1634: The Baltic War (67 page)

"Despite the bravery of the men you entrusted to my command, we were unable to inflict equivalent damage upon the enemy. In fact—" He looked directly into Christian's eyes. "—to the best of my knowledge, we failed to inflict a single casualty. Under the circumstances, when Admiral Simpson summoned me to surrender to avoid further useless bloodshed, I felt there was no option but to accept his terms rather than see all of the ships under my command destroyed, along with their crews, with no chance of damaging the enemy in return.

"I apologize to you for this failure," Overgaard continued, bowing his head at last. "I also acknowledge that I personally am responsible for it, and that it was in no way the fault of the officers and men with whose command you honored me."

The captain admiral stopped speaking and stood silently before his monarch, and Christian glared at the crown of his bent head. Lieutenant Chomse allowed the silence to linger for several seconds, then cleared his throat discreetly, and Christian's eyes whipped back to the USE officer.

"If I may, Your Majesty," the lieutenant said gravely, "my admiral has instructed me to tell you that Captain Admiral Overgaard and his men fought with the utmost gallantry against insurmountable odds. Their artillery was completely unable to damage our vessels, yet they did not surrender until more than half of their own ships had been disabled or destroyed outright."

"I see," the king said after a moment. "May I ask what the terms of their surrender were?"

"Of course, Your Majesty." Chomse bowed slightly once again. "In light of their courage, and of the losses they suffered, Admiral Simpson permitted Captain Admiral Overgaard's remaining ships and men to sail for Svendborg, with the understanding that they would remain there, at anchor, taking no further part in the current conflict until the conclusion of a general peace or until they have been formally exchanged. At that time, unless the terms of any such general peace preclude it, they will be returned to the service of the Danish crown."

Christian's jaw muscles tightened once again, yet despite his evident anger, it was obvious even he recognized the liberality of Simpson's terms. Which didn't mean he liked them, of course.

"Somehow, Lieutenant," he said after a moment, "I feel certain your admiral didn't send you to my palace just to tell me the terms under which he permitted Captain Admiral Overgaard's surrender."

"You're correct, of course, Your Majesty," Chomse replied. "In fact, Admiral Simpson instructed me to inform you that he is under orders to proceed to the complete reduction of Denmark's ability to continue to wage war against His Imperial Majesty Gustav II Adolf and the United States of Europe. He regrets the fact that those orders require him to bombard and destroy the shipyards and fortifications of Copenhagen. In addition, he is deeply distressed by the potential for the loss of civilian lives when he carries out that bombardment."

Christian seemed to swell to an even larger and somehow denser size as Chomse delivered Simpson's message in a clear, respectful, but firm voice.

"Admiral Simpson would greatly prefer to avoid the necessity for any such bombardment, loss of life, and destruction of property. He therefore urges you, Your Majesty, to seriously consider the possibility of agreeing to withdraw from the so-called 'League of Ostend's' coalition against the United States. Should you agree to do so, the admiral will consider that his instructions from the emperor have been discharged without any further conflict."

"And what of reparations and indemnities?" the king demanded in a rasping voice. "What of reprisals?"

"Your Majesty, Admiral Simpson instructed me to tell you, should you raise that question, that he is unable to comment on those points. He would strongly urge the emperor to press no unreasonable demands upon you, and he believes the emperor would prefer to avoid doing so. However, the admiral also instructed me to reiterate that he is unable to speak for the emperor and has no official instructions on this point."

"Of course not." Christian snorted harshly. "And because he can't, his own conscience will be clear when the Swede dictates his demands!"

Chomse said nothing, but Ulrik felt his own heart sink. Like his father, he knew that Gustav Adolf cherished the design of restoring the Union of Kalmar—only, this time, under the crown of Sweden instead of Denmark. Despite that, the reasonableness—no, call it what it was; the
generosity—
of Simpson's terms was astonishing. Far better than anything Denmark might have reasonably anticipated out of an emperor fighting for his life against most of the rest of Europe, and now emerging triumphant.

From where Ulrik stood, it was obvious Gustav Adolf wanted to woo Denmark rather than club the kingdom into unwilling, surly submission. No doubt that was the result of cold, political calculation on his part, but did it really matter? Especially when Ulrik had no doubt at all that the emperor would bring out the club if Denmark—which was to say King Christian IV—declined his offer.

His father, he knew, was intelligent enough to understand that at least as well as he did. Unfortunately, his father was also stubborn enough—
obstinate
enough, one might better put it—to reject that offer anyway.

Now the king glared at Chomse, as if daring the flag lieutenant to disagree with his last statement. The naval officer, however, was clearly too smart to fall into any such trap and simply stood silently, respectfully, obviously awaiting the Danish monarch's formal response to Simpson's terms.

"I am, of course, aware of the . . . generosity of the admiral's offer," Christian said at last, his voice hard and flat. "Denmark is not yet destitute of means by which to defend herself, however. If Admiral Simpson wants to discover exactly what those means are, then by all means, he should attack my capital. But I warn him that if he does, he won't enjoy the experience."

"I see." Lieutenant Chomse gazed at him for several heartbeats, then gave his head an odd little toss. "Should I inform the admiral that you choose not to accept his proposed means of avoiding further destruction and loss of life?"

"You may inform Admiral Simpson that
I
will decide with whom to ally myself, Lieutenant. No one else will dictate that decision to me, and my capital is prepared to defend itself against any attack," Christian said with a cold, hard control Ulrik found far more disturbing than his father's normal roar of outrage would have been.

"Very well, Your Majesty." Chomse bowed deeply. "In that case, my admiral has instructed me to inform you, regretfully, that hostilities will resume as soon as I've returned aboard the flagship with your response."

"Fine!" Christian half-snapped while Ulrik's heart settled somewhere in the vicinity of his boot tops.

"If that's your final word, Your Majesty, I must beg leave to return to my ship now. Captain Admiral Overgaard has given my admiral his parole and promised to take no part in any fighting until he is exchanged or released from his parole's conditions."

"Of course," Christian agreed coldly, then looked to the chamberlain who had escorted the lieutenant into the throne room.

"See to it that the lieutenant and his boat are returned safely."

Ulrik wasted no time trying to convince his father to see reason. That, he'd known from the outset, would have been difficult, at best. Given the king's hard, controlled tone and the white-hot rage that lay beneath it, it would have been outright futile. So, instead, he took his leave quickly and went jogging off in search of Norddahl.

He found the Norwegian down by the waterfront, where their own response to the probable American attack had been prepared. Norddahl was busy shouting orders to their carefully chosen and trained crews, but he paused and looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised, as Ulrik appeared on the wharf behind him.

"Why do I suspect from your expression that Admiral Simpson's message failed to find a favorable reception, Your Highness?" he asked.

"Because you know my father," Ulrik growled, and Norddahl chuckled harshly.

"True," he conceded. "How much time do we have?"

"Not a lot, but long enough to get into position, I think." Ulrik shrugged. "It's going to take Lieutenant Chomse—that's Simpson's aide—another half-hour or so just to get back to the flagship. Then they're going to have to move into position. Call it another hour or so. Probably longer."

"Hmmm." Norddahl rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "At least the wind is out of the north. That's something. And the tide will be on our side, as well. You know,"—he grinned at the prince—"we might just actually accomplish something after all."

"I hope so." Ulrik's tone was enough grimmer that Norddahl looked at him with some surprise. The prince shrugged again. "There was someone else at the meeting, Baldur. Captain Admiral Overgaard."

Norddahl's lips pursed in a silent whistle as he considered the fresh information for a few seconds.

"Well," he said finally, "I suppose that answers any questions about the effectiveness of Simpson's ships. Do you know if Overgaard managed to inflict any damage in return?"

"Yes, I do, and the answer is no."

Norddahl sighed. I wish I could say that surprised me."

"I feel the same way," Ulrik agreed. "On the other hand," his smile was thin, "unlike Overgaard,
we're
not going to be trying to batter our way through their armor, are we?"

"I'm sorry, sir," Franz-Leo Chomse said. "His Majesty seemed disinclined to listen to reason."

"Not too surprising, sir," Captain Halberstat pointed out.

"Not surprising at all, actually," Simpson replied. He stood on the bridge wing once again, gazing up the body of water usually known in English as the Sound. He'd been here before the Ring of Fire, right after the Øresund suspension bridge's construction had finally been authorized. He would have liked to have seen the bridge completed, he thought.

There are a lot of things I would have liked to have done, come to that. And there are some things I'm not going to enjoy doing at all. Not that Christian's left me a lot of choice
.

He considered delaying the attack until the turn of the tide. The channel between the island of Amager to the west and the shoal fringing the low-lying island of Saltholm to the east wasn't all that wide. Indeed, when Nelson attacked Copenhagen, several of his ships had gone aground on that shoal, Simpson recalled. The seaman in him was tempted to allow the incoming flood tide to give him the greatest depth of water possible over the shoal, but the admiral in him suspected that the temptation was simply one more subconscious effort to avoid the inevitable. Yes, some of Nelson's ships had grounded. But those ships had been wind-powered, far less maneuverable than any of his. And Nelson's ships had been deeper-draft than his, as well. Not to mention the fact that
his
ships boasted fathometers.

Stop delaying, John
, he told himself sternly.
You have enough water for what you've got to do. And the more promptly you move in, the deeper the psychological impact is going to be. Maybe even deep enough to make an impression on Christian IV.

"All right." He turned back to Halberstat. "If he won't listen to reason, then we're just going to have to convince him to reconsider his position, aren't we?"

"They're moving!"

Ulrik glanced up from his conversation with Norddahl. The man assigned to watch the dockyard signal flag mast was pointing at the mast, and the prince looked over his own shoulder. The agreed upon signal flag had been raised, and he felt his belly muscles tighten.

"I suppose it's time to go a-viking," he said, as lightly as he could.

"It is that," Norddahl agreed. The pirate was closer to the surface than Ulrik had ever seen it, and the burly Norwegian radiated a fierce readiness, an
eagerness
, which abruptly made even the most outrageous of his tales very believable.

To Ulrik's surprise, some of that same fierceness seemed to leap across the space between him and the older man, like sparks flying from a piece of rubbed amber.

"Then let's get started," he said, and oars thumped, then groaned in the oarlocks, as the crews ran out the sweeps and threw their weight on to them.

The slender, shallow-draft galleys—basically long, narrow rowboats, really—gathered speed through the two-foot swell. They were just over thirty-five feet long. Fifteen of them had an eighteen-pounder cannon mounted in their bows, while ten more carried spar torpedoes, raised so that they looked like strange masts stepped all the way forward, swelling into ungainly pods at the business end.

Half of the galleys towed rafts in addition to their weapons, and Ulrik jerked his head in their direction, then nodded to Norddahl.

"Whenever you think best, Baldur," he said.

Norddahl glanced at the water, obviously considering the state of the tide and wind. He waited a few more moments, then picked up the signal flag and waved it around his head with a quick, circling motion.

The galleys towing the rafts slowed briefly. Just long enough for the men carrying the lit oil lanterns to toss them into the carefully prepared rafts. Oil splashed over the piled combustibles. Flame followed, and the first tendrils of dense smoke began to rise.

"Smoke bearing three-five-five!"

Simpson raised his binoculars and peered in the indicated direction. At first, there wasn't a great deal to see, but the first smudge the sharp-eyed lookout had done remarkably well to spot grew quickly into something far denser and darker. The moderately stiff breeze blowing out of the north played with it, rolling it along on its breath, and he frowned as his binoculars picked out the first of several low-slung galleys.

"Ships bearing three-five-five!" the same lookout announced at almost exactly the same moment Simpson spotted them. "Many ships—galleys!"

Simpson's mouth tightened. His intelligence reports had warned him the Danes were assembling a fleet of oar-powered gunboats to defend Copenhagen. Even without those reports, he would have anticipated exactly the same thing. Galley fleets had lasted longer in the Baltic and the Black Sea than anywhere else, given the normal sailing conditions. They were also small enough that they could be turned out quickly in relatively large numbers, and they had frequently been manned by hastily impressed soldiers, rather than the trained seamen sailing ships required.

Set against that, they'd seldom proved very effective against larger warships. They were simply too fragile, and the best they could hope to mount was a single heavy gun in the bows, which could normally fire only straight ahead. As long as a sailing ship had enough wind to turn and keep its broadside directed at the oncoming galleys, they'd been able to accomplish very little. Against the tough hides of Simpson's ironclads and timberclads, galley gunboats—especially with seventeenth-century artillery—were going to be totally ineffectual.

Several of
these
galleys, however, carried what were obviously spar torpedoes, and those actually could damage or even sink any of his ships . . . if they managed to get close enough.

Which is exactly what that damned smokescreen of theirs is designed to bring about
, he thought grimly.
Damn. Why couldn't they be stupid, as well as stubborn?

Even as he watched, the steadily thickening pall of smoke was rolling down across the leading galleys, blotting them from sight like a dense, artificial fog bank.

He lowered the binoculars, eyes narrow as he contemplated his options. The probability of any one of those torpedo-armed galleys getting close enough, even under the protection of their smokescreen, wasn't very great. But he'd seen at least six or seven of them, and the odds of
at least
one of them getting through were substantially higher. What he needed to fend them off were lighter escorts of his own, but he didn't have those. Certainly the one undamaged bass boat he still had available would be useless floundering around out there in the smoke.

"Captain Halberstat!"

"Yes, sir?" the flag captain replied almost instantly.

"We're going to change formation," Simpson decided. "Have
Ajax
take the lead, then
Achilles
. The ironclads will follow behind them, and the squadron will assume Formation Charlie on a heading of zero-niner-five."

"Aye, aye, sir."

Halberstat disappeared back into the conning tower, and Simpson heard him calling down the interior ladder to the radio room. At almost the same instant,
Constitution
and her sister ships slowed, reducing speed to allow the timberclads to steam past them.

Simpson watched
Achilles
coming up to port, while
Ajax
steamed past to starboard and wondered what their crews were thinking. He wasn't sending them ahead because they were more expendable, although he supposed that was exactly what they were, in cold-blooded terms. But the main reason for sending them ahead was their heavier close-range firepower. They'd be much more capable of taking care of themselves in the sort of knife fight galleys with spar torpedoes would be seeking.

"Well, sir," Halberstat's voice observed at his elbow, "at least we can be fairly certain we're not sailing directly into one of those minefields of theirs. Not if their own galleys are crossing through it, at any rate."

"Probably," Simpson replied, but his own tone was more thoughtful, less assured, and Halberstat's eyebrows rose. Simpson turned his head in time to see the flag captain's expression, and he chuckled mirthlessly.

"First, those galleys probably don't draw much more water than the ironclads do when their ballast tanks are empty. They could be sailing right across the top of a minefield, if they were ballsy enough. Second, they
could
be deliberately showing themselves to us figuring that we'd charge right in to attack them, at which point we'd discover that there was a minefield
between
us and them."

"Do you seriously think there is one, sir?"

"No, not really," Simpson acknowledged. "Mining this channel would have closed Copenhagen's harbor completely, which obviously hasn't been the case. Not unless they somehow managed to work out a way to detonate mines from the shore after all, and I don't believe they could have. Even contact mines built with the tech currently available to them are going to be pretty damned problematical. Most of the mines employed prior to the 1900s had a very high failure rate, and I'd guess that anything they could cobble up on such relatively short notice would be . . . less than fully reliable, let's say.

"On the other hand, only one of them would have to work to put any one of our ships on the bottom. And the same is true for those spar torpedoes of theirs. Which is why we're going to Formation Charlie."

"Yes, sir."

The main problem with smoke screens, Ulrik discovered (not to his surprise, particularly) was that
neither
side could see through them. He knew approximately where the American warships had been when the reeking, choking, thoroughly filthy wall of smoke rolled down across the galleys. Unfortunately, he couldn't be certain they were still there. For that matter, it was all but impossible to be confident about his own vessels' heading. Fortunately, the breeze was strong enough and the smoke rolling along on it was thick enough to keep his sense of direction from becoming totally confused.

"Shouldn't we have made contact by now, Your Highness?" his galley's second-in-command asked. He sounded more than a little nervous, and Ulrik commanded himself to wait long enough to draw a deep breath and be positive he was in control of his own voice before he responded.

"We haven't gone as far as you think we have since we lost sight of them, Sven," he said then. "And if you were in command on the other side, would you have continued charging straight ahead after you'd sighted us coming? Especially if you'd noticed the spar torpedoes, first?"

"Probably not, Your Highness," the other man acknowledged after a moment. "I wish we did know where they are, though."

"Well, so do I!" Ulrik assured him with a laugh. "On the other hand, blind as we may be, they have to be equally blind. And just between the two of us, that suits me just fine."

Commander Wolfgang Mülbers muttered another oath as the front edge of the smoke bank enveloped
Ajax
. Mülbers' timberclad had turned hard to starboard, with
Achilles
astern of her. Their new heading was at right angles to their earlier course, and they had reduced speed to no more than six or seven knots. He didn't like moving so slowly when he might have to maneuver hard to avoid those dammed spar torpedoes, but Formation Charlie was essentially a defensive one. Admiral Simpson had worked it out as one of the Navy's standard deployments specifically designed to deal with the threat of torpedo attack in poor visibility and narrow waters. In open water, or with better visibility, they would almost certainly have gone to Formation Delta. Delta called for all units to maneuver at high speed, giving them the best opportunity to evade, but that wouldn't have been very practical here in the approaches to Copenhagen. And at least the slow speed of Formation Charlie should give them stable gun platforms.

The smoke grew thicker, and he heard members of his bridge crew coughing. He also felt his muscles tightening, and his nerves singing with tension. Below the bridge, the forward port mitrailleuse moved slightly, mounting squeaking as its crew trained it in the direction of the anticipated threat. The carronades were ready, as well, but they were also much slower firing.

Seconds dragged past, trickling away into minutes that seemed impossibly long, and still there was no sign of the Danes. What the hell where they up to?

"Think the smoke's reached the ironclads?" Ulrik asked. He kept his voice low, his mouth only inches from Norddahl's ear, as if he were afraid the Americans might hear him. Which was pretty silly, he supposed . . . not that he had any intention of raising his voice.

"Hard to say," Norddahl replied only slightly more loudly. The Norwegian frowned into the eye-watering murk, then shrugged with a certain fatalism. "Either it has, or it's about to, or it's never going to get there at all. In any case, it's probably time, Your Highness."

"That's what I was thinking, too," Ulrik said, and then he did raise his voice.

"All right, boys! Let's go!"

There were no cheers. He and Norddahl had been very firm about that part of their instructions during their training exercises. But Ulrik felt the sudden electric surge, the release of the tension of waiting transmuting itself into eagerness, as the sweeps groaned once more and the galleys, which had come almost completely to a halt, began to accelerate through the water again.

They'd stayed about as close together as they could get without fouling one another's sweeps. Even so, Ulrik could see only the three or four closest galleys, and he was unhappily certain that his squadron was advancing unevenly. The other galleys, the ones far enough out from the center of his line to be unable to see his command galley, wouldn't know to begin advancing once more until one of the other galleys they
could
see started to move. Still, he'd factored that into his planning with Norddahl from the beginning. They couldn't hope to win an organized fight at any sort of extended range, so they'd planned from the outset to fight the opposite sort of battle: a close-in melee under the worst visibility conditions they could create.