Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (28 page)

“We've two hours of fair water, my Lord.” Fraser, recognizing the moment of crisis, had adopted a respectful formality.

Cochrane did not respond. He was staring toward the harbor entrance. Was he thinking of making a dash for it? But how could two slow ships dash? Their speed, even with the tide's help, was scarcely above that of a man walking.

“We'll not get through, my Lord.” Fraser, reading His Lordship's mind, growled the warning.

“No,” Cochrane said, but said nothing more.

Fraser shot a beseeching look at Sharpe. Sharpe, more than any other man in the expedition, had counseled against this attack, and now, Fraser's look seemed to be saying, was the time for Sharpe to urge withdrawal. There was just one chance of avoiding disaster, and that was for the two ships to turn and slip away southward.

Sharpe said nothing.

Fraser, desperate to end the indecision, challenged Sharpe directly. “So what would you do, Sharpe?”

Cochrane frowned at Sharpe, but did not countermand Fraser's invitation.

“Well?” Fraser insisted. The ship was still creeping toward the harbor mouth. In another half mile she would open the entrance and be under the guns of Fort San Carlos.

Cochrane was a devil, Sharpe thought, and suddenly he felt a smaller imp rise in himself. Goddamn it, but a man did not come this far just to be challenged by a toy boat and then turn back! “If we anchor off the beach,” Sharpe said, “they'll think we're obeying their orders. We wait till it's dark, then we send a boat or two ashore. We can say we're looking for fresh water if anyone questions us. Then we'll attack the nearest fort. We may only capture a few kegs of powder, but at least we'll have let the bastards know that we're still dangerous.”

“Magnificent!” shouted Cochrane, released from his torpor. He slapped Sharpe's back. “Goddamn it, man, but magnificent! I like it! Mister Almante! A signal to the O'Higgins, if you please, ordering them to ready anchors!” Cochrane was suddenly seething with energy and enthusiasm. “But bugger snatching a few kegs of powder! Let's go for the whole pot! We'll capture the western forts, then use their guns to bombard Niebla while our ships work their way inside. That'll be at dawn, Mister Fraser, so perhaps you will work out the time of the morning's flood tide for me? I don't know why I didn't think to do it this way from the very start! Mister Cabral? Order a meal served below decks. Tell the men they've got two hours rest before we begin landing troops.”

“Now you've done it,” Fraser grumbled to Sharpe.

“You spoke, Mister Fraser?” Cochrane demanded.

“Nothing, my Lord.”

“As soon as we're at anchor,” Cochrane went on, “you'll lower boats, but do it on the side facing away from the land! We don't want the enemy to see we're launching boats, do we?”

“A hole in each end, my Lord?” Fraser asked.

“Then suck the damned egg dry!” Cochrane, knowing he had given Fraser an unnecessary order, gave a brief guffaw of laughter.

Behind the Kitty the sky was a glorious blaze of gold touched scarlet, in which a few ragged clouds floated silver gray. The sea had turned molten, slashed with shivering bands of black. The great Spanish ensign, given an even richer color by the sun's flaming gold, slapped and floated in the fitful wind.

The two ships crept toward the shore. Sharpe could hear the breakers now and see where they foamed white as they hissed and roared toward the sand. Then, just when it seemed that the Kitty must inevitably be caught up in that rush of foam and be swept inexorably to her doom, Fraser ordered both anchors let go. A seaman swung a sledgehammer, knocking a peg loose from the cathead, and the starboard anchor crashed down through the golden sea. The port anchor followed a second after, the twin chains rattling loud in the dusk. Then, with a jerk, the Kitty rounded up and lay with her bows pointing toward the setting sun and her stern toward the mainland. The headland, on which Fort Ingles stood, was now on her port side.

The O'Higgins anchored a hundred yards further out. Both ships jerked and snubbed angrily, but Fraser reported that the anchors were holding. “Not that it will help us,” he added to Sharpe, “for the boats will never land on that beach.” He jerked an unshaven chin toward the Aguada del Ingles where, in the last slanting light, the foam was shredding spray like smoke. Cochrane might believe a landing to be possible, but Sharpe suspected that Fraser was right and that any boat that tried to land through that boiling surf would be swamped.

Cochrane stared up to where his topmen were efficiently gathering in the Kitty's sails. “The wind's backing, Fraser?”

“Aye, my Lord, it is.”

Cochrane fidgeted a second. “We might leave the spanker rigged for mending, Mr. Fraser. It will hide your boats as they're launched.”

Fraser did not like the idea. “The wind could veer, my Lord.”

“Let's do it! Hurry now!”

The orders were given. Fraser offered Sharpe an explanation. The wind, he said, had been southerly all day, but had now gone into the west. By leaving the aftermost sail half hoisted he turned the ship into a giant weather vane. The wind would then keep the ship parallel to the beach, leaving the starboard side safely hidden from the fort. Cochrane could then launch his boats in the last of the daylight, safe from enemy gaze.

“Why not rig the sail full?” Sharpe asked. The sail was only half raised.

“Because that would look unnatural when you're at anchor. But half rig is how you'd hoist her for mending, and a half-collapsed sail hides the far side of the quarterdeck a deal better than a fully hoisted sail. Not that I suppose anyone up there understands seamanship.”

Fraser had jerked a derisive thumb toward Fort Ingles above the beach. From Sharpe's position on the quarterdeck the fort's ramparts formed the skyline, clearly showing six embrasures in its grim silhouette. The guns were less than a half mile from the Kitty. If the Spanish did suddenly discover that the two anchored ships were hostile, the guns would wreak havoc in the crowded lower decks. Sharpe shuddered and turned away. Harper, seeing the shudder, surreptitiously crossed himself.

The sun was now a bloated ball of fire on the horizon. Ashore the shadows were lengthening and coalescing into a gray darkness. On the Kitty's quarterdeck, behind the concealing folds of heavy canvas, the ship's four longboats and two jolly boats were being lowered overboard. The Captain's barge was the last boat to be launched. Each boat held a single seaman whose job was to keep his craft from being crushed as the frigate heaved up and down on the swells. “Another hour,” Cochrane spoke to Sharpe and Harper, “and it'll be dark enough to land troops. Why don't you get something to eat?”

Harper brightened at the thought and went below to the gun-deck where the cooks were serving a stew of goat meat to the waiting men. Sharpe wanted to stay on deck. “Bring me something,” he asked as Harper swung off the quarterdeck.

Sharpe, left alone, leaned on the rail and gazed at the fort. A sudden gust of wind came off the land, ruffling the sea and forcing Sharpe to snatch at his old-fashioned tricorne hat. The wind gust billowed the loosely rigged spanker, driving the canvas across the deck and occasioning a shout of alarm from Lieutenant Cabral who was almost thrown overboard by the gusting sail. “Stow that sail now!” Fraser ordered. The longboats were safely overboard and the spanker no longer hid any suspicious activity.

A dozen topmen scrambled up the ratlines and edged out on the mizzen yard to haul in the spanker. The wind was still pushing the sail, driving the stern of the Kitty away from the beach.

The wind gusted again, sighing in the rigging and making the boat lean seaward. Some of the men in the longboats feared being trapped under the hull and pushed off from the threatening Kitty with their long oars. The boats were all tethered to the frigate with lines, but now, as the heavy warship with its clanking pumps continued to blow toward them, the boat-minders pushed themselves as far from her tarred hull as their tethers would allow.

The Kitty kept turning so that her bows were pointing almost directly at Fort Ingles. Fraser knew that the fort's garrison must be able to see the longboats and even the dullest Spanish officer would realize what such a sight portended. Innocent ships waiting for medical attention did not launch a fleet of longboats.

“Close up, damn you, close up!” Fraser shouted at the boat-minders. The topmen had furled the sail and the Kitty was swinging back again.

Cochrane came running up from his cabin where he had been eating an early supper. “What the hell is happening?”

“Wind veered.” Fraser decently did not add that he had warned of just such a danger. “It drove us around.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Cochrane, a leg of chicken in his hand, stared at the fort. The longboats were hidden again. “Did they see?” He asked the question of no one, merely articulating a worry.

The fort's silhouette betrayed nothing. No one moved there, no one waved from the ramparts. The gaunt semaphore gallows stayed unmoving.

Cochrane bit into the chicken. “They're asleep.”

“Thank God for that,” Fraser said.

“Thank God indeed,” Cochrane said fervently, for the only thing that had kept the Kitty safe from a murderous bombardment was the Spaniards' inattention. Cochrane bit the last meat off the chicken leg. “No harm done, eh? The silly buggers are all dozing!” He hurled the chicken bone toward the high fortress as a derisory gesture.

And the fortress replied.

For the sentries on the ramparts of Fort Ingles had seen the longboats after all. The garrison had not been dozing, and now the gunners opened fire. Sharpe saw the smoke, heard the scream of a cannonball, then felt the shuddering crashes as the first two shots slammed into the Kitty’s weakened hull.

The Spaniards had been ready, and Cochrane's men were trapped.

Screams sounded from the gundeck. The Spanish shots had hit with a wicked exactness, slicing through the Kittys disguised gunports and into the crowded deck where Cochrane's assault force had been snatching its hasty meal.

Two more guns fired. One cannonball smacked into the sea, then bounced up into the frigate. The other slammed into the hull, lodging in a main timber.

“The boats! Into the boats!” Cochrane was shouting. “Assault force! Into the boats!” The sun was a flattened bar of melting light on the horizon, the moon a pale semicircle in the cloud-ridden sky above. Powder smoke drifted from the fort with the land wind. A signal rocket suddenly flared up from the fort's ramparts, its feather of flame shivering up into the darkling sky before a white light burst to drown the first pale stars.

“Into the boats! We're going to attack! Into the boats!”

More shots, more screams. Sharpe leapt off the quarterdeck just as a cannonball screeched across the poopdeck, gouging a splintered trench in the scrubbed wood. He twisted aside from the roundshot's impact, scrambled for the officers' companionway where, disdaining to use the ladder with its rope handles, he slithered down to the gundeck. “Patrick! Patrick!”

It was dark below. The lanterns had been extinguished as soon as the first shots struck the Kitty and the only illumination was the day's dying light that seeped into the carnage through the ragged holes ripped by the incoming roundshot. Those roundshot had ripped across the deck, flinging men aside like bloody rags. The wounded screamed, while the living trampled over the bodies in their desperate attempts to reach the open air.

“Patrick!”

Another roundshot banged into the deck. It cannoned off a ship's timber to slash slantwise through the struggling men. Splinters felled three men close to where the shot struck, while the shot itself sliced down a half dozen more. A spray of blood drops fogged the light for a foul instance, then the screams sounded terribly. Another ball cracked into the tier below. The pumps had stopped, and Sharpe could hear the gurgle of water slopping into the bilges. “Patrick!”

“I'm here!” the voice shouted from the deck's far end.

“I'll see you ashore!” There was no chance of struggling through the demented pack of panicking men. Harperl and Sharpe must get themselves ashore as best they could and nope that in the sudden chaos they would meet on land.

Sharpe turned and hauled himself up to the poopdeck. Men were scrambling down the starboard side into the longboats. The O'Higgins was returning the fort's fire, but Sharpe could see the warship's roundshot were falling short. Gouts of black earth were erupting from the slope in front of Fort Ingles, and though some of the balls were ricocheting up toward the defenders, Sharpe doubted that the naval gunnery was doing the slightest good. The O'Higgins herself was wreathed in cannon smoke so that, in the day's death light, she looked like a set of black spidery masts protruding from a yellow-white, red-tinged bank of churning smoke. The fort had turned two guns on the O'Higgins. A great splash of water showed where a shot fell short inside the bank of smoke, then Sharpe was at the rail, a rope was in his hands and he shimmied desperately down to a longboat already crammed with sailors. The sailors had cutlasses, muskets, swords, pikes and clubs. “Bastards,” one man said again and again, as if, somehow, the Spanish defenders had broken a rule of war by opening fire on the two anchored ships.

“Fast as you can! Fast as you can!” Cochrane was in another longboat and shouting at his oarsmen to make the journey to land as swiftly as possible. For the moment, shielded by the great bulk of the Kitty, the longboats were safe from the fort's gunfire, but the moment they appeared on the open sea the cannon would surely change their aim.

“Let go!” yelled Lieutenant Cabral, who had taken charge of Sharpe's boat. “Row!” The oarsmen strained at the long oars. Sharpe could see Harper in another boat. A cannonball whipped overhead, making a sizzling noise as it slanted down to slam into a green wave.

“Row!” Cabral shouted, and the longboat shot out from behind the Kitty's, protection. The coxswain turned the rudder so the boat was aimed for the shore. “Row!” Cabral screamed again, and the men bent the long oar shafts in their desperate urgency to close on the beach. A roundshot slapped the sea ten yards to the left, bounced once, then hammered into the Kitty's stern where it sprang a six-foot splinter of bright wood. Sharpe glanced back at the frigate to see a bloody body, dripping intestines, heaved out of a half-opened gunport. Gulls screamed and slashed down to feed. Then Sharpe looked back to the beach because a new sound had caught his ear.