Admiral (34 page)

“Pull yourself together man! What’s the matter?”

“It’s all down there, sir,” Saxby said shakily. “Great blocks of silver, bags and bags of pieces of eight, sacks of doubloons… It’s what we’re looking for, sir. Oh my Gawd, it’s the riches of El Dorado!”

Ned ignored the man’s excitement and asked crisply: “Have you left a guard on it? Those men have locked the dungeons again?”

“There’s just one lock, large. Yes, locked it and nineteen of them are down there guarding the key!”

“Five should be enough for that: tell them to stay down there with the key. I need the others up here as guards.”

With the colour coming back into his cheeks, Saxby hurried down to the dungeon again. Ned signalled to Secco and talked with him for three or four minutes, but even before they had finished there was a banging at the door and muffled shouts. As Secco signalled to his men to open the door, he explained quickly: “The rest of the Triana men!”

The door flung open and more than a dozen men rushed in, paused as they looked round, and then stood rigid as Secco snapped an order. They turned their heads slowly as the door closed to confirm they were indeed covered by pistols, and quickly dropped pikes and pulled swords from scabbards and threw them to one side.

Two of the buccaneers collected up the weapons and Secco said: “We need somewhere to lock up the prisoners: there’s hardly any more room in the guardhouse, and…”

“Quite. Well, let’s lock them in the dungeon along with the bullion: they can’t destroy it!”

Secco started laughing. “No better place!”

“Very well, have some men march them down, but keep the guards at the door because –”

He broke off as shouting outside and bangings on the side door announced new arrivals. Once again Secco gave the signal and waited while the San Fernando garrison rushed in, responding to an urgent call said to be from the garrison commander of San Gerónimo and relayed by Ramirez, who had explained that he was part of the reinforcements just arrived from Panama during the night. The garrison were wildly excited over the trumpet call and disappointed that Ramirez had not known exactly what the emergency was.

The door shut quickly behind them as they looked round, finally fixing their gaze on the black-bearded captain in armour who was standing in front of them. The captain said something and then repeated it, and like the others they looked over their shoulders into the muzzles of pistols, dropped their pikes, threw aside their swords and stood very still.

“I’ll have these taken to the dungeon first,” Secco said.

“Saxby’s down there bringing all but five of his men up. You’d better tell him to leave all his men down there as guards. Twenty – that should be enough.”

“I’ll look at the lock, sir,” Secco said, giving a string of orders to the men who had been opening and closing the door and covering the prisoners with pistols.

Just then Ned saw Thomas coming down the steps and he told Secco to wait.

“No sign of the ships, and no sign of life at the Iron Fort,” Thomas reported. “I saw a couple of our men going to visit our nearest neighbours, and then the neighbours came to call.” He waved at the prisoners. “We’re getting quite a collection!”

“Listen, Thomas, all the plate is down in the dungeon: Saxby found it and his men are guarding it. We have so many prisoners we’ll have to put them in the dungeon as well – they can’t harm the bullion. Will you take over from Secco and secure the prisoners? The rest of them are in the guardhouse.”

Thomas gave a happy bellow which brought over the buccaneers who had been guarding the powder beside the falcons, and using one of the Spanish buccaneers as a translator he soon had the Triana and San Fernando men marching towards the dungeon.

In the meantime Ned was deep in conversation with Secco. Once again the Spaniard had a delighted grin on his face.

“Sir, if I may suggest something… Yes, I can give this ultimatum, but it might help if I had some other captains with me, who could speak their own languages. They won’t be understood, of course, but to these people buccaneers
are
foreigners! They’d be much more impressed by Englishmen, say, or Dutchmen, than someone they regard as a renegade Spaniard.”

Secco was quite right of course. Ned looked round to where the buccaneers were standing in various groups, as they had been ordered, with their captains nearby. A Dutchman – Gottlieb really looked a foreigner, blond with widely spaced eyes and high cheekbones. Coles and Brace – a calm pair who, if things went wrong, would act as a steadying influence. And Rideau. Black-bearded, short, he was unmistakably French. He named them to Secco, who nodded in agreement.

“Now we want a white flag!”

“The officers’ quarters,” Ned said promptly. “They won’t have taken all their table and bed linen to Jamaica!”

Charles Coles slapped at the swarming mosquitoes whining out of the shrubs and attacking the five men. The path skirting the anchorage from the Castillo de San Fernando round to the Castillo de San Felipe de Todo Fierro was narrow, often twisting to avoid big rocks, and – all too frequently for Coles, who had no head for heights – running almost to the edge of the cliff. Not exactly a cliff, Coles admitted, but a very steep drop to the sea. Still, he thought with a grin, it was in a good cause – a king’s ransom, according to Mr Yorke, because the bullion was there, in the dungeon.

Would they get to the Iron Fort in time, or would the ships arrive and – to all intents and purposes – sail into a trap? Mr Yorke’s lady, and Lady Diana, would not know that a damned trumpeter whom happened to be on sentry duty on the battlements and whom everyone had forgotten in the rush had been able to sound the alarm.

Coles cursed as he slipped, grabbed a bush and knew without looking that it was prickly pear: now he had a dozen fine spines, looking as innocent as the blow-away seeds on a dandelion, stuck in his hand, each as painful as a needle and broken off level with the skin.

Coles was unusual for a buccaneer: he had been at sea ever since he was nine years old, and he owned a ship only because, escaping after transportation to Barbados for a noisy affair in a Scarborough tavern leading to a man’s death, he had joined a group of buccaneers on the north coast of Hispaniola and led them in a raid on a ship in La Plata. Ah, that had been an expedition! Through jungle and pampas, over mountains and across rivers to the port – but no one had expected them, least of all the ship’s crew. Eight Spanish throats were quietly cut, and perhaps the rest of the Spaniards strolling along the quayside wondered why the
Argonauta
was suddenly sailing… Well, that was five years ago and he had kept the name. Now, with a king back on the throne in England, perhaps he’d fly English colours.

They were making good time: it was completely light now, although the sun was still below the top of the hill. The Iron Fort – well, it looked strong enough, built on top of the steep cliff so that it could not be attacked from seaward. Not by armed men, anyway. Bombarded from ships, yes, though the walls were probably as thick as San Gerónimo’s, and it would take a month of Sundays to make any impression on them.

In a few minutes they would be far enough along the path to be able to see round the end of Cocal Point, which formed the other side of the entrance, and perhaps catch a glimpse of the ships.

Coles suddenly had an idea. “Wait a moment. Listen, if the ships come in sight we can set fire to this brushwood. It’s dry enough to burn well, but there are enough leaves to make smoke. That’ll warn ’em something is the matter and they won’t try to sail in.”

Gottlieb nodded and Brace said it was a good idea. Secco and Rideau thought for a moment and then agreed with enthusiasm.

“Flint and steel?” inquired Brace and both Gottlieb and Coles slapped the sides of their breeches.

“Come on, then,” Secco said, “we’ll be there in five minutes.”

Now, in the clear sight of the Iron Fort, the men were hurrying in a crouch. Then, as the path straightened for the last hundred yards up to the big gates, Secco stopped them, motioning them to shelter behind the bushes. From there they carefully examined the Iron Fort. It seemed deserted. No sentry paced the battlements, watching to seaward, no sentry at the small door set into the gates guarded the entrance from the path. The barrels of cannon poked out through the embrasures, stubby black fingers streaked with rust. How many could be trained to fire at the ships entering the harbour? Coles and Brace guessed at six, the rest agreed on eight. “Six, eight, a lot,” Coles commented wryly.

But all agreed that from here it must have been possible to hear the San Gerónimo’s trumpeter sounding the alarm, so either the Iron Fort had no garrison – which seemed absurd to all except Secco – or they had prepared a trap.

“You don’t understand the Spanish,” Secco explained. “They probably garrison Triana, Gerónimo and Fernando because they have orders to protect the town of Portobelo. The Iron Fort’s guns cannot reach the town, so…” He gave an expressive shrug. “The orders in writing from the Viceroy in Panama said Portobelo, so no commanding officer would interpret that as guarding the
harbour
. Portobelo is the town, the harbour is the harbour.”

“Time we started,” Brace said, holding out the pike he had been carrying. “Let’s lash on the flag.”

Secco unfolded a white tablecloth that had been torn in half to make it the right size, and a piece of line tied to each of two corners. Swiftly he secured it to the pike, using it as a flagstaff. “That’s big enough,” he commented.

“Right,” Brace said, “off we go.”

“I’ll carry the flag,” Secco said.

“No, leave it to me. The first one they’ll shoot is the flag-bearer. We need you alive to protest about it in good Spanish.”

The others laughed at Brace’s dry humour, but all of them knew it was a possibility, and each was secretly thankful for Brace’s offer.

Quite without being conscious of doing it, they spread out to make less of a target as they walked towards the fort. Then Coles saw that a door which seemed to be shut was in fact partly open: he could see a sliver of light down one side and a movement showed that someone was watching.

When they were twenty yards from the small door it swung open and revealed three men: one crouching with a pistol, the second kneeling and holding another and the third standing with a musket. From all three guns the breeze was not enough to disperse the smoke from the slow-match held in the serpentines: it curled up and reminded Coles of an old man’s pipe.

As soon as the door was open the man standing with the musket shouted an order and Secco hurriedly translated: “Stop. Hold your hands out sideways so they can be sure you are unarmed.”

A stream of Spanish followed and Secco waited patiently until it had stopped. The speaker could well be the brother of the sergeant at San Gerónimo: he was fat, he had flowing moustaches (the cups were missing: a sign, Coles wondered that they had heard the trumpet and were prepared?) and was short of breath.

This one, Secco thought to himself, is a stupid ox. Probably born out here – his accent has that slurring that those brought up on the Main seem to acquire: a laziness of the tongue.

“Listen,” Secco said, “we are not armed and we come under a flag of truce, so put down those guns. Who is in command here?”

“I am,” growled the man with the musket, “and that’s a white flag!”

“Yes, it is the flag for an armistice. For a truce. For –” he broke off, realizing that this fat oaf had probably never served anywhere but Portobelo and that the words “truce”or “armistice” probably had no real meaning for him.

“Truce? You mean there’s been fighting?” The man (Secco guessed he was a sergeant) was bewildered by Secco’s Castilian accent. “Was that why the trumpet sounded?”

Warning the others in English to watch for the ships without giving anything away, Secco began a long but simple explanation of what had happened.

“So we have the garrisons of Triana, San Gerónimo and San Fernando locked in the dungeon,” he said. “We come under a flag of truce to offer you terms. Either you surrender Todo Fierro and the garrison to us, or we will blow up San Gerónimo with all the prisoners in it. Your comrades,” he added.

“I do not believe it. You tell lies. It is a trap!”

“Calm yourself, sergeant. You do not believe we have the garrison of Triana as our prisoners? Let me tell you the name of the commanding officer. Does the name Captain Peralta mean anything? You do not believe we hold San Gerónimo? But I am sure you have drunk many glasses of wine with Sergeant Bayona, as fat as yourself, and who is now locked in the dungeon with the rest of his men. And San Fernando, where normally there are one sergeant, two corporals and twelve men, all present and correct, sir. Sergeant Pardal and his corporals and all his men are in the dungeon too. Do you believe me
now
, sergeant?”

There was a pause. Coles heard the hissing of the two men with pistols talking to the sergeant. That was the silly thing about the Spanish language: it sometimes sounded like a boxful of angry snakes bargaining. Then the sergeant said: “I believe you, yes, but what is the reason for it? Why do our own people capture our forts and castles?”

The man sounded bewildered, so much so that Coles and Brace asked for a translation, and laughed heartily when Secco gave it.

“Sergeant,” said Secco, “we are not ‘your own people’; we are buccaneers. These two gentlemen are countrymen of
El Draco
.” He turned to Brace and Coles. “Shout something about Drake in English!”

He waited until both men finished an impassioned impromptu eulogy about Drake, and then pointed to Gottlieb. “This gentleman is Dutch.”

Gottlieb needed no explanation: with hands waving he described in Dutch the viciousness of the Spanish occupation of his country.

“Are you satisfied?” Secco asked politely. “There is a French captain here, too.”

“No, I’m satisfied.”

At that moment Secco realized that there was a musket barrel protruding from each of the dozen or so gun loops cut in the wall above the door: slots that allowed an archer or musketeer to fire at an enemy outside the walls.