Admiral (35 page)

He pointed up at them and said to the sergeant sharply: “Tell those men to put down those muskets; don’t forget we come under a flag of truce.”

The sergeant shouted into the courtyard and Secco saw the musket barrels being withdrawn and could picture the reluctant look on the men’s faces.

“Well,” Secco said briskly, “now you understand that we have seized Portobelo and the three castles.” He felt the casual addition of the town was allowable. “We have come to give you your orders. You will march your men to San Gerónimo and leave this fort.”

“March to San Gerónimo? Leave this fort –” the sergeant was incredulous. “But my orders are to command this garrison until my captain comes back from Jamaica!”

Secco sighed. At this point he was not sure whether to wheedle this ox or rage and shout. He glanced across at Cocal Point and there was no sign of the ships: the light wind was slowing them up, thank goodness.

Firmness, Secco decided. “Sergeant, either you form up your men and start marching to San Gerónimo, or we shall leave you and return to San Gerónimo ourselves. There we shall light the slow-match we have laid down to the magazines, and all your comrades will be blown to pieces along with the castle. You’ll have a good view from here.”

“But you can’t do that! All the bullion –” he broke off suddenly, perhaps remembering old orders that its presence was never to be mentioned.

“All the bullion is now stacked well away from the castle,” Secco said calmly. “What do you think nearly a thousand men have been doing all night?”

“A
thousand
men? Buccaneers? A
thousand
?”

“Oh, there were a thousand carrying the bullion,” Secco said airily. “And a thousand more must be looting the town. When I left them the rest were talking of blowing up San Fernando and Triana…”

“But I don’t understand… How did they get here? No ship has…”

Secco waved up at the line of mountains. “The road from Panama. We just walked in. Your comrades took one look and surrendered. Well, sergeant what are you going to do? Kill all your old comrades and destroy San Gerónimo or surrender like the rest of them? You can’t fight, unless you have enough men to attack more than two thousand.”

“We stay here!” the sergeant said firmly. Secco guessed the man was completely befuddled but in his own dogged fashion was refusing to leave the place he knew – and, although he did not know it, the place where he could do a great deal of harm.

“Very well, we’ll tell your comrades in the dungeon as we light the slow-match. Your name, sergeant? I would like them to be grateful to the right man.”

“Gonzales…” the man growled, “and I didn’t kill them.”

“You will,” Secco said coldly. “You can save their lives by surrendering – or you can kill them, by being stupid.”

“Stupid” was obviously a word with unhappy associations in the sergeant’s past: he began jumping up and down, jowls quivering and waving the musket. “No one calls me stupid!” he roared. “Me, important enough to be left in command of Todo Fierro by the major, and you call me stupid! Run away with your silly white flag before we decide to turn you into real boucan! Farewell,
filibustero
!”

Secco shrugged his shoulders and turned away, followed by the four other men, and for fifty yards he reflected that it only needed the idiot or a zealot at one of the gun loops to put a musket ball between his shoulder-blades. Flags of truce, he realized, only worked when both sides understood the meaning of the word “truce”.

Ned and Thomas watched from the battlements of San Gerónimo. “I can see the five of them coming back along the track,” Ned said, watching with the glass. “They’ve taken the white cloth from the pike, and now the little door is shut at the castle. No, they haven’t succeeded. The dam’ garrison won’t surrender…”

“That means they’ll open fire at the ships,” Thomas said.

“Look!” Ned exclaimed. “There’s Jensen and his boats creeping along the side of those mangroves!”

He leapt on to the top of the battlements and waved his arms wildly and was relieved to see a man in the leading boat – he presumed it was Jensen – wave back. Thomas jumped up beside him. “My shape is more recognizable,” he commented. “But Jensen seems reassured that we hold the castle – they look like ducklings, don’t they, coming out of those mangroves.”

Warning the ships: could one of Jensen’s boats get down to the entrance in time – and avoid being blown out of the water as it passed the Iron Fort? Was there time? No, or rather he could not risk it. There was one other chance…

He turned to Thomas. “Send fifty men with pistols, pikes and cutlasses to get the prisoners up from the dungeon and into the courtyard. Bunch ’em in a corner and train all the falcons on them. Any nonsense, fire into the middle. You understand?”

“It’ll be a pleasure; means we didn’t haul those guns for nothing,” Thomas said, and jumped down from the battlement and headed for the stairs down to the courtyard.

Ned took one last look round from the battlements and, catching sight of the Castillo de San Fernando out of the corner of his eye, realized that it would serve the purpose just as well. Except that Secco would have told the Iron Fort’s garrison that all the prisoners were in San Gerónimo… Well, that settled that. He followed Thomas into the courtyard and then plunged down the steps into the dungeon, calling for Saxby.

The dungeon smelled like a sewer. It comprised six large cells along one side of a long corridor, and all the walls glistened in the light of lanterns from the water seeping through the stonework from the harbour. The floor was slippery, slimy with some sort of lichen or moss that grew everywhere. The doors of the cells were made of iron bars, giving the impression of cages for wild animals, and Ned remembered a description of the cells for animals and humans beneath the area of the Colosseum in Rome.

In the middle of the corridor was a rack and at the far end a thick post had been let into the stone floor. It took Ned a few moments to realize that it was the flogging post; a man had to put his arms round it and his wrists were tied on the far side, leaving his back exposed to the lash. And whether a man was being flogged at the post or stretched on the rack, all the other prisoners could see – in fact were probably made to watch – through the bars. Now the cells were crammed with Spaniards, two buccaneers standing at each door, a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. Already Thomas, with more buccaneers, was getting the prisoners out of the first celll, having just explained to Saxby who, seeing Ned coming down the steps, hurried over.

“Change of plan, sir?”

“Yes, the Iron Fort won’t surrender. Now, take all the men you need, apart from Sir Thomas’ guards, and carry the bullion out of here. Pile it up outside at least five hundred yards away. Put sentries over it.” He thought for a moment whether or not to use the Spanish prisoners as porters, then decided the extra buccaneers needed to guard them would be better used carrying bullion.

“Where is the bullion?”

“In the first two cells that Sir Thomas is emptying.”

“Very well, get your men and start carrying! Don’t forget the sentries. And a good five hundred yards away. Have you seen Burton?”

“He’s there, sir,” Saxby exclaimed, pointing at one of the guards. Ned called him.

“Have we plenty of slow-match, Burton?”

“Yes, with the falcons, sir.”

“Good, get some. A quarter of an hour’s burning time. Fuse the magazine of this castle so we can blow it up.”

“Yes, sir,” Burton said calmly, as though Ned had just told him to load a pistol. “Fifteen minutes. And shall I stand guard over it when it’s done?”

“Yes. Take a couple of men – you may have to shift the barrels of powder round. But make haste!”

Thomas and his men already had the Spanish prisoners out of the first cell and Saxby was leading the first of the buccaneers up the stairs, wedges of silver under each arm, to show them where to stow it among the bushes and prickly pear on the edge of the swamp.

Up in the courtyard, Ned wondered when the place had last been so busy. A dozen buccaneers were ramming bags of langrage into the falcons and training them round to cover a corner already black with prisoners – all of whom, Ned was surprised to notice, were sitting on the ground with their backs to the guns. Thomas strolled over to him.

“They know the guns are there and being loaded, but they can’t see what’s going on. Must be very worrying!”

“It’d worry me,” Ned admitted, “but as soon as we’ve got the bullion out of the castle, we’ll transfer them all to Triana.”

“Why not leave them here?” Thomas said, the surprise obvious in his voice.

“Because the moment we sight a sail approaching the other end of the harbour, I’m going to blow the place up.”

“My goodness,” Thomas said. “That’ll warn Aurelia and Diana all right. Unless they think we’re inside. Or they might try and rescue us.”

“Perhaps, but it should put the fear of God into the Dons in the Iron Fort and keep them away from the guns. I want to discourage them from interfering when we row out with Jensen and his boats.”

“Ah, that’s an idea with merit,” Thomas said. “Anything that means we don’t have to climb back over those damnable mountains!”

“I’m going up to the battlements again: you’re in charge of the courtyard. Saxby’s getting out all the bullion, as you can see, and Burton’s running a slow-match into the magazine. As soon as Saxby’s got up the bullion, start transferring your prisoners to Triana. If any start making difficulties, shoot one or two to encourage the others to be more obliging. And Thomas, watch out for the good folk of Portobelo: they might suddenly take it into their silly heads to make a foray. It might be funny to have the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers set about us, but we might be laughing so much they’d succeed! When you have the prisoners in Triana, move our guns out of here.”

Up on the battlements once again, Ned searched the sea horizon at the entrance with the perspective glass. No sails, no whitecaps, and judging from the near silence of the palm trees round San Gerónimo, next to no wind: the little fleet could be just drifting with the current, sails hanging like heavy curtains. Aurelia and Diana would be going mad with frustration, knowing they were due in Portobelo about ten o’clock – in an hour or so’s time – and knowing equally well they would be very late. They would be terrified that they were letting him down, never guessing that for perhaps the only time in his life he was glad that the women were late.

The thudding of feet and a man gasping for breath made him swing round to find Søren Jensen standing there, a cheerful grin on a face red and stiff with sunburn.

“The boats are all alongside the jetty, sir. Where do you want the powder, shot and provisions?”

“Er…it’s good to see you, Jensen. There’s been a change of plan. That damned Iron Fort has not surrendered…”

“And those guns can…”

“Exactly.”

“And we have to warn our ships!”

“Exactly!”

“Sir,” Jensen said eagerly, “I’ll unload three of the boats, double-bank the oars and we’ll try to get past the Iron Fort to warn the fleet. One of the boats will, for certain.”

If anyone could do it, Jensen was the man, but Ned realized that just warning the fleet solved nothing. With the fleet outside of Portobelo, the buccaneers and the bullion inside and the Iron Fort in between, there was stalemate, unless they were prepared to carry the bullion over the track back to the Rio Guanche, and meet the fleet there, using the boats that had remained. But what was Saxby’s estimate? Five crates of silver, each weighing more than a hundredweight, twelve big canvas bags of silver coins, most of them pieces of eight, a hundred-pound crate packed with emeralds and another the same weight, containing a mixture of pearls and more emeralds. They could, of course, raid Portobelo for donkeys and carts – indeed the prisoners could be made to help – or they could break open the crates and make lighter loads. Still, a loaf of silver weighed seventy pounds.

But with Jensen’s boats here, how much easier and safer it would be to load all the treasure into the ships anchored in front of the town! It boiled down to this, Ned decided. Would blowing up San Gerónimo with an almighty bang frighten the Iron Fort’s garrison into surrendering? The Iron Fort had the key to everything. Well, he would have to wait for Secco and get his opinon.

He said to Jensen: “Take your boats to the next fort, Triana, and secure them there. Leave boatkeepers and then join Saxby with your men.”

Ned finally stood alone on the battlements. So this is how it feels to capture a king’s ransom, he told himself. Well, he felt flat; it was about as exciting as catching a cold, because at the moment he, like its rightful owner, His Most Catholic Majesty, could not spend even one piece of eight.

He walked along the top of the battlements, watching to seaward for the first glimpse of a sail. You have gone mad, he told himself. The amount of treasure you have captured would probably pay all the expenses of running England for a year – army, navy, the King and his court, and the great number of functionaries needed to do all the paperwork – and yet you are striding along with a face as long as a yard of pump water, feeling sorry for yourself. Why?

He stopped, startled by both the question and the obvious answer: he was in here and Aurelia was out there, the Iron Fort was in between, and no amount of treasure could bring them together.

He heard someone calling his name from the top of the stairs. It was Saxby, who reported: “The last boxes and bags coming up from the dungeon now, sir. The quantities are unbelievable. Some of these Spanish fellows have been translating what is painted on the boxes and bags. Millions of pieces of eight, sir:
millions
. Emeralds – thousands of ’em. Pearls, too, from Margarita Island I suppose.”

“You’ve got it all well guarded? The Dons might suddenly sally out from the town.”

“Every musket and pistol we have is loaded and has a man behind it in a circle round the treasure, sir. Sir Thomas is guarding his prisoners with the falcons.”

So the Castillo de San Gerónimo now contained only Spanish prisoners. He walked down the steps with Saxby.