False Colors by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page B

of the pens as unchallenged as they had entered. Tension crushed John’s back and shoulders as he waited for an outcry that did not come. A smell of cinnamon and sweat drifted from Nesim, whose cheek glimmered wet in the moonlight.
    The tension wound to a pitch as they passed the pit where the city’s dogs dug and fought over bones. Sordid little monuments topped with spat out date stones loomed, crumbling, in the night, and still silence followed them. As they crossed to the parks and silent, cube-like mausoleums of the well-to-do, shadows moved as vagrants laying in the well-tended doorways scrambled out of their way. Despite the lack of pursuit, fear, primeval and irrational, made John’s spine tingle cold in the sweltering night.
    The locked gate of the city wall yielded to a crowbar. He shut it behind them with sweaty hands and led the rescue party on its long, burdened walk back to the cove, the threat of discovery padding behind like a hunting lion.
    They left Nesim on the beach, fingering a small bag of gold and looking like a man who feels a change of career coming on. Then, dawn rising on their left, they sailed out for two hours, until—half way to Tizi Ouzou, it seemed—a glass showed the off-white triangles of the Meteor ’s sails coming to meet them.
    Sunrise’s bright citrine light danced on the water. Armitage’s face, for once open as he reveled in being left in charge, looked over as they hailed.
    “A rope here!” shouted John, making it fast under Donwell’s arms to pull him on board. As he did so, Donwell stirred, leaning into him, gingerly settling his swollen face on John’s shoulder.
    “Captain?” His small whisper, dry and cracked as picked bone, plucked at John’s heart.
“You’re safe now, Lieutenant.” A wave of pity and strange tenderness washed over him. Then he stirred himself, made the rope fast with a hitch, and signaled for the crew on deck to pull the man on board. By the time he had run up the side himself, they had lowered Donwell down into the main hatch, and all he saw was the lace on Mrs. Harper’s bonnet, white as the spray, disappearing after him.
John straightened up, looked at the grim faces that surrounded him, and grinned. The expression spread, until finally the ship’s crew put him in mind of a pool of piranhas gently holding station as they watched the descent of an unwary foot.
“We will bend on the red sails,” he said. “And then you may clear for action.”
    By the following night all was ready. At the rim of the world the sinking moon extinguished itself in the sea, and in the starlight the Meteor’s black painted hull and ochre sails were all but invisible. Brass guns lurked without a gleam under a fresh coat of brown paint. The mortars, uncovered, squatted like gargoyles peering over her prow, their great black mouths gaping. Standing next to them, the men of the Ordnance Corps deigned to smile, gloating over their bombs.
    Only the bow wave caught the occasional glimmer, dimly shimmering as the Meteor forged her silent way into the vast bowl of the harbor of Algiers.
    Map in one hand, the other on the compass binnacle, John whispered his instructions to the helm. Ship’s boys raced on soundless bare feet to relay commands to the captains of the main and mizzen masts.
    “Prepare to heave to. Helm a lee. Back the main sail. Boat crews, row out the spring anchors.”
Groaning, the braces of the masts so tight a little rain of dew squeezed out of them, the Meteor slowed, turned up into the wind and stopped, holding her position, balanced between the backward push of her backed mainsail and the forward thrust of the other sails. Like a dancer balanced and still on the tip of one foot, it was a poised, precarious stillness ready to swing back into motion at any moment.
First to one side, then the other, the boat crews slid the spring anchors gently into the water. John felt them take—the deck beneath his feet shuddered slightly then firmed, losing its