Free Legend of the Gypsy Queen Skull: The Devil's Triangle - Book 1 by otis duane Page A

and
snapping into two.
    Thrusting his fist into the air, he made the
first move.
    “Give ’em hell, boys! FIRE!” he ordered and
instantly his ship’s cannons roared to life, ripping into the
Lexington with stunning ferocity.
    Everywhere on the English warship, decks and
railings were exploding apart as burning debris rained down on her
crew.
    Soon, a thick cloud of spent gunpowder, the
true fog of war, began to linger over the decks of both ships.
    Although he would have preferred to sink
Gliv’s ship, Darcy had ordered the Lexington’s cannons to remain
silent. He didn’t want to endanger the remaining innocents held
captive aboard the slave ship.
    ~*~
    With chaos reigning all around him, Seaman
Jansen crawled behind a cannon’s mount, seeking cover, when a
nearby explosion propelled him out from his hiding place.
    “Ahhhh!” he screamed as a sharp stabbing
pain shot up his leg. Grimacing, he looked down to see a sharpened
piece of timber sticking straight through his calf muscle. Reaching
for the wooden shard, he tried futilely to remove it but only
managed to amplify his pain.
    With the color in his face quickly leaving
him, senior crewman, Joshua Burnham, seized ahold of his wrist.
    “Leave it be sonny. Otherwise, you’ll bleed
to death.”
    “Now, hold still,” Joshua added and broke
off the protruding ends of the shard from either side of his calf
as Jansen gritted his teeth.
    Tearing off one of the boy’s sleeves, Joshua
used it to bandage his leg.
    Finishing up his handiwork, he slapped the
greenhorn on his shoulder and said, “Get ready sonny. We’re going
over the railing lickety split.”
    The speechless seaman’s jaw nearly hit the
deck.
    Fight? I can’t even walk!
    ~*~
    With the intense barrage of fire coming from
the slave ship the Lexington’s casualties began to mount.
    “Keep firing!” Gliv screamed out, handing
another cannonball to one of his gunners.
    With the Lexington’s boarding party pinned
down behind their own hull wall, Darcy had to do something, and
quickly. Otherwise, the corsairs would get away, as the setting sun
dipped further below the horizon.
    Jumping down off of the bridge deck, to the
main deck below, Captain Darcy sprinted across to their position.
Diving below the railing, he pressed his back up against the hull
wall and turned to Joshua.
    “I’ll take it from here,” he said, slapping
his first mate on the back.
    “Aye captain,” the older man replied,
relinquishing his command of the fodder squad.
    “You boys ready?” Darcy shouted over to the
newbies.
    “Aye-aye captain!” they spiritedly shouted
back in unison.
    With exploding timbers still raining down
all around them, Darcy stood up and pointedly directed his sword to
a group of sailors to his right and shouted, “Grapplers! Ready your
hooks!”
    Turning his head toward his sharpshooters,
he yelled out, “Cover fire!”
    Immediately, they too bound to their feet
and shot a deadly volley of rifle fire across the corsairs’ deck,
cutting down several pirates, dead in their tracks.
    As Darcy’s men reloaded, another pirate
charged toward them, raising his pistol up but the captain was
quicker on the draw. Shooting him in his Adam’s apple, the corsair
was propelled backwards, where he hit the deck and writhed about,
holding onto his throat.
    ~*~
    “Grapplers up!” Darcy shouted to his
team.
    Hopping up to their feet, they began to
swing their large treble hooks overhead, like lassos.
    “Now!” he commanded, and his men flung their
rusty iron hooks into the air, across the watery divide.
    Landing them on the pirate ship’s deck, they
hurriedly dragged them across its wooden planks as their barbed
ends eerily screeched like fingernails scratching across a
chalkboard.
    Snagging their hooks onto anything they
could, the grapplers pulled and heaved, drawing the two ships
closer together.
    ~*~
    When they were within an arm’s length of the
slave galley, the Lexington grapplers tied off their lines.