"This better be goddam necessary, is all I gotta say," Jesse Wood groused as he stomped into Mike Stearns' office, still shedding a little show from his jacket. Catching sight of the three other occupants of the room—he hadn't been expecting them—he made an attempt to retrieve the military formalities he'd so flamboyantly discarded on the way in.
A stiff little nod, to the Swedish officer sitting in a chair near the prime minister's desk. "Morning, General Torstensson." Another one, to the man sitting next to him. "Morning, Admiral." And a third to the man sitting on the other side of the room. "General Jackson."
Mike Stearns looked up from the pile of papers on his desk and grinned. So did Frank Jackson. Torstensson smiled. A bit thinly, but it was still a genuine smile. Admiral Simpson, on the other hand, was frowning. From his viewpoint, the top command of the USE's other armed forces had a terribly slack attitude when it came to military protocol.
"Well, I think it is, Jesse," Mike said, waving at an empty chair next to Jackson. "Have a seat. Want some tea?" Stearns rose and reached for the pot on the small table next to his desk.
"Thanks, I will. It's damned cold outside in mid-December, especially at eight thousand feet. It's a good thing the weather cleared or I couldn't have come at all." The flyer removed his old Nomex and leather gloves, unwrapped the scarf at his neck, and unzipped his pre-Ring of Fire leather flying jacket.
"To be more precise," said Torstensson, "the prime minister believes the matter is necessary. I've got my doubts, myself." Although Torstensson's English was still heavily accented, by now he'd not only become fluent in the language—he'd been almost fluent, anyway, when the Americans had first met him as the commander of Gustav Adolf's artillery—but was even becoming adept at American idiom. "I believe it's fair to say that Admiral Simpson thinks he's completely off his rocker."
Simpson's frown came back. "I certainly wouldn't put it that way, to the prime minister. But, yes, I think his proposal is unwise."
Stearns handed Wood a steaming mug. "Sorry about hauling you up here on such short notice. You want something to eat?"
After taking a seat, Jesse shook his head. "It'll wait. Besides, that behemoth out there you call a secretary doesn't look like he's the type to cook. Where'd you get him, anyway?"
Stearns put down the teapot and leaned back into his seat. "David? Well, believe it or not, he's a professor at the University of Jena. Or was, until he volunteered for government service. He taught rhetoric and languages. Speaks about six, near as I can tell. A very handy man."
"I don't doubt it," Jesse said. "Rhetoric, eh? He didn't get those scars declining verbs, though, did he?"
Torstensson chuckled. "He wasn't always a scholar, and today he's also one of Achterhof's people. I don't object, mind you, even if Axel would be aghast to learn that many of the USE prime minister's personal staff were hardcore CoC members." That was a reference to Axel Oxenstierna, the chancellor of Sweden, who was still fully committed to the general principles of aristocratic rule. "But—"
The Swedish general who was the top commander of the USE's army shrugged heavily. "Since one of our prime minister's many foolish whims is a distaste for having a proper military escort, I figure it's just as well to have him surrounded by people like Achterhof and Zimmermann. Any Habsburg assassin trying to get past Achterhof will need mastiffs—and to get past Zimmermann, they'll need climbing gear."
Jesse hadn't noticed Gunther Achterhof, on his way into Government House. But as one of the central organizers of the CoC for all of Magdeburg, Achterhof often had other things besides Mike Stearns' security to keep him busy. It didn't matter. Jesse hadn't spotted Achterhof himself, but he had spotted at least three other CoC members keeping an eye on the building.
He was inclined to share Torstensson's view of the matter. The special CoC unit that Achterhof had assigned to guard Stearns—as well as Admiral and Mrs. Simpson, and Frank and Diane Jackson—might lack the formal training of the up-time Secret Service, when it came to guarding dignitaries and heads of state. Not to mention lacking fancy communication gear. But Jesse thought they probably made up for it by their instant readiness to engage in what up-time spin doctors and public relations flacks might have labeled "proactive security."
The CoC didn't exactly have an iron grip on Magdeburg. Not when Torstensson had twenty thousand men in army camps just outside the city, and the CoC was maintaining good relations with him. But there wasn't much that happened in the city that they didn't find out about very quickly. Jesse had heard the rumor—never officially confirmed—that a presumed enemy assassination team had found themselves at the bottom of the Elbe less than two days after they got into the city. With weights around their ankles to keep them there.
"Presumed," because Achterhof's men had never seen any need for something as fussy and officious as pressing formal charges and holding an actual trial.
By now, Jesse was intrigued. For all the jests about Mike Stearns' recklessness, it was actually rather unusual for both Torstensson and Simpson to be this strongly opposed to something he wanted to do. Which meant this was going to be a real doozy.
"So what's on your mind, Mr. President?"
"It's 'Prime Minister,' " Simpson corrected him stiffly.
"Yeah, sorry. I forget. Whatever. What do you want, boss?"
Mike looked him right in the eye. "I want you to fly me into Luebeck, if it's at all possible."
Jesse thought about it. Not for long, however, because he'd already given the matter quite a bit of thought. Not from the standpoint of being able to fly Stearns into Luebeck, admittedly. Jesse's concern had been whether he could fly Gustav Adolf out, in case the Ostender siege of the city looked to be succeeding. But the technical problems involved were the same, either way.
"Yeah, I can—provided Gustav Adolf is willing to cooperate. There's no way to land inside Luebeck itself, you understand? But if the emperor can keep a big enough field clear of enemy troops just outside the walls, we can manage it."
"That much is not a problem," said Torstensson. "Here, I will show you."
He pulled out a map from a satchel by the legs of his chair and spread it over Mike's desk, after Mike had cleared some room. Torstensson pointed to an area just outside the walls of the city and across the moat that guarded Luebeck on the east. There were field fortifications shown there, that provided something of a sheltered area because of a large bastion shown on the southern side of the field. It would be an earthen bastion, nothing fancier, but it would be enough to protect the field from the French troops who'd crossed the Trave south of the city.
"Will this be enough space?" Torstensson asked.
Jesse studied the map for about a minute. His main concern was to get a sense of how accurate the whole map was, from the standpoint of maintaining consistent measurements of distance. As a rule, especially when working on the scale of a city, seventeenth-century cartographers tended to be reasonably accurate even if they were still rarely able to use the sort of precision surveying equipment that Grantville had brought—in no great supply, alas—through the Ring of Fire.
Finally satisfied, he sat back down. By now Jesse had overflown Luebeck at least half a dozen times and the map pretty much corresponded to his own memory. As it happened, he'd noticed that field himself, on one of those flights, and had even taken the time to overfly it again as a way of getting a rough estimate of whether it would work as a landing field. He'd thought at the time that it would, although it would be a bit tight.
"That'll do," he said. "But they'll need to check it carefully to make sure there aren't any obstructions. All it takes is one good-sized rock to break the landing gear."
Torstensson nodded. "Not a problem. I doubt if there'll be much in the way of obstructions anyway. The city's residents—even some of the king's soldiers—use that area to pasture goats, since it's shielded from enemy artillery. And it's much too far from the bay for the enemy's naval forces to pose a threat." He grinned, rather wolfishly. "Needless to say, the Danes and the French don't even try to enter the river any longer. Not after His Majesty let them know that he still had his American scuba wizards residing in Luebeck."
Mike smiled, and Frank Jackson laughed outright. But Jesse noticed that Simpson didn't share in the amusement.
Neither did he, although he smiled politely. The problem was that he and Simpson led the two branches of the USE's military that dealt more closely with German artisans and craftsmen than the army did—or politicians like Mike Stearns. By now, Jesse had come to have a much deeper respect for the abilities of seventeenth-century skilled workers than he'd had in the first period after the Ring of Fire.
True enough, by the manufacturing standards of the world they'd left behind, the skilled craftsmen of the time worked very slowly. More precisely, they could only produce a small quantity of something in the same time that, back in the twentieth century, any factory could have churned out large numbers. But it was amazing what they could produce, even if only in small quantities. All they really needed to know was that something was possible, and be given a rough idea of the general principles of how it worked.
Personally, he thought Gustav Adolf had been foolish to let the enemy know how his forces had destroyed the ships that the Danes had sent up the river to threaten Luebeck early in the siege. It hadn't taken more than six weeks thereafter for two of the spare scuba rigs in Grantville that Sam and Al Morton had left behind to vanish.
Where, and by whose hands? No one knew. But Jesse was certain that enemy agents had been responsible. Probably French agents, but . . . it could have been almost any one. Perhaps simply one of the many independent espionage outfits that worked on a freelance basis for anyone willing to pay their price. Like mercenaries in general, they seemed to be crawling all over Europe—and nowhere in greater concentration than in Grantville. For good or ill—and Jesse could feel either way about it, depending on his mood of the moment—Grantville's ingrained traditions and customs didn't allow the CoCs there the same latitude when it came to "proactive security" that they had in Magdeburg.
So . . .
Jesse would be very surprised if there weren't already French or Danish top secret projects working around the clock to duplicate American capabilities with underwater demolitions. Or both, and he wouldn't rule out the Spaniards either, especially the ones in the Low Countries, which had probably the highest concentration of skilled craftsmen anywhere in the world outside of Grantville itself. For sure and certain—Mike's head of espionage Francisco Nasi had been able to determine this much—there were at least three enemy efforts underway to build submarines.
Primitive ones, surely, just as whatever they came up with in the way of diving equipment would be primitive. Not to mention dangerous as all hell for the men operating them, with sky-high fatality rates. But there was no more of a shortage of bravery in Europe than there was a shortage of ingenuity. Soon enough, some of that stuff would be put into action—and not all of it would fail.
But there was no point in fretting over that now. Especially since whatever energy and time Jesse had to spare for fretting, he'd spend fretting on the subject that would impact him immediately and directly. Nasi had also been able to determine that there were at least eighteen separate projects underway somewhere in Europe to build aircraft. Most of them in enemy territories, but not all. Many of them harebrained, but not all.
And if all of them were risky, so what? In the world they'd left behind, the early pioneers of flying had been willing to accept ghastly casualties. Why would anyone in their right mind think that seventeenth-century aviation pioneers would be any less bold? These were the same people who didn't think twice about undertaking voyages around the globe on ships that were practically rowboats, by late twentieth-century standards. Something like thirty percent—nobody knew the exact figure—of the commercial seamen in the seventeenth century wound up dying at one point or another, just in the course of doing what was considered a routine job. Probably an equal percentage wound up maimed or crippled or at least seriously injured in the course of their working lives. So far as Jesse was concerned, anybody who thought down-timers would shy away from still higher casualty rates for the sake of mastering aviation or underwater demolitions was just a plain and simple idiot.
Unfortunately, whatever his many virtues, Gustav Adolf shared in full what was perhaps the most common vice of seventeenth-century monarchs and princes. He liked to boast. So, boast he had, to his enemies, and damn the price his people would wind up paying for it downstream.
But Jesse tore his mind away from those gloomy thoughts. Mike was coming back to the subject.
"So it's doable, then?" he asked.
"Yes."
"How soon?"
Jesse shrugged. "The weather's fine. We could leave this afternoon, if you're ready to go. Well . . . at least once we hear back from Luebeck that that field is clear. But the radio connection is good enough now that we shouldn't have to wait for the evening window to get word back."
Mike shook his head. "There's not that much of a rush. And I need to spend this afternoon"—he made a little sweeping gesture with his head toward the other officers in the room—"dealing with some other matters. Let's figure on tomorrow morning; how's that?"
Jessed nodded. "Fine. Do you need me to stay for that discussion?"
Mike looked at Jackson and then Simpson. "Gentlemen?"
Jackson grinned again. "Not unless Colonel Wood's changed his mind about fitting machine guns onto his planes."
Jesse grimaced. There were times he felt like a man under siege himself, the way enthusiasts—down-timers worse than up-timers—would deluge him with eager questions on the subject of when the USE's warplanes would be able to start riddling the enemy with machine-gun fire. "When," measured in terms of this week or next week. Alas, among the many American terms that had made its way into the down-time German lexicon, some damn fool had included the verb "to strafe."
"No," Jesse growled. "I haven't. We're still at least two generations of aircraft away from mounting machine guns. Any that are worth mounting, anyway—which those antique contraptions you're talking about aren't."
"Okay, then," said Stearns. "In that case, there's no reason you need to stick around for the wrangle. Unless you want to, of course."
Jesse shook his head. "No, I've got plenty of other things to attend to. And participating in another argument over machine guns ranks somewhere below getting a colonoscopy, in my book."
Torstensson perked right up. "What is a colonoscopy?" he asked. "And how soon could we have one deployed against the Ostenders?"
After Jesse left—and Frank had clarified the nature of a colonoscopy—Mike decided to cut right to the chase. He had a faint hope that Simpson wouldn't argue the matter for more than an hour, if Mike made clear from the outset that he'd made up his mind.
"Gentlemen. After long and careful consideration, I've decided that the army's claim to the volley guns has to take first priority."
"Blast it, Mike!" exploded Simpson, jettisoning his beloved protocol. "We need volley guns for the timberclads, if we're to have any hope at all of suppressing cavalry raids on our river shipping."
A faint hope got fainter.
"And who cares about that if we can't win the battles?" demanded Jackson. "The best way to suppress cavalry raids is to smash up enemy cavalry before they can go out on raids in the first place."
"Yes, I agree completely," said Torstensson. "With all due respect, Admiral—"
Fainter and fainter.
It took closer to two hours, but in the end Simpson gave up the fight. Looked at from one angle, it was absurd for him to persist so stubbornly in the matter. With both his prime minister and the top commander of the USE's military arrayed against him, he was bound to lose the dispute and was perfectly smart enough to have been aware of that five minutes from the outset.
Mike knew full well, of course, that what Simpson was really doing was storing up negotiating points. He'd eventually conceded the Requa volley guns—and within two days, at the outside, would be using that to twist Mike's arm for something else he wanted.
So it went. Mike was no stranger to negotiating tactics himself. He'd probably agree to whatever Simpson wanted, if it was within reason. But, push came to shove, he'd never been a stranger to the magic word "no."
After Simpson left, Mike gave Frank Jackson a sly little smile. "I take it from the vehemence of your arguments that you lost the debate you'd been having with Lennart here."
Jackson gave Torstensson a look that was unkind enough to be right on the edge of insubordination.
"Well. Yeah. I did."
Torstensson sniffed. "As if we down-timers are so stupid that it never occured to us that skirmishing tactics are a lot safer than standing up in plain sight, all of us in a row. Ha! Until a good cavalry charge—even good pikemen, with good officers—shows us the folly involved."
The jibe made and properly scored, Torstensson relented. "Frank, when your mechanics can start providing us with a sufficient quantity of reliable breechloaders, we will rediscuss the matter. But, for now, even with the new SRGs, we simply do not have a good enough rate of fire to be able to risk dispersing our troops too much."
Jackson didn't say anything. He just stared out of the window gloomily.
"C'mon, Frank, fill me in," Mike said. "What happened in the exercises?"
Frank took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "Pretty much what this cold-blooded damn Swede said would happen. The skirmishers did just fine—until the OPFOR's cavalry commanders decided they'd accept the casualties to get in close. After that, it was all over. Even the best riflemen we've got need twenty seconds to reload those SRGs. They're still muzzle-loaders, Minié ball or no Minié ball. Cavalry can come a long ways in twenty seconds."
He gave Torstensson another unkind look. "As he so cheerfully rubbed salt into my wounds, so can a good line of pikemen, if their officers are decisive enough. Which his were."
Jackson sighed again. "After that, it's just no contest. The skirmishers are scattered, not in a solid line with their mates to brace them and their officers right there to hold them steady. And a cavalry charge is scary as all hell. Most of them just took off running. The ones who did try to stand their ground got chopped up piecemeal. Bruised up, anyway." Another unkind look was bestowed on the Swedish general. "They weren't any too gentle with those poles and clubs they were using instead of lances and sabers, let me tell you."
"Spare the rod and spoil the recruit," Torstensson said cheerfully.
Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the advent of the Minié ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred yards. When—cluck; cluck—they should obviously have adopted the skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.
But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand their ground when cavalry came at them. After they fired their shot, and needed one-third of a minute—if they were adept at the business, and didn't get rattled—to have a second shot ready. In that bloody world where real soldiers lived and died, skirmishing tactics without breechloading rifles or automatic weapons were just a way to commit suicide. If the opponent had large enough forces and was willing to lose some men, at least.
Seventeenth-century armies did use skirmishers, to be sure, but they were literally just that—skirmishers, usually called "light companies" attached to the regiments and battalions. When two heavy formations closed for battle, the respective skirmishers who'd often started the fighting withdrew back into the safety of the main formations when the two sides closed within long gun shot.
"So be it," he muttered. That meant high casualty rates, of course. But it was also the reason he'd come down on the army's side over the issue of the new volley guns. True enough, the navy could put them to good use. But for the army, they could be a Godsend. If enough volley guns could be provided for the army in time for the spring campaign, Torstensson could put together heavy-weapons units for all of his regiments and incorporate their capabilities into his plans. That still wouldn't allow for real skirmishing tactics, but it would go a fair distance in that direction. At least the infantry could spread out a little, instead of having to stand shoulder to shoulder and make the world's easiest target.
"How'd the two volley gun batteries do against the cavalry?" he asked.
Finally, both of the generals smiled in unison.
"Oh, splendidly," said Torstensson. "It was almost as humiliating an experience for my arrogant cavalry captains as a colonoscopy would have been. By the way, are there enough of those devices in Grantville that I could get one for the army? I'm thinking it would do wonders for discipline."