With a new shred of hope, their eyes locked on the screen. At first the image was small and indistinct. Then the weather plane’s cameraman zoomed in on a red-hulled vessel.
“From up here I’d judge her to be a survey ship,” reported Grant.
A gust of wind caught the flag on the ensign staff and stretched out its blue colors.
“British,” announced Metcalf dejectedly. “We don’t dare ask foreign nationals to die for our sake.”
“You’re right, of course. I’ve never known an oceanographic scientist to carry an automatic rifle.”
Metcalf turned and said, “Grant?”
“Sir?”
“Contact the British research vessel and request they pick up survivors from the helicopter.”
Before Grant could acknowledge, the video image distorted and the screen went black.
“We’ve lost your picture, Grant.”
“One moment, General. My crewman manning the camera informs me the battery pack on the recorder went dead. He’ll have it replaced in a minute.”
“What’s the situation with the towboat?”
“She and the barge are under way again, only more slowly than before.”
Metcalf turned to Sandecker. “Luck just isn’t on our side, is it, Jim?”
“No, Clayton. We’ve had none at all.” He hesitated. “Unless, of course, the second ship is an armed Coast Guard cutter.”
“Grant?” Metcalf boomed.
“Won’t be long, sir.”
“Never mind that. What type vessel is the second ship you reported? Coast Guard or Navy?”
“Neither. Strictly civilian.”
Metcalf dissolved in defeat, but a spark stirred within Sandecker. He leaned over the microphone.
“Grant, this is Admiral James Sandecker. Can you describe her?”
“She’s nothing like you’d expect to see on the ocean.”
“What’s her nationality?”
“Nationality?”
“Her flag, man. What flag is she flying?”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Spit it out.”
“Well, Admiral, I was born and raised in Montana, but I’ve read enough history books to recognize a Confederate States flag when I see one.”
72
Out of a world all but vanished, her brass steam whistle splitting the air, the seawater frothing white beneath her churning paddle wheels, and spewing black smoke from her towering twin stacks, the Stonewall Jacksonpitched toward the towboat with the awkward grace of a pregnant Southern belle hoisting her hooped skirts while crossing a mud puddle.
Shrieking gulls rode the wind above a giant stern flag displaying the crossed bars and stars of the Confederacy, while on the roof of the texas deck, a man furiously pounded out the old South’s national hymn, “Dixie,” on the keyboard of an old-fashioned steam calliope. The sight of the old riverboat charging across the sea stirred the souls of the men flying above. They knew they were witnessing an adventure none would see again.
In the ornate pilothouse, Pitt and Giordino stared at the barge and towboat that loomed closer with every revolution of the thirty-foot paddle wheels.
“The man was right,” Giordino shouted above the steam whistle and calliope.
“What man?” Pitt asked loudly.
“The one who said, ‘Save your Confederate money; the South will rise again.’ “
“Lucky for us it has,” Pitt said, smiling.
“We’re gaining.” This from a wiry little man who twisted the six-foot helm with both hands.
“They’ve lost speed,” Pitt concurred.
“If the boilers don’t blow, and the sweet old darlin’ holds together in these damned waves…” The man at the wheel paused in midsentence, made an imperceptible turn of his big white-bearded head and let fly a spurt of tobacco juice with deadly accuracy into a brass cuspidor before continuing. “We ought to overtake ‘em in the next two miles.”
Captain Melvin Belcheron had skippered the Stonewall Jacksonfor thirty of his sixty-two years. He knew every buoy, bend, sandbar and riverbank light from St. Louis to New Orleans by heart. But this was the first time he’d ever taken his boat into the open sea.
The “sweet old darlin’“ was built in 1915 at Columbus, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Her like was the last to stoke the fires of imagination during the golden years of steamboating, and her like would never be seen again. The smell of burning coal, the swish of the steam engine, and the rhythmic splash of the paddle wheels would soon belong only in the history books.
Her shallow wooden hull was long and beamy, measuring 270 feet by 44. Her horizontal noncondensing engines ran at about forty revolutions per minute. She was rated at slightly over one thousand tons, yet despite her bulk, she walked the water with a draft of just thirty-two inches.
Down below on the main deck, four men, sweat-streaked and blackened with soot, furiously shoveled coal into the furnaces under four high-pressure boilers. When the pressure began to creep into the red, the chief engineer, a crusty old Scot by the name of McGeen, hung his hat over the steam gauge.
McGeen was the first man to vote for pursuit after Pitt crash-landed the helicopter in shallow water near Fort Jackson, waded ashore with Giordino and Hogan, and described the situation. At first there was undisguised disbelief, but after seeing their wounds, the bullet-riddled aircraft, and then hearing a deputy sheriff describe the dead and injured FBI agents a few miles downriver, McGeen stoked up his boilers, Belcheron rounded up his deck crew and forty men from the Sixth Louisiana Regiment tramped on board hooting and hollering and dragging along two ancient field cannon.
“Pour on the coal, boys,” McGeen pressed his black gang. He looked like the devil with his trimmed goatee and brushed-up eyebrows in the flickering glare of the open furnace doors. “If we mean to save the Vice President, we’ve got to have more steam.”
The Stonewall Jacksonthrashed after the towboat and barge, almost as if sensing the urgency of her mission. When new, her top speed was rated at fifteen miles an hour, but in the past forty years she was never called on to provide more than twelve. [2]
She thrust downriver with the current at fourteen, then fifteen… sixteen… eighteen miles an hour. When she burst from the South Pass Channel, she was driving through the water at twenty, smoke and sparks exploding through the flared capitals atop her stacks.
The men of the Sixth Louisiana Regiment — the dentists, plumbers, accountants who marched and refought battles of the Civil War as a hobby — grunted and sweated in the nondescript woolen gray and butternut uniforms that once clothed the Army of the Confederate States of America. Under the command of a major, they heaved huge cotton bales into place as breastworks. The two Napoleon twelve-pounder cannon from Fort Jackson were wheeled into position on the bow, their smoothbore barrels loaded with ball bearings scrounged from McGeen’s engine-room supply locker.
Pitt stared down at the growing fortress of wired bales. Cotton against steel, he mused, single-shot muskets against automatic rifles.
It was going to be an interesting fight.
Lieutenant Grant tore his eyes from the incredible sight under his wings and radioed the ship flying the British flag.
“This is Air Force Weather Recon zero-four-zero calling oceanographic research vessel. Do you read?”
“Righto, Yank. Hear you clearly,” came back a cheery voice fresh off a cricket field. “This is Her Majesty’s Ship Pathfinder.What can we do for you, zero-four-zero?”
“A chopper went into the drink about three miles west of you. Can you effect a rescue of survivors, Pathfinder?”
“We bloody well better. Can’t allow the poor chaps to drown, can we?”
“I’ll circle the crash sector, Pathfinder.Home in on me.”
“Jolly good. We’re on our way. Out.”
Grant took up a position over the struggling men in the water. The gulf current was warm, so there was no fear of their succumbing to exposure, but any bleeding wounds were certain to attract sharks.
“You don’t carry much influence,” said his co-pilot.
“What do you mean?” asked Grant.
“The Limey ship isn’t responding. She’s turned away.”
Grant leaned forward and banked the plane to see out the opposite cockpit window. His co-pilot was right. The Pathfinder’sbow had come around on a course away from the helicopter’s survivors and was aimed toward the Stonewall Jackson.
“Pathfinder,this is zero-four-zero,” Grant called. “What is your problem? Repeat. What is your problem?”
There was no reply.
“Unless I’m suffering one hell of a hallucination,” Metcalf said, staring in wonder at the video transmission, “that old relic from Tom Sawyerintends to attack the towboat.”
“She’s giving every indication,” Sandecker agreed.
“Where do you suppose she came from?”
Sandecker stood with his arms crossed in front of him, his face radiating an elated expression. “Pitt,” he muttered under his breath, “you wily, irrepressible son of a bitch.”
“You say something?”
“Just speculating to myself.”
“What can they possibly hope to accomplish?”
“I think they mean to ram and board.”
“Insanity, sheer insanity,” snorted Metcalf gloomily. “The gunners on the towboat will cut them to pieces.”
Suddenly Sandecker tensed, seeing something in the background on the screen. Metcalf didn’t catch it; no one else watching caught it either.
The admiral grasped Metcalf by the arm. “The British vessel!”
Metcalf looked up, startled. “What about it?”
“Good God, man, see for yourself. She’s going to run down the steamboat.”
Metcalf saw the distance between the two ships rapidly narrowing, saw the wake of the Pathfinderturn to foam as she surged ahead at full speed.
“Grant!” he bellowed.
“Here, sir.”
“The Limey ship, why isn’t she headed toward the men in the water?”
“I can’t say, General. Her skipper acknowledged my request for rescue, but chased after the old paddleboat instead. I haven’t been able to raise him again. He appears to be ignoring my transmissions.”
“Take them out!” Sandecker demanded. “Call in an air strike and take the bastards out!”
Metcalf hesitated, torn by indecision. “But she’s flying the British flag, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ll stake my rank she’s a Bougainville ship, and the flag is a decoy.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Maybe. But I do know that if she crushes the steamboat into firewood, our last chance to save Vince Margolin is gone.”