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
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
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
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
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
'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
'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
'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
Muskets.
The Spaniards had sent a company of infantry down to the beach where the blue-coated soldiers were now drawn up at the high-tide line. Sharpe saw the ramrods flicker, then the muskets came up into the company's shoulders, and he instinctively ducked. The splintering sound of the volley came clear above the greater sounds of guns and booming surf. Sharpe saw a spatter of small splashes on the face of a wave and knew that the volley had gone wide.
'Row!' Cabral shouted, but the port-side oars had become entangled in a mat of floating weed and the boat broached.
Behind Sharpe the
'Row, row, row!' Cabral, standing beside Sharpe in the stern sheets, shouted at his oarsmen. 'Row!' The oars were free of the weed again. There were a dozen men rowing and a score of men crouching between the thwarts. The oarsmen, their backs to the land and the muskets and the surf and the cannon, had wide, frightened eyes. One man was gabbling a prayer as he tugged at his oar.
'Bayonets!' Sharpe shouted at the men crouched on the bottom boards. 'Fix bayonets!' He said it again in Spanish and watched as a dozen men, those who had bayonets, twisted their blades onto their muskets. 'When we land,' he called to the crouching men, 'we don't wait to give the bastards a volley, we just charge!'
Off to the left were a dozen other longboats. Some had come from the