Souls Aflame (39 page)

The men were coming closer.

The knife! Harley had tucked the knife inside his boot after killing the sentry. If he awakened, he would use it on these men, and he might kill her too, thinking she had alerted them. She had to get to the weapon before he woke up.

She tried to bend over but realized it was futile because she was so tightly wedged into position. Forcing her knees to twist slightly, she maneuvered herself downward, careful lest she jar Harley.

Her face rubbed painfully against the burlap. His right boot brushed her arm. Raising herself slightly, she touched the top rim of his shoe and carefully slid her fingertips inside.

She felt nothing!

Harley moved slightly, and Julie froze, holding her breath. The voices were getting closer. Any time now, he would hear them, wake up, and reach for his knife, and he would find her groping for it! Cautiously she moved her fingers out and down and across the top of his boot, inching her way to the left one. Once more reaching gingerly inside, her body tensed as she felt the knife handle. Carefully, slowly, she began to slide it upward.

She had it in her hand. Then, just as she started to move back, to struggle to an upright position, a loud voice slashed the air about them. “Let’s look between these rows. Looks like these bales might be a little wider apart than the others…”

Harley awoke with a start. Instantly he pushed his hand down, reaching for his knife, but instead of fastening his groping fingers about it, he found himself clutching a handful of thick black hair.

Startled, Julie dropped the weapon.

“What the hell?” He was too surprised to think about keeping his voice low. Twisting her hair so painfully she cried out, he snarled, “What’re you doing? Where’s my goddamn knife?”

“In there! Quick! Somebody’s in there. Move these bales.” The crewmen were working frantically.

Harley’s fingers found their way to Julie’s throat, pulling her roughly up beside him as he began to squeeze the breath from her. He yelled to the men: “Stay back or I’ll kill her. So help me, I’ll choke her to death…”

The bales parted suddenly, and Harley had the necessary room to flex his arms and elbows outward to squeeze even tighter. The crewmen took in the sight with wide eyes, and one of them quickly yelled, “You think we give a damn? We’ll blow you both apart where you stand—” He pointed a gun menacingly toward their faces.

Julie felt her life ebbing. If Harley did not kill her, then these two angry men, blurring before her swelling eyes, would.

And her last conscious thought, as the black shroud surrounded her, was of Myles, imprisoned beyond hope.

Then the image of his dear face faded, and in its place were ebony eyes burning with anger, shaded with desire. And as she succumbed to inevitable death, she felt only the pang of sorrow over never again knowing the sweet comfort of his arms…

Chapter Eighteen

Leaning back against a small wooden table, arms folded casually across his massive chest, Derek stared down at Julie. She had been placed, unconscious, on his narrow bunk. And despite her haggard appearance, he thought once again, with a rush of desire, how she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

The doctor on board had examined her and said that she was unconscious because that man, whoever he was, had almost choked her to death. She would be all right, he promised, and could awaken any time. Derek told the doctor not to attempt to bring her around with smelling salts. He wanted her to sleep. They had to run the blockade, and there was no time for talk—and God knows, he had plenty of questions to ask. First of all, he wanted to know how she came to be on the ship, squeezed between tightly packed bales of cotton, with some rogue trying to kill her.

The crewmen who discovered them explained how one of the crew, quite adept with his knife, had sent a blade plunging into the man’s leg. With a howl of pain, he’d released Julie. In the ensuing struggle he’d been killed, and his body unceremoniously dumped overboard for the sharks’ supper. Julie had been brought to Derek.

Derek had not let on that he knew her, even though it had been extremely difficult to retain his composure and mask his concern. Often in the past months he had wondered about her fate, promising himself that once the blasted war ended, if he was still alive, he’d try to track her down.

And here she was, in all her glorious flesh. He only hoped that she remained in her present comatose state until they had slipped through the Federal blockade and were on the open seas.

He moved to tuck the blanket tighter under her chin, letting his hand brush her bosom. There was no denying the tightening in his loins. God, but she had been a warm, loving creature in his arms. He’d known the pleasure of hundreds of women’s bodies, but never one that made him feel as though he were plunging into living, breathing velvet, so soft, yet so hot and eager to receive him. Chuckling to himself, he remembered how there had been times when she struggled to reject him, but he had been able to turn her into a writhing mass of begging ecstasy.

And he would know the joys again, he promised himself as he left his cabin. Whatever her reason and purpose for slipping aboard his ship, he would have his fill of her before letting her go.

Derek went topside, grateful for the moonless night. No matter how many times he ran the damned blockade, he always felt a knot of apprehension in the pit of his stomach until they had actually gotten through it.

He knew that the Federal blockade stretched across an arc about forty miles wide, from New Inlet, twenty-five miles south of Wilmington, down around the Cape and Frying Pan Shoals to Old Inlet, which lay just below Smithville and the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

He saw that the ship was quiet, his crew alert. Someone reported that all hatches had been tightly covered with canvas to assure that no light from the fireroom below would show and give them away. There was one remaining light left aboard, which shone on the binnacle, but it, too, had been shielded by heavy canvas. Once Derek was satisfied that the ship was dark and blended in with sea and sky, he softly called orders down the tube, and the
Pamlico
, its engines smoothly humming, began steaming toward the line of blockading cruisers.

He wished he could use the running lights for the twenty-five mile stretch of marsh-bordered water leading to the channel between Wilmington and Eagle’s Island. Just inside the channel, a few yards from shore on the east, there was an ancient cypress called the Dram Tree, which marked the beginning of real danger, for once it was sighted it was inevitable that they were heading straight towards the blockade. With good navigation, and luck, they would make it through again.

All eyes, Derek knew, would be straining for sight of the Mound, a hillock no higher than a tree which would show a slight gradation of color marking black shore from black sea, and would mean that they were moving to New Inlet.

They would then steam toward Confederate Point, a few miles above New Inlet. As they moved out of shallow waters, Derek stationed his leadsmen at each quarter of the ship. He could hear the men whispering measurements to each other. Ten feet. Twelve. Fifteen. He, himself, felt the pull of the waters.

They were navigating now through New Inlet, a channel that had been opened by hurricanes over a hundred years ago. Even though it had a bar of shifting sand and silt, Derek was one of the few pilots who found it easy to navigate, and it had the added advantage of being protected by the small fort of palmetto logs and railroad iron called Battery Bolles.

Derek knew that the Federals hung in as close to the shore as their drafts would permit, anchoring off the two main channel inlets of Cape Fear. Old Inlet entered the Cape Fear River at its mouth, which was guarded by Forts Holmes and Caswell. Navigationally it was the most dangerous route, and a boomerang-shaped bar known as the Lump lurked just two to five feet below the surface. One small miscalculation and the
Pamlico
would be run aground and left helpless and exposed to the fire of the Yankee cruisers, but Derek felt pride in knowing that his men placed their full trust and confidence in the fact that he could navigate them through the dangerous pass. He would never let them know that he too breathed a sigh of relief once he had succeeded.

Now they were moving cautiously through Onslow Bay. No sound was heard, and Derek could smell no telltale smoke, yet he knew with the instinct of a jungle animal that somewhere out there in that foreboding darkness, they were there, like a giant spider in a massive web, waiting…for a sound…a flicker of light…a single mistake that would present them with a target for their guns.

Derek had lost count of the number of times he’d run the blockade. Since the
Ariane
had been blown to bits and he’d narrowly escaped with his life, he’d stopped thinking of the war in terms of making money and coming out of it a wealthy man. Now he wanted only revenge, and since he was akin to the sea and knew all the hazards waiting beneath the ocean’s murky depths, he liked the idea of making fools of the Yankees as he maneuvered the ship assigned to him through their damned web.

Tension surrounded him. He could feel it in himself and his men. It would not last much longer, but each second seemed an eternity. He tried not to think of the present. Every possible precaution had been taken, he told his pounding heart. They had succeeded before, and they would make it this time. He would think of Julie, and how sweet it was going to be to take his pleasure with her once again.

Suddenly his muscles tightened, and he gripped the railing with a grip like a steel vise. Something was not right. He could just
feel
it, dammit. His eyes darted everywhere, searching for something to tell him why he felt so anxious, why his nerves were stretched taut. Straining his ears, he listened for any sounds…voices…scrapings. Suddenly he knew. He could just feel it in his bones. Something was wrong, and a deep chill of foreboding began to wash over his body.

And then the night exploded with brilliance as a Drummond light illuminated the sky. There, less than a mile apart, two ships waited. “Full speed ahead!” He thundered the order. “We’ve been spotted. Make a break for open waters, fast, dammit—”

But just then both Yankee cruisers fired, and their shots landed heavily in the water nearby. Next the onshore battery of the Confederacy opened fire on the Federal ships, but they were too far out. At fifteen knots, Derek felt the
Pamlico
was crawling; yet their only chance was to hit the open waters and outrun the cruisers.

A shot whizzed by his head, hitting the edge of a large wooden crate and sending it crashing down from its moorings on the port foredeck. It hit a seaman, who smashed against the deck with an agonized cry.

And then another shot fell astern. “Four points starboard!…” Derek cried. The Confederate battery continued to fire, and the
Pamlico
steamed along. But the deck was a mass of confusion, with the crewmen running for cover.

Another shot screamed through the night, and this time the
Pamlico
was hit. Fire shot upward like a giant fist of crimson against the black sky.

“Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”

Derek heard the cries fill the air. He heard men shrieking as they clambered over the railings to jump into the water. They would try to swim back to shore, but he knew they would never make it. They were too far out at sea.

Another shot split the sky, this one landing so as to splinter the port side. It was all over. Derek gave the order to abandon ship, but no one was listening to him any longer, as each man fought to save his own life. Fights broke out over rafts, boards, anything that might keep a man afloat.

Derek turned his head at the sound of a blood-curdling scream and saw a man running across the crowded deck, his whole body aflame. Someone else knocked him down with one mighty swing from a rifle, and he was left to die in agony.

Derek knew they could be hit again at any second, and this time they would be sent straight into eternity. Any other time he, too, would have scrambled to jump overboard. He wasn’t about to honor that age-old rubbish about a captain going down with his ship. Besides, he reasoned wryly as he made his way below, he wasn’t really the damned captain anyway. The Confederacy wouldn’t bestow such an honor upon him after he’d lost his ship. He was just the pilot. Although technically in command, nevertheless it wasn’t
his
ship going down, and he saw no need for a heroic stand.

The only “heroics” he had in mind were saving Julie. Alone, helpless, she didn’t stand a chance, and he wasn’t about to leave her below to sink with the ship.

He stepped over a body, shoved someone aside with a sharp jab of his elbow. The scene was one of mass confusion and hysteria, punctuated by the screams of those already hit and wounded, who knew they were going to be left behind to die.

Smoke stung at Derek’s eyes. The
Pamlico
was burning, and he had no way of knowing if there was time to make his way below before the ship was caught in the suction that would pull it beneath the surface and to the bottom of the ocean. But he had to try to make it. He had to.

Bursting through the cabin door, he could see Julie in the red glow that was coming through the porthole from the burning deck above. She was sitting on the side of the bunk, staring about, dazed. And then she lifted confused eyes and gasped, “Derek. It—it is you…”

“No time to talk, Julie.” He lifted her as effortlessly as though she were no more than a sack of flour, threw her over his wide shoulder, and turned back toward the door.