Four sets of surprised eyes turned on me.
“We’ll be undercover. Like a nautical version of James Bond,” I told my men. They didn’t even blink, just stared at me with identical blank looks. I sighed to myself and gestured them to their tasks. “Just get us going. We need to be in the blockade before it gets light enough for them to see us clearly. Douse those lanterns. We need to be running silent and dark, like a particularly clever and saucy sort of deadly shark.”
I hummed a bit of the Jaws theme as my ship slipped away from the noise and mayhem of the dock. I climbed up to my favorite spot—the crow’s nest—to watch for trouble as we sailed as close to shore as possible without grounding. Pangloss must have been watching for me, for when we started around the far arm of the harbor and I o
