Hell or High Water (Deep Six #1)
Julie Ann Walker
To all the fans who have followed me through each adventure in every story, who have encouraged me to keep writing, and who have cheered me on since the first sentence of the first book I ever published. This one’s for you!
As the son of a son of a sailor, I went out on the sea for adventure…
—Jimmy Buffett
Prologue
May 26, 1624…
The end is near…
The words rang through Captain Bartolome Vargas’s mind with the ominous clarity of a death knell. The seas…the wildly capricious seas had turned against him just as they had done many times before. But unlike all those earlier hard-fought, hard-won battles, something inside him—a premonition, perhaps? Or maybe simple intuition?—told him this day there would be no escaping the watery jaws that waited to swallow his beloved ship and the 224 souls aboard her like a giant blue whale gulping down a gullet full of krill. This day neither Christ nor cannon could protect his precious galleon from the huge, frothing waves rushing up against her hull.
“Take in the main sails! Make haste!” he bellowed to the crewmen crawling in the rigging and scrambling and sliding across the Santa Cristina’s waterlogged deck. His first mate blasted the command through a whalebone whistle, the three-note trill nearly lost when the ferocious wind caught it and whipped it out to sea. Raking the rain and salt spray from his eyes, Bartolome wrestled with the big wooden wheel, looking toward the east and the roiling wall of clouds that heralded his doom. When he’d awakened that morning to the eerie glow on the horizon, his sailor’s instincts had warned him they were in for one hell of a storm. But so early in the season, he had not been prepared for this…
Un huracán—a hurricane. There was no doubt in his mind.
With a violent curse, he swung his gaze to the north, hoping his sister ship, Nuestra Se?ora de Cádiz, had made it to Bone Key in time to ride out the fury on the leeward side of the island. Upon seeing the tumultuous red sky at sunrise, he and Captain Quintana, his counterpart aboard the Cádiz, had made the decision to split the armada sailing for Spain. Quintana would continue on, taking refuge along the way at Bone Key if need be. And Bartolome would turn back to their home port of Havana—and if he could not make that, he would shelter near the ringed island halfway between. Their thinking had been that if worse came to worst, at least one ship would survive the tempest. But un huracán… Un huracán could very well see them both at the bottom of the sea.
Just like Eustacio…
With a grimace, Bartolome thought of the man he lost overboard midmorning along with six of his bronze deck cannons when the Santa Cristina took a rogue wave broadside. It should have been his first clue this was no mere summer squall. He should have sought shelter then.
He had not.
“God help them.” Bartolome quietly whispered a prayer for both Eustacio and his sister ship. Then he included a prayer for himself and his remaining crew, “God help us all,” before turning his attention to the south.
The merciless wind whipped his hair from the clasp at his nape, plastering it against the stubble on his cheeks and chin. He paid it no mind as he strained and wished with his whole heart to see the glittering, welcoming lights of Havana. Unfortunately, with the city still so far away, that sight was no more substantial than a memory. It was impossible to fight the wind and the tides to sail back to her now.
As if to prove his point, he watched, stricken, while the San Andrés and the San José, the two gunships tasked with protecting the Santa Cristina, each fell victim to the monster waves crashing over their decks. First one, then the other quietly slipped beneath the surface of the teeming water. Their demises rendered even more horrific by the seeming banality, the simplicity, with which they were dragged to the bottom.
The end is near…
Those words once again rose up to taunt Bartolome, and he had just enough time to send up an invocation for the lost souls aboard the gunships when—sploosh!—the Santa Cristina’s yardarms plunged into the angry ocean as she rolled violently to her side. The deck heaved beneath his feet. He gripped the wheel with one hand and the slick rail with the other, holding on so tightly his fingers ached. The mighty masts groaned and creaked in dire warning, and the bitter smell of silt and kelp, stirred up by the swirling currents, added to the sharp bite of electricity burning through the air.
Boom! A burst of lightning, only found in the most turbulent and unpredictable hurricanes, sizzled through the sky overhead, highlighting the determined faces of Bartolome’s crew as they battled for the life of the ship, and ultimately their own salvation.
They had only one chance: the ringed island he’d left behind just a short time ago when he was still arrogant enough to think it was possible to reach home port…
“We are coming about!” he yelled to his first mate.
Nodding jerkily, the young officer lifted his whistle to his lips. Bartolome saw the man’s cheeks puff out, but no sound emerged from the small instrument. With a shouted curse, his first mate shook as much of the sea spray from the whistle as he could before trying again. This time, two short, clear notes pierced the blustery air, followed by one long, melodious trill.
Bartolome watched through the blinding screen of rain as his valiant crew struggled to do his bidding. When the rigging was ready, he spun the wheel, his muscles burning from the long hours of desperately working to control the big ship. The Santa Cristina moaned mightily, the wood of her hull straining as she fought to make the turn in the heaving seas. But the instant the secondary sails caught the force of the gale, lifting the ship sharply before plunging her to her side, it became obvious it was too late. She could probably hold together long enough to take them back to the ringed island, but she was far too cumbersome to make the maneuvers needed to safely sail them around to the leeward side.