Monarch seemed to stagger under the blow, and then the second American ship slammed a second broadside into her. More jagged bits and pieces blasted out of her. Her mizzenmast staggered, then wobbled drunkenly. Somehow, it didn't quite come down… yet.
Smoke streamed from the Americans' gun ports, rolling steadily northward on the wind, and the lead ship's cannon-those "carronades" the spies had warned of-flashed fresh fire. It was preposterous for such heavy guns to fire so rapidly, but they managed quite handily, and Monarch literally began to disintegrate.
"I believe it's time to come hard to starboard, Jerome," Lacrosse heard himself say. The order was out of his mouth before he even realized he'd decided to speak, but he never contemplated changing his mind. Martignac had discussed exactly this contingency, after all.
"Yes, sir!"
Bouvier's fervent response made his own reaction to his orders abundantly clear, and he began snapping commands of his own.
I'm sorry, Captain Admiral Overgaard, Lacrosse thought, looking astern, but it's time to save what we can from the wreck.
Aage Overgaard swore with passionate inventiveness as his formation abruptly began shedding the vessels of his so-called "allies." He wasn't certain who'd turned away first, although he felt fairly confident that if he had been certain, it would have been a Frenchman. Not that it mattered. Once the first ship turned to flee, it would have taken the direct intervention of God Almighty to keep the others from following suit.
And for that matter, he told himself, fighting to get his fury under control, what else could you expect them to do, Aage? In fact, it's what they ought to do.
"Hoist the signal to scatter!" he snapped harshly. "New course, north-by-northeast."
"Well, that didn't take very long, did it?" Admiral John Simpson murmured to himself, watching through his binoculars from Constitution's open bridge as the League's column began to unravel. It was safe enough to stand out here in the open, at least for now, he reflected. None of Overgaard's ships were in a position to fire on Constitution, and none of them appeared to want to be, either.
Hard to blame them for that, he reflected. There's absolutely no point in standing around and getting yourself blown out of the water when you can't even hurt the other side. Trying to fight wouldn't be showing guts, only stupidity.
Achilles and Ajax's first target was a broken ruin. In fact, Simpson was more than a little astonished that the Danish ship hadn't caught fire. Not that the lack of flames was going to make much difference to the broken wreck's ultimate fate. Wood reacted poorly to powerful explosions. Framing timbers, hull planking, masts… the very fabric of the vessel had shattered. Her port side was beaten in, as if it had been pounded with huge sledgehammers, and her decks were littered with dead and wounded.
"Alter course to port, Admiral?"
Simpson turned his head at the quiet question and found himself looking into Halberstat's steady gray eyes.
"No, Captain. Not yet, at any rate. Instruct Commander Klein to increase to ten knots. We'll circle around to the west and close the sack from behind."
Overgaard watched in half-incredulous but vast relief as the preposterous USE vessels continued swinging around to the west.
Don't feel too grateful yet, Aage, he told himself. They're devilishly fast. Even if you get a head start on them, they've probably got the speed to run you down. Unless, of course, you can keep away from them until dark, at least…
The enemy's guns continued to bellow, and he felt his jaw clench as the ironclads began to fire, as well. The USE ships seemed to be moving more rapidly, and even from here he could hear those murderous shells exploding inside the hulls of his more laggard-or perhaps simply foolishly brave-warships.
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.