by Dudley Pope
Suddenly he froze, reaching out to stop Paolo. From just ahead of them there was a curious, regular noise. As Ramage concentrated on identifying it and making sure of its direction, he heard several more, muffled and apparently beyond it. Then, almost sheepishly because already he had half drawn his sword he recognized it and whispered to Paolo: 'The guardhouse is just ahead. The sentry is asleep somewhere outside: the rest of the guard are sleeping inside. Go back and tell Jackson I want to talk to him.'
The semaphore station guard were in for a rude awakening. They were lucky not to get their throats cut with a slash from a cutlass; indeed, Ramage knew that if anything went wrong he would later be blamed for taking needless risks in making them prisoners.
Paolo returned with Jackson and Ramage described what he had heard and deduced. 'We have to work quickly', he added, 'because one of the other landing parties might cause someone to raise the alarm. I'll deal with the sentry - knock him out - and I want you and half a dozen men to follow me and go on into the guardhouse and lay out the rest of them. We'll leave them with a couple of seamen as guards while we see if any of the other parties need help. And put two more seamen here outside in the lane by the guardhouse with orders that no one passes - even if they have to shoot.'
As Jackson disappeared into the darkness Ramage and Paolo began to creep towards the snoring. 'We walk how do you say, "like a cat on a hot brick"', Paolo murmured.
'Silent cats', Ramage muttered warningly.
There was maquis on each side of the track; waist-high scrub bushes humming with insects during the day (even now the persistent whine of mosquitoes warned of unseen attacks on his neck, face and hands) and heavy with the smell of wild herbs. He could now hear the waves stirring and jently scouring the sandy beaches on each side of the headland, emphasizing how narrow it was.
He touched Paolo to stop him, and then dropped down on one knee so that anything higher than the maquis would be outlined against the stars. He was immediately startled to see the guardhouse less than five yards away, although the snoring of the one man had lessened considerably.
Paolo had also knelt and, obviously hearing the same thing, said quietly: 'He has turned over, away from us!'
Ramage took a pistol from his belt, made sure that it was not cocked, and resumed creeping towards the guardhouse. Suddenly the snoring was interrupted for a moment by a massive grunt - bringing Ramage and Paolo to an abrupt stop - and then once again loudly resumed.
'He's restless', Paolo muttered.
Then they were at the guardhouse. It was a substantial though small rectangular building, built of rough stone with a steeply pitched wooden roof and the entrance at the narrow side facing the track. Ramage guessed the building had originally been a donkey shelter: France and Italy were littered with them, and in times of bad harvests - and probably war - whole families lived inside.
They both spotted the sentry within a few seconds: he was slumped on the ground to the right of the entrance, his back resting against the wall.
Ramage walked over to him and carefully hit him across the right side of the head with the butt of the pistol. The man gave a low grunt and slid slowly sideways, away from the entrance.
There was a low hiss from the track behind and Ramage hissed back. Jackson and his men glided up and Ramage could smell the soot of the shielded lantern.
'All right if we use the light, sir?'
'Yes, it'll prevent accidents. But you'll have to be extra quick in case one of 'em is sleeping lightly.'
Jackson turned and whispered to the man behind him - who was, Ramage realized, holding the lantern - and as Jackson glided through the entrance, the man followed, opening the shutter and lighting the inside of the building. Ramage immediately followed the man even though the next seaman in line, not recognizing him, protested. A second later the inside of the guardhouse was like a box full of wild cats.
Jackson knocked out the nearest man but they were sleeping in two-tiered wooden bunks along the walls, and although it was easy to hit the man in the top bunk there was little room to wield a pistol butt to get at the lower one.
The two in the lower bunks farthest from the entrance were awake and trying to roll out by the time the seamen reached them and one was lifting a pistol. Ramage heard him cock it and saw none of the seamen could get to him because of sprawling bodies, before he fired. He hurled his own pistol at the man's head, lost sight of it among the flickering shadows as it spun through the air, and then saw the man's hand drop. By then he had pushed his way through the seamen and found his victim sprawled half out of the bunk, blood dripping from a cut by his ear. He retrieved the pistol and turned to find Jackson methodically checking each of the Frenchmen to make sure he was unconscious.
'Six, sir, and your chap outside. One of 'em must be the sergeant or corporal in charge of the guard.'
'Probably. Anyway, hurry up and secure them. Collect up their arms and hide 'em in the bushes. Each will have a cutlass and musket, but that fellow with the pistol may have been the sergeant.'
Ramage saw one of the seamen unwinding a line he had coiled round his waist while Stafford stood by ready to cut off lengths with his cutlass, using the end of a bunk as a chopping block.
''Ere, Jacko', Stafford said hoarsely, 'why don't we just lash 'em in their bunks: a bit of line tied round one wrist, under the bunk and securing the wrist the other side? It'll truss 'em up like a Christmas goose.'
'Good idea: do that. Start cutting plenty of lengths of line. Here, the rest of you, get these Frogs neatly stowed in their bunks. Two of you fetch Mr Ramage's man from outside the door - that's his bunk there, the empty one.'
The American went outside and gave a good imitation of a sea bird - was it a tern? - calling three times. Within a couple of minutes the rest of his party, waiting just down the track, hurried up.
At that moment Ramage, by now standing at the entrance to the guardhouse, was almost deafened by a pistol shot behind him and the grunt of a man hit by a bullet.
He spun round in the lantern light to see that the Frenchman he had earlier knocked out had recovered consciousness, somehow found a pistol and fired it at the nearest seaman. As Ramage cocked his own pistol and lifted it to aim, the Frenchman flung his own empty pistol at the lantern, knocking it off the table and putting out the flame of the candle. As the hut suddenly plunged into darkness, Ramage shouted: 'Everyone outside! Jackson, there's a window each side. Cover them in case any of these dam' Frenchmen try to escape.'
He waited a few moments hearing his own seamen in the guardhouse - the only ones to understand the order - scrambling out. That Frenchman should have stayed unconscious longer than that, but more important, Ramage knew he should have collected all the pistols: his carelessness had led to one of his men being wounded, perhaps even killed.
'Did anyone see who was hit?' he demanded once they got outside.
'Wilson, sir; we've got 'im 'ere', Stafford said. 'Not bad, so he says: just caught 'is right shoulder.'
'Is everyone out of the hut?' Ramage called loudly in English. There was no reply, and he asked Jackson: 'Windows covered?'
'Yes, sir.'
Ramage then said clearly and slowly in French, directing his voice through the doorway: 'Surrender! You are surrounded and the camp is taken!'
'Merde!' growled a voice from the far end of the hut, and another Frenchman obviously still dazed but able to think, exclaimed excitedly: 'The camp taken and not a shot fired? You think we are drunk to believe that?'
Time, Ramage thought; he did not have time for a long argument with these idiots. With one shot fired up to now (and, as luck would have it, at the nearest point in the camp to the village) another couple of dozen would not matter.
'You will come out, one at a time', Ramage said conversationally, 'with your arms in the air.'
'And be shot down like sheep going through a hole in the hedge', a third voice said bitterly. Three out of seven had regained consciousness.
'Paolo', Ramag
e said, and the boy came to him out of the darkness, cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. Ramage said in English: 'Curse them in French for fools. I want to confuse them. They'll never credit two French speakers in a landing party.'
Succinctly Paolo told them that their hut was not the Bastille; on the contrary it was a pigsty which would in a few minutes become their coffin because they were -
Ramage tapped his shoulder after a suitable torrent of abuse and then continued, in a quiet voice: 'If you do not come out, we shall wait for daylight and shoot you down, one at a time, like starlings on a bough.'
There was no reply. Ramage heard whispering and crept up to the side of the door, where the sleeping sentry had been sitting. At least four of the guards had recovered consciousness. Two were for surrendering and two, including the man who had fired the shot, reckoned there had been only four or five rosbifs, and the seven of them, when the others had recovered, would be able to overpower them. They would all rush the door, he said. Any moment, he added, more of the garrison would arrive, roused by the shot. 'Merde!'he hissed. 'You saw how I shot one of them. Dead, the way he dropped. They're just privateersmen. You'll see.'
'What about that frigate that passed this afternoon?' a second man asked.
'We saw she was French - her colours were clear enough.'
'Why didn't she capture the privateer, eh sergeant?' the man persisted.
Ramage crouched by the entrance and, knowing the stonework would stop a fusillade of musket shot, waited for a pause in the Frenchmen's discussion and then said, in a conversational tone: 'You are outnumbered seven to one, gentlemen. Your rosbif enemies do not care whether they kill you or take you prisoner. They, through me, are leaving the choice to you. If you are thinking of waiting for daylight so you can use your muskets, let me remind you that a grenade thrown in at either window, or through this doorway which has no door, will blow you all to pieces. And if you doubt that Ramage lobbed into the room the heavy rock that he had picked up from the edge of the track and waited ten seconds after the ominous thud as it landed on the wooden floor and rolled two or three feet.
'- you can now consider yourselves lucky to be alive because that was a rock, not a grenade. I have just given you your last chance. Do you and your men surrender, sergeant?'
'Yes, mon colonel!'the sergeant said hoarsely, obviously deciding such perfidiousness with grenades could be contrived only by someone of such exalted rank. 'We lie in our bunks awaiting your orders.'
'Very well. Do you have a tinder box?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Pick up the lantern and light it.'
Ramage heard the man's movement, then the scraping as he found the lantern and set it on the table, the faint click as he opened the door and the scratching as he began striking flint on steel. Then Ramage went back to the track and told Paolo and Jackson what had been agreed.
Paolo, who had heard most of the talk in French with the sergeant, said miserably: 'Only one shot fired and it's all over.'
'You'd feel differently if you were Wilson', Ramage said unsympathetically. 'How is he, by the way?' he asked Jackson.
'Oh, Staff and Rossi bandaged him up and he's around here somewhere - he's left-handed anyway and wants to find a Frenchman to shoot.'
By now the glow in the guardhouse was turning into a strong light as the sergeant lit the candle from his tinder box and called: 'Colonel - we have the light. Now what are your orders?'
'Wait a moment.'
Those bunks were the best places for the prisoners.
'Jackson - we'll tie them to the bunks as Stafford suggested. He and Rossi can do the lashing - the fewer of our men in the guardhouse the better. Have two men leaning in at each window with pistols and tell 'em to shoot to kill at the slightest sign of trouble.
'I'll be inside with Rossi and Stafford; you stay at the door with Mr Orsini - and you'd better hold the lantern', he told the American.
While Jackson passed on the instructions to his men, Ramage gave the French sergeant his orders and stood to one side of the doorway, in shadow but able to see inside, watching as the seven men obediently climbed into their bunks, holding their arms out sideways so that their wrists hung over the edge each side.
Startled by a thudding noise, Ramage discovered that Stafford was cutting lengths of line with his cutlass, using the doorframe as a chopping board, passing each one to Rossi, who was counting in Italian. 'Cinque ... seis ... siete... is enough, Staff.'
Jackson called: 'My men are ready at the windows, sir. But if there's any trouble, do make for the door, sir!'
'I will', Ramage assured him. 'Shooting pistols in a room is fifty times more dangerous than facing a ship of the line's broadside!'
As he walked into the guardhouse, Ramage said to Stafford: 'Secure that plump, bald fellow first. He's the one that shot Wilson.'
The two seamen had one more man to secure when suddenly there was confused shouting on the track immediately outside the guardhouse. Jackson shut the door of the lantern and in the darkness pushed Orsini away from the doorway, out of the line of fire.
Ramage, nearly blinded by the darkness, made for the dark-grey rectangle of the doorway and as he moved tried to distinguish the voices. Obviously a group of Frenchmen from one of the barrack huts was attacking, or the alarm had been raised in the village and the local militia had been called out.
The moment he was outside the door the first thing he heard - indeed he seemed surrounded by it - was a barrage of cursing in the English of a dozen counties or more. New voices, he realized; not the men of Jackson's party.
'Stand fast, all of you!' he bellowed.
In the sudden silence that followed he said: 'This is Captain Ramage's party. Who has just arrived?'
'Sorry, sir, it's Rennick, but we heard a shot and we thought the guards had overpowered you. The lantern was throwing shadows and in the last rush we didn't recognize -'
'Mr Rennick', Ramage interrupted him, 'don't apologize for trying to rescue me! I was careless, which is why you heard the shot and Wilson has a bullet in his shoulder. But you? How about your parties?'
'All five barracks are secured, sir; all the French troops embarked in the two cutters and on their way out to the Calypso.'
'Did you -?'
'And here are all the papers in the camp, sir', Rennick said, handing Ramage a large leather pouch. 'Nothing was destroyed. There's just one officer, and I took the liberty of holding on to him in case you wanted to question him immediately. He's under guard and sitting in your gig.'
'Very well, Rennick, that's excellent: it's been a good night for your Marines, and give them my thanks. Perhaps you'd take over this French guard - we'll ferry them out to the Calypso in the gig, but first I'd like to talk to that lieutenant.'
'The cutters will be back very soon, sir', Rennick said. 'They'll be bringing a half platoon of Marines with them - I didn't know whether or not you'd want a garrison here.'
Ramage realized that the French prisoners had the uniforms he needed. Suddenly his wild idea seemed possible. 'Yes, it's a job for the Marines - but pick small ones: they're going to have to wear French uniforms. We'll strip the prisoners and give them seamen's clothing, and your men will have to get the best fits possible.'
Fifteen minutes later Ramage was scrambling over the bow of his gig as it was held by several seamen: in the last hour or so - he could not guess how long they had been because patches of cloud were now hiding the more obvious star constellations - a slight swell had started.
In the darkness he could see a shadowy figure in the sternsheets, lying awkwardly, sprawled sideways. Rennick reported: That's the French lieutenant. They've got him in handcuffs and leg irons.'
'You can take off the handcuffs. If he tries to escape by jumping over the side, the leg irons will make sure he drowns. Now, you go back and garrison the place with your Marines and take Orsini with you: he will deal with any stray Frenchmen. I'm taking this lieutenant out to the Calypso and I'll be back at
daylight, but I'll make sure those French uniforms are sent over for your men.'
'Very well, sir; I'll inspect my guards. There'll be no sleeping sentries at the guardhouse!'
'Make sure Orsini is always within hearing of the guardhouse: if any Frenchman turns up, the sentries must whistle for him and not talk ...'
'Yes, sir', Rennick said patiently, having received his orders several minutes earlier and understanding them thoroughly.
The Marine sergeant pulled the French officer's arms up, pushed the rudimentary key into the lock of the handcuffs, and then gave them a bang with the back of his cutlass to overcome the squeaky stiffness of the hinge.
Ramage saw the lieutenant cringing, obviously assuming that the removal of the handcuffs was a preliminary to removing his head with the same cutlass. Ramage waited while the man sat upright and then said coldly in French: 'Sit quietly and nothing will happen to you.'
'But - who are you? What happened?'
'You will understand soon', Ramage said, wanting to ensure as much surprise as possible when he came to question the man.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ramage turned the lantern over his desk round on its hook so that the dim light fell on the leather pouch which Rennick had handed to him on the beach. Large and made of heavily grained, thick leather, once polished black, it was a relic of the monarchy or, more accurately, a sad representative of the new regime: the royal coat of arms had once been embossed on the flap, but someone had crudely scratched out the gilding of the fleur-de-lys without entirely destroying the pattern, merely disfiguring it.
The pouch was stuffed with papers, many crumpled. Clearly Rennick and his men had been in a hurry when they grabbed everything. Ramage shook the papers out and spread them on the desktop.
He reached out for a slim book, and then for something that looked more like a counting-house ledger.
