Valhalla Rising Read Online Free

Displaying the flag and protecting the United States’ interests in the West Indies, she was on a voyage from Haiti to Nicaragua when her lookouts spotted a strange shape in the water a mile off the starboard bow. Visibility under clear skies stretched to the surrounding horizons and the sea was calm, the swells rising no more than two feet from trough to crest. The black-humped back of a strange species of sea monster could clearly be seen with the naked eye.
    “What do you make of it?” Captain Leigh Hunt asked his first officer, Lieutenant James Ellis, as he stared through a pair of brass binoculars.
    Ellis squinted through a telescope, braced against the railing to keep it steady, at the object in the distance. “My first guess is that it’s a whale, but I’ve never seen one move so steadily through the water without showing its tail or diving beneath the surface. Also, there’s a strange mound protruding forward of its center.”
    “It must be some type of rare sea serpent,” said Hunt.
    “No beast I’m aware of,” murmured Ellis in awe.
    “I can’t believe it’s a man-made vessel.”
    Hunt was a thin man with graying hair. His leathery face and deep-set brown eyes were those of a man who spent many long hours in the sun and wind. He clutched a pipe between his lips that was very seldom lit. Hunt was a navy professional with a quarter century of oceangoing experience and a fine record of efficient conduct behind him. He had been given command of the most famous ship in the navy as an honor before his retirement. Too young to have served in the Civil War, Hunt graduated from the naval academy in 1869 and served on eight different warships, rising through the ranks until he was offered command of the Kearsarge.
    The venerable ship had earned her fame after an epic sea battle thirty years earlier in which she’d battered and sunk the infamous Confederate raider, Alabama, off Cherbourg, France. Though evenly matched, Kearsarge had reduced Alabama to a foundering wreck in less than an hour after the start of the battle. Her captain and crew were feted as heros by a grateful Union after their return to home port.
    In later years she had served on cruises around the world. With a length of 198 feet, a beam of 33 feet and a fifteen-foot draft, her two engines and one screw could propel her through the water at eleven knots. Her guns had been replaced ten years after the war with a newer battery consisting of two eleven-inch smoothbores, four nine-inch smoothbores and two twenty-pound rifled barrels. She carried a crew of 160 men. Ancient though she was, she still packed a powerful punch.
    Ellis put down the telescope and turned to Hunt. “Shall we investigate, sir?”
    Hunt nodded. “Order a ten-degree turn to starboard. Request Chief Engineer Gribble to increase our speed to Full, turn out the crew for gun station two and double the lookouts. I don’t want to lose sight of that monster, whatever it is.”
    “Aye, sir.” Ellis, a tall balding man with an expansive, neatly trimmed beard, carried out his orders and soon the time-honored ship began to increase her speed, the waves splitting her bow with sheets of foam as she swung against the wind. A plume of heavy black smoke poured from her funnel along with a spray of sparks. The decks of the old warhorse trembled with anticipation as she took up the chase.
    Soon the Kearsarge began to close with the strange object that neither increased nor decreased its speed. A gun crew assembled, rammed a power charge and a projectile down the barrel of a twenty-pound rifled gun and stood back. The gunnery officer stared up at Hunt, who stood next to the helmsman.
    “Number two gun loaded and ready to fire, sir.”
    “Put a shot fifty yards ahead of the monster’s nose, Mr. Merryman,” Hunt shouted through his megaphone.
    Merryman simply acknowledged with a wave of one hand and nodded at the man standing next to the gun with the lanyard in his hand and another man who