Sharpes Devil   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

"Stay there!" Cochrane shouted. "It's all right, lads! Stay where you are! Wait for it! I promise everything will be well! Heads down now! Heads down! Keep your—" Cochrane's voice was swamped as the whole world suddenly exploded in noise and stone fragments.

"Christ!" Harper screeched as the citadel's foundations seemed to shudder with the impact of gunfire.

The O'Higgins, now that the citadel's main thirty-six-pound battery had been silenced, had sailed out from the unwitting protection offered by the American ship and had anchored with her starboard broadside facing the fortress. She had just fired that full broadside at the defenders bunched at the top of the broad flight of stairs. The volley of cannonfire had been shockingly dangerous to the attackers, but magnificent shooting all the same. At a range of almost a half mile the flagship's guns were firing just feet over the heads of Cochrane's attackers. At least one cannon-ball fell short, for Sharpe saw a marine virtually disintegrate just five steps above him. At one moment the man was aiming his musket, the next there was just a butcher's mess on the stairs and a crack of murderous intensity as the ball ricocheted on up toward the Spaniards.

"Heads down!" Cochrane called again, and once again the broadside thundered from the Chilean warship. Stone shards, struck from the battlements, sang viciously over Sharpe's head. This, he remembered from the tales of survivors, was precisely how Wellington had captured San Sebastian. That great fortress, the last French bastion in Spain, had resisted every British attack until, at the very last moment of the very last assault, when the helpless attackers were dying in the great breach as the French garrison poured a murderous fire into the redcoated ranks, Wellington had ordered his siege guns to fire just above the attackers' heads. The unexpected cannonade, catching the French defenders out of their entrenchments and exposed behind the breach's makeshift barricades, had turned a glorious French victory into a butcher's nightmare. The huge roundshot had destroyed the French defenders, blowing them ragged, and a British defeat had turned into sudden triumph. Now Cochrane was trying the exact same trick.

"Heads down!" Cochrane called again. He had clearly anticipated that the defenders might block the head of the stairs, and had thus arranged with the O'Higgins for this drastic solution that had caught the Spaniards bunched at the stairhead. "One more broadside, lads, then we'll fillet the bastards!"

The third broadside slammed into the citadel above Sharpe.