anger, knelt at his side and hugged his burly neck. She grabbed his whiskers and gave a gentle tug. “You hear me?”

He heard.

“There you be, missy. Lord Congreve is at your service,” said Tregoning. He had balanced the rocket on a wheel and pointed the weapon in the direction of the front gate.

Raven took up one of the Quakers and, pointing the pistol at the dirt, held the flash pan near the fuse, and slowly squeezed the trigger…

The rage was upon Kit McQueen. Armed with his broad-blade hunting knife, he stalked his victims amid the swirling smoke, rising from a crouch to knock a man senseless with the heavy iron embossed grip, darting away and catching another pirate attempting to reload and slipping the razor-sharp blade beneath the brigand’s ribs and finding the heart, his left arm encircling his prey’s throat to cut off any cry.

This was the Highland rage, the black anger, the fire whose flames could only be doused with the blood of his enemies. A pirate with a patch over his right eye charged from underneath the wall. He was fair-haired and lithe of limb and fearless as he tried to crush McQueen’s skull with the butt of his musket. Kit’s powerful left arm shot up and stopped the musket in midswing and then straightened, stiff-arming the freebooter square in the face. “Patch” went reeling backward and crashed into the stewpot, spilling the contents over himself and scalding his legs in the process. He shrieked in pain and stumbled off through the smoke.

Another pair of swarthy-looking reivers brandishing muskets fitted with bayonets charged Kit, who overturned a long oaken table and met his attackers head-on. Both men buried their bayonets into Kit’s wooden shield. He slammed the table into the men and drove the pirates back against the stone wall with enough force to knock the wind out of his attackers. Gasping, they grabbed for their pistols. Kit grabbed the ruffian on his left and slashed his knuckles, tore the flintlock from his grasp, and emptied the pistol into the second brigand at close range. The first man howled in agony and cradled his ravaged hand. Kit silenced him with a slap across the skull, using the pirate’s own pistol for a club.

“Navarre!”

Kit heard the Cayman’s name called out, somewhere near the front gate, followed by a roar of pistols fired almost simultaneously. McQueen sprang like a cat in the direction of the gunshots and tracked the sound through the smoke and rubble until he stumbled over a body lying prone on the ground. It was Tom Bragg. The tavernkeeper had a hole between his eyes, a smoking pistol clutched in his outstretched hand.

“Tom was never the forgiving kind,” a voice said from behind Kit. It was Orturo Navarre. “I thought the Sea Spray an ample reward for a leg.”

Kit leaped to his feet, turning as he lunged. He gambled that Navarre only had one pistol… and lost. Navarre shot him at close range with the second bone-handled flintlock he had retrieved from the debris. Kit groaned as a slug seared his side and flung him backward toward the front gate. The damn door was bolted. Kit ignored the white-hot burst of pain in his side and started to crawl toward the entrance to the compound. Navarre realized what his adversary was up to and hurried over to block his progress. The Cayman placed himself between McQueen and the gate and calmly reloaded. He shoved the lieutenant back with a well-placed bootheel. Kit groaned and tried to collect his strength for one last try. He would reach the gate or die.

“You are a dead man, Lieutenant. And for what? An island that means nothing to you.” Navarre rammed a charge down the gun barrel and followed it with wadding and shot. “Your woman said I would die by the snake. But I do not see any snakes, eh? But you will die by the Cayman.” He threw back his head and laughed, enjoying his moment.

It was at this precise moment Kit heard a familiar high-pitched swooshing sound he remembered all too well from the battle of New Orleans and the bombardment the American defenders had endured at the hands of the British. He instinctively hugged the earth.

For Orturo Navarre, the oncoming rocket was something out of a nightmare. Launched from the wagon, the projectile first skimmed along the earth, then bounded into the air where it spiraled through the drifting smoke like some hellish snake, leaving a serpentine trail of fire and smoke in its wake. Navarre shrieked and held up his hands as if to ward off a demon. The Congreve rocket struck the Cayman square in the chest, lifting him off the ground and impaling him like a bug on a needle. The rocket carried its victim across the remaining few yards and pinned him to the gate.

Navarre writhed in agony as the rocket continued to spew smoke and embers.

“No!” he screamed, struggling to pull free of the skewer. “No!” as the propulsion dissipated, signaling the inner fuse was burning down to the explosive charge. “
Noooo
!” His voice no longer sounded human, but animalistic, and thick with terror, confronted at last with his own mortality and the conjure woman’s revenge.
The snake. The destroyer of souls. The snake.

Kit could have reached the pirate captain and freed him from the rocket. After all, there was a time to temper justice with mercy. But not today.

“Nooo!” wailed Orturo Navarre.

“Yes,” said Kit, and curling tight, he pressed himself against the hard-packed earth. The world was about to become a better place.

The explosion blew the gate to bits, and with it, Captain Orturo Navarre. The last thing that went through the Cayman’s mind… was an iron hinge.

Kit had the best berth in the place to watch Jean Laffite, his crew, Obregon’s men, and the townspeople, led by none other than Father Bernal, storm through the gaping hole in the wall where once the gate had stood. Laffite looked as if he had been through his own battle. His coat was powder-burned, his cheek gashed, and the side of his neck was stained crimson. He halted for a moment, but Kit waved him on. There was still work to be done.

Raven hurried to Kit’s side, sank to her knees, and held him in a tender embrace. O’Keefe lumbered forward as a familiar figure raced through the ruined wall to stand alongside the Irishman. Johnny Fuller seemed wholly offended that he had missed all the excitement.

“I knew you’d make it, Chief Iron Hand,” the boy exclaimed. “I bet you chased those pirates off the walls all by your lonesome.”

“I had a little help,” O’Keefe magnanimously admitted.

Harry Tregoning and Strikes With Club joined their companions at the entrance as the remainder of Navarre’s crewmen, with no one to lead them, began to surrender by the dozen to Laffite and the islanders. The rebellion was ended. Natividad was free again.

Obregon limped forward and stood over Kit and Raven. The Hawk of the Antilles saluted Kit and bowed to Raven. “I shall do everything in my power to make the last days of your visit here more pleasant than the first.” Cesar Obregon started down the road toward Morgan Town. He hoped he could find a cask of jack iron that hadn’t been smashed. His ankle slowed him down quite a bit; however, he wasn’t worried. The Hawk knew where he was going. At last.