Finally there was Wagstaffe's report on the 'forum' and on the Lynx. Jebediah Hart and the small grey-haired Frenchman had been on shore once in the only boat to leave the Lynx in four days. Their boat had been pulled up on the beach and the two men had climbed up to the 'forum', stayed half an hour and then gone back to the ship. A routine visit, it seemed to Wagstaffe; they did not take provisions or water, so presumably the camp was adequately supplied.

He tidied the papers and rolled up the chart and the map. There, reduced to words and lines on paper, were all the facts he needed to carry out his next task, yet nothing there provided an answer to the most important question of all, one that was screaming in his brain like a descant sung by a mad chorus in an empty cathedral: how to keep the hostages out of harm's way when the fighting started.

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.