1634: The Baltic War (39 page)

For that matter, Eddie didn't want to see it himself. He could remember being sick to his stomach, just reading about it.

"You're right, I'm not feeling well. Perhaps I should return."

"Into my brother's carriage, at least. We'll have to wait for Ulrik before we can go back to Rosenborg Castle. But it'll be warmer in the carriage than it is out here, with the wind. Here, let me help you."

She took him around the waist with her right arm and began propelling him toward the carriage some twenty yards away. Then, not satisfied with the arrangement, pulled his left arm over her shoulder so she could carry more of his weight, while he used his cane with his other arm. By now, Eddie was getting around well enough on his wooden leg that he'd been able to dispense with the crutches.

The contact was intimate enough to distract Eddie quite nicely from more unpleasant matters. Of course, it also made him very nervous. Even after the months he'd spent in Danish captivity, he still hadn't been able to figure out the social parameters involved. Christian IV seemed oddly oblivious to the relationship that was developing—so to speak, since Eddie didn't really know what it was himself—between his American captive and his oldest surviving daughter.

Fine, she wasn't technically a "princess" because her mother, Kirsten Munk, hadn't been highly enough ranked in the nobility for anything but a morganatic marriage. Big deal. The oldest daughter was still the oldest daughter—and the father was a no-fooling seventeenth-century goddamit king. One hell of a lot closer in time and spirit to Henry VIII than he was to the harmless royals that Eddie had grown up with. Queen Elizabeth II waving at crowds from an open car, looking sweet and just a bit insipid; Princess Diana, who couldn't harm anything except the reputation of the British royal family and who cared anyway; and a whole passel of silly idiots losing money in the casinos in Monte Carlo.

Eddie never quite knew what might or might not get him hauled to the chopping block. What made it all the more odd was that Anne Cathrine seemed just as oblivious to the matter as her father. From one day to the next, Eddie couldn't tell if she was in any way attracted to him as a man. One day, he'd swear she was. The next . . .

Who ordered this?

Granted, Eddie had never been what anyone in their right mind would call a ladies' man, bowling over the girls right and left. But at least in his comfortable and familiar world back up time, he'd known when he was pining away hopelessly.

Okay, pretty much all of the time, that had been. But he'd
known.

"Will that man be all right?" Anne Cathrine asked, as they came up to the carriage. A coachman held the door open for them.

There was no point in lying. "No, he won't," Eddie said harshly. "He's already dead. He was dead before Baldur went down after him."

Frowning, the king's daughter more or less hoisted him up into the carriage without waiting for the coachman's assistance. The combination of that pretty teenage frown and the Valkyrie strength almost made Eddie laugh, despite the circumstances. His new world seemed full of contradictions.

"That can't be right," she said firmly, climbing in after him. "Drowning isn't that quick."

Eddie eased himself into the bench, and the king's daughter sat next to him. He was about to say, "He didn't drown, Anne Cathrine," but caught himself in time. The girl was nothing if not inquisitive. She'd want an explanation, and that was the last thing Eddie wanted to provide her. He didn't even want to think about it himself.

Especially not after, thirty seconds later, she gave him a mischievous smile. "You are too much the gentleman," she proclaimed. "I've given up."

Then, kissed him. Then, did it again, for a lot longer.

So, at least one question was answered. There remained only the petty details of which form of execution the king would select, once he got wind of the situation. But Eddie, in the middle of the hottest necking session he'd ever had in his life, gave that piddly problem no thought at all.

Some time later, they heard people approaching the carriage and resumed more decorous positions. Anne Cathrine looked a bit flushed, immensely pleased, and fifteen going on thirty. Eddie had no idea what he looked like. Twenty going on thirteen, he suspected. Not that he cared. Bring on the headsman; he'd greet him with a sneer. The world has no greater armor than a flood of hormones.

Ulrik came in first, with his sidekick right behind. As he clambered in, Norddahl called out something to the coachmen. As soon as he closed the door, the coach set off for Copenhagen.

"Ghastly," the prince proclaimed. "Never seen anything like it."

He was sitting on the bench opposite Eddie and Anne Cathrine. Norddahl slid onto the same bench. "You, Baldur?" the prince asked. "Have you?"

The Norwegian shook his head. "No, Your Highness. And I'd have thought by now I'd seen just about any way a man could get killed."

Alas, Anne Cathrine was now intrigued. "What happened? I thought he drowned."

"Oh, no. Lucky for him, I suppose," said her half-brother. "Drowning's slow. People say it's a good way to go, though I have my doubts. But this one died instantly."

"Couldn't have even known it was happening," Baldur said, "it had to have been so quick. Judging from the results."

The king's daughter's eyes were wide. She didn't look fifteen-going-on-thirty, any more. She looked fifteen-and-no-kitten-is-more-curious.

"What
happened
?"

Ulrik grimaced and held up his hands, as if holding a big globe. "Most of his body was in the helmet. All mashed up like you wouldn't believe. Every bone in pieces, all crushed together with flesh and blood. You couldn't really recognize most of the organs."

"Never seen anything like it," Baldur repeated. "The first fifteen feet of the hose attached to the helmet were full of him, too. Like a bloody meat paste."

The king's daughter clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh! That's horrible!"

Norddahl shrugged. "He died a lot quicker than he would have, a week from now, in the executioner's hands. But it was the most gruesome thing I've ever seen."

Ulrik was peering at Eddie. "Can you explain what happened?"

Since Eddie's attempt to shield the girl was now pointless, he heaved a little sigh. "Yeah. There was probably something like twelve tons of pressure on his body, that all caved in at once. Like a giant squeezing a toothpaste tube. His body had nowhere to go except into the helmet and the hose. I think they call it 'excarnation.' "

He had to say the last word in English, of course. But what everyone really wanted was an explanation of the other American term. And once he explained what a toothpaste tube was, even Norddahl grimaced.

"Oh, that's icky!" said Anne Cathrine. She frowned at her half-brother. "Ulrik, you have to
promise
you won't try that yourself. You either, Baldur."

"No fear of that!" Ulrik exclaimed. "Even our sainted father is now persuaded that it's a hopeless way to wage war."

The Norwegian wasn't looking as cheerful, though. "He'll still want me to keep working on it. Not much, of course, since I've already provided him with what he needs."

Eddie squinted at him. "Huh? I thought you said—"

"Hopeless for
war
," explained Ulrik. "On the other hand, it struck my father that it would make a splendid form of execution. Too expensive, of course, for common crimes. But for high treason—gross outrages against the monarchy—that sort of thing—the king thinks it would serve nicely."

That sort of thing.
Eddie wondered if necking with the king's daughter fell into that category. It might. You never really knew until it was too late. Fucking goddam seventeenth century.

Anne Cathrine's hand slid into his and seemed bound and determined to stay there. Her half-brother gave the clasp a glance, then smiled slightly, but said nothing.

On the other hand, you really
didn't
know. It might all work out very nicely, too.

Who the hell ordered this, anyway? I'm just a West Virginia country boy.

Magdeburg

"But no bombing?" Jesse asked.

Mike Stearns shook his head. "No. John's got his ironclads parked—moored, anchored, whatever the right term is for boats on a river—not more than three miles from Hamburg. If he has to make the run, he tells me that any bombs you could drop would just be a drop in the bucket." Mike grinned. "He also added that you shouldn't take offense at any implied sneer coming from a squid."

Jesse sniffed. "Give it a few more years and let's hear him say that." But he didn't argue the point. Right now—probably for a fair number of years—the destruction Simpson could bring down on Hamburg with four ironclads and their ten-inch main guns simply dwarfed anything Jesse could do with two airplanes. Even the Gustavs were still small warcraft. While they could carry far more weight than a Belle, they weren't exactly B-17s. They were armed with a mixture of rockets and bombs, though the rockets were still inaccurate and the few bombs no more than one-hundred-pounders.

Not that they didn't pack a punch. Unlike the Belle, the Gustav had been designed from the start with hardpoints under its low wings and fuselage and had the power to lift a solid war load. Up to eight twenty-five-pound rockets could be carried under the wings, plus either two fifty-pound bombs or one hundred-pounder under the fuselage. At need, two rockets could be replaced with an additional fifty-pounder on each wing.

But the bombs were black powder packed into aerodynamic wooden casings. An inner lining of rifle balls made them deadly against soft targets, but they couldn't penetrate squat all. Hal Smith was working on an incendiary version, but they hadn't tested it, yet.

"Besides," Mike continued, "I want to avoid that anyway. I know you don't want to hear this from a politician covered in muck, but the fact is that I want to avoid as much as possible anything that neither you nor I likes to call 'collateral damage' but there it is. Meaning no offense, again, but you're also a long ways away from what anyone would call precision bombing. And you don't have a so-called 'smart bomb' to your name."

Jesse sniffed again. "I always thought those terms were oxymorons, anyway. A bomb's only as smart as the person aiming it. War's war. People get killed, and plenty of them are noncombatants. Way it is."

He gave the prime minister a skeptical look. "Although why you think that Simpson's guns are going to do any better is a mystery to me. Dive-bombing, I can pretty much promise a circular error probable of one hundred feet. That can't be any worse than his ten-inch guns will do, firing into Hamburg from the river."

Mike shrugged. "They won't do any better. At least some of those shells are bound to miss the fortifications and go sailing into the city. But down-timers are plenty familiar with cannons and what they do and don't do. If John misses, people will assume he missed. If you missed, who knows that they'll think?"

Jesse thought about it and decided Mike was probably right. Whether he was or not, however, he was certainly the boss so that was that. And Jesse didn't really care anyway. For all the back-and-forth ribbing and needling between him and Simpson, there wasn't any real heat to it. The few genuine arguments they got into at least involved genuine issues. Thankfully, they were also a long ways from being in a situation where they had to squabble over contracts for the sake of guarding budgetary turf. If Jesse was lucky, he'd be dead before that became a problem.

"And they'll have an airfield ready?"

Mike nodded. "John already has his army escort working on it. Doesn't take much, he said, since they found a nice field close to the river. It's actually on a big island formed by the confluence of the Elbe and one of its tributaries, so it's well protected even if it's not a huge area. Meaning no offense from a squid, he added, suggesting that your splendid fighting machines didn't exactly require a landing field suitable for a B-52."

"Guy's a smart-ass, Mike, beneath that oh-so-proper upper crust exterior. But I'll take his word for it. How soon?"

"He said you could land by tomorrow, midafternoon. Then do the overflights the next day. He needs that time anyway to do maintenance on the boats and get their fuel tanks topped off. If the Hamburg establishment doesn't come to their senses, he'll do the run the following morning."

"He'll do it in daylight?"

"That's his plan—unless you spot something that requires him to rethink it."

"Like what?"

"Who knows?" Mike said, shrugging. "A fourteen-inch gun that might actually threaten his armor, instead of the cannons he's pretty sure they have. Failing that, he'd rather have the advantage of daylight."

"If the Hamburgers were smart they'd have a big chain across the river—and a mine field. I might spot the chain, but I'm not likely to spot any mines unless they're badly placed."

"They've got a chain, all right. But no mines."

"You're sure about that?"

Mike smiled coolly. "Oh, yes. There
are
advantages, you know, to being a disreputable rabble-rouser."

"Don't tell me. Gretchen's got people in Hamburg."

"Be better to say the CoC does. They've become quite powerful there, in fact, But I don't think Gretchen herself had anything to do with it. That she-devil reputation she's gotten—all across Europe, seems like—is more than a little inflated."

Jesse chuckled. "Handy, though, isn't it?"

"Yup. For me even more than her, as often as not. But the point is—yes, we have excellent intelligence in Hamburg. More than that, in fact. The CoC is prepared to cut the chain for us. I don't know the details, but Simpson's been in touch with them and seems confident they can manage it."

Jesse grimaced. "That's likely to get tough on them, after the ironclads pass through."

The expression on the prime minister's face lost any trace of humor. "No, it won't, Jesse. The CoC has a lot of people in Hamburg by now, enough to hold off the garrison for a day or two. And that's all it'll take. Torstensson's personally leading eight regiments to Hamburg. They started marching five days ago—they'd already been pre-positioned at Lauenburg—and by tomorrow evening should have reached the airfield. They'll set up camp there. At which point you'll fly back here and be ready to fly me to Hamburg."

"Ha. The negotiator with a big gun. Walk softly and carry a Sequoia. You're not fooling around, I take it."

"Nope. And Gustav Adolf sure as hell isn't. If Simpson has to blow his way through Hamburg, that city's authorities just lost whatever trace of goodwill they still had in the emperor's account. Which wasn't much to begin with. They'll register a flaming protest to him, and the gist of his answer will be: 'If you think that was bad,
heeeere
's Torstensson. Or you can cut a deal with Mike Stearns.' And I'm going to be a real hard-ass."

"I'm not sure eight regiments are enough to storm the city, Mike, if they balk. Hamburg's got pretty damn good fortifications, by all accounts."

Mike's cool smile came back. "Not after the admiral goes through them, it won't."

The Elbe, near Hamburg

"That's the final readiness report, sir," Lieutenant Chomse said.

"Good." Admiral Simpson nodded in satisfaction. Franz-Leo Chomse was as conscientious and efficient an aide as he could have asked for. In fact, in most ways, he was far more satisfactory than Eddie Cantrell had ever been. He was certainly more attentive, and he carried around none of Eddie's impossible to eradicate "smartass attitude," for want of a better word. And yet, however little he was prepared to admit it to most people, Simpson found himself deeply regretting Eddie's absence.

It wasn't the first time that had happened. Simpson often wondered if Eddie was as surprised by the turn their relationship had taken as he himself was. Or, for that matter, if Eddie was actually fully aware of that turn. It didn't really matter one way or the other, of course, but as the inspiration behind the squadron's construction, Eddie should have been here to see it go into action for the first time at last.

And if he
were
here, he'd undoubtedly be busy comparing this to running the batteries at Vicksburg, or possibly Farragut's attack on New Orleans
. Simpson shook his head.
Unbelievable. I'm actually
missing
the chance to hear him rattling on about it!

"Admiral?" Chomse said, and Simpson realized he'd allowed his smile to surface for at least a moment.

"Nothing, Lieutenant." He shook his head again. "Just a passing thought."

He accepted the folded message slip from Chomse and glanced over it. It contained no surprises. Commander Wolfgang Mülbers, commanding the timberclad
Ajax
, was a stickler for detail. Simpson had expected his readiness report to come in last, given Mülbers' attention to every little thing, just as he'd expected that report to announce
Ajax
's complete preparation for battle.

Not that
Ajax
should have all that much to do
, the admiral reminded himself.

Ajax
and her fellow timberclads had turned out to be even more resistant to seventeenth-century artillery than he had anticipated. He'd known the weight of shot and muzzle velocity of contemporary artillery was substantially below that of even the eighteenth century, far less the nineteenth-century Civil War artillery the progenitors of his current ironclads had faced. As a result, he'd anticipated that the forty-eight-inch wooden bulwarks he'd used to "armor" the timberclads would be effectively impenetrable by the sort of relatively lightweight field artillery which was likely to be deployed against them along river banks.

Instead, he'd discovered that that much timber was invulnerable even to heavy shipboard guns—or what passed for them in 1634, at any rate—at any range beyond sixty or seventy yards. It simply absorbed the impact of the hurtling shot—when the shot in question didn't just bounce off, that was—while the ships it protected got on about their business. Their decks were completely unprotected, of course, which meant they would always be vulnerable to plunging fire, delivered from above, but other than that, they had turned out to be remarkably capable of standing up to any weapons that might be employed against them.

Unfortunately, their armaments were far less powerful than those of his ironclads. Wooden hulls were much more massive and heavier, strength for strength, than iron hulls, and the same was true of wooden armor, when compared to iron armor. A timberclad simply could not mount as many or as large guns as an equally well protected ironclad of the same displacement, and their reliance on bulkier, less fuel-efficient steam power plants only put an even tighter squeeze on their internal volume. That was why the timberclads like Mülbers' ship carried only carronades, not the massive, long-ranged ten-inch muzzleloaders which were the ironclads' true teeth.

Ironically, that was going to make the timberclads even more effective than the ironclads in ship-to-ship engagements. Their weapons were fully adequate to deal with any down-time warship, and they were also much more rapid-firing.
Constitution
and her sisters mounted three carronades in each broadside, themselves, but the timberclads mounted six, plus two of the mitrailleuse-derived navy version of the army's volley guns. They were designed for close-range, rapidly firing engagements that would usually be over, one way or the other, quickly.

The
ironclads
, on the other hand,
were designed for sustained slugging matches against the heaviest prepared defenses and fortifications here-and-now could produce. That was the true reason for those enormous ten-inch guns. They were far heavier than anything that would ever be required against a wooden seventeenth-century warship . . . but just the thing for drilling straight through little things like the fortress walls protecting Hamburg.

As the good, cautious, pigheaded, ass-covering burghers of Hamburg were about to discover.

At noon, Thorsten Engler did a final walk-through down the whole length of the field, using every man in his battery to check for any small stones or other obstructions that might have been missed. The four military engineers attached to Fey's company went with him.

He didn't expect to find much. Between the farming equipment they'd "borrowed" from two of the nearby villages and the equipment the engineers had brought themselves, they'd been able to prepare quite a good landing field. So, at least, the engineers assured him—and all of them had experience at the work. That was to a large degree why they'd been selected.

"Should do fine," one of them said, once they reached the far end of the landing strip.

"It's better than the one they started with in Wismar," added one of his partners. He pointed off to the side, where soldiers had erected large, crude sheds to provide shelter for the two planes. They'd demolished two nearby barns for the materials. The farmers hadn't even objected too strenuously, since they'd gotten paid more than the structures had really been worth.

"Even that's a better hangar than they had in Wismar, at the beginning."

Thorsten had no idea if they were right. He'd seen the airplanes, any number of times, but only up in the air and at a great distance. But since they seemed so confident on the matter, he saw no reason to worry much about it.

His only real concern had been the soil itself. The spring melt was underway, and everything was a bit soggy. Not too bad here, though. They were a half mile from the river and the engineers had picked a field that was slightly elevated to begin with. By the time they were done preparing the field, the strip was still a bit on the moist side but nothing you could actually call muddy. And by the time the planes arrived, several hours later in the afternoon, the sun would have dried everything still further.