Each of the five rafts was a great square platform of timber with a short mast to which a scrap of sail could be attached. The French had been waiting for a dark night, a north wind, and an incoming tide to drive the rafts down onto the fleet waiting to take the army south. Volunteer crews would have manned the ponderous rafts, guiding them to within a quarter mile or so of the anchorage. Then they would have lit the slow matches and taken to their rowing boats to escape the inferno. If the rafts had ever succeeded in getting among the British and Spanish shipping they would have caused panic. Ships would have cut their anchor cables rather than be set afire and the wind would have driven the anchorless ships crashing into one another or onto the marshy shore of the Isla de León, and meanwhile the monster fire rafts would drift on, causing more chaos. Each was crammed with barrels of incendiaries and with baulks of firewood, and they were armed with ancient cannons at their perimeters. The cannons’ touchholes were connected to the incendiary-filled barrels with slow matches. The cannons, some of which looked two hundred years old, were all small, but Sharpe supposed they were loaded with grapeshot, round shot, and anything else the French could cram into their muzzles so that the blazing rafts would spit balls and shells and death as they lumbered into the tightly packed anchorage.
The engineers were setting their charges and running quick fuse to the southern bank where General Graham stood with his aides. Sharpe gave him Gough’s message and Sir Thomas nodded an acknowledgment. “Evil bloody things, aren’t they?” he said, nodding at the nearest raft.
“Balgowan!” a voice hailed from the northern bank. “Balgowan!”
“Perthshire!” Sir Thomas bellowed back.
“All secure on this side, sir!” the voice shouted back.
“Good man!”
“Balgowan, sir?” Sharpe asked.
“Password,” Sir Thomas said. “Should have told you that. Balgowan is where I grew up, Sharpe. Finest place on God’s earth.” He was frowning as he spoke, staring south toward the San Luis fort. “It’s all been too easy,” he said, worried. Sharpe said nothing because Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham did not need his comments. “Bad troops.” Sir Thomas spoke of the French who had supposedly been guarding the rafts. “That’s what it is. Battalion level, that’s where the rot starts. I’ll wager your year’s wages against mine, Sharpe, that the senior battalion officers are sleeping in the forts. They’ve got warm beds, fires in the hearth, and dairymaids between the sheets while their men suffer out here.”
“I’ll not take your wager, sir.”
“You’d be a fool if you did,” Sir Thomas said. In the light of the dying French campfires the general could see ranks of redcoats facing the fort. Those men would be silhouetted against the fires and thus be prime targets for the fort’s artillery. “Willie,” he said, “tell Hugh and Johnny to lay their men down.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lord William said, dropping into naval jargon. He ran southward and Sir Thomas slopped through the mud and clambered on board the nearest raft.
“Come and have a look, Sharpe!” he invited.
Sharpe and Harper followed the general who used his heavy-bladed claymore to prize open the nearest barrel. The top came off to reveal a half dozen pale balls, each about the size of a nine-pounder round shot. “What the devil are those?” Sir Thomas asked. “They look like haggis.”
“Smoke balls, sir,” an engineer lieutenant said after taking a quick look at the balls. He and an engineer sergeant were replacing the slow matches in the cannons with quick match.
Sir Thomas lifted one smoke ball and prodded the mixture beneath it. “What’s in the rest of the barrel?” he asked.
“Mostly saltpeter, sir,” the lieutenant said, “probably mixed with sulfur, antimony, and pitch. It’ll burn like hell.”
Sir Thomas hefted the smoke ball. The case was pierced by a dozen holes and, when Sir Thomas tapped it, sounded hollow. “Papier-mâché?” the general guessed.
“That’s it, sir. Papier-mâché filled with powder, antimony, and coal dust. Don’t see many of those these days. Naval equipment. You’re supposed to light them and hurl them through the enemy gunports, sir, where they choke the gunners. Of course you’ll probably die doing it, but they can be nasty little chaps in confined spaces.”
“So why are they here?” Sir Thomas asked.
“I suppose the frogs hoped they’d churn out a cloud of smoke that would drift ahead of the rafts to hide them, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir.”
“Of course, man.” The general stepped out of the lieutenant’s way. He put the smoke ball back in the barrel and was about to replace the lid when Sharpe reached for the balls.
“Can I have those, sir?”
“You want them?” Sir Thomas asked, surprised.
“With your permission, sir.”
Sir Thomas looked as though he thought Sharpe very strange, then shrugged. “Whatever you want, Sharpe.”
Sharpe sent Harper to find a French haversack. He was thinking of the cathedral’s crypt, and about the caverns and passages around the low chamber, and about men lurking in the dark with muskets and blades. He filled the haversack with the smoke balls and gave it to Harper. “Look after it, Pat. It could save our lives.”
General Graham had jumped onto the next raft where a squad of engineers was putting new fuses to the loaded cannon and planting powder charges in the raft’s center. “More smoke balls here, Sharpe,” he called back.
“I’ve enough, sir, thank you, sir.”
“Why do you need…” the general began asking, then stopped abruptly because a gun had fired from the Fort of San Luis. The garrison had at last woken up to what was happening in the marsh and, as the bellow of the gun faded, Sharpe heard musket balls whistle overhead. That meant the cannon had been loaded with canister or grapeshot. The sound of the cannon had scarcely gone silent when the smoke of its shot was lit by three violent explosions of red light as more guns slashed their shots from the embrasures. A round shot screamed just above the general’s head and a swarm of musket balls seethed across the marsh. “They won’t use shell,” Sharpe told Harper, “because they don’t want to set the rafts alight themselves.”
“That’s not much of a comfort, sir,” Harper said, “considering they’re aiming their guns straight at us.”
“They’re just firing at the camp,” Sharpe said.
“And we happen to be in the camp, sir.”
Then the guns of the San José Fort opened on the northern bank. They were much farther away and the grapeshot sighed in the dark rather than hissed or whistled. A round shot landed in the creek and splashed water over the nearest raft. The guns’ flashes were to the north and south now, lighting the night with sudden lurid flares that glowed on the writhing smoke, then faded, but leaving Sharpe dazzled. He knew he should not have come, nor indeed should Sir Thomas have come. A lieutenant general had no business joining a raiding party that should have been led by a major or, at most, a lieutenant colonel. But Sir Thomas was plainly a man who could not resist danger. The general was gazing south, trying to see in the intermittent light of the cannons’ muzzle flashes whether any French infantry had sallied from San Luis. “Sharpe!” he called.
“Sir?”
“Captain Vetch tells me the engineers are making fine time. Go back to the lighters, will you? You’ll find a marine captain there, name of Collins. Tell him we’ll be sounding the withdrawal in about twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. Remember the password and countersign?”
“Balgowan and Perthshire, sir.”
“Good man. Off you go. And I haven’t forgotten you need a favor from me! We’ll talk about it over breakfast.”
Sharpe led Harper back along the creek. The marines challenged them with the password and Sharpe called the countersign. Captain Collins proved to be a stout man who looked askance at the score of prisoners who had been put under his charge. “What am I supposed to do with them?” he asked plaintively. “There’s no room in the lighters to take them back.”