“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 Amargos, 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 surf’s 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.”
Fraser, Cochrane’s sailing master, opined that the repaired Kitty might stay afloat long enough to reach Valdivia, but he did not sound optimistic. “Not that it matters,” the old Scotsman told Cochrane, “for you’ll all be dead bones once the dagoes start their guns on you.”
The two ships, both clumsily disguised as unloved transport hulks, had sailed four days after Cochrane’s council of war. Cochrane had left just thirty men in Puerto Crucero, most of them walking wounded and barely sufficient to guard the prisoners and hold the fort against a possible Spanish patrol. Every other man sailed on board the Kitty and the O’Higgins. The two warships stood well out to sea, traveling far from land so that no stray Spanish vessel might spot them.
The Kitty’s pumps clattered ceaselessly. She was repaired, but the new wood in her hull had yet to swell and close her seams, and so, from the moment the frigate was refloated, the pumps had been manned. Despite her repairs she was proving a desperately slow ship. Some of the men in Cochrane’s expedition had declared her an unlucky ship and had been reluctant to sail in her, a superstition that Cochrane had lanced by choosing to sail in the fragile Kitty himself. Sharpe and Harper also sailed on the erstwhile Espiritu Santo, while Miller and his marines were on the O’Higgins. “I’ll salute as you sink,” had been Miller’s cheerful farewell to Sharpe.
“If we don’t sink, we’ll die under the guns,” Fraser opined, and the nearer the two ships came to Valdivia, the gloomier the old man became, though his gloom was always shot through with an affectionate admiration for Cochrane. “If any man can do the impossible, it’s Cochrane,” Fraser told Sharpe and Harper. They were five nights out of Puerto Crucero, on the last night before
they reached Valdivia, and the ships were sailing without lights, except for one shielded lantern that burned on the faster O’Higgins’s stern. If the O’Higgins looked like it was going too far ahead in the darkness, a signal gun would be fired from one of the Kitty’s two stern guns which were still the only heavy armament that the frigate possessed. “I was with Cochrane when he took the Gamo,” Fraser, who was steering the Kitty, said proudly. “Did you ever hear how he did that?”
“No.”
“It was in ’01, off Barcelona. His Lordship had a brig, called the Speedy. The smallest seagoing thing in the Royal Navy, she was, with just fifty-two men aboard and fourteen guns—seven guns a side and none of them more than four-pounders—and the mad devil used her to capture the Gamo. She was a Spanish frigate of thirty-two guns and three hundred men. You’d have said it couldn’t be done, but he did it. He disguised us with an American flag, ran in close under her side, then held her up against the frigate as he blasted his seven popguns up through her decks. He held her there for an hour and a half, then boarded her. She surrendered.” Fraser shrugged. “The trouble with Cochrane is that every time he does something insane, he gets away with it. One day he’ll lose, and that’ll be the end of him. Mind you, whenever he tangles with the lawyers, he loses. His enemies accused him of defrauding the stock exchange, which he didn’t do, but they hired the best lawyers in London and His Lordship was so sure of his own innocence that he didn’t even bother to turn up in court, which made it much easier for the bastards to find him guilty and put him in prison.”
“And they hurled me out of the most noble Order of the Bath.” Cochrane himself, who had crept up behind them, intervened. “Do you know what they do when they expel a man from the Order of the Bath, Sharpe?”
“No, my Lord.”
Cochrane, who clearly relished the story, chuckled. “The ceremony happens at dead of night in Westminster Abbey. In the chapel of Henry VII. It’s dark. At first you hear nothing but the rustle of robes and the scratching of shoes. It sounds like a convocation of rats, but it’s merely the lawyers and lords and pimps and bum-suckers gathering together. Then, on the stroke of midnight, they tear the disgraced man’s banner from above the choir stalls, and afterward they take a nameless man, who stands in for the villain, and they strap a pair of spurs on his heels and then, with an axe, they chop the spurs off! At night! In the Abbey! And all the rats and pimps applaud as they kick the man and the spurs and the banner down the steps, and down the choir, and down the nave, and out into the darkness of Westminster.” Cochrane laughed. “They did that to me! Can you believe it? We’re in the nineteenth century, yet still the bastards are playing children’s games at midnight. But one day, by Christ, I’ll go back to England and I’ll sail up the Thames and I’ll make those bastards wish their mothers had never given birth. I’ll hang those dry bastards from the roofbeams of the Abbey, then play pell-mell with their balls in the nave.”
“They’re lawyers, Cochrane,” Fraser said sourly, “they don’t have balls.”
Cochrane chuckled, then cocked his face to the night. “The wind’s piping up, Fraser. We’ll have a blow before tomorrow night.”
“Aye, we will.”
“So do you still think we’re doomed, Sharpe?” Cochrane demanded fiercely.
“I think, my Lord, that tomorrow we shall need a miracle.”
“It’ll be easy,” Cochrane said dismissively. “We’ll arrive an hour before nightfall, at the very moment when the garrisons will be wanting to go off duty and put their feet up. They’ll think we’re transports, they’ll ignore us, and as soon as it’s dark we’ll be swarming up the ramparts of Fort Niebla. By this time tomorrow night, Sharpe, you and I will have our feet under the commandant’s table, drinking his wine, eating his supper, and choosing between his whores. And the day after that we’ll go downriver and take Valdivia. Two days, Sharpe, just two days, and all Chile is ours. We will have won.”
It all sounded so easy. Two days, six forts, two hundred guns, two thousand men, and all Chile as the prize.
In the darkness a glimmer of light showed from the stern lantern of the O’Higgins. The sea hissed and roared, lifting the sluggish hull of the Kitty, then dropping her down into the cold heart of the wave troughs. Beyond the one small glimmer of light there was no other sign of life in all the universe, neither a star nor moon nor landward light. The ships were in an immensity of darkness, commanded by a devil, sailing under a night sky of thick cloud, and traveling toward death.
They sighted land an hour after dawn. By midday they could see the signal tower that stood atop Fort Chorocomayo, the highest stronghold in Valdivia’s defenses. The signal tower held a vast semaphore mast that reported the presence of the two strange ships, then fell into stillness.
Three hours before sunset Sharpe could see the Spanish flag atop Fort Ingles and he could hear the surf crashing on the rocks beside the Aguada del Ingles. No ships had come from the harbor to enquire about their business. “You see,” Cochrane crowed, “they’re fools!”
Two hours later, in the light of the dying sun, the O’Higgins and the Kitty trimmed their sails as they turned east about the rocky peninsula that protected Valdivia’s harbor. They had arrived at the killing place.
The great clouds had gone, torn ragged by a morning gale that had gentled throughout the day until, in this evening of battle, the wind blew steady and firm, but without malice. Yet the sea was still ferocious. The huge Pacific rollers, completing their great journey across an ocean, heaved the Kitty up and down in a giant swooping motion, while to Sharpe’s right the great waves shattered in shredding explosions of foam off the black rocks. “You would not, I think, want to make a landing on the Aguada del Ingles in these conditions,” Cochrane said as he searched the shore with his telescope. Suddenly he stiffened. “There!”
“My Lord?” Sharpe asked.
“See for yourself, Sharpe!”
Sharpe took the glass. Dim in the gauzy light and through the shredding plumes of foam that obscured the sea’s edge like a fog he could just see the first of the harbor’s forts. “That’s Fort Ingles!” Cochrane said. “The beach is just below it.”
Sharpe moved the glass down to where the massive waves thundered up the Aguada del Ingles. He edged the glass back to the fortress which looked much as he remembered it from his earlier visit—a makeshift defense work with an earthen ditch and bank, wooden palisades, and embrasures for cannon. “They’re signaling us!” he said to Cochrane as a string of flags suddenly broke above the fort’s silhouette.
“Reply, Mister Almante!” Cochrane snapped, and a Chilean midshipman ran a string of flags up to the Kitty’s mizzen yard. The flags that Cochrane was showing formed no coherent message, but were instead a nonsense combination. “In the first place,” Cochrane explained, “the sun’s behind us, so they can’t see the flags well, and even if they could see the flags they’d assume we’re using a new Spanish code which hasn’t reached them yet. It’ll make the buggers nervous, and that, after all, is a good way to begin a battle.” At the Kitty’s stern the Spanish ensign rippled in the wind, while below her decks the pumps sucked and spat, sucked and spat.
The gaunt arms of the telegraph atop Fort Ingles began to rise and fall. “They’re telling the other forts where we are,” Cochrane said. He glanced down at the waist of the ship where a crowd of men lined the starboard gunwale. Cochrane had permitted such sight-seeing, reckoning that if the Kitty were indeed a Spanish transport ship, the men would be allowed on deck to catch this first glimpse of their new station. Also on deck were four nine-pounder field guns that had been manhandled on board from Puerto Crucero’s citadel. The guns were not there for their firepower, but rather to make it look as if the Kitty was indeed carrying artillery from Spain. Cochrane, unable to hide his excitement, beat a swift tattoo on the quarterdeck rail with his hands. “How long?” he snapped to Fraser.
“We’ll make the entrance in one more hour,” Fraser spoke from the helm. “And
an hour after that we’ll have moonlight.”
“The tide?” Cochrane asked.
“We’re on the flood, my Lord, otherwise we’d never make her past the harbor entrance. Say two and a half hours?”
“Two and a half hours to what?” Sharpe asked.
“One hour to clear the point,” Cochrane explained, “and another hour to work our way south across the harbor, then half an hour to beat in against the river’s current. It’ll be dark when we reach Fort Niebla, so I’ll have to use a lantern to illuminate our ensign. A night attack, eh!” He rubbed his big hands in anticipation. “Ladders by moonlight! It sounds like an elopement!” Below the Kitty’s decks were a score of newly made ladders which would be taken ashore and used to assault Niebla’s walls.
“There’s a new signal, my Lord!” The midshipman called aloud in English, the language commonly used on the quarterdeck of Cochrane’s ship.
“In Spanish from now on, Mister Almante, in Spanish!” If the Spaniards did send a guard ship then Cochrane wanted no one using English by mistake. “Reply with a signal that urgently requests a whore for the Captain,” Cochrane gave the order in his execrable Spanish, “then draw attention to the signal with a gun.”
The grinning Midshipman Almante began plucking signal flags from the locker. The new message, gaudily spelled out in a string of fluttering flags, ran quickly to the Kitty’s mizzen yard and, just a second later, one of the stern guns crashed a blank charge to echo across the sea.