The Shadows of God by J. Gregory Keyes Page A

do.”
    The man hesitated a long moment. “I shall have to use the aquaphore in my ship. By the time the wretched smoke you filled it with clears enough, the others will either surface to fight or try to run. There is nothing I can do until the smoke clears.”
    “That is if they surface.”
    In the end, they ran. A detachment followed them down the river a safe distance from the captured ship, then used the devil gun. An hour later, two ships surfaced and floated until they fetched against the chains. The stuff of their hulls was too hard to break through with the weapons Oglethorpe’s men THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    had, but they unmounted one of the blue-fire guns, took it downstream, and tried that. It cut the ships open quite nicely, and they sank. As they took on water, the hatches came open then, damn fast, and after the first three men on each had fallen dead from musket shot, the rest came out with hands raised high.
    They marched the prisoners back to Oglethorpe’s mansion and added them to those chained in the servants’ quarters. Meanwhile, Oglethorpe set the more scientifically minded of his men to finding out who the pilots of the ships were.
    “I want us to be able to use that ship by morning,” he said. “And I’ll need volunteers to learn its operation.”
    “Sir, I’d like to do that!” MacKay said.
    “You’ve experience in this line?”
    “I ran a steam galliot against the Spanish, Margrave.”
    “Good. You’ll be our chief pilot, then.”
    “Thank you, Margrave.”
    Oglethorpe nodded briskly. “Meanwhile, I want an order to go down for half of those redcoats laying siege to Nairne and his people to march south, away from here. Have Mar sign it, as he did the last.”
    “Sir, this can’t last forever,” Parmenter said. “Sooner or later they will realize they’ve been tricked.”
    “Indeed, and I will not count on this succeeding. But it is certainly worth trying.”
    “And now what, General?”
    “We move by morning, using the amphibian boat. We’ll attack from the river side, coming out of their own ship. They’ll never know what hit ”em. The real trick is to get Nairne to start something at the same moment, so we can have THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    the confusion as great as possible.“
    “I can do that, sir,” Parmenter replied.
    “How?”
    “I know that fort, sir. I can get near enough to put a message over the wall.”
    “Without getting caught? Because if you’re caught, they’ll be onto us.
    “I can do it, sir. I swear it.”
    Oglethorpe regarded the ranger for a moment, thinking that he had never known a man with a more level head.
    “Very well, Captain. How many men will you need?”
    “Two will do, sir. If they’ll do it, I prefer Unoka and Jehpath.”
    “Both Maroons?”
    “Best for this sort of work.”
    “And damned hard to see at night, eh?” Yes, sir.
    “Go to it then.”
    Two months ago, Oglethorpe mused as he watched Parmenter go, no white man or Indian I knew trusted those Africans as far as they could spit. Now we can hardly do without them, no more than we could do without the Indians.
    Because this was their sort of war, which by European standards was merely murder. But then, all war was murder. Why put an uglier face on this, or a pretty one on what he had seen at Vienna? He blinked away the memory of the Turks, practically swimming up siege trenches full of their own blood, falling under the ruthless rain of lead the Holy Roman army had loosed on them. For his own part, Oglethorpe had never even known if one of his own bullets killed THE SHADOWS OF GOD
    or not. It was impossible to tell.
    Here, he knew what he did, what he was responsible for. What he fought for.
    He could look in his heart and feel no shame, despite it all. He did what he must.
    They landed the ship without being seen. Fort Montgomery commanded a high bluff, and the land around it for nearly a league was pretty clear. An outer wall surrounding the town of Montgomery—a town of some