: Daniel Wyatt
: The Cotton Run
: Mushroom eBooks
: 9781843193807
: 1
: CHF 3.90
:
: Krimis, Thriller, Spionage
: English
: 163
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Captain Joshua Denning is a veteran of the nighttime cotton runs through the Union blockades off Cape Fear, near Wilmington, in 1863.
During a confrontation on the high seas outside Nassau, Denning clashes with an old adversary, Captain Robert Carlisle, from his days at Annapolis Navy Academy ten years before. The next time they meet, when Denning takes on one final blockade run, carrying the greatest shipment of them all, only one will be victorious...
The Cotton Run gives us a different insight into the American Civil War, a story of love, hate, greed, and double-dealing that takes us deep into the exciting and dangerous world of naval combat, and the controversial blockade-running trade through the strategic Confederate port of Wilmington, North Carolina.

Chapter one


Cape Fear, North Carolina — April 1863

The captain slid his hand through his reddish-blonde hair and sniffed, his tall, hard-muscled body absorbing the breeze. Rain was on the way. No doubt about that. He could smell it in the damp, heavy air. He turned west, where his weathered clean-shaven skin caught the last of the setting Carolina sun.

Time to move out.

Inside his cabin, Captain Joshua Denning switched from his white frilled shirt, black tie and black slacks into his functional, all-gray ensemble. Outside, theSilver Sally crew slipped the ship’s cables on schedule at nine o’clock, and pulled away. In order to dodge the numerous sandbars at the mouth of Cape Fear, Denning preferred to depart Wilmington an hour or so early and make his escape just as the tide reached the high-water mark, which tonight would be shortly after midnight.

The southerly eight-knot cruise in the inky darkness gave the meticulous Denning time to check his last minute details and plot his strategy. Night had brought a gloomy hush to Cape Fear. Pressed in around him were seven-hundred pound cotton bales piled firmly on the ship’s deck, so high that his tanned, well-built Southern sailors in similar gray garb to his had to stand on the bundles to perform their tasks. This was a lucrative cargo at their feet; a Confederate fortune of five hundred and sixty-four bales of American Sea Island, the finest-fibered cotton grown in the South, two hundred and seventy-five bales of the general purpose Georgia Bowed, and thirty cases of turpentine.

Skimming down the Cape Fear River, Denning now had one of two choices: New Inlet, off the port bow, with Fort Fisher and Fort Buchanan as covers, or Old Inlet, guarded by Fort Caswell and Fort Holmes, farther down river. The mouth of the river was divided into these two openings, only six miles apart and separated by the triangle-shaped Smith Island and numerous underwater sandbars, the worst of which were the Frying Pan Shoals.

TheSilver Sally drew even with New Inlet.

Denning brought his telescope to his eye... and shook his head. Too many enemy gunboats for his liking. And they were too close. First mate Matthew Balsinger had a saying for it:as thick as fleas on a dog’s ass. Denning didn’t wish to take on the cross wind either. The escape route now had to be Old Inlet and the Frying Pan Shoals, no matter what was waiting for him.

As theSilver Sally slid on, the only sound aboard was the soft drone of the ship’s powerful engines. Clouds from the southeast had blotted out the quarter moon. The mild breeze up the river before nightfall had peaked at twenty knots. From the port rail near the bridge, Denning watched the silhouettes of the pine and palm trees along the bank give way to the towering oaks and the weighty smell of the swampland along Smith Island. The moon poked throu