Sharpe's Devil

and explained. 'The fools take any risk to chase whales. They got caught by an iceberg calving off the ice mass. The sea churns like a tidal wave when that happens. Still, they're good seamen to have brought their boat this far. Ask where they're heading.'

'Valdivia!' came the reply. The whaler was close now, close enough for Sharpe and Ardiles to see how gaunt and bearded were the faces of the three survivors.

'Ask how many there are on board,' Ardiles commanded.

'Four of us, mister! The rest drowned!'

'Tell them to keep away,' Ardiles was worried that the heavily built whaler might stove in the Espiritu Santos ribs. 'And tell them I'll float a couple of water barrels to them.' Ardiles saw Sharpe's puzzlement, and explained. 'Barrels of fresh water float in saltwater.'

Sharpe leaned over the rail. 'Keep away from our side! We're going to float water barrels to you!'

'We hear you, mister!' One of the Americans dutifully leaned on the makeshift steering oar, though his efforts seemed to have little effect for the clumsy whaler kept heaving herself ever closer to the frigate.

Ardiles had ordered two barrels of water brought onto deck and a sling rove to heave them overboard. Now, while he waited for the barrels to arrive, he frowned at the Mary Starbuck's wallowing hulk. 'Ask them where Nantucket is,' he ordered suddenly.

Sharpe obeyed. 'Off Cape Cod, mister!' came back the answer.

Ardiles nodded, but some instinct was still troubling him. 'Tell them to sheer away!' he snapped, then, perhaps not trusting Sharpe to deliver the order with sufficient force, he seized the speaking trumpet. 'Keep clear! Keep clear!' he shouted in English.

'We're trying, mister! We're trying!' The man on the steering oar was desperately pushing against the whaler's weight.

'Trying?' Ardiles repeated the word, then, still in English, he swore. 'The devil! They didn't lose their tryworks when they rolled!' He turned to shout toward the quarterdeck, but already events were accelerating to combat pace and Ardiles's warning shout was lost in the sudden chaos.

For just as Ardiles turned, so a massive wave lifted the whaler's square stern and an officer on the Espiritu Santos quarterdeck saw that the Mary Starbuck's rudder was not shorn away after all, but was in place and being steered from a tiller concealed beneath the whaler's deck. The rudder was bringing the heavy boat toward the Spanish frigate, which meant the steering oar was faked, which meant the shipwreck was faked, a fact that Ardiles had simultaneously guessed when he saw that the whaler's tryworks, a brick furnace built amidships in which the whale blubber was rendered down into the precious oil, had survived the apparent rolling of a ship that had destroyed three solid masts.

The Spaniards were shouting in warning, but the Mary Starbuck was already within ten feet of the frigate. A man aboard the whaler suddenly cut free the American flag and, in its place, unfurled a red, white and blue flag which was unfamiliar to Sharpe, but all too familiar to Ardiles. It was the flag of the Chilean rebel government. 'Beat to quarters!' Ardiles shouted, and as he called the order aloud, so the hatch covers on the whaler's deck were thrust aside and Sharpe, astonished, saw that a huge gun was mounted in the hold. It was a carronade: a squat, wide-mouthed, short-range killer designed to shred men rather then smash the timbers or rigging of a ship. Sharpe also saw, before he and Harper dropped for cover behind the nine-pounder cannon, that a mass of men was seething up onto the whaler's deck. The men were armed with muskets, pikes, cutlasses, pistols and grapnels.

'Fire!' The order was shouted on board the Mary Starbuck, and the carronade belched a bellyful of iron scraps and links of rusted chain up at the Espiritu Santa's waist. Most of the missiles struck the starboard gunwale, but a few Spanish crewmen, helping to lower the first water barrel over the side, were thrown back in a sudden spray of blood. The barrel, holed in a hundred places, sprayed drinking water into the bloody scuppers.

Grapnels came soaring across the narrowing gap of water. The metal hooks snagged on rigging or thumped into the decks. The Espiritu Santo's crew, trained to just such an emergency, reacted fast. Some men started slashing at the ropes attached to the grapnels, while others ran to seize pikes or muskets. 'Gun crews! Gun crews!' Ardiles had left the frigate's bows and was striding back to the quarterdeck where the children were screaming in terror. 'Passengers down to the orlop deck!' Ardiles was astonishingly calm. 'Quick now! Below!'

Musket balls whiplashed up from the whaler, which suddenly struck the frigate's side, so hard that some of the Espiritu Santo's crew were knocked down by the force of the collision. The first boarders were already swarming up their ropes. Sharpe, snatching a glance from the beakhead, saw two of the invaders fall back as their rope was cut free. Another, gaining the gunwale, screamed as a pike slammed into his face to blind him and hurl him back to the Mary Starbuck's crowded deck. The attackers, jostling at the ropes, were screaming a war cry that at first sounded jumbled and indistinct to Sharpe, but which now became clear. 'Cochrane! Cochrane!' Ardiles, it seemed, was having his dearest wish granted.

A grapnel soared high over the Espiritu Santo's bows to fall and catch on the beakhead. For the moment Sharpe and Harper were alone on the small hidden platform of the beakhead, and neither man moved to cut the rope free. 'We're joining the fight then, are we?' Harper asked.

'I like Ardiles,' Sharpe said, 'but I'm damned if I'll fight for a man on the same side as Bautista.'

'Ah, well. Back to the wars.' Harper grinned, then instinctively ducked as another carronade fired, this one from the forecastle above them. The Espiritu Santos forecastle carronade, unable to depress its muzzle sufficiently, had not done great damage to the attackers, but its noise alone seemed to encourage the Spaniards who now began to shout their own war cry, 'Espiritu Santo! Espiritu Santof

'So what do we do?' Harper asked.

'We start with that big bugger up there.' Sharpe jerked his chin up toward the forecastle carronade. He had to shout, for more big guns were firing, these new ones from down below on the gundeck where the Spanish were evidently firing straight into the Mary Starbuck's upper deck. Sharpe could hear the screams of men being disemboweled and flensed by the close-range horror of the big guns. Sharpe jumped, caught the edge of the forecastie's deck, and hauled himself up to where three men were serving the carronade. One of them, the gun captain, snapped at Sharpe to fetch some quoins so that the breech of the carronade could be elevated.

'I'm not on your side!' Sharpe yelled at the man. Behind Sharpe, Harper was struggling to haul his huge weight up the sheer face of the forecastle which, though only eight feet high, was too much for a man as heavy as Harper, which meant that Sharpe, for the moment, was alone. He grabbed one of the carronade's heavy spikes: a six-foot shaft of hardwood tipped with an iron point. The spike was used to aim the heavy gun by levering its trail around, and the wooden deck under the carronade's tail was pitted with holes left by the sharp iron point. Sharpe now lunged with the spike as though it was a bayonet. He did not want to kill, for his attack was unexpected and unfair, but the gun's Captain suddenly pulled a pistol from under his coat and Sharpe had no choice but to ram the spike forward with sudden and savage force so that the iron point punctured the man's belly. The gun Captain dropped his pistol to grip the spike's shaft. He was moaning sadly. Sharpe, still lunging forward, slammed the wounded man against the rail and, still pushing, heaved him overboard. Sharpe let go the spike so that the gun Captain, blood cartwheeling away from his wound, fell to the sea with the spike's shaft still rammed into his belly.

Sharpe turned. He ducked to retrieve the gun Captain's pistol and the carronade's rammer, swung with terrible force by one of the two remaining crewmen, slashed just above his head. Sharpe's right hand closed on the pistol just as he charged forward to ram his left shoulder into the Spaniard's belly. He heard the man's breath gasp out, then he brought the heavy pistol up and hammered it onto his attacker's skull. The third crew member had backed to the inboard edge of the forecastle where he was uselessly shouting for help. Harper, abandoning his attempt to climb the forward face of the forecastle, had ducked through the galley and was now climbing the companionway steps which led from the maindeck. The third crewmember, thinking that help was at last arriving, leaned down to give Harper a helping hand. Harper grabbed the offered hand, tugged, and the crewman tumbled down into the churning mass of men who fought in the ship's waist.

That larger fight was a gutter brawl of close-quarter horror. Cochrane's invaders had succeeded in capturing a third of the Espiritu Santos main deck, but were now faced by a disciplined