1634: The Baltic War (59 page)

* * *

Overgaard watched in half-incredulous but vast relief as the preposterous USE vessels continued swinging around to the west.

Don't feel too grateful yet,
Aage
, he told himself.
They're devilishly fast
.
Even if you get a head start on them, they've probably got the speed to run you down
.
Unless, of course, you can keep away from them until dark, at least
. . .

The enemy's guns continued to bellow, and he felt his jaw clench as the ironclads began to fire, as well. The USE ships seemed to be moving more rapidly, and even from here he could hear those murderous shells exploding inside the hulls of his more laggard—or perhaps simply foolishly brave—warships.

He forced himself to turn around, look back. The timberclads' dense black funnel smoke merged with the dirty-gray clouds of powder smoke, billowing like some brimstone-born fog bank shot through with the lightning of muzzle flashes. At least two of his ships
were
on fire now, he noted grimly, and three more were obviously in severe distress. Under the circumstances—

"
Fire!
" Captain Markus Bollendorf barked, and SSIM
Monitor
's starboard carronades thumped deafeningly.

Alain Lacrosse's head jerked around in sheer, shocked disbelief as the low, squat ironclad almost directly across
Justine
's bows opened fire. The abrupt appearance of the enemy vessel stunned him. His attention—like that of every other man aboard his ship, a corner of his brain realized numbly—had been focused on the carnage astern of them, where the American timberclads and ironclads were now moving steadily in pursuit. The weight of their fire had been significantly reduced as they were forced to turn end-on to follow in the fleeing fleet's wake. That wasn't preventing them from scoring hits steadily, if not in enormous numbers, however, and they didn't
need
a lot of hits. Not when the accursed things kept exploding
inside
their targets!

But perhaps at least some of us should have been looking the
other
way
, he thought with a clear sort of shock-induced detachment.
If we had
,
we might have noticed where the
other
ironclads had gotten to.

The thought was still running through his brain when the first two eight-inch shells crashed into his command. One of them struck just to one side of
Justine
's cutwater. It ripped into the cable tier and exploded deep inside the coiled heap of anchor hawsers, and a few, potentially deadly tendrils of smoke began to curl upward.

Lacrosse never noticed. He was still staring ahead, still trying to wrap his mind about what had happened, when the second shell streaked aft, somehow missing masts, spars, and rigging until it crashed directly into
Justine
's poop deck.

The resultant explosion killed Jerome Bouvier, both helmsmen, and the sailing master. It did not kill Alain Lacrosse . . . but only because the shell itself had cut him cleanly in half before it detonated.

"It worked, Admiral!" Halberstat announced gleefully as he listened to Bollendorf's radio reports. "I never thought they'd get
that
close before anyone even saw them!"

"Neither did I, Franz," Simpson admitted.

The admiral tried to match his flag captain's jubilation, but it was hard.
Constitution
reeked of gunsmoke, despite the high-powered blowers he'd installed. She hadn't fired all that many shots, perhaps—certainly not for the amount of damage she'd inflicted—but each carronade shot spewed out truly extraordinary amounts of smoke.

And why are you thinking about that right now, John?
he asked himself harshly.
Could it be to keep you from thinking about just how many dead and mangled men that "damage" represents?

Perhaps it did. But whatever he might feel at the moment, it wasn't going to stop him from doing his duty.

"Let's get this over with, Franz." He'd thought his voice sounded completely calm, completely normal, but the expression in Halberstat's eyes told him that he hadn't. There was nothing he could do about that, and so he simply met the flag captain's gaze levelly.

"Take us in among them," he said.

"Aye, aye, sir," Halberstat acknowledged.

The flag captain turned to his helmsman, and Admiral John Chandler Simpson returned to his conning tower vision slit, gazing out into the hellish murk of gunsmoke and burning ships as his squadron closed to finish off its crippled, demoralized prey.

Please, Overgaard
, he thought.
Please order your men to surrender before I have to kill them all
.

London

Rita Simpson had been half-petrified that she wouldn't be able to pull it off. She'd always been a lousy actress, and she knew it. Leaving aside her one brief stab at amateur thespianism her sophomore year in college—what a disaster that had been!—there was the accumulated evidence of all those years as a kid and a teenager when her parents invariably saw through her fibs and lies while her brother Mike got away with everything.

But, by the time she got out from under the heavy staircase leading up to the White Tower's only entrance, she was in fact so thoroughly disgusted and angry that she had no trouble at all.

"You'll be lucky if you don't get an epidemic!" she snarled at Sir Francis Windebank. She half-turned and pointed a rigid finger at the staircase. More precisely, at the dark interior below the construction. "It's a cesspool in there! I don't care if the so-called toilets in the keep are completely inadequate for the number of soldiers you're billeting in it. They have
got
to start using the latrines! It's insane to have them shitting right underneath the main entrance—no, I take that back! the
only
entrance—to their own lodgings. Are you all crazy? Do you have any idea how much bacteria that's generating?"

She lowered the Finger of Accusation and the hand that it belonged to—but only partway. As she was doing with her other hand, she kept it well away from her skirt. She still had hopes—faint hopes—that she might be able to salvage the garment. Her shoes, of course, were hopeless, and would have to be pitched into the moat. They were a cheap pair she'd bought yesterday from the Tower's saddler, though, not one of her good pairs.

"Look at me! I'm filthy! Just from going in there to set the bacteria monitors." Thankfully, she hadn't actually had to crawl at any point, which had been her other great fear. There was enough room under the staircase for her to move about in a half-crouch. Still, with an area that filthy—not to mention vile; gross; disgusting; nauseating—there was no way she could have managed the chore without bringing traces back out with her. An incredible stench, if nothing else.

The stench was bad enough that Windebank was trying to sidle away. But Rita would have none of it.

"No, you don't! Come here, Sir Francis!" She made an imperious and impatient gesture, waving at him to accompany her toward the stairs. "I want to show you the monitors, so you can make sure—I'm holding you responsible, sir!—that none of these idiots fiddle with them."

"Please, Lady Simpson," he murmured, raising his own hands. That was more in the way of a protective gesture than a protest. Just in case Rita might try to grab him and get his own fancy clothing filthy. "I assure you—"

"No, you don't, buster!
Look
at them." She'd reached the staircase and stooped over—careful to stay a couple of steps from where the real filth began—and once again pointed the Finger of Accusation. "You can see one of them from here. Not too easily, because it's dark, but you can see it. The other one, you'd have to go inside."

Reluctantly, Windebank followed, staying several steps behind. Now, he lowered his head in a very brief manner and began nodding vigorously. "Yes, yes, I see it."

That was pure nonsense, of course. Windebank couldn't possibly have spotted the package that Rita had affixed to one of the staircase's two main weight-bearing columns, not with that brief a glance. All the more so because Harry Lefferts' demolitions expert Gerd Whazzisname—and wait till she finally met the bastard personally and could give him a piece of her mind; him and Wild-Man Harry both!—had deliberately painted the things to make them hard to see in a dark place.

But it was good enough. She was so aggravated that she had to remind herself that the "bacteria monitors" were nothing of the sort, and she didn't
actually
want Windebank or anyone else looking at them closely.

"Fine, then," she muttered, coming away from the stairs again. "As I told you, they need to stay in place—undisturbed—for a full week. At that point, I'll have an accurate reading of how bad the situation is. But, in the meantime—station guards if you have to—nobody keeps using the place for an outhouse."

"Yes, Lady Simpson. Certainly. Not a problem."

He just wanted to get rid of her, obviously enough. But Rita was pretty sure she'd accomplished her goal, so she gave him a curt nod and began stalking off toward her quarters in St. Thomas' Tower.

Amazingly, it was done. What she'd labeled "Mission Impossible" when that maniac Lefferts had first proposed it, but would now label otherwise.

Mission Disgusting.

Mission Puke—no, best not dwell on that.

Mission Harry I Will Piss On Your Grave. That had a nice ring to it. She might even crap on the bastard's grave, she was so ticked off.

"See to it," Francis Windebank ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Henry Langscarr, after the obnoxious American woman left. Langscarr served as Windebank's deputy, whenever the constable was not present in the Tower—which was most of the time, these days.

"Yes, Sir Francis. I will have to post guards, though."

Windebank frowned but said nothing. The mercenary companies that now made up most of the Tower's military force were as poorly disciplined as mercenaries usually were. He found it hard to imagine, himself, why any sane man would crawl into that horrid space to defecate when there were perfectly functional latrines not more than a minute's walk from the White Tower. But, surely, they did—giving proof yet again that Pope Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas had been correct in listing Sloth as one of the seven deadly sins.

"What is 'bakeria'?" Langscarr asked, as the two men walked away.

"I have no idea, Sir Henry. The woman's accent is wretched enough when she speaks English. I hate to think how she's mangling Latin. Something to do with disease."

"Ah." Langscarr's puzzled expression disappeared. Actually, he thought Sir Francis was being excessively harsh. Langscarr himself had found Lady Simpson quite pleasant to deal with, as a rule. Her behavior today had been untypical—not that he could blame her, given the circumstances.

More importantly, like many people who spent most of their time in the Tower, he'd come to respect the young American woman's medical knowledge. Even some of the mercenaries had started taking their injuries and ailments to her for healing. Whatever that mysterious bakeria was that her devices were monitoring, he was quite sure she knew what she was doing, even if she couldn't pronounce the Latin properly.

Or perhaps it was Greek. Hard to say. Her accent really was atrocious.

"You did good, hon," said her husband soothingly.

But he, too, held his hands up in that fending-off gesture. No loving embrace there, ha!

"I
stink
," Rita hissed at him.

"Well, yeah, you do," Tom allowed. "Reek to high heaven, in fact. But it's nothing a good long bath won't fix."

The dark expression on his wife's face didn't lighten a bit. "Yeah, right. A good long seventeenth-century plumbing so-called 'bath.' "

"Oh, come on, it isn't that bad."

She gave him a sweet-looking smile that would have looked appropriate on the face of a tarantula, if spiders could smile. "Really? In that case, I'm sure you won't mind scrubbing my back."

"Well . . ."

"She did it!" Harry exclaimed gleefully, slapping his hands together after he set the walkie-talkie down on the kitchen table. "I will be good goddamed."

"Probably," said Andrew Short. "Though not damned by the Almighty. But I'd recommend you keep your distance from Lady Simpson, once we're all piled into the boat. Or you'll likely find yourself swimming back to the Continent."

Harry grinned. "Yeah, I'll just bet she's spitting mad by now. But that's okay. Rita's like her brother Mike. They both got a temper—every Stearns I ever met does—but they don't actually hold grudges."

The two men who'd worked together to design and build the explosive devices Rita had placed under the White Tower's staircase were also smiling, in the way skilled craftsmen will when a difficult job is finished.

One skilled craftsman, rather—Gerd Fuhrmann, the wrecking crew's acknowledged demolitions expert. Jack Hayes, still only nineteen years old, had a natural aptitude for the work, not to mention an avid interest. But you couldn't really consider him more than a promising apprentice in the Art of Boom.

Despite his youth, he was the one member of the Hamilton-Short clan whom Gerd had deemed worth training. As tough as they undoubtedly were—the women, in their own way, as much as the men—the talents of the rest of the male members of the clan ran toward more personal forms of mayhem. You needed to have a finicky streak, working with explosives and incendiary materials. Jack was the only male member of the extended family who possessed that quality.

"That's it, then." Harry pulled out his chair and sat back down. "Two windfalls in a row, by damn. I didn't really think Gerd and Jack would be able to manage their job, either."

Fuhrmann shrugged. "You can thank Jack for that, really. The charges were straightforward enough, just like the ones that are sitting under the stairs of the White Tower. The real problem was the same. How do you plant the bloody things without being spotted?"

Gerd jabbed his thumb at the smallish young man sitting next to him, who was grinning with a combination of pride and embarrassment. "But he managed it, as neatly as you could ask for."

"It's because I look younger than my age," Hayes said modestly. "People don't think much of a youngster scampering where he shouldn't be."

Julie Mackay shook her head. "Naw, Jack, it's the freckles. I don't know what it is about freckles, but the minute people see 'em they figure the owner's an innocent fellow." She jabbed her own thumb at her husband, sitting next to her. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen that trick work for Alex. It's why I fell for him, prob'bly, until I learned what a devious mind lurked beneath. But by then, it was too late."

Alex Mackay arched his eyebrows but made no other comment. Not to Julie, at any rate. To Harry, he said, "Do keep in mind that if you set off those charges at the wrong time, a lot of innocent people are likely to be hurt. Killed, some of them. Deaths at the Tower, especially those of mercenary soldiers, won't matter. But killing a dozen civilians just going about their business is a different proposition altogether."

Harry looked smug. Gerd looked even smugger.

"Way ahead of you, Alex," said Lefferts. "Gerd and Jack planted a smoke bomb with the big charges."

"Stink bomb, too!" said Hayes. "It'll go off first, when we send the signal. Half a minute later, when the real bombs go off, you won't find anyone in the vicinity."

Mackay shook his head. "Instead of concocting spurious theories about freckles, people ought to be examining a true mystery. How is it that the same people obsessed with the crude business of blowing things up also have such twisted minds?"

"I had a warped childhood," said Fuhrmann.

"Stephen Hamilton is my uncle," was Jack's explanation. He gave his mentor a sly glance. "What's that American term, Gerd? You piker, I think."

Stephen Hamilton shook his head. "No, lads, I'm firm on the matter. I'll accompany Darryl and Victoria into the Fens. Then, Scotland beyond. But I'll go alone. You and the rest of the family will go with Lady Mailey and Lady Simpson and their party, over to the Continent."

Given the nature of this subject, as opposed to some others, the senior female members of the family were present also, along with all the adult males. That was Isabel Short and Patricia Hayes. Isabel was the mother of Andrew and Victoria and their two surviving older brothers, William and John. Patricia was Isabel's half-sister, being the offspring of the same father, the now-deceased Henry Short, and his second wife Elizabeth. Her last name of Hayes came from her husband, Thomas Hayes, who'd been killed in an accident three years before.

Patricia had had four children by Thomas, all of whom had thankfully survived childhood. Their chances were good, now. Neddie, the oldest, was almost twenty-one years of age, and the youngest, Mary, had just turned twelve. In truth, Patricia was more worried about the health of her second-oldest child, Jack. Not from the danger of illness but from his new-found enthusiasm for explosives.

"You're certain about this, then?" asked John Short. He was the oldest of the three Short brothers, being almost forty. That gave him, along with Stephen Hamilton, the informal status of one of the two patriarchs of the little clan. In practice, it was normally the youngest of the three brothers who really exercised that function. That was due to Andrew's personality, which was more assertive and self-confident than those of his two older brothers. But for such a solemn matter as dividing the family, John's opinion and agreement was necessary.

Stephen Hamilton nodded. "Yes. It simply makes sense, John. We've all agreed, after discussing it at some length, that we'll accept his offer and enlist in Captain Lefferts' company once we make our escape. Formally speaking, that is, since for all that matters we've already done so. But the reality that remains is that the captain's military unit is really not well suited for families. Certainly not children."

Patricia made a face. "Tell that to my son!"

Andrew smiled. "The captain doesn't consider a nineteen-year-old lad to be a 'child,' Patricia. Neither do I, come down to it."

Isabel sniffed. "Sophistry, and you know it. Harry Lefferts wouldn't think twice about enlisting a twelve-year-old in his schemes if he saw a place for him."

"Or her," added John, chuckling, "and at the age of nine. Just last week I found out he'd put my little Mollie—Marian, as well—to the task of counting all the soldiers using the staircase below the White Tower in the early morning hours. Great fun, she thought it was. Marian, too. Those two girls! Whom their mother usually has to threaten with bodily harm to do any chores at all."