The King's Marauder (36 page)

“Thank you, sir,” Keane replied, returning to his men.

There was a noisy bustle and the drum of boots on the deck as the Marines lined up at the entry-ports and the nets, as the sailors who manned the boats went over the side to lay out their oars ready to hand, and take hold of the bottoms of the nets to make the Marines’ descent easier.

“Once they’re gone, we’ve enough room to play tennis, or bowls,” Midshipman Fywell muttered to Kibworth, and that was true. With over fifty of
Sapphire
’s people seconded to the transport, the boats’ crews away to get the Marines ashore then stand guard over the beach, and the Marines themselves, the ship’s berthings below were echoingly empty.

Lewrie groped his way to the binnacle cabinet to fetch out one of the night-glasses and returned to the bulwarks to peer shoreward. A telescope for use at night presented an image upside down and backwards in its ocular, which took some getting used to. At full extension, Lewrie could see a few lights. Two were lower in the ocular, and he took those for lanthorns or torches along the stone parapet of the battery. To the left of those, actually to the right of the battery, there was a dim light in the window of a fisherman’s cottage, and one square of vertical grid. What was there?

“Bugger the bloody thing,” Lewrie muttered, lowering the telescope and relying on his eyes. Behind his back, officers and watchstanders grinned.

The grid, he determined, was a wood-shuttered window with a light inside, leaking round all four corners of the badly fitted shutters. Further up the town there were a few more lights, some half-hearted attempts at street lighting, or lanthorns hung outside some taverns or lodging houses for travellers. The windmills, the granary, and the secondary objectives were indistinct black lumps on dark grey. Puerto Banús was deeply asleep, it seemed, and even the fishermen were still a’bed, else the quays and gravelly harbour shores would be lit up with dozens of glims as nets were removed from the drying racks and stowed, rowing boats hauled back into the water, and the larger offshore boats would be hoisting sails already.

“Our boats are away, sir,” Lt. Westcott reported.

“Very well, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie replied. “Mister Kibworth? Show two flashes from your lanthorn to
Harmony.
”

“Aye aye, sir.”

It took another three or four minutes before the transport made a replying signal light, announcing that her boats were also away and laying on their oars, waiting for the three-flash signal to row ashore.

Two Bells were struck; it was 5
A.M.

“We’re really going to do it, by God,” Lt. Elmes muttered with rising excitement. He could not yet quite make the fellow out, but Lewrie could hear his new Hessian boots, of which Lt. Elmes was especially proud, squeaking as the Third Officer rose and flexed on the balls of his feet.

They had sailed from Gibraltar three days earlier, but once at sea, another bout of squally weather and rough seas had sprung to life, forcing the ships to stand well offshore under reduced sail, with the men of the 77th Foot at the bulwarks to “cast their accounts to Neptune” as they suffered their first exposure to the way that
Harmony
rode the swells. One would have thought that their long voyage from England to Gibraltar had given them
some
sort of “sea legs”, but, evidently it had not. They were as sea-sick as so many dogs.

Lewrie had delayed the attack one full day after the weather had moderated to let them recover, fearful of shoving them ashore and into combat, still crop-sick and puking from a ship still reeking of vomit.

As long as I’ve been at sea, the smell’d make me shit through my teeth,
Lewrie thought, recalling how a kindly older sailor had put it when he’d gone aboard the old
Ariadne
the first time in 1780.

“A trader told me that down at Tetuán, the Arabs say that the dawn is when one may distinguish ’twixt a black thread and a white one, sir,” Lt. Westcott said in a soft voice by Lewrie’s elbow.

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Lewrie replied. “Have you tried it, yet?”

“Going half cross-eyed, but nothing yet, sir,” Westcott japed.

Lewrie went back to the binnacle cabinet to stow away the night telescope, then bent over the compass bowl’s glim to consult his watch, and found that it was twenty minutes past 5
A.M.
, and ten minutes to Three Bells. He stood back up and peered shoreward once more. Those large windmills could now almost be made out, a bit more distinctly.

“Three flashes, Mister Kibworth,” Lewrie snapped. “Let’s get our people on their way, before any sentries can spot ’em.”

Both ships lay about a half-mile from shore, and it would take long minutes, perhaps a whole half-hour for them to ground and land the troops, uncomfortably close to the period of muted greyness, the arrival of false dawn, when those Arabic threads
could
be distinguished, and a watcher ashore could espy the two ships and the boats that beetle-crawled their way to the beach.

Damme, did I leave it too late?
Lewrie fretted to himself;
Ye poxy fool, I
should’ve
sent the signal at Two Bells!

Now that the operation was committed, he felt a
frisson
of dread, for, by the faint light of the stars, and a sliver of a moon that was just rising, he could make out the disturbed-water splashes from the boats’ oar blades as they dug in, rose, and trailed hints of phosphoresence!

Lewrie knew that the soldiers, Marines, and sailors going ashore in the dark, their young officers also, would be feeling the same sort of icy, stomach-clenching dread of the unknown.

I pressed for this, I planned it, arranged it, come Hell or high water, and if it don’t work, or I get a lot o’ people killed, it’s me that takes the blame,
Lewrie fretted.

If the whole thing went smash, it would be tempting to write a report to Admiralty to try and pass the onus of failure off on to someone else; Lewrie had seen that done too many times before. To do so, though, would force him to face the fact that he wasn’t clever enough, or smart enough, to manage senior command, and had spent his career in the Navy coasting by on supreme good luck!

“Christ, but command is a vicious bastard!” he whispered.

At that moment, he would much rather have been one of his Midshipmen in the landing boats, with but one simple task to perform and no responsibility beyond the gunn’ls of his boat.

A simple task for simple bloody
me
!
he thought.

“I think I can make out…” Lt. Westcott intruded on his frets, “yes, I can see the oar splashes, sir. They’re in close to the beach.”

Lewrie looked out over the bulwarks and spotted them for himself, finding that the boats
were
closing in on the shore, but not in the hoped-for single line-abreast.

“Where the Devil are
Harmony
’s boats goin’?” he exclaimed, gripping the cap-rails. “Can’t they see the bloody lights on the bloody battery? They’re too far off to the left!”

There was no way of signalling them to change course, and they were too close to shore to do so, without steering right,
parallel
to the beach, before turning again to make their grounding.

This is goin’ t’turn t’shit!
he grimly told himself;
Even in this next-to-nothing surf, some are sure t’get overturned!

If the operation failed due to that mistake, perhaps he
would
write that report to Admiralty, a blistering one!

Lewrie dashed up the ladderway to the poop deck for a slightly better view, even though false dawn had not yet greyed the skies, but by then, even the oar splashes and faint phosphoresence had vanished. He realised that for good or ill, the boats and all those men were now ashore, and there was nothing he could do about it!

Several long minutes passed with nothing happening, no blossoming of lights round the battery to indicate that the sentries had wakened and spotted the troops, then …

“Gunfire, huzzah!” young Midshipman Fywell cried aloud, hopping up and down in excitement.

“Still, young sir!” Lewrie heard Lt. Harcourt snap. “Bear yourself with the proper demeanour!”

Wee red and amber fireflys were twinkling ashore, quite merry to observe, rippling along in a line in what Lewrie recognised as platoon fire. Long seconds later, after the first winkings, he could hear the faintest hint of twig-crackling as many weapons were discharged.

“False dawn, at last, sir,” the Sailing Master, Mr. Yelland, called up to him from the quarterdeck below. “At, ehm … five fourty-seven.”

Black threads, white threads … now it was dark grey land and white surfline, dull grey windmills and stone battery, and red tunics with white crossbelts, billows of gunpowder smoke, soldiers in tall shakoes in a long two-deep line fronting the battery, and another pack going round the right of it, disappearing into the rising smoke. One of the artillery pieces fired with a roar, adding more smoke to the confusion, and a roundshot moaned far overhead of
Sapphire
’s masts.

“I don’t suppose we should respond to that, hey, sir?” Westcott asked from the foot of the ladderway.

“Not without killing our troops, no,” Lewrie said, grimacing. He had called his crew to Quarters, but had not issued orders to load or run out, and the only weapons from the arms chests had been given to the shore parties.

That was the only shot from the battery, though, and the next sounds that could be made out from shore sounded like thin cheers and feral shouts. That thin line of red-coated soldiers could be seen as they swarmed up the slight slope to the parapets and scrambled over it. A moment later and a small British boat jack was being waved and wig-wagged over the parapet in vigourous fashion.

“We’ve taken it, then,” Westcott said, with a whoosh of relief.

“Thank God!” Lewrie said, with more emotion than was proper to a Navy Post-Captain. “That’s the first part done,” he added, returning to the correct calmness. “Now’s the mills’ turn, and all of the boats in harbour that we can reach. Assuming of course that there’s not a garrison that’s moved in since the last agent’s report.”

“If so, the battery was the most important part, as you said, sir,” Westcott pointed out. “If they appear, we can retire in good order, with the morning’s honour intact.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Lewrie cautioned. “And carry on, Geoffrey. I think I’ll go below and see if there’s any coffee.”

*   *   *

Thankfully, Puerto Banús had no Spanish military presence beyond the artillerists who had manned the battery, and the rest of the morning was spent merrily destroying as much as they could. The windmills were stone towers, but the upperworks, the rooves, mill vanes, and all the gearing that drove the grist milling stones were wood, and the landing parties turned those tall towers into roaring chimneys. The large granary, pitifully low on flour or un-milled wheat in sign of the devastation which Napoleon Bonaparte’s Continental System had wrought upon the Spanish people, was lined with several levels of wood storage racks, and they burned quite nicely, too, so hot a fire that the slate roof caved in and the granary shed slabs from its eaves.

The smaller fishermens’ boats drawn up on the shingle for the night succumbed to boarding axes, their bottoms smashed in, then run into the slack harbour waters to sink. Wood rudders, oars, and fishing nets were gathered up to make a fine bonfire. Landing boats penetrated the inner harbour without a shot being fired, or a single Spaniard to be seen, and armed parties boarded the larger boats to tow them out to the middle of the harbour and set them alight.

Lastly, all but a few of the troops were rowed back to their transport and the small number that remained ashore dealt with the battery and its guns. The guns were spiked at the touch-holes, trunnions blown off with borrowed Spanish gunpowder, and their wooden truck-carriages set afire. The long wooden barracks and the smaller officers quarters behind the battery were set afire, and a long length of slow-match laid to the powder magazine beneath the battery.

When the last shore party was about a cable offshore, the magazine exploded, heaving stone blocks from the parapet and the thick flagstones of the battery high in the sky, flinging heavy guns aloft, and all in a great gout of flame and sickly yellow-tinged white smoke.

The boat crews and the Marines returned to
Sapphire
just in time for “Clear Decks And Up Spirits” to be piped for the rum issue, which raised a great, self-congratulating cheer. There was an even greater one when Lewrie ordered “Splice The Mainbrace!” for full measures for all hands, with no debts to be paid to “sippers and gulpers” for any favours rendered. The same signal was made to
Harmony,
with similar good cheer among the men of the 77th.

*   *   *

“Leftenant Keane t’see th’ Cap’m, SAH!” the Marine sentry at Lewrie’s cabin door shouted, stamping his boots and musket hutt.

“Enter,” Lewrie called back.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Lt. Keane said as he approached the day-cabin portion, where Lewrie was sprawled on his settee with Chalky in his lap.

“Good afternoon to you, Mister Keane,” Lewrie said, waving a hand at one of the chairs. “Take a pew, and let me express my congratulations, again, for a fine day’s work.”

“Ehm, thank you, sir,” Keane replied, seating himself primly, with his hat on one knee, his expression stony.

“A glass of something for you, sir?” Lewrie offered. “Wine, or might ye try my cool tea?”

“I believe I will assay your tea, sir,” Keane decided. “I have not tasted it before.”

“Pettus, a glass of tea for Mister Keane,” Lewrie called out to his steward. “Now, why the long face, Mister Keane? You look as if ye have something serious in your mind.”

“You have not begun your report to Admiralty, sir?” Keane hesitantly asked.

“Not yet, no,” Lewrie told him. “I thought I’d do that once we get back to Gibraltar, and combine our part with Major Hughes’s.”