He reached the foot of the downward slope and now the tunnel seemed to stretch straight and slightly upwards. ‘I hate tunnels,’ Sharpe said.
‘What’s that?’ Harper had seen a faint red light far ahead. ‘Oh God, no.’
‘Down!’ Sharpe shouted and dropped to the floor.
Then the world ended, or it seemed to. There was a gout of brilliant flame at the tunnel’s distant end and a noise that sounded as if the earth itself had exploded. Smoke obliterated the flame as devils clawed and screeched at the tunnel’s walls. Something struck Sharpe’s right shoulder and a lance of pain streaked down to his arse. Behind him a man cried out. ‘Cannon,’ Harper said.
Lanier was guarding his tunnel and had somehow managed to get an artillery piece underground and the wretched thing had just fired a round of canister. The small red glow had been the portfire about to touch the powder charge on the gun’s vent. ‘Are you hit, Pat?’
‘No.’
Sharpe moved his right arm. He suspected one of the musket balls from the canister had struck his back just behind the shoulder, but the ball had not pierced. It still hurt though. He pulled his rifle forward, ignoring the pain, and fired a shot down the tunnel. ‘Lieutenant!’
‘Sir?’ Lieutenant Anderson was crouched behind Sharpe.
‘This is why you’re here. Those bastards are reloading. Stop them.’
The tunnel would be impassable if the French had a cannon firing canister, a weapon all infantrymen feared. A canister was simply a tin tube crammed with musket balls and, fired from an artillery piece, the can disintegrated as it left the barrel and the musket balls spread out like duckshot. The tunnel could only concentrate that deadly blast, bouncing the balls off the stone roof and sides to form a concentrated blizzard of death. ‘Anyone hurt?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I think Potter’s dead, Mister Sharpe,’ McGurk called. ‘Hit in the head.’
Three men were wounded. Sharpe’s shoulder was stiffening and he could feel blood on his back, but he rolled aside to let Anderson’s men lug one of their rockets past him. Sharpe had first seen rockets in India where his enemies had used them, then he and Harper had tested them in Spain after the artillery claimed great things for the outlandish weapons, which were copied from the Indian models. Anderson had brought a half-dozen six-pounders, the smallest of the rockets, each one a thick stick over a man’s length trailing from a cylinder which contained the gunpowder that propelled the rocket with its explosive head. Sharpe had seen a handful of the rockets fired at Waterloo, tracing their erratic course through the grey sky, and that memory had prompted him to ask for the artillery’s assistance here. He feared meeting Lanier’s men in the tunnel, perhaps having to face most of the French battalion with just his small company, but the rockets would be fearful weapons in the confined space.
Sharpe started reloading his rifle as Anderson peered down the smoke-obscured passage to estimate the range. All that was really visible was a red trace where a gunner was swinging a portfire to keep it alight, but Anderson grimaced at how close the enemy appeared, then cut the fuse at a rocket’s base. He knelt and struck flint against steel, then blew the charred linen into a flame that he put to the weapon’s fuse. It fizzed to life and Anderson pushed the stick to move the rocket further up the shallow slope. ‘Careful,’ he said, and then the rocket lit up, its base flared noxious smoke and a searing flame, and the weapon leaped up the tunnel, struck the roof, bounced down to the floor and up to the roof again.
The problem with rockets, Sharpe remembered, was that they hardly ever went where they were aimed. They were as likely to turn in the air and come back at the men who had fired them as hit the enemy, though on the day before Waterloo he had seen one rocket explode right on a French gun team. Lieutenant Anderson’s first rocket might want to wander anywhere, but the tunnel acted as a gun barrel and the rocket flamed and seared its erratic path, slamming against the tunnel’s walls to leave a trail of sparks and smoke, then exploded at the tunnel’s far end. ‘Well done, Lieutenant,’ Sharpe said, ‘now give them another.’
‘Sir.’ Anderson was already trimming another fuse.
The second rocket behaved like the first, scraping along the wall, bouncing from ceiling to floor and back again, but always channelled by the tunnel to its target where it exploded. The explosion was like a shell, bursting scraps of iron, and Sharpe hoped the two weapons had gutted the cannon’s crew. His ears were still ringing from the noise as he stood. ‘Let’s go!’
‘You’re bleeding,’ Harper said.
‘A scratch.’
Sharpe had to stoop as he ran. The lantern had gone out so the tunnel was utterly dark, the smoke noxious and thick. If the bastards had survived Anderson’s rockets then another blast of canister would come soon and in the tunnel’s confines it would prove murderous. Best not to think of it, and then ahead, through the dense smoke, Sharpe saw a flickering red glow. Something was on fire there. Still the cannon did not fire. His shoulder was hurting now and the pain slowed him so that Harper pushed past him. Sharpe tried to keep up, stumbled on a rough patch and struck his head on the roof as he recovered, then heard Pat Harper bellow with rage as he reached the French gun. Sharpe noted it was another old six-pounder, the smallest cannon in the French arsenal, and he realised he had not seen many of the small guns since the early days of the war in Spain. The gun had been replaced by the larger eight-pounder, but presumably Lanier had found this weapon in a Paris arsenal and brought it to protect his precious tunnel. Sharpe reached the gun and leaned against the barrel as his Riflemen streamed past. The French crew, there were three of them, were all dead, blasted by Anderson’s rockets. Behind the cannon was a wooden ramp sloping up. It was smouldering. And Sharpe could just hear the thorn-crackling sound of musketry. So the battalion had reached the estate and, with Kippen’s men, were advancing on the house. Sharpe had hoped that by attacking through the tunnel the Light Company would be a stab in the back to Lanier’s men who would be concentrating on the larger assault, but that had not worked. Lanier had guarded his tunnel, and now men were at the top of the ramp firing down into Sharpe’s company. One of Anderson’s artillerymen was crawling by the gun, spewing blood from his mouth, while a Frenchman was shouting for other men to join the group at the ramp’s head. Then a great crash sounded as Harper fired the volley gun, and the half-dozen men above Sharpe were snatched backwards. The smoke thickened in the tunnel. ‘Up the ramp!’ Sharpe called, and pushed off the small cannon.