In Dangerous Company: The Dorset Boy Book 4 Read online

  They set up an ambush at a checkpoint before the town. They police who normally manned it had been given a large payment by the smugglers to be somewhere else had been and replaced with Antton and Matai.

  They had brought over the latest innovation from the Toolshed, as Marty had christened the three inventive marines that manned their workshop at the farm. Crossbows that fired a heavy blunt bolt designed to stun rather than kill. Marty had seen it being tested and knew that if it hit at the base of the skull the victim probably wouldn’t survive, but they were quiet and effective. Apart from the crossbows they armed themselves with slings, clubs and blackjacks. They didn’t need any unsightly holes in the uniforms.

  Anton leaned on the barrier as the detachment arrived. He behaved in the slovenly ill-mannered way that all checkpoint guards did. Matai sat on a chair with his feet up on a table, apparently dozing.

  The detachment and their cart plodded up to them. The cart couldn’t move faster than a walk over the badly maintained roads. Any faster risked a broken wheel or axle.

  The officers rode in the lead and stopped as they got to the barrier.

  “You there! Get that thing out of our way!” Ordered one of the officers impatiently. He had a hangover from an extended drinking bout the night before and was even ruder than he normally was.

  Antton looked up at him and casually asked him for his papers. The officer bristled but his colleague muttered something to him, and he dug in his pouch and handed over a sheaf of documents. Anton dropped them.

  The officer cursed and jumped down off his horse to gather them before the slight morning breeze scattered them. He didn’t see the rear rank of men topple off their horses closely followed by the next two. The two on the cart slumped forward and then a mass of men rushed in and pulled the remaining five off their horses. Antton clipped the officer behind the ear with his blackjack and Matai dealt with the other by shooting him the solar plexus with his crossbow. In less than two minutes all the soldiers were overpowered, and their horses secured.

  Marty measured himself up against the two officers and chose the uniform that he thought would fit him best. He took the insignia from the other uniform and swapped them for his to make himself the commanding officer. James took the other. The rest of the men changed into the uniforms of the other soldiers. Marty had his team mounted as the escort with five smugglers to make up the numbers. He had two of the smugglers man the cart and the others joined the mounted guards.

  Gaston and another man said they would maintained the illusion that the checkpoint was manned until the real ones returned. Marty didn’t ask what they were going to do with the soldiers. However, he had a suspicion that an old well nearby would get some use today.

  James gathered all the documents and identified the officers. Marty was Captain Hugemont and James was Lieutenant Duval both of the 4th Lancers on detachment to the Department of Internal Affairs. The also had the names of all of the men and the rest took a name each. As the smugglers weren’t trained in deception, they just asked them to stay quiet and act surly when they met anyone.

  They set off through the town. Most people ignored them; others called out. Local whores offered their wares luridly in screechy voices. One old girl called to him.

  “Hey Captain. I bet you’ve got a big lance! You want to have me polish it for you?”

  He waved and smiled at her and she cackled a laugh through half a mouth of teeth.

  They left the town after stopping for lunch at a café on the outskirts and made their way on up the road. Their orders said they should overnight in Boulogne, but Marty didn’t want to risk a military hostel as too many questions could be asked. So instead they slept in a barn and passed through the town early. They would be at the Fort by midmorning.

  The entrance was along a causeway that passed over the moat via a wooden bridge. Marty looked up at the wall and scanned along it to the Bastion on the right. There were twenty-four-pound cannon protruding from the casement at regular intervals. He glanced to the left, it was the same there. He looked over at James and raised his eyebrows.

  They passed over the bridge, the horses hooves clattered, the wheels of the cart rumbled, and the gates swung open to let them in. They passed through the maw and tried to keep an even pace. Marty got an itch between his shoulder blades and felt like he was walking into a trap. A sergeant directed them to a block house and when they pulled up outside a Major of Infantry stepped out and waited for Marty to dismount.

  “Major Dupont.” he greeted them with a casual salute. He had no time or respect for the cavalry, in fact he despised them.

  “Captain Hugemont.” Marty said urbanely playing the part of the superior cavalryman. Even if he was outranked, he was still superior he told himself as all cavalrymen considered themselves superior to mere infantry. It had something to do with the horses he guessed, being mounted put you above everyone else.

  Dupont looked down his nose at him and held out his hand. For a second Marty thought he wanted to shake, but then realised he wanted the papers. He dug into the pouch, pulled out the requisite documents and passed them over. The Major read them and made a gesture towards the blockhouse. A sergeant came out leading two soldiers with Armand suspended between them. He wasn’t conscious.

  The guards took him around to the back of the cage, threw him in and shut the door. The Major looked smug and said.

  “He is all yours. Please sign here that you have received the prisoner.”

  Marty scribbled an undecipherable signature and said.

  “I hope for your sake he lives until Paris. The department wants to question him.”

  That will make you sweat you bastard.

  The Major shrugged.

  “He was alive when he left my custody. What happens on the road is your problem.”

  Marty got back on his horse, flicked a half a salute and wheeled away. He led his men back through the gate and over the wooden bridge without a backward glance. The itch between his shoulder blades got stronger.

  Once they got out of sight of the castle he dismounted and rushed to Armand in the cage. He had been badly beaten up and was concussed, but apart from a couple of suspected broken ribs and a hand showing signs of being stamped on, he didn’t look too badly damaged. Marty sighed in relief.

  “Get him back to Crotoy,” he said to James and passed him the pouch.

  “Tell Gaston I have things to do in Calais. I will be at the meeting point at Wissant, at dusk, three days from now,” he told the senior smuggler.

  He stripped of his uniform, handed it to James and put on the clothes he had worn on the trip over.

  “I need to find the information Armand was collecting and find out what made him risk capture.” Marty told James. “Get him home to his wife and child.”

  James nodded but looked like he would rather stay.

  “If anybody questions where the captain is, tell them he got sick and your orders didn’t allow for any delay, so you left him behind at his order. Now go.”

  Marty took off on foot, a French civilian riding a cavalry horse would be very suspicious and made his way to the house that Armand had been using. He knocked at the door and this time the old man practically dragged him inside.

  “Have you gotten him out?” he asked, visibly distressed.

  “Don’t worry he is safe. A little beaten up but otherwise fine. He is on his way home.” Marty reassured him.

  “Thank God! I thought they were going to shoot him.” The old man had tears in his eyes.

  “What is your name?” Marty asked him.

  “Francois Legrande at your service. I was one of Monsieur Armand’s family retainers before the revolution,” he replied recovering his composure.

  “I am Martin and I need your help to complete Armand’s mission.”

  “I will help in any way I can Sir.” Francois offered.

  Marty quizzed him on what Armand was doing and what he found prior to his disastrous sortie into the camp and then asked
him to show him Armand’s room. If he had made any notes they would be in there.

  The room was quite large and had a nice bed, a wardrobe and a dressing table. First, he searched the room in general, looking under the bed and around the inside of the wardrobe. Then he pulled the drawers completely out from the dressing table and checked inside the recess and under the base of the drawers themselves.

  Nothing.

  He stopped and walked to the centre of the room and just looked. Slowly turning in a circle. He was trying to think like Armand. There was a fireplace. He checked the chimney, nothing. He sat back and looked carefully at the brickwork at the back of the fire. He scanned each row and then he noticed that one brick sat slightly further back than the others. He looked closer and saw two very small gaps in the mortar either end of the brick.

  Now what goes in there? he thought. He stood and went back to the dressing table. It had been used by a lady in days gone by and there was a stand with button hooks on it. Marty picked up each hook in turn and ran his finger and thumb down the shafts. Two left a very slight black mark.

  He returned to the fireplace and very carefully inserted the hooks into the two slots as far as he could then turned them ninety degrees and gently pulled. The brick slid out and before it could drop on the floor, he carefully held it by pressing his fingers against the ends and pulled it out all the way. He made extra sure that he put it down with the outward side facing upwards so it wouldn’t get damaged.

  Now he could see into the cavity and at the back were some rolled up papers which he carefully retrieved.

  He recognised the writing as Armand’s, but they were in code. This is going to take a while, he thought.

  After working half the night, he had deciphered the papers. Most of what they held was numbers of troops, horses and so on, but one had a description of what Armand called a ‘ballon de transport’ or transport balloon. It apparently could carry ten men and would, Armand suspected, be towed behind a vessel of some kind.

  Marty sat and thought about it. If all the barges had a balloon tied to them that would increase their carrying capacity by a third! Or they could carry stores or horses in the barges and the men in the balloons.

  This was serious, Marty had read that Jacques Charles and Robert Brothers had made “La Caroline” an elongated, steerable craft that had internal gas cells, a rudder and something that pushed it along. Jean Baptiste Meusnier, the French Revolutionary General had championed it in 1784. So, he could quite believe this was feasible. He read the paper again and noticed that it said that the balloons relied on a gas to make them fly. It also said that the gas was highly inflammable. The part of Marty’s soul that was an arsonist started to speak to him.

  He burnt his decoded versions making sure there wasn’t a scrap left and returned the originals to the cavity in the fire place. He carefully replaced the brick, but this time made sure that it was level with its counterparts either side.

  He slept for four hours and woke refreshed and had a hearty breakfast of cheese and ham with croissant, which he loved, washed down with strong coffee. It was time to go and look for those cargo balloons.

  It was just getting light when he arrived at the perimeter of the army encampment. He had chosen an entry point close to the powder store that was marked on a hand drawn map in Armand’s notes. He started to crawl across the dew drenched grass, getting thoroughly soaked in the process. He looked back. Oh shit! He thought as his trail was clearly visible as a dark line across the dew-covered field.

  He had no option, he backtracked down the same line until he came to the ditch he had started at. He made his way along to a gravel path and took that at a stroll hoping no one would challenge him.

  He got lucky and came across a civilian working party that was loading a cart with casks of powder from a powder store. He joined in and helped load a couple of casks before he slipped behind a stack and waited for them to move off. Once all was quiet, he used his knife to remove the bung from one of the casks and check the contents. It was artillery grade gunpowder. He looked around and found a smaller cask which provided some fine ground priming powder.

  Humming quietly to himself he took a brass timer out of his pocket, wound up the wheel lock and set it. He then selected a cask of powder in the middle of a stack and, after removing the bung, poured a good portion of priming powder into it. Finally, he set the timer to twenty, too short, forty minutes and lodged it in the bung hole with a rag wrapped around it so the wheel lock was directly above the priming powder. It was precisely nine o’clock in the morning according to his watch. Satisfied he made his way to the entrance.

  There was a guard outside who had a sudden urge to sleep as Marty’s blackjack sang him a lullaby. He was found a comfortable spot, out of sight, where he could slumber undisturbed, trussed up and gagged.

  Marty checked the map and made off in the direction of the balloon storage. He joined another civilian group that were moving in the right direction and left them when they turned towards the food tents.

  He ducked into a tent, as there were a number of soldiers heading straight at him, to be confronted with the sight of a whorehouse. There were half naked girls sprawled around eating croissant and a couple of officers doing up their uniforms getting ready to leave. The madam swore at him as this was an officer only establishment and a bouncer ejected him through the tent flap with a hearty shove.

  He landed in the dirt outside of the tent much to the amusement of the soldiers he had ducked inside to avoid. They called out ribald suggestions and insults at random as they marched by.

  He stood and brushed himself off with a show of injured dignity then carried on walking in the direction of the balloon store.

  He spotted a sign outside a compound that with big red letters and a pictogram of an explosion warned of ‘Inflammable Gas’. He stopped and looked around, there was one man inside that he could see. He was a scholarly looking fellow with a shaggy mane of brown hair that looked to be totally out of control and had a pair of round glasses perched on his nose.

  The man looked up, noticed him and said, “You are here at last! You are late! Get in here and assist me immediately.”

  Marty hesitated for about a count of three and then hurried into the compound. The man started giving him rapid instructions, obviously expecting him to understand what he meant and when Marty didn’t respond as expected peered at him closely.

  “You aren’t de Jorney! Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  He was about to ask yet another question when Marty punched him on the jaw, knocking him out.

  “I dunno who de Jorney is,” he muttered as he moved the man behind a pile of boxes, “but I bet he knows where he is better off.”

  There was a contraption under a canvas roof in the centre of the compound and Marty went to look at it. It looked like a large kettle of some kind. The spout had a canvas pipe connected to a large bladder held under a cargo net that was staked to the ground. The bladder looked to be about half full. There were a lot of boxes with iron filings nearby and demi-johns with the skull and crossbones for poison on them. He carefully un-stoppered one of the demi-johns and recoiled at the smell of sulphur that almost burnt the hair out of his nose.

  After thinking about what the now unconscious man had told him to do, he took the lid off the kettle and dumped in a box full of iron filings and then took a demi-john of brimstone smelling liquid and poured that in on top. The reaction was immediate, it started to bubble. He clamped the lid back on.

  He looked at his watch, thirty minutes had passed since he set the timer!

  He heard a noise and glanced over his shoulder. The bladder was inflating! Whatever the kettle was producing was being forced into the bladder!

  He stood and thought for a moment. If that kettle thing is making the gas to raise the balloons, then whatever is in that bladder is inflammable or maybe even explosive according to Armond’s notes.

  He could feel a fire coming on.

 
He glanced at his watch.

  Four minutes to go.

  He went to the bladder and cut a small slit in it near to the pipe that joined it to the kettle. Not big enough to stop the inflation but big enough to let out a steady stream of gas. He had one more timer in his pocket which he took out, set the wheel lock and wound the setting to six minutes. He carefully placed the timer by the stream of gas escaping from the slit he had cut.

  He found the scholarly man, slung him over his shoulder and carried him out of the compound. He was spotted by a guard who was just about to challenge him when the powder store exploded. They felt the concussion where they stood, and the guard looked in horror at the mushroom cloud of smoke that was drifting into the sky. Twenty plus tons of black powder sure makes a significant bang. Marty thought with a grin and broke into a run.

  There was a whole load of secondary explosions as kegs were thrown in the air and detonated. It was a very impressive display that flattened everything near it. But if he was right in his assumption about the gas, he needed to get away from the immediate area as soon as possible, so he yelled to the guard to follow him and ran towards the burning powder store. He stopped by the brothel to deposit his passenger into the caring arms of a pair of whores who he tossed a silver half Louis to.

  As he turned away there was a whoosh as the gas from the leak he had created ignited. The bladder was slightly porous to hydrogen so there was a thin layer of the gas all around it which ignited as well. The heat caused the bladder to rupture from where he had cut the slit and it exploded with a sharp, very loud, bang. The blast sprayed sulphuric acid everywhere in a hundred-yard radius. It was time to leave.

  Chapter 17. Barging around

  Marty had no trouble leaving the camp. He just joined a group of fleeing civilians, ducking out of the group as they got to the town. There was quite a crowd gathered on the outskirts watching the smoke rising from the direction of the encampment, but he didn’t want to wait there.