It was obvious to Tromp that even that stoutly fought ship had no option but to surrender. It might take a little longer, cost a few more Spanish lives, but Santiago was too badly wounded to run and her crew was too savagely maimed to continue the fight.
He turned away from her once more, listening to the howling bedlam of the battle, and looked back at Brederode as Revenge, Tobias' flagship, altered course very slightly in order to cross astern of de With. Obviously, Tobias intended to rake San Nicolas as he crossed her stern, then range up on the Spaniard's disengaged side and smash the already crippled ship into submission.
The Englishman's bowsprit was no more than sixty or seventy feet clear of Brederode's high, ornate poop as Revenge started across her wake…
And then Maarten Harpentzoon van Tromp's face went bone-white under the soot and grime of powder smoke coating it, as the English flagship poured a deadly broadside through Brederode's stern.
For perhaps two heartbeats, Tromp told himself it had to be an accident. A colossal blunder. But no "accident" would have been that accurate. The Englishman's guns fired two by two, upper and lower deck together, carefully aimed, and the impact of those deadly shots turned Brederode's stern windows into the gaping cavern mouth of an abattoir.
De With's flagship was over four hundred yards from Amelia, but even at that range Tromp could hear the English roundshot hammering home, crashing the full length of her hull in maiming, mangling fury. An entire twenty-four pounder slammed forward, flung two-thirds of the way out its port as a screaming roundshot dismounted it and shattered its carriage. Even as Tromp realized in horror that the attack was deliberate, Brederode's foremast toppled like a weary tree. It pitched over the side while the ship wallowed in agony, and Tromp heard English voices baying in triumph.
The Americans were right, a small, numb corner of his brain told him. Richelieu's offer was too good to be true.
He spun around as fresh, concentrated broadsides thundered, and his belly knotted as more of his "allies" poured fire into his own ships. The French flagship surged past Dordrecht, firing as she went, and Dordrecht staggered. Her already damaged mizzen mast toppled into the smoke, splinters flew from her "disengaged" side, and she began to fall away to leeward as the French fire killed her helmsman and smashed her wheel.
From triumph to despair. The transformation required no more than a minute-two, at the most. That was how long it took Maarten Tromp to realize that the Dutch Navy had just been destroyed. It might take some time still to accomplish that, but the outcome was inevitable, and he knew it. Everywhere he looked, as far as he could see through the smoke and spray and splinters, French and English warships vomited flame and fury as their fresh, carefully aimed broadsides crashed into his weary, already damaged vessels. And he understood now why the Spanish fire had been so "badly aimed." With their rigging mangled and crippled by Oquendo's gunners, his ships would be unable to outrun their undamaged "allies."
Fresh cheers went up, this time from the Spaniards' bloodsoaked decks as they saw the trap they had paid so much in life and limb to bait spring. And then Tromp flinched in shocked disbelief as Revenge's fire found Brederode's magazine and de With's flagship vanished in a single, terrible explosion.
The explosion, and the sudden blow of realizing his friend and Brederode's entire crew had just died, shocked Tromp out of his immobility. He shook himself savagely and spun away from the horrible vision while broken fragments of Brederode's hull were still rising in lazy arcs above her fireball death. Mastenbroek stood no more than fifteen feet from him, but Amelia's captain was frozen, mesmerized by the spectacle of Brederode's destruction. He didn't seem to hear the lieutenant-admiral when Tromp shouted at him, didn't even blink until Tromp seized him and shook him brutally.
"Get under way!" Tromp barked.
Mastenbroek shook his head, fighting his way up out of his own confusion.
"Make more sail-now!" Tromp commanded harshly. Mastenbroek stared at him for a moment longer, and Tromp flung out an arm, sweeping it in an arc which indicated the ruin encompassing their fleet. "All we can do is try to run for it," he grated. "So make sail, Captain! Make sail now!"
Chapter 20
"And so, while the final reports have yet to come in, I have no doubt what they will tell us." Armand Demerville, comte de Martignac, smiled thinly at Don Antonio Oquendo. "So far, over sixty of the enemy have been definitely accounted for."
"I see." Oquendo sat on Santiago's poop deck in the only one of his chairs to have survived the action intact. Well, not entirely intact, he reminded himself, his face taut with pain. Its cushioned leather back was split in three places, and one arm had been entirely removed. Which made it an appropriate seat for him at the moment, since the surgeons seemed so eager to amputate his own left leg at the knee.
Of course, that decision would be his.
It was hard to believe, even now, that they had truly gotten away with it, he thought. The trap had required that the Hollanders suspect nothing until the moment it actually sprang, and that had been impossible on the face of it. Even assuming that none of the French or English officers had been in the pay of the Dutch-or Swedes-there were the crews to consider. However bloodthirsty the threats intended to keep them from letting the secret slip, they would have failed. No navy could keep its men from drunkenness once they went ashore, and all it would have required was a single drink-addled seaman-or a sober one, boasting to a whore-to alert the Dutch beforehand.
But Richelieu had had an answer for that, as well. "Sealed orders," he'd called them-another notion borrowed from the future. No one in the Franco-English force, except for the fleet commanders themselves and one or two of their most senior, most trusted captains, had known a thing about the true plan. All the others had discovered what was going to happen only when Oquendo's ships actually came into sight and they opened their sealed orders as they had been instructed to do when that moment came.
And so it had worked, he told himself grimly… however much it had cost.
"And your own losses?" he asked Martignac after a moment.
"None," the Frenchman assured him, then made a small throwing-away gesture with one hand. "Oh, we've lost a few dozen men, but nothing of significance."
"Would that we could say the same," Oquendo said flatly, and even Martignac had the grace to look briefly abashed.
All of Oquendo's ships had survived the battle, but five of them were so savagely damaged that he had already ordered them abandoned and burned, and he would be extremely surprised to discover that even a dozen of the others remained fit for further action. When the Dutch had realized what was happening, many had been too damaged-or too enraged-to even attempt to disengage. Instead, they'd set their teeth in their foes' throats like wounded wolves and continued to hammer their enemies until they were literally overwhelmed. Their casualties had been horrendous… and Oquendo's were little better.