1634: The Baltic War (7 page)

Red tape
, after all, was another up-time loan word in Amideutsch. At least the old-style mercenary recruiters could generally be depended upon to deliver on whatever promises they made. No such thing could be said about recruitment into the new regiments. Thorsten personally knew a man—he'd been working at the plant when Engler first hired on—who'd signed up for the army thinking he'd become a cavalryman because the recruiter had told him his horsemanship skills were useful and would be prized. Instead, he'd wound up in the Marines—spending all day on his feet standing at attention while guarding the navy yard, bored half to death. Not even the fancy uniform had consoled him.

And why? Apparently because some careless clerk had jotted down something wrong in his papers. But try getting it changed, after the fact! In the real world, often enough,
we play no favorites
was a gleaming phrase whose immediate and tarnished successor was
and we don't pay any attention to what we're doing, either
, followed by the downright sullen
no, that's too much of a bother to fix now that it's done.

"It's true," Eric insisted.

Thorsten was still squinting at Achterhof. Gunther smiled, took another drink from his beer, and then shrugged.

"No, I can't guarantee anything. But I know General Jackson and he's an easy man to talk to. More to the point, the Swede Torstensson put Jackson in charge of the new units. And why did he do so? Because the reason they're called 'heavy weapon' squads is because they'll be using gadgets that only the Americans really understand that well yet. And the Americans—you know
this
to be true, Thorsten, from your own experience—prize nothing so much as a down-timer who seems to have an aptitude for mechanical things."

He pointed at Eric with his beer stein. "That's him. And they also prize down-timers who seem to know how to manage men with mechanical skills. Which is you."

Another flashing image of Stiteler came. And went, thank God, faster than most.

"Oh, yes," Thorsten said gloomily. "I can just imagine how enthusiastic your Jackson fellow will be, Gunther, when you tell him that—O happy occasion!—the foreman who managed to oversee several men getting killed and the whole coal gas plant getting destroyed is now available to be a sergeant—that's the rank they use, am I correct?—in his new units."

Eric grimaced. But Gunther's smile actually widened.

"It'll be the easiest thing in the world, Thorsten," he said. "After I tell the general that Quentin Underwood owned the factory—which he knows already—and that he blamed you because he didn't take the time and spend the money to have you trained properly. Jackson will have you sworn in ten minutes later."

Engler squinted at him. "Why?"

"Ha! You don't know anything about Frank Jackson, do you? Well, he wasn't a general up-time, I can tell you that. He—and the prince himself, you know—were both coal miners. Leaders of their union. And Quentin Underwood was the mine manager. And if you think
you
have a low opinion of Underwood, ask Jackson about him someday. Make sure you stand back a few paces, though. Your skin will likely blister if you don't."

Thorsten pondered the matter. He'd had so little direct contact with up-timers that he'd never really given any thought at all to what they'd done or who they'd been in the world they came from. To him, as to most Germans he knew, all the Americans seemed somehow
Adel.
True, they didn't fit any of the existing categories of the nobility, but what difference did that make? They'd simply added another one of their own, which they enforced either by simple prestige or the still simpler method of beating naysayers into a pulp on a battlefield.

A coal miner.

Thorsten came from a village not far from Amberg in the Upper Palatinate. There were iron mines all over that area. For generations, men in his family had often supplemented their income by doing a stint of work in the mines. Thorsten himself had done so for a few months, when he was seventeen.

A former miner, for a commander. That might be . . . pleasant. Even in a war.

Perhaps
especially
in a war. Anger that had been simmering for a day and half, under the grief and the guilt, fed by the nightmares and the horrible sudden images, began to surface.

The accident
hadn't
been Thorsten's fault. Being fair, it hadn't even been the fault of Underwood or the plant manager. Everyone was being pushed, by the demands of the war. Which was just another way of saying, by the aggression of Richelieu and Christian IV of Denmark and Charles of England and the Habsburg king of Spain.

"So fuck them," Thorsten growled softly. He
liked
the way things were happening in Magdeburg, and everywhere else that he knew of in the Germanies that the up-timers had an effect upon. One of his uncles and three of his cousins had moved to Bamberg after their village had been destroyed. Thorsten had gotten some letters from them since. Part of what they talked about in those letters was their good opinion of the new up-timer administration of Franconia. And part of the letters seemed very veiled, which meant that something explosive was brewing down there. Something which the Americans might not be leading or even really know about, but also something that his uncle and cousins didn't expect the up-timers to oppose, either.

A prince of Germany—the
only
prince that all Germans had, commoners for sure; that much Thorsten had already concluded—who had once been a coal miner. That was also . . . pleasant to think about.

"Okay," he said, unthinkingly using the one American loan word that had swept over Germany faster than any plague and bid fair to do the same across all of Europe. "Where do I sign up?"

Achterhof hoisted his stein in another half-salute. "Right here. In about"—he glanced at the big clock hanging over the bar—"forty-five minutes. I told Frank to meet us here."

Both Engler and Krenz stared at him.

That vulpine smile that fit so easily came back to Gunther's face. "I told you. I know him. Quite well, in fact. And he's partial to the beer in this tavern, and doesn't mind getting his general's hands dirty doing lowly recruitment work. He's very enthusiastic about the new squads, too."

He looked down at his stein, which he'd set back on the table. It was almost empty. "Speaking of which—another round? Oh, stop looking like a fretful housewife, Thorsten. I'll buy."

Achterhof did know Jackson quite well, as it turned out. The first sentences out of the American general's mouth after Gunther finished his summary of the way Thorsten had been singled out for blame with regard to the accident was:

"Quentin Underwood is the biggest fuckwad asshole who ever disgraced the state of West Virginia. Yeah, fine, he's a competent mine manager. He's also a complete prick and a miserable shithead and if the cocksucker was lying in the gutter dying of thirst the only thing I'd do is walk over there to piss all over the worthless motherfucker."

He took a long pull on his beer. "So forget that bullshit. What matters is that after Gunther raised this with me, I went and talked to Mike about it. He was right there next to the two of you all the way through that nightmare. He told me if I didn't sign you up, assuming you volunteered, I'd be an idiot. Not to mention a bigger asshole than Underwood, which probably isn't possible anyway given the laws of nature."

Another long pull. "So. Thorsten, I can start you right off as a sergeant. We promote from the ranks, so anything after that is up to you. Eric, you'll be what in my old army we would have called—ah, never mind—but what it amounts to is a technical specialist. The thing is, these volley guns aren't that complicated all by themselves. They're really just a fancier version of organ guns. But what I'm looking toward is replacing them as soon as we can with
real
machine guns. That'll most likely be Gatlings, first off, but who knows? So I need as many men as I can get who've got the knack for this stuff. Especially someone like you—this is what Gunther tells me—who comes from a gunsmith's background."

When Engler and Krenz reported to the army headquarters the next morning, so it proved. The papers were already prepared and ready for their signatures, enlisting both of them in one of the new heavy weapons units. As promised, Engler with the rank of sergeant and Krenz with a specialist rating.

No clerk had made an error.

Given Jackson's command of the more salient features of Amideutsch, Thorsten was not surprised. Paper was flammable, after all. So were clerks, when you got right down to it.

Luebeck

Two hours later that same morning, Jesse Wood and Mike Stearns

were at eight thousand feet, flying toward Wismar. The air was cold and clear, albeit choppy and turbulent. Jesse noted the course as best he could on the bouncing compass, confirmed it with familiar ground references, and put in a large chunk of drift correction. The wintry earth below appeared lifeless, blotched with large white patches of snow-covered fields and some dark woods here and there. The aircraft bucked, pitched, and shuddered in the uneven bottom edge of the low winter jet stream. Jesse looked at an obviously uncomfortable Mike Stearns in the right seat and chuckled.

Stearns shot him a look. "Something funny?"

Jesse realized that Stearns had misunderstood his attitude and held up a placating palm.

"No, well, yeah, a little. Do you remember last summer when that group wanted us to concentrate on ultralights? 'They're cheaper, they burn less fuel, they're easier to fly.' All that horsepucky? Well, every time I get up here where it's a little bumpy or cloudy, I remember how Hal Smith stood up in front of the resource board and said, 'I build aircraft, not toys.' He reminded me of that German engineer in that old movie,
Flight of the Phoenix
." Jesse grinned.

Stearns mustered a small smile of his own. "I remember. You don't look much like Jimmy Stewart, though."

Wood was about to reply when a stiff gust swatted the aircraft, forcing him to take a moment to wrestle the plane roughly back on course.

"Well, anyway, don't worry about this bird. She flies just fine. I would've liked to use a Gustav, but I'm still learning about them myself." He passed Stearns a thermos full of tea. "Here, warm up a bit. But take it easy, we've got maybe three hours to go with this headwind. We're lucky Hal figured out a way to get a little heat in this version of the Belle. It's probably twenty below out there."

Stearns took the thermos and nodded his thanks. Jesse let him alone and concentrated on flying. The cold and the constant juddering of the aircraft discouraged talk as they flew over the seventeenth-century landscape.

When they finally reached Wismar, Jesse flew low over the town, which looked almost deserted on this cold December day, save for the curls of smoke from nearly every chimney. The few townsfolk in the streets looked up at the sound of the aircraft and watched it for a bit, but there were none of the gawking little crowds there would have been just a few weeks earlier. Jesse reflected again on how quickly the people of this time became used to the wondrous American machines. He turned towards the airfield as Stearns took in the sights.

Jesse flew over Richter Field, checking the wind and surveying the light snow covering on the grass. He noted many improvements made since his last visit, over a month ago. No need for a tower, as yet, but already there was a shed big enough for two aircraft and the shack that had been the sole building in October had been replaced by a big, solid-looking structure with new plank walls. He reckoned that another low building, surrounded by a berm near the field, must be the armory cum fuel storage. The new construction showed the importance placed on this small spot of turf near the frigid Baltic.

As he took in the scene, it was as if Stearns read his mind.

"Shame it takes a war to get things done quickly, eh, Jesse?"

Jesse glanced over at his passenger and nodded. Looking down again, he noticed two figures, hands jammed in coat pockets, standing next to the wind sock, faces turned upward. He hooked a thumb towards his window.

"It's also those boys down there. Nothing very important gets done without the 'Sons of Martha.' "

After he spoke, Jesse realized that Mike might not understand the reference. The man had had something of a haphazard education, with just three years of college. But you never knew. He also read extensively and had a wife who was a genuine intellectual.

So, Jesse wasn't really surprised by Mike's nodding reply. "Yeah. Kipling knew a thing or two, didn't he?"

"Yes, he did. Or will. Or something."

Jesse checked the windsock again and turned downwind for landing.

"Might as well get this beast on the ground."

Later that afternoon, two aircraft moved through the North German sky at five thousand feet, headed toward Luebeck. "Snarled through the sky," Jesse often thought of it. There was that one advantage to propeller aircraft compared to the jets that he'd mostly flown up-time. Damnation, they
sounded
like warplanes.

Jesse flew as wingman, in a rather loose formation off Lieutenant Woodsill's left wing. He'd decided to let Woody lead, since he knew the way. In any case, he realized that Woody and his copilot Ernst Weissenbach had not had any recent formation practice.

Best keep 'em where I can see 'em,
Jesse thought.

Otherwise, he had absolutely no complaints about the two young officers. Having been left in charge of the airfield at Wismar and with the original Belle, once a third had been built, the two young pilots had performed superbly. They'd made good use of the shipments of fuel and rockets sent to them overland. According to accounts from Luebeck, their observation and harassment of the League of Ostend's armies besieging the city had been instrumental in holding off several assaults.

As a result, Colonel Wood had listened carefully to Woodsill as the lieutenant had described what they could expect around Luebeck. Though the enemy had crossed the river and nearly cut off the city, they had not yet gotten any artillery across, apparently content, for the time being, to keep all of their field pieces on the west side of the river. That would probably change, especially if the rivers froze solid, but it meant that, for now, the area near the city's eastern walls was reasonably unmolested. Unless very unlucky, they could probably land fairly close and reach safety under the city guns before the enemy pickets could even give warning.

"Aside from scattered pickets and some small cavalry units, the Ostenders aren't very much of a bother there, sir," Woody had said. "Naturally, we've been concentrating our attacks on the main encampment of the Dennies on the other bank."

"Dennies?" Jesse had interrupted.

Woody hesitated. "Uh, yes sir, that's what folks have taken to calling them."

Jesse was mildly amused. It seemed to be an iron law of nature that soldiers immediately found pejorative terms to refer to the enemy. All very politically incorrect, no doubt, but he figured it was fair and square. He was quite sure the enemy reciprocated in full. Going way back, for that matter. A friend of his who was a military history buff had once told him that Napoleon's soldiers referred to Austrian troops as "Kaiserlicks" and English troops as either "the grasshoppers" or—Mike's own favorite—"the goddams." Jesse didn't doubt at all that the ancient Assyrians and Hittites had done the same.

"Anyway," Woody continued, "we've mainly been concentrating on the Frogs, since they constitute most of the enemy troops who crossed the Trave and are threatening Luebeck from the south."

"How many are there now?" Jesse asked.

The Air Force lieutenant pursed his lips. "Hard to know exactly, sir. Most of them arrived early on in the siege, transported by ship, but there have continued to be smaller units arriving by overland march. The Spanish are apparently letting them though the Low Countries as long as they don't send too many at a time. We figure by now there are about twenty-five thousand French troops, to add to the Danes' twenty thousand. Then figure maybe two thousand Spanish—they're mostly cavalry—and one thousand English."

Jesse frowned. It said something for Gustav Adolf's gambling spirit—and his confidence in Luebeck's garrison and fortifications—that he'd been willing to withstand a siege waged by almost fifty thousand men with a defending force of not more than twelve thousand. Even taking into account the fact that he was favored by winter conditions—disease in the besieging forces had to be getting terrible by now—and a large civilian population that would be desperately supporting him because if he failed the city was sure to be sacked. As it had so many times since, the savage destruction of Magdeburg and the slaughter of most of its inhabitants by Tilly's army in 1631 had backfired on the imperials. Cities under siege that might have contemplated surrender in earlier times rarely did so any longer.

"I didn't realize the English had sent anybody."

"It's really a token force, sir, is the way we figure it. When I said 'one thousand' I was probably being generous."

Woody went back to the map. "We've mixed up the timing and direction of our attacks, trying to keep the enemy off balance. It's been working pretty well, but if you see a block of soldiers standing motionless while everyone else is running, break off your attack run. They know by now that our rockets aren't all that accurate and any group standing still is probably under the command of a steady officer. It's pretty clear they're hoping for a lucky shot from massed fire to bring us down, the way they got Hans. We try to discourage that little trick by carrying a couple of black powder grenades. Ernst here, has gotten damn—uh, quite good at chucking grenades. They're actually more accurate than the rockets, though they don't have as much punch, of course."

Woody paused and pointed to a spot on the map he had made of the Luebeck area.

"One other thing, Colonel. During our last reconnaissance a couple of days ago, we noticed some activity in this grove to the south of this one Dennie encampment. Right about here. We'd already expended our rockets and we didn't get too close. Don't know what it is, but it looked like tents and buildings of some sort. I recommend we give it another look this afternoon. Maybe one of us can make a low pass, while the other flies cover. No telling when we'll have two aircraft here, again."

The idea was tempting, but . . .

Jesse hesitated, glancing at Mike. This was already a somewhat risky enterprise, flying the USE's prime minister into a city under siege. Adding into the bargain getting him involved in an actual combat operation . . .

But Mike just grinned. "Sure, Jesse, go ahead. Don't mind me. Actually, I'd like to see how it works. Give me a much better sense of what 'air power' does or doesn't mean in the here and now."

There was always that about Stearns. He was a politician, sure enough, and had most if not all the vices of the breed. But you couldn't ever accuse the man of lacking balls. Even brass ones, in his case.

Jesse finished replaying the briefing in his mind. The flight from Wismar to Luebeck hadn't taken more than twenty-five minutes and he could see they were nearing the city. The radio crackled and Woody's steady voice came out of the speaker.

"Two, this is Lead. Approaching Luebeck and descending to one thousand feet. Luebeck Radio should be listening." A pause, then: "Luebeck, Luebeck, this is the Richter Express, five minutes out."

Whoever was manning the radio for Gustav Adolf was on the ball.

"
Guten Tag
, Richter Express, Luebeck here. Have you brought presents for the enemy, today? They've been getting lonely this past day or so."

"Roger that, Luebeck," Woodsill confirmed. He sounded amused. "And some visitors. Better send for His Majesty."

"Roger, Express.
Ein moment, bitte
."

The Swedish king must have been nearby. The sound of someone fumbling with a microphone and a muffled, "Closer to your mouth, Your Majesty" was followed by the unmistakable voice of command.

"
Hallå där
, Lieutenant Woodsill. Do you have Colonel Wood with you?"

"Yes, sir. Standby, please. Go ahead, Two."

Jesse was ready. "Good afternoon sir. Colonel Wood here. As promised, we have your mail and will deliver it shortly."

They didn't think anyone had sold the Ostenders a radio yet, but communications security was always a good idea. The enemy would soon know there were two aircraft in the area, but there was no sense in letting anyone, even the radio operator, know who Jesse's passenger was. Word had already been passed to Gustav Adolf by coded message the day before.

"Very good, Colonel," the bemused sounding monarch replied. "All is in waiting for you."

"Yes, sir, thank you. But first, we must deliver some gifts to your neighbors. We will call again in fifteen minutes."

"We will be ready for you, Colonel."

Jesse clicked the mike. He looked over to see Mike Stearns give a thumbs up and gave one in return. Time to get to work.

"Lead, this is Two."

"Two, Lead."

"It's your show, Lieutenant. Call the shots."

The Richter Express, flight of two, flew low over the besieged battlements of Luebeck. As they passed, Jesse paid close attention to the flat green just outside the city's east wall. Thousands of faces craned upward, mouths open, cheering wildly. Most of those cheering people, whether noblemen, soldiers, or peasants, had never seen an aircraft until two months ago. Waggling their wings, the aircraft flew the length of the city and then turned westward towards a decidedly less friendly audience.

As had been briefed, the aircraft overflew the enemy encampment, the pilots taking careful note of potential targets. From high above, the camp looked like a disturbed ants' nest, as men scattered or ran to their posts. Jesse could see no tent city, no large horse herd, no grouping of flags and standards—which would seem to indicate that air power had already made an impact on this bit of seventeenth-century warfare. Siege cannon facing the city were thoroughly dug in, even from the rear and, all around, men were jumping in holes dug into the frozen earth. A large train of wagons was hurriedly pulling off the road leading into the camp from the west. By now, traders and camp followers knew the danger as well as any soldier. As the aircraft passed the camp, Woody gave his first order.

"Two, maintain orbit at one thousand feet just south of camp. Rejoin on command."

Jesse merely clicked the mike and banked left, turning back over the French camp. Blocks of men had begun to form on the ground below. Woodsill and Weissenbach continued westward passing from view of the enemy. Jesse continued to circle, just over the southern edge of the camp. Once, smoke erupted from a regiment formed up in a square below. Though no sound reached him, Jesse unconsciously edged upward two hundred feet.