Sharpe's Devil

seaworthy, and Cochrane chivied his carpenters unmercifully, because every day that the Kitty spent careened on the sand shoal was a day lost, a day in which Lord Cochrane worried that the two real Spanish transport ships might reach Valdivia, or that some Spanish spy might report back to Valdivia just what preparations the rebels were making.

Even a half-witted spy, Cochrane grumbled, could have guessed his plans by just looking at the work being done on the two warships. In essence Cochrane was repeating the trick that had won him Puerto Crucero. That trick had enabled the Scotsman to take his men to the very edge of the defenses before their presence was detected, yet if the Spaniards had been alerted to the trick and had opened fire on the Espiritu Santo as soon as she had shown at the harbor mouth, blood would have poured thick from the frigate's scuppers and Cochrane would have earned his first defeat.

The Spaniards could easily inflict that first defeat in the massive harbor at Valdivia. Valdivia's six forts contained far more guns than Puerto Crucero's one fortress, and Valdivia's guns were spread out so that a surprise assault on one bastion could only serve to alert the others. It was that dispersion of enemy guns that worried Sharpe. Five of Valdivia's forts were on the harbor's western shore, while the sixth, Fort Niebla, was on the eastern bank and guarded the entrance to the River Valdivia. Cochrane, if he was to capture the town with its citadel and reputed treasure, had to capture Fort Niebla, for with the river mouth in his hands he could prevent the garrisons of the remaining fortresses from reinforcing the town's defenders.

Cochrane's plan to capture Fort Niebla was unveiled at a council of war that he held in the high arched room of Puerto Crucero's citadel. He spread a map on a table and weighted its corners with bottles, of Chilean brandy, then, in a calm voice, spoke of sailing the disguised ships past the silent guns of the Spanish forts. Sharpe, like the other dozen officers in the room, listened to Cochrane's confident voice, but saw on the map the terrible dangers that the Scotsman so blithely discounted. Most of the forts had been built high on the hills that surrounded the harbor—so high that, while they could plunge a lethal fire down into Cochrane's ships, his own cannon could never elevate enough to return the fire. 'But no one will open fire if they believe us to be the long-awaited transports with Colonel Ruiz's guns and men!' Cochrane said confidently. He would keep his false ensigns flying until his two ships actually reached the quays in the river's mouth. There, sheltered from all the western fortresses, as well as from the guns on Manzanera Island, he would launch a sudden landward assault against Fort Niebla. 'And when Niebla falls, the whole thing collapses!' Cochrane said again. 'Niebla controls the river! The river controls the town! The town controls what's left of Spanish Chile!'

'Brilliant! Genius! Superb!' exclaimed Major Miller, his eyes glowing with admiration for his hero's cleverness. 'Superb, my Lord! Quite magnificent! Worthy of Wellington! I applaud you, 'pon my soul, I do!'

'I believe Major Miller trusts our plan!' Cochrane said happily.

'I don't,' Sharpe said.

'You don't believe it will work?' Cochrane asked sarcastically.

'I believe it will work, my Lord, just so long as not one Spanish soldier can tell the difference between a transport ship and a warship. It will work so long as the real transport ships haven't arrived yet. It will work so long as those real transport ships weren't supplied with a password we don't know. It will work so long as not one single officer of Colonel Ruiz's regiment isn't carried out to the arriving ships to check their cargoes. Good Lord! You think the Spaniards won't be suspicious of every ship that comes into sight? They know how you captured this fortress, my Lord, so they'll surely suspect that you'll try the same trick again! How do we know that the Spanish aren't inspecting every ship before it's allowed to enter the harbor?' Sharpe spoke in English so that his pessimism would not be obvious to every man in the room, but his tone was more than enough to give it away. Even those who did not understand his words could look at the map and imagine the hell of being caught in the harbor, at the center of a ring of heavy guns that would be splintering the ships into floating charnel houses.

'If we attack at night,' said Miller while surreptitiously trying to coax his precious watch into life, 'the Spaniards will be asleep!'

No one responded. Miller tapped the watch on the table and was rewarded with a ticking sound.

'How many defenders will there be?' The question was put by Captain Simms, who had skippered the O'Higgins during Cochrane's absence.

'Two thousand?' Cochrane suggested airily.

Someone at the table took a deep loud breath. 'We have three hundred men?' the man asked.

'Close to,' Cochrane smiled, then, in Spanish, he challenged anyone to suggest a better scheme for capturing the harbor. 'You, Sharpe? Can you think of a way? My God, man, I'm not rigid! I'll listen to anyone's ideas!'

Sharpe, given a choice, would not have attacked at all. Three hundred men against two thousand were not good odds, and the odds worsened appreciably when the two thousand defenders were safely ensconced behind ditches, palisades, walls, embrasures and the wickedest array of cannonfire assembled in all South America. But it was no use expressing such defeatism to Lord Cochrane, and so Sharpe tried to find some other weakness in the Spanish defenses. 'I seem to remember there was a beach here when I sailed into Valdivia.' He leaned over the map and pointed to the very tip of the headland around which the attackers would have to sail.

'The Aguada del Ingles,' offered Fraser, Cochrane's elderly sailing master. 'Aguada means a watering place,' and the old Scotsman explained that Bartholomew Sharp, a seventeenth-century English pirate, had landed on that same beach, right under the Spanish defenses, to fill his barrels from a freshwater spring.

'There's an omen, eh, Sharpe?' Miller said happily. 'Your namesake, eh?'

'It rather depends on whether he got away with it,' Sharpe said.

'Aye, he did,' Fraser said. 'They called him a devil in his time, too.'

'Why don't we land there ourselves,' Sharpe suggested, 'and attack the forts one by one? These forts aren't designed to defend themselves against a landward attack, and if we take Fort Ingles, then the very sight of the defeat may demoralize the other garrisons.'

There was a few seconds' silence as the men about the table stared at the map. Part of Sharpe's solution made sense. Most of the westernmost forts had not been built to defend against a landward attack, but merely to threaten any ship foolish enough to sail unwanted into Valdivia's harbor, but Corral Castle and Fort Niebla were both proper fortresses, built to resist ships, artillery and infantry, and even if Cochrane's men could tumble the defenders out of Fort Ingles, Fort San Carlos and Fort Amar-gos, they would still need to capture the far more formidable Corral Castle before they marched around the southern side of the harbor to lay siege to Fort Niebla.

Cochrane rejected Sharpe's halfhearted ideas. 'Good God, man, but think of the time you're taking! An hour to land our men, that's if we can land them at all, which we can't if the surfs high, then another half hour to form up, and what are the Spaniards going to be doing? You think they'll sit waiting for us? Christ, no! They'll meet us on the beach with a Hail Mary of musket balls. We'll be lucky if ten men survive! No. We'll risk the gunfire, hoist the ensigns, and run straight for the defense's heart!'

'If we make a land attack at night,' Sharpe persisted in his less risky plan, 'then the Spanish will be confused.'

'Have you ever tried landing men on an exposed beach at night?' Cochrane demanded. 'We'll all be drowned! No, Sharpe! To the devil with caution. We'll go for their heart!' He spoke enthusiastically but detected that others besides Sharpe doubted that the thing could be done. 'Don't you understand?' Cochrane cried passionately, 'that the only reason we'll succeed is because the Spanish know this can't be done! They know Valdivia is impregnable, so they don't expect anyone to be mad enough to attack. Our very chance of victory comes from their strength, because their strength is so great that they believe themselves to be unbeatable! And that belief is lulling them to sleep. Gentlemen! We shall lance their pride and bring their great forts down to dust!' He picked up one of the bottles of brandy and eased out its cork. 'I give you Valdivia, gentlemen, and victory!'

Men raised the bottles and drank to the toast, but Sharpe, alone in the room, could not bring himself to respond to Cochrane's toast. He was thinking of three hundred men ranged against the greatest fortress complex on the Pacific coast. The result would be slaughter.

'There was a time,' Harper had seen Sharpe's reluctance and now spoke very softly, 'when you would have done the impossible, because nothing else would have worked.'

Sharpe heard the reproof, accepted it, and reached for a bottle. He pulled the cork and, like Harper, drank to the impossible victory. 'Valdivia,' he said, 'and triumph.'