Admiral (39 page)

Now they were coming back: the Portobelo garrison with perhaps the several hundred soldiers taken from Old Providence and as many more levies collected from all the nearby towns. Suddenly the bullion seemed to be receding into the distance.

Aurelia had been watching him closely. “Five ships?” she said casually. “Who are they?”

“The Portobelo garrison coming back from Jamaica.”

“The garrison – or their ships?” she asked shrewdly.

Ned thought for a moment or two. “Both, I should think. If it’s only the ships, that means they’ve left the troops there – abandoned them.”

Diana said: “With General Heffer in command, I wouldn’t be too sure. We knew he expected the Spanish to land on the north coast. Supposing they landed at Port Royal instead – could they capture it?”

“Two thousand properly led probably could,” Ned said soberly. “Anyway, we’ve got to do something now on the assumption the ships
are
carrying troops”

“This is like some game,” Diana commented. “While the first robber is out about his business his home is burgled and he returns and finds the second robber still at work…”

“I wonder Shakespeare never used the idea,” Ned said. “He might have –” he stopped abruptly, realizing that the pain in his arm really was slowing down his thinking.

“Will one of you go up on the battlements and tell Burton, who is up there with half a dozen men, that I want him to fire five guns at half–minute intervals, starting as soon as he’s ready? Use guns pointing across the swamp: I don’t want sharp eyes in the Spanish ships to spot the smoke.”

Diana ran out of the room with the orders and Aurelia said: “Why five?”

“Five, six, seven – it doesn’t matter: it’ll bring Thomas and all the rest of our men back here quicker than anything else.”

“Unless any of them have gone into the
tabernas
.”

“They’ll have gone in all right, but to roll the barrels into the street to bring back to the ships. No one is going to spend much time looking for hot liquors to drink when he could be finding gold or silver, or jewellery.”

Aurelia made a face. “I hate to think of a woman losing all her jewellery – wedding ring, necklaces that were betrothal presents, family heirlooms…”

“If the Spanish government let us trade, we’d be buying and selling. If the Portobelo garrison has managed to capture Jamaica, I doubt if the Spanish have left any woman with her chastity or even her life, let alone her jewels – and they are regular soldiers, not cut-throat
filibusteros
.”

“I suppose you’re right, but… Anyway, what are you going to do now?”

“Well, when you’re trapped in a trap, I suppose the best thing to do is to try to trap the trapper.”

“Ned,” Aurelia said plaintively, “how do you expect your French mistress to understand such complicated sentences?”

“Don’t worry,” Ned said cheerfully, “I’m not sure I do, but now I have an idea.”

It took more than a quarter of an hour for all the captains and buccaneers to get back to Triana fort, puzzled and alarmed, and by then a seaman messenger had found Jensen, so that his flotilla of boats was waiting at the San Gerónimo jetty.

By then both Barnes and Woods had each been back with later reports. The Spanish ships were running into calms where the buccaneers, led by Aurelia and Diana, had found fresh breezes. In answer to a direct request from Ned that they both look, they each reported that the damage to San Gerónimo was not very obvious from as far away as Todo Fierro: the dried and stony ground camouflaged the scattered masonry and the ragged edges of the grey battlements were not noticeable outlined against the distant rocky hills.

“I don’t reckon,” Woods said emphatically, “that the Dons will notice anything – except our ships, o’course – until they’re actually in the harbour: the headsails make it hard to see dead ahead anyway.”

“
Except our ships
” – Woods had put the problem into three words.

Before the captains arrived from Portobelo town, Ned had tried to see the anchorage through the eyes of the Spanish senior officer of the Spanish ships. Portobelo would look the same as when they sailed for Old Providence and Jamaica, except for two things: there were twenty-eight small ships now in the anchorage and, if he looked harder, he would see that the Castillo de San Gerónimo was badly damaged: not the walls, but as though someone had sliced the top crust from a square loaf.

Aurelia had once amused him by saying that the best place to hide something was by putting it where everyone could see it without effort, and now the phrase came back to him.

The moment he had a good look at them, the Spanish captain or admiral would guess that the anchored vessels were buccaneers and then, noticing San Gerónimo, conclude they had just attacked Portobelo – and attacked it successfully. He would also see at once that he had twenty-eight buccaneer ships trapped.

He would have to attack them at once. His ships would not have many guns because they were built as transports, but if he had all the garrison with him he had more than double the men needed to board and capture the ships and – as far as he knew – recapture the forts.

Very well: the admiral of the Brethren of the Coast needed to think of some way of making the Spanish admiral draw the wrong conclusion from what he saw, so that he would just sail his ships in and anchor.

Ned looked round the room. The buccaneer captains were all here, and most of them, wild-looking with bloodshot eyes after a sleepless night crossing the mountains, looked impatient, anxious to be back in Portobelo searching cisterns, wells and chimneys and poking behind lathe-and-plaster walls to see where the rich had hidden their wealth.

“I’m sorry I had to interrupt you all,” he said. “But we haven’t much time: the Spanish are coming back and we have to get ready for them.” No actor playing the most dramatic scene in his life could have created such an atmosphere: suddenly more than a score of the toughest men at sea in the West Indies were tense and silent: having successfully captured Portobelo and a king’s ransom in bullion, they suddenly heard from their leader that the job was not yet completed.

“Spaniards? Coming back, Ned? How? From where?” Thomas was so puzzled he was almost stammering.

“There are five transports on the horizon, heading for here. You can take your choice as to what they’re doing: they’re empty, having landed their troops in Jamaica; they’re full because General Heffer beat them off; or they’re bringing back the survivors having failed in their attempt.”

“Which is it?” Leclerc asked bluntly. “What do you think?”

Ned shrugged his shoulders. “For the moment, it doesn’t matter: we have to act as though they’re carrying all the Portobelo and Providence garrisons.”

“But we’ll be outnumbered two or three to one!” Gottlieb exclaimed.

“At least,” Ned agreed. “Now, you are going to have to work fast…”

They stood under the hot sun amid the swamp stench drifting invisible across Triana, and Thomas wiped the perspiration from his face and said sourly: “Just imagine having to spend your whole life in this place… Always the stink of the swamp; mosquitoes and sandflies; the mountains making cloud, rain and humidity most of the time; always the same faces and the same conversation and the same gossip… The women complaining they can’t get cloth, lace, thread or needles to make new dresses, the men cursing the lack of wine, or poor quality… The garrison steeped in the history of Francis Drake and guarding against the English who never come – until the one occasion when they’re away…you know, I’m getting sorry for them!”

“Don’t,” Ned said, gesturing towards the five ships which were now past Todo Fierro and stretching into the anchorage, the leading one almost level with the last of the buccaneer vessels. “They might be cutting our throats very soon, or handing us over to the priests. Saxby, you said the church has a rack in the vault; perhaps you should have smashed it!”

The stone of Triana’s battlements seemed to soak up the heat of the sun and almost immediately throw it out again twice as hot, and the only moving things unaffected by it all were the lizards, their skins shiny like chain mail, which watched with beady eyes for a few moments, reminding Thomas of politicians looking for votes, and then seemed to vanish, to reappear several feet away, eyes unwinking, apparently missing nothing.

Pelicans plunged into the water with reckless abandon down in the anchorage and then floated smugly, gulping fish like old men with heavy jowls emptying tankards of ale. Laughing gulls wheeled and shrieked overhead, demanding their share, while an osprey hovered motionless above San Fernando.

A sudden hoarse shrieking from the town made the three men and both women stiffen and then relax, grinning with relief. Some Spaniard was ignoring the buccaneers and slaughtering a pig.

“As long as they don’t roast it now,” Diana murmured. “I’m so hungry.”

“There’s a satchel of boucan at the top of the steps, in the shade,” Thomas said.

“Please, my dear Thomas,” Diana said, “don’t mention that dried-up beef in the same breath as fresh roast pork!”

“We’ll round up some hogs and roast them when we’ve finished this business,” Thomas promised.

Ned looked carefully across the anchorage. To his eye it all
looked
genuine enough but how would it seem to a Spaniard? Was it
likely
? That, he was sure, must be the first question the leader of the Spanish ships would ask, whether a soldier or a naval officer. (One could never be sure which it would be with the dam’d Dons; the senior captain of the ships might in fact be taking orders from the garrison commander.)

Each of the twenty-eight buccaneer ships lying head to wind in the anchorage now had a large white flag streaming from the masthead. They were anchored so close together, lying with their sterns towards the entrance, that it would be difficult for the Spaniards to see exactly how many there were until they sailed past. And on the deck of each of them were a few men wearing the distinctive Spanish armour and helmets, obviously guards.

At this very moment the Spanish leader must be examining the ships with his perspective glass. Unless he was obtuse or stupid, Ned was convinced, the man could only conclude from the fact that each ship was properly anchored and flying a white flag and had Spanish troops pacing their decks, that
filibusteros
had attacked, failed and been wiped out.

So much for the ships. Supposing the Spanish leader then began examining the forts… Well, the flags were flying and a couple of “soldiers” in Spanish armour were obvious on the battlements of Todo Fierro, San Fernando and Triana. The only question mark (a large one, of course) was San Gerónimo.

“He might think it was an accident.”

Thomas looked round startled, and Ned realized he had been thinking aloud. “The Spanish commander, when he sees San Gerónimo. When he sees the damage to San Gerónimo, I mean.”

Thomas thought for a moment, brow furrowed and putting himself in the position of the Spanish commander. He held out one hand and ticked off the fingers with the other as he made the points.

“Buccaneer ships but obviously captured and guarded by Spaniards; all but one fort have Spanish soldiers on the battlements and Spanish colours flying; no damage to the other forts. With all the buccaneers captured why should only San Gerónimo be damaged? Yes, Ned,” he said with a grin, “he’d conclude there had been an accident in the magazine…”

Aurelia laughed and said to Diana: “It would be ironic if the Spanish commander is feeling reassured by looking at buccaneers wearing Spanish armour!”

“Yes – unless some Spaniard in Portobelo town thinks of a way of raising the alarm.”

“That’s not likely,” Thomas said. “We have the intendant and the other leading citizens locked up in the dungeon here.”

“They’re lively enough over there to slaughter a pig!”

“If they slaughter pigs while the garrison is sailing back home, they can’t be very interested.”

“No, I suppose not,” Diana said. “One forgets the great gap between the Spanish people and the government.”

“Remember they have to deal with the enemy – his smugglers anyway – to get new pots and pans and knives and forks,” Aurelia said.

“They do it in England!”

“Yes, but for luxuries, brandy and lace, not for the things used every day, and the smugglers are English.”

“Watch them!” Ned said sharply, wanting more pairs of eyes to supplement his own looking at the five ships. He glanced across and down at the buccaneer boats and canoes made fast at the remains of the jetty in front of the wrecked San Gerónimo. A dozen of them, secured casually by their painters just where men of the Spanish garrison would put them, having captured their parent ships.

There was no sign of the falcons or their crews. Thomas, Saxby and Burton had done a good job in siting them. Down there, the fourteen falcons were already in position, all aimed at a half-mile square a few hundred yards in front of San Gerónimo jetty. All were loaded with langrage, although beside each gun was a pile of roundshot.

Falcons! Compared with the guns in the forts, they were little more than fowling pieces, firing a roundshot three inches in diameter with a point-blank range of 130 paces and a random range of 1,500.

“You allow powder equal to half the weight of the ball… Be sure it is not pistol powder, which is finer and takes up less room and will split the gun… Select the balls to make sure you use only perfectly spherical ones…” Ned found himself recalling Burton’s instructions to the buccaneers. The armourer was a patient and careful man with an enormous enthusiasm for his work. He had tried to place each falcon so that its target should be about 700 paces away, and this had led to some new trees suddenly appearing close to the water’s edge, and small huts and beached boats being quickly moved to new positions where they would better camouflage the falcons and the men serving them.

Ned felt a quite irrational anger with the man, or men, who designed Triana and San Fernando. The embrasures were built so that the barrels of the guns could not be depressed enough to fire at a target close below. The minimum range was about half a mile from both forts, which meant that they could only fire at an enemy ship until it was half-way up the anchorage. For the last half mile the enemy would be quite safe, the roundshot going over his head. Ironically enough, this almost incredible shortcoming in the forts was saving the five Spanish ships from being destroyed by their own great guns…