Ramage and the Renegades r-12

by Dudley Pope

  He had worked out the general plan, and he was certain that he had reduced chance to the minimum. He could only attack two ships a night: it would be too exhausting for the swimmers to try more. Tired men made mistakes, and he had to be sure that the risk he took was reasonably small. By seizing the Earl of Dodsworth and the Amethyst on the first night and the Heliotrope and Friesland on the second, he was releasing the majority of prisoners first. The risk was simply that privateersmen from the Lynx might come to the Earl of Dodsworth or the Amethyst on the second day, before the other two ships could be secured. The Commerce could be left: she had no passengers, and the four privateersmen on board her were obviously little more than shipkeepers.

  How to warn the hostages... Confound it, as far as the Earl of Dodsworth and Amethyst were concerned it was already too late: he had set the time for the attacks at 3 a.m., a time when he reckoned the privateersmen on guard would most likely be all asleep, and there was no way of getting a warning to the two ships.

  Well, the two boarding parties were now well trained: every one of them could swim a mile and at the end of it silently board a ship by shinning up the anchor cable if a rope ladder had not been left hanging over the side. At the moment all four ships had ladders down their sides: obviously the privateersmen were confident they had nothing to fear. However, a plan to board could not be based on the chance of a rope ladder, or the hope that no sentry would be waiting at the top.

  He would be leading the Earl of Dodsworth party with Martin and Orsini; Aitken would be tackling the Amethyst with Kenton. That left Wagstaffe and Southwick in the Calypso, and both men had protested violently at being left out of the rescue. Finally Ramage had pointed out that if anything went wrong, it would be up to the two men to get the Calypso out of the bay and back to England . . .

  There was in fact one way of warning the hostages, he realized, and shivered with a fear which was not only for his own life but, in the case of the Earl of Dodsworth, for the lives of eight women and eight men hostages. And how would Aitken react?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Silkin gave a sniff which, registering disapproval, would have outdone anything Southwick could have produced. Ramage was standing naked in the middle of his cabin, trying to arrange an old stock as a loincloth. 'It's no good, the damned thing keeps slipping!' he grumbled.

  'Breeches, sir, or even these trousers I bought from the purser: they will answer the purpose admirably.'

  'Silkin, I have a good half a mile to swim, and I'm not going to be weighed down by heavy clothes.'

  'These trousers, sir, they're not really heavy. Just nankeen, they are. Just enough for the purposes of modesty.'

  'The devil take modesty,' Ramage snapped, 'I'm not anticipating parading in front of the women passengers. I'd go naked but for the fact that it would remind an enemy that the quickest way of disabling a man is to kick him in the groin.'

  'What are the seamen wearing, sir?'

  'I don't know, but they don't have such vivid imaginations as I do. Here, this stock is fine now. Give me a big pin. Ah, that's it. Now, that belt. Slide the frog round, so that it's in the small of my back.'

  The sailmaker had been busy adapting cutlass belts which were normally worn slung over one shoulder; the swimmers had demanded a way of keeping the cutlass from getting between their legs as they swam, and the best he could do was devise a waistbelt stitched to the shoulderbelt which kept the cutlass to one side. Ramage had not liked it; instead he was just using a waistbelt but fitting it much higher, under his armpits, so that as he swam horizontally the cutlass blade lay along his back, the point on his buttocks. He preferred this method to the other because, with the blade to a man's left, it could cause trouble if he swam to the left or the right.

  'What's the time?'

  Silkin picked up Ramage's breeches and took the watch from the fob pocket. 'Just ten minutes past two o'clock, sir.'

  'Good, time I was off. Quickly, that knife and sheath. Now, strap it round my right shin.' Ramage put his foot up on a chair. 'Tighter . . . that's fine. Now take the line at the bottom of the sheath - yes, it goes round my ankle.'

  With the sheath knife secured on the side of his right shin, the cutlass slapping against his back, and dressed only in the stock round his hips, Ramage felt more than faintly ridiculous, but no one was going to see him for some time . . .

  He met Aitken and Southwick at the top of the companionway. Aitken was naked to the waist and wearing seaman's trousers, a cutlass belt across his shoulder.

  'You look like an Indian, sir,' Southwick said cheerfully, 'I half expected you to try to sell us mangoes.'

  'I'm off to demonstrate the Indian rope trick,' Ramage said. 'Well, Aitken, do you still feel as confident?'

  'No, sir,' the Scotsman said bluntly, 'I didn't feel confident when you first mentioned it, but as I don't feel any less so now, we needn't worry.'

  Ramage took his hand in the darkness and shook it. 'I'll give you a wave when we take our exercise in the morning!' With that he went to the entryport, acknowledged the murmured good wishes of the small groups of men waiting there, and reached out for one of the two manropes hanging down into the water.

  As soon as he grasped them, two seamen held them away from the hull, and two more scrambled down the side battens to hold them out farther down, where they would otherwise touch because the hull curved outwards in the almost exaggerated tumblehome.

  Slowly Ramage let himself go hand over hand down the rope, acknowledging the good wishes of the sidemen as he passed them. Then the lapping of water against the hull became louder, and the curious mixture of seaweed and fishmarket smell peculiar to the waterline of a ship in the Tropics warned him he was almost in the water.

  He felt chilled. A slow descent into the water or a sudden plunge? He let go and a moment later gave an agonized gasp: for a moment the water seemed icy cold, and he held his breath until he surfaced again.

  Then, kicking away from the side of the ship, he checked first the cutlass and the knife and then, as an afterthought, the stock. Then, swimming on his back, he identified the particular stars he needed. A cloudless night: the one thing that would have postponed tonight's attempt would have been cloud, because it was impossible to see the Earl of Dodsworth or the Amethyst from the sea on a dark night.

  The water was not as cold as he had expected and as he began swimming away on his back the Calypso seemed huge, her rigging and spars making a complex pattern against the stars, a vast net made by a crazy fisherman.

  The cutlass was hanging down vertically, now he was swimming on his back, and the hilt was digging painfully into his shoulder blades. Aitken would be in the water by now and beginning his swim to the Amethyst. Because she was lying more to the south the first lieutenant had no further to swim: the Calypso was the centre of a radius whose circumference went through the Earl of Dodsworth and the Amethyst.

  Ramage turned over and began swimming on his stomach. All the men had practised keeping their feet well below the surface, to avoid making any noise, and he was sure he was silent. He hitched the cutlass into the middle of his back and suddenly thought about sharks. No one had seen any sign of one all the time the Calypso had been anchored at Trinidade, but now, with only the stock round his hips, he suddenly felt vulnerable. It must be the darkness, he told himself, because he had never given it a thought while swimming naked with the men in daylight. Not only shark but barracuda, of which they had seen many. He found himself swimming faster, then realized that his strokes were making a noise.

  He turned over on his back and saw from the stars that he had been swimming round in a half circle. He looked back and was surprised to see that the Calypso was now some distance away. He checked the position of Orion's Belt, which was acting as his compass, and after a few strokes decided to tread water and look for some sign of the Earl of Dodsworth. When he could see her masts clearly against the stars he began swimming again in a powerful overarm stroke. There was little or no phosphorescence, a
nd at this distance if the guards heard a splash they would assume it was a fish leaping to escape a predator. A predator like a shark or a barracuda. . .

  The sea now seemed warm and the air cooler on his face while he was treading water. In the Tropics at night the sea usually stayed at more or less its daytime temperature while the air temperature dropped below that of the water.

  Where was Gianna now? Thinking of her took his mind off the thought of sharks and barracuda possibly circling below him, but as he congratulated himself on not feeling tired so far, he thought of the two dozen men who would be swimming in his wake from the Calypso in half an hour or so, and the twenty who would follow Aitken to the Amethyst. Was it possible that all of them would escape cramp, shark or barracuda? Was it possible that the whole operation would be achieved without someone screaming with pain as a shark's teeth took off a leg or the backward-pointing teeth of a barracuda ripped out a great piece of flesh? He shivered and wanted to clutch himself protectively, but to do so would miss a stroke and armour him about as effectively as a shrivelled fig leaf.

  He began counting the strokes and stopped at a hundred for a rest, not because he was tired but to avoid arriving at the Earl of Dodsworth out of breath. There was no hurry; once on board and his first task accomplished, he would have to wait for the boarding party to arrive. Wet feet. Suddenly he realized that once he was on board he would have to be careful that his wet footmarks did not give him away. Even in the moonlight they would show up on the dry decks like blobs of black paint. He should have brought a towel, or a length of dry cloth, in a sealed glass jar. A thin roll of nankeen slid into a bottle which was then tightly corked would have done the job. Well, he had not thought of it and now it was about a quarter of a mile too late.

  What else had he forgotten? He coughed as a wavelet slopped at the moment that he opened his mouth to take a breath. The salt water seared his throat and he immediately trod water and turned his face away from the ship. The sound of a racking cough like this would carry for miles; it seemed that he was coughing up his lungs as well as his throat. Finally the spasm ended and he thought of the two dozen swimmers who would soon be following him. If only one man in four accidentally swallowed water, as he had just done, that would mean six of them rasping away in the darkness . . .

  He resumed swimming once his breathing returned to normal. This swim was taking longer than he anticipated, although he had cured himself of the tendency to swim in a half circle. It was hard on the neck trying to keep an eye on a star constellation which was almost overhead: he should have thought of that and chosen one nearer the horizon - except none in the right direction were as obvious as Orion's Belt, which could be identified at a glance.

  All of a sudden - or so it seemed - the Earl of Dodsworth was in front of him, like a huge castle wall in the moonlight. For the last few minutes he had been swimming and distracting himself by having a furious argument with Gianna in his imagination as he tried to persuade her to get into a carriage he had waiting outside the Herveys' Paris residence.

  The bow was to his left and he swam cautiously towards it, propelling himself by slow strokes with his feet as he checked the cutlass, the stock and the sheath knife strapped to his shin. There was little or no wind and the Earl of Dodsworth had her bow to the northeast, riding to the current which, weak at the moment, ran continually to the southwest and meant that her anchor cable would probably be hanging down almost vertically.

  The mainyard seemed to show up strangely, as though it was emitting a faint orange glow. Then he caught sight of a glow in several gunports and realized that a lantern on deck amidships was lighting up part of the deck, rigging and mainmast. How would he get aft from the fo'c'sle without being seen if the guards were amidships with a lantern?

  He turned towards the stern. Unless an odd rope or an extra rope ladder was hanging over, there was scant chance that he would be able to board there, but it was a chance he could not afford to neglect.

  Now he was swimming as carefully as if he was walking across a frozen pool in hobnailed boots: the Earl of Dodsworth's sides rose almost sheer out of the water and he could make out the gunports - East Indiamen were always heavily armed; from a distance an unskilled eye often took them for warships. Now the outward curve of the stern and the sternlights, the big windows which lit the main cabin. Again there was the glow of a lantern, but no rope or ladder hung down.

  He had arrived - just the length of the ship to cover, to reach the anchor cable - and he was feeling cold, but he was not puffing. All that would change soon: he would be hot and puffing by the time he reached the hawsehole after climbing the cable.

  He stopped from time to time, keeping himself afloat by holding the tips of his fingers against the edges of copper sheathing, and listened for voices, but he heard nothing. The eight guards in the Earl of Dodsworth - did they stand a two-on-and-six-off watch at night?

  Here was the cable: eight inches in diameter, perhaps ten, as thick as a man's leg at the knee. He checked the cutlass and knife again, paused for a few minutes while he breathed deeply, and then clasped his legs round the rope and pushed up while grasping it and hauling with his arms. The cordage was new and the thick strands of the cable-laid rope made it much easier to hold. Quickly he found the rhythm: clasp tight with the ankles, straighten up the body and then hold with the thighs; reach up with the hands, haul higher by making the body jackknife while sliding the legs higher.. .Ten feet above water, fifteen, twenty . . . Supposing a guard's bowels were troubling him and he came to the head, the so-called 'seat of ease' built in the stem, one each side of the bowsprit in an Indiaman like this and merely a wooden form with a circular hole. A seaman sitting there would hear someone climbing the anchor cable.

  He had slowed down, his breathing shallow, until he realized that the chances of anyone being there were negligible and anyway it was too late to do anything about it. He resumed the scissor-cutting movement and worked his way up to the hawsehole, where he paused and listened. As soon as he was satisfied that no one had heard him he reached up, carefully holding the blade of the cutlass so that it did not hit a piece of metal and make a clang, and climbed on board.

  Looking down at the sea he was almost hypnotized by the reflection of all the stars. He began to shiver as the water dripped off him, and he tried to squeeze as much as he could from his hair. His teeth were going to be chattering in a moment unless he did something about it. He walked aft until the belfry hid him from anyone abaft the fo'c'sle and reached over his shoulder to draw the cutlass, which he put flat on the deck and then removed the belt, now stiff and cold from the salt water. Then he pulled the pin from the stock and unwound it so that he was standing naked, except for the sheath knife on his shin.

  Using the edge of his hand he wiped the drops of water from his body like a cook rolling dried pease into a jar; then he rubbed his body briskly. He twisted the stock between his hands, like a washerwoman squeezing the water from a towel, put it on the deck and smoothed it flat with his hands, and then wound it round his hips again, finally securing it with the pin. It was cold and clammy, but even as he put the wet and unyielding cutlass belt round his ribs again and tightened the buckle, he could feel the cloth warming slightly to his body.

  Well, he was on board the Earl of Dodsworth and he could have been feeling a lot worse. His shin muscles were telling him he had swum a long distance; his thigh, shoulder and arm muscles were protesting at the climb up the rope, but he felt he could (in case of dire need) swim back to the Calypso and climb up her anchor cable.

  As he warmed up and the salt water dried in his nostrils he realized that the ship smelled and sounded almost like a farmyard. There were several hen coops on the fo'c'sle, presumably supplying fresh eggs and white meat for the passengers. And turkeys, too. He could smell sheep's wool and guessed that several animals were tethered below with a couple of cows - no doubt, to provide fresh milk. Passengers were charged so much that they expected fresh food. Some of these passenger
s probably controlled areas of India as big as a dozen English counties, and were certainly not going to eat salt beef and sauerkraut!

  The lantern just abaft the mainmast was dim; in fact the candle inside was obviously guttering, the wick probably fallen over so that it was only partly burning, the rest lying below the melted wax.

  Ramage picked up the cutlass. The lives of sixteen passengers and the fate of an East Indiaman depended upon him not making any mistakes in the next few minutes. From infrequent visits to East Indiamen years ago, when he was a hungry midshipman and glad of an invitation to dinner on board - the richness of John Company food was famous among naval officers no matter what their rank - he remembered that the captain's cabin was right aft, with cabins for the most important passengers further forward on the same deck, and the cheaper cabins (for passengers who dined at the tables of the second and third mates) one deck lower.

  Well, he needed to find the nearest passenger cabin that he could enter without a privateersman seeing him. He decided that going up and down companionways was the riskiest thing he could do; if a guard saw him, or he accidentally met one on the steps, there could be no doubt that a man rigged out with only a loincloth was an intruder and the alarm would be raised in moments.

  Obviously he had to find the forwardmost passenger cabin on the upperdeck. Whether it was to starboard or larboard depended on the route he had to take to dodge the guards. How long since he had left the Calypso? It seemed hours ago. Weeks ago, in fact. It was probably only about twenty minutes at the moment, and very soon his boarding party would be slipping down into the water and beginning their long swim.

  He came out from behind the belfry and saw the chimney of the galley. He continued moving to his right, his bare feet occasionally stubbing against an eyebolt or a coil of rope. After kicking one metal fitting - he could not see what it was - with a violence that seemed for a moment to have broken his left big toe, Ramage slowed down: he would have to look ahead at eye level, and then look down at the deck, before he moved. Looking ahead and trusting his feet to luck was an invitation to go sprawling.