The second transport was already slipping her cable, but the nearest ship stood no chance at all. Some of her men must have realised the inevitability of the collision, and Bolitho saw several small white splashes alongside as they jumped overboard. There were pistol shots too, and he guessed that the French officers were busy trying to restore calm and order to the last.

Belsey led his choking, wheezing men to the poop and yelled, “Time to go, sir!” He was grinning, and his eyes were streaming from the smoke.

Bolitho pointed down. “The quarter-boat is tied under the counter! Down you go, lads, and sharp about it! The magazine will blow up before long!”

One by one the sailors slithered down the rope and into the small boat below the poop. Bolitho went last, his lungs seared from the advancing fire, his eyes all but blinded.

Stockdale bawled, “Out oars! Give way together!”

The boat pulled clear, each man’s eyes white in the cruel glare as the burning sloop drifted past. Several French sailors were swimming nearby, and one tried to pull himself aboard the overcrowded boat. But Stockdale pushed him away, and Bolitho heard the man’s cries fading piteously astern.

A seaman yelled, “They’ve struck, by God!”

Sure enough, the sloop had reached the other vessel, and already the flames were racing up the transport’s tall masts where the half-loosed sails vanished like ashes in a strong wind.

“Keep pulling, lads!” Bolitho turned to watch, satisfied but awed by the terrible success of his attack.

The sloop’s magazine exploded, the shockwave making the little boat jump beneath Bolitho’s chattering seamen. The little ship, which thirty minutes earlier had been riding quietly at her anchor, folded amidships and dipped spluttering and hissing below the surface. But the work was done. The transport was ablaze from stem to stern and with fore- and main-masts already down in a welter of flame and dense smoke.

Of the second transport nothing was visible through the pall. But Bolitho knew that she had only two choices. To try to warp clear and risk the fate of her sister, or drift ashore to be left a useless ruin when the tide retreated.

Belsey said, “There are lights at the end of the bay, sir! That must be where the troops are camped!”

Bolitho wiped his smoke-blackened face and nodded. “There will be a hornet’s nest about our ears shortly!” With their ships destroyed and no battery to protect them, the French soldiers would be all the more willing to die to avenge their disgrace, he thought grimly.

But it was done. And done far better than he had hoped. In future, people might remember this when they spoke the name of the Phalarope.

* * *

Lieutenant Matthew Okes stared down from the gun-battery shocked and dazed by the raging holocaust and the echoing thunder of exploding powder. He could feel the hot breath of the burning ship across his sweating face, and his nostrils rebelled against the stench of charred timbers and other horrors he could only guess at.