Frederickson shouted to the sentry in French, an answer was made, and Harper, fearing a sudden musket blast from above, groaned horribly on the cart. The blood on his huge chest was drying to a cracked crust.
“He wants to know,” Frederickson spoke to Sharpe with astonishment in his voice, “whether we’re the Americans.”
“Yes!” Sharpe shouted. “Yes, yes!”
„Attendee!“ The guard’s head disappeared.
Sharpe turned to look through the notch made where the approach road cut through the glacis. He stared at the place where the villagers stood by the trees and where he had dimly discerned the shape of a gun’s limber among the pines. “The Americans are manning those guns?” He too sounded astonished.
Frederickson shrugged. “Must be.”
Sharpe turned back, his boots making a hollow sound on the thick planks of the drawbridge. To right and left the flooded inner ditch stretched. The ditch water, fed by a rivulet from the millstream, seemed shallow enough, but it would still be a cloying obstacle to men trying to assault the gaunt, rough-faced wall of the fort’s enceinte.
The fortress guns bellowed to Sharpe’s left, jetting smoke and flame towards the frigate that was now beyond Cap Ferrat. The battle had become a long-range duel as Grant teased the fort and, doubtless, cursed the land force for their late arrival.
“What’s the crapaud bastard doing?” Harper growled softly.
“Gone to fetch the officer of the guard?” Sharpe guessed. Harper shivered. The light was dying in the west, a cold evening promised frost in the night, and the huge Irishman was stripped to the waist. “Not long now,” Sharpe said, the words spoken more in nervousness than for comfort.
Suddenly a bolt clanged, scraped, then a bar thudded to the ground from its brackets.
“Christ!” Frederickson’s voice betrayed relief that their ruse, so quickly devised and then made possible by Harper’s pain, was working.
“Wait for my word.” Sharpe said it softly as he saw Harper’s muscles, beneath their crazed and shivering quilt of dried blood, suddenly tense.
The hinges of the gate squealed like a tormented soul. Lieutenant Minver, two hundred yards away, would see the huge door leafing open and should already be moving. “Now,” Sharpe said.
The French guard was eager to help the wounded man. The guard himself was injured, his leg setting in plaster, and he gestured at the cast as if to explain the slowness with which he tugged the huge, iron-studded gate open.
Harper, rolling from the cart, did not see the thick plaster on the man’s leg, nor did he see the welcoming, reassuring smile; he only saw a man in an enemy jacket, a man who barred a door that must be opened, and Harper came up from the roadway with a sword-bayonet in his right hand and the Frenchman gave a horrid, pathetic sigh as the twenty-three inch blade, held like a long dagger, ripped into his belly. Sharpe saw the blood spilling like water on the cobbles of the archway as he pushed his full weight on to the half-opened gate.
Harper twisted the bayonet free and left the guard bleeding and twitching on the drawbridge. He kicked the man’s musket into the ditch, then fetched his rifle and seven-barrelled gun from the cart. Frederickson, sword in hand, dragged the empty handcart into the tunnel that pierced the ramparts. No one had seen them, no one raised the alarm; they had taken the garrison utterly by surprise.
Sharpe bolted both doors open. His rifle was slung, his sword naked, and at any second he expected a shout of alarm or a musket shot, but the three Riflemen were undetected. They smiled at each other, made nervous by success, then their ears were punched by the shattering pulse of air as the fortress guns fired towards the Scylla. Harper hefted his seven-barrelled gun. “I’ll teach those bastards how to fire guns.”
“Sergeant!” Sharpe called, but Harper was already running, gun cocked, towards the courtyard.
A shout sounded from the sand-dunes and, at the same instant, two muskets coughed above Sharpe. He realized there must be other guards on the gate’s roof, men who could see Minver’s assault approaching, and Sharpe looked for a route that would take him to the ramparts. A low, arched doorway lay to his right and he ducked through it.
He found himself in a guardroom. A wooden musket rack, varnished and polished, held eight muskets upright. A table was littered with playing cards before a black-leaded potbellied stove that silted smoke from an ill-fitting chimney pipe. Stairs climbed through an arch on the far side of the room and, exchanging his sword for the rifle, Sharpe took the steps at a rush.
He could hear, above him, the rattle of ramrods in barrels. The stairs turned a right angle, the sky was grey overhead, then a moustached face, just ten feet away, turned towards the sound of feet on the stairs and Sharpe pulled the rifle’s trigger and saw the man twitch backwards. More blood.
A movement to his left as he cleared the stairs made Sharpe twist round. A second man was desperately pulling a ramrod free of his musket’s long barrel, then, seeing that he could not free his weapon of the encumbrance, the Frenchman just raised the gun to his shoulder.
Sharpe fell and rolled to his right.
The musket banged and flamed and the ramrod, which could have impaled Sharpe like a skewer, cartwheeled across the inner courtyard to clang against the stone ramp.
„
Sharpe turned towards the sound of the fortress guns. He could see an empty wall on which vast, cold guns stood mute. At the wall’s end was a small stone citadel, little more than a covered shelter for sentries, and beyond that was the semi-circular bastion that jutted into the waters of the Arcachon channel and from which the heavy guns fired. The French artillerymen, stunned, deafened and half blinded by their own firing, had still not seen the small slaughter at the gate. They swabbed and charged their vast weapons, intent only on the frigate that dared to defy them.
Then a voice screamed defiance at them. Some turned. The others, losing the rhythm of their tasks, twisted to see what had interrupted the work.
Patrick Harper had shouted at them in a voice that would have silenced hell itself, a voice that had called Battalions to order across the vast spaces of windy parade grounds, and the gunners stared with astonishment into the courtyard below where a blood-boltered giant seemed to hold a small cannon in his hands.
“Bastards!” Harper screamed the word, then pulled the seven-barrelled gun’s trigger. The half-inch balls flayed up and out, fanning to strike the left hand gun crew. Two men fell, then Harper dropped the massive gun and unslung his rifle.
“Patrick!” Sharpe had seen a Frenchman on the barrack roof who knelt, carbine in hand, to aim downwards. “Cover!”
Harper rolled right, looked up, and ran.
A French officer, commanding the big gun battery, stared at the blood-streaked giant, then to Sharpe, and the Rifleman saw the look of sheer surprise on the thin, pale face. Frederickson, sword in hand, was crossing the yard, careless of the carbine above him, and shouting to the gunners to surrender.
The French officer suddenly jerked, as though waking to find a nightmare real, and shouted at his men to forsake their cannons and snatch their carbines from racks beside the embrasures. Sharpe had forgotten how French gunners carried long-arms and he bellowed at Frederickson to take cover, then saw the flicker of movement as the Frenchman on the roof changed aim.
Sharpe twisted away, knowing the shot was aimed at himself. He had a glimpse of the foreshortened stab of flame with its aureole of smoke, then the carbine ball slashed across his forehead. One half inch closer and he would have been dead, killed by fragments of skull driven into his brain, but instead he staggered, stunned, and his vision was suddenly sheeted with scarlet as he twisted, fell, and heard the sword clang as it bounced on the rampart’s stones. His head felt as if a red-hot poker had been slashed across his face. He was blind.
A pitiless stab of pain lanced in his head, making him moan. The blindness was making him panic, and his dizziness would not let him stand. He slumped against the wall and tasted thick, salty blood on his tongue. He
